Yesteryear Fiction

2/15/12

2012-02-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

More Than Meets the Eye
By Linda M. Crate

The falls are beautiful this time of year — or so they said. He didn’t really notice, he was spending too much time with his girlfriend to notice much else. He supposed if he looked he might have seen the beauty in them, but right now that wasn’t a primary concern.

Lavender had invited him over for dinner, he suggested that they might see the falls afterward. She seemed rather ecstatic about it. He didn’t understand that one simple suggestion would light up her eyes like the sun star but it had.

When he arrived to her grandmother’s house he saw the friendly old woman sitting in a rocking chair on the porch. He smiled at her, but she seemed to have a sinister expression etched in the folds of her old face, he blinked a few times and she was waving at him, as always. He tried to shake the eerie feeling aside. Lavender’s grandmother was a sweet, old lady incapable of hurting a fly!

He helped her grandmother up and together they walked into the house. Lavender stood with her back to them, finishing up the last minute arrangements at the table. She looked lovely in a white cotton sun dress complete with small scarlet strawberries sewn into the fabric. She looked lovely — tall and willowy with pale skin that refused to tan and scarlet hair that fell down her back in waves.

Her grandmother cleared her throat. “Florian, my boy, would you mind reaching for the wine glasses, please? They’re a little too high up for me to reach.”

“Oh, of course,” Florian blushed, feeling his cheeks creep up in heat. The grandmother had seen him eying up Lavender, he was certain of it, by the way she kept grinning at him. He was embarrassed — what would his mother say if she knew? She would be quite ashamed, he knew it.

He was quite grateful was dinner was over. He even helped Lavender with the dishes so that they could get out of the house without feeling too uncomfortable.

When they walked outside into the summer sun it glistened gold upon them and shimmered upon the dew beads still caught on some of the blades of grass. He couldn’t understand how he didn’t note it’s beauty on the way over.

“It’s so pretty!” Lavender exclaimed, spinning a few circles. She walked over to the lilac tree and pulled off a small branch, using the flowers to adorn her hair. “How do I look?”

“Magnificent, as always!”

“Shameless flatterer.”

“I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

She laughed happily, twining her hands with his. “Let’s go see the falls. I’m sure they look wonderful especially in a day as bright and cheerful as this one.”

He smiled. “You’re right,” he concurred.

They arrived at the falls to examine their beauty — the sun shone and shimmered through the crystal waters in beads and bending blades of light; the water dazzled like dragonfly wings. Lavender smiled at the sight. “I wish I could go swimming,” she sighed.

“Why can’t you?”

“Grandma said so.”

“Why, what happens —?”

“What does it matter? I’m not going to,” she shrugged. She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he remarked, perplexed over why Lavender couldn’t swim. He had dated her for two years and she had never gone swimming before. He wondered why. She had never expressed a yearning or desire to before today, but now that she had he grew suspicious. Why wouldn’t her grandmother let her go swimming?

Nonchalantly he ‘accidently’ bumped her into the water. “I’m sorry,” he called, as she fell into one of the shallower streams of water.

She laughed as she fell into the rivulets of bending light dancing upon the depths. “It’s okay,” she remarked, smiling. “I don’t want to freak you out or anything,” she went on, “but I don’t see how I can hide this any longer.” With that, she raised her fins, and his eyes went wide.

“You’re a mermaid?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “But then I fell in love with you — when I saw you, I don’t know, something in me just yearned for you. I pined away for days when I first saw you at the beach. My parents decided that I could live as a mortal only if grandmother came with me —.”

“Is your name really Lavender?” he asked. If they could hide the fact that she was a mermaid from him, he wondered what else they could hide.

“Yes,” she answered. “Because my fin is purple,” she remarked. “My parents weren’t very original.” She sighed. “Grandma is going to be so mad when she finds out what happened.”

“I’m sorry, I did it on purpose,” he admitted, hanging his head. “I just wanted —.”

“I know you meant no harm,” she interjected. “I’m not mad at you, but my throat is getting tired of raising my voice to be heard. Come swim with me?”

“Okay,” he agreed. First he pinched himself just to be sure that this was real. It was. He couldn’t imagine that this would have happened in a thousand years. Florian knew he would still be reeling over this fact days and maybe even months from now. His true love wasn’t even of this world — maybe his mother was right in calling him weird. Shoving that thought aside, he jumped into the water to join his girlfriend.

- - -
Linda Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poetry has recently been featured in Magic Cat Press, Black-Listed Magazine, Bigger Stones, and Vintage Poetry. One of her short stories has been featured in Carnage Conservatory and she has an upcoming short story for publication in Dark Gothic Reconstructed Magazine in April 2012.

2/8/12

2012-02-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

Your Loved Ones Never Leave You
By Linda M. Crate

Angora looked over her shoulder at Andre. She had never understood the elves’ language. It seemed flutist without any true substance to it. However, fortunately for her, Andre spoke English as well. She looked over to her fiancé, and wondered what had made an adventure seeking elf like Andre fall in love with a mortal like her.

She knew that he was depressed, it was something that she could sense, but she would be rather lonely; too, if her sister was dead. She felt the same way, in fact, when her brothers had been murdered by her father’s late tyrannical wife. The same woman had her mother murdered, too, she hadn’t known how she escaped death — but it was probably only in leaving her father’s castle that she had done so.

That was a terrifying thought, one she didn’t wish to speculate on much further. She looked at the sky — it was as somber and grey as Andre must have felt.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“I miss my mother and brothers, too, sometimes. A lot, in fact.” She held a hand to his heart. “Just because she’s gone from this earth doesn’t mean she’s gone forever. You’ll always have her here,” she remarked, placing a small hand directly over his heart.

He captured her mouth in a kiss. “Thank you for that gentle reminder, it’s good to know that you care.”

“I do,” she agreed. “And I doubt that Avanna would want you moping around for the rest of your life. Sure, she would like to know that she’s missed, I’m sure, but she’d also want you to live.”

“I have every intention to,” Andre smiled, wrapping an arm around her narrow waist. “If we ever have a daughter I would like to name her Avanna, though, in tribute to my sister.”

“Of course, and we can name our sons after my brothers.”

“What about your father?”

Her face fell. She sucked in her breath sharply. He knew that he hadn’t meant to offend her, but she felt as if she had just been sucker punched in the gut. Her father had chosen to be a vampire instead of walking the path of light — he had chosen her stepmother instead of her. He had chosen death over love. She would not want to remember him anytime soon. “Gabriel was the name of an angel, but my father tainted it,” she said slowly, swallowing hard. “I don’t think I would want to grace my child with it.”

He stroked strands of her burnt sienna hair from her brown eyes. “I understand, Gabrielle, but I think that the name could use cleansing. The snow washes the world white, giving her a new promise and a new hope for a better year. So could the name be washed of it’s former stain.”

She smiled. “When did you get to be so wise?” she asked.

“I’m an elf, it’s a prerequisite, isn’t it?” he joked.

She laughed. “I suppose so,” she agreed. “Although, you have your blonde moments.”

“Hey, you might want to watch what you’re saying,” he teased. “I am, after all, a redhead.”

“That’s true, our children are going to have the worst tempers ever,” she snickered.

He laughed. “Maybe not. I have met my share of level-headed redheads,” he winked.

“But you’re not one of them,” she grinned.

He feigned being hurt. He placed a hand before his heart, “That burns, Angora, that just burns. Don’t make me call you Gabrielle, I will do it.”

“You already overused that name today,” she wheedled, sticking her tongue out. “Besides it was my given name, I’m not going to be too offended, I promise.”

“But you’ll still be offended.”

“You’re so annoying.”

“Duh? I’m a man, what did you expect. You still love me,” he grinned, picking her up around her waist, throwing her over his shoulder.

“Although, I might love you less if you keep doing that,” she joked.

“Dually noted,” he grinned. He then paused from his teasing of his bride-to-be when he caught sight of the sky. The clouds parted, and the sun shone gold upon them bathing them in it’s incandescent light. He smiled. “I think my sister approves of you.”

“What sister wouldn’t approve of me?” she recoiled.

“You have a smart remark for everything,” he snorted. He rolled his eyes. “But I guess I’ll put up with you, anyway.”

- - -
Linda Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poetry has recently been featured in Magic Cat Press, Black-Listed Magazine, Bigger Stones, and Vintage Poetry. One of her short stories has been featured in Carnage Conservatory and she has an upcoming short story for publication in Dark Gothic Reconstructed Magazine in April 2012.

2/1/12

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

War Song II - Northend
By Ram Iyer

The North Land is a cold place and the weather is only partly to blame. The North Landers are not a rich people, not traders, nor merchants. They’re people of the land, farmers, tillers, hunters, soldiers, warriors.

As the scribe, Yohanas once put it …
“These are not men of opulence and plenty.
Not Olothians nor Varn.
for even the Lord L’Skarr,
Resides in what can only be called a glorious barn.”

What they lack in gold and jewels, they make up for, in food, ale and land. The North Land extends from the Briar’s Bridge at the borders of the Lost Forest to the Andheste Peaks, at the northern edge of the world. Of the twelve kingdoms, the North Land is the largest.Land is by far their greatest treasure and they have vast expanses of it.

The most fertile land, in all of the twelve kingdoms is in Northend, the capital. It is odd for such a cold place to have such bountiful soil. It is the warm currents of the sea of Horingas, which flows to its shores that makes it so.

Yet the northerners do not till more than they need, nor do they graze their stock, for more than their feed. The land is a gift from their gods, and is to be treated so.

They will not let other kingdoms have use of it, and they will bleed before an inch of it is taken by other men.

For this, they are at war; always.

There are times when there is peace and people talk of growing things and life. Such times are fleeting and rare.

***

“Did you hear, Valko ? They say we may ride to battle again! This time, against the armies of Torvenfell!!”

A young man spoke to his companion at the table. One could be forgiven for mistaking his tone for confidence, for it was only the slightest quiver in his voice that gave away his nervousness. It was a particularly busy night at the tavern in Northend and yet, over all the voices in the tavern, the young man spoke louder.

“About time, eh?” he laughed. “I was wondering if there was any fight left in these lands or had all the men taken to wearing skirts and tilling their land along with their women!!”

This drew a chorus of grunts and table thumping. He tossed his empty pint at the old man serving them. The pint hit him on the shoulder which drew laughs from all around the tavern. The old man pulled on his hood, picked up the pint and continued with his work. You learned to grow a thick skin, working in the taverns of Northend; especially, if you were a southerner working in the North Lands.

The young man’s friend Valko, nodded and spoke. He was a big man. Towering in height and bearing a girth, worthy of a bear.

“I hear there is talk of a treatise!!, to let those bloody Varn’s use our land to grow their stinking crops!”.

It was true. There had been talk all over the land of such a treaty. The Varn emissary had travelled to Northend several times to hold talks with the Lord L’Skarr. The North Land, was a proud kingdom, but years of war had made it poor and tired. Perhaps, the Lord L’Skarr’s age drove him more toward a path of wisdom than that of pride.

“I’d slit my own throat and die before I let some Varn plant seeds in my yard!! “ Valko declared with finality.

His young friend retorted “I’d slit that boy Varn’s throat first!!”

More laughter ensued. The lack of years behind the Kingship of Torvenfell’s new king, Carsedius Varn was a subject of jest in many kingdoms. But the lords knew better. Carsedius Varn was as vicious and ruthless, as he was young and he had the immeasurable riches of the Varn dynasty to fuel his thirst for conquest.

Now Valko threw his pint at the old man in belligerent petulance, and missed. This drew laughter from the tavern again, but more directed at Valko this time. The alcohol and embarrassment only served to fuel Valko’s rage.

Valko got up and walked to the old man who in comparison was a shorter, thinner man unlike most of the Northmen were. He was certainly not from the North Land. He did not have a northerners build and had black hair, which no Northerner could have possibly had.

“Why’d you move south-blood?” Valko asked with contempt.

The old man hadn’t moved. Valko’s aim had been so off the mark, that there had been no need for the old man to move.

The old man did not answer, but stood his ground. His eyes to the floor, he did not look up.

Valko, put his hand on his sword and spoke “Pick up the pint … and hit yourself with it.”

The old man did not move … the tavern crowd had turned quiet save for a lingering uneasy murmur.

“Pick it up … “

The old man bent down and picked up the pint.

“Now hit yourself with it on the head. I want to hear it … “

The old man stood motionless, eyes still on the floor.

“Do it … or I’ll bloody cut your hea …”

He did not finish the sentence. The old man leapt up with startling speed and drove the pint’s lip into Valko’s temple hard. It made a sickening squishing sound as it slammed into the side of his face. Valko staggered as blood poured down his face … and fell heavily onto a table near him.

His companion drew his sword and lunged at the old man, who leaned out of the way to avoid the sword. As the young man’s momentum took him past his target, the old man reached out to grab his shoulder and with a single motion, shoved it down. The companion crashed heavily into the floor and slid along it for some distance knocking over chairs and stools … sword still in hand.

The old man, held the groaning companion’s head down with his foot, while he pulled up Valko by the collar.

“You know nothing of War, Soldier Valko … you have been in one battle by my count and it would be a injustice to other battles to call it that.”

He looked around the tavern at slightly drunk, slightly startled faces. There was a glint in the old man’s eyes that pierced deep.

“There is no bloody glory in war … no greatness in killing or dying. There is only blood, pain, desperation, un-kept promises and if you are fortunate, perhaps death.”

The old man’s face shone from under the hood. It was a hard face, scarred and worn and his voice was calm yet sharp. There was something very quietly murderous about him.

The tavern turned quiet. The old man dropped Valko onto the floor, with a bloodied face and a broken ego. He looked around again, this time with some degree of disappointment showing on his face.

“War is on these lands … but you are all fools, if it is by choice.”

He turned and walked toward the door. The tavern-keep came up to him with an old bag, a water skin and an ornate sword. The sword was crafted with a mark. Two silver serpents on its black hilt. It was not a symbol that was well known and with good reason. The Lord L'Skarr's “Blades” wished it so.

“I’m sorry Selhem” the tavern keeper said.

“ So am I,Haar … So am I” The old man said as he walked out into the cold dark.

- - -
Ram has been making up stories since he was a kid. It was only recently he decided to put them down on paper and tell other people about them. When he isn't writing, reading or generally concocting devious ideas, he enjoys being a musician, an engineer and a marketing professional. His area of literary focus is fantasy, horror, sci-fi and similar forms of fiction. He lives in India with his amazing wife.

1/25/12

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

War Song I - Torvenfell
By Ram Iyer

War, Prince Carsedius, is in the nature of men.

We are constantly at war; with enemies, with neighbors, with aggressors and with those we seek to conquer. There are no constants in life. Everything changes. You can either effect change or you can accept it. That is the choice that separates Kings from men. You will be King one day Carsedius, and you will make this choice.

Remember then, that you are no longer a child waiting to accept change as it is handed down to you by others more powerful. You will be a King then and you must effect change. There are those who will never accept that change and you will be at war with them. There are those who want you to fail so they may claim your glory for themselves and you will be at war with them. Finally there will be choices that will pit your mind against your soul. These are the toughest battles, young king, for you will be at war with yourself.

Your first lesson begins today.

This morning, I was in council with your father. He rides to Northend of The North Land, seeking to barter peace with the Northmen. The council and I, expressed my concern against such actions but he has grown old and tired. War is incessant, and it has taken its toll on him. I fear, he will not return from this Journey. If the Northerners do not kill him, my assassins will.

My loyalty, you must understand, is not to the crown, but to the land. The council work to secure the safety of Torvenfell’s ambitions. No harm will come to you child, for you will be King soon as Torvenfell must have a King of the royal Varn bloodline, and you will have a choice.

Seek revenge and stand against The Council or take your throne and become the most powerful king in the twelve lands. Which will you choose Carsedius Varn?

****

I know that my father is already dead, Vicar. The northerners did not kill him.

I am King now and Torvenfell’s throne lies before me. There is yet a third choice I may make. Am I not King ? true and just ? How then, can I leave the traitorous Vicar to be?

I will slay you here and now Vicar, for you have taken the life of my father like a coward, with a knife in his back. But I will not let it be known that you did it out of some sense of loyalty to the land. Instead, you will be called traitor and colluder with the Northmen. Then I will go to war with the north and lay claim to their lands for your council is wise even if its method unforgivable. The Council will fear me, the North will be won, my father avenged and I will be king. War my dear Vicar, comes to us all.

****

You are now a King indeed, Carsedius. You have taken your father’s throne, stolen my righteousness and used them both to your ends. I would spit on your face before you slay me, but I will not, for I admire your cold heart. You are King this day by my death and you will lead us well in War. For Lions are kings only in poems and tales. Wars are won by hungry dogs like you.

- - -
Ram has been making up stories since he was a kid. It was only recently he decided to put them down on paper and tell other people about them. When he isn't writing, reading or generally concocting devious ideas, he enjoys being a musician, an engineer and a marketing professional. His area of literary focus is fantasy, horror, sci-fi and similar forms of fiction. He lives in India with his amazing wife.

1/18/12

2012-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

Cuy
By Michele Markarian

Miles and his parents were visiting the Inti-nan Solar Musuem in Ecuador. It was an interesting place, with winding paths that lead to little exhibit areas where their English-speaking guide conducted hands-on experiments and hummingbirds fluttered freely. They were a disparate group of tourists, the English speakers – Miles and his parents, two Korean colleagues with the son of their supervisor, and a family from Washington State complete with parents, two children and two grandparents .

“Have any of you had the chance to try cuy?” asked the guide.

“Is that guinea pig?” asked the grandfather from Washington State.

“That’s right,” beamed the guide.

“I did”, said the Korean women.

“Did you like –“

“Too gamey. Full of bones,” said the Korean woman.

“Cuy is a great delicacy here,” said the guide. “However, it is very expensive – like, around twenty dollars – so we only have it for festivals and special occasions.”

“One of my friends saw a painting of ‘The Last Supper’ in Peru,” Miles heard the Washington State mom whisper to his mom. “Right smack in front of Jesus was a big platter with a dead guinea pig on it. I guess if it was for festivals….”

“Why wouldn’t Jesus want cuy?” said Miles’s mom, and they both laughed.

Miles didn’t think he could eat cuy. He liked guinea pigs. Several of his friends had them as pets. Eating one would be just too weird.

“Here are some guinea pigs we are raising,” said the guide, leading them over to a little indoor pen. A dozen or so cream-and-butterscotch colored guinea pigs were huddled there.

“Are you raising these for –“ Miles’s mom began.

“Yes,” said the guide. “Now let’s move on to this room, where you will see some shrunken heads.”

Miles took a last look at the guinea pigs. “Awww,” he said involuntarily before turning away.

“Pssst.”

Miles turned around. The rest of the group was ahead of him. Nobody was there. He headed towards his parents and the others.

“Pssst. Kid. Kid, turn around.”

Miles whirled around. The voice was coming from the guinea pig pen.

“That’s right, kid. It’s me, the talking guinea pig. Don’t make me shout, okay?”

Miles leaned over the pen. Sure enough, a large guinea pig with long white whiskers and large beady eyes was staring at him.

“I heard that ‘awwww’ that came out of your mouth a few seconds ago. Don’t be feeling sorry for us, okay? Being a delicacy is a huge honor, kid, a huge honor. Don’t you forget it.”

“How come you speak English?” asked Miles, when he finally found his voice.

“A lot of folks come through here speaking English. The guides speak English, if there’s a demand for it.” Now that Miles noticed, the guinea pig had a slight accent, but for the most part, his English was pretty good.

“I have to go back to my parents,” said Miles.

“Are you kidding me? A guinea pig wishes to converse with you, and you have to go back to your parents? Kids today have absolutely no intellectual curiousity,” snarled the guinea pig.

“I’m sorry, I am curious, but this is really weird,” said Miles, who was a little frightened. “How can a guinea pig talk?”

“How old are you, kid? Eleven? Twelve?”

“Eleven”, said Miles.

“Don’t worry about how right now. What’s important is why. I heard that ‘awwww’, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit.”

“I’m sorry,” said Miles quickly. He looked over his shoulder. His parents and the rest of the group were taking turns trying to balance an egg on a nail. “It’s just that you’re all so cute. I hate to see you eaten.”

“Hate to see us eaten!” The guinea pig stretched on his two back legs and shook his front ones in anger. “We live to be eaten, and don’t you forget it! We are the pride of South America, you hear me? Do you know how much it costs to buy a decent cuy?”

“Twenty dollars,” said Miles. Seeing the guinea pig’s face fall, he added, “The guide told us.”

“Twenty dollars is a lot of money, my friend. And do you know why? Because we’re worth it, that’s why. My father and his father’s father and his father’s father were raised to be feasted upon. It’s in our blood. And then you come along with your ‘Awwwwww’, and next thing you know, people will want to keep us for pets. Then what?” asked the pig.

Miles held out his arms. “Then you could be pets. All of you. You could live in a cage, and –“

“Live in a cage!” the guinea pig sputtered. “Sounds like a real blast! A cage! Then what? Death?”

“Well…..” Miles though about it. “Yeah. But you’d live a long time. And maybe some kid would feed you, and play with you –“

“We get plenty of that,” said the guinea pig shortly. He craned his neck to see over the pen. “Those your parents over there? The short brunette with the tall guy?”

“Yeah,” said Miles.

“Do me a favor – they look like they have some cash. Get them to try some cuy while they’re here, will ya?”

“They’re not really into –“

“Please?” The guinea pig looked at Miles with his pleading beady eyes. “Please? You’re from the States, right? I want the world to know how great we are.”

“Miles!” Miles’s mother came over and took his hand. “You have to try and balance this egg on a nail. It’s impossible. Come on, I’ll take your picture while you do it.”

