Memories Saved by Allen Cash

I never thought I would want to kill my wife. Yes, the thought had crept into my mind previously, but it was only a fleeting thought. That’s when there was still hope. As I sit here now, I know there is no hope. She is a shell of the woman I once loved, and I can’t stand it. Over the last two years, she has declined; a husk of the loving mother our son remembers. I have even started to avoid her. Once the cold heart of depression was warmed by the soft embrace of acceptance, she was lost.

It’s been months since she has spoken to Jimmy. Our son. That’s probably for the best… Last time she talked to him, there was more profanity and insults than anything. He is twenty-six now and lives three states over. He is supposed to visit tomorrow for a few days. As always, I’m sure he will be disappointed with his mother’s condition. Thinking of the sadness in his face every time he sees her blurs my eyes.

God, I hate this.

I wipe my eyes and take a long pull of the dark liquor I have in front of me. Slamming the glass, I grab the revolver and the bottle. My rusty vertebrae creak one at a time into place as I stand.

Staggering towards the stairs, I catch glimpses of our life together—family photos from years past, trinkets collected from various places. I stop in front of a glass cabinet filled with small ceramic and porcelain babies. She would fuss over these stupid things for hours. Memories swim through my numb mind as I trade the gun for one funny little boy wearing a blue hat sideways.

We had spent the weekend in St. Louis, where she had found a little shop. After an eternity, she found the one she wanted, only realizing she had forgotten her purse.

“Oh, honey, I love it, please.”

“You want me to run three blocks in the rain for that?”

“It’s vintage, and I don’t have this one,” she said.

If she hadn’t said the last comment with her bottom lip out past her nose, I would have stayed dry. That’s the day I fell in love with her. But now I am standing here, without her, just this silly statue. I take another pull from the bottle. The small boy stares back at me. Mocking me with his stupid grin. Anger wells inside of me, and I throw the ceramic baby across the room, shattering a mirror. I see my fragmented face full of pain and anger, and it fuels my rage further. Spinning, I grab the banister to save myself from falling. A memory flashes through my mind of when she told me to just leave if I couldn’t handle it. She stood in this very spot. Hollow eyes and spindle legs. So weak from the drugs, she could hardly stand, but the venom in her voice was toxic. That was eight months ago. Righting myself, I retrieve the gun.

Halfway up the stairs, I see a younger version of myself with my arm around a beautiful brunette in a flowing white gown. My head swims, and I take a knee. A war of love and hate rages in my chest, being instigated by guilt and convinced by duty. Violent like white heat, it racks me into a cold sweat. I begin to weep.

I try to recall memories of our life together. Each of them is slowly being swallowed by new ones. Horrible ones filled with bags of piss and words of hate. Ones with fear and uncertainty, empty, lost.

No! I won’t lose them, I won’t let these things take over, I won’t lose her memory, too.

After a few moments, I take two long swallows. Pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes, and with my lips pressed tight to my teeth, nostrils flared, I continue up the stairs.

Pausing as another picture catches my eye. This one is of Jimmy. He is standing in a football uniform two sizes too big. A giant toothy grin takes up half his face. Staring at the picture, I finish the bottle and let it slip from my hand.

“I’m sorry! I have no choice, can’t you see?” I yell, ripping the picture off the wall, and throwing it down the stairs. Glass smashes everywhere, ramping my anger back to a ten. Wiping the snot on the back of my hand, I turn back upstairs.

Just outside the bedroom door, I can hear the white noise of the humidifier. I know she will be asleep; that’s all she does. My hand tightens around the gun as I slip quietly through the door. Stale breath and body odor assault my nose. Stillness engulfs me like a mad mood, and my skin prickles.

Resisting the urge to gag, I make my way over to the bedside. IV bags and clear tubes surround her like an alien sea creature. She lies there like a lump. A slow rhythmic beep echoes through the room. Her pale skin glows like a specter in the ambient light. She doesn’t even know I’m here. All that I do for her. Never a thank you. Never even a fuckin’ smile. I think of the way she has robbed me and our son. How she has taken this life and turned it into a toxic soup I am forced to eat daily. Someplace in my sober mind, I know it’s not entirely her fault, but it feels that way; it feels like she chose to leave us, like she quit. Swaying above her, I feel the pistol in my hand. It feels heavy and foreign, but as I put cold steel to flesh, it feels like home.

I can feel my heart beating hard in my chest. My breath is coming in short, quick fits. My vision is reduced to pinpoints as tears run down my face. Sweat covers my forehead.

I whisper one final I love you. Then, in one swift move, I kill the power to the machine that she has clung to for the past eighteen months and pull the trigger.

Picture of Allen Cash

Allen Cash

Allen Cash lives in East Texas with his wife and eight animals. When he is not writing, he spends his time playing guitar and playing with his dogs. He is currently taking classes at Full Sail University, working towards a creative writing degree. Follow him on Instagram.

Blood Ties by Malina Douglas

The ache of absence drove her to it, even as Odette dreaded what lay ahead.

The doors rattled open. She found herself in a hallway, shadow-thick. Distorted faces leered and grinned. Pale hands trailed tattered sleeves, reaching towards her.

Odette caught her breath, forced herself onward.

They lunged at her.

She shrieked.

Sharp nails snatched at black lace. Grasping, tearing. They ripped her dress. From scratches, blood welled. She ran, clutching a phial of liquid to her chest, heart juddering, slippers slapping stone. The potion she had lied to a hedge-witch to steal.

Emerging to a hall of checkered stone, she slammed the door shut behind her.

From the stairwell, harsh laughter.

There he was, the man she loathed. Velvet cloak, ancient eyes.

“Return my sisters,” she demanded.

“They’re here.” He flicked his arm and the door she had come through burst open. The creatures from the hall emerged, sliding and crawling, lank hair and vacant eyes.

“No! It’s not them. What have you—”

His laughter screeched like fingernails on stone. “Join them.”

