Tara’s Mother’s Skin

by Suzan Palumbo

“You eat the rice you pick out of the dirt?” I asked Tara’s Mother. I’d found her sitting on a wooden bench in the gallery of her squat, concrete house, massaging her inflamed elbow. The heat had been a noose at our throats that day and she was enjoying the late afternoon breeze, a serene expression splayed across her brow. She swayed like a dried banana leaf, twisted and weightless, framed by her doorway as I stood on the cracked earth of her yard talking to her.

“Yes, Farrah, I cook the rice children throw when they pass on the road. It’s good food they waste when they pelt it at me.” Her voice had the texture of rust-covered velvet, gritty but soft underneath. I scribbled her responses in my notepad and drew a question mark after the words Tara’s Mother at the top of the page. When I’d returned from university, in St. Augustine, earlier that week, my inquiries about her identity and the daughter she was styled after had been met with a warning: “You looking for trouble, girl. Soucouyants don’t have first names,” Neighbourman had said. “Tara’s Mother is a leech. Only thing to do is leave rice on your window sill for her to count before sunrise so she can’t break in your room and bite you.”

(Continue Reading…)

The Mad Eyes of the Heron King

by Richard Dansky

There was a lake or something like one near Leonard’s office, and it was to that lake that Leonard occasionally took himself after work. He did so in order to relax, to avoid thinking about work, and generally to sidestep the possibility of doing anything he might later regret.

But mostly, he did it to watch the herons.

Leonard liked watching them, finding something soothing in their manner. He admired the way they moved, standing still for untold minutes before suddenly striking, or advancing robotically back and forth on some secret avian agenda that only they would ever know.

And thus it was that when his work day was done, Leonard would come to the lake, and watch the herons, and do nothing else because nothing else needed doing. At least, not until the day the Heron King spoke to him.

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Big Brother

by Evan Marcroft

I was seven when I first met my big brother. It was five minutes after school let out, and Jason Bigmore and his fourth-grade friends had caught me before I could make it out of school grounds. This was a game we played most every day—sometimes I won, but this time around, two of them held me down by the arms while Jason smushed my face into the black dirt beneath the dead old oak tree out by the baseball diamond. They called me the usual names and told me to stick your tongue out, pussy willow. They wanted me to lick the anthill—they called it eating hot sauce—and if I didn’t, they’d let those hungry red ants crawl into my ears and sting my brain. I didn’t know they couldn’t do that then, so mostly I just cried, being seven and all, and they laughed and laughed.

The difference between kids and adults is that adults want years in advance, where kids only want what the moment demands, and they want it with everything they have.

Right then, I wanted help.

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Dive in Me

by Selena Chambers and Jesse Bullington

The girls were a gang of three: a triad, a triumvirate, or what have you. Like the Gorgons and Moirai before them, they never made a move or decision separately. So when Spring was missing from their usual hook-up spot in the kudzu-veiled lot behind the Hoggly Woggly one Saturday morning, the gang was thrown into a state of chaos.

“Where the fuck is she?”

“You don’t think she got busted last night, do you?”

Gina paused to consider this, because it was a real possibility. They had been in the alley behind the skating rink throwing bricks at streetlights until the girls were broken up by crescendoing sirens and red and blue illuminations. In such desperate if not rare instances, they would all separate and regroup later.

“Nah, if she got bagged, we’d hear about it right?”

Gina sat on a vine-cushioned log. (Continue Reading…)

Blackout

by Hal Ellson

It’s a hot night. I got that uneasy feeling again and I swing out of the poolroom, walk to the corner.
Jim is there. He’s my buddy. We greet each other and he asks me what I’m doing.
“Nothing, man. But the scene stinks. You want to drift?”
“Where to?”
“Coney Island’s okay. We’ll see the sights.”
“Okay, cool.”
That’s it. We hit for the bus, climb on and ride. I got that funny feeling inside me.
“Why’d we have to take the bus, Jim?” I say. “The window’s open and it’s still dripping hot.”
“You complaining, Ace?”
“Too many people riding with us. More than I figured to see.”
“They paid their fares same as us.”
“Yeah, it’s like they all wearing masks. The bus is too slow. Seems like we ain’t ever going to get where we going. It’s too hot.” (Continue Reading…)

You Can Stay All Day

by Mira Grant

The merry-go-round was still merry-going, painted horses prancing up and down while the calliope played in the background, tinkly and bright and designed to attract children all the way from the parking lot.  There was something about the sound of the calliope that seemed to speak to people on a primal level, telling them “the fun is over here,” and “come to remember how much you love this sort of thing.”

Cassandra was pretty sure it wasn’t the music that was attracting the bodies thronging in the zoo’s front plaza.  It was the motion.  The horses were still dancing, and some of them still had riders, people who had become tangled in their safety belts when they fell.  So the dead people on the carousel kept flailing, and the dead people who weren’t on the carousel kept coming, and—

They were dead.  They were all dead, and they wouldn’t stay down, and none of this could be happening.  None of this could be real.

The bite on her arm burned with the deep, slow poison of infection setting in, and nothing was real anymore.  Nothing but the sound of the carousel, playing on and on, forever. (Continue Reading…)