Miles looked back at the guinea pig. He was silent, but his shiny eyes were saying please. Miles turned to his mother. “Can we try some cuy tonight?”

His mother dropped his hand. “Really? You want to try cuy? Why, son?”

Miles looked at the guinea pig and swallowed hard. “A friend of mine told me it was really good.” He thought he saw the pig wink.

- - -
Michele Markarian ‘s plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Heuer Publishing, and the Book of Estrogenius, and are produced throughout the United States and Great Britain. Her short story Shake was published in the anthology Families: The Frontline of Pluralism by Wising Up Press, and her story, Don’t You Want This Baby? was published in the anthology View From the Bed by Wising Up Press. Michele has written for Mom’s Literary Magazine, Regional Air Cargo Review and The Air Charter Journal, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

1/11/12

2012-01-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Dancers by the Hedge
By Anahita Ayasoufi

“It was a peculiar dance,” Maria said, and she tried to imitate some of its moves, disregarding completely how people would think of an old lady dancing in the bar. The move she tried to show was the hip-slip as she called it, but it came out quite dissatisfactory. The dancers by the hedge did it as if they were moving in a viscous fluid, as if a sort of resistance in the air smoothed their moves and blended it with nature.
“There was no music, and yet I felt like I actually heard the music in my head.” Maria closed her eyes for a moment, to hear that sound again, but all she heard was the subtle clanking of drinks at a neighboring booth. “Some dancers.”
“What dancers?” The bartender asked.
“The dancers by that huge hedge on the right of the summit path,” Maria said.
“What hedge?” The bartender asked. “The summit path is bare on both sides.”
Maria felt a little shiver pass on the back on her wrinkled hands. “Bare?”
“The crater’s flesh is still warm. It’ll take a while for anything to sprout in there, let alone a huge hedge.”
And it was not the first time that the sound of reason had mismatched the concrete experience of her eyes.
The first time had happened two weeks ago, when she was in the cemetery. It was well before sunset, and yet she saw the sun’s setting over the graves, with all its sadness and haunting beauty, except it was well before sunset time. She walked in that surreal scene for ten minutes, enough to get to the exit. During those ten minutes, the sun rose again, to the height it should be at.
“But I saw that hedge,” she said. “I can’t even imitate their dance moves. How could I have imagined moves that I don’t understand?”
The bartender was back to wiping glasses. Maria stepped out.
It was a bit after sunset, the sky dark but not quite. The last rays of the sun still reflected on shreds of clouds. Enough light shone on the summit path, enough to show its bareness on both sides. All as the bartender had said, except at about a quarter mile’s distance, the shreds of clouds twisted inside each other in the form of a cone, one that had almost touched the ground.
Tornado was the first word forming in her brain, but it dissolved as fast as it had formed. There is no such thing as a static Tornado. And the cone stood frozen static in her horizon.
For the past two weeks, Maria had wondered, what would she see had she stayed in that cemetery, had she gone from that surreal sunset into a surreal night? She did go back the next day the same time, but nothing out of the usual happened. Now this was her chance of discovering if her dancers were inside that cone.
By the time she covered half the distance to that cone, the darkness had settled, blurring the edges of her sight. She glanced back one time and saw the bar gleaming in the fog. Ahead still stood the cone, except she felt it had spread out, infecting more of the space. She felt as if the cone was reaching to her, that if she stood still, the cone would swallow her up. Maria did not stand still, though. She stepped forward and into that cone.
Maria thought she was dead. She thought it was her passing that brought her images from her past. She felt the effect of gravity lessen on her flesh. Floating was the feeling, her feet some inches above the ground, and the space around her solidified into a prism, glowing and multi-sided.
Through one side of the prism, she saw her dancers by the hedge. This time close-up revealed their clothing—sleek shards of skin, emeralds glowing in their eyes. Maria reached in their space and felt the viscous air slowing her fingers down, and she saw an irregular moon in their purple sky. A shriek escaped Maria’s throat. The dancers never stopped dancing.
Was she dead? It did not feel like that. But then again, how would she know? She had never died before.
On the other side of the prism her mother quilted by the fire. Now she knew she was dead. How else would she meet her mother again? Yet she turned her head. The fire seemed too familiar. It was the fire that caught on the house, the moment the volcano trembled. Not all memories she wanted to revive.
The side of the prism she turned her head to, showed her the magma flowing, the landscape of the bleak, except it had never happened. The magma never swallowed the town.
In confusion, she spun on her heels. In the side of the prism behind her, the bar was still gleaming in the fog.
The multifaceted prism was open to her. She was free to step in either side of it that she chose. And there were many sides, so many it would take an eternity to count them.
The cemetery sunset had not been an illusion. The hedge was not an illusion.
Time was an illusion; space an illusion—tricks of perception of human mind.
The choices were real.
Maria was alive.

- - -
I teach at East Tennessee State University and have a flash piece published at Bosley Gravel’s Cavalcade of Terror.

1/4/12

2012-01-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Process of the Fungus
By Tim Gerstmar

It was springtime and all the little green things were growing. Ron sat on his front porch wearing the pajamas they gave him at the hospital and looking out over the burgeoning yard. In the past few weeks things had gotten greener. Shoots and vines crept up the picket fence, bushes blossomed, and the moss shimmered on the rocks like felt under the bright sun. What Ron found most pleasant, however, was the strange green vines that seemed to come from nowhere and cover everything. They twisted like chlorophyll-filled noodles, and wove a pattern around the yard that made him believe for the first time in his miserable life that nature was an artist. He wanted to get up and go for a walk, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to go ten feet without collapsing.

He brought the iced tea that his wife made to his lips and felt the cool, moist glass under his thick caterpillar-like fingers. His cough had gotten worse, and that worried him. He was feeling extremely weak, but he demanded they let him out of the hospital nonetheless. What the hell did they know?

He drained his glass, and he was still thirsty. He called for Gina, but she did not respond. “Gina!” he yelled even louder. This sent him into a coughing fit that lasted a good minute. When he recovered, he noticed some strange green bile in the tissue that he hadn’t seen before, but at this point nothing surprised him. “Gina, come here a minute,” he rasped. It was no use. She couldn’t hear him. He filed it away as something to tell the doctors about when he went in on Tuesday. At least it was a good day, a wonderful day, and that made him feel a little better.

The dappled sunlight on the yard played tricks on his eyes, and he could swear he saw things moving across it, shapes and patterns shifting with a rhythm and a purpose. It was so different from anything he had ever seen that he was at once captivated and fearful. This odd dance of light held his attention so hypnotically that he couldn’t drop his gaze, and the plants and shapes writhed and wiggled. Then there came a low humming sound that began to change in tone and pitch, whispering and burbling like some quiet, unearthly language.

Suddenly, he felt the urge to stand. He got up slowly, fearing the intense pain that always accompanied any movement he tried to make these days, but there was no pain. In fact, he felt a surge of energy. He stood effortlessly and looked out over the dew soaked-lawn. He kicked off his hospital slippers and walked down the porch steps and into the yard, the soft grass caressing his bare feet, moving of its own accord. The entire world was green, and green it would remain. Where he walked was no longer his yard. The cool earth felt brisk on his toes. The wind tickled his skin and left goose pimples. There was revitalization in his organs as they surged and coursed with new life. He moved to the hillside, covered with twisting tubers and candy green nettles. He laid himself down on the earth and felt his tiny chest hairs stand on end. He rolled, feeling the ground and its moist contents stick and suction to his body. Out of his mouth he could feel tiny tendrils, his children moving out into the open air, grasping for sunlight and water.

The plants moved around him, and his flesh slowly disappeared beneath a gnarled covering of green. Tiny insects swirled above the vines that crisscrossed his chest in an elaborate cat’s cradle. Along his cheeks, fresh stems fixed themselves, pumping chlorophyll through him. Moss covered the top of his head, slowly fading down his neck like new hair, tiny leaves sprouted under his eyes and reached for the sun. The grass tickled his sides and his legs, and settled around him like a comforting blanket. Soon birds were landing on his shape, and the song of the summer burbled and chirped from the trees around him. He couldn’t believe that he was free. “Welcome,” a voice said.

When Gina came out onto the porch with another glass of iced tea, Ron was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes widened when she saw how fast the vegetation in the backyard had grown. “Ronny? Where are you?” There was still no answer. She put the glass down and put both hands on the porch railing and wondered how everything got so green. There was a rustle out in the far end of the yard, and for a second she swore she saw a hunched green shape moving off into the forest.

- - -
Tim Gerstmar was born in 1972 and grew up in Massachusetts. He has had a varied career, including a stint in the U.S. Navy and ten years of teaching ESL in the U.S., Korea, and Thailand. Tim writes short fiction during his free time.

12/28/11

2011-12-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Adrianna’s Journey
By Robert Shmigelsky

Adrianna clutched tightly the golden looped cross in the palm of her hand.

Standing to the side of the newly weathered mountain pass, the rock-strewn path winding through, Adrianna looked on with silent lament cast on her face, her coruscate eyes leading her backwards through past events.

In the back of her mind, she relieved the betrayal and murder of kings, the battles that ended the lives of countless heroes: their eventual defeat at a vastly superior enemy and subsequent flight to the base of the mountains.

Interrupting her of these sights, the ragged remnants of Adrianna's people, who graciously expressed their gratitude to her as they passed by.

"Thank you, my lady." "How can we ever repay you?" "May you have many sons and daughters," they said to her as they hurried down to the other side of the mountain pass.

Strands of her long auburn-brown hair adrift along beside her she hid her emotions behind a wind-swept face. Adrianna looked at each of them in turn, nodded and said she would see them all on the other side—lies.

A talented clairvoyant, and a sorceress, Adrianna unfortunately had the burden of foreknowing events that others did not. That alone left her with the responsibility to act, knowing that if she did not—no one would.

Around her, the tops of Adrianna's eyes perceived the gleaming white tips of the lofty mountain range once thought to be impassable. A gift from the light above, her father had used the remainder of time imbued inside the cross to weather the mountain pass into being. While only a few moments had passed for her and those around her, for her father countless unmeasured years, perhaps an entire Age, had passed as temporal wind rapidly grinded away granite rock with a whooshing torrent of ice cold wind and rain.

When the temporal wind ceased and the swirling green barrier fell, they saw inside, but all that remained was an old man on the ground.

Adrianna recalled running to her father's side, cradling him in her already burdened arms then watching as he finally succumbed to all the sand in the hourglass, having used the cross—until that point—to keep the grains at bay while they continued to ravage those around him.

In fact, only moments before, Adrianna herself had looked older than her father.

One last grain for her to spend on her father, Adrianna looked at the cairn atop the mountain pass.

Forcibly removing her gaze from such a sight, Adrianna averted her eyes and turned them onto the far north, above the other side of the mountain pass and the climbing bodies, hefting on their shoulders what belongings they had left.

There inside a snow globe, within a magical glass-like barrier, she saw falling snow hanging in mid air upon the remnants of their once magnificent castles, halls, towers, mansions and arks.

In the back of her mind, Adrianna thought of the brave two hundred temporal knights and their daring captain—now hidden from her eyes inside the barrier—that had given their lives to buy the time needed for the last of their kind to lock their swords together, weave their magic and freeze Palador in that moment of time.

Once more her clairvoyant gaze announced its presence, arriving from out of the netherworld. It resumed control of her eyes, replacing the color with the brilliant hues and tinctures of the world unfolding inside them.

Beyond the scope of what men see, she saw the barrier shimmer and vanish and the curse lift then a dark cloud begin to waft and rise towards her up the mountain pass in obvious pursuit of the cross.

Although her body shook and her mind felt the tremors of the internal kind, Adrianna steadied herself and remained strong, refusing to shut her eyes or turn away. Not only was she determined to keep up a brave appearance, she knew from past experiences, the pain felt when a clairvoyant tried to ignore a vision: like a bandage being peeled off your eyes instead of your skin.

Soon enough Adrianna's sight returned to her.

The vision over, Adrianna watched her people descend to safety, but the last to follow noticed she had yet to turn away.

"Are you feeling distressed, my dear?" an elderly lady herding her husband along asked; the old couple stopped before Adrianna.

"For now..." she told them, "but I promise I will follow when I am able."

She did not know whether those last few words were the truth or not.

The woman nodded before the couple proceeded on their way. Adrianna could not tell whether the woman had sensed the truth.

When she was alone again Adrianna focused her gaze back to where it had been. She waited until she was sure the last of her people were safely down the mountain pass then clenched ever more tightly the looped cross she held in her hand.

Adrianna closed her eyes and with a single thought froze time a small radius around her while leaving herself relatively unaffected. The sorceress' staff she held in her other hand she raised into the air. In combination with her other talent, she flung her arms, shouted spell mantras and built up a great chandelier of earth above her. When she sensed it was large enough to close the mountain pass, she opened her eyes and resumed time.

The earth fell, but in unison a light flowed out of the cross and fleeted above Adrianna, protecting her and deflecting the collapsing earth away.

As her surroundings darkened, so too did her eyes as the weight of what was happening around her pushed her conscious to the farthest recesses of her mind...

###

Adrianna’s eyes opened, but saw only darkness. Her body felt something hard beneath her.

Instinctively, she searched in the dark for her staff. A few blind grabs later her hand caught hold of something.

Leaning on her staff, Adrianna pulled herself off the ground. In unison to the thought of brightening her surroundings a light came to life from the stone inset on her staff, illuminating her immediate surroundings.

Adrianna redirected the light around her and found she was in a large, dome-shaped cavern riddled with clefts that there as dark as a void. She looked up momentarily, shone the light up towards the ceiling, but saw only the empty space above her.

Grimacing, Adrianna brought the light back before her: her body felt broken and her mind half closed to her – as if all the wonders of the Age of Legends had been taken away and those that had counted on them were still feeling the effects.

She no longer felt the pain that accompanied her clairvoyant visions, which gave her slight pause: she had grown accustomed to them and now that they were not there—she was not sure how to react. Should she lament the loss of one of her powers or celebrate the loss of a curse? Either way, for now at the very least, she figured she would be able to survive with only the most basic of spells.

She pondered the implications of the previous day and asked herself how she had managed to survive it. A momentary thought of her father passed through her.

Adrianna pictured the flash of light as she remembered the last thing she saw before falling. She pulled the cross up to her eyes. Was this tiny piece of jewelry responsible for all this she now saw around her and that aura which had engulfed and protected her?

This is truly one of four godly gifts, Adrianna thought.

She wished to give the subject more of her time, but at the moment she believed it more prudent to remove herself from this surrounding.

Adrianna illuminated the entrance of one of the tunnels then turned and sauntered off, using her staff as support. She headed down a tunnel, one being as good as any. Upon reaching deeper, she saw that the sides of it were riddled with cracks and small holes. If the cross was somehow responsible for creating this cave, a tremendous amount of energy must have gone into it…

Here and there more tunnels crisscrossed with the one she was on. Adrianna ignored them and proceeded on the path she was on. She knew the surest way of finding a way out was staying more or less on the same direction.

After what seemed to be days spent walking through the dark, accompanied only by the sound of her feet echoing off the hard cavern floor, finally, Adrianna glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel.

At long last, Adrianna murmured out loud to herself before she hurriedly hobbled to the exit of the cave, the strength in her legs having yet to return to her fully, and stepped outside.

Adrianna had to shield her eyes with a hand, the sun being unusually bright on its mountain perch. Before she could finish thinking that perhaps she had been asleep underground for too long and her eyes were no longer used to sunlight, two fierce, blistering winds swept down on her from both directions, sending shivers down her spine. She tried to brace herself against them, wrapping her rubicund cloak around the supple curves of her body, but to little prevail.

How unbecoming, she thought to herself—wind coming from two directions. Her eyes adjusted somewhat from the glare and she was able to lower her hand and look before her.

She wondered where she had emerged to. By the look of things, she had arisen in an entirely different realm. Like the rim in her father’s crown a wing of mountains stood majestic against the setting sun, encircling the land she was in. The land itself was narrow and wind-swept, which gave way to a highly eroded gorge at the valley’s bottom. The gorge also encircled the land and Adrianna followed one side of it before it disappeared behind a mountain’s side.

Adrianna looked and saw the base of a mountain right there in front of her. She gazed up the length of it and saw it stretched past the clouds higher than the mountains around it.

Adrianna stumbled backwards a few steps as she tried to get a better look at the mountain. Despite appearing almost kingly, the wind-swept damage not without standing, Adrianna immediately thought of her father. If she had not known better she might have thought this was where she had left him.

When Adrianna had sufficiently recovered, she swung back around, intending to figure out which way to head next, but both sides of the vale looked equally uninviting: steep slopes leading to jagged edges stretching out to what appeared to go nowhere in particular.

In the end, Adrianna decided to head back into the cave. First of all, she wanted to get out of this blasted wind that kept blowing everywhere (already, she could feel parts of her ears start to turn pink). Secondly, her insides twisted with hunger. And thirdly, not knowing where she was, if she waited until night – perhaps the stars would help her.

Adrianna proceeded to sit down on the floor of the cave and conjure herself some bread and cheese while she waited for the sky to darken. As she did so, the wind gave no hint of dying or even slowing down. Throughout the day, it remained steadfast.

Before long the slopes outside and the entrance of the cave dimmed. Soon enough the sky darkened.

The wind sounding like it was being blown from a horn Adrianna climbed up to her feet, wrapped her cloak tight around her and entered the night.

Looking up at the star-hung sky, she immediately recognized two constellations: to the east, the ranger sidestepping into dimensional shadows and to the north, the dragon knight riding the high winds.

While the land around her told Adrianna she was in an entirely different place, the sight above her told her she was under the same sky as yesterday. Why a trickster sought to confuse her, Adrianna could only assume. She felt unnerved, no longer being connected to her clairvoyant powers. Since childhood, she could not remember a time when they did not provide her with the answers she sought.

Well, she thought: her people went south and the ranger’s arrow pointed in that direction; so that was the direction she decided to head herself.

Heeding the ranger, Adrianna swung to her left and headed south down the mountain vale. She entered the gorge at the bottom and began winding her way through it. Traveling at the thickest time of the night, the shadowed nooks and crannies of the place seemed like the perfect hiding spots for the darkened contortions of necromancers or common night creatures; but, besides the churning of the wind, she saw or heard nothing that might indicate possible perils or wildlife. It was as if a great hand had reached down from above and took hold of every living creature in the vicinity.

Nearly half way through the night, Adrianna found herself approaching the southern rim of the mountains. This up close at night, they almost looked like the spikes of a crown.

Adrianna found a path leading up and climbed out of the gorge. Though almost spent she reached within and climbed up the steep southern slope to the base of the mountains. Searching for a way through, she skimmed the rim when not far along she happened on a narrow chasm leading in.

She headed down the path of this chasm, but nearly a quarter of the way through it narrowed to a small cleft. Turning sideways, she began sliding through. Half way along, the cleft widened again and Adrianna began climbing ridge after ridge. As behind her the sun began its climb back up to its perch, she sensed she was almost there and lo the path leveled off before her, allowing her to continue at her leisure.

In unison to the sun cresting the mountains behind her Adrianna arrived at the edge of a high outcropping overlooking a small grassy green valley. At the center of which, long already built, she saw a magnificent white castle surrounded by a bustling large town with brightly colored roofs and wide cobbled streets.

Recognizing a temporal castle when she saw one, she knew at once her people had reached safety. But how did it come to this point? Her eyes could see that much time had passed. That meant her brother and those she knew would most likely be long dead. Still, despite what she saw before her, she could not believe how much time had passed.

She surveyed the surrounding landscape in search for clues. Around the castle and its town the rolling foothills went up and down, each hill getting bigger than the one before it. The forests stood tall and spread out, casting long shadows. Meadows filled with flowers, and of every imaginable color, were in the height of bloom. Only the mountains were timeless, their pristine white peaks showing not a sign of melt even in spring.

Adrianna spun around to look behind her. To the far west and east, in the fading blue horizon, she saw the shapes of familiar white peaks, but before her, putting what she saw during her journey into perspective, the mountains sloped away from her like a certain ornament, the outcropping its jewel.

It was a crown…

The only possible explanation had latched onto her mind.

The aura from the cross had thrust the White Mountains apart, forming the mountain crown; then, as the earth fell from above, it piled on top, forming the grotto Adrianna had woken up in and the wearer of the mountain crown: the mountain itself—her father.

Adrianna surveyed the surrounding landscape again.

Absorbing such a sight, she clenched once more the looped cross in the palm of her hand: it was over objects such as this that had awoken things in the hearts of men that should have not been woken and so caused the shadow to rise and throw the race of men out of paradise for their folly. She could not throw it away for someone else to stumble on, nor could she destroy it as the aura had proved: that some things were meant to play a role in the world and so could not easily be undone, but it would be a shame to bring such an object to this new world. Adrianna did not need to be a clairvoyant to see what would happen if she did.

Such a vision at the forefront of her mind, Adrianna looked on with silent lament cast on her face as she gave her people another look before turning back the way she came, knowing she could never rejoin them – only set sight on them from a distance, from time to time.

- - -
Robert, a residential care aide, is unapologetic in his pursuit of excellent high fantasy and has been writing fantasy for himself in his spare time for the last seven years. He is currently sifting through the first of three novels he wrote in his younger years and has upcoming poetry collection from Diminuendo Press entitled “Fragments Through Time”

12/21/11

2011-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Infinite City
By Chris Griglack

She drifts about the city, as if in the midst of a dream, but she's not. Rather, she wanders somewhere between memory, hallucination, and reality, never knowing one from another. Dreams are born in such a place, but elsewhere. Where she walks reality is thin, not the suffocating cocoon which prevents glimpses of what lies beyond. Other beings, other places, other times, and other realities all cross her path as she walks wonderingly down the streets of the Infinite City.

