Sick Day

by Michael Chant

As she leaves for work, my wife kisses me goodbye. It is love in the machine, passion stripped away on the assembly-line known as the workweek. Her car pulls out of the driveway, leaving me with more than an hour to kill before I have to go to work.

I empty a little plastic bag of capsules and gelcaps into my palm. These are all the vitamins a man my age should be taking. I wash them down with a glass of calcium-enriched orange juice, and then it’s time to shower. While lathering up, masturbation gets considered and rejected, the pleasure I would receive is found to be too fleeting to affect my mood. After rinsing and drying off, I pause to look at my face in the bathroom mirror. Seeing is believing — I look older than I am.

Clockwork

by Trent Jamieson

Some places you visit in dreams again and again. Some places visit you. Fourteen and it found me.

I stood knee deep in grass, brittle, yellowing, summer grass. The citadel rose above me, its clockwork beat roaring in my head; gears and wheels rumbling, ticking, tocking, groaning under the weight of all that time.

On the furthest buttress from me, though I dared not look, I knew he would be there, a single figure hanging, broken-necked, spinning in short circles, dancing on the dry hot wind.

And because I was doomed, because the dream was a tide and inevitability, I walked towards the citadel.

When I was near, so close that I could almost touch it, the ground shook and the brass doors at the tower’s base flung open like the wings of an iron dragon and I stared into the guts of the machine.

The Cellar

by Stephen Owen

“I’m Mr. Sinclair.” The smiling old man introduced himself. “Not too early, am I?”

“Whatever you’re selling, I ain’t interested,” said the man, ignoring Sinclair’s offer of a handshake. He was taller than Sinclair by a couple of inches, probably in his mid-forties, with cropped blond-grey hair and a permanent frown etched between tired-looking eyes.

“Didn’t they tell you?” said Sinclair, studying a piece of paper in his hand, then checking the brass door number. “I’ve come to look round your house.”

“No-one said nothing.”

“It is still for sale, isn’t it?”

“Oh sure, just wasn’t expecting…”

“Of course, I can always come back another time,” said the old man. He frowned and scratched his chin. “That would be rather inconvenient, though. I’ve come all the way from Oxford. Traffic was an absolute nightmare.”

Furnace Room Lullaby

by Leah Bobet

The house off Weathervane Street came old, but not haunted.

It came with bright red brick walls on the outside, cherry-paneled floors on the inside, plaster that weeps moisture in the summer that plinks into a hundred dented pots. It came with cats that drink the water, wander in and out of the house, vanish into the weedy yard at dusk. It came old and weeping, rafters twisted, foundation long settled and scented with earth.

Isabelle made it haunted, and so she still lives in the house.

Periods

By Florence Ann Marlowe

Read by Damaris Mannering

“It’s going on three weeks, now.”

“Mmm-hmmm. And there’s no chance of you being pregnant?”

“Oh, no!” Nancy shook her head. “I haven’t even been with a guy in a long time.”

“Good.” Doctor Mason stood up, his eyes still glued to Nancy’s chart. He flashed her a quick smile. “One less thing to worry about.”

Nancy nodded. “So what could it be?”

The doctor seemed lost in thought. He pressed the butt end of his pen to his teeth. He then quickly shifted his seat, uncrossing and re-crossing his legs. Nancy suppressed an impatient sigh.

“I know exactly what it is,” he said finally.

Nancy was surprised. “Oh.”

Radiodemonology

by John Medaille

Okay.

I first discovered the existence of the human soul while examining the x-ray of a broken clavicle of an ugly boy named Peter Demetrios. Peter, who was the kind of kid I think of as a fly-torturing, spaghettio-bellied, dirty-fingernailed, nose-picking little crap of a little boy, had landed on a trampoline wrong and sustained a multiply displaced comminuted fracture of the collar bone.

Spurling’s Virus

by Michael Savastano

A tiny slit in the yellow protective suit killed her.

Ridley Means slammed down the quarantine lever, locking the room that would soon become Joella Henney’s tomb. Pale blue warning lights flashed. Joella swerved toward the window and peered with panicked eyes. Her head darted to each side, inspecting her body, arms outstretched.

She won’t see it. You never see the one that gets you.

She charged toward Ridley. The coiled air hose straightened behind her. Her gloved hands laid flat against the glass. She mouthed something. It looked like, “Please.”

In the Coils of the Serpent

by William Meikle

“So after he killed her he cut out the clitoris.”

“Well, that settles it – it can’t have been a man. If it had been, he’d never have found it.”

I looked up at her over the top of my drink, but there was no humour in her eyes – then again, there rarely was these days.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this anyway”, I said, taking a long swig of beer and brushing the foam from my upper lip. “If the boss ever finds out, I’ll be knocked back to traffic patrol – this is all supposed to be hush-hush – even the tabloids haven’t got hold of it yet.”

“I should hope not,” Jane Woolsey replied, “If they get so much as a whiff that I’m involved, you won’t see me for dust.”

I didn’t blame her. I remembered the last time – the finding of the body, the lurid headlines, the media circus permanently encamped on her doorstep. I would do everything in my power to make sure that didn’t happen again.

She was playing with her hair, twirling the blond tresses around her little finger. She had that faraway look in her eyes again, as if she was staring fixedly at something in the far distance that only she could see. I leaned over and took her hand.

“I’ll try to keep the press out of it, Jane – I really will.”