Wild Musette Journal

by Rosemary Gemmell

The sea is still today;
no white horses
dancing the waves
foretelling black storms.

Only the empty stares
from a painted carousel
reminding me
life is circular.
We all return
to the quiet earth—
except for you.

You sing and play
in the fathomless ocean
where kelpies breathe life
into drowned lungs.

I watch the turning seasons
beside the silent horses
on their endless ride
through time and space.
Hoping the calm water
will cleanse dark thoughts
to let me glimpse you dancing.

Rosemary Gemmell is a historical and contemporary novelist from Scotland. Her short stories, articles and occasional poems have been published in UK magazines, in the US, and online; several stories have won awards. Rosemary has a Post-Graduate Masters in literature and history and is a member of the Society of Authors, the Romantic Novelists’ Association, and the Scottish Association of Writers.

www.rosemarygemmell.com

by Russell Hemmell

I’d never liked daylight, streets full of people—and pubs, bars, and oddly defined meeting spaces even less. After many years of wondering about the reasons of my idiosyncrasy, I arrived at the inevitable conclusion: I dreaded the smell and sound of the living, their violent intrusion into your private sphere, their shameless prevarication in imposing their presence when the only thing you crave is blissful solitude.

Difficult for a human to avoid the ordeal though. I prayed to all divinities mankind has produced to be turned into an insect, a rat, or at least into a less conspicuous mammal. No such luck. My human awkward shape—spiderlike white legs and clumsy arms—didn’t go away no matter the spell I voiced.

So I adapted and chose a job that suits my neurosis. I worked on the streets, cleaning what rests of raucous parties and unbridled revelries. Socially authorised to live at night, I slept my day away, forgotten by the loudly mass.

An uneventful existence for a colourless individual, where days are all the same and equally (un)cherished. Until one night in the Scottish summer, collecting trash across old Edinburgh closes just near the dungeons, I saw something I was not supposed to see.

I saw her. Pale, gentle, with a dress in tatters.

I’ve escaped. She said. You won’t give me away, will you?

“No,” I said.

Her name was Ranya, a murderer, she confessed. She had broken free from the dungeons and she was going to stay in the close, hidden, until the angry mob stopped searching for her. It could take a long, long time, she announced.

“Who have you killed?”

You don’t want to know, she replied with a sad stare.

She turned her head away from me, and I left the close in silence.

❦

I tried to steer clear of Ranya’s Close—so I rechristened that dark, smelly little alley—but I couldn’t. Something there attracted me inexorably, as if it was only there that life breathed for me in the city. One night, a few months later, I went to see her again.

Hello, visitor, she said, spotting me in the dark.

“Hi. I thought you had left by now.”

This is my new prison. If I indeed have to hide, I’d better be comfortable, yes?

“Yes—but why here?”

Because it’s here I was born once—in the age-darkened building that still towers above us now, she said, her pale green eyes wide open. It’s a kind of different prison, this one. It has no gates or bars to restrict movements and yet it’s a confined space. I can breathe open air, but the invisible line that crosses the entrance of the close is harder than concrete. I like it this way—it’s unblemished and luminous, always allowing for a view of the city.

“Edinburgh?”

 The city of dark and light, that’s what we used to call it at that time. The city where anything is possible during the day, and everything is dangerous at night. I love my city. It’s just that I wouldn’t have lived here, if I were given a choice.

“Talking about choices…”

Will you be my friend, yes? Somebody friendlier than a jailer, but not substantially different in cases like this. She smiled for the first time. I’m a nice prisoner to have. I’m neat, gentle, even kind when the mood is good. And when I’m bad, I retreat behind the stones of this close, where only air is allowed and silence is sovereign. There I stay, until violence passes over like a hurricane on a deserted beach. No witnesses. No damages, except to dead things—like that monstrous entity of mine that doesn’t deserve the name of soul.

I shivered, and stepped back, involuntarily.

You do understand, don’t you?

“I’ll try.”

So keep me company. Until I leave again—one day.

I nodded, while her hand, like a butterfly’s transparent wing, touched mine in a cold caress.

❦

In my daymares I had often imagined how it could have been to make friends, kindred spirits I could talk to, sharing thoughts, feelings, or simply moments of silence. But for that I should’ve ventured out of my oyster—mixing up with people, bearing that physical proximity impossible to manage.

With Ranya, I didn’t need it any longer.

I was going to the close every night. To visit her and the people she had murdered centuries ago in her blind vengeance—against a community that failed her and her family and a government that crushed her delicate bones.

But there were no hard feelings among them, for ghosts, I discovered, are nicer in comparison to the living. Pale, gentle, discrete. Sticking to their familiar closes, to their forgotten crypts and any other space where the light of sun doesn’t penetrate, they appear only when somebody comes searching for them. Like me.

❦

I will leave soon, she said again.

“I thought ghosts were perennial.”

Everything ends, Iain. Even ghosts. But you’re welcome to come here, staying with the others. Keep them company.

“I’m going to miss you.”

Something of me will always remain in this place—tied by invisible but unbreakable tendrils of fear and pain. Nothing else has survived.

❦

Ranya let me touch her face sometimes, cold and weightless like a white shadow or the winter breeze. She talked to me about her sister dead of plague, about her trial as a witch, about the community she had slaughtered in revenge. But she remained silent about her tortures and the suffering that turned her into a monster.

Rage, pain, and agony were long gone. Condemned in life but forgiven in death by the same she had killed, Ranya shared the close with them, like a peaceful family finally reunited. It was power, Iain, that corrupted them and confused their minds. They aren’t but victims that deserve your compassion.

I know it now; there are no angry ghosts, only angry living.

❦

Yet I discovered things about Ranya’s ordeal, scant details I picked up here and there—whispers, gossips, and solitary tears on her sister’s face. The little girl that still bore on her ghostly features the marks of the disease told me one night a story I’m not going to forget.

They came for her on All Souls’ Day, like monsters from children’s nightmares. The elders of the kirk they were, our highest authorities. I was dying of plague because it was God’s will, they said, and going against that will was blasphemy. Studying the human bodies is against the laws of the Church, Ranya, it is consorting with the Light Bearer, it is renouncing your immortal soul—those were the terrible words the head of the kirk threw at my sister. They searched and found her books, her anatomy treaties, and her medical instruments that she had used on me to incise my buboes.

They arrested her and put her on trial. They tortured her, by water and by wheel, by sleep deprivation and by iron pincers. She is a witch, they said, performing rites and summoning the Devil. She has to die, burnt at the stake. The community was called as witness, and the community bent to the elders’ will. It gave testimony against her, telling about Ranya’s herbal remedies, forgetting the times they had profited from her help. She was condemned but the day of her execution the riots broke out in Edinburgh, for one more war of religion. She escaped from the dungeons and came back to the close, to cry on my deathbed and bury my mortal spoils. Then she empoisoned the public wells on the Royal Mile, killing them by the thousand.

“How did she die?” I asked the girl.

Happy, like a sated guest after a plentiful banquet. Fighting against a power that prefers killing rather than saving its subjects, that fears science and relishes in obscurantism. She was one of the countless victims of the riots, but she went with a smile on her face.

I didn’t say anything, but when at the breaking of the dawn I came back home, I curled in bed and cried.

❦

One night I didn’t find Ranya. She had been taken on by the northern winds, freed from the close’s invisible chains and the regrets of the ones that linger.

Cherished by the others still prisoners, longed for by all.

Edinburgh’s ghosts still wander through dungeons and closes, through castles of sand, in a city that never sleeps—remembering the golden moments of their mortal existence. Gentle and smiling, they come out at night and pale away at dawn in a minuet dance that knows no pauses.

Caught in time as entangled particles or gentle cats, they present themselves to the city of light and dark, to people that stumble at night. Like me who sees things I shouldn’t possibly see, meeting white glowing shadows.

And missing the ones that have left.

Russell Hemmell is a statistician and social scientist from the U.K. who is passionate about astrophysics and speculative fiction. Russell has had recent work appear in Gone Lawn, Not One of Us, SQ Mag, and others, and was a finalist in The Canopus 100 Year Starship Awards 2016–2017.

earthianhivemind.net

by Sarah Milne Das

Do not fear the spirits of the dead.

When our loves are the dead, how can we find them? Scrying mirrors, turning tables, incense, prayers incantation? Left-behind lovers, sisters, mothers, all call the spirits of the dead.

And how must we speak with our dead loves, and tell words that are true from tricks and illusion? Fingertips on glass, a pendulum’s swing, the voice in the ear of a priest or a king?

Then how will we hold them, our loves that are dead? With dreamcatchers, salt and saucers of cream? We’ll know when we find it, the one true rite. We’ll know when we know them again, all our dead.

❦

There is a woman who took out a piece of her heart. She displays it on a plate, on her dining room table, surrounded by artificial flowers in peach and lilac and primrose.

The plate is not of the best china, but the most-perfect specimen of the second-best set. It is important to keep a full pristine set of the very best china, she thinks. The second-best can spare a plate; it is usually used for smaller parties.

Over the plate, covering the hunk of heart, is a Pyrex mixing bowl, upside down. It is protection from the flies and from the air, she says, as if the torn handfuls of bloody muscle are genteel slices of cake.

Once upon a youth she freely gave her heart away, and when its master joined the dead she knew the heart would summon him back to her. So she locked away her grieving, bit her tongue with needle teeth till her cries were drowned in swallowed blood and then she prepared her bait.

She cracked through the safe of her living marrowed ribs, the break a creaking shrieking wail, heartache made sound. Her nails tore a jagged wound-trail into the dark red tissue, her fist twisted the bleeding portion out and up to her lips for bitter blessing.

Through dry sobs, she flung it down and left it there to wait for him.

But hearts are not preserved this way. The piece of the woman’s heart is not in good shape, not heart-shaped; you could not imagine it beating a second, a minute, or year ago.

The heart is spongy, melty, blackening and browning. Stinking of meat, the odour seeping and weeping, escaping the Pyrex. It is a dead thing, a sick thing, a remnant of the abattoir.

“Oh, that old thing!” she exclaims now, when visitors’ eyes enquire. “I almost forget it’s there, you know, it was all so long ago.”

❦

There is a woman who feeds the graveyard birds; she piles blackberry offerings on blackening tree stumps.

She knits, coarse wool in grubby shades: tiny shoes, skew-buttoned cardigans, unpractised lumps of hats.

She hangs the garments in arching branches, in the sprawl of a corner where the soil-womb rests, where great stone angels give way to cherubs, to soft toys, rainbow beads, greeting-card epitaphs.

She prowls the perimeter of the rotting nursery, cooing at the earth and tutting at observers. “Hush!” she whispers, “Babies are sleeping.”

On new moon nights she murmurs lullabies, smears berry juice over the cradle-graves, burns rosemary and waits.

❦

There is a woman who sets a trap for her mirror-self, every day.

Still, still as a stalking wildcat, she stares at the face so like her own that everyone else is fooled, slows her breathing, waits, waits.

She leaps—it is sudden, sideways—she spins, lunges, whirls, jabs. She does not blink, alert, waits for the spirit in the mirror to slip, trip, skip a beat.

Dervishing fast, faster and faster, the not-a-reflection at her heels, toes and elbows, hand to hand and eye to eye, never missing a step or a breath or a howl.

Frustrated she whirls at impossible speed, knowing, knowing, that the lost girl is hiding there, her troubled trickster twin who she will catch, she will keep, will comma-curl around again like in their first nine months.

Friction on flesh and sparks fly, smoke furls and swirls as bare feet grind down to the bone. Ragged bloody ankles, skin and flesh-strings whip like curtains,

her skeleton feet dance on.