The sorcerer curled his hand inward, and Odette slid towards him, unable to step back.

She flung the phial. Glass shattered against his chest. Smoke wreathed. He screamed as he melted.

The spell broke. The shriveled creatures grew straighter, flesh pinker, eyes brightening. Relief flooded Odette’s chest. The house rumbled.

Taking her sisters’ hands she ran down the long dark hall as the walls rained plaster, through the great creaking doors to the sunlight beyond.

Picture of Malina Douglas

Malina Douglas

Malina Douglas weaves stories that fuse the fantastic and the real. She explores ruins, caves and jagged rocks that could be the homes of monsters, ghosts or trolls. She was shortlisted by the Four Palaces Prize and received an Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future Contest. Publications include Cast of Wonders, Metastellar, Wyldblood, Sanitarium IV, The Theatre Phantasmagoria, Parabnormal, and The Periodical Forlorn. Anthologies include Odin by Flame Tree Press, Out of the Darkness by Wolfsinger Publications, R is for Revenge, From the Yonder IV, and A Krampus Carol.

Get In! by Steve Calvert

“Get in!” she said.

“No,” replied the boy, “I’m not supposed to accept lifts from strangers.”

“But it’s raining,” the woman in the car said. “You’ll catch your death.”

The boy looked at the rain bouncing from the ground. His feet were already wet inside his shoes, but he knew he wasn’t supposed to get into cars with strangers. He peered up at the woman. It was dry in the car and he could feel warm air coming from the door she had swung open. She was a very pretty lady, and she was smiling.

“If you were my son,” she said, “I wouldn’t expect you to walk home in weather like this.” She glanced through the windscreen and down the road that was quickly resembling a river. Little creases formed on her forehead.

Cold and wet, the boy shivered. It was a long way home. He wasn’t supposed to accept lifts from strangers, but he got into the car, anyway. The lady leaned across and helped him to shut the door. She smelled of flowers.

***

“Get out!” she told him.

“No,” said the boy. “I don’t know where I am. I’m scared and want my mummy.”

“But there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she assured him. “It’s warm inside, and, if you stay out here, you’ll freeze.”

A cold draft rushed in through the open door. The boy’s clothes were wet against his skin. The house did indeed look warm. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, and, through the window, he could see the orange glow of a fire.

“If you were my son,” she said. “I would take better care of you.”

She had a kind voice, and the boy could hear something big moving about in the woods. He was scared and needed his mummy, but he got out of the car, anyway. The lady closed the door behind him, reached down, and took hold of his hand. She had very soft skin that smelled of flowers.

“Come in,” she said. “Sit down and make yourself at home.”

“Okay,” said the boy, “but can I call my mummy?”

“Not now. Later. Your clothes are drenched. Take these and put them on, or you’ll likely catch your death.”

The boy took the clothes and looked at them, wondering who they belonged to. He could hear someone moving about upstairs and was scared. He wished he’d listened to his mummy.

***

“Get off!” he screamed. “No! Please leave me alone. I want my mummy.”

“She’s not here. It’s too late,” they said, and took him in their arms. He was a very pretty boy, and they buried him among the flowers.

Picture of Steve Calvert

Steve Calvert

Steve Calvert is a British writer. His short stories have appeared in various online and offline publications including Hub, Arkham Tales, The Rose and Thorn Literary Ezine, and on the Pseudopod and Creepy podcasts.

Howl by Albert N. Katz

I saw, if not the best, the most curious minds of my generation hungry, naked, and mad, looking for that fix when the moon was high and round and yellow as a dead man’s skin. Minds so curious and hungry they did what foolish young men and women have always done, and wandered into the unknown where some returned changed, and some returned no more. Most were unknown to me, and tragically, one was much too dear.

It was for the longest of times, nights filled with magic and joy and unbounded strength, wasn’t it, love? At least for a time. And yet here we lie you and I, in the bowels of Mexico City, you, running your fingers through my hair, and me holding a gun loaded with two silver bullets, and, God be blessed, Emily, safe in your sister’s home. What a long spiral road we took to get to this place. What a precipitous fall. But in the end, we knew, didn’t we, that this day would come? And we would have to pay, after all, spending more of our days as humans and not as the other.

Shhh. Don’t say anything. Just run your fingers through my hair and listen again to the tale of when I first saw you. It was in the woods adjacent to the family’s hunting lodge, where villagers dared not go, and yet, there you were, walking on that fateful, dreadful, wonderful evening. The moon was full, and I was in thrall to the hormones coursing through me. Even then, fur bristling and teeth bared, I knew I could not do what was driving me. You were the most beautiful creature that ever I had seen, dressed in a white silk robe, a cape billowing behind you in the breeze. Glowing as you were in the moonlight, I thought I was seeing a goddess. I watched you quietly from the deep grass as you bent down, picking mushrooms, placing them in the basket you carried, and oh, how I could see the red of your blood flowing through your veins, a ruby river calling to me, stronger than it had ever called before or since.

 I have no doubts that had it been anyone else, I would have just leaped and gorged until I could drink or eat no more. How can one resist the thrill of the hunt, knowing that anyone in my path could be mine for the taking? That is how we are driven when the bloodlust is upon us, isn’t it, love? But as you went about your task, looking so pure and innocent and full of life that, even with the bloodlust upon me, I could not bear to bring that vitality to an end even though I was hungry. Oh-so-hungry and the cracks in my soul were crying for relief. I howled loud and clear, wishing to warn you, hoping you would run away, far away, and I could go seek my sustenance elsewhere.

But you, my love, did not run. Or cry. Or beg. Like so many before you had. No, you smiled. And walked. No, not walked—glided, yes glided—toward me, slowly undressing as you approached until, beside me, your chocolate-brown skin so naked, your human body, oh so perfect in the moonlight, you came right up to me and petted my head as if I were the family dog. I heard for the first time your voice like a church bell echoing through the mist.