When she at last arrives at her destination, a small, tinny sounding bell rings to alert the shopkeeper. The store is full of a thick, flowery smoke, gently drifting about, giving the air the same consistency of the Mist of Minds outside, but with a more pleasant smell. An elderly oriental man, thankfully human, tentatively pokes his head up from behind the counter. His grin upon seeing her threatens to split his face apart and his eyes become swallowed up by crow's feet and wrinkles. “Shoppa Ereyting, washu need?” He asks, possessing far more energy than any man his age had a right to.

“I need a guide,” Impossibly, his grin widens. The few teeth he has left are all on display to her as she waits for his answer.

“No nee guide,” he replies. “City go erewhere. Jus wok.”

“I need to find a man I've never met before.”

His smile vanishes, a look of understanding replacing it. He nods sagely before he says, “Ahhhhh. You nee guide.” She crosses her arms and frowns at him. Under her glare of disapproval he continues, “Whosis man?”

“His name is Ranga. He was once a world explorer,” her words are almost a snarl through her gritted teeth.

The shopkeeper studies her carefully, under which scrutiny she maintains her glare to show she means business. Without warning, his entire body is overcome by something between laughter, crying, and an asthma attack. Her eyes widen in horror until she realizes that he is not, in fact, dying of laughter. The glare returns, twice as disapproving as before, but his mirth deflects it. “You no nee guide,” he finally replies when he recovers, “Ranga work fo me. He at utter store.”

He emerges from behind the counter, taking her by the hand and leading her outside, “Clossa eyes.” She does, and follows the man half a dozen steps into the mist without looking at all. When he says, “Here a go,” she opens her eyes to view an identical building before them. She digs in her purse for her wallet, but the elderly man shakes his head and says “No charge!” before disappearing into the mist.

When she enters the shop, a small tinny sounding bell rings to alert the shopkeeper. The air is clear in this shop, and a very different man stands behind the counter, ready to assist her. He wears a pair of baggy white pants and a blue vest embroidered with strange patterns in golden thread. The vest lays open, showing off his bronze, muscled chest and stomach, but what attracts her attention is the white turban studded with a giant emerald. “Shop of Everything, how can I assist you?”

She looks him over again, comparing him with the descriptions her mother had given her. Physically similar, but she needs to check his temperament, too. “Nice headgear, Aladdin.”

A pouty look crosses his face as he rips the turban from his head and throws it into the corner. “Hey, it's not by choice,” he snarls, building up to a full-blown rant. Apparently she was not the first to insult him at work. “Management makes me dress like this. I'm supposed to look as “mysterious” as possible. Like all brown-skinned people in turbans look mysterious. They told me I could bring my hookah to work, then laughed when I said I didn't have one.”

She smiles at his frustration, but says nothing as he continues. “Y'know they have another location with a golem tending shop? Like a real, eats rocks and shits diamonds golem. I can't compete with that! So ya, if it'll make you buy a magic carpet, I'll dress up like Aladdin, or even Hadji.”

She claps sarcastically as he picks up and dusts off the turban, all the while taking deep breaths to calm himself. “What do you want, lady?” he asks when he finally regains his composure.

“I came looking for you.”

“Well here I am. The finder's fee on that is gonna be...” he shrugs and throws his right hand up in a gesture of indifference, “50 of whatever currency you have.”

She places a single grubby coin on the counter, which he raises to his face to study. The engraving is hard to make out, partially faded from years of being carried around. It was last spent nine months before her birth, on her unwilling mother. He squints down at the coin, up at her, then back down again. “Oh. Shit,” he finally manages.

“Ya,” he clutches his chest where her bullet goes through, dropping the coin to the counter, “The same coin for both our lives.” The last thing he hears is the small, tinny sounding bell ringing as she exits the shop.

She is enveloped by the Mist of Minds, the stuff from whence dreams are made, among other things. Ubiquity is its nature, but so too is the void. It is the nothingness from which everything arises. Timeless, formless, and above all, reasonless. For reality's hold is thin in the Infinite City, but the mist weaves a thick blindfold of its own. If you close your eyes for even a moment in its midst, there's no telling what you'll open them to. You can never get lost, though. No matter how far they've wandered, an enigmatic old Chinese man always sends the lost back home.

- - -
I'm a Senior English writing major at UMASS Dartmouth, and I prefer to write a sort of slipstream or weird tales type of story that doesn't really neatly into any genres. My website isn't updated nearly as often as it should be, but it has some brief fiction, poetry, essays, and even a few reviews.

12/14/11

2011-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Conjunctions
By Rick McQuiston

“I knew it!” Todd exclaimed as he slammed the heavy book shut. He wasn't in the least bit surprised when the tome exploded into a puff of golden smoke.

The genie leaned back against a huge oak tree. Even its partially ethereal form was still great enough to bend the trunk slightly. A golden hue bathed its ancient visage.

“Are you prepared to make your second wish?” it boomed.

Todd stood up and rubbed his stubbled chin. The possibilities were endless now that he found a loophole, apparently one large enough to drive a truck through no less. He eyed the glowing form of the genie.

“You know I majored in English back in college.”

The genie was becoming irritated. “Your second wish?” it repeated in a darker tone.

Todd ignored the genie’s imposing mannerisms.

“A conjunction,” he continued, “is a word or words that join other words, groups of words, or sentences. They also show relationships between ideas.”

The genie’s expression grew threatening. It floated over to where Todd was standing, looming over him with its menacing, gaseous form.

“Your incessant babbling tests my patience mortal.”

Todd smiled up at the creature. “Please, just bear with me.”

“Your second wish?”

“I’m getting to that. You see Mr. Genie, I thumbed through your rule book, which as you may recall was my first wish.”

The genie nodded in resignation. “Continue.”

“Thank you. As I was saying, I went through your book and found no mention as to the use of conjunctions, nor any restriction as to wish structure. Only the basic limitations are covered: cannot raise the dead; cannot alter or delete love; and of course the most obvious: cannot wish for more wishes.”

The genie rose up into a huge pillar of golden flame, bloated with immense but flawed power.

“Enough of this foolishness!” it bellowed, shaking the very forest with its cries. “Make your last two wishes!”

“I will. I will. I promise,” Todd said as calmly as he could. “Your book stated the punishment for breaking any of the rules was… well let’s just say you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it. And with that, I am prepared to make my second wish.”

“Proceed,” the genie snarled as it gradually shrunk back to the size it was when Todd had first released it from the lamp: about seven feet tall.

Todd casually sauntered over to the edge of the campfire.

“I wish for ten million United States dollars, tax-free, in ten-thousand dollar denominations…no, deposited directly into my Money Market account at Trust Bank.

And…a brand new Porsche 918 Spyder…

And…the ability to fly…

And…enormous musical talent, including but not limited to drums, guitar, keyboards, and flute.” He once dated a girl who played the flute so well he’d fallen in love with the instrument.

“And…”

The genie’s arms elongated into a swirling, golden mist as it encircled its new temporary master. The stench of sulfur drifted upwards, tainting the forest air and corrupting the night with its promise of doom.

“Are you finished?” the genie asked quietly, but still with enough conviction to easily cut through Todd’s words.

“And…perfect health…

And…world peace… (He felt an obligation to do something for everyone else).

And…

The genie smiled a devilish smile as its ethereal form darkened. Forest animals scurried away, fleeing for their lives. The campfire began to wane, sputtering as it splashed its depleting warmth into the chilled air. And as it began to bear down on its clueless victim the genie convulsed in a poisonous mockery of a dance…of death.

Todd finally stopped his wish making when he felt the hot breath on his back.

“What? What’s going on? I wasn’t done yet.”

The genie swept its master up in its powerful embrace.

“You broke a rule. Your fate is sealed.”

Todd was dumbfounded. “What? What do you mean? I checked your rulebook.”

“You wished to see the tome of my restrictions,” the genie replied while flexing its fingers in anticipation of what was to come, “but your wish was singular-only ONE book. But, foolish mortal, there is yet another volume which has yet to be viewed by yourself.”

Todd was having trouble breathing. The mist from the genie was clogging his senses, disorienting him, weakening his grip on life.

“But…but that’s not fair. I…”

The genie laughed, a deep reverberation that echoed in the forest.

“Behold fool,” it boomed. “Part two.”

And the last thing Todd saw before he slipped into oblivion was an enormous black book. It was frayed from age, and scrawled across its cover was one word, that although simple in its structure, was nonetheless profound in its implication:

And…

- - -
I’m a forty-three year old father of two who loves anything horror-related. I’ve had over 250 publications so far, and have written two novels, five anthology books, one book of novellas, and edited an anthology of Michigan authors.

12/7/11

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Sloth the Lazy Dragon
By Regan W. H. Macaulay

The dragon lurched over his haul of unfinished finery: gold goblets, loose rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, tiaras waiting for stones, unpolished shields, silver chainmail, partially finished gold necklaces and rings, shining weapons encrusted with jewels, waiting for filigree.

A dwarf hovered in the archway, the exit out of the lower mountain. The dragon’s head lolled to the side and he noticed the diminutive fellow, with his pointed hat in his tense, gnarled hands. The dragon belched a small flame and rolled over onto the golden mound.

“Sir,” the dwarf began with a shaking voice, “this is the workshop. These goods are not complete. Surely you wish a finer hoard for yourself?”

“Hm?” the dragon replied, as if roused from a long slumber, rather than the beginning of his nap. He opened one yellow eye and yawned. His mouth was a chasm of brown, rotted teeth. The dwarf raised a wrinkled fist to his face to block the stench. “A finer hoard, as you put it, would mean flying to the top of this mountain. That would mean getting up.”

“But surely, a great dragon such as yourself…”

“Use your eyes, little man!” the dragon exhorted. “Can you not see my girth?” he sneered. He gave the poor dwarf a stare so foul it rivaled the reek of his breath.

The dwarf frowned and his manner altered. The dragon opened his second eye to regard this change in the little man. He postured like a man nearing the full extent of his patience. The fear appeared to have dissipated.

“Maybe if you got up off your hairy ass and moved around,” the dwarf sputtered, “perhaps flew to more mountaintops to pillage some real treasure, maybe then you wouldn’t be so fat – a pudgy, hideous beast stuck at the bottom of a mountain in a workshop filled with second-rate booty!”

The dragon snickered. “Nah,” he rolled onto his back, exposing his soft belly, “and my ass is not hairy. Clearly I am a reptile – no hair.”

“How can you expose your underside to me, stupid creature?” spewed the apoplectic dwarf. “Can you not see I am armed?” The dwarf unsheathed his sword – merely a dagger in relation to a human man – but it was sharp and gleamed for the dragon.

“Silly, tiny man,” the dragon sighed. The dwarf ran at him, his dagger gripped in both hands. “Why all this bother?” the dragon muttered, watching this absurdity.

The dwarf bellowed a warrior’s call to arms and drove on toward him with his weapon. The dragon waited until the dwarf was mere meters away before opening his great gob and blowing a rank wind upon him. He watched the dwarf stop, draw his limbs into himself in a wild convulsion, then drop to the ground coughing and covering his face. The little dwarf rolled back and forth on the ground, holding his grey beard to his face. The next breath the dragon blew at him was more lethal. He watched the dwarf alight. A moment later, he was a crisp.

“What an asshole!” the dragon remarked.

- - -
Regan has been writing since the age of seven, directing since high school, and producing theatre, film and television for the last eighteen years. Writing prose is her current focus. She has a strong interest in frogs, dragons, zombies, pink things, fuzzy creatures, and her husband.

11/30/11

2011-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

Blessed Curse
By Terri Rochenski

Daustan stared into his tankard of ale. I should have died. Not them. He sat against a slab-board wall of the Rogue and Horse amidst a ruckus of conversation and laughter. Frothy bubbles tickled his nose as he raised the cup to his lips.

Across the room the tavern’s door opened. A dry wind blew in along with a bearded hulk of a man. Stonewise’s minion, Lynus, scanned the room, his onyx eyes locking on Daustan.

Great. Just what I need, Daustan slumped further into his seat. How did he find me?

The High Wizard’s disciplinarian glided across the room, purple cape billowing behind him. “He’ll have you horse whipped for sure this time! And that’s the burnt bunion’s truth!”

“It won’t help.” Daustan’s green eyes clenched shut. “Nothing he’s done has helped.”

“You’re right.” Chair legs scraped on the wooden floor as Lynus sat. “Stonewise is at a loss. But you mustn’t give up and run away like this. Your blood sings with magic. You just need to find a way to release it.”

“I don’t want it released.” Daustan lifted his head and met Lynus’ gaze. “Ever again. It’s a curse.”

“It doesn’t matter if you want it or not, boy. It’s part of who you are.”

Daustan tugged on a tawny forelock. “Because of it my family is dead.”

“You cannot allow the misfortunes of your past to control your future actions.” Lynus frowned.

Daustan shifted in his seat and listened to the chaos of voices around them. A serving girl glanced at their table, lifted a painted brow, and wiggled her hips. He shook his head and turned back to face the grizzled man across the table. “What’s the point of my attending a wizard’s school when I have no intention of becoming one myself?”

“It’s the king’s law, my boy. Any with magic in their blood that reach the age of sixte-“

“Must be under Stonewise’s tutelage. I know. I’ve been told more times than I can count these past five years.” Raised voices drew Daustan’s attention to a group of men on the other side of the smoke-hazed room.

“I said that’s the tenth time you done rolled snake eyes!” One player stood, his chair tumbling backwards.

The accused rose to his feet. “And I said I ain’t no cheat!”

The table flew aside in a clatter of dice and coins. Meaty fists thumped into ale-filled stomachs and stubbled jaws.

Another dicer got too close and was knocked over. With a curse he jumped on the back of the accused, and the fourth dicer slammed a pitcher on his head for interfering. Within moments the tavern erupted.

“Much as I enjoy a good fight I believe it’s time we left,” Lynus suggested.

Daustan picked up his tankard as a body crashed into their table. “You may be right.”

They ducked and sidestepped their way through the confusion of flying pitchers, chair legs, and drunks. Lynus threw open the door just as a lantern exploded on the wall beside it. Hungry flames shot up the slab-boards. Daustan rushed behind him into the moonlit night.

“Fire!” A voice shrieked from within the tavern.

Daustan turned. People jostled out the doorway onto the village green. The serving girl tumbled through an opened window, her skirt in flames.

Lynus tore the cloak from his back as he hurried to her side.

Daustan’s feet dug oak-like roots into the earth beneath them. The acrid stench of burning fabric filled his nose. Visions of a similar night flashed through his mind as people rushed past.

His home burned in a red hot blaze. His arms lifted to call forth rain, but he froze in horror as his mother’s flaming body fell from her bedroom window. It was his fault! The magic had called to him – enticed him into trying to bring forth a flame. His stomach emptied itself.

“Daustan!”

Damn my blood! And damn the magic coursing through it!

“Daustan!”

Daustan turned glassy eyes toward Lynus.

He cradled the serving girl in one arm and pointed to the tavern’s upper window. “Do something!”

Daustan looked up and saw a child leaning out the window, smoke billowing around her. Wild, frightened eyes met his. She struggled to get a leg over the sill.

“Oh, no,” Daustan whispered. “Please, gods, no!” He threw back his head. “No!”

His legs trembled; arms shook as he raised them to the sky. A well-spring of molten power rushed through him, scorching his bones. He called forth the wind with a mere whisper. Clouds rushed from the horizon on a rumble of thunder.

The girl tumbled from the window, screaming as she fell. The wind caught the child in a whirl of ash and smoke, and gently lowered her to the ground.

Torrents of rain fell from the clouds and whipped at Daustan’s face as he called the air out of the fire. The orange flames drew inward till every last red ember surrendered.

The rain slowed. The last few droplets landed on the ground in staccato splats.

He lowered his arms. The tavern still stood, although half of its timbers were blackened and steaming.

A hand grasped his shoulder. “May the gods favor you for saving my daughter’s life.”

Daustan watched his hands clench and unclench. “With these hands I’ve called forth fire and killed.” He looked up into the misty eyes of the tavern owner. “I’m cursed.”

“No.” The grateful father shook his head. “You are blessed.”

- - -
Terri is a stay-at-home mother of two toddlers who enjoys an escape to Middle Earth during the rare 'me' moments her daughters allow. Her fiction has appeared in Larks Fiction Magazine, Hogglepot Journal, and Every Day Fiction.

11/23/11

2011-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

The History of Things
By G. martinez cabrera

The boy looked up, and this is what the clouds told him:

That radio antenna over to the left, the giant metal X of Twin Peaks stuck firmly to the hilltop was no antenna. It was once alive—a being raising his hands into the fog. And Kezar’s stadium light that the boy’s father was always complaining was too bright, was in another life, a flower whose petals gave off petals that glowed in the darkness. People wouldn’t believe the boy when he told them what the clouds had told him, but that didn’t bother him. Even though he was young, he knew there would always be doubters.

So he listened to the clouds, and they told him this as well:

The world was once very different. It was not unusual to be thankful, to call out to the heavens from the highest peak and smile. But even back then, long before men and women walked the Earth, there was already Jealousy. At that time, Jealousy actually roamed the Earth instead of people’s hearts. This Jealousy was constant and, contrary to common opinion, not green at all.

Jealousy looked on at all the happy beings in the world, and true to his nature, the happier and the more thankful they were, the more his chest ached. That was the way Jealousy thought of the feeling, but it wasn’t pain. There was just something in his heart that he couldn’t control. People nowadays don’t get it: the fact that Jealousy did not mean to hurt anyone. He was just the way he was.

After years and years, as this feeling at the center of him grew, Jealousy finally couldn’t take it any longer. He went away and hid himself in a deep, dark cave, though no one is sure where that cave is now, and he cut his chest open and took out the frozen hunk that was his heart.

What came next was instant. There was no vegetation left for miles and miles around the cave—only white powder and weeds and twigs were left. The land, it seemed, was becoming sad. And that cold sadness kept pouring down through the world, spreading out in waves from Jealousy’s cave. The effect was that all those creatures, like what we now call an antenna and a stadium light, beings who were once alive and happy and who gave thanks to the world, now were lifeless. And they were not the only ones. Skyscrapers became skyscrapers. Bridges became bridges. In each case, all these beings lost their capital letter to a lower-case death.

“But then, how did we come to be?” the boy asked the clouds.

The answer was not a good one. “You are the descendants of Jealousy,” the clouds told the boy. “For you see when Jealousy removed his heart, his blood flowed and combined with the sadness of the Earth, and out of that came you.”

The boy wept at hearing this, and the clouds came together and tried to make pictures in the sky that would make him feel better. They became cotton candy and clowns smiling, and knights on horses and giant fluffy birds, but the boy could not be consoled, and he wept until he had nothing left in him except the awareness that the things around him were more than mere things.

- - -
G. martinez cabrera currently lives in San Francisco with his wife. When he’s not spending time with said wife or writing, he tortures young people with learning. He lives electronically at www.thehistoryofthings.com and blogs regularly at http://circularrunning.wordpress.com.

11/16/11

2011-11-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

Smoke
By Jon-Paul Stracco

Edward watched the glow of the torch fade into the black mouth of the cave from a hundred paces back with his men.

He closed his eyes and prayed a single familiar line, “mighty Rhagen help us.”

It was a request to the god and protector of their city for the safe return of his soldier, James. He didn’t feel the prickly heat upon his neck that signified Rhagen was close and wondered if it was because they were too high in the mountains. It worried him.

Two days ago the unit had been escorting their king and queen at a meeting of alliance with their neighbors to the south, the Wunsons. A new treaty had been signed. While marching home the men had sang victory songs at the top of their lungs until the last segment of forest before the fields, when huge clouds of smoke had filled the sky above the trees. Edward had called for a full sprint.

In the fields they had slowed to a walk, then halted altogether. Some had tripped over their own feet and fell. Their beloved fortress city had been reduced to a pile of smashed stone, bent metal and glowing embers.

The king and queen, still high off the success of the conference had stumbled out of their coach and collapsed. The king had died from shock. The queen had crawled back into the coach and locked the door, refusing to speak or take nourishment. The soldiers had circled the city three times, calling out for survivors.

There had been a few, huddled in the rubble, their eyes still brimming with fear. Others had crept out of the forest staring at the sky, startling at the slightest odd sound. They had spoken of a starless night, fire from the sky, screams upon screams, the shattering of iron and stone and a trembling earth. They had whispered about a huge mouth, filled with teeth bigger than a man that took their loved ones away.

Edward had climbed through the smoking ruins to the remains of his house and recovered the bodies of his wife and children, crushed under its broken walls. He had buried them in the woods, sat by their graves and felt his love for them burn in his chest like a hot iron. He had prayed to Rhagen to help him exact revenge.

The men had not mourned for long. After burying the few dead they could recover, and without speaking more than a few words, they had gathered a herd of cattle from the fields, and ten carts of grain from the silos. It was enough food for a month. They had fallen into formation, five hundred strong clad in the finest chain mail and leather armor, with supplies at the rear and Edward at the lead. Some of the survivors had begged them to stay, said it was madness to proceed, but they had been ignored.

A trail of broken trees, smeared with blood and ash, had led them through the forest. With axes and long iron levers the men had cleared a path for the cattle and carts. In only two days they had made it past the tree line to the cave in the mountains. Hundreds of boulders, each the size of a horse cart, had littered the valley under its mouth. Some had steamed as a light mist fell upon them.

Edward had asked the men about the cave. One man had claimed that not two years ago he had stood in this exact spot while prospecting for copper and there had been no cave. Others, mostly goat hunters, had agreed.