❦

Do not fear the spirits of the dead, fear that the rites are the living’s alone, and all our dead loves are gone.

Sarah Milne Das is based in Oxford, UK. When not playing with Excel in a University office, she writes flash and other fiction with a touch of the fairytale, as well as the occasional essay. You can read her work in The Sandspout (Albion Beatnik Press).

www.dixitstories.net

by Richard Zwicker

Coexistence with gods involves accepting a complex world run on a need-to-know basis. When people demand more information, that’s when I go to work. I’m Phokus, Athenian detective. I wear a tunic.

It started when my wife Delphinia left me for a Spartan. With that city-state’s constant militaristic training, I wasn’t surprised she preferred his  drilling to mine. The truth was, I’d neglected her for my profession. Not ready to throw in the chiton, however, I paid a visit to the temple of Hera, goddess of marriage. I didn’t expect any great insight, but it doesn’t hurt to have a goddess in your corner. I should have known better. I stepped between the Doric columns and right into Hera’s priestess and Zeus getting something straight between themselves. The priestess had her eyes closed and was reciting the opening passage of The Odyssey, but Zeus saw me, and I knew if I didn’t change my address posthaste, he’d transform me into a gadfly and make me bug myself to death. I’d once helped Cadmus, the king of Thebes, find his kidnapped sister and he told me to stop by if I was ever in the city-state. It was time to call him on that. I convinced Alastor, my plodding but faithful assistant, to accompany me. At the very least, it would take my mind off my failed marriage.

❦

Extended land trips guarantee you’ll encounter the biggest misshapen cretins this side of Egyptian mythology. We got off easy, meeting just three questionable characters. One old man wanted us to wash his loincloth. We told him to look us up when he had enough for a full load. The second day an underage female flashed us and offered to rock our world for twenty shekels. Alastor expressed interest, but I reminded him to beware of girls baring groins. On the third day we encountered a zealot who vowed to cleanse the world of its filth. We sent him to the loincloth guy.

On the fourth morning we reached the outskirts of Thebes. In the distance we saw what looked like a very large dog sitting in the middle of the road.

“I don’t want to know whose best friend that is,” Alastor said.

“It’s got the head of woman, the body of a lioness, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a serpent. What does that say to you?”

“Mixed breeding?”

“No, it’s a sphinx. Let’s get out of here.”

We turned left off the road, hoping to double back and enter Thebes from a different route. Before we could get far, the sphinx let out a piercing squawk, and in an unnatural combination of running and flying, plopped down in front of us. It reeked of death.

“If you answer my riddle, I will let you pass. If not, I will eat you,” it said in a world-weary female voice.

I chuckled nervously and turned to Alastor. “It’s incredible Thebes has any tourism at all.” Then I said to the sphinx, “I’m a private detective. Usually I have weeks to solve cases.”

The creature sat still as the rock in front of the Cyclops’ cave. “I’m a sphinx. I eat immediately. Here is my riddle. What creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening on three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?”

I’d never considered myself a leg man and had no idea. It sounded like another sphinx, but I doubted that was it. I gave the only answer I knew. “To get to the other side?”

“Wrong!” the Sphinx said. “Prepare to be eaten.”

I didn’t know what to do except be literal, hoping to delay the inedible. “Isn’t the onus of preparation on the eater?” Apparently it was, as a claw clasped my left leg. “Alastor,” I said weakly, “this would be a good time for assistance.”

Alastor had on what he called his bluffing face. I called it his blank look. As seconds passed, I wondered if he was thinking of a way to save me or deciding which engraver he’d use to carve “Alastor, Private Detective” on my office door.

“Wait,” he said finally. “There are two of us here. Don’t we get one chance each?”

The Sphinx and I looked doubtfully at Alastor. “Very well. Make haste,” it said.

Alastor did his best, grimacing, grunting, and growling. In the end he just slumped and said, “Man, I don’t know.”

The Sphinx screamed, shooting into the air like an arrow and crashing to the ground like an empty coat of armor.

“What happened?” Alastor asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t even know why people like riddles.” But as I was a detective, it was a good thing they did.

The guards couldn’t believe their eyes when we straggled in. After we told them the riddle and our answer, they still couldn’t believe it.

“What kind of stupid answer is that?” one asked.

“Of all the sphinxes in the world, we get a retarded one,” the other said.

I identified us and our reason for being in Thebes. They took us to a pool, where we freshened up. A circular table with eight chairs was at the water’s edge. A slave set two of the places with dishes of figs and two-handled wine cups filled with a liquid I didn’t recognize. He then motioned for us to sit. We stared at the figs, unsure if we should eat or not. Whether meeting visitors, fulfilling government promises, or pleasing his wife, Cadmus had a reputation for making people wait, and then they wondered why they bothered. The shadow on a horizontal sundial moved about a tenth of a revolution as the figs toasted and our faces burnt. Finally, to the funereal beat of a drum, Cadmus entered.

Compared to his pottery drawings, he looked flabby. The tall, vacant-eyed slave who provided the accompanying percussion stood immobile at his side. Had he got tired of solo drum, he could have done duets on his protruding ribs.

“Gentlemen,” Cadmus said, “you honor me with your presence. Did you have any trouble getting to Thebes?”

“No, your kingship,” I said. “We just pointed ourselves northeast and put one foot in front of the other. The Sphinx was a bit of an obstacle though. If it weren’t for Alastor, we’d be paddling down its gullet right now.”

“Sorry about that. We do seem to attract an unwholesome element.”

“The Sphinx could be Thebes’ city-state bird,” Alastor muttered, while undressing the figs on his plate with his eyes. The slave’s mouth was also watering, and I felt a bit peckish myself. Judging from Cadmus’s puffy appearance, however, we had no chance of winning a game of chicken over the figs.

Cadmus continued, “It’s propitious you’re here as I have a delicate problem you might help me with. It has to do with my daughter, Semele.”

“We’re here to serve. Is she missing?” I asked.

“No,” he said, but before he could explain, we heard a splash. The frothing slave had fallen into the pool. Now more animated, his muscular arms flailed and he screamed in a language I didn’t recognize. Neither had much effect on his buoyancy.

Cadmus shook his head. “I got that slave from Ephesus. Can’t swim a lick.”

I told Alastor to jump in and save the poor man, though being a slave, I was unsure we were doing him a favor. In a few moments, both men sat on solid land, sputtering and gasping. Once the slave recovered, Cadmus sent him to fetch Semele.

“The problem is she’s in the family way but won’t tell me who the rest of the family is,” Cadmus announced.

“And you’d like us to find out,” I said. “Has she much exposure to the public?”

“Well, yes, she’s a priestess,” Cadmus said. My heart skipped a beat, then spent the rest of our conversation trying to catch up.

“For Hera?” I asked.

“No, for Zeus.”

Alastor burst into mirthless laughter, but for me, the bad news produced a kind of epiphany. Zeus might not be omnipresent, but as his far-flung seeds attested, he was omnipotent. We’d come all this way, but there was no escaping him. We could only do our job as best we could.

“What exactly are her duties?”

“The usual things. She keeps the torches lit, sweeps up, prepares the sacrifices.”

I could imagine the kind of sacrifices she was making with Zeus. The slave returned, saying he was unable to bring Semele because the temple door was locked.

Cadmus looked confused. “Follow me.” Reluctantly, Alastor and I left the fig-laden table for the temple.

“Semele, are you in there? What’s going on?” Cadmus asked at the entrance.

Moments later, a discombobulated young woman opened the door. Her cloak was wrinkled and her hair askew.

“Why was this door locked?” Cadmus asked.

“Was it locked? The wind must have blown it shut. It gets stuck easily.” She had a musical voice stuck in a high register.

“I’ll have Deleterius put a rock down to hold it open,” Cadmus said. I guessed Deleterius was the slave. The king motioned toward us. “These two men are great admirers of Zeus and have come from Athens to pay their respects.”

“Doesn’t Zeus have a temple in Athens?” she asked.

“Yes, and it’s a very good one, but the lines are terrible,” I said.

We introduced ourselves, then Semele showed us around the Zeus shrine. Inside we noted various symbols associated with the chief god, among them a statue of an eagle, paintings of Mount Olympus, and a cloud with a lightning bolt. In the far corner sat a thick bull oak tree. In the center was a blood-speckled stone altar.

After our tour, Alastor and I met in the courtyard to discuss strategy and attack the figs.

“What I’m wondering is,” Alastor said, “after Zeus turns us into blighted turnips, will we have the sensitivity of turnips or humans? I hope it’s turnips because they can’t feel anything.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen, I had an epiphany in the courtyard. Our lives will be easier if we accept that we are the gods’ playthings.”

He grimaced. “It would have been nice if you’d had this epiphany in Hera’s temple before we walked fifty kilometers.”

“With epiphanies, the question is not when they happen but how you respond. For better or worse, I’m a detective and you’re my assistant. I say, let’s detect and assist. Are you with me?”

Alastor hesitated, looked sweepingly at the sky, then at himself. “I’m with you.”

We toasted our solidarity but the wine was so watered down, I didn’t know whether to drink it or wash my face with it. Everyone diluted wine, but this was ridiculous. Thebes’ economy must really have been in the chamber pot, and I worried about my fee.

Alastor grimaced. “You realize there’s more mystery about where this wine came from than about who slept with Semele.”

I pushed my cup away. “Sometimes I dream of how nice it would be if we didn’t have a chief god that was such a porker.”

“King of the porkers. The Sultan of Twat, the Olympian of the Loins.”

“Let’s not get distracted. If we’re going to get paid, we need proof.”

“How are we going to get that? See if the baby has a lightning bolt on its forehead?”

“No. As distasteful as the prospect is, we’re going to have to catch them in flagrante delicto.”

“What does that mean? ‘In deep shit’?”

I told him it didn’t, but for us it probably did.

We settled on a surveillance schedule. While Semele was at the shrine, one of us would enter with a group of devotees and hide behind the bull oak tree. I had the afternoon. I made no discoveries, though I did wonder what bulls had to do with oak trees. I watched as Semele talked to a really ugly old woman who could have been the plain-looking sister in Medusa’s family. Without warning, Alastor stumbled into me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You’re not due until dusk.” He looked like Helios had rear-ended him with his sun chariot. His hair, normally neat, branched out in more directions than the tree of life. His eyes were unfocused and his mouth hung slightly open, despite his body crashing to the ground.

“I wanted to see how many goblets it took to get drunk on Theban wine,” he slurred.

This was the type of experiment that fascinated Alastor.

“How many?”

He hesitated. “After a while it didn’t seem to matter. So what’s happening here? Oh, holy Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades.”

His blurred eyes lit on the old crone talking to Semele.

“We can do without your ageism,” I said.

“Ageism? I’m a Greek. I worship the human body. That woman is against my religion.”

“If you cut down on your drinking, you’ll be old someday. You might even make it to thirty-five.”

He belched, then giggled. I told him to hush, as the conversation between Semele and the old woman grew animated. There was no one else in the temple.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the crone rasped.

“Who are you to tell me what I should feel, old woman,” said Semele. “No one would be ashamed of this child’s father.”

“Really?” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Is he a prince?”

Semele pshawed, the youngest person I’d ever heard pshaw. “Much greater than a prince.”

“Is he a king?”

Semele guffawed. She really was a virtuoso of dismissive dialogue tags. “A king? My guy could see three kings coming and wonder if it was worth getting out of his seat.”