And those words! “I have dreamed of you, and I am ready.”

Do you remember how I howled a second time, more silently, more happily? I was giddy, no doubt of that. I knew with certainty you were to be mine forever, and I yours.

Then you spoke again, in words as clear and pure as a nightingale’s song. “Do it!”

And I did, biting you deeply on your left breast. I still can hear the ecstatic sigh you made and can see your blood splatter like raindrops. You slumped to the ground, and I ran away, stalking the nearby farms and fields to find a less willing and attractive victim. I found a young man, a boy really, tending his flock and I attacked him with a viciousness novel even for me. God forgive me. Even now, especially now, I can see the frightened look in his eyes and can smell his blood as I tore off chunks of his skin in utter glee.

The next day, I joined the mob looking for revenge, because we are always hunted afterward. We are, after all, human most of the time, with different fragilities and wishes. We came upon a wolf and killed it. Poor, dumb, magnificent, innocent beast.

But that was the next day. After my kill, I returned sated to find you sitting near where I had left you, leaning against a large oak. I lay down beside you while you ran your fingers through my fur, slowly and sensually, much like you are doing now. You looked at me wistfully, murmuring, “I always wondered what form my nahual would take,” tying me to the ancient knowledge of your people.

We stayed that way, you with your hand in my fur and me lying contentedly beside you, until the sun rose, and I transformed painfully back into my human frame. You were still so weak and helpless that I had to help you put on your clothes piece by piece, covering your perfect body again with your white robe, embellished now by blood droplets.

Oh, how slowly you moved, tired from the change that was already growing inside you. I carried your weakened body in my arms to where I had left my clothes, and then dressed in the style of the day, I, a young man of wealth and position, carried you to my hunting lodge from where I would take a rifle and the next day kill a wolf.

From that evening until this sad, sad day, you have been my companion, my partner in life and in the hunt, blood of my blood, light of my soul. I nursed you, caressed you, as your body was wracked with pain, your mind full of sensations never experienced by mere humans. And you, like all our kind, slowly filled with the knowledge that we who are the hunters are the true hunted, that anyone we meet can be our prey, can be our killers.

When next the moon was full, and the change complete, you and I went out hunting together for the first time, as joyous as pups, the bloodlust and the love-lust strong within us, running wild. You should have seen yourself, as beautiful in that frame as you are in human guise. Your pelt golden-red like your hair, sleek and shiny. Oh, how we ran, you in front of me, me barely keeping up with you. What joy! And oh, how your fur glowed in the moonlight. You were so wonderful, so alive at that moment. When we saw the herdsman, you leaped as he stood frozen by the sight, and you tore his neck as if you had practiced your whole life. I never had a meal that tasted so sweet. And then we went forth killing indiscriminately, as happy in our skin as the sea is blue.

May God forgive us.

Of course, the next day, I joined the hunt to find a wolf to pay for our happiness and for our sins. There always must be a reckoning, doesn’t there, my love?

My parents disapproved of my choice of mate, as I fully expected. They were, and are, bigots and snobs, blinded by their wealth and privilege. They accepted you begrudgingly later, only after Diego and then Emily were born.

Forgive me, love, his name just slipped out. Hold me. Hold me. Soon we will be at peace.

I think it was a relief to them that I agreed so readily with my father’s suggestion I take my mestizo woman, as he called you, and oversee the family interests in Mexico City. I have never forgiven them for the disrespect with which they treated you and our children, pure and innocent, when they were born. But in the end, Mexico City was the perfect place for you and me, near to your family and all that the place offered, awash in ancient spirits who still walked the land. It was a magical place in a magical time, rich in the history of our kind. A place where the past is only partly hidden, slowly sinking and rising from the debris of time.

Your mother and father greeted us with open arms, but your sister Juanita, having the second sight, looked at us in disgust and fear, always crossing herself when she saw us. I smile at her look, even now. When the children were born, she was adamant that they be baptized and wear the crucifix necklace she gave them. We had no qualms in doing so—such baubles have no power over us.

I said the words renouncing the devil, and why not? We are all God’s creatures, are we not, living our lives as He made us, or permitted us to be made?

I am glad for Juanita and her superstitions. Emily will be safe in her embrace.

Being the scion of the Garcia family fortune, we lived in style and moved into a spacious house in the aptly named Coyoacán district where, it is said, that nahual in the form of coyotes walk in the mist, snatching young children they meet on the way.

What a time it was. The dances, the parties, and you, so beautiful, truly the envy of every other woman in the city.

Mexico City! Such a perfect place it was for the hunt. Teeming with people, many without families of their own. A feast. When the moon was full and the bloodlust upon us, we moved through the shadows, sleek and quiet, until we came upon a solitary figure or two and pounced and ate until the sun started rising, and we two, our fur covered with blood and gore, made our way back to our casa.

The next morning, the cry of “Nahual!” rose in the streets and we joined our neighbors in hunting down any poor creature we found.

Always the hunter and the hunted.

But even in Mexico City, where the past is so present, and the spirit of the dead lies upon the land, the magic had to end. For us, you and I, love, it came with the birth of Diego and then of Emily. Yes, I will mention his name now. It is time.

How we nurtured them, protected them, kept hidden from them our secret lives, wanting for them a life where they would not be obligated to hunt, and then become the hunted

Do not all parents want for their children a life better than the one they lived?

We succeeded so well for such a long time, that even Juanita ceased her trips to the market for protective elixirs passed down for hundreds of years. Ah, humans, poor things, never know how those preparations cannot harm us or keep us at bay.

They were so beautiful, our children. So strong. And yet, they too had minds so curious and hungry that they did what foolish young men and women always have done and wandered into the unknown.

But why, oh why did they wander so on a night when the moon was full and our bloodlust so strong?

And why, of all the places they could go, did they go where we hunted?