As Edward awaited James’s return, he controlled the urge to think about what lay in the darkness. He knew better than to try to imagine the unknown, it would only bolster the spirits of fear, that swirled around him.

Instead he did what he always did when the world seemed to press against him, push him into the dark corner. He drew his sword. It was a simple sword with no ornate carvings or etchings. It didn’t have a special name. What was remarkable was how big it was, almost equal in height as some of the smaller men, with a two handed grip. Edward ran his finger along the blade checking for chips or nicks. He had to be careful, it was sharp enough to shave with.

Most men in the region called Edward the greatest warrior alive, the real reason that a city as small as Sangine had been able to retain its sovereignty for so long. Edward didn’t deny it. He had never encountered an equal in battle. Men fell before his tall sinewy frame like leaves off a dying tree, and he knew why. It was because Rhagen favored him. He gave him his strength, his speed, his luck. He put ideas in his head during the midst of battle which never failed. The men he killed by the thousands had always been invaders, hungry for land, for gold, for women, for destruction. They had been hated by Rhagen and at the end of every battle the grasses had drank their blood and the trees and ferns had feasted on their bodies.

When Edward was satisfied that his sword bore no defects, he sheathed it over his back, just as James appeared. His torch and sword were gone, but he appeared unhurt. He jogged up to Edward, his eyes wide, his forehead covered in sweat, but his lips did not tremble. There was something almost serene about his composure. The men leaned in, formed a circle around him.

“It’s a monster,” he said. “I didn’t get a good look at its face, but it’s at least as big as five houses stuck together end to end. Its belly was swollen and covered in scales each the size of a man’s leg. It spoke to me.”

Edward clenched his fists, and felt the prickly heat of Rhagen upon his neck. He was with him now.

“It said it was done feeding, and soon the cave would collapse and it would sleep for more than a thousand years before feeding again. It said that if we attack, it will kill us all, to the last man. When it spoke heat came from its mouth, and I once caught a glimpse of fire.”

Edward patted James on the shoulder. He stepped away and climbed the side of the mountain, turned and faced the men. He had heard stories about creatures such as this, and having seen the wake of its destruction it was easy to believe James. The question was what to do. First he repeated for the men what James had said, then he opened the group to suggestions.

The men quickly offered their thoughts. They believed that the beast was bluffing, that its stomach was too stuffed with their people and it was vulnerable. Edward agreed. A plan formed to smoke the monster out of the cave, shoot it with a giant crossbow and attack from all sides. Edward took a vote and everyone raised their hand.

At that very moment the door to the coach flew open, and the queen came forth, ragged and wild haired as anyone had seen. She stood before them, swaying, then her body stiffened and her reddened eyes grew wide.

“Kill it!” she screamed in a raspy voice and raised her hands above her head.

The men burst into cheers.

Edward set camp a half mile from the cave, behind a ridge. Some of the men went down into the forest to fell trees, while others hauled them into piles with the help of the two huge horses from the royal coach. At the top of the ridge, just out of sight from the cave, fifty men built the frame of a crossbow as big as a house. A select few went into the forest to gather just the right fibrous plants to build its massive, elastic string. The cattle were kept in a large glade half way down the mountain, and slaughtered in groups of five. Barrels of grain were made into bread daily by ten men with bakery experience. The queen, cleaned herself up, took regular meals, put on her crown and wandered the camp inspecting things and giving advice. Some of the men made her a throne and sometimes she sat in it and seemed content.

Edward kept busy coordinating tasks between the different units, often lending his muscles to help free a jammed log or twist a vine into rope. Once in a while he found himself sitting on a stump and thinking about his wife and two kids and life in the city. Sometimes he questioned why Rhagen had allowed their deaths. Had they done something wrong? He always pushed this question from his mind and remembered that the ways of Rhagen were beyond him.

In one week the giant crossbow was finished, mounted on wheels. The queen conducted a small ceremony over the machine, praying to Rhagen, and carving the city’s symbol into its side, a hawk and a sword. The men loaded a giant arrow, made from a perfectly straight tree as long as two men end to end and almost a forearm in diameter.

The machine fired with a great snapping noise, and the arrow cracked a large boulder in half. The queen clapped her hands, and the men, bright eyed and big grinned, roared with approval. Edward felt something rise up in his chest, something light and wonderful, like when his children were born or he first fell in love.

That night Edward dreamt he was in a lush valley in a new land. The men were there, building houses. There were huge trees full of fruits and nuts, fields flush with crops, and venison drying in the sun. There were women, and little children. He talked with James about the five pound trout he had caught earlier in the day in the lake near the village. He woke with a smile on his face, but it faded before he had thrown off his blanket.

Two days later, on the eve of their attack, the group leaders gathered in a circle around Edward and reviewed their plan. At dawn they would set up the crossbow twenty paces from the entrance of the cave, off to the right. Men had been crawling down the slope every night, removing stones, patting down the ground to make a path for the machine. The bulk of the soldiers would take positions to the left and right of the cave, with directions to spread out when the monster showed itself. The horses would pull a pile of dried wood, lashed together with ropes, down the slope to the mouth of the cave.

To hide their scent, the men dipped their clothes and armor in a solution made from boiled pine needles and bark. Edward paced around the camp, holding his sword in front of him, sharpening the blade with a stone. The queen took to her throne and gave a rousing speech about honor, the dignity of their people, and their will to survive no matter the odds.

This last part of the speech struck Edward as strange because the monster was asleep. Men had been hearing its loud snoring for the past three days. For a moment he remembered his wonderful dream, and almost burst out with it, but instead toasted his men with a cup of special elixir to help quiet his nerves, drank from it, went to his tent and fell fast asleep.

Edward heard light rain falling on his tent walls when he woke and smiled. It meant no shadows, due to the clouds, and plenty of cover noise, due to the rain. The burn pile, covered by a blanket of soldiers’ capes, would still be dry.

Without Edward saying a word the men carried out their plan. First the crossbow was wheeled into position. The path the men had constructed was as smooth as a flat rock, and the wheels had been greased well. It made no sound. Next the men crept down to their places. Not one tripped, coughed or dislodged a single stone. Edward quietly drew his sword as the horses approached with the burn pile.

With every hoofed step Edward felt his heart beat a little faster. One of the horses neighed and Edward swallowed hard, but the rattling snore of the monster did not stop. The horses became nervous near the entrance and their handlers had to lead them with great care and skill.

“Mighty Rhagen help us now,” Edward prayed.

The burn pile dropped quietly into place. The blanket was ripped away and a small torch thrown into its center. Clouds of black smoke drifted into the cave. The horses galloped back to the top of the ridge where the queen sat in her throne, holding a golden bow. Edward’s chest swelled, despite not feeling the prickly heat upon his neck. His men had achieved perfection.

The morning passed. The rain stopped and the clouds broke up. Sun poured down, and their armor sparkled. The fire was nearly out. Edward looked up, worried somehow they had been tricked.

At that moment a cloud of smoke wafted from the cave and with it, came the beast. It was as tall at the shoulder as the walls of their former city, and built like a heavily muscled, short legged bear. Its head resembled that of a massive fish.

“Fools,” the monster grumbled, and Edward felt the ground vibrate.

“Fire!” Edward screamed.

There was a tremendous crack, like the splitting of a tree down the middle, as the arrow hit the beast in its bulging side just behind the top of the front leg. It penetrated almost fully, a perfect shot. The monster closed its eyes and groaned.

The men whooped and charged. A stream of flame shot over Edward’s head, and he felt the heat through his armor. Agonizing screams came from behind him, as he bore down on the beast’s front leg, sword in hand, heart pounding. He struck with his full power, his long frame snapping the huge sword forward like a whip. A small piece chipped off the leg sized scale. He swung again, but the beast shifted its leg and he hit the rocky ground, the impact rocking his arms and shoulders. He swung again, but only managed to chip off another small corner of the scale.

The rest of the men swarmed around the legs and pried at the scales with pikes and spears, cut between its toes with swords and axes, and fired arrows into its underside. The beast kept moving, knocking the men down, and crushing them underfoot. Its legs were wider than the oldest trees in the forest.

Edward felt something cold rise up in his chest and over his neck and saw his hands were trembling. One of the men called out. The beast side stepped and the man disappeared under its heavy foot. They had been tricked. This was not meant to be a fight, Edward realized. It was a rout, a punishment. Even with the great arrow in its side the monster was still ten times their equal.

The thoughts came fast, in a flash of knowing. Rhagen had used Edward and his soldiers to punish bad men for years, but now it was they who were being slaughtered like cattle. Maybe Rhagen had not just abandoned them and let the creature destroy their city. Maybe Rhagen had summoned this horrible monster. Or perhaps, Edward thought, his mind racing, the creature was Rhagen himself!

Edward fell to his knees. It was over. Rhagen’s will was Rhagen’s will. He started to bow his head, but caught sight of James crawling towards him, his legs broken, blood gushing out of his mouth. Good old James, Edward thought.

Reaching out, Edward caught hold of his hand and held it as he saw the light go out of his eyes. He thought of the bodies of his family, disfigured and wide eyed. It wasn’t right, Edward thought, that Rhagen should be so fickle, so quick to destroy such good people, and so sadistic in his methods. Something stirred inside him. He stood up.

A burning feeling rose up in his guts, spread into his chest and outwards into his arms and legs. It pulsed with hatred for Rhagen. A thought came into his head of a single crow dive bombing a large blood tailed hawk, going for the neck, driving it away from its nest. He knew it was not one of Rhagen’s supplanted ideas, but his thought alone.

Edward sheathed his sword, and placed his hand upon the beast’s scales. They felt cold and hard like stone, and were ridged at their bottoms, making excellent hand and foot holds. Soon he found himself on the beast’s shoulders. He saw flames shooting everywhere, the catapult on fire, and many of his men on the ground, their armor blackened.

Laying on the top of the beast’s head, Edward drove his blade into its cow sized eyes. The monster let out a horrible wail and began to stomp and kick its feet. Men were kicked against the side of the mountain and broken apart.

Edward crawled backwards to the base of the neck. He stood up and struck downwards, smashing the scales apart like they were made of dried clay, making two shallow slits. He stuck his feet in the holes. Anchored, he chopped between his legs into the white flesh, until there was a seam deeper than his blade could reach. He sliced parallel to the seam, hauled out the large slab of tissue, and jumped down into the bloody pit.

The monster slowed, its breathing labored, its muscles shaking. Edward’s legs burned, his arms trembled. The creature shook its head, but Edward was in too deep.

“Vengeance upon you Rhagen,” he screamed, slashing at the vertebrae. Bone chips the size of human skulls flew in all directions. The beast swayed. Edward plunged his sword down into the core of the spine and felt it snap.

The beast slowly went to its knees without a sound, then gently toppled onto its side. Edward’s legs gave out when he hit the ground. He lay panting, bathed in sweat, next to the monster whose blood flowed freely from its mouth, eyes, nose and a thousand wounds covering its body. His men had done well.

Anger lifted Edward to his feet. He did not raise his hands over his head and whoop the way he usually did when the battle was won, a shrill, high pitched cry like that of the blood tailed hawk. Instead he bellowed, “Rhagen is dead!”

No one answered. He screamed again. There was silence. He ran behind the monster and started to yell, but the sound died in his throat. His men littered the ground like fallen acorns; torn apart, crushed, and burned. Nothing moved. The fire smoldered in the cave. A tiny trail of smoke drifted into the blue sky. He turned and looked up at the throne on the ridge. It was knocked over, the queen’s body next to it, under a small boulder. He dropped his sword and searched among the boulders, but found only dead bodies.

- - -
Jon-Paul loves living in the hills of Vermont with his wife, infant daughter and two dogs. He enjoys wandering the woods, going on adventures, running barefoot and making up stories. His work recently appeared in Pulp Empire: Volume Five.

11/9/11

2011-11-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

AMERICAN VAMPIRE
By Keith Good

Part One: Bandito
1913

I.

He craved death. Each bone-stubbled carcass, each spike of irradiated grass growled the dark inside him. Days stretching to weeks, he entertained the fantasy that, like him, these plains would die forever. It was a cruel thought. Flickering lizards—little candles of life—and summer cloudbursts snuffed his macabre fantasies. He could never die, and the world would only live.

He pulled the small book from Rosie’s saddle bag only to put it back. He was almost there. Hypnotized by the steady hiss of Rosie’s pneumatic horseshoes, he surrendered to the familiar dream. Denver City rose from the shimmering heat, woven from the light and fog. He and Rosie trotted the familiar High Street, a squat warehouse on their left. Its hand-carved sign declared:

Metalwork & Horseshoeing
L.M. Smith, Prop.

In this false lucidity, he pulled Rosie’s reins toward their former home. She ignored him; instead breaking into a brisk jog. As all good things do, Denver City faded and died. He tried to ask Rosie ‘¿Que es esto, chica?’ but weeks without water had left his voice as dead as the plains he rode.

The question was superfluous. A black speck squirmed on the horizon, too big for brush and too small for buffalo. It was another horse, which meant another rider. He swung an arm behind him and let the safety off his rifle. Just in case. Rosie, her sight superior, her attentions inexhaustible, recognized the speck and upped her pace. The Rider obliged her enthusiasm and sat firm, a hand on his gun and his eyes fixed on the growing shape.

As in most matters, Rosie’s judgment proved correct. The shape was a horse stretched across the earth, bested by the cruel heat. The poor animal was missing most of a foreleg. A bandito slumped against its neck, pot bellied and bloody-mouthed. Rosalina broke to a thundering gallop, the tubes grafted to her hooves screaming steam. Too proud for bit or saddle, the Rider tugged her mane to maintain his seat.

“Whoa, chica,” he croaked. His words did nothing. Rosalina ran until the greasy outlaw was under hoof. She reared back to deliver vengeance, but a forceful pull on her mane fell the blow wide. The mare stomped murderous intent, snorting and spitting. The Rider, minding his grip lest he end up on the brick-hard ground, whispered in Rosalina’s perked ear.

She settled and The Rider, rifle in hand, hopped to the ground. A bandito slouched in the shade of his dead horse, gnawing a grisly femur. His skin was burned leather, spotted with yellow blisters and the blackness of encroaching death. Blood matted gnarly stubble to his cheek. Flies swarmed his face, landing without reprove on eyelids, nose and cheeks.

“¿Hablas íngles?” The Rider trained his rifle between the bandito’s sunken eyes. His custom scope flickered a red dot against the book-leather skin.

The bandit laughed and tossed the femur away. “No. I sprecken zee Doitch.”

“Get smart with me again and I’ll relieve you of your brains.” The rider punctuated his warning with a kick to the bandito’s ribs. Blood puffed from the wretch’s lips. “You one of the Banditos Rouges that held up the Union Pacific last week?”

“What if I am? You a law dog?”

The Rider lowered his rifle. “If I’m a dog, then you’re the bitch, bandito.” He turned from the wretch and whispered in Rosie’s ear. She snorted, putting a rare smile onto the Rider’s face. He pulled the small book from Rosie’s saddle bag and secreted it to a pants pocket.

“Today is the luckiest day of your life, bandito. The way I figure, your boys are whoring in Santa Fe by now. Rosie here will take you to them.” The Rider took a canteen from his hip and emptied half into the aluminum tanks on Rosie’s haunches. He tossed the rest to the bandito. “Take it easy with the water and you’ll live.”

The bandito laughed.

“You’re gonna give away your horse and your water in the center of hell? Gringo, you’ll be dead by sundown.”

“Doubt it,” the Rider said, staring into the sun.

“Santa Fe is too far for this mare—laden as such with those metal tanks and that steel case on her ass. She’ll die the same as my ol’ Buck.”

The Rider pulled the bandito up by his collars and slung him over Rosie’s back. “Thinking ain’t your strong suit, bandito. You leave the logic to me. Consider yourself fortunate—I’m in a charitable mood. That only happens every two hundred years or so.” The Rider pointed to the rectangular metal case strapped to Rosalina’s hind. “Whatever you do, don’t open Pandora’s box. Hell’s inside.”

With a swift slap, Rosalina and the crusty bandito set off into the plain. He bounced as if strapped to a bucking bull. The boots grafted to her hooves hissed pressurized steam, driving hydraulic rods to the ground in concert with her gallop. The machine amplified her speed tenfold.

“What the hell kind of horseshoes are these?” The bandito roared, his voice heavy with the echo of distance. Within seconds Rosie and the thief were over the horizon. The Rider thought of the noose awaiting the gullible bastard and flashed another rare smile.

He was again alone. The sun needled exposed skin, fighting a battle it could never win. He pulled the book from his pants pocket and put it back. Left to his own devices, Denver City congealed from the haze before him. He stood at the arched door of his old workshop, the damned machine just beyond. Decades wound back like the gears in his pocket watch.

The Rider walked through the arch and into a day dream, shuttled from 1913 New Mexico to the floor of his workshop, at the end of the High Street in Denver City, 1861.

Part Two: Compañera
1861

I.

Electric dragons roamed the warehouse. Birthed from copper and steel obelisks, they flew to the center of the shop, leaving a wake of sapphires. He shoveled one last load of compressed coal into the boiler’s mouth and stepped back. His conglomeration of magnets and locomotive parts conducted a beautiful symphony: coal fire from the boiler shot compressed steam to each of the four magneto towers, forcing the magnets across copper screws which pulled electricity to the domes atop each column.

Above the boiler, insulated from its hellfire by layers of Comanche fabric, sat a crystal dodecahedron 12 inches across. The dragons swarmed a filament ascending from the box and plunged inside.

Protected by the crystal and glowing with electricity, sat a human heart. Each snapping dragon made it dance. The man stepped to a small dial atop the boiler and nudged it clockwise. The pistons increased their intensity. Sparks flew faster, stronger, until one dragon chomped the tail of the next into continuous arcs of power. Electrons sputtered from the machine, condensing an electric cloud over the man’s head.

He lowered blacktinted goggles and peered at the heart glistening inside the crystal box.

The heart beat. It was alive.

The man fell to his knees and cried in savage ecstasy. Electricity rained over his hands, his eyes, until his veins ran blue and he was indistinguishable from the cloud above him. The dragons, weary of their mechanical master, began to fly free through the shop. They exploded vials like glass bombs. They kindled errant papers and wood like struck matches.

Even for one who can not die, the chaos proved too much. Frantic to save the machine, to preserve the two tons of steel and 78 years of toil, he lunged to the copper kill switch glinting from the boiler. The machine shrieked in agony, bleeding molten metal. The pistons halted, the steam fizzled and died.

The familiar dark draped over his eyes. In the haze between life and death, the man saw a strange beast—maybe imagined—roaming his workshop. A chimera of water and flesh doused the shop, squelching the hungry fires. The water-beast hovered to where the man lay, stooped down to his face. He opened his mouth to speak but the curtain of consciousness dropped, plunging him again into the unfathomable abyss.

II.

She perched on a charred stool, his rifle bouncing across her knee. “You should be muerto.” She was dark as the room, only eyes and teeth. Her hair tangled to bare shoulders.

“True.” It still hurt to speak. He coughed ash and propped to his elbows, pain cramping his every muscle. Most humans he read like children’s rhymes: all definition and subtext gleaned from a simple once over. This black wraith, however, was obtuse—indecipherable. She wore rags but had the air of an oil baron.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The chica that saved you from the ashes.” A slender cigar bounced from the corner of her mouth, ruby ember conjuring peacocks of smoke that strutted and swirled above their heads.

“That’s a fifty-cent cigar you’re chomping on.” He made incremental movements in the low light, inching forward while looking stationary.

“Esta cigarillo es mia.” A steely cloud rolled from her mouth. “The way I figure, you owe me for saving your skin.”

“My skin needed no saving.”

“Tu máquina, then.” She tossed her black hair to the mass of iron, copper, crystal and magnet behind them. He gave the machine a once-over: it was mostly intact, cogs and wheels still in the right place. The worst damage was to the crystal heart—a crack ran top to bottom, precious liquid dripping to the floor.

“Fair enough.” He pushed from his elbows to his palms, sitting up in the low light. “If that Cubana de Oro pays part of my debt, what more do I owe?”

Her eyes sparked with bemusement. “When the Law shows up, you tell them I'm not here and you never saw me.” She looked to the arched doorway across the workshop. Her attentions foolishly divested, he jumped from the floor, stole the rifle and trained it between her chocolate eyes.

“Chica,” he snorted, “Law ain’t piss next to a malo like me." He swung the barrel skyward and boomed a shot into the rafters. “I despise humanity. Pray tell why I shouldn’t blast your head clean off and bury you under the floorboards with the rest.” His finger flexed against the trigger, rifle nestled into his shoulder.

“Easy,” she snorted. “No soy humana. Soy monstrua.” She bared her incisors and growled.

“A monster?” He lowered the gun a shade, the potential shot no longer a lethal blow.

“Mi madre was a slave in El Paso. Una dia, a pack of banditos came riding in; slaughtered her master like the puerco he was, burned the house, plundered its stores. It would have been a blessing if they’d burned mi madre with the house but they were coños without compassion. They cut her face, stripped her clothes and took turns with her. Twelve banditos, one after another for days. When they got bored, when she stopped fighting against their greasy hides, they rode away, left her for dead. The law came around, sold her to another puerco. Nine months later I arrived…she died not too much after.”

She stared past him, into a dark corner of the warehouse. “Soy una monstrua. Half bandita, half negra. In this country, a Mexican half of three-fifths ain’t shit.” The woman looked to the barreled ceiling and whispered feathers of sugary smoke.

“Alright.” He swung the rifle point to dirt and leaned elbow to its stock. “What’s the law want with a monstrua like you?”