“Hmm, you make him sound like Zeus. But it’s hard to believe Zeus would give the time of day to a young sprite like you, especially when he’s married to such a beautiful goddess as Hera.” A smile came over the old woman’s face, giving her the appearance of a grinning skull, yet I thought I recognized the outline of Hera herself.

“Oh yeah? Well, it just so happens I’m mature for my age and…” She looked around to make sure the temple was empty. “Zeus is the father.”

“Ha! I don’t believe you,” the crone said.

“It’s true!”

“How do you know?”

“Well, he had a beard.”

The crone flew into hysterics. “That narrows it down to every man and some of the women.”

“But he told me he was Zeus!”

The woman’s waved her hand. “Maybe he was a minor god pretending to be the god of thunder when he was actually the god of crabgrass or fire ants.”

“There’s no god of crabgrass.”

“And there’s no god for you either, you deluded girl.”

The crone left, taking Semele’s composure with her. We watched the girl pace back and forth, muttering, “He was Zeus.” I wondered if the old woman could be right. If Semele had been compromised by a poser, it would be harder to discover his identity, but after we did, we might avoid joining the brotherhood of the tuber. I was about to comfort Semele, but she abruptly left the temple. As Alastor was younger, I ordered him to follow her. The spirit was willing, but the body was shitfaced. After achieving a wobbly balance, he leaned over by the tree and hurled. By the time he finished purging himself of Theban wine, Semele was back, leading an apprehensive bull to the sacrifice platform.

She tied the bull’s rope to the platform and from the wall grabbed a sword half her length. I prefer to remain general on what happened next: Semele sacrificed the bull. I’ll hear the screams of that poor animal for the rest of my beef-eating days. Alastor threw up again, and I felt queasy myself as blood flew like a sandstorm. So much of it landed on Semele, she looked like a giant, displaced body part. But instead of being appalled, she said, “I guess I’d better clean up.” She doused the floor with a bucket of water, which just spread the stains further. I thought she was going to the pool to get more water, but she kept going and didn’t bring the bucket. We kept a safe distance, but she moved as one possessed, to the river.

We found plenty of trees to hide behind as we watched her romp in the water, humming, “I’m gonna wash that blood right out of my clothes.” For someone doused in bull blood, she maintained a puzzling equanimity. Every so often she glanced at the sky, as if worried about rain, but this time of year, there was more chance of Hephaestus falling to the ground. Then I saw it: a large eagle soaring above us in a majestic circle. Slowly, the circles diminished as the bird approached Semele. On landing it assumed its true form: the mighty, bearded, armored, horny Zeus. Alastor crouched spellbound and I told him to stay that way. One belch out of him and our sleuthing days were over.

“Semele,” Zeus said. “What are you doing here? Did you sacrifice another bull and get blood all over you?”

To my surprise, Semele’s happy mood vanished. This trip to the river was clearly an assignation, but when the guy she’d meant to assig with showed up, she got pissed off. I’ll never understand women.

“If you were truly Zeus, you’d know I sacrificed a bull,” she snarled.

“What do you mean, if I were truly Zeus? Who do you think I am, the Trojan Horse? The world is a complicated place. I can’t be aware of everything.”

Of course, they being lovers, that’s exactly what Semele thought he should be. “Anyone could say they were Zeus. I’m the type of girl who needs proof.”

From his incredulous look, this was news to Zeus, and probably to the unborn child as well. “Proof? We—we yoked the chariot, we did the centaur stomp. Do you really think anyone else could make love like Zeus?”

“How am I supposed to know? You’re the only one I’ve ever slept with.”

“Should I send Hades over for comparison bonking?” Zeus asked, flustered. “Trust me, you don’t want that. Besides, he’ll try to make you eat a pomegranate seed.”

“I don’t like your tone. If this relationship is to continue, you need to prove once and for all that you’re Zeus.”

Zeus lowered his Olympian pectorals. “The fact that I came here as an eagle doesn’t carry any weight with you?”

“I’m not a bird expert. It could have been a roc or a vulture.”

“Very well.” Despite the authoritative aura emanating from Zeus’s body, he looked unsure of his next move. We’d heard Semele admit to a relationship, and Zeus said they’d made love. Would that be enough evidence for Cadmus? Even if it was, what could he do with it? We weren’t exactly treading on the course of logic here. Point in fact, Zeus’s next words: “To prove to you I am Zeus, the king of gods, ask me anything and I will grant it.”

I couldn’t believe it. How could the king of gods be so dumb? How many times had gods made that kind of promise to young people? There was no chance Semele would ask for something sensible, like a ring or a necklace.

“I want to see one of your lightning bolts,” she said.

For a moment, Zeus relaxed. “No problem. I’ll just sashay up into the sky and make a storm you’ll never forget.”

“No. I’ve seen thunderstorms. I want you to produce a lightning bolt right now, in front of me.”

The ruddy color drained from the visible portion of Zeus’s bearded face. “That’s not possible.”

“Aha, so you’re not Zeus!”

“Please ask for something else. How about an all-expenses-paid trip to Mount Olympus, three days, two nights?”

Semele was unmoved. “I want my lightning bolt.”

Zeus lowered his head, sighed, then said softly, “A promise is a promise.”

This is another thing I’ve never understood. Greek gods have affairs all the time, often with their brothers and sisters. They castrate their fathers. They ruin the lives of innocent people to satisfy their lusts and whims. BUT THEY CAN’T BREAK THEIR PROMISES? It makes no sense. Sometimes I feel like opening the gates and saying, “Barbarians, come on down!”

Zeus, in a masterful understatement said, “This is really a bad idea,” and explained to Semele how he was going to show her his smallest lightning bolt. Alastor, Zeus, and I all knew no human could survive seeing even a small lightning bolt up close.

We needed a plan and we needed it yesterday. “Listen,” I told the now sobered Alastor. “Just before the bolt appears, I’m going to throw my body in front of Semele and avert my eyes.”

“That’s very brave, boss. I salute you,” Alastor said.

“You’re going to do more than that. On my signal, I want you to charge into the river and scream, “Aegean Beach!”

“Why ‘Aegean Beach’? This is the Dirke River.”

“That’s not the point. I want you to cause enough confusion for Zeus to think, ‘These humans are nuts. I’m going back to the mountain.’ But if he does get off that lightning bolt, whatever you do, don’t look at it.”

We waited, then Zeus raised his arms. I yelled, “Go!” and we both took off. I had my head down though, and accidentally crashed into Semele. To this day, I can’t say if the flash I saw was inside or outside of my head, but it happened. Alastor really did yell “Dirke River!” but I don’t think that mattered. When I came to my senses, Zeus was gone and a dazed Semele lay sprawled beside me. She slowly sat up, rubbing her head.

“What hit me?” she asked.

I checked my head for dents. “I’d like to say common sense, but that’s probably more credit than either of us deserve.”

After we’d returned Semele to her father, we had a long talk. Basically, Cadmus said, “How could you?” while Semele said, “How couldn’t I?” What could I say to bridge that divide? In trying to understand emotions, I’d turned to a life of logic and detection, and it cost me my marriage. I finally said to Semele, “Though you will bear Zeus’s child, you can find a better life partner than the king of gods.” I hoped one day she would be old enough to believe that.

The walk back to Athens was more solitary than the way up. We didn’t meet anyone of note except Hermes. Of course he had a message, and it was from Zeus. I quote, “I admire your courage, but know this. There are things humans can never understand. We call those things gods.” Unfortunately, since the gods are omnipresent and we are in their image, humans have no choice but to keep trying to understand them. For now, my conflict with Zeus is at a standoff, and I figure as long as I don’t have a wife, daughter, or female livestock, I am safe.

I’ve since pledged to restrict my practice to Athens. I even have my own riddle ready if the sphinx comes knocking on my door: Why is Thebes the last place you should ever visit? Answer: You don’t want to know. It’s not sphinx quality, but it works for me.

Richard Zwicker is an English teacher living in Vermont, USA, with his wife and beagle. His short stories have appeared in T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, Zetetic, Perihelion Science Fiction, and other semipro markets. Besides reading and writing, his hobbies include playing the piano, jogging, and fighting the good fight against middle age.

by Lynne Sargent

I have been staring at vines for weeks,
watching

their sticky paws latch
onto their walls

indiscriminately in love,
whether stone, or wood, or cement

hanging on
after death, turning red, black

supported by the fallen lengths
of their body.

I have been brushing past them,
noticing

their protruding leaves
dropping pollen

in search of purchase,
desperate only in their frequency

hearing their song;
produce,

hold on.

Lynne Sargent is a writer, and circus artist based in the Hamilton area. She holds an MA in philosophy from McMaster University, specializing in bioethics. She is a lover of all things fey, strange, and bloody. She is a novice writer, specializing in poetry and fairytales.

 moralguillotines.wordpress.com

by Helen Grochmal

Flora Cockerell was a gardener par excellence in the independent living community. She didn’t need to go to the Home Depot every week in the summer buying the perfect fertilizer, aerators, bug sprays, and the like. There were some there who went even in the winter, coming home  with a carload of gardening stuff. Flora’s plants came up lush and green no matter what she did to them; they just wanted to be around her and have her touch them. Not that she neglected their physical needs. Her garden was so perfect that at least one person wouldn’t talk to Flora all summer long out of envy.

Flora was oblivious to this envy. She was a natural woman in her sensible dark cotton pants and colorful jersey tops, although she did prefer undyed long flowing skirts or dresses in her social activities, but one could not bend over plants all day in those.

One day she decided to dig deeply in the dirt where probably a bird had dropped an unknown seed that was growing into a vine or some sort of tree forbidden in the community, where grounds keepers were to make sure nothing “troublesome” took over that would require days of maintenance to remove. She apologized to the plant as she dug it up, for days really. The roots went down many feet. The days turned into weeks, but Flora was not one to complain. In truth, she was fascinated by it, never having seen such a plant. She thought about taking a cutting to the nearest botanical garden but that would take her a day away from her own beloved garden that she loved tending and touching as much as the plants loved her doing it.

While burrowing around Flora struck something hard with her tools. She lay on her stomach and reached down with her hands to feel around at what she had hit. It felt cool even in the cool dirt, but touching it sent a thrilling sensation down to her toes. After about a month of digging, she looked down to see something stonelike in the hole where the vine above it had recently been. She had blessed that plant and said a farewell to it, having already used it for compost. Flora spent that spring on her belly reaching into a hole, the neighbors who went by asking why she was doing that for so long.

“Oh, you know. Some plants need deep soil treatments,” she would answer and ask about their health. She didn’t know why she couldn’t tell the truth, it was her secret somehow.

One day when she was making lunch in her kitchen she heard noises on the patio where she found grounds keepers filling in the hole on which she had spent so much effort digging.

“Please stop! I am digging that hole. Please take the dirt out.”

“We have to fill it in, lady. A hole like that is dangerous. Someone could step in it.”

“I’ll put a little fence around it and keep my porch light on. I am working on something.”

“Nothing allowed here would need a deep hole like that. What are you trying to do? Bury someone in it?” the man replied stubbornly.

“Leave it now and I’ll take it up with Management. I’ll be finished soon.” Flora could not stand the idea of not feeling that stonelike thing anymore. She thought she had felt a design on it.

“I don’t get paid enough to argue with you, lady. I’m not digging the dirt out again though. You get your permission.”

Flora forgot her lunch to dig out the soil poured back into the hole. By dark she could feel the figures on the stone again.

Visiting Management at the Home, Flora carried a note like a kid takes to school from a parent. This one gave permission for Flora Cockerell to dig a hole next to her patio since she was working on a “project.” Flora had typed it out so the friendliest of the Managers would just have to sign it. Miss Cockerell had a reputation as an agreeable woman in the senior community. Being new and in a hurry to get to a meeting, the Manager signed it. With it in hand, Flora went home feeling almost as if she had gotten good news from her doctor after a scare. She was elated.