God forgive us but when we came upon them, we saw only the blood moving through their veins calling to us and we did as we do when the bloodlust is upon us and our mind focused just on the joy of the kill. How we leaped and poor beautiful Diego lay on the ground with his throat bitten open, his head almost severed, his life bleeding away in the shadows of Mexico City. Slowly recovering our senses, we saw Emily, her eyes wide with horror, turn and run to your sister’s house for protection. At least we had the sense to not pursue her.

We, the hunters, must pay, mustn’t we? Always. And today is that day. Cry, my love, cry. I will join you. It is the time to mourn and to bring our memories of joy and the weight of our sorrow to an end.

There are two bullets in this gun. I do not know if we need silver when we are in our human frame, but you and I cannot take a chance that we will survive, and rise to kill and kill again when the moon is full, and the sky is red. Or take the chance, no matter how slight, that perhaps one day we might slaughter Emily, as we did Diego, as we mindlessly did with so many other innocent youths.

Farewell, my love. Think of me as I pull the trigger. When I turn the gun on me, I will dream of you dressed in a white silk robe, a cape flowing behind you in the breeze, and glowing in the light of the full moon, your pelt as golden-red as your hair, sleek and shiny.

Running, oh so swiftly and so free.

Picture of Albert N. Katz

Albert N. Katz

Albert N. Katz (he/him) retired from academia after 43 years working as a cognitive psychologist and started a new career as a writer of short stories and poetry. His stories and poems have appeared since in horror, science fiction, fantasy, murder and literary magazines or anthologies. With respect to his speculative writing history, they can be found (or accepted for publications) in magazines, such as Allegory, Everyday Fiction, The Hungur Chronicles, Illustrated Worlds, Punk Noir, Spaceports & Spidersilk, and Twenty-two twenty-eight., and in various fantasy or horror themed anthologies.

How Beautiful Things Disappear by Euan Lim – Part One

“Are you finished?”

“No. Be patient,” Alexandru scolds. He shifts, lifting Vasile’s arm out of the way and adjusting his grip on the ballpoint pen. They sit next to the mussed bed, the floor around them cleared of rubbish, their suitcases and twin violins resting in front of the window obscured by the dirty canvas curtain they’ve kept closed since sneaking in.

Vasile inhales, his head tilting back and eyes slipping shut. The wood beneath him has long since lost its varnish and is rotting at the corners; cold from the damp earth below seeps into his bare thighs and palms. The tip of Alexandru’s pen just barely dents his skin, black ink curling over his ribs and making him shiver, as if he could shake off their problems—if only for now.

Being fired from their jobs.

The alarming state of the dilapidated house where they were staying temporarily.

The quickly declining number of leu bills in their wallets, even though they’d withdrawn everything from their bank accounts.

Alexandru’s hand is warm and firm as it smooths over Vasile’s chest, the pen trailing after in long, sweeping strokes. “Sometimes I wish we were birds,” he says softly. “We wouldn’t have to worry about what people think of us. We could fly away to the Pădurea Hoia, and Muma Pădurii would take us in.”

“Because we’re broken things?”

“No,” Alexandru says. “No, we’ve never been broken. It’s the rest of the world that is. But I think she’d protect us. One outcast helping another. Don’t you agree?”

He doesn’t, but rationality could hardly dim the flame of Alexandru’s unwavering fancy.

The air around Vasile grows colder as Alexandru sits back on his knees with a soft smile, Brown hair curls messily around his round face, any slapdash attempt at styling ruined by how much Vasile had been running his hands through it a half hour ago.

Iată,” Alexandru whispers.

Vasile peers down at his side and the owl scribbled there—feathers splayed wide and half-finished, the mess beautiful in a way only Alexandru could make it.

“My turn,” Vasile says, and Alexandru holds out the pen.

Vasile takes it, and Alexandru leans back against the bed’s ugly, fading quilt, sewn in pale greens and purples, raising his arms to rest over the mattress. The pose pulls his breasts nearly flat, dark bruises there a mocking facsimile of the colors of the quilt, standing out starkly against pale skin where he’d bound wide strips of cloth that morning—again—to disguise his chest.

“I wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself when you do this.” Vasile touches a stripe of skin rubbed raw from chafing.

Alexandru’s lips twist wryly. One of his knees comes up, almost self-consciously, as if to shield himself from Vasile’s eyes. “It’s fine, Valy. What other options are there? There’s no one else here who can advise me on what I’m supposed to do with… this, until I get it fixed.”

When Alexandru won’t meet his gaze, Vasile leans down and kisses one of the bruises, feeling the even rise-and-fall of Alexandru’s quiet breaths, dragging his lips lightly along skin as Alexandru’s hand winds into his hair.

He lets Alexandru hold him there for a moment, their hearts beating together, then presses a last, delicate kiss to Alexandru’s sternum. Alexandru cups Vasile’s chin as he draws away, a smile hovering at his lips and creasing the corners of his eyes before he lets go.

Vasile leaves the topic alone, reaching over to his backpack and pulling out the photo he always uses as reference. He settles his hand on Alexandru’s waist and begins to draw, avoiding the yellowing edges of bruising as he shapes the heart face of a barn owl, then its broad wings flared wide. Alexandru tips his head back lazily, his pulse fluttering under Vasile’s touch like a caged bird trying to fly.

“Notice how I don’t ask you when you are done, even though you’re taking longer than I did,” Alexandru murmurs after a while.

Vasile snorts. “I’m doing mine right,” he says. “It actually looks like what it is. Yours is so sketchy. It could be a bat, for all I know. Did you draw Dracula on me?”

Alexandru laughs. The unexpected movement makes the pen slip, an untoward mark skidding after it.

“You made me mess up!”

“Just draw over it.”

Vasile makes an angry noise. “I can’t. It’s not going to look like the photograph now!”

“It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy, motănel. It’s not sheet music for the orchestra. Just make up what comes next.”