“The sheriff of this town mistook me for a sporting bitch. I told him my honey wasn’t for sale, not even to no bigshot lawman, but the coño didn’t listen. He slapped me around and stole the poke I wouldn’t sell. When he was done, sleeping like a baby, I took a set of butcher shears and – snip!” she mimed this with her fingers, “Sliced off his tiny little pene. I was out the window and down the street before he realized the blood was his.”

He had no choice but to laugh with her, sap the electricity she generated. It had been centuries since he’d laughed. The ease of the smile on his face and the helium rising in his chest surprised him—joy was a luxury he thought long dead.

“Fine.” He tossed the rifle onto the girls lap. “The Cock-Butcher of Denver City can stay in my shop as long as it would have taken me to rebuild the machine she saved. Two months sound fair?”

“Sí.” She answered with a firm nod.

“¿Como te llamas, senorita?” he asked, striding to inspect his damaged machine.

“Rosalina.” She quit the stool and followed.

“Get a wrench, Rosalina, we have some repairs to make.”

III.

The law hobbled in a week later—comical in his ill-fitted waistcoat, over waxed moustaches and frayed bowler. His accessories—a gauze diaper and sapling crutch—proved too much for the Blacksmith's sense of humor. It was only with the greatest self-discipline (and molars gnashing his tongue) that he kept laughter at bay.

“Now, John, I heard of cowpokes coming in from the trail, asking the whores to diaper them and let them suck the tit, but honestly, I didn’t figure it the kind of thing you’d go in for.”

“Where is she, blacksmith?” The sheriff's voice was more cry than command.

The Smith put on a cocksure smile. “I'm sorry, but of whom are we speaking?”

“The mulatto who tried to kill me, that's who!”

“I heard she only tried to geld you, John.”

The Sheriff was sweating and out of breath, struggling to stay upright. The strain of argument was almost too much for him to bear. He took a few breaths and swallowed before starting again in a calmer voice. “We know she's here, Blacksmith. We ain't found her tracks out of town and we checked every dern building. Hand her over so she can hang for what she done.”

The Smith showed the sheriff his upturned palms, absolving himself of sleeved aces. “As much as I'd fancy a drink with any dame that snips off your prick, I regret to say I haven’t seen her.”

The sheriff stood fast at the door, blood dribbling down his diaper. Clearly he was not one to be led away so easily. The Blacksmith, palms still out, stepped aside and waved the law inside.

“You and your boys are more than welcome to nose around the shop at your leisure. I should warn you though,” he pointed to the mass of blackened behind them, “I'm doing some experiments with electricity. I’d hate for an experiment to go bad with you and yours in here.”

The Sheriff righted himself as best his gnarled groin would allow, face scrunched with skepticism. Trickles of sweat arched his convex jaw, quivering at each of his three chins. With his non-crutch hand, the Sheriff removed his bowler—blonde wisps matted to a bald head—and mopped his flop sweat with a sleeve. Bowler back in place, he unleashed a heavy-hearted sigh.

“I suppose I’ve no reason to think you a liar.”

“Very good,” the Smith replied.

The Sheriff nodded—bookending their interaction—and the Blacksmith swung the massive oak door. It slammed into the jamb with a resounding thud.

The Smith turned to face the waiting dark. “Don't think he’ll be back.”

IV.

Rosalina proved to be an inexhaustible fountain of questions. Had the Smith known this from the start, he may have shot the woman and been done with it.

“¿Que es esta máquina?”

Her first query came before the diapered law came knocking. The Smith was walking a slow circuit of the contraption, hands clasped behind his back, head swiveling, when the reserves of Rosalina’s restraint evaporated, exposing her vast bed of her curiosity.

His first thought was to be glib—to say, “Metal and glass,” but the girl had saved the machine. She’d earned enough currency to purchase a few answers at least.

“It is a mechanical heart,” he said. “Each of the four magnetic towers turn steam power into electricity. The electricity flows from the dome atop each tower to the central chamber. At just the right frequency and power, the electricity revivifies the heart inside the machine.”

“¿Una Corazon maquinal?”

“It’s not too unlike the function of your own heart. You body metabolizes the food you eat into small parcels of electricity which then move your muscles and beat your heart.”

Pausing at the northwest tower, the Smith noticed a hairline crack tracing the perimeter of its copper coil. He made a quick mental note: “Copper winding on NW Tower compromised; refire or replace.”

“It looks like a torn up train to me.”

He turned around. As requested, Rosalina stood behind him, wrench at the ready.

“Yes… excepting the magnets and crystal, the machine’s components were… borrowed from the Southern Pacific 2224.”

“They just gave you a train?”

He resumed his diagnostic circuit.

“A rifle between the conductor’s eyes can be an invaluable bargaining tool.”

“How do you know Spanish? You don’t look like no Mexicano to me.”

They were seated for dinner a few nights into Rosalina’s stay. She spoke between savage mouthfuls of potato while he played with the small portion on his plate.

“In my youth I was a bit of an explorer. A Privateer. I spent years in the southern reaches of the American continent with a group of buccaneers.”

Rosalina’s eyes bulged, contrasted against her dark face.

“In your ‘youth?’ ‘Many years?’ You’re barely older than I am! ¡Gringo loco!” She petered into a disbelieving chuckle, amusement glinting her eye.

He flattened his mashed potato Matterhorn with the brunt of his fork, leaving a great grey plain. “Yes…” The Smith cleared his dry throat. “I suppose it only seems like many years ago.”

“What were you looking for?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Vida.”

“How do you know so much?”

Rosalina interjected during an explanation of magnetism and electricity, placing a hand on his forearm. He was surprised at the softness of her palm, the light kiss of her fingertips. Like a spooked rabbit, he hopped backward. Rosalina’s arm hovered for a moment, then folded gently over her bosom.

“It would take ten lifetimes to gather so much into one head, gringo.”

Her observation elicited a single surprised word from the Smith:

“True.”

V.

It took the Blacksmith, aided by his water-wraith, thirteen days to repair the mechanical heart. He hadn’t considered the value of extra hands until he had Rosalina. Fresh copper was fused into cracks, each magnet calibrated, the crystal box patched and refilled with saline solution. No precaution was overlooked. Both the Smith and Rosalina wore rubber gloves and smocks to insulate them from the electrical maelstrom. Buckets of water, four for each tower and six circling the heart, sat ready.

Rosalina wore excitement in flush cheeks and glowing eyes. She stood at the mouth of the boiler, a shovel of fuel ready. Her wards were the fire and the kill switch. Her head followed as the Smith made a final pass to inspecting their repairs. Satisfied, he took three brisk steps to Rosalina and whispered in her ear.

“Esta es el tiempo, señorita.”

Before he could remove himself, Rosalina swept in planted a kiss on the Smith’s cheek, warm and full of the life he envied.

“For luck.” She winked and heaved the first shovel of coal into the boiler. Fiery teeth gnashed into the fuel, tearing molten bits to feed the inferno. Her back turned, the Smith rubbed his cheek where the girl’s lips had been, hoping to trap her lingering heat.

The machine groaned.

“More!” The Smith mimed shoveling coal. Rosalina scooped a mountain of briquettes—eyes clenched and arms trembling with strain—and heaved toward the furnace. Her effort was rewarded with a surge of raw power—aroused fires drove the machine’s four pistons. The towers moaned jets of steam. Lubricating oil squished obscenely, accumulating at each piston’s base

Satisfied all was within operating parameters, the Smith again mimed Rosalina to feed the boiler. She threw more coal, sending the machine to frenzy. Pistons pumped violent lust, hungry for more. The towers quivered, copper screaming against steel. The workshop floor shuddered with the machine’s primal force. Vials and test tubes clinked a ghostly dirge. Rosalina clenched her eyes, certain the vicious coupling would kill everything.

But the machine quieted to a low hum. Having achieved some degree of equilibrium, the earthquake shivers lessened. A hush fell, laden with anticipation. The hum matured into a buzz and Rosalina felt the hairs on her arms stand on end. She turned to the Smith, saw him staring at the southeast tower with a grin on his face.

Pearlescent electricity squirted from the tower. It looked like heavy water, morphing through the blackness. Sparks rained over them, everything fizzing and blue. The Smith, one final time, thrust his fists forward and tossed them left. One last shovel of fuel.

Rosalina tossed in the last of the fuel and slammed the boiler door. Ropes of glistening light shot from the machine, turning and weaving over their heads. Rosalina raised a gloved hand and watched as electricity ran over her fingers and down her hand.

Then came the scene she had witnessed two weeks prior: the ropes and globules congealed to steady streams of blue fire, arching from each of the towers to the central heart. This spectacle, now that Rosalina understood the machinations, resembled a dance. Arcs of electricity (egged on by the grunting towers) grew in stature and quickened their steps until, at center, illuminated by an oceanic glow, the heart began to partner in their dance.

The shimmy was life itself. Rosalina looked to the Smith. His shoulders were rounded, arms and legs slack, utter relief on his face.

His joy, however, was short lived. The scene continued as it had before; the electric dragons grew bored of their restraints and fled. The Smith rushed to the heart of the machine and began finessing the control knob, but the dragons refused to obey. Again they leapt from their towers, eager to explore the shop.

Rosalina put her palm to the emergency stop. It was warm to the touch. She awaited an order she knew wouldn’t come. The Smith’s face slackened in defeat as vials exploded, fractured by raw electricity. He watched the heart dance faster and faster, a St. Vittus’ Dance beyond his control. He did nothing but stare at his failure as the world burned about him.

Entropy advanced, great snakes of blue lighting invading the shop. Sparks tumbled from the heart itself, attacking the Smith. He offered no resistance. He only fell to his knees, hands cradling the violent heart in its crystal shell.

Rosalina would take no more. With hell closing in around them, she slammed the copper emergency stop with all her might.

VI.

The Smith fell to despair. He existed only in dark recesses of the shop, staring at nothing, eyes unfocused. His reverie plunged deep, his isolation colder than Rosalina thought possible.

The Machine became proxy in her desire to nurse the Smith. Rosalina checked every inch of copper, steel and crystal—the little trauma was easily fixed. Only minor burns remained as badges to this second failure.

Rosalina, anticipating the eventual buoyancy of the Smith’s spirits (he couldn’t wallow for eternity, could he?), catalogued theoretical improvements to the machine: three towers instead of four (three being the number of the Trinity), a restraint mechanism to prevent the pistons from quaking, an intermediary—a battery of sorts—to protect the heart from cruel electricity. The Smith was a statue in the corner, eating and relieving himself only once exhaustion had pulled Rosalina to sleep.

Through this cloud of pessimism and defeat, Rosalina cast her light. After fixing the machine, she went about cleaning the shop, removing the ash of failure that seemed to smother everything. But six days on, Rosalina’s patience broke. With the last traces of day beaming orange over the workshop, she put a gentle hand to the Smith’s shoulder. His cold demeanor seemed to manifest physically—chilling her fingertips.

“Cheer up,” she said, leaning over, lips to ear, “esta es temporary.”

“Don’t,” he growled.

Rosalina disobeyed, massaging his shoulders and back, her hands sliding lower with each pass, eventually finding his chest. His muscles softened under her hands. She lingered, playing gentle notes over ringlets of hair.

“I can take your mind from here.” She nuzzled his neck.

“Please—” his protestations were squelched as Rosalina swung around onto his lap. Eager hands yearned down his torso, ripping buttons from his shirt, her lips exploring the topography of his clavicle. With a playful tug the tails of his shirt pulled free and fell to the floor. He sat bare-chested and bowbacked, Rosalina astride him.

“Please.” His tone was nasal and desperate. Rosalina’s kisses traveled south, trekking his mountains and valleys.

Then, in a burst of animal sexuality, heat flowing from her in great rolling waves, Rosalina leapt from his lap and clawed away his belt, tearing the sliver buckle from leather.

“Now comes the real fun, gringo.” Her fingers dove under his pants into tufts of pubic hair.

But he did not react—could not react. He sat petrified on the stool, face to the sky. His skin would not warm under passion’s flame. Like so many other times in his life, days and years gone, the Smith wished with all his might that he could just die. He scorned himself for even thinking it—hope was a bankrupt enterprise.

Rosalina, eyes alight, apple cheeked and lips flush with anticipation of kisses yet to land, reached down and felt the Blacksmith flaccid. Cold. Unresponsive to her advances. Her playful smile died with the sunset. She recoiled her hand as if bitten, his limp member peeking from his fly.

She backed from him, hips jutting and eyes narrow. “You a fairy? You like boys?” Her gaze was a cutlass.

“No,” he said, “No… It’s—”

“Porque soy una monstrua.”

He moved in to grasp her, smother her fires of self-loathing. She welcomed his embrace with a flurry of body blows—open palms and knuckles to his cold heart.

“You’re not the monster, Rosalina. I’m the monster.”

She broke into sobs on his shoulder.

“I’m the monster,” he repeated.

They stood in the advancing shadows, her body rocking against his, the Smith doing his best to reassure her that not a single thing was wrong with her, that the problem truly was his alone.

Rosalina looked up to him, red eyes trying to read his face. A million questions flew through her mind—inquisitions, accusations, expeditions to the core of this man, but all she could ask was:

“¿Porque?”

His answer was simple and profound, not words to be misinterpreted or read incorrectly, but a simple action to erase all doubt.

“Porque.” He took her hand in his, and stepping back, placed her palm over his heart.

The infinite questions were answered; why he rarely ate, why she spied him awake at all hours of the night, his vast knowledge and why he’d put so much of himself into that damned hulking contraption.

The Blacksmith had no heart beat.

His chest was cold, unmoving, like a doll. Rosalina stared at the stagnant flesh, searching for a tremor to disprove what she knew to be true.

“It stopped beating two thousand years ago,” he said, barely a whisper.

Rosalina’s mind raced through the horror stories whispered around dying fires in the slave quarters. Their macabre words bubbled to her lips.

“¿You…,” she stammered, “¿Vampiro?”

The Smith released Rosalina’s hand. It stayed fixed to his chest, probing for some hint of life.

“Vampire?” The Smith looked to the ceiling. “Vampire—yes. It’s been some time since anyone has used that term… But yes, they used to call me ‘vampire.’”

Rosalina cupped her hands around her neck.

“¿Quieres mi sangre, no?”

The Smith pried Rosalina’s trembling hands from their protector positions.

“The stories are exaggerated. I did experiment drinking human blood, but never from living necks.” His fingers played down from Rosalina’s hands. “Wrists are much easier to drain—less splatter.”

His ill-advised attempt at humor only fanned Rosalina’s fear. She was wracked by feverish shivers, her gaze elusive.

“I’m not alive but I can’t die. My heart doesn’t beat…” he swept errant coils of hair from Rosalina’s face. She flinched but dared not move. “I am every monster history has ever imagined, impotent in every way.”

Her terror a poison, the Smith broke from Rosalina, toward his machine. He stroked the crystal box, gazing at the dead heart inside. It shimmered like a carefully wrought gemstone, beautiful but without intrinsic value.

“Years ago I discovered lightning could make cobbled corpses walk again. So this collection of magnetized ore and locomotive parts is my attempt to create and harness pure light—life.

“It was my hope that the proper application of electricity would force my shriveled heart to beat once more. I long to restore my life so as to finally die in peace.”

Rosalina shook, crumpled onto the floor, trying to reconcile reality with the man-shaped monster before her. She steeled herself, forced the panic to subside until she could again speak.

“How?”

“Like so many of the events in my half-existence,” the Smith spoke in a voice as distant as his origins, “my genesis is more myth than history. The truth is I can no longer remember. Myth says I was, at the dawn of human civilization, a rake and a thief—condemned for coveting that which was not my own. In my final moments, I asked another, one much greater, to save me my fate. I expired and was laid to tomb, only to wake in the blackness, neither alive nor dead.

“Had I known the curse for which I begged, I would have gladly died for my crimes.

“I spent generations debauching, reveling in excess, devil may care to the consequences. But each passing year brought diminishing joy, fading happiness. All things human and good evaporated, leaving me an empty shell, a zombie, cursed to roam the earth.

“I turned my energies to death, spent centuries spreading famine, plagues, pestilence—secreting help to those who joyed in sorrow and pain. I led holy conquests. I built the gears of war and oiled them with the blood of the innocent. Always in the hope—silly hope—that the next wave of death would carry me with it. I sparked revolutions, kindled wars, burned homelands until all was ashes and death.

“In my máquinations, I found the greatest tools of death were not powder and steel, not blades or pandemic illness, but the hands of man. Ensconced in the European mountains, I set about the task of creating the ultimate weapon—human life.

“Needless to say—undoubtedly you’ve heard the gothic tales—I succeeded. The true value of my creation was not in cloning man as the tales sing, but as proof of principle. If I could spark life in a foreign bosom, then by extrapolation, I could spark life in myself. I came here following stories of rocks which could draw electricity from metals, and created this…this monstrosity.”

He turned from the limp heart, saw Rosalina sitting still on the floor. She stared to him with curious eyes—an attentive school child before the lecturing head mister.

“My machine has twice proven a failure. Electricity alone is unable to endow enduring life. I failed to realize that even cobbled corpses contain…for lack of a better term…the vitreous humor of soul—the essence of life, a substance foreign to this mass of steel and magnets.”

His words melted the doubt frosting Rosalina’s bosom. She pushed from the floor and strode to the Smith. With memories of sunlight dancing over her skin, Rosalina took his cold hand.

“If you are cobbled from myths, perhaps myth is where your answer lies.”

The Smith looked to her—eyes brimming with curiosity and surprise—and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Travelling monks tell tales of a spring at the heart of a volcano,” Rosalina spoke in low musical tones. “Legend says one of their number wandered the Sangre de Cristo mountains, converting natives. One day, near the Southern ridges, he was ambushed by a warrior tribe. They gave chase, arrows flying. This monk’s escape brought him to the lip of a volcano. There, an arrow hit true and sent him tumbling into the mountain’s bowel. Figuring the interloper dead, the Natives quit their chase and offered prayers of sacrifice to their god.

“Badly wounded and expiring of thirst, the holy man prayed to his savior. He swooned, and in his dream, he saw a vision of the Savior weeping over a lame lamb. The monk awoke to find a fountain of purest holy water at his feet. He bathed and his wounds were healed—he drank and was thirsty no more.

“Legend says the monk lived to be one hundred and seventy-five years old, preaching to his last breath of the sacred waters of the Southern Volcano.”

The Smith did not respond. Countless times he’d tried to quit the vice that was hope. Against the warnings in his head, infected by Rosalina’s inexhaustible vigor, the Smith nodded

“Yes.” The word was like a magical incantation, transubstantiating the Smith into pure hope. “Yes.” He felt centuries of weight being lifted from his body with each repetition, until he felt he would quit the dreary earth forever. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes.”

VII.

Claire was uneasy, huffing, her hooves dancing in place over the dark earth. The passing clouds blanketed her dark hide so Claire was only the white lozenge on her muzzle and the glint of queer metal boots. She moved in uneasy bursts, apprehensive of the steel grafted to her legs.

The Smith sat bareback. One hand on her neck, he made a final once over of the machinery strapped to Claire’s flank. The cylindrical water tanks were full, the metal box over her tail secure—waiting. Of most importance was the small luggage bag behind where he sat. Inside were two thick glass carefully wrapped and wrapped again. His rifle—scope extended and ready—lay across Claire’s neck.

“So I follow the mountains south?” He asked the dark.

“Sí,” the dark answered. “The volcano is at the southern end of the ridge, north and east of Santa Fe. Take the east fork when the ridge splits in two.”

The Smith, satisfied in his preparations, turned face forward on the saddle and spoke to a spot some fifteen yards away on the shadowy ground.

“Claire and I will return no later than sundown tomorrow. It would be in your best interest to stay in the shop until then. There’s food and water in the cabinets.”

“¿Mañana?” the shadow retorted, “Gringo, it’s a day and a half just to get there.”

“You don’t worry about that.” Mischief put a half-smile on the Smith’s face. “I work in horseshoes the same I do hearts, señorita.”

He spurred Claire, shooting horse and rider into the unfathomable dark. Steam hissed from Claire’s horseshoes with each step, shooting them into the southern wilds like a bullet from a rifle. As the city melted into earth behind him, the Smith heard a valediction whispered from the dark:

“Adíos.”

Claire’s satisfied breaths fell into the rhythm of hissing steam and drumming earth and the darkness swallowed them whole. Without landmarks to measure time, it seemed horse and rider floated through a vast black nothing. Night’s ether was superconductor to the familiar thoughts. Regrets and fears materialized from the black and ran circuits of his aching head.

Disappointment after disappointment, he had vowed to never again chase hope’s evanescent promise. Hope was a child’s story, a fairy tale, something he’d long outgrown. Emboldened by hope he had transfused alien blood into his veins, created the vampyre. Hope drove spikes into his chest, wound ropes around his neck, immolated flesh… Hope that each time he would be swallowed by the blackness never to emerge. But light always followed dark.

A wretched invention, hope. Always fungible, never dried up, photosynthesized with the slightest hint of sunshine. It was the pious hopeful whom the Rider despised most, yet there he was, astride his machine-aided horse, riding into hope’s waiting trap.

A dome of sun soon lazed over the horizon, reluctant to quit dewy sleep. Through its pink glow, rose a cone of earth. Claire, sensing the proximity of their destination, pushed to a sprint. Morning’s full bouquet—the sky all hyacinth and dandelion—found horse and Rider at the volcano’s base. The Rider shielded his eyes from golden sun blaze as he surveyed for a route to the top. The steam boots, far too dangerous on fragile volcanic soil, he toggled off.

“Well chica, what do you think?”

Claire dug anxiously at the mountain’s skirt. She craned her neck to the apex, and, having made the appropriate triangulations, leapt to the volcano’s face. They found the monk’s myth to be popular—a few yards up the west face, Claire and the Smith came across a path hewn by the feet of countless pilgrims. The trail spiraled to the volcano’s cone.