Working all day and evenings she soon had the hole widened. She invested in some fencing and showed her “pass” whenever the grounds keepers went by. Getting her camera, Flora took pictures of the stone with lighting inside the hole so she could see more details. It looked like a person with flowing locks that resembled vines, the sort of vines that had grown above it for real, Flora realized with wonder.

She felt that a visit to the computer at the Home was in order. Nobody used it. She got on the Internet to look up architectural designs, putting in words like “man” with “vines,” although Flora thought it could be a woman too. She wished she could see the stone better.

Sites appeared on the screen informing her that a figure with vines might be a symbol of fertility or something primeval, belonging to many cultures besides Europe, including Egypt and Mesopotamia. There was even a Green Man of Borneo. It might be a universal symbol, an archetype.

She read about gargoyles of green figures serving as water spouts high above Christian churches, hunky punks (grotesque decorative figures), goddesses, a sheela na gig, the somewhat embarrassing (to Flora) figure of a woman with an explicit female sexual part illustrated along with the leaves and vines. She wondered what she had been touching with such abandon all of this time. Many of these figures had leaves and vines all over them, some vines substituting for facial features and some figures with faces covered in leaves coming out of their mouths and noses.

Having no idea what to expect next from Management about the hole, Flora found that the decision was taken out of her hands. Complaints were made about the piles of dirt around Flora’s patio that never got smaller. The Head Manager showed up at her door one day.

She joined him in a visit to her sacred site which now was surrounded by foliage, although a drought was parching the plants around other patios.

“When is your ‘project’ going to end, Miss Cockerell?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“What is this project? Some of us here are not as thorough as we should be when granting requests from, uh, women residents who try to manipulate them in a busy moment.”

Flora looked contrite. That is what she had done.

“Well, Miss Cockerell. What are you doing and when will it end?” The Head Manager looked down the hole. “Are you planting something? Are you building something probably prohibited or needing approval? Tell me exactly.”

Flora, being basically an honest woman, admitted, “You can see it if you look. I unearthed one side of it. It is a sculpture of a figure with vines streaming from it. It is beautiful. I would like to bring it up and put it on my patio.”

“Is it yours, Miss Cockerell? Does it not belong to the Community? To the Organization? To Management? You do not own the cottage nor the land. You have bought into this place for a certain period, until you pass on, er, move.”

Flora looked even guiltier. “I wasn’t going to keep it, just look at it.”

“You should have reported it. Why did you dig so deeply for it? It is too deep to plant anything.” He looked at her suspiciously.

“I was digging out a sort of vine that was growing. I didn’t plant it! A bird probably dropped the seed. I dug to save the grounds keepers work.” (She really hadn’t wanted them tramping on her plants.) “I like to plant and, oh, other things. We don’t have much ground for gardening.”

“Well, the thing down there will have to be assessed. I’ll send the Head of Maintenance over. We will probably just have them fill in the hole.”

“But you can’t! If I pay for the sculpture to be dug up, may I keep it on my patio?”

“That might be arranged,” he said, thinking he might save some money in the budget that way.

The Head of Maintenance came and was charmed by Flora into agreeing to let her have the stone dug up if he could supervise the digging.

Two men came to her home one day. These workers had been recommended by someone who knew someone who knew someone who had hired them in the past. They came equipped with shovels to dig. The Head of Maintenance showed up to watch for a while as did half of the residents who lived on her side of the Home. The next day the farther side showed up. The men worked and dug, giving dirty looks to the people staring at them. They took off their shirts in the heat and cursed under their breaths, hating to be on display. Finally, they told Miss Cockerell that she needed to hire equipment to dig this thing out and hoist it up. They couldn’t lift it without it.

“Who knows how big it is?” one said.

“Maybe the peepers can lift it,” grumbled the other man.

“How much would it all cost?” Flora asked with dread.

“We could rent the equipment for a few hundred dollars.”

“Okay, then, but please keep the cost down,” thinking that with equipment she might save on labor costs in the end.

Before they could do that, the Head of Management came back to talk to Flora.

“How are things progressing, Miss Cockerell?”

Flora told him about the hoist proposition.

“No, no, no, Miss Cockerell. You must cancel that. There are permits to get. You may cause all sorts of trouble with the authorities! Just have them fill it in!”

“No,” said Flora, “not after I have come this far. I have to do it!”

“You are becoming quite unreasonable. We must have a meeting about you, uh, I mean the situation. Cancel that work contract for now. Permits here take up to a year.”

Flora turned away, furious. She burst into tears after Management left, stopping only to call the workmen to postpone the work.

As it got dark, Flora went out to the patio, put down a rug to lie on and felt the statue, almost asking it for help. She just HAD to see it uncovered. She had to. Comforted, Flora went into her cottage, showered, and went to bed.

The next day she went to see Blanche, the resident Representative on the Advisory Committee to Management, telling her of her sad experiences. Flora convinced her to make a plea for her to continue her “project.”

“But if permits are needed, that is something to consider, Flora. I’ll do my best. Maybe if you agree to pay for them, they will give you the go-ahead.”

Flora flinched but silently shook her head yes.

So Flora, the Head of Management, the workers, a city inspector, and Blanche met to look at the stone in the hole, trying to peer in with the workers holding lights inside, with mounds of dirt piled up all around them.

“It looks like a carving,” said Management.

“I see a head with leaves around it. It looks like the leaves are coming out of its mouth,” observed Blanche, who had good sight for her age.

The city inspector said, “Stop right there. No excavations can be made without checking for pipe and water lines, and the historian will have to be called in since the stone must be old, a work of art. It may be a Native American totem pole or something.”

They all left Flora alone in despair, even the gawkers who had congregated.

Flora waited as inspectors came by making lines with spray paint to show the utility locations.

“It looks like you are okay as far as we are concerned,” they all said. “There will be a charge for this inspection since it is for personal reasons.”

Flora nodded, thinking of what she would eventually have to sell to pay for all of this “help.”

Then another day a man dressed in a suit came by her door introducing himself as the antiquities inspector. Actually, he was a volunteer from the University. “I’m Professor Ogden Frizzleton.”

Flora took him out to her patio, plugging in the industrial light so the Professor could see in the hole. He took off his coat to look, then feel, in the hole. He got very excited, it seemed to Flora.

“This shouldn’t be here. It looks like a Celtic stone of fertility, although there are common archetypes around the world. How did it get here in America?” He got upright, saying sternly to Flora, “Is this some sort of hoax, Miss Cockerell?”

“No, how can you say so?”

“How did you find it? Why dig here and so deeply?”

“I don’t know. I’m a gardener,” was all she would say, thinking of the right to not self-incriminate or to be made a laughing stock. She could imagine explaining again about the wild vines leading her to the leaf figure below.

“You must stop work. You and the Home will get a cease and desist order. We will have to explore this site carefully. You could have damaged the artifact or the hoax evidence against you!” He left.

Flora was distraught. What had she started? She looked outside from her dining room and saw the mess of dirt covering all of her flowers and greenery now. The plants were dying.

When she woke up uncharacteristically late the next day, she found all of the ground in front of her cottage except her patio cordoned off. She got calls from the other residents complaining about the dirt and asking her when it would all be over.

Flora said she didn’t know. It was all out of her hands. She got a letter from Blanche telling her the Advisory Committee to Management was upset by the condition of her property and demanded that she resolve the problem and return to being a cooperative neighbor.

Flora called up Blanche only to hear a click when she identified herself.

She felt hated. Everyone hated her. Flora went outside and felt the figure under the ground again.

Soon swarms of people collected around her patio. Among them were neighbors, men with heavy equipment and a hoist, and reporters, as well as students and faculty from the University. Flora kept her door locked and the curtains down. She thought about leaving her apartment to go away for a while but couldn’t desert the figure that seemed to be reaching out to her.

More parts of the community were roped off. More people confronted Flora as she went to get her mail or for other errands. She started to do errands after midnight, hiding out like a criminal.

After some days, Flora heard a lot of commotion on her patio and peeked out to see the crane hoisting a statue bundled in some protective material to her patio where all of the furniture had been piled up in a far corner. It was stabilized and several men including Professor Frizzleton prepared to unwrap the treasure. Flora stepped out onto her patio, seeing flashes as pictures of her were taken. All stood quietly as the large figure was revealed. The figure, mostly a face and full torso, stood out from the slab of stone that was flat on two sides where it may have been attached to some temple or church. Flora was glad the vibrant upright figure looked as though it existed on its own and that it came out facing her and the world tall and not lying at anyone’s feet. Flora lost her breath as she saw what she knew from her research was an ancient Green Man with leaves coming out of his mouth and making up his eyebrows. He made her heart beat with his unspeakable beauty. He spoke to her silently. She knew she was spending her last dollar to be with this figure, in truth, she would lay down her life for him. She felt like shouting out, “God save the Green Man!” as if He were a King.

Night brought floodlights to disturb Flora and her neighbors from then on. Flora knew she had to buy heavier curtains.

She looked out next morning to see the statue on her patio looking towards her large glass door. Flora felt a shudder of delight. She went out on the patio crying and approached her beloved figure. Reaching up, she touched the face with its intense features and the leaves in the semilight. She felt the smooth weathered stone. She could tell he was very old. She didn’t care where he had come from. A creature of this kind was bound to have had a deep life of its own and relationships with others who had loved him and been loved. She could almost hear him saying, “Your flowers will come back; everything will turn green again under your fingertips. All will yet be well.”

Flora nodded in understanding. She went to get a pail and hose to wash her precious companion. She lovingly washed the leaves, massaging the veins in the leaves with her fingers to get out the dirt, then washing the precious face and the whole robust figure until she was interrupted.

Cars stopped, filling up the street in front of her lawn, and the passengers began tramping on everyone’s lawn. Flora emptied her pail, said good-bye to the Green Man and fled into her house.

Soon a sign was posted on her patio door and other doors, and lawn signs were planted all over the community. Particular places were cordoned off. Flora’s phone rang all day. The place was chaos.

The Head Manager appeared on her front doorstep along with a thicker and even more officious man. They pounded and yelled to gain admittance. Flora let them in with reluctance. They pushed past her and slammed the door on the reporters and angry residents waiting to get a piece of Flora. She imagined she could hear them setting up the straw ricks on the lawn, just awaiting an opportunity to capture the elusive Flora to set the match.

“Miss Cockerell, you must stop this at once. We have gotten a notarized letter saying the Home, our Home, which you do not own, is a historic site and we can do no excavating or such without permission of the City. The State wants to dig up this whole place. You know what a danger that would be to our residents and to our ability to sell other units as they become unoccupied, which many may become with this mess! You are to blame and will be held financially responsible if we lose revenue or anyone is hurt! You started this. By the way, may I have that permission slip back that the Sub-Manager mistakenly signed? He is gone, so that is why we are collecting his correspondence,” the Head Manager added that last explanation rather too quickly.

Flora dismissed his words without a thought. Her concerns were all about the figure.

“Please leave,” she demanded. “My lawyer will be in touch with all of you if I am harassed!”

“You harassed! We’re all harassed because of you!”

The thick Central Manager merely looked at Flora as he left, a look that scared her way more than the Head Manager’s threats.

Flora needed to feel the Green Man, to get comfort from his face and body. Her life and everyone’s around her was ruined, it seemed. She needed his comfort.