Frustration looping tight around his neck, Vasile licks his thumb and scrubs at the mistake. That only makes it worse, smudging the ink like another bruise on Alexandru’s skin.

Alexandru sighs, fondly exasperated, and tugs the pen from Vasile’s tight grip. Pulling his breast out of the way with his other hand and craning his neck to see, he begins jotting down swift lines, sectioning the owl’s wing into its different parts, feathers appearing like slashes of moonbeams over the bars of his ribs.

“There,” he says, scrawling a narrow, sloppy ‘V’ for the beak. The drawing is chaos but, as always, Alexandru embraces it in a way Vasile never has been able to. “See?” He holds out the pen.

Vasile takes it.

Rising to his knees, Alexandru reaches onto the bed and pulls on his shirt. “Don’t frown, Valy,” he says, putting a hand on Vasile’s cheek.

Vasile glances away, sullen. “It didn’t go how it was supposed to.”

Nothing in the past month has been going like it was supposed to. They should have been at home in their separate apartments in Andrei Mureşanu, then meeting at a café the next afternoon before heading to orchestra rehearsal to practice Tchaikovsky—Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. Even before the two of them had been fired, Vasile hadn’t been picked for the solo, and upset still simmers, thick and hot, under his conscience.

“But it still worked out, didn’t it?” Alexandru’s eyes shine treacle, illuminated by the naked lightbulb that buzzes yellow at the center of the room. “It all works itself out in the end. We’ll get through it. Three days from now, we’ll fly from here to New York and be free. We can find other people like us, and we won’t have to be scared anymore. I’ll get proper treatment, and we can be who we are without always having to watch over our shoulders. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.

“Here.” Alexandru reaches over to his wallet, separating a bent plane ticket from its partner, where they were hidden behind green lei. “I forgot to give this to you yesterday. You should keep yours, in case something happens to me.”

“Don’t say that,” Vasile says sharply. “Don’t say it. It’ll always be you and me.”

“Just in case. I don’t want to be the one making you stay if I lose them. It’s only a precaution, Valy,” he promises. He touches Vasile’s jaw lightly, his gaze so hopeful it makes Vasile ache. “I can’t wait to start a new life with you.”

He hesitates. Alexandru always speaks of America with such reverence, hope lighting up his face, while Vasile clings to terror every time the subject comes up. How could he leave Transylvania and never come back, even if his home has never treated the two of them with anything but indifference bordering on cruelty? The tickets have been tucked away in Alexandru’s wallet since last night, when Alexandru came back from meeting an acquaintance’s friend’s cousin, who’s a travel agent. With their departure now imminent, Vasile has been trying in vain to memorize the red-roofed and pale-walled houses of Cluj-Napoca; the chatter of families eating outside on restaurant decks fenced with wrought iron; the smell of petrichor when Alexandru convinces him to take walks along the edge of the Pădurea Hoia after it rains, despite Vasile feeling eyes on the back of his neck every time they go out together. He never tells Alexandru, who’s always busy scattering seeds for the red squirrels to curry favor with Muma Pădurii.

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” he whispers. Something flickers across Alexandru’s face—frustration, worry, disappointment—before it vanishes so quickly Vasile knows he’s imagined it.

“Of course you are,” Alexandru says assuredly. He presses one of the plane tickets into Vasile’s palm.

Closing his eyes, Vasile brings their hands up to kiss Alexandru’s wrist, then his thumb, then his fingers, which smell of ink and salt and faint flowery soap.

Alexandru’s answering smile could have enchanted concert halls and concert halls full of people to love him.

“Okay, Sandru,” Vasile whispers.

***

“I have to get something today,” Alexandru says the next afternoon while they’re still in bed. “Before we leave Donath.”

Vasile lies curled around him comfortably. Like this, he can revel in what they’d never had while living apart, before everyone had found out who they were. All this, because Alexandru had rapped on the door to Vasile’s apartment four evenings ago, terrified of the men who’d been following him for several days. They’d packed up and fled for somewhere more clandestine, not really caring where they ended up—it isn’t as if they have to worry about a commute to their jobs anymore.

“Okay,” Vasile says sleepily, nosing into Alexandru’s hair and reaching for his hand, twining their fingers together—Alexandru’s shorter than his own but just as strong.

“It’s a little outside the city, so I’ll go alone. I know you’re sick and tired of this dump, so if you take the bus to Old Town, I’ll meet you there. We can eat at Vărzărie and book a hotel. I’ll even go by my old name, so we can share the room.”

“Okay,” Vasile agrees.

“And before we leave for America, we can go busking and play a feciorească duet together. As a farewell to Romania,” Alexandru adds slyly.

Absolutely not.”

Alexandru reaches back to smack Vasile’s chest. “Măgar! Why?”

“I do not busk,” Vasile says stiffly. “Nor do I play folk music.”

I am Vasile Nicolescu, former second chair of the Transylvania State Philharmonic Orchestra, and I do not busk or play folk music,” Alexandru mocks in a sing-song voice. “I spend my weekends perfecting my page-turning technique for the concertmaster—”

“And you’re so obsessed with folk, why did you even accept that position as assistant concertmaster?” Vasile catches Alexandru in a headlock, scrubbing the top of his head with hard knuckles until he squawks.

Alexandru is breathing hard by the time he manages to thrash free, his hair sticking wildly in every direction. “Just to convert you.” He shoots a smirk over his shoulder as he swings his feet over the edge of the bed, which creaks dangerously. “Don’t act like you’re too good for it. I saw you looking in that bush along the Pădurea Hoia after I saw an iele there.”

“I did not,” Vasile sniffs, watching Alexandru stand and stretch, then reach for his folded clothes draped over the footboard and begin to dress. “You don’t want me to come with you?”

“No,” Alexandru says. “I’m just getting something back from Wadim. It won’t take long.”