Horse and rider crested the basin’s lip at noon. On their heavenly pedestal, the world seemed a child’s toy below. Black earth yawned to his left, a downward path catching glints of noonday gold. A platinum glint of liquid shimmered at the crater’s bosom. Claire pawed at the rock, testing its composition and hardness.

“Well, Claire, that’s enough sight-seeing. Let’s begin the end.”

With a pat to her neck, Claire started forward. Her forehoof was slow, hesitant to contact the inner face of the volcano. The Rider, impatient with the prize so close, spurred Claire downward.

Claire lurched into the volcano, front hooves exploding the volcanic loam. Desperate for a foothold, she bucked the Rider into the earth’s bowel.

The volcano buffeted the Rider with bone crunching blows as he fell. He flailed his arms, desperate for any hold to stall his descent, but the volcano gave no quarter. His falling dream came to crescendo with a sonorous crunch as his skull split like summer melon. He tasted iron, smelled roasting almonds as his consciousness hemorrhaged to black.

VIII.

In the perfect black, it took minutes before he realized his eyes had again opened. It was the dirge of midnight crickets which finally roused him. Evening or a week of evenings—he didn’t know. The Rider turned his head—burning pain!—and gazed to Claire’s unblinking eye. She lay breathless beside him, flies already swarming for food. They dove like keen-clawed raptors to her deformed rear knee—insatiable for the blood curdling from an open wound.

“Oh, chica,” he rasped. His body prickled as molten needles knitted repairs to shattered bones, melding fragments of flesh again into one whole.

Pushing to hands and knees, he saw before him the silver pool. His palms sank into wet earth as he crawled forward. He inhaled, smelling nothing beyond water and dirt. Cupping the liquid in trembling hands, the Rider drank and then waited. He pressed a damp hand to his heart, anticipating.

Nothing.

Fooled again by hope.

“Just dew in a crater.” He patted Claire’s still head with a dripping hand. “My apologies, girl.” The dew sunk into her hide, finding channels around her milky eye toward Claire’s open mouth.

The Rider, sitting cross-legged on in volcanic mud, searched the sky for portents to explain his perpetual misery. Night cast a faint glow into the crater, highlighting the fractured path—jagged debris tracing where horse and rider’s fall.

“Seems we just missed dusk,” the Rider mused. Stars saturated the orb of sky beyond the volcano’s mouth. “Curious, though, all these stars. Sunset usually washes ‘em out.” The Rider glanced to his fallen companion. Like a struck match, hope rekindled in his breast.

Beside him, Claire flickered with light. Her skin was damp, slick with luminescence, quitting its black for an earthen brown. It seemed her flesh wasn’t muscle and sinew but pure electricity, illuminating a shattered skeleton. Light coursed through her body, bright rapids eroding the fractures to nothing. Her bones melted and re-cast as the glow shot from her nose and muzzle.

The Rider shielded his face from Claire. She was a star—burning hot beside him. With a sucking gasp, Claire whinnied. The earth shook, threatening to unmake the very fabric of the universe. Pure energy swallowed the rider, gnashed him like a crumb in a giant’s mouth. The heat and light dissipated as soon as they’d come, leaving only the cold night.

A horse stood before him, alive and well. She was both Claire and not Claire. The same white lozenge covered her face, but now her hide was the light brown of coffee with cream.

“Claire?” He stared at the familiar and foreign creature. The horse splashed muddy earth, rebelling against her old name. Claire was dead—truly this was a new horse.

“Okay.” He searched his mind for a name befitting one stubborn enough to spurn the reaper himself. “How about…Rosie?”

The horse turned to profile, presenting saddle. Rosie it was.

He reached into the pack strapped to Rosie-nee-Claire and found the two glass vials miraculously intact. He baptized them in the pool and gathered the blessed water.

He held a bottle to the night sky, saw the universe dancing in its waters. Retrieving his rifle from the ground, he strode to Rosie, and careful to pack the bottles in layers of cloth, saddled up for the journey home.

IX.

The ride back to Denver City was instantaneous. It was as if he traversed a tabletop map; the Sangre de Christo Volcano and Denver City pinched together by a Titan’s fingers. Excitement and hope turned miles to meters. His mind ran the improved experiment: a thousand times he watched as aqua vita goaded life from the steel heart.

It was near midnight when Denver City broke the horizon. His stomach dropped. Heat rippled through the dark, refracting tendrils of light into the black. Buildings stood in silhouette, the red flicker of a fire pulsing like blood. The Rider reached back to ready the box on Rosie’s flank and spurred her on.

His hunch was confirmed by a stumbling drunk.

“The whore is deaaaaaaaaad!” he sloshed an empty bottle of Bourbon, took a slug and kissed the ground.

The Rider passed his shop. Its door was torn clean from the jamb, smoke and fire belching into the night. Bloodlust echoed from the town square ahead.

The last of his pity evaporated in the searing heat. Without thought, the Rider clipped back the latch holding shut his steel Pandora’s Box. Spring-loaded, its metal sides blossomed like a mechanized flower. Two Gatling guns, each the size of a forearm, flipped out and clipped into stays at Rosie’s hip. They spun with a sound like rattlesnakes ready to strike, driven by the rods pushing Rosie’s gallop. Hand behind him, the Rider itched to release the safety. For good measure, his other hand cradled the rifle, ready to cast Denver City into the Hell he knew so well.

The square opened before him, lit by makeshift bonfires, drunks and puritans alike dancing like Pagans. Their false idol hung from the gallows at center, her head bowed and feet dangling.

Rosalina. The woman, the one thing still connecting him to the living world, was dead. Damn that sheriff. There was no longer any reason for restraint. Teeth gnashed against his tongue, desperate for any feeling at all, the Rider toggled the safety.

The machine roared, spitting death and hellfire without aim. Clouds of brain and muscle tore from the crowd and blood fell in torrents. Man, woman or child—neither Rider nor gun gave a damn who crossed its path. Bullets cut through the mob, felling bodies left and right. Their drunken song morphed into panic. Revelers fled for their miserable, worthless lives, splashing through rapids of their kinfolks’ blood.

He leapt from Rosie at the gallows, rifle in one hand and knife in the other. The horse ran laps around the square, pumping hot lead into those too drunk or stupid to run. Amidst a chorus of moans and gurgling, blood slick breaths, the Rider stepped to his fallen angel, knife ready.

“Stop.” The voice behind him was strengthened by the click-clack of a shotgun cocked. “I knew you were hiding that filthy whore. Your noose is nex–”

The Rider’s spun and gagged the sheriff with three rifle hits. His torn jugular a fountain, his shit-for-brains exploded out the back of his skull, and a poppy blooming over his heart, the law staggered back. He opened his mouth to speak, but his dying words were drowned in blood and bile. Another shot blew off what was left of his head and the sheriff folded over his knees and fell.

With the workman attitude of one driving railroad spikes, the Smith strode to the corpse and fired shot after shot. Skull, brain, teeth and bone exploded like a 4th of July firework. The Smith shot his breech empty, reloaded, shot empty, reloaded and shot empty again. The Sheriff’s blood ran dry, his body perforated and torn like used paper. His ammunition exhausted, the Smith threw his gun and ran to his dangling compañera.

He sawed the rope until Rosalina’s weight fell to his cradled arms. Her body against his, the Smith leapt from the gallows and, a bottle of liquid pulled from his horse’s flank, ran at full sprint from the square.

Will-‘o-the-wisp fires roamed the floor of his shop, searching for mischief in dark corners. Kicking dust and ash, the Smith carried Rosalina to the waiting machine. He swept away the false heart and lay his idol in its place. The Smith plunged a filament through Rosalina’s breast, giving electricity direct line to her heart.

“For hope.” Pulling cork from vial with his teeth, he dribbled the liquid over her bosom and into her mouth and swilled the dregs. The push of a button fired the boiler and shovels of coal stoked it to fury.

The machine roaring, the Smith ran to a sideboard and pulled a second filament. He impaled himself and lie next to Rosalina. The Smith watched as electricity twisted down the filaments, like ivy down a signpost, plunging into two dead hearts.

The raw power tried to tear him muscle from bone. Each spark pulled him tight as a piano wire. He burned from inside out, his guts a desert. Feeling the blackness close around him, he turned for one final glimpse of Rosalina. In the flash before total black, the Smith saw her heart glowing through the shadow, its beat strong and steady.

Part Three: History & Myth
1913

I.

The two-story house sat centered in his rife scope. A whitewashed picket fence guarded a verdant yard from the surrounding plain. He swung his scope left and saw three horses in an adjacent corral. The one colored like coffee with cream turned its white-lozenge face to the scope and whinnied.

Farther, maybe a mile past the house, stood a gnarled Joshua Tree, its tarantula shadow long in the setting sun. From a low branch swung a lifeless form. Little more than a smudge in his sights, the Rider snorted to see greasy bandito’s Karma paid out.

He lowered the rifle and approached, watching three girls bounce through the yard. Their chestnut skin was splotched with sweat and dirt, their white dresses matted with play. ‘Grandchildren,’ he thought. His approach sent a wave of excitement through their game. Like magnets to iron they crowded the front gate, waiting in silent expectation. Damn if their chocolate eyes didn’t look familiar.

With a forced smile slashing his skin, he pulled the small string-bound book from his back pocket. “I’m looking for the author of this story. Miss de los Santos.”

He held a thin collection of parchment pages, folded lengthwise and bound with loops of twine. Its cover, yellow and curled from its infinite travels, was printed with an ornate border, its title and attribution at center:

American Vampire
By Rosa de los Santos

The tallest of the three girls, upon seeing the tract, turned to the farmhouse behind. “¡Mama! Un visitor! ¡Tiene tu novella!”

The door swung open, dark save a ruby ember and feathers of smoke

“¿Que quiera, visitor?” Her voice had changed, gravelly with a patina of age, but the notes were unmistakable.

The Visitor crossed the threshold onto the yard, sending the girls scattering back to their game. He held the book, his history, in outstretched hands. “I have something I’d like you to sign.”

“Let me see.” She strode from the darkness and took the tract from him. The Visitor gasped. Sixty years had only managed to age her twenty. The thin lines in her face only highlighted her beauty, traced her laugh, pointed to her chocolate eyes. As she turned the pages in her hands, the Visitor saw the hangman’s scars like a necklace under her jaw.

“You’ve torn the last chapter from my book.” She spoke without looking to him, voice steady. “You’ve skipped poor, stupid Rosalina waking alone—hunted like a dog for more than a decade for a massacre she had no part in. You’ve torn out the chapter describing how she outlives her children, her grandchildren. She ends up a filthy monster in the end, just like that bastard Blacksmith.”

The Visitor took her shaking hands, put them over his eternally still heart. “Rosalina.” He dared touch her chest. Her rebellious heartbeat made him shiver. “Rosalina—”

“No.” She stepped back from him, disengaging from the Visitor’s icy grip. “Anymore, Rosalina is just a character in a book.”

The woman produced a pencil from the folds of her wrap and scribbled the book’s cover. She finished with a flourish and threw it back to her Visitor.

For the briefest of moments, made even smaller by his unending life, their eyes met. The lingering doubts evaporated in the fire of her glare. It was her, the part of him still smoldering with hope’s spark, the last vestiges of everything human and good clinging to his perverted soul.

“Rosalina,” he said.

Her gaze hardened, jaw clenched with inexhaustible anger. She stepped back into the shade of her home and slammed the door, her final word terse and stinging.

“Adíos.”

The Visitor looked down to the salutation penciled on his tract:

“History and Myth are the same tale, told differently – Rosa”

The girls, witness to the scene, could no longer dam their questions. Inquisitive voices sung in chorus, the jumble of ‘quiera’s and ‘mama’s forming an incomprehensible and beautiful round.

The rider put his fingers to his lips and blew a shrill whistle. His horse—the only true Rosie now—jumped the corral fence and ran to his side.

With a tip of his hat he mounted the horse. He flung the book into Rosie’s saddle pack. Its pages curled around a small vial of luminescent water. He turned Rosie east, toward the spilled ink of night, and without taking pause to look back, spurred her on. The Rider galloped toward the blackness, ready to pen another chapter in his miserable and infinite fiction.

- - -
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize

11/2/11

2011-11-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Strategist's Apprentice
By Robert Langmaack

“WHAT?!” bellowed the general. Everyone else in the command tent watched him nervously. “Those Levaran bastards, trying to attack us here? Fools! Our troops will have them running back home with their tails between their legs like the whelps they are! Lieutenant Morres!”

A young officer to his right saluted. “Sir?”

“Go prepare the men for battle. If the enemy’s going to be here in two days, I want them ready to go by tomorrow. We’ll teach those wildmen just how safe they are under my watch!” The general flashed a vicious grin.

Another man, an aging gentleman dressed in the royal strategist regalia, cleared his throat and began speaking carefully. “General, sir, the enemy may have a stratagem in store for us. Maybe we should hold off on attacking until we have a plan of our own.” Behind him, a young boy of eight was writing on parchment with a furrowed brow, occasionally looking up at the assembly with interest.

“Stratagem? Ha!” the general barked. “Bartholomew, our troops are superior to theirs in every way. Who has need of a strategy for a simple skirmish like this?”

“Perhaps,” said Lieutenant Morres, scratching his beard stubble nervously, “we should take precautions, sir, just in case.”

The general waved these words away. “Enough! My mind’s made up! Morres, prepare the men! We march at sun-up!”

The lieutenant sighed briefly, but saluted again. “Yessir.”

As the conversation ended and people began exiting the tent, the young boy got his master’s attention. “Um, master,” he said quietly, “why aren’t you telling him about the Levarans’ flanking tactic?”

Bartholomew hushed him. “The general’s decision is final… as it always is,” he sighed. “And we must always respect the chain of command. Besides, I haven’t decided on a counter-tactic to propose yet, and he is right about our troops. They’ll be fine.” Muttering, he added, “Probably. Now come.”

Vander frowned. “Yes, master.” He looked at the map again one more time before running out of the tent.

That night, Vander snuck out of his tent and made his way to the officers’ quarter. Although he had been told not to wander around at night, he knew his master was worried about the outcome of the battle. ‘A wise strategist plans for every battle, no matter how simple it seems,’ he always said to him. Sadly, he also knew his master wouldn’t say anything to anger the general. He was pretty scary, I guess, he thought. Still, this is for the good of the troops! I have to tell someone!

He had just reached the outer tents of the officer’s quarter when a guard’s voice stopped him in his tracks. “You there, boy! Why are you out here so late?”

Vander began to panic, “I-I-I, um, I-I have a m-message for…for, um…”

“A message? For whom?”

The boy continued stammering for a few moments, until suddenly he remembered a name. “M-Morres! Lieutenant Morres, sir! My master said it’s urgent!”

“Master? Oh, right, Bartholomew’s boy.” The guard looked over the boy curiously, but shrugged. “Wait here, I’ll go see if he’s awake.”

Soon, Vander was standing before Lieutenant Morres. The boy looked up at him. He wore a soft smile on his tired face, which soothed Vander’s fears immediately.

“So, you are Bartholomew’s apprentice, aye?” said the lieutenant. “Your master speaks well of you.”

Vander couldn’t help but smile. “Thank you, sir.”

Morres let out a small chuckle. “So, what’s this message Bartholomew has for me?”

“Well, sir, he’s concerned about the upcoming battle. He was hoping you could convince the general to use a plan he devised.”

The lieutenant regarded him quietly. “I see. And why isn’t Bartholomew himself telling me this?”

Vander fidgeted. “Um, h-he started feeling sick and needed his rest, so he sent me.”

“Hmm. Well, the general is notoriously stubborn, especially when the Levarans are concerned. Still, perhaps I could convince him while we’re on the march. What is this plan then?”

“It’s…well…” Vander tried to speak, but couldn’t. His eyes kept glancing to the map. “I can show you on there.” After an awkward pause, he added, “Th-that’s how my master showed me, I mean.”

Morres nodded. He watched as the young apprentice began moving markers around silently on the map with a surprising intensity. Once he was finished, he redid the battle for Morres, speaking with confidence about the troops’ movements. When he was finished describing his plan, the boy backed away and let the lieutenant look over everything.

“So,” said Vander, once again speaking nervously, “what do you think?”

Morres smiled. “Impressive. With this, even if the Levarans manage to surprise us on the battlefield, we’ll be ready.” He turned his attention back to the boy. “Alright then, go tell your master to rest easy. I’ll make sure our troops are ready for the enemy.”

“I will sir, thank you!” Vander bowed and left, smiling all the way back to his master’s tent.

Two days later, the atmosphere in the camp was electric after their victory. In the command tent, the general clapped his lieutenant on the back. “Ha ha! Excellent work, Morres! They were practically tripping over themselves trying to run away!”

Morres chuckled. “Thank you sir, but the credit really should go to Bartholomew. It was his tactic, not mine.”

Startled, Bartholomew looked up. “What?”

“No need to be modest,” continued Morres. “We’d almost certainly had lost if they’d managed to pull off their flanking maneuver.”

The aging strategist just blinked. “I-I’m sorry milord, but I never devised a plan for that.”

“What’re you talking about? Your apprentice came in and told me about it last night!”

“Vander? I never sent Vander out for anything!"

The officers all looked at each other, then at the young boy. Vander looked up from his notes, saw everyone, and frowned. Stammering, he shrank and said, "A-am I in trouble now?"

- - -
I'm a college graduate currently between jobs. I've earned a BFA in Creative Writing, and am now working on sharpening my writing skills in my spare time.

10/26/11

2011-10-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Red Tunics
By Jerome Brooke

“Play another tune, with thy lyre, pretty lad!” called one of the shieldmaidens. “A lay of war!”

The women were gathered round the campfire. They wore red tunics, of a rough weave. I began to sing.

“Artemis, send us victory this day,
“Drive before us the foe,
“As them we do slay,
“Artemis, send us victory…”

The captain of the troop rose, and came up to me, where I sat. She cast a silver coin before me. I grasped the coin, and put it into my pouch. The woman gave me a loaf of bread that she was eating.

“Your voice is sweet, dear one,” she said, as I tore into the bread. “Come, I am tired from the ride today, come to my tent.”

The warrior pulled me into her tent, and then tore my tunic off. She then cast off her own garments. She took my arm, and pulled me down onto her blanket. She climbed atop me, forcing me back onto the mat. The two other women in the tent came near to watch. Soon, she cried out in passion. She then slipped to the side, and stopped to catch her breath. After a few moments, she moved atop me once more.

After she was finished with me, another one of the women took her turn. When she and he comrade had both been satisfied, the captain returned. She lay at my side, seeking a taste of sweet mead.

I was allowed to remain in the tent until morning. I had been with the chariot regiment for a few days. One of the women had heard me playing in an Inn. She had given me a coin to return to her camp with her.

When the squadron was ready to go forth, the captain called me to her side. She extended her hand, and helped me to climb into the chariot.

“Come, pretty boy. You will be used by my comrades tonight. Do not fret, we will not harm you!”

- - -
Jerome Brooke was born in Evansville, Indiana. He now lives in the Kingdom of Siam. He has written Our Lady of Silk and many other books.

10/19/11

2011-10-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

A WELL-ATTENDED DECISION
By Charles Ackerman

It was all but impossible to not feel the joy surging from the earth. The potency of spring was everywhere: flocks of migrating birds overhead, the air ripe with the warm expectant smell of the soil, the boisterous laughter of youthful flirtations drifting up from the street below. Yet Meyis turned pale when she heard the knocking, for she knew answering was not so much opening the door as opening up the abyss of widowhood.

“Will you get that?” her husband said absently, not even opening his eyes.

The knocking came more insistently. Meyis looked across the small table and over at the man lying in bed. If nothing she had already said had moved him, what would more words do? She sighed and leapt from the chair and went down. She flung the door open and crossed her arms, immediately presenting the visitor with an image of pure fury.

The young girl before her was undaunted. “Sorry to bother you, good lady, but mayhap you have a length of ribbon you could spare? We’re preparing for the mummers’ dance. Preferably not Dsainar yellow as we have plenty of that. Though I see that you are Dsainar — honest merchants I’m sure.” Meyis considered scolding the girl for pounding on the door with such enthusiasm for such a whimsical cause, but then she decided that surrendering a length of ribbon was the quickest way to remove her presence.

“Thank you, good lady,” the girl said when she received the object of her search. “It’s going to be a good year. Why, there are even flowers growing in the Void. I saw them myself.”

Meyis felt dizzy. She had been living in dread of news that the Void had dried out. “Goodness, child, what were you doing in the Void?”

“Me and my mother were looking for flowers and it had been so dry that we kept walking and walking. I didn’t even get mud on my ankles.” She pulled up her dress for proof; Meyis was too surprised to instruct on modesty.

A month after her brother-in-law, soaked by a late winter rain, appeared in the doorway, looking like his soul had been stolen, she was still in shock. His words made little sense: Gerkin’s Tavern, a barmaid, a Maxos, a duel challenge. Exchanging tears for muys wine and a longer explanation helped not. The brother-in-law feebly concluded, “He was in the right, you must understand. The Maxos was roughing her up something fierce.”

“What do I care?” Meyis gasped. “He’s never expressed interest in anyone’s honor before, and now I’m going to be a widow over a barmaid? He told me he never as much stepped foot in the taverns when he made his trips for muys. Now you say he was in Gerkin’s? Even I know of its reputation and I do not go to Pouletan but for once a year! Was he lying to me all this time?”

“No,” the brother-in-law said quietly, “he was not. He always insisted on doing business by the wagon.”

“So what were you two doing in Gerkin’s?”

The brother-in-law shrugged his shoulders in defeat.

As Meyis was closing the door on the girl she heard a horrific shriek. The bird-butcher down the street was doing his business. Meyis grabbed some money and quitted the house.

That night her husband said, chewing absently, “This is the plumpest duck we’ve had this early in the year. It must have cost a goodly coin. What’s the occasion?”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to cook this for you again,” she explained. She burst into tears.
He looked at her helplessly.

Ascradt recounted the copper coins that amounted to the shop’s savings and sighed. He had of course agreed to be his brother’s second the instant he returned to Gerkin’s from the outhouse. It proved more costly and time-consuming than he would have ever feared. He almost daily received a letter from the Maxos second discussing negotiations of the rules, the ceremonies, and the inspections.
Ascradt was hapless in the face of the blizzard of minutiae, for it pushed his literacy to the limit. “I need a second,” he bitterly joked to a friend who was helping him with the more exotic words in the Maxos communications. While he had made no progress in getting his brother or the Maxos to back down, he at least had convinced the aristocrat to pay for the coffin.

It was no victory. Duel coffins, Ascradt had been told, were rarely elaborate affairs because injured combatants often yielded, and if they died, it was days later. So the coffin received little thought.
Ascradt was awash in horror when he went to inspect it. The wood was so knotted and warped that the Maxos must have paid extra to have the coffin-maker put aside his pride and craft such a monstrosity. The message was clear: the Maxos would not be the one lying within the slovenly wood tomb. Still hoping to convince the man to agree to call off the duel and in truth quite intimidated by the prospect of a disagreement with a Maxos, Ascradt could only sputter, “It is acceptable.”

Ascradt encouraged his brother to prepare for the duel. He had helped his sister-in-law strip the main room of the third floor to create a space unhindered by the rains to drill. He had taken the tapestries off his own bedroom walls so the support rods could be used as practice rapiers. When his brother said that they were nothing like real swords, he went to Bakil for a master at arms. He found several, but they were unwilling to instruct a Dsainar for anything less than extortionate prices. To cover the fees, he looked for a buyer for the shop and the apartments above, but even the most generous offers left him well short of what was needed.

Ascradt cursed his brother for proposing rapiers. They left horrific puncture wounds that developed gangrene if the victim lived long enough. Maxos men trained daily with them, and the Dsainar could barely get a hold of one. If only his brother had said staves, he would have escaped with broken fingers or a cracked skull.

“Are you listening to me? These wounds — do they not frighten you? If you will not practice, promise me you will yield at the first opportunity.”

The brother’s eyes turned glassy. “Trust me,” he said in a dreamy voice and patted Ascradt on the shoulder.

“What does that mean? Meyis can bear you another son. We have the strength.”

“This has nothing to do with what happened to my son! How I wish you and Meyis would not fuss so! I want this silliness to stop. Put the tapestries back up before you catch a cold.”

“If you promise to yield.”

“Yes, fine, whatever. Just put the room back the way it was.”

Nen thought nothing of the knock on the door down below until her father, his face twisted into a scowl, came up the steps and said, “It is this afternoon. You have to watch.”

Nen returned the ugly look. “How many times do I have to tell you that I did not ask that man to intervene?”

A Maxos had been particularly drunk and rough that night, taking more liberties than even an aristocrat could expect. His powerful hands had mauled her, but the bruises, running from her arms to her thighs, had been healed for over a week. She just wished the whole thing would go away.

Instead, she had to endure a long, bumpy wagon ride to the Void, a glade on the eastern slope of the valley that was so dead to the world that no duelist’s artifice was believed to work. Nen could not have cared less whether enchantments affected this or any other duel.

And she certainly did not care to receive so much attention. As she stepped off the wagon, worrying that Gerkin would be upset if she arrived late to work, a cheer arose from the half hundred Dsainar who had assembled to watch.

The brother of the man who started the fight approached her, introduced himself as Ascradt and asked her to wear her champion’s corsage, a delicate pink and yellow affair. “No,” she said coldly. “Tell him I had no expectation of him other than to mind his own business.”

The brother gave her a pleading look and whispered, “Please. I can’t take this back there.” He gestured over his shoulder to a small table that was bare save for a sword and a pair of mismatched gloves. The man who was to be her champion stood beside it, shifting his weight from leg to leg. She did not even know his name.

The brother looked hopefully at Nen’s father but his stony look mirrored hers, and the man refused to make eye contact.

Without warning, the brother thrust the corsage against her bosom and violently secured it with a pin. Only the sheer intensity of the pain kept Nen from crying out when the needle plunged into her breast.
“It was such a simple thing, bitch.”

Gran Kestock hand been in eleven duels and had the scars to prove it. But it was an ill omen that he only found out that he had challenged a Dsainar two days after the fact. It was then that his best friend deemed him sufficiently recovered from his hangover to remind him of what had transpired. Once he had his wits about him, Gran inked a letter for his second to give to his Dsainar counterpart. It hinted that he had been hasty to think the incident a matter of honor warranting a duel. There was no satisfaction needed. It was a cautious, evenhanded letter, the kind that could only have been written by someone who could not remember the events about which they wrote.

No sooner had he sent it, people began approaching him in person and through the post. They were so pleased that he was putting the Dsainar in their place. Everyone, it seemed, had a story about trickster merchants, ingratitude, insults, coin-chipping or worse. At dinner parties and balls, women who had never expressed an interest in Gran were most solicitous of the trivial bump on his temple. Several of the greatest duelists in Kanna volunteered to help him train.

A cousin who hand spent the winter in Bakil sent two of the newfangled edgeless rapiers. His second quickly had gotten the Dsainar second to accept them. Gran thought the octagonal blades vicious: reduced to a thrusting tip, the rapiers’ lack of a sharp edge made it difficult to deliver superficial but impressive looking cuts that allowed opponents to yield with grace. It was going to be a challenge to disable the silly Dsainar without running him through.

Sick of hearing increasingly fantastical accounts of how he had fought off five Dsainar barehanded in Gerkin’s, he retreated to one of the Kestock keephouses. He considered writing a more explicit letter to the Dsainar, suggesting the duel be called off, but he procrastinated on rewriting it until it was too late. Instead, he distracted himself by overseeing the sharpening of plows and the fixing of harnesses.
Gran almost persuaded his fiancé to demand that he withdraw. She hazarded that some might think it unseemly to challenge a Dsainar. Gran waited for one more sentence, a simple prohibition. An uncomfortable silence descended upon them, and the fiancé filled it by saying that he should do what he must. The engagement was the only time when Gran would have obeyed an order from her, but she stopped short. She stopped short, took a deep breath, and again looked for reassurances about why he had been in Gerkin’s.

“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered after glancing at the pathetic coffin in the back of the wagon parked at the edge of the Void. He wasn’t pleased with the insult the misshapen wooden box represented. His cousin had been an exemplary second for his last five duels. His newfound zealotry, however, was most untoward.

Gran studied the growing crowd with unease. None of the Maxos who had puffed him up were there, leaving him and his second vastly outnumbered. The Dsainar, who obviously had never attended a duel before, were forcing themselves to be noisy. Gran was sympathetic in the abstract — the sound-swallowing glade was unnerving the first time it was experienced — but the snippets of conversation he caught made it clear that the Maxos were not the only ones who saw in a bar fight an epic battle between good and evil.

Gran strode across the glade and pulled the Dsainar second aside. “All he has to do is apologize for...” Gran let the sentence linger. Punching him? Throwing a flagon at him? Pushing him into a wall? He had heard so many versions of the night at Gerkin’s he was uncertain which he had heard first.

The second shrugged and then looked nervously at the crowd. “Believe me, I tried. Can’t you stab him in the foot?”

“And take my point that far off line?”

The tone of his response was ambiguous, but the second apparently read into it an alliance of civility. “Can you tell me,” he asked Gran in a whisper, “why the left-hand glove is maile but the right is leather?”

An inexplicable rage suddenly filled the Maxos. “You really have no idea, do you?” he snapped. He had been told that the man had asked the same question at an inspection ceremony and had been thoroughly answered.

Gran spun around and walked back to his own table and second. He pulled on the gloves, made an annoyed comment about their poor fit, grabbed his rapier, and walked to the center of the glade. The air felt warm, a perfect day for planting, he thought. His opponent struggled with his own gloves and then met him.

To indicate he was ready, Gran wordlessly raised his hilt to his forehead in a salute. His opponent, who appeared scrawny under the midday sun, looked at him blankly, caught the meaning of the gesture, and then awkwardly replicated it.

Raising his left hand to swat aside thrusts, Gran crouched down and began circling. He feinted a thrust to the Dsainar’s left side. The man just stood there and was lightly jabbed in the forearm. Gran was so shocked by the man’s utter lack of skill that he dropped his guard. He was thinking about the best way to disarm the Dsainar when the man charged at him, swinging wildly.

Gran fell back under the clumsy but spirited onslaught. It was a crude attack, fatal to try twice, but Gran had never seen anything like it and he found his point repeatedly knocked aside as he retreated. If the audience had contained any Maxos other than Gran’s second, undoubtedly they would have had difficulty stifling a laugh at his bad handling of the attack. Instead, the gathered Dsainar, in an egregious violation of decorum, let out a loud cheer, which grew into a sustained cacophony of shouts and whistles when Gran was hit in the face.

The Dsainar stopped and pulled back, visibly impressed that he had scored a hit. Gran instinctively raised his hand to check for blood. When the crowd hissed unsympathetically, Gran blushed and dropped his hand. He would lose blood quickly if the wound went untreated.

The Dsainar’s brief triumphant look vanished when Gran seized the man’s blade with his maile glove. Gran had hoped to simply yank the sword out of his opponent’s hand and press the rapier tip to his chest — a clear cut and bloodless victory — or to disable him by stabbing him in the forearm. But the man unexpectedly clung to his blade and fell forward, impaling himself on what was meant to be superficial thrust. That, at least, is how Gran later justified how he so swiftly grabbed the Dsainar’s weapon and in the same motion ran his tip through the man’s heart.

The crowd fell quiet when two hand length’s of Gran’s blade appeared out the back of his opponent.
The duel lasted less than ten strokes of an axe.

- - -
This story has its origins in my own experience with sword martial arts (in the Japanese and German traditions). Unfortunately, the hectic nature of life keeps me from continuing, but I still draw inspiration from those days.

10/12/11

2011-10-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Boardwalk
By Jack Bristow

The man, Derek Whitely, walked the boardwalk, past the junkies, Bible salesmen, and religious zealots of many stripes. He had an acute anxiety in his heart but was not sure why—something, and he didn't know what, was profoundly wrong. And then he had thought of Julianne—the perky breasts, the brown hair, the delicately nimble body pressed against some other being. Then, he was stopped by an Eastern Indian with what looked like a velvet pebble in his forehead.

“Your future—it desperately needs to be told. Come with me—around the doughnut shop.”

“I don't have money for this type of bullshit,” Derek replied.

“No,” the Eastern Indian had said, guiding him by the arm to behind the doughnut shop. “I do not want your money. I have had thoughts about you all day—and anticipated your coming here at this very moment, please.” The east Indian, who introduced himself as Karpal, was tall-- about 6'7, with intense brown eyes and a no-nonsense demeanor.

He cringed as he had looked into Derek's hand. “Ah, I see—it's your old lady. You've been having all types of terrible intuition about her this morning, no? That she was maybe engaged in all kinds of decadent sex acts with other men.”

Derek, his blood boiling abnormally, was about to curse out the Indian, but then had remembered his inexplicable paranoia just moments before. Instead, he told Karpal, a panic-stricken tone permeating his voice. “Yes—oh, God, yes! I had the feeling this

morning—and I don't know why—that she's been cheating on me. Probably, it's all bullshit—a husband's jealously. You know.”

And then Karpal nodded his head understandably. “This woman, I can see her clearly. Her name is Julianne—she has brown hair, little breasts, but an extraordinarily attractive face, no?” Karpal smiled confidently at Derek, and Derek returned the smile, thinking, Aha, I must have been overreacting to all this. And Karpal—his purpose is to assuage my paranoiac concerns.

“Ah,” Karpal rubbed the tiny pebble embedded in his forehead, “I can see her now. On the massive king size bed in your bedroom, no? She's in there with a man named Jordan Whitely, and he's really giving it to her good!”

Derek shrieked, and then collapsed onto the boardwalk.

“I'm very sorry for you, it is never a good thing for a man to find out his wife is having an affair,” Karpal placed his long tan hand on Derek's shoulder compassionately, and then he helped Derek to his feet. Derek red-faced now, saying to Karpal, “You don't

understand the half of it my friend—Jordan's my big brother. That son of a bitch—that ribald, two-timing son of a bitch. I'm going to go home and kill him!”

“Hold on a second, my friend,” Karpal waving his hand across his pebbled forehead again, this time saying, “Aha, here is another vision. And this is a man named Carl Whitely, and this is four years ago, he is really giving it to your old lady good! And she is wearing a white, bridal gown. She wore that on your wedding day, no?”

“Oh Christ,” Derek tumbling to the ground again.

Karpal helped him up, and asked, “Who is it this time—another family member?”

“Yeah,” Derek replied, tears streaming down his cheek. “My father! Holy shit. I can't believe it-- my very own father, putting the wood to my wife, on our wedding day!”

And then it had all started to make perfect sense to Derek—his wife was pretty effortless in the sack that night, and now he had known why: She was sloppy seconds. Oh God. Oh God. Derek started thinking, over and over again. I can't bear another image—please, God, do not let there be another one, because, as it is, I'm already going to have

to kill my father and brother. Please, God—don't make me have to kill anyone else.”

“My friend, I'm afraid to tell you,” Karpal said, “of yet another vision—your wife, and this time she is with a woman. But at least, my friend, she does not share your surname! Her name is Rebecca Leland. She and your wife are going at it in in the backseat of the an '89 Chevy. And, oh boy! You should see the woman she is with—big roomy chest, pouty lips, and large blue eyes.”

“Let me guess: She has a panther tattooed on her left forearm?”

Karpal looked at Derek perplexedly. “Why yes, my friend. But how did you know that?”

“She's my sister!”

The man fell to the boardwalk yet again, his face red like an abused piece of raw meat, whimpering, stuttering. And then, after Karpal had helped him up for the third time, the man had run for the end of the pier, running and running until he had reached it, Karpal in tow. “No, my friend. Please do not do that—I have another image, something else,

that may help you reconsider. It is not so bad as the other ones, my friend. Please, do not jump!”

Derek, already halfway over the pier and determined to jump had said, somewhat irritatedly, “No,I've heard enough. I can't bear to hear anymore about my wife engaged in sexual intercourse with members of my immediate family!”

“My friend,” Karpal insisted. “This is different—it is not like the others. You have to hear it.”

“Why,” the man had asked pleadingly.

“Because,” Karpal replied, waving his hand around his pebbled forehead one last time, “This one's my favorite—it involves your wife, two Chip and Dale dancers, an old lady, two circus midgets, a donkey, a German Shepherd, three Albanian goat herders, two vials of Cocaine, a ping-pong ball and two bags of ice.”

“No,” Derek cried, before leaping head-first into the shallow, rock-infested waters.

- - -
Jack Bristow is a short story writer/on-again, off-again, bassist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. If you have nothing better to do, you can follow him @RealJackBristow.

10/5/11

2011-10-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

White Moths Fluttering
By Susan Dale

Above the indentation in the earth, the trees and the underbrush shifted position; all together and at the same time. There was a great sound like the earth heaving. Rabbits and deer jumped high before they raced off in frightened flurries.

The eyes of the Cherokee son widened to see the earth cracking open with wide gaps and fierce sounds to swallow the soft circular ground. Crashes and billows of smoke. The earth shook to wide gaps that cracked open and sunk deep. The dry river bed began filling with water. Astounded, the Cherokee son realized that he was witnessing the ground collapsing into a sink hole, half a mile long; a chasm that shook the river back into its long trench. He heard the splashing of water and saw it coming in an onslaught. Hurriedly, he jumped out of the now dry river bed before it filled with water. Then he turned to watch the water fill the trench and splash along merrily.

The smoke puffing above the sink hole cleared for him to see that below the earth that had collapsed lie the barest remnants of a long-ago village; primitive and abandoned to the ages. He saw too the stone steps that climbed down into the ground, as was he. Down he descended to inspect the long-ago buried village now being revealed.

He wondered- ‘How far is the village below the earth; twenty, twenty-five feet?’

All around him a musty smell of the bowels of the earth. In front of him waved the roots of trees trying to climb back into the earth; thin and silvery; struggling to find the ground to sink into. The roots waved eerily above him; they gave him the willies, even as he realized that they were only looking for directions on where they should go.

And when he bent to inspect the earth around the forsaken village, to his amazement, he saw the ground was composed of living soil. The patches of dark, knobby growth that formed tiny circles in the earth was crypto soil, composed of living organisms. He ran his hands over the top of the soil, and closed his eyes to hear the soil speak to him of the primitive village and of its peoples. Once alive, their presences were still within the soil. The jolts of energy coming from the beings once inhabiting the stone dwellings were Asian ghosts with the background of the village showing through their white-washed presences. Here they were before him, eating, drinking, hunting, and hiding from their enemies beneath the earth. Propagating, nourishing their young, etc. The soil lived yet with their present selves; unspoken, unseen. He saw some climbing out of the ground to watch for enemies, to hunt, to forage. Some were coming down the steps for protection from the elements.

Hunkering on the rocks, watching him now.

The Cherokee son blinked to the white moths suddenly replacing the ghosts. Fluttering about the stones; white wings to the cave; eternity to the villagers.

Stones were stacked to form walls five foot high to separate the dwellings of the individual families. In the middle of the cavern, over a stack of piled twigs, swung a community pot for cooking. Piles of ashes were scattered below the pot. And to the far left of the abandoned village, stretched other steps; they were going further down. Wondering where those steps led, the Cherokee son walked over to see the steps descending to forty feet or better. He squinted through the darkness to see another dwelling place of stone walls and a cooking pot.

One built upon another. One world over another. Time gone by into time reborn within the living soil. In this habitat beneath the earth, birth and death - sleeping, awakening - eating - consummating. And more. The buried village was brimming with life thereafter. Life to death, and death and life colliding to merge inside the living soil. And all flown into life on the wings of the white moths.

And then, something shining up at him: something compelling him to climb down the steps to have a better look. And in the shadowed darkness, as though it was meant for him, lie a knife with a wooden handle and the long blade that coaxed him down with its gleam. All the way down the steps, he descended to walk over then bend to pick up the knife. He ran his fingers carefully over the blade; his now. With the knife in one hand, he looked around to see but another set of steps.

‘Can it truly be,’ he wondered as he felt his way down yet another set of steps.

The mysteries of time taking him deeper into other mysteries of other times. He was so far down now that he was having trouble seeing. He lit his lighter then jolted upright. There, below both stone villages, one stacked over the other, lie a burial ground of skeletons. Their grinning white skulls and rattly bones lie scattered about in mad disarray. The sight of those picked-clean bones took the Cherokee son from revulsion to speculation.

‘Can this be the remains of a mass sacrifice? Or simply the burial grounds of the village?’

No matter. The anxiety running rampant within him told him that it was time to turn around and go back up the way he had come down. With knife in hand and fear in his heart, he hastened to climb the steps. From one set of steps up to another, and then up another. Up through the stillness of here and gone. Up, and hearing the river of time back in place and splashing into infinity. The river running from and back into time. And the Cherokee son running over the living soil with its breath of life. In transition he was, and within a cyclical bond with the earth.

***************

On the top step it lie coiled in a cyclical ring. Arrested while waiting with coiled muscles; taut and motionless. It waited on the step between exit and entrance; between life-giving sun and the dark village of yesteryears. Between escape and joining the white moths of eternity. Writhed up from the darkness of the underground, the Burmese python waited for him on the top step. A haughty look on its face, as though it knew that the Cherokee son had not a chance of escape. Thick muscled with its head weaving on its neck, it moved with an exquisite grace, ever so slowly writhing while moving forward. Slowly, surely, moving towards the Cherokee son who was zigzag backing down the steps, his heart beating dirges of fear. The snake up quick with a twisting motion. Wrapping quickly, tightly around his leg. Twisting and climbing with utmost purpose, squeezing off the circulation of his leg. His leg burning like the fires of fear that jump-started his heart now beating furiously. Gulping, swallowing his fear. The foot of his freed leg dangling in mid air, searching for escape. The snake inching to the top of his thighs, squeezing, wrapping.

Unconsciously, quickly, and from somewhere not known, the knife came down with a force of rage and desperation into the body of the snake. Spurts of blood flying in the air. But still the snake hung on; heading towards his groin. Again, the knife came down to stab once, twice, and with such force that the blood was spurting everywhere at once. The snake gurgled a death cry and fell back. It collapsed as though the air had been released from its heavy body; the muscles lying limp, lifeless. The Cherokee son let out a wail of release. And looked to see that he was covered with the snake’s blood; baptized with blood into life. He was shaking uncontrollably when he stepped over the lifeless creature. His hands, his chin trembling. His leg numb and hot; he drug it along behind him. Over the bloody snake and out. Silently, he said goodbye to the spirits in the darkness. He was leaving behind the village beneath the earth. Heading into the light of life he was; moving into the sunbeams coaxing him forward.

- - -
Susan writes regularly for print magazine, WestWard Quarterly, Pegasus and Hudson View. Online she has poems and fiction on Ken * Again, Smoking Poet, Eastown Fiction, and Jerry Jazz Musician, Tryst 3, Word Salad, and Pens On Fire to name a few.

