Farewell Concert at the World’s End

by R. K. Duncan

On October 30^th, 1968, Luther killed a pair of wannabes a little way behind a roadhouse in southern Virginia. He’d smelled the power on them while they played with a pickup band for tips from truckers taking a late lunch. A scent like sage and engine grease cut through the rockabilly trash and the tortured picking that chased chords from chart-toppers that never should have been attempted on that battered, out of tune guitar. They hadn’t looked like much, the pair of thickset men with matching dirty-blonde mustaches and weathered jeans, but the scent was unmistakable for an Enthusiast like Luther. He’d thought of stepping up to play himself, hooking them that way, but his guitar was out in the lot, in the last car he’d stolen, and he had sudden flashes of the last time he’d played without it, the booing laughs and the bottles when he stayed and tried to save the set. (Continue Reading…)

The Culvert

by Maxwell Price

Jamie had been visiting the thing that lived in the culvert for about three weeks now. He spent more time with it than he ever had with anyone his own age, or even anyone outside of immediate family members. Jaime was a curious child, but not particularly social. Friendships existed in the abstract. The companionship of even a strange culvert-dwelling thing was not easily cast aside. (Continue Reading…)

The Shrike

by Cameron Suey

By the time she’s thrown herself upright and grasped for the remote with shaking hands, it’s too late. She’s seen it. She’s heard the words. Instead, she stumbles for the kitchen sink, feeling her throat clench with acrid, stinging horror. The vibrant green and brown hues of the nature documentary wash the inside of her darkened apartment, sonorous tones of the narration hanging in the air. She tries not to listen as she hunches over the filthy, dish-choked sink, retching and gasping for air, but the words still come. Thorns. Impale. Butcher.

Coupled with ambien and supermarket gin, the nature documentaries had been the only thing that helped her fall asleep for the last month, but that’s over now. Ruined in a single fusillade of frames and words. She shuts her eyes tight, presses her face to the cracked tile of the kitchen counter as sobs rock her wasting frame. Behind her eyelids, she sees what she always sees. Trinity on the spike, wide and terrified eyes going glassy with blood loss as her little mouth struggles and fails to form a plea for help. But now the jagged spar of rusted iron in the little girl’s throat has a name, christened by the late night documentary on the cruel hunting habits of predatory birds.

Shrike. It repeats in her ears, a ringing bell striking midnight. Shrike. In the cold clarity of the moment, she feels a silver thread of relief. She knows the name of the thing, now. It is no longer just a factor, one link in the chain of her fatal, unforgivable mistake. The Shrike is an entity. It is something outside herself she can blame. Something she can hate. (Continue Reading…)

Beneath Their Hooves

by Katharine E.K. Duckett

We go to Grandmère’s house to ride the unicorns.

We only go once or twice a year, and it’s never enough. Riding the unicorns is the most fun a person could have, and I don’t know why we can’t do it every day. Mom never gives us a good reason. It’s not like ice cream, where it’ll give you a stomachache if you have too much. You could ride the unicorns for hours and hours. They never get tired. They prance and they fly a little, just a foot or two, and they’re blue and pink and green and purple, and their horns shine in the sun like candy canes, like candy canes after you’ve licked off all the red and made them white and sharp with your tongue.

Grandmère watches us from the veranda as we ride. She never touches the unicorns herself. They’re here for us. They’re here because she loves us, and she wants us to have fun. She watches, and sometimes she waves with her hand cupped like she’s a queen, the big diamonds on her necklace sparkling across the lawn, and Robin and I go around and around until we’re dizzy and Mom yells at tell us it’s time to go home. (Continue Reading…)