She put on her TV for temporary comfort but there was no picture available. The cable line must have been cut. Flora got her radio and was looking for a good station when she heard the news, “Local authorities made a strange find in the local senior cottages. An ancient statue has been excavated. Teams of archeologists are on their way to do major work in the community. The elderly residents may have to be moved out, some buildings razed. It may be the find of the century, our own Green Man artifact that will change the history of our continent and our ideas about its social evolution.”

Soon after the announcement Flora heard heavy knocks on her door and cries of “We hate you, Flora. Come out. We may be evicted or fall down holes they will dig all over our lawns!”

“Go away,” yelled back Flora. She cowered all day wondering how long she could hold out.

That night she was afraid to go on her patio, the lights were so bright, and a guard was sitting in a car watching.

Suddenly as the lights went out inside and out, Flora thanked the heavens for the storm. She looked for activity by the light of many strikes of lightning, but seeing none, she ventured outside and carefully made her way over to the figure. She felt his head and roundness and smoothness and felt strength. She knew by her touch that she would be helped. She had proved herself, she had passed a test.

The next morning she was listening to the radio when she heard a bulletin saying, “The Governor has contacted local authorities telling them their first concern should be for the elderly in their State.” (A State election was looming and the Governor must need the senior vote.) “Excavations will be called off for now in the senior cottages.” (Apparently, the State budget could not afford the current plan.) “The State University is being given permission to excavate for six weeks each summer. The residents will not be inconvenienced.” (The Governor as usual was trying to appease all parties.)

Flora looked outside in the following days, seeing the cars disappear and the equipment taken away, and the yellow tape removed from the community and the holes filled in.

The Professor knocked on her door.

“May we leave the artifact on your patio until we are able to move it some day?” he asked vaguely. “We will be back next summer but won’t touch your patio nor disturb your plantings except to study the sculpture. I hope no offense was taken.” (Professor Frizzleton was worried about his grants.) Flora knew by now that the figure would stay as long as he wanted.

All became quiet and the night returned to normal. Life was too changed for her to know what normal had been. She could see the figure and could touch him whenever she chose. She felt his power and his mystery. She met his need. Her garden flourished. She had been overwhelmed by disaster and hate but now felt love. Residents came by to see the figure and brought their families to see it proudly. Years passed for Flora to enjoy her life and her love grew. She even looked forward to greeting Professor Frizzleton every summer. Management somehow knew Flora was special and powerful. They also appreciated acquiring an expensive artifact and having something to brag about to tempt new residents. Flora didn’t have to wonder why things had turned out right. She had found her life when she had made her physical connection with the Green Man. She also noticed, without alarm, that when she showered her skin was turning a light but distinct shade of green.

Helen Grochmal started writing fiction in her sixties when she moved to a retirement home. After two mystery novels, she turned her attention to writing short stories in various genres to test her range and talents. She even participated in a podcast and a group mystery (Chasing the Codex). Her publications include Bards and Sages Quarterly, Meat for Tea, Sobotka, Minerva Rising, and Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review.

by Mike Murphy

When Maureen picked up the postcard her deceased grandmother had sent her many summers ago, all the writing fell off. The words dropped into a pile on the table. She tried to pick them up, but they sifted through her fingers like sand.

The yellowed postcard was otherwise unchanged: A picture of boats in a harbor at sunset. In the bottom right-hand corner was the name of the hotel—the Mariner. On the reverse, its rates and amenities (color TVs!). The cancelled stamp still clung to the card.

Putting the postcard down on the table, Maureen again reached for the fallen words. As she neared them, the pile starting bubbling. Some words emerged and, under their own power, crawled like inchworms back onto the postcard. She watched in awe as they arranged themselves into a new message. Unneeded, the remaining words crumbled into dust.

Maureen looked at the new message in Grandma’s writing: “I’m coming for you.”

❦

She shrank back. Grandma? It couldn’t be! She’d never say anything threatening to her favorite granddaughter. This was the gentle, gray-haired woman who always had warm, homemade chocolate chip cookies ready for her when little Maureen visited with her late father and never forgot to send every grandchild a birthday card with a fresh five-dollar bill in it.

Grandma would never threaten her. But there it was: “I’m coming for you.” Maureen shook the postcard. The words didn’t budge. It was like they had always been there.

Could Grandma have—changed? Who knows what happens after death? Maybe she’s a grumpy old lady now, like Mrs. Washburn down the street. No, that couldn’t be.

Whoever the card was from, he or she meant Maureen trouble. She’d have to protect herself. But how do you guard against someone when you don’t know who they are?

❦

She thought about the worst cases:

A vampire: She could get garlic at the market. A pointed wooden stake and a mallet? The hardware store?

A werewolf: A silver bullet, right? She’d have to Google that. Where do you get them? And a gun? Guns frightened her. One website said the bullet had to be fired into the beast’s heart. She had never held a gun! She’d be lucky to hit the werewolf.

A mummy: She had no idea how to kill a mummy, and they were all the rage now.

She fell asleep on the keyboard. Hours later, she felt a gentle touch upon her shoulder.

❦

She awoke with a start. Once her eyes focused, she saw—Grandma. She was just as Maureen remembered her: Gray hair pulled back into a bun, glasses around a chain on her neck, a flowered house dress, and a partially buttoned cardigan. “I’m sorry I frightened you, dear,” she apologized.

Maureen was dumbfounded. “Grandma,” she managed, “it’s you.”

“Of course it’s me,” the dead woman replied. “Who were you expecting?”

“I—I don’t know,” she answered, rubbing her tired eyes.

“I sent you a message.”

“That was from you?” Maureen asked, growing nervous.

“Of course.”

“It was so—threatening.”

“It was?” her grandmother asked.

“‘I’m coming for you.’ Don’t you find that threatening?”

“But it was from me.”

“It didn’t sound like something you’d say.”

“I could only use the words that were already there,” Grandma explained. “That was the best I could do.” She held out a withered hand. Maureen grasped it gently and rose from her chair. “It’s time to go.”

“Go?” she asked, looking into the old woman’s long-remembered blue eyes. “Go where?”

“Heaven. I’m your guide. We always send someone the dear departed knew to ease the transition.”

“But I’m not dead.”

Grandma nodded in the direction of the desk. Another Maureen was seated at the computer. “You are dead, honey,” she reiterated.

“But—how?”

“An aneurism.”

Maureen was amazed. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“All the better,” Grandma said, tugging gently on her granddaughter’s hand. “Come along.”

Maureen glanced around her apartment. Her whole life was inside these four walls. “That’s it?” she asked bitterly. “This is how it ends? One minute, I’m fine, and the next…”

“It’s a passage. It doesn’t have to be a sock to the jaw.”

“Who will find my body?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s an empty shell.”

“But I…” Maureen began.

“Come with me, dear,” Grandma calmly continued. “You have many souls to meet and many wonderful things to see.”

“You’ll be with me?” Maureen asked, feeling like a child again.

“Always.”

Mike Murphy has had over 150 audio plays produced in the U.S. and overseas. In 2016, he won two Moondance International Film Festival awards. Mike’s prose work has appeared in Dime Show Review, Gathering Storm Magazine, Zeroflash, Inwood Indiana Press, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, With Candlelight, Asymmetry Fiction, Lyonesse Fiction, Communicators League, Theme of Absence, Visions With Voices, Fabula Argentea, and The Flash Fiction Press. In 2015, his script The Candy Man was produced as a short film under the title Dark Chocolate. In 2013, Mike won the inaugural Marion Thauer Brown Audio Drama Scriptwriting Competition.

www.audioauthor.blogspot.com

by Donna Migliaccio

Beep…beep…beep…

The faint bleating finally pierced the fog of Birdy’s drugged slumber. She cracked her left eyelid open and after some moments, identified the source of the noise: a monitor, screen glowing green, at the left side of her bed. Of course, she thought. Operation. Guess it’s over. Guess I made it.

Through the haze of her stubby grey lashes, she took slow, deliberate stock of her condition: IV in the crook of her elbow, oxygen tube taped to her nose. Mouth dry, throat sore, belly painful. More tubes down there. Gasp and sigh of machines pumping stuff in and out. Another glow, this one bluish, off to her right. She peeled open her other eye to look.

Laurie was sitting in the light, head tilted down, eyelids lowered, like an angel, Birdy thought, her heart swelling so suddenly that her chest ached, like an angel lost in prayer. Laurie shifted position then, rolling her shoulders wearily, and Birdy saw that the unearthly blue light was, in fact, a cell phone, and Laurie was not praying but absorbed in some game. “Laurie,” Birdy tried to say, but her tongue was as dry and limp as an old sock, and although her lips moved, no voice came out.

A nurse came into the room then, shoes squeaking on the linoleum, brisk and efficient in pastel scrubs. “Evening,” she said. For just a breath Laurie looked up, and on her face was the expression Birdy had come to loathe: mouth pursed and pulled down at the corners, brow furrowed, eyes hard and squinting. A disappointed face, a disillusioned face, a face too old for such a young woman. It made Birdy want to weep.

The nurse fiddled with a monitor, made notes on a clipboard, then leaned over Birdy. “Well, hello,” she said. “You awake now, Mommy?”

Mommy. Laurie had called her that, long ago, when her blue eyes had been wide with innocence and her face baby-soft with trust. Mommy.

Although she was not Laurie’s mother. Aunt Birdy, that was who she was, spinster Birdy, practical Birdy, the dependable, sturdy, and unimaginative older daughter with a steady, boring job. Birdy, who lived at home with their aging parents while Laurie’s mother, ten years younger, the lovely, lively daughter, lived a harum-scarum life, replete with laughter and wild parties and man after man after man. Their parents had disapproved, and Birdy had joined in their disapproval, and as a reward had been willed everything, money and house and all. After the parents were gone Laurie’s mother moved with her latest man to another city, but within the year she was back, down and out, with baby Laurie in her arms. She swore to change her ways, and for a few months she did, but first the drink took hold and after that the drugs. More and more Laurie’s care fell into Birdy’s stolid, capable hands. Laurie’s mother would sing to the baby, yes, slurring tunes of love and regret, and toss her in the air and tell her that she loved her, but it was Birdy who fed the child, Birdy who diapered her, Birdy who walked the floor with her at night when she was colicky. And it was Birdy who, holding the helpless little mite in her arms, felt for the first time in her stolid, solitary life the flickering flame of love.

Mommy.

The night nurse laid one hand on Birdy’s brow and frowned. “Open, please,” she said, producing a thermometer.

And when Laurie’s mother died after one wild party too many, it was Birdy who held out her arms when Laurie took her first steps, Birdy who taught Laurie her ABCs and walked her to the school bus and sat with her while she did her lessons and all the while, her love for Laurie spread like a bonfire in her virgin breast.

The nurse whisked the thermometer from Birdy’s mouth and peered at it. “Bit of a low-grade fever,” she announced. “The doctor may want to prescribe stronger meds for your mother.”

Laurie’s eyes flicked up from the cell phone. “She’s not my mother. She’s my aunt.”

Not your mother, some meddling neighbor had told the child one day. Teary-eyed, Laurie had come home for reassurance, but pragmatic Birdy could not bring herself to lie to the child. She could not lie, no matter how her love for Laurie consumed her. She told Laurie the truth and watched the light of innocence fade from the baby-soft face. Over the next few days the hurt in Laurie’s face hardened into distrust and Birdy would have given anything, anything at all to get it back.

She had never indulged the child in make-believe, but she did now, filling Laurie’s evenings with storybooks and songs about princesses and unicorns and gentle magical dragons. Laurie turned the pages and read the words and hummed the tunes, but when Birdy encouraged her to extend these flights of fantasy into her own play, Laurie stuck out her lower lip and frowned. Why, Aunt Birdy? Laurie would say. I know it’s just pretend.