9/28/11

2011-09-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

Rumplestiltskin - The Epilogue
By Natasha Cabot

Rumplestiltskin tossed his empty bottle of whiskey into the corner of the wall, where it shattered in a million pieces and rained down upon the dirt floor.

That blonde bitch cheated me out of what was mine, after all I’d done for her, he thought.

He went to the cabinet for a new bottle of scotch and opened it, taking a long chug and wiping his mouth with his dirty, ripped sleeve. The bell on his hat jangled morosely.

“I was supposed to have that child! That child should have been mine!” screamed the angry imp, tears forming in his grotesquely mutated eyes.

He remembered that day in the dungeon when the miller’s daughter had promised him her first-born. She was facing execution when he appeared to her. She was terrified. She wept. She prayed. Her father told the king she could spin hay into gold…a corn-fed alchemist, she was. The miller lied! He lied to the king. No human being can weave straw into gold. Not one. Being a kind and sensitive imp, Rumplestiltskin took pity upon the blonde beauty with the big blue eyes and giant breasts. He gave her the power to turn straw into gold and all he received in return was broken promises. In the end, she got a crown, a king, and kept the baby and he received nada.

“I have nothing,” he whined into the air. “I am alone.”

Rumplestiltskin puked and fell to the ground, passing out for the eighth time that week. When he came to, he felt the dry vomit on his cheek and went to the bathroom to wash it off. He looked at himself in the mirror, his eyes reddened by drink and fury. His pathetic visage stared back at him.

“All I wanted was to be a dad. All I wanted to do was to care for someone. To hold a child, raise it, and give it love. I can’t have children of my own. She can have others. She’s such a selfish bitch.”

He splashed the cold water on his face and dried off with a towel that was hanging on a nearby rack. He flicked out the light and went into the living room and sat on the sofa. He turned on the television; the news would soon be on. He turned it to the sports channel instead. It was playoff season and there were a million games from which to choose. Besides, the breaking news was that the queen was expecting another child and he didn’t want to be reminded of what could have been.

He lit a cigarette and sat in the dark, with only the television providing light. He blew smoke rings and looked out of his window. He had a perfect view of the palace. All the lights were on and the festive sounds of celebration wafted down the valley and into his ears.

”She has everything and I have nothing. I’ll never help out anyone else ever again,” he promised himself, taking a long drag off his cigarette and washing it down with scotch. “Never again,” he promised himself as he wiped away a tear and dreamt about unobtainable fatherhood.

- - -
Natasha Cabot is a Vancouver-based Canadian writer who has been published in numerous journals, likes odd things, owls, and writing. She has a BA in English Literature that has proven to be useless in pursuit of high-paying employment. Her advice to you is don't get a BA in English Literature unless you are going to teach.

9/21/11

2011-09-21T00:00:00.001-07:00

In The Eye of the Beholder
By Paul Siluch

A woman’s beauty is a subjective concept. One man may find dark hair to be enchanting, while another is swept away by fair tresses on a maiden. A fulsome woman desired by one brother is ignored by the other for the charms of her willowy sister. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder.

“Where is the Lady Angelique at this moment?” Queen Josephine stood in front of me, absently running a silver comb through her hair. She leaned closer, opening her eyes just a fraction wider as she asked the question. Her green irises glittered like emeralds lit by the fire of her red hair.

“She is walking in the underground passage from the king’s chambers to the royal stables,” I replied.

I have made a rigorous study of the allures of women. Men the world over, for example, prefer longer to shorter hair. A woman’s eyes, whatever their color, should be widely spaced for their greatest appeal. The female shape even has an ideal ratio: four spans of a man’s hand to encircle a woman’s bare waist to six around full hips. Such are the curves that draw every man’s eye, as long as he still has warm blood in his veins. I have known the queen ever since she stole the heart of the king, stopping the breath of the nation when she appeared on his arm.

“I was not aware of such a passage into my husband’s bedroom,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “It would explain many things.” She looked out the window to her right, over the manicured lawn and the fountain in the distance, and placed a finger on her lips in thought.

Among all men, and I have observed a great many, there is one final feature they all agree upon – consciously or unconsciously – that transforms a woman above all. An aspect that can make a pretty woman beautiful, and a beautiful woman radiant. It is the shape of her lips, their fullness, and the way they draw a man in. When I look upon the queen, as I am bidden to every day, my eye always lingers upon her lips. They are as luscious and full as summer fruit, and they reveal her teeth in luminous perfection when she smiles. As red as the blood-red rose found in the foothills of the southern continent (a place none but I have ever seen), her lips need neither wine nor berry to color them.

“And where is the king now?” she asked sharply, accelerating her brush strokes. Her hair crackled with static, fiery strands floated up as if charged with anger. “I was told he was to hunt after the noon meal.”

“He is resting in his chambers. His horse remains in the stables, neither bridled nor ridden today.”

“Then I shall wait for him in the dining hall,” she said, crossing her arms. “Dinner should be most entertaining this evening.” She reached for the door, indicating our conversation was at an end, then paused. Her mouth opened into a wide smile, spreading up her cheeks before stopping at her eyes. They remained as cold as mid-winter ice.

“Does she compare to me?” she asked, dropping her head then looking up through lashes that veiled her eyes like a young bride. By all facts and features as I measure them, the queen today is the most beautiful woman in the world.

“Of course not,” I told her. I am incapable of lying to her.

“Then why does he…” She stopped in mid-sentence and closed the door quietly. I was left, as always, in the dark with my thoughts.

***

The babble of conversation and the clatter of eating thrummed off the stone walls, rising and falling as courses were carried in and platters carried out. Torches flickered high above, while tall long mirrors along the walls helped light the room more fully. Smoke blended with the steaming aroma of the fireplace where a skewered carcass of a deer turned, dripping fat that blazed and sizzled in the coals. Knives thunked on the wooden plates of the lower nobles who sat at the far ends of the long U-shaped table. Finer steel tapped pewter plates halfway up the arms, ending with the tinkle of silver on fine china where the king and the queen presided on high, carved chairs. When the din fell, the guests quieter in their fullness and the comfortable haze that had settled in the room, I watched as the queen sat back and turned to one of the ladies halfway down the table.

“Lady Angelique, how was your ride this afternoon?” she asked nonchalantly. The noblewoman was startled as the room hushed and all eyes turned to her.

“Your…your Highness, I was, it was…very…pleasant,” she stammered out. “It is a new horse.”

“I understand that particular breed is very spirited.” The queen smiled without humor. “Some say such animals…can never be tamed.” Lady Angelique blushed and looked down at her plate.

“It was certainly a lovely day for a ride,” Queen Josephine continued, turning to the king on her right. I thought her gaze softened, as though she sought even a single kind word or gesture from him, but her look narrowed when he would not meet her eyes.

“Your Majesty, I understand you were to hunt this afternoon. Did you manage to catch what you set chase upon?”

The king cleared his throat with a growl. “I chose not to hunt this day, my lady. I had matters of state to attend to.” He pursed his lips and raised his chin, as if he intended that to be the end of the topic.

“I walked by your chambers mid-day and I thought I heard laughter. Surely matters of state are not so jovial as that!” She pursued him like a hound playing a fox.

“Lord Mawdsley was in my chambers and, between our deliberations, told me a story in jest. It was nothing, a moment’s pause betwixt hours of work.”

“A jest would be perfect entertainment after such a hearty meal as this! Lord Mawdsley – pray share your joke with our table that we may join in the king’s merriment.”

Lord Mawdsley squirmed in his seat as the collective attention of the great hall turned to him. He looked, I thought, as though the heat of all the flickering candles and of the blazing fireplace at the far end of the room had combined to burn his face red.

“But, your Highness, you see…” he stammered, looking to the king for help. The king lowered his head and directed his most fierce scowl at the pinioned Lord Mawdsley.

“I, er, it was nothing really. A story of no consequence that I cannot remember in the slightest.” He reached for his cup and took a large gulp of wine, taking time to wipe his mouth and then his forehead. “But if your Highness would suffer a delay, I will search the very depths of my mind to try and recall the story, for telling on another evening.”

“Well, then, that is most unfortunate. I had hoped for a tale or a song to end our meal,” said the queen, pushing her chair back. “There is so little happening in the castle that is worth discussing at this time of year.” She stood and offered her arm to the king, indicating his evening was also at an end. A servant raced to pull the heavy chair as the king rose gruffly, extending his arm to her with a frown. She led him from the hushed whispers of the dining hall into the darkness of a side passage.

“I do not like it when…you seek your meals elsewhere,” the queen said firmly, looking away from him. “Your appetite could not be sated when we first wed.”

“Time passes,” he said after a moment of silence. “Tastes change.” He turned his head away from her as well, which is how I know the king and queen are about to speak the truth to one another. “I like my game hot and hardly cooked, so it fights me when I cut into it. The way dinner used to be with a younger queen I once knew.” They came to a junction in the hallway with one passage turning left and the other right.

“Sometimes cooks spend too much time on the appearance of the meal and too little time on how it tastes,” he said over his shoulder as he walked down the passage to the right, “which is why I am forced to eat elsewhere.”

***

The queen was incensed, moreso at this affair than at any prior indiscretion of the king’s. When she stood before me the next morning, almost close enough to kiss her if I could, I saw the reason. A tiny line at the corner of her eye which, on some women, would be called a mirth line. It could not be mistaken as such on a face that never laughed. From frown or worry, sadness or age, it was the first blemish on her perfect face. She did not ask me the question she always asked each morning, and I was glad of it. I cannot lie to the one I love, and I was not ready to leave her yet. An aging woman can still hold my heart, just as the first days of autumn are my favourite time of each passing year.

I told the queen where Lady Angelique was hiding, of course. The noblewoman was deep in the woods in the small unused charcoal hut of a collier on her family’s estate - a secret place only she and the charcoal-man himself knew about. From the moment on the night of the banquet, Angelique knew she was marked, for the queen brooked no quarter from any that wronged her. Even if the king himself initiated the dalliance, the maiden always paid. When the collier found her dead the next morning, Angelique’s fair face was frozen in surprise at being discovered. He was blamed and hung from a tree without trial, as astonished as she was. The king was in the foulest of moods when he heard, and took it out most viciously on the creatures he hunted.

***

Josephine opened the cabinet door the next morning. Her hair was uncombed and her gown wrinkled, as though she had rolled in it all night. She closed her eyes and faced me, drawing in a long breath.

“Mirror, mirror,” she began. She had always taken great care to appear before me at her best before today. Such a beautiful girl when I found her, now grown into my lovely queen.

“…on the wall…” None is a better judge of a fair woman’s face than I, for I am cursed to love only the most beautiful. Faces that broke hearts, smiled at children, cried in silence, started wars...faces I would give anything to touch and caress.

“…who is the fairest one of all?” Some called it diabolical, the way she knew everything that happened in her kingdom. The way women who crossed her, and especially young girls just budding into exceptional beauty, ended up dead. From behind the glass, my eyes see every corner of the world, hear every word whispered. When the queen was the fairest in the land, looking at her own face in my silvered surface, I often wept in longing looking back, forever unseen. I was glad to tell her anything she asked, just to gaze upon her longer.

“It is…no longer you.” I said after a moment. “A lass, barely sixteen – just come of age. Hair as black as a raven’s, skin like marble. Her lips, well, I have only seen lips so perfect once before.” Josephine gasped and raised her fingers to her mouth.

“Who is she? Where does she live?” she hissed.

“I can only love the fairest, Josephine – you have always known that. I will tell you her name, but only that. I will protect her from you if I must.”

“The people of her village call her…Snow White, because of her fair skin. Snow White is now the fairest in all the land.”

The queen screamed and threw her heavy silver comb at me with all her might. The cracks spread across my glass like wrinkles on skin, making Josephine’s reflection look old in an instant. It was a sad way to leave her, after so long.

Snow White was brushing her hair and singing when I appeared in her mirror. My heart burst with love, all over again.

- - -
I am unpublished but have taken two science fiction/fantasy courses at Gothan Writers Workshop. I write extensively in the finance industry.

9/14/11

2011-09-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

Literary Blood
By Rania Hanna

The literary ghoul fed off the withered pages of decaying literature. Voltaire spoke to him from the fading inks coloring the pages; while Thoreau whispered haunting politics. He fed off the thoughts of dead souls. His blood was books. He wandered around the maze of unforgiven mental revolutions, feeding off the carnal words of forbidden literature. He fed his knowledgeable zeal with impeccable devotion. The pages bled out their ink. Bringing the books to his lips, he drank the blackened liquid and gained nourishment in this way. He ripped out the pages of the books, feeding his mouth with them. Through the eroding library he wandered around, ripping his victims out from their binding and gorging himself on them. The words he hunted, while they themselves hunted him. Emerging slowly from the leaves, the words haunted him. They attacked his fragile sanity, and terrorized his brain-washed mind. The chains that fettered him were tightened agonizingly by the thought of the past. But still he fed, the words nourishing him. Without their knowledge, he would die. But with them, he would also die. Death was inevitable; but a brain-washed death was honorable. Thus, he fed and swallowed insatiably. His mind evolved as the literature devolved. This he understood not, but still he remained in the books’ intoxicating presence. They hunted his mind, and haunted his sanity. And he ate. He stalked predator and prey. He tore at the pages, chewing them thoughtfully, swallowing them ravenously. He became drunk on the lies, but he believed them as unadulterated truth. His pale flesh soaked in the inky darkness, and painted itself with truthful untruths. He wandered outside, his soul slumbering and dead. He thought and thought, his mind spitting forth wild theories. And his wild theories called for even wilder actions. He preyed on living flesh, craving the blood of actual corporeality. He saw the girl and stalked predatorily to her.

*******

I sensed danger pervading the atmosphere, but I didn’t move from my desk. I sat still, pen in hand, the paper before me painted madly with thoughts and symbols. I heard the library door open and saw a silhouette slowly walk over to me. I saw him look at the books, his insatiable hunger carved painfully into his face. He hesitated, hungry for knowledge, and hungry for live blood. Tracing his fingers lightly over the dust-blanketed books, he watched me out of the periphery of his vision. He grabbed a book off the shelf and flipped it open. He devoured it, attacking blindingly into his mind the thoughts of mortal men. He ate insanely, his hunger growing with the more knowledge he gained. He turned to me suddenly, his eyes a pale red-purple, eyeing me suspiciously. He came to stand directly before my desk, his tall figure throwing a large shadow over me, blocking much of the room’s light. He grabbed my throat and lifted me out of my chair. I stared into his deep eyes and lost almost all conscious thought. The last thing that registered in my mind was sanity—murdering pain raging in my chest, and the sight of my beating heart resting upon his hand.

I awoke in semi-darkness, tall objects looming over me. Bookshelves surrounded me, with thousands of lies lining its space. I felt a deep hunger within me, and my throat burned with an unquenchable thirst. I grabbed the books, wolfing down the thoughts contained within them. I swallowed unhesitatingly the lies and deceptions contained within them, knowing them to be untruths. I ingurgitated everything, poisoning my mind, becoming intoxicated on the fraudulences, becoming a literary ghoul, a vampire of deadly lies.

- - -
Just another horror writer living in my own world.

9/7/11

2011-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

Outcast of the Moon
By Kayla Bashe

Sitting on a sand dune, Reviya watched the stars. Although she hated to admit it, she had never become accustomed to the moon: shivering in the wing-numbing cold beneath a silver-sequined, yet bleak sky, the cool silver sand sifting between her fingers like a travesty of the beaches she’d once loved to luxuriate on.

She’d chosen this fate.

Better to feel loneliness’s ache on Luna’s alien shores than to face the pity of her faerie tribe. She hadn’t chosen her misshapen left hand; her fellow faeries, yellow-rose-clad, tittered at her behind perfect fingers.

They called her ogre-cursed. Sharp stones whispered her name. Their secret voices called her like the moon pulling the tides.

Because of her ugliness and their perfection and her misery and laughter and she had not requested the rockslide that rolled over her, crushing her hand, and because the obsidian’s glossy edge bore jagged perfection, such a clean line, she picked it up.

Agony and rage ripped a newborn scream from Reviya’s throat. She hacked at her arm, her wrist, until blood covered her pale skin.

From then on, the white-winged faerie moved through a susurrus of pity. Even the wind murmured: poor thing, poor girl, did you hear?- not knowing that each whisper only drove her closer to the obsidian’s silence, its efficient distractions.

The moon lacked wind.

Footsteps in the sand behind her. Reviya’s brown-blonde braids whipped around. She turned her merciless gaze to the intruder, blue eyes narrowing above a strong snub nose.

***

Kylan marveled at the endless stars stretching above an undulating horizon. In the low gravity, one pigeon-wing flap, one woo-hoo bound, and he traveled for several feet. The landscape appeared simultaneously desolate and magnificent. No wonder Revy had fled here.

Revy. Reviya.

Once, they sat side-by-side on the same toadstool, playing cat’s cradle with scraps of dandelion thread; after the rockslide, he’d sought to comfort her. She left like the night. Aching for her presence, he’d spent years searching for her.

Kylan’s chest felt tight. Panicked, he glanced towards his wrist, but the moonbreathing charm, a string of polished, enchanted meteorites, remained intact.

Just nerves.

He exhaled slowly, deliberately. Still, his heartbeat fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings.

Would she return with him?

***

“I won’t go back.” Reviya sat on a sand dune, knees hugged to her chest.

Wounded-puppy eyes regarded her.

“Not for you,” she lied. Frankly, she felt tired and cold, moon-surface lifeless. The dark-haired faerie had never pitied her; she missed their friendship.

The other faeries had not missed her.

They would greet her with perfect smiles and untangled hair, flawless hands and arms splayed in a falsely cooing embrace. Only the obsidian would never lie to her, its dried-blood-spattered edges reminded. Unconsciously, Reviya reached into the pocket of her sleek, ankle-length silver gown. She gripped the stone, hard; her fingers whitened. The other faeries would take her obsidian away, tell her “it’s for your own good,” but she needed its calming pain, the raised scars it left- she had to do something so that no one could ever return her to the too-bright blue world below-

Reviya raised the stone high and slashed through the moonbreathing charm’s golden thread.

***

“Oh, Goddess,” Kylan murmured, holding his friend. Blue tinged her lips. she’d breathed space’s vacuum for only a second, only long enough to make her eyes bulge out and her crippled hand fly to her slender throat, only long enough to crumple her to the ashen ground. Now air moved through her chilled lungs in shallow gasps.

The obsidian chunk lay on the sand.

Kylan glared at it; it seemed to glare back. They would never return home safely; unlike Reviya, who prepared for peril, he’d cavalierly enchanted the charm for a scant handful of hours. Carrying cargo slowed his flight speed, turning their chances into a dangerous gamble. He shoved thought-waves of rage towards his cheerful , careless past self.

Starlight moved over the rock’s contours. You don’t have to watch her die, it whispered. End this.

Now.

Kylan summoned a fragment of his magical essence. Purple energy blasted the hated rock to smithereens.

Harmless black shards twinkled against the sand. Reviya stirred in her almost-sleep, and a smile’s ghost flickered across her lips.

He marveled at her strength: he had almost heeded the obsidian’s first fatalistic stirrings, but she’d resisted it for years. Like the stone, Revy had shattered; unlike the stone, she would have Kylan to pierce her back together. They would sit on sun-dappled, red-capped toadstools, listen to the bluebirds’ song, lie in a beach’s warm sand, sail down creeks in oak-tree rafts.

Cradling Reviya, Kylan flapped his wings, rising into the air, and turned towards the Earth.

- - -
I'm a homeschooled high schooler from a little town on the East Coast. My work has previously appeared in Raphael's Village and YARN; in addition to writing, I enjoy musical theater and yoga.

8/31/11

2011-08-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

We Miss You
By Madeline Dyer

My memories of you are odd ones. They're never quite in focus, always hazy, always slightly hidden. But then that sums you up exactly, doesn't it! Or it did, back when I knew you.

Maybe you are still like that, maybe you're not. Maybe I'll never know.

My favourite memory of us is when you took me to the Moonlight Market. I'd wanted to go for ages, but not until that day was I old enough. And you didn't want to take me, you'd rather have been out flying with those strafe friends of yours; but you still took me to the Moonlight Market.

I remember flying there, you did all sorts of crazy stunts, flying backwards, upside-down, loop-the-loop. Show off. I remember trying to copy you. Ha! Remember that! I'd only just learnt to fly, as if I could do anything fancy, my little wings were tired after I'd barely begun. But I still tried to copy you. I was stupid even to try, it would only end up with me falling...

I remember the chilling rush of air, my screaming as the ground came up to meet me, and you're strong arms as you saved me from a horrible, painful death. My wonderful big brother.

Strangely enough, I can't even remember much about the Moonlight Market after all. I think I must've been too tired after all that excitement. Too tired and too young.

But I remember other things. I remember you weaving a grass mat, and when you caught that cute baby rabbit which you brought home for me. And how could I forget the day you were showing off your magic and made yourself too tall to fit in the house? Dad had to shrink you back. And he made you shorter than normal as a punishment for using dangerous magic. You were furious but didn't dare try to right it.

Maybe that's why you ran away, leaving only our memories of you behind.

I've still got that baby rabbit you know. Well she's not much of a baby anymore. Mum's been teaching me how to ride her. I've called her Silkie and I'm making a new saddle blanket for her.

I dream of the day you'll come back. I wonder will you recognize me? I'm not little anymore, I'm taller than Mum. But I've still got the red hair. And the green eyes. The same as you.

Please come home. I want to see you. Kiri wants to see the legendary big brother she's never met. Mum and Dad want to see you. Please come home. We miss you.

- - -
Madeline lives on a farm in Devon, England, and has a strong love for mythology and folklore; this in particular inspired her to start writing fantasy. She is currently working on a young adult fantasy novel.