Vasile scowls, the blanket bunching around his waist as he sits up. “You said you stopped talking to him after he called you mentally ill and tried to beat you when you told him about…”

Alexandru’s smile is too beatific to be anything but a mask of reassurance. “I did,” he says.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, Vasile. Take the bus to Old Town. If he finds out I’m seeing someone new, he’ll be angry. I’ll be okay alone.”

 “What do you need him for?” Vasile asks sharply. Maybe, yes, he’s jealous—the ugly feeling slipping over his shoulders like sunset, casting darkness over his eyes.

“I’m getting back the violin from my tataie that he took from me when we broke up.”

“You have one already.”

“Yes, from Hora Violins. I know. You paid for it, even though I didn’t want you to.”

“It’s not good enough?”

“It is. I love that violin. It’s wonderful. It’s just not the same,” Alexandru says gently, coming around the bed. He puts a knee on the sagging mattress, taking Vasile’s face in his hands. “You know that.”

“Am I not good enough?”

Alexandru’s face softens, a sad smile curving his lips. “You are, Valy. I’ll tell you that every day. You’re so good to me. I just want this one thing, that’s all.” He leans forward, pressing a light kiss to Vasile’s lips.

“That’s a lie,” Vasile mumbles. “You want a lot of things.”

Alexandru laughs quietly, leaning forward to rest their foreheads together, the tips of their noses brushing. “That’s true, isn’t it? But look what happiness it got me.”

Vasile presses his head harder against Alexandru’s, winding his hand behind Alexandru’s neck and fingering the soft hairs there, feeling Alexandru shiver. “Fine,” he allows. “Fine. But if you’re not at Vărzărie by sunset, I’m going to come looking for you.”

“I expect nothing less, motănelul meu.”

Though it’s past time for them to be getting up, Vasile yanks him closer so that they tumble into bed together again.

Picture of Euan Lim

Euan Lim

Euan is a first-generation author writing contemporary and fantasy fiction centering themes of cultural inheritance and queer identity. His work has been previously published by TL;DR Press, Improbable Press, and A Coup of Owls, and has been shortlisted by the Reedsy Weekly Writing Contest. When he's not at his desk, you can find him birding, undertaking various crafting projects, or planning his next travel adventure. More of his work can be found on his website.

Not All Who Wander by Damir Salkovic

We were not allowed to ride our bikes all the way out to the park. Not so close to dark, and not just the three of us by ourselves. We had our own reasons to avoid it, too. But we went anyway, carefully skirting the town’s main street, where we could be spotted by a nosy neighbor, or—worst of all—one of our parents driving home from work.

It was a dare to test our fear, a game to push boundaries. Less than a month into the new school year, the glorious, carefree summer was already behind us. Leaves were turning and the days growing shorter, the pleasant smell of bonfires rising on the crisp, cool evening air. The thought of the coming winter was making us restless, even if neither of us could put a finger on the exact reason.

Back then, I was too young to name the sense of emptiness and loss that came over me when the skies turned dreary and cold. When there was nothing to look forward to but school and rain and slogging through slush-filled streets. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten to know intimately over the years.

But all that was still in the future, like a wreck waiting for you on the other side of an approaching curve, and the three of us—Joey, Danny, and I—were speeding blithely around it with our eyes closed. We whooped and shouted and pedaled our bikes faster down the back lanes of the town. Here the houses were older and grubbier and fallen leaves clogged the gutters. Here rusted jalopies squatted like dead beasts in unkempt front yards. Here lived the kids who wore hand-me-down clothes and who often showed up to class with black eyes, or took unexplained sick days, or who dropped out of school altogether.

I knew it was getting late and that I’d be in trouble if I wasn’t home when my dad came back from the mill. I’d be the only one. Joey’s parents barely noticed him, and Danny lived with his mom, who would already be three sheets to the wind by this time. But my dad saw everything, and he wasn’t one to spare the rod. Still, the threat of punishment didn’t deter me in the least.

We redoubled our efforts until we passed the Congregational church and turned left at the hardware store. This was the town center, or what passed for a center in our forgotten, forgettable hometown. Getting off our bikes, we pushed them to the edge of the park.

It wasn’t much of a park. Now that seems obvious to me, but at the time it was the only park any of us knew about. Built during our town’s brief heyday in the fifties, the years had buried its lawns under successive layers of neglect. Many of the lights no longer worked, the grass was yellow and straggly, and local hooligans had demolished the benches, which no one had bothered to replace.

Teenagers would gather there after dark to smoke and neck and drink. But most kids my age hated it on sight. There were frights in its depths that a young boy’s imagination could run away with. Like the pond in its middle, where a fountain had once spouted, was a murky puddle that smelled bad in the summer, afloat with candy bar wrappers and beer cans. Like the thicket on the side facing the movie theater parking lot, where drunks and drifters snuck in to spend the nights.

But the bandstand—the bandstand was the worst of all, a focal point from which all the other terrible things seemed to radiate. Its wood was flaked and rotted, its roof sagging from corrosion and dead leaves and the memory of many winters of uncleared snow. Under the warped floorboards of its base, blackness yawned through a broken wooden lattice. Homeless folks would sometimes bed down beneath it, or junkies looking for a fix—if rumors were to be believed.

For the three of us, childish fear had evolved into fascinated horror because of something that had happened the summer before. I didn’t know then what force compelled me to dare my friends to visit the park after dusk. I still don’t know, and I don’t care to guess. They accepted it, and that was all.

We stopped a good distance from the bandstand, and I realized I’d miscalculated. Above the unruly trees, the light was already dimming; the heat evaporating quickly, like it does on warm fall days. But it wasn’t just the temperature that raised goosebumps along my arms and neck. The park was empty, utterly empty, which somehow made the shadows lurking in its corners all the more ominous.

“What now?” Danny said, his voice thin and reedy.