“Ah,” said the nurse. “My mistake.”

“It’s okay,” Laurie said. “She pretty much raised me.”

How I tried, Birdy thought, her insides trembling and hot with sudden misery. Again and again she had tried to ignite Laurie’s sense of wonder. Took her to the movies, to concerts, to thetheater, to the ballet, anything to stir Laurie’s imagination, to curve and soften the walls of her world. Dancing swans and nutcrackers, boys and girls who could fly on broomsticks and work magic, talking lions and hippos and little robots—any and all of it. In the darkness Laurie’s eyes gleamed with yearning for such wondrous things, but in the banality of daylight her practical side stubbornly asserted itself. It was fun, but I don’t believe in all that stuff, she would say. I know it’s not for real.

“Day shift told me you’ve been here since this afternoon. Must have been dull.”

Dull rote schoolwork set by dull rote teachers; Laurie excelled at that. Just like Birdy. Numbers and science problems were her forte, composition and literature her demons. As she got older she excelled at algebra and chemistry and grammar; struggled with English lit and poetry and mythology. Why did people believe this stuff? she would grumble. Half-human things like griffins and centaurs. Impossible things like phoenixes. Why would a bird burn itself up to live again? What’s the purpose of that?

“The hospital cafeteria closes in half an hour. The hot food’ll be mostly gone but they’ve got some nice sweets down there today. Coconut cake and apple pie.”

Laurie had a weakness for sugar, but all through high school she watched her weight and counted her calories. Her body was trim and taut when she left for college, but when she came home for Christmas break she was softer. It’s my Freshman Five, she told Birdy, laughing. Every freshman gains five pounds. But in addition to the softened body Laurie wore a softened expression and Birdy soon found out there was a Boy, a Boyfriend, Jason by name, a junior who had spotted Laurie in biology class and had scented her freshness like a fox scents a mouse. For the next few months Laurie’s calls home were all Jason this and Jason that, setting off alarm bells in Birdy’s head and fears of a future that mirrored Laurie’s mother’s, but she made herself say nothing, forced herself into silence. Let her believe, Birdy told herself. She dreams and wonders and trusts at last. Let her believe, and hope, and maybe it will come true.

“Thanks, but I don’t eat that stuff.”

“Well, how about soup? Nothing fancy today, just chicken soup with rice, but it’s good.”

By the end of the school year Jason had broken Laurie’s trusting heart and when Laurie came home for the summer it was all gone: the soft yearning flesh and mouth and eyes, and when in her senior year Laurie started dating again this time it was a practical boy named Doug who was in ROTC and had his career in the military mapped out. He was a square young man, with a square boxy body and a square jaw, an unimaginative but steady suitor, well-mannered and stalwart but a little dull. His level-headedness meshed with Laurie’s stubborn pragmatism. They had a practical courtship and a practical wedding and they seemed happy enough because they had a Plan, a plan for their lives together.

The nurse was peering at Laurie now. “You all right, miss? You need a drink of water or something? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine. I feel a little off today, that’s all.”

A little off. Ah, no, not again.

Laurie had felt a little off in the first year of her marriage, and the doctor confirmed her suspicions that she was pregnant. Doug and Laurie’s Plan skewed off track because babies were not supposed to be in the picture, not yet. It didn’t matter, though, because practical Laurie and practical Doug became almost silly at the idea of Their Baby. They had a sonogram and proudly showed it to Birdy, who was bemused by the shadowy creature in the photo. Do you dream already, little thing? she asked it silently. Do you wonder? And Doug and Laurie giggled and called their little unborn pet names like Peanut and Button and Nugget…

And then.

Doug was on maneuvers and Laurie woke up feeling sick and went to the doctor and bled and telephoned Birdy and cried in Birdy’s lap until Doug arrived still in muddy boots and sweat-stained fatigues and Birdy sat quietly as they grieved and then bucked each other up and listened to the doctor and agreed to Try Again.

And again.

And again.

And with each failure Laurie’s face grew harder and colder and Doug’s jaw more square and his spine more stiff beneath his uniform tunic.

And Birdy grieved for them both, because she remembered how Laurie’s sweetness had blown out the walls of her own safe, square little box of a life, and she could not bear to see Laurie’s eyes grow hard forever.

With an effort, she turned her head toward Laurie. Look at me, Laurie. Look at me.

“I think someone’s awake for real now,” the nurse said.

Laurie put down her cell phone and hitched her chair a little closer. “How are you feeling, Aunt Birdy?”

“Probably won’t be able to talk just yet,” the nurse said. “The intubation and all.”

Love of my life, Birdy tried to say. Child of my heart. But all that came out was a gurgling hiss. She twitched her hand toward Laurie. You opened my soul. You opened the world to me. You gave me wonder. You showed me how to dream. I would give anything to see that wonder in your eyes again. Anything in the world.

Laurie patted Birdy’s hand with long, cool fingers. “What’s the matter, Aunt Birdy?”

One of the machines let out a little ping. “What’s the matter?” the nurse echoed, peering at its screen.

…I would give it all back to you: Santa Claus and dragon riders and griffins and the Easter Bunny and fairies and Peter Pan and centaurs and dancing swans and phoenixes…

Birdy gripped Laurie’s wrist with all her strength. Her heart beat hot and fast. She closed her eyes.

“Aunt Birdy?”

…phoenix…

Blood throbbed in Birdy’s temples. It hissed through her veins, rattled up from fingers and toes, coursed to the furnace of her heart and hesitated there, churning and heaving like a sea of lava. Go, Birdy commanded. Go now. Go fast.

With a single great heave of her body, she sent her own life surging and pounding toward Laurie.

“Her temperature’s spiking…” the nurse cried, and stabbed at a button with a frantic finger.

“Aunt Birdy?” Laurie’s voice scaled up like a child’s. Beneath Birdy’s smoldering fingers Laurie’s pulse suddenly ratcheted, and Birdy sensed the blood, freshly heated, rushing through veins and arteries and capillaries, through flesh and muscle and organs, toward the little life nestled deep in Laurie’s body but already fading, growing cool…

The nurse was at the door, shouting for assistance. Laurie was on her feet. “She’s burning up!” she cried. “Aunt Birdy! Aunt Birdy!”

Gasping, Birdy thrust the heat of her life and her love toward that small weak one, sent the heat of her heart tumbling through Laurie’s body until it collided with the little new life and enveloped it, swaddled it, embraced it. Wake up, Birdy told the little life. Imagine. Hope. Look at the world with your fresh new eyes, and Laurie will see it with you and learn to dream again, just as I dreamed through her.

She opened her eyes. All around her the nurses and doctors were shouting instructions and the machinery was beeping and pinging but still she held onto Laurie’s hand, warm now, warm even as Birdy’s own body grew cold.

Phoenix, she thought. Phoenix, rise up.

And smiling, Birdy breathed her last.

Donna Migliaccio is a professional stage actress with credits that include Broadway, National Tours, and prominent regional theatres. Fiery Seas Publishing began releasing her fantasy series The Gemeta Stone in August 2017, which includes Kinglet, Fiskur, and StoneKing. When not on stage or in front of her computer, she can usually be found curled in a chair with a good book, or tramping around muddy fields and leafy woods with her binoculars, looking for birds.

donnamigliaccio.com

by Ali Jones

You must cross his palm with silver,

or he cannot pass; he cannot explain,

currant eyes peering beneath clouds

of leaf hair, unruly enough to be fashionable

and hide that which should remain secret,

lest it cause distress.

He will take you

by the hand, clothed in the fashion of the day,

bright logos, shoes made for speed,

although he does not need them, bony fingers

imploring, can you spare 60p? Only

an adamant shake of the head if asked why.

You hand it over because you do not know

what else to do, then walk the uncomfortable line

away from him, among billboards, cigarette butts,

receipts, coffee cups, curling in the rain.

He is gone, his measured pace too fast

for the human eye flashes him away,

like a door into something, opening.

Ali Jones is a teacher and writer, living in Oxford, England. She holds an MA in English, focused on poetry in domestic spaces and has written poetry in a variety of forms for many years. She is a mother of three. Her work has appeared in Fire, Poetry Rivals Spoken Word Anthology, Strange Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, Snakeskin Poetry, Atrium, Picaroon Poetry, Mother’s Milk Books, The Lake Magazine, Breastfeeding Matters, Breastfeeding Today, and Green Parentmagazine. She writes a regular column for Breastfeeding Matters magazine, and blogs for The Motherload. She was the winner of the Green Parent Writing Prize in 2016, the runner up for the Mother’s Milk prize for prose in 2016, and has also written for The Guardian. Her poetry pamphlets, Heartwood and Omega, are forthcoming with Indigo Dreams press in 2018.

by Nikita Andester

It wasn’t until they moved in together that he discovered the egg. Lee and Tammy each nursed a lukewarm beer as they sorted through boxes. Lee was working through one of Tammy’s boxes, in which she had  lumped things that, to Lee, had no evident connection. So far, he had found a soup ladle, two romance novels, her jewelry shoved into a plastic bag. And this. His hands closed around something dense and round, protected by several thick layers of newspaper and warm under his touch. He swallowed, then paused at the steady warmth radiating under his hands. Removing each sheet of paper like petals or onion skins, he uncovered a sphere. An egg. Roughly the size of a grapefruit, it looked like unpolished stone, its navy shell unyieldingly flat. If someone had asked Lee what he thought it might taste like (and eventually he would lick it during a consuming flood of restlessness and curiosity), he would have told them that it tasted like asphalt after a thunderstorm. The warmth rippled down his hands, starting at his fingertips toward the base of his palms in a patient rhythm.

He looked up at Tammy, who was hoisting books out of a box. “Hey, Tam. What is this?”

Tammy looked over her shoulder and paused before shoving books onto the shelf. “That?” Her voice sounded high, light, pushed out of her diaphragm. “Nothing. It’s gonna hatch one day.” She laughed before grabbing it out of Lee’s hands. “Here, let me take that. I’ll just put it …” She trailed off as she walked with it cradled in her arms to the bedroom.

That night he found himself cross-legged on the bed with Tammy, drinking whiskey and playing cards, a wooden pedestal cradling the egg on the dresser beside them. He asked her again.

“What’s the story with that sphere, really?”

She paused before continuing to shuffle the cards in her hand, reluctant to answer. Her smile was stiff when she said, “Oh, you mean the egg? Come on, Lee, I told you. It’s gonna hatch one day.”

Despite his gentle prying, she refused to answer anything more, peeling his questions off her like stray hairs on a sweater, and pouring him another drink from the bottle nestled between her legs.

That night, Lee dreamt of grey hands pressing the egg toward him, of a voice whispering so close that its warm breath hummed against his ear. Lee tried to understand the whispers, but the voice was too near, too urgent, and the dream gave way to morning, where Lee’s eyes were pinned to the egg. The navy whorled like a Jupiter storm before solidifying back into the unyielding flatness he had believed it to be.

“Tam,” he licked his lips, rubbing her shoulder to wake her.

She turned to him, a sleep-sodden smile pleating her eyes. “Yeah?”

“The egg. I saw it, its colors; they were swirling.”

Tammy’s face collapsed into a mask. “No, they weren’t.”

He propped himself up on one elbow. “They were! Isn’t that wild? I wonder why it did that, I wonder what it…”

“You must have been dreaming, Lee.” There was no whisper of sleep left on her face now. Her statement was an answer, an end, a fact. She swung out of the bed, grabbing the hairbrush from the dresser and attacking her hair in the vanity mirror. “Could you make us some coffee, angel?” Her tone belied the furrow between her brows.

