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.

(Continue Reading…)

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.

(Continue Reading…)

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…)

Les Lutins

by Jonathan Lewis Duckworth

It began with sparrows, finches, and swallows. Little dead birds Magritte would find littering her lawn. It didn’t trouble her at first, for songbirds died all the time. But then in successive weeks she’d wake to find entire flocks of birds littered on her property, under the shady sycamores and in her rose garden, their flight feathers plucked and their delicate necks broken. These birds had menaced her garden in the past, but still she’d cry to see them killed, so pretty they were. She didn’t know what to make of it all, whether it was the work of cats or a man with a disturbed mind and brutish hands. Four years after her husband died at the Battle of the Somme, Magritte may have felt like an old woman, but with her golden hair and bright green eyes, she was still young and pretty enough to attract that sort of attention. 

She was on the verge of contacting the local police when early one morning she found a huge magpie left outside her bedroom window. There was a patch of semi-firm mud there, where she’d emptied her chamber pot the night before. Crisscrossing the muddy patch were prints—humanlike footprints no bigger than postage stamps. Seeing the prints, Magritte recalled her grandmother’s stories of the lutins, the little people of the forest. They were mischievous imps who played tricks on people, and especially loved tying women’s hair into knots as they slept. Even as a child she’d never believed the stories, despite the gravity with which Grandmother described them. 

“Never chase a lutin into the forest,” Grandmother, a crooked old woman with a frightening mole on her elbow, had said. “No matter how peeved he makes you.”  (Continue Reading…)

Sandy the Tinker

by Charlotte Riddell

“Before commencing my story, I wish to state it is perfectly true in every particular.”
“We quite understand that,” said the sceptic of our party, who was wont, in the security of friendly intercourse, to characterise all such prefaces as mere introductions to some tremendously exaggerated tale.
On the occasion in question, however, we had donned our best behaviour, a garment which did not sit ungracefully on some of us; and our host, who was about to draw out from the stores of memory one narrative for our entertainment, was scarcely the person before whom even Jack Hill, the sceptic, would have cared to express his cynical and unbelieving views.
We were seated, an incongruous company of ten persons, in the best room of an old manse among the Scottish hills. Accident had thrown us together, and accident had driven us under the minister’s hospitable roof. Cold, wet and hungry, drenched with rain, sorely beaten by the wind, we had crowded through the door opened by a friendly hand, and now, wet no longer, the pangs of hunger assuaged with smoking rashers of ham, poached eggs, and steaming potatoes, we sat around a blazing fire, drinking toddy out of tumblers, whilst the two ladies who graced the assemblage partook of a modicum of the same beverage from wine glasses. (Continue Reading…)