A glance at Joey showed me he was just as afraid as I felt. Last year, I would have suggested that we head home as fast as we could. But this year was different. This year I’d grown up and filled out, and I was ready to challenge Joey for the unofficial leader spot of our little group. If I chickened out, I’d lose the upper hand I momentarily had on him. It was a perverse feeling, at once giddy and sickening, and getting stronger as my own fear grew.

“We should check out the bandstand,” I said, forcing a casual expression onto my face and doing my best to sound dismissive. “There could be a bum down there. Or a wino. Maybe they got themselves a little booze stashed away.”

Joey didn’t take the bait. “It’s getting pretty dark,” he said. “Maybe we should head back.”

He looked at Danny for support, but Danny was silent, his gaze fixed on the tops of his dirty sneakers.

Triumph bubbled inside me, but I managed to hide it. I shrugged, made as if to swing my front wheel back toward the street.

“I get it,” I said to Joey with a mocking smirk. “It’s okay to be scared. Maybe next time, when it’s still light.”

“I’m not scared,” Joey said, his voice cracking on the last word. Embarrassed anger colored his cheeks. “You go ahead and do it, if you’re so tough.”

But it was a weak comeback, and all three of us knew it. The last of the sun had faded and darkness was advancing across the common. A similar darkness was spreading from some secret well inside me. Part of me wanted to stop whatever I’d set into motion. But a different part, the one with the sweet, poisonous voice, was now in charge.

“It’s cool,” I said, my insides swimming with giddy terror. “I got this. I’m not a baby, afraid of a little dark.”

Could I have anticipated what was about to happen? I’d like to think I was innocent and clueless. That I would have done it, walked my talk. No big deal, nothing to it. But to this day, part of me suspects otherwise. I knew, because no sooner had I said it than I wanted to take it all back.

Except it doesn’t work that way with words.

Joey and I both felt it. We shivered and backed away from each other. I glanced around and realized that Danny was no longer standing next to us. He was walking toward the old bandstand, his back stiff, his movements almost robotic with fear.

I wanted to stop him, to say it was all a joke. Maybe I did shout after him. But Danny kept going, across the blighted lawn, bending down to peer through the broken siding. He hesitated for a moment, terror evident in every inch of his stance.

Darkness swallowed his feet. Was he trying to crawl inside, or being pulled under? I couldn’t tell, because the shadows converged on him suddenly and it was hard to see. Next to me, Joey was saying something—stop, or look, or don’t—but his voice was a whisper that barely left his lips.

Danny was staring at us now, his face white as a sheet. Something moved under the stand. A sack, or an old coat, fluttering even though there was no wind. Fluttering, because no person could have been inside it, moving like they had no bones in their body. Our friend’s mouth was opening, shaping a cry, or a plea, but a vast dislocation had fallen over the park, or filled my head, and I couldn’t hear a sound.

Then he was gone.

Say what you will about our town, but almost every household turned out for the search. Everyone but the very young and the decrepit. The cops searched under the bandstand, combed the park over and over, but found no trace of Danny. Drifters and petty offenders in a ten-mile radius were detained and questioned, to no avail. The old pond was dredged several times. Nothing in it except knee-deep, mucky water, broken bottles, and used condoms.

There was no way a kidnapper could have subdued and made off with a struggling twelve-year-old boy without being seen. Danny had not run away from home, nor could he have gotten lost on the few streets between the park and his house. None of it made sense, but it didn’t make him any less gone. The case went cold after a while and remains unsolved to this day. Danny’s mom moved away shortly afterwards. I have no idea what became of her, and I never asked.

No one ever pointed the finger at Joey and me. They didn’t have to. People avoided us, whispered behind our backs. Parents would pull their children closer when they saw us in the street. Small towns can be like cauldrons, boiling you to death before you noticed what was happening. Invisible walls hemming you in and shutting you out at the same time.

Joey never spoke to me again, and after a few months, his family picked up and left too. I guess those invisible walls finally got to be too much for them. I stuck through it for high school, then let life take me away. First to one coast for college, then the other for work. Never settled long in one place, never started a family. I suppose I could say I wanted to do the responsible thing, but really, I was just scared shitless.

Because there was another reason we avoided the park. One that neither Joey nor I would admit to the cops, or to our parents, or to anyone else. Even to ourselves.

That summer we’d been loitering on the edge of the park, embroiled in a hot argument I could never remember afterward. With an inhuman howl, an apparition had risen from the bushes and charged at us, bellowing in incoherent fury. That was what it looked like, at least. Almost pissing myself in panic, I hopped on my bike and started pedaling. Joey was already twenty feet ahead of me, knees pumping like he was setting a world record.

But Danny, stocky, slow Danny, had frozen for a moment. As the shambling figure came for him, he reacted in panic, turning, stumbling, throwing his arms out.

Pushing the wino right into the street, into the path of an approaching car.

I’d heard a car brake, that awful meaty thump, a woman screaming like she was never going to stop. Then the engine roaring as the driver raced away. The first thought in my horror-stricken brain was Danny, and it made me turn back. But he was fine, if a little pale, standing on the sidewalk like he’d grown roots. On the road lay the bulky body of an elderly man, made even bulkier by the layers of filthy clothing he was wearing.

I remember his eyes were open, glassy under his long, greasy hair. I remember a bottle of White Lightning, miraculously intact, rolling on the asphalt until it came to a stop in the gutter. There was a bit of blood, but the man was alive. He was making noises in the back of his throat, and I thought of getting help. Then I thought about the trouble I would get in. Apparently, all three of us thought the same, because we picked up our bikes and snuck away.

Without a word, we let the wino bleed to death in the street.

None of us ever told. None of us ever mentioned it to the others. Because what was there to talk about, really?

“Just one of those things,” Lee Sobchak, the police chief, told me many years later. I was in town for a visit, and he was long retired, killing time in one of the few remaining bars. “Your buddy prob’ly just got spooked and wandered off. Got lost. It happens. Wasn’t no one’s fault.”