Lee raked his hand over his face and to his neck. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

He watched Tammy in the mirror, watching him as he looked once more at the egg before shuffling out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He knew what he had seen. He hadn’t been dreaming, not then, not after the whisper had coaxed him awake.

In the days that followed, Lee found that he couldn’t lie down in bed without opening his eyes to watch the egg in its hallowed pedestal on the dresser, hoping the colors would swirl again, hoping he could puzzle out why. Each night, the egg forced itself into his dreams, shattering his restfulness into slivers he couldn’t reassemble. Morning after morning, he ground his elbows into the table and pressed his coffee mug against his eye socket, hoping the heat would shock him back to the waking world.

One evening, Lee was rubbing lotion into his feet when Tammy brushed a “Good night” from her mouth to the egg with her fingertips. The navy sang green where her fingers had been. He blinked. The navy—solid, guileless—returned. Tammy and Lee’s eyes locked for a moment before he began rubbing the lotion into his feet with renewed vigor. Tammy knelt in front of him, grabbing his hand and kissing his knuckles.

“I love you, Lee,” she said, studying his knuckles as she rubbed them with her thumb. “Some things are just for me. Some things are just for you. Let this, you know, be for me. Okay?”

Chastened, Lee looked at her ears, her chin, her eyes. “Of course, love. Of course.”

They had sex that night, intimate and rough, clawing. As he came, a flash of grey hands shuddered across his eyes and down his spine. He fell asleep curled into Tammy’s side, praying for a night uninterrupted.

But he dreamt again.

Each day, the chasm between Lee and Tammy broadened. When Tammy asked him to play cards, he lost every round. When they went out for happy hour, he drank in jerking, marionette motions, checking his watch as if he were waiting for someone. At night, the gap between them was palpable, the space between their bodies in bed so vast their pinkies only grazed. If she did reach for him, he held her with the pain of the inarticulate, unable to tell her that the question threatened to swallow him whole.

His growing preoccupation fractured his work ethic. He was unable to read on the bus like he used to. Any progress his clients had been making faltered.

A receptionist knocked on his office door. “Your ten o’clock’s here to see you.”

Lee ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah. Okay. Right. I’ll call for her in just a minute.”

He looked at his desk, dismayed to discover that he had been drawing circles and filling them in with his ballpoint pen, covering papers he needed to file. Had he really spent the past half hour this way? Shoving them into his drawer, he called his client in. As expected, no breakthroughs were made.

On the bus home that afternoon, anger grew hot inside of him. Why should Tammy have a secret? He had shared everything—almost—with her about his life. Why this mystery act around a stupid sphere? What was she keeping from him? What else was she keeping from him? Lee’s anger rolled through him for the next thirty minutes, his teeth grinding tighter and tighter at the thought of her.

She was already home when he got there, humming to herself and hanging a painting of a naked woman. She smiled at him as she stepped back, checking that the painting was straight.

“Why are you hanging that there? Above the couch.” He was still in his shoes, still clenching the strap of his messenger bag in his tight fist.

“What? I guess it just seemed like a good spot. I’m not married to it here though; I could take it down.” She moved to take it from the wall.

“That easy? You don’t care where it goes? You’re really that fickle?”

“The hell are you talking about, Lee? I got off early and thought I’d work on things around here.” She gestured to the boxes on the floor and the paintings stacked against the wall. “What’s up with you?” She walked over to him, taking the bag out of his hand and setting it by the door. “Bad day?”

Lee pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Something like that.”

That night in bed, eyes half-lidded—still watching the egg through the darkness—he wondered if Tammy would notice if he punctured it with just one thin nail on the underside. He traced his memory through the past two weeks of their new life together. He had never seen her lift it from the pedestal. No, he thought, Tammy wouldn’t know if the egg were punctured. It would be so easy for him to…

Tammy shifted in her sleep, turning to face him. Her features softened in the moonlight, her bare shoulder seemed luminescent in the dark. Of course he would never puncture Tammy’s egg. Of course not. He curled against her, kissing her shoulder until she opened her sleeping arms to hold him. He felt sickened and relieved by Tammy’s unquestioning welcome back into the familiar jigsaw puzzle of their sleeping bodies. When he finally drifted into sleep, he remained there through the night, undreaming.

The next morning, he whistled as he tied his shoes on the way out to work, and fell dreamless that night into Tammy’s arms. The week passed quiet, rested. When Lee reflected on his obsession, it felt like a fever dream, seen through a camera lens that wasn’t his own.

Saturday came. Their apartment was mostly unpacked, the painting of the woman had been hung back above the couch, and Tammy and Lee had decided to reward themselves with a brunch that had meandered across three mimosas apiece before ambling to the farmers market, where they were sampling their way from booth to booth. Tammy stopped in front of a vendor selling eggs.

“Oh, Lee, look! They’re so beautiful, let’s get them!” She was pointing to a dozen pale blue eggs.

The vendor looked proud. “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re from Araucana chickens.” She pointed to a glossy photo in a plastic frame beside the eggs. “Real rare.”

Tammy looked at Lee, open and expectant for these eggs that probably tasted like every other egg. Did she not see that they were blue? Lee thought about the egg at home in its pedestal, so navy and large next to these delicate, watery ones in front of him. How did Tammy not see the connection, this slap in his face? Lee smiled back at her, tight. “Yeah, love, let’s get them.”

For dinner, Tammy scrambled them for sandwiches, delighting in the pale shells. “We can plant some seedlings in them.”

Lee nodded and sipped his whiskey in silence.

That night he dreamt. He looked down to see the navy egg nearly black against the grey hands that were pushing it deep into his stomach. He was filled with dark blue light, and began warbling a monochromatic swan song. His song turned into a deep cough that rattled his lungs and tasted of blood. He doubled over with the spasms until he coughed out a single, shining, bloodied nail into his palm.

The next morning, Lee waded through an egg-laden dream fog into the kitchen, kissing Tammy on her temple and helping himself to some coffee. Taking a tentative and scalding sip, he watched Tammy already at the table, blowing on the steam rising from her mug and poring over The New Yorker, which she would be lost in for the next hour. Urgency rose in Lee like vapor, and he understood that this was his moment, that he had to see what was inside that egg, that if he waited any longer, he would explode. He looked at Tammy reading, silent. He felt certain that the hunch of his shoulders, the mug in his hand, even his bedhead, somehow incriminated him, and if Tammy so much as grazed her eyes over him, she would know what he was considering.

Taking one large swallow of still-burning coffee, he ran his hand through her hair, and walked toward the bedroom, grabbing a nail and small hammer from the utility closet before shutting the bedroom door with a click and a sigh.

He eyed the egg, so innocuous on the dresser. The egg eyed him, conspicuous by the door. If Tammy called for him, he thought, he would take it as a sign and never think about the egg again. But Lee didn’t hear any call, and so he closed the space that separated him from the dresser. Tossing the hammer and nail onto the bed, he carefully—reverently—lifted the egg from its pedestal, touching it for the first time since he had unwrapped it several weeks ago. The egg sang green—neon, luminescent green, the brightest green Lee had ever seen!—where his fingertips touched it. Lee sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes never leaving the egg, and cradled it in his lap. He plucked up the nail and hammer. Lee inhaled.

A single tap to lighten the weight of his dreams. A single tap to answer the question he had unearthed. A single tap to shatter the upper corner of the egg, to slake his frenzied curiosity. Squaring his shoulders, opening his eyes, Lee peered through the hole. Inside stood the smallest bird that Lee had ever seen—the size of a flower petal, a bottle cap, Lee’s wide spade thumbnail, but all the same a complete bird—with opaline blue feathers and a grey beak. The bird stood at the bottom of the egg, warbled one drowning note, and collapsed onto the hollowed bottom.

The floorboards groaned. Lee looked up. Tammy stood in the doorway. “See?” Her chin trembled. “It was gonna hatch one day.”

Nikita Andester‘s nonfiction work can be found in Loam Magazine, an environmental activist publication, and The Shapes We Make. Currently a graduate student at the University of Denver for creative writing, she lives in her van around the greater Denver area. When not writing, Nikita can be found covered in glitter, reading fantasy novels, drinking coffee from her French press, or making art from trash.

by F. J. Bergmann

Some dream only of clouds
roiling with trapped light,
not of a paradise on the other side.
The critical part of an experience
is the beginning, which becomes an end
in itself. There’s a certain freedom in indecision,
romance in being thwarted.
Life is an assault on the void, a song
humming at the black limits of space.
A cavalry charge through drifting petals,
not the blood-soaked, splintered grove.
Shopping for a bottle full of good times,
not a damned cage for a dwindling,
less-than-human figure. Lovers
slow-dancing in a field of flowers,
not the rotting pumpkin of a marriage.
Another prince searches rain-emptied streets,
holding the glass slipper before him like a lamp.

F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com) and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets.

fibitz.com

by Melissa Crandall

After the pandemic had killed everyone but him, Emerson left the city and wandered without purpose, a shambling thing half-dead with grief. He longed to lie down and die as well, but a hot kernel of regret kept him walking; guilt for having failed Imogen.

He slept wherever exhaustion claimed him, sometimes falling to the  ground between one step and the next, and ate little when he remembered to eat at all. Haggard and filthy, he broke into houses and took away whatever he fancied. He lay on dead people’s couches—but never in their beds—and found damnation rather than salvation in his unlikely survival. For all he knew, he was the sole human alive on the planet. Certainly nothing in the wider world suggested otherwise.

One night, he discovered a baby grand piano in the living room of a suburban home. He stared at it for a long time, then slowly approached; hesitant, as if it might bite. He ran his hand along the lid, disturbing months of dust, then sat on the bench, wiped his palms against his pants, and laid his fingertips on the ivory keys. The opening chords of Moonlight Serenade conjured Imogen—the swirl of her favorite purple dress as she swayed to the music, the shift of long dark hair against her back, her smile. He played to the end, and then cried until he vomited.

❦

When at last the thought of another day spent walking became more than he could bear, Emerson settled on a small abandoned zoo as his refuge. The reasons for this were visceral rather than conscious—the place had an air of safety, like a fortress, and Imogen had loved the children’s zoo near their apartment.

He spent several days exploring, salvaging anything of use—tools, medicine, pre-packaged food and plastic bins to store it, a rifle and ammunition, books to pass the time. His footsteps echoed in the empty cavern of the bear grotto, the elephant barn, and the cement building where big cats once prowled in shoulder-rolling silence. Overgrown grass wicked softly against his boots as he wandered the empty paddocks. In the ape house, swings and climbing ropes hung motionless.

There were bones everywhere.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine how events had played out. The pandemic had struck with such unexpected violence and speed that no one had remained to care for the animals. Open cages attested that many of the smaller creatures had been set free, but not the larger beasts or predators. Tooth and claws marks scarred the walls and doors of their enclosures, evidence of their desperate struggle to escape. He tried not to dwell on the gut-twisting hunger and burning thirst they must have suffered; the confusion and terror when, day after day, no one came to tend them.

❦

Spring turned to summer. Emerson kept himself occupied by tidying up the place, moving from office to laboratory, clinic to nursery, anything to keep from thinking too deeply. With a vague sense of winter lurking somewhere in the months ahead, he foraged for wood, chopping and stacking with diligence. Never a muscular man, he grew hard on the strenuous labor and meager diet, portioning his food like a miser dispensing alms. The work toughened him, but its real blessing lay in sleep without dreams, free of the violence of Imogen’s final seizure.

He carried the rifle everywhere, not as protection—what was there to defend against?—but as insurance. If he meant to survive, he’d need to learn to hunt before the easy food ran out, but the prospect of killing filled him with an oily cold he couldn’t shake. If he were honest, he might have acknowledged the weapon also granted him a sense of control. It represented possibilities, should life without Imogen prove too arduous to contemplate.

❦

One sultry night, he woke to sound. Fearful, he lay without moving, listening. This was no fox or raccoon; he’d learned to identify their noises in the night. This was different, something … exotic. Rising, he shoved his feet into boots, took up the gun, and hurried outside.

The zoo was full of animals.

Emerson rubbed his eyes, positive he must be dreaming. He pinched his wrist hard enough to raise a welt, but the creatures remained. Translucent as fog and glowing with moonlight, the phantom beasts tread familiar paths, weaving among their bones, colorless eyes bright with a sense of soul. They saw him, and responded to his presence with strident demands for food and water.

“Go away,” he commanded harshly. “You’re dead.” He fled back to his den and locked the door behind him. Throughout the night the animals trumpeted and howled their misery, making sleep impossible. Only as the eastern sky grew pale with impending dawn did their cries lessen, weakening as each once again relinquished hope and lay down to die. As the last faint wail shredded on the morning breeze, Emerson slept.

The next night, and every night after, bedlam rang in the zoo’s caverns and corridors. The noise settled at the center of Emerson’s skull, denying him rest. He became largely nocturnal, napping only when daylight silenced the cries.

The sensible thing was to leave this place; walk on in any direction until he found a house with a fireplace, a soft couch, and no noise. But the thought left him queasy. He couldn’t abandon the animals as their keepers had done, even if that betrayal had not been intentional, but what could he possibly do for them if he stayed?

❦

Long ago, he’d read somewhere that ghosts were nothing more than troubled spirits unaware of their own death. To lay them to rest, one need only convince them of their demise. Emerson spent an entire night walking the zoo grounds, chanting, “You’re dead. Move on.” The animals watched him with bleak, begging eyes and cried their hunger, growing gaunt as the dark hours waned. The sight of bones pressed in stark relief beneath their hides made him weep with despair, as he’d wept over Imogen.

He staggered to bed in the predawn hours, the sun a faint pearlescent glimmer in the east. Animal moans dwindled in his ears as he plunged into a dream in which he entered a familiar sickroom bearing a bowl of soup on a tray.

“Lunch, dearest,” he announced softly to the woman in the bed.

Imogen’s eyes, enormous in the wasted planes of her face, tracked away from the ceiling to look at him. “Thank you,” she murmured without energy or emotion, drained of everything except disease. Her body, withered and twisted, barely disturbed the covers.

He placed the tray on the bedside table and drew up a chair. Snapping open a napkin with a flourish, he tucked it beneath her chin. “On today’s menu,” he said, adopting the ostentatious tones of a maitre d’, “we have Dr. Emerson’s Super-Duper Beef Barley Soup, guaranteed to cure what ails you.” It was a name he’d made up, same as Grandma Charlotte’s Really Good Grilled Cheese, Uncle Harry’s Penicillin Pumpkin Pie, and half-a-dozen others in an ongoing attempt to stimulate his wife’s flagging appetite and make her smile.

Imogen offered what passed for one these days. “Mmm, sounds delicious.” But when he lifted the spoon to her mouth, she grimaced and turned her face away. “Sorry, darling.” Her eyes begged him to understand, to not see her refusal as rejection of him. “Guess I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

“Perhaps later, then.” Heartbroken and hopeless, Emerson set the bowl aside and folded his hands together between his thighs. He stared at the clock, the lamp, the half-drawn window shade and the bright day beyond without really seeing them. These days, he made it a point not to look closely at things, afraid of what he might find lurking in the shadows, waiting.

Imogen sighed. In that sound was all the misery of the world they shared; the small one confined by these few walls, and the greater one beyond their apartment where countless had died and more lay dying, lips bubbled with pustules, internal organs dissolving into mush.

“Dearest,” he said into the silence, “if you could have anything to eat, anything at all in the whole wide world, what would it be?”

“Strawberry shortcake.” Her reply came with a surprising lack of hesitation, almost as if she’d been expecting the question and held the answer ready. “The kind my grandmother used to make, with sweet biscuits and clouds of whipped cream.” Enthusiasm he hadn’t seen in weeks animated her face, filling her eyes with light. “We picked wild field berries as small as the nail on your pinkie. They smelled like warm wine and tasted of sunshine.”

Emerson touched a finger to his lips in thought, and then made a cup of one palm as if holding a small bowl. He imagined it full to the brim with the sweet goodness she’d described. “You know, darling, it just so happens that your grandmother’s recipe has come down through the ages, written on papyrus and delivered by a wee sparrow this very day for madam’s pleasure.”

He saw at once that she understood what he was doing, that this game of pretend was not only for her amusement, but might also encourage her to take a few useless mouthfuls of soup. Her chin dipped in a barely perceptible nod. She focused on his empty hand. “More whipped cream,” she whispered.

❦

He woke sobbing. “Thank you, darling,” he said, palming tears from his eyes like a child as he sat up. “Oh, thank you!” Pushing to his feet, he scrubbed his hands through his greasy hair. Taking a chocolate bar and a small bag of corn chips from his stores for breakfast, he spent the day riffling through file cabinets for information on what the animals had eaten, scribbling notes on quantity and serving method in a barely-used steno pad. In the feed rooms and prep areas, he located buckets and pans, cleavers and knives, everything necessary for his pantomime.

Physical props were helpful, but Emerson understood that the chief element to success lay not in creation, but in his ability to make the animals believe. For three days, he hardly slept; rehearsing until the motions became fluid and the images fixed in his mind—a barrel of fragrant yellow grain, fronds of leafy green bamboo, cold water gushing from a bone-dry hose.

On the day of his premiere, he went to bed at first light, slept deeply, and woke refreshed. Stripping off his rank clothing for the first time in months, he bathed in a bucket of cold rainwater, making a ceremony of it. He trimmed his hair and beard with surgical scissors, and dressed in a too-big keeper’s uniform taken from a locker.

He emerged from his den as the first sounds from the rousing animals reached him like the opening chords of an overture. Pushing a variety of tools in a wheelbarrow, he went first to the tiger because its cries were the most strident and pathetic. Beneath the animal’s intent, colorless gaze, he brought out a cleaver, hacked at an invisible joint of horsemeat, and tossed a chunk past the bars. The cat stared at him and cried, seeing nothing. Emerson swore and clenched his eyes tight, drawing up the images he’d practiced so assiduously. The cleaver’s sharp edge caught the moonlight as he raised it high, paused, and brought it slashing down. It bit into flesh—he felt it!—and severed the haunch at the joint, revealing gristle and a bright circle of bone surrounding the marrow.

Grasping the meat in both hands, he swung and launched, putting his shoulders into the effort. The tiger bounded after the rolling lump of meat like a kitten pursuing a toy and fell on it in a frenzy of hunger. Elated, Emerson turned on the empty hose, filled the drinking bowl with water that existed only in his mind, and moved to the next enclosure.

Hours later, as the sun stroked its first pale fingers of light across the ground, he watched the animals fade one by one. Wishing them well, confident that their spirits had been laid to rest, he barely made it to bed before falling unconscious.

Their cries woke him at sunset.

Emerson sat up, bewildered and disappointed. He’d seen to their needs and watched them consume their ghostly meals with vigor, yet they remained. What had he done wrong?

There was no time to ponder the question; animals were waiting to be fed. The dispensing of grain, meat, hay—like a sacrament to the sinner’s soul—now bound him to the beasts, made him theirs. So he rose, splashed water on his face, and went to work.

His chores became first routine, and then habit, as weeks passed and he grew more adept. Like any muscle, his imagination strengthened with use. In his care, the animals began to flesh out again, pale hides shining with robust health. Their panic at being abandoned waned, and they began to greet him as well as the bounty he provided. The tiger—Joe, according to its file, a stupid moniker for such a magnificent beast—rubbed its chin against the bars at his approach. One night a chimp—Bella—caught his sleeve as he passed her a banana. She pressed the back of her hand against his and drew him into a brief embrace as Emerson wept.

❦

The pythons were the first to vanish. He arrived at the reptile house with his ephemeral dead chickens to find nothing in the glass-fronted enclosure except old bones and desiccated skin. Rather than being elated by their departure—here was proof that his idea did work!—he felt grief at the loss. But perhaps that was right and proper. Now that they were truly gone, their excitable ghosts laid to rest, sorrow was the next logical step.

A few nights later, the zebra was absent, and then the gazelle. After that, the process sped up, taking at least one species a night, sometimes more. He watched Bella fade before his eyes, and hurried to unfasten and swing wide the cage door before she departed entirely. He did the same with Joe. The big cat strolled through the open doorway like a king, paused to rub its head against Emerson’s thigh, and evaporated into moonlight.

The Asian elephants—Sundar and Thoda—remained, standing together at the cage bars, rocking slightly on massive feet, trunks coiling ghostly fodder into their mouths. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “All the others have gone.” They met his gaze with placid, enigmatic eyes and flicked their ears in response.

Because they were the last, he spent most of his time in their company—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the moonlight, or sitting on the floor with his back against the stout pillar of a leg as the first chill of autumn crept from the cement. By day, he pored over every file in the elephant keeper’s office, seeking to better understand the animals. As incentive to leave, he propped open their cage door. They moved through it willingly, and often followed him on strolls about the grounds, but seemed content to remain in his company.

Until one evening.

He was leaving the cage, having laid out a small mountain of food in front of each elephant, when Thoda suddenly abandoned her meal, pushed rudely past him, grabbed the cage door with her trunk, and slammed it closed in his face. Instinctively, he cringed back and quickly slid through the man-width space between the bars as if that might make a difference. She met his gaze with intensity never before displayed, then eased open the door and slammed it again.

“All right!” he said loudly over the clangor as she repeated the motion a third time. “You have my attention. What is it?”

Sundar moved up beside her and the two elephant cows looked down at him. To Emerson, small in their presence, it felt like being regarded by the eye of a god. From his reading, he’d learned that elephants were widely regarded as a “keystone species,” one capable of modifying its habitat to the benefit of others. He knew also they existed within a web of family experience that stretched both backward and forward through time, using infrasound broadcast in the bone and through the ground across countless miles to bridge the distance between herds. In this way, each elephant knew the location of every other.

Emerson put a hand to his mouth, breathless with sudden understanding. If this zoo could hold the spirits of the animals that died here, then so could every other. How many shades haunted those places, bound by starvation, unable to move on? How many needed him to set them free?

The elephants dogged him with long-legged strides as he ran to the office. They waited patiently outside as he tore through every file, searching for something he knew he’d seen, but could not remember where. Finally, he found the booklet containing a list of every zoo in America. Maybe not the small road-side attractions, the ones he now knew were called “mud shows,” but he’d find them as best he could, and the elephants would help because elephants know.

Three days later, on an evening whose sky bled with an extraordinary sunset, Emerson shouldered the rifle and a heavy pack and stepped through the zoo’s front gate. Heart beating strongly in his chest, he set his feet on the road south.

And the elephants walked with him.

Melissa Crandall writes fantasy, dark fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Tricks and Treats: A Collection of Spooky Stories by Connecticut Authors, Allegory online magazine, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She is the author of three science fiction media tie-in novels. A nonfiction book, The Man Who Loved Elephants is currently under consideration. She lives in Connecticut, where she spends her free time cooking, gardening, and beating her husband at Scrabble.

www.melissacrandall.com