Tumble

by Trent Jamieson

“My Daniel’s out there.” Mother Beet crossed her stick-thin legs, lit a cigarillo, then offered me one. I shook my head, staring into the black hollows where her eyes should be. Black hollows that held my measure, nonetheless, and stared back. Tiny brown cockroaches nested in the right orbit. They bubbled and hissed, irritated by the smoke perhaps. “I can feel him, sure’s the memory of spittin’ the bastard, bloody and blind-eyed, out of me womb.”

I sat, and her smoke-bound mutterings washed against me. Folk like that, their words are weighty. You listen and not without fear.

The Intrusion

by Joel Arnold

Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Confession time. The night I cheated on my wife –

No – let’s save that for later.

The night Mary wakes up and screams “I can hear him! Make him stop!”

“Honey, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

She sits up staring blindly as I turn on the bedside lamp, “No, I heard him. I saw him. His shadow – like he was over me, breathing.”

“Settle down. You were having a bad dream.”

“No,” she insists. The bed shakes with her tremors. “No.”

“You were dreaming.”

She starts to cry.

Rapunzel’s Room

By John Dodds

In the showers later, she raised her right arm and examined her armpit minutely. Even after having shaved it yesterday with the LadyShave it still seemed hairier than it should. Normally, at worst, it was like the chin of a cartoon character like Desperate Dan or Fred Flintstone, a constellation of black dots. Now it was almost full length again. The hair had grown long enough to curl into a matted bush beaded with droplets of perspiration. It simply wasn’t possible. Unless it was caused by those vitamin supplements she had been taking. Those, and the performance enhancers so she could work out longer and harder.