“Maybe it was,” I said. I was a little drunk, and a lot depressed, and feeling more than a little sorry for myself. “Maybe we asked for it. Brought it down upon ourselves.”

Lee’s gaze remained fixed on his beer glass, and his face was empty, hollow, like he’d aged a decade between two blinks of an eye. “What’s done is done,” he said, his voice old and quavering. “Ain’t no use digging up the past. Better to forget.”

But I can’t forget. Even if I wanted to, they won’t let me.

It doesn’t happen every evening, or even at the same time each year. But it usually happens as the days grow shorter. When they’re still warm, but that ineffable chill has started to creep in, and you know winter will be here soon. I’ll sense the light dimming, like a shadow has fallen over the sky, and I’ll look around.

Sometimes it takes me a minute, sometimes more. But eventually they’ll be there. Two figures, one tall and shapeless, the other smaller. Holding hands, outlined against the dying day. Too far away to make out their faces, but I’ll know they’re staring directly at me. Danny is still wearing the same clothes he wore when he disappeared, and over the decades that have grown ratty and threadbare. But it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need clothes where he is now. Those are for my benefit, a reminder.

I know this, just like I know there will come a day when I’ll tire of running. Or when they will no longer be content with watching from a distance. On that day, I’ll raise my head and see them right there next to me, unspeakable things reflected in what passes for their eyes. They will hold their hands out to me, and I’ll follow them into whatever space they now inhabit. Either because I won’t be able to say no, or because they won’t take it for an answer.

It’s getting harder and harder to wait.

Picture of Damir Salkovic

Damir Salkovic

Damir is the author of the story collection Collapse Years, two novels, and short stories featured in multiple horror/speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. An auditor by trade and traveler by heart, he does his best writing thirty-plus thousand feet in the air and in the terminals of far-flung airports. He lives in Virginia with his wife and a dynamic duo of cats. When not writing fiction, he reviews horror movies, discusses books, and shares unsolicited opinions on just about everything on his blog, Darker Realities.

The Hinge That Shouldn’t Have Moved by Fendy S. Tulodo

At 3:12 a.m., the cabin door creaked—but the wind had died an hour ago.

Harvey didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. The fire had smothered itself into coal-colored silence, but something—something—moved. Not outside, not scratching the walls like the wolves did last winter. It was inside. Just past the trapdoor.

Three days he’d tracked the Red Stitch. Three nights without sleep, gut-fed on adrenaline and canned beans. Locals said it wasn’t an animal. Said it watched. Harvey didn’t care what they believed. His cousin was dead. Split open from spine to chin like a zipper peeled wrong. He’d seen the remains—steamed in the snow like slaughterhouse waste.

This was no job anymore. This was something else.

The hinge moved again. A stifled tick in the dark.

He cocked his rifle toward the basement and waited.

Harvey Wren had been a wildlife tracker for over a decade. Former Army, too—discharged after a mine exploded three feet from his squad. His hearing never fully recovered in the left ear. He’d tracked grizzlies in Wyoming, and mountain lions in British Columbia. Nothing ever made him afraid.

Not until the trail markers started vanishing.

It began near Crooked Elk Pass. Scratches—long, curved, four-pronged—appeared six feet high on spruce bark. No bear could reach that. The air smelled off. Not bad, just off. Like iron and burned wiring. The moment he stepped off the official trail, things changed. Birdsong ceased. Trees leaned wrong. Moss curled inward.

The creature never left blood. Never left fur. But Harvey found other signs: a torn boot, half a jawbone. A child’s drawing impaled on a thorn. He’d walked that horror until it led here—a half-buried forest cabin, thirty miles from the nearest fire road.

The place had been empty when he arrived. Until now.

The basement door hadn’t opened.

But the air had changed. Warmer. Breathing on him. Harvey knew the smell of enclosed rot—whatever was down there, it had waited long enough.

He stood and moved slowly. Each footfall was planned, measured. He didn’t rush. Rushing got people killed.

The trapdoor’s metal ring was rusted stiff. He didn’t touch it. Instead, he poured a line of salt around the door and settled back, facing it.

Nothing. For an hour.

Then, at 4:22 a.m., it spoke.

Not words. Scraping.

Long, deliberate drags—like claws across stone, coming up the steps.

The Red Stitch was real. And it wasn’t hiding anymore.

Harvey remembered what the old woman in town told him.

“You don’t hunt it,” she said, crushing tobacco in a blue bowl. “It lets you think you do. It makes itself small until you’re close. Then it blooms.”

He’d chalked it up to superstition. But now, as the trapdoor bulged upward and the salt began to smoke, Harvey understood. He was never the predator. He was bait.

And it was time.

He raised the rifle, cocked it once, and waited.

The door didn’t open.

The fire pit hissed. Then something new entered the room—not a beast. Not a creature. A boy.

He couldn’t have been more than eleven. Filthy hoodie, shoeless, bleeding at the ankles. His eyes were all pupil.

Harvey’s grip tightened. “Stop there.”

The boy stood between the fireplace and the table. No footprints. No breath.

Then the boy blinked. And it wasn’t a child anymore.

Its jaw cracked open, far too wide. Tongue lined with thorns. The hoodie melted into its flesh, turning inside out with a sound like torn leather. Harvey fired once—center mass.

The thing staggered, hissed—not in pain, but disapproval. Like a parent catching a lie.

Then it ran at him.

Harvey dropped the rifle, grabbed the iron poker from the fire pit, and swung. The hit connected—something snapped, either bone or illusion. The creature collapsed against the wall. Screeched once. Twitched. Then peeled itself backward, slipping down the trapdoor like water down a drain.

Gone.

He didn’t chase it.

Instead, he locked the cabin, burned the salt ring again, and waited until daylight.

He didn’t sleep. Didn’t cry. He watched.

At dawn, the frost returned. The air grew sharp again. The woods settled into a new stