The Good Mothers’ Home for Wayward Girls

by Izzy Wasserstein

One of the Mothers shoves the new girl into the dorm room, the slick threads of the Mother’s grasp lingering long enough that several of us shiver. The new girl wears a short dress, shot through with sunset, though we are not sure we remember sunsets properly. The hem of the dress is ragged and mud-caked. It is the most beautiful thing we have ever seen. We hate the new girl.

Get her into uniform, the Mother commands. It makes no sound, but its words echo between our ears. The new girl has been standing with her hands on opposite shoulders, her chin jutting forward. That changes when we surround her. We rip the dress from her shoulders and toss a gray shift over her body. Now she is dressed just as we are.

The Mother squelches out of the room, and the door slams shut behind it. (Continue Reading…)

When the Slipling Comes to Call

by N.R. Lambert

She rises. The ache of eons and a cold night brittle her bones. She cracks them one at a time, and sometimes all at once, like tree branches snapping in an ice storm. The stone floor of the hovel is chilled with October’s first frost, but it doesn’t bother her, her feet never need touch the floor. She hovers over it, knotted fingers dragging tangles of dark hair from her face and eyes.

Her slick black tongue flicks the melting frost from her flaky gray lips as she goes about gathering the scraps of bone, hair, and skin she needs to make her Littles. One by one, she stuffs them with dead leaves and other rot. She ties off the dollies’ necks with gut string, then tops each Little with a smooth clay head–the vessel–blank faces reflecting nothing of their fates or those of the ones to whom they’re tied.

The Slipling fills her basket. (Continue Reading…)

For Fear of Little Men

by Sandra M. Odell

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alton who longed to be a kobold and keep treasure in his stone shoes. . .

That is until one came to live under his bed and he learned what horrid little creatures they truly were.  The wicked thing smelled of licorice and MaeMa’s kisses when she went too long without brushing her dentures.  It hobbled around in its stone clogs in the dark of night, knocking over books,tumbling shoes off the rack.

“There is a kobold living under my bed, Mama,” he said when his mother came to see what the fuss was all about.  “I saw it with my torch.  He pinched me here, and here, and even here.”

“There will be none of that, young man,” Mama said as she tucked the brushed cotton quilt under his chin.  “You go to sleep this instant, and in the morning you will pick up your room or else.”

That night Alton realized mamas did not know what it meant to have a kobold living under one’s bed. (Continue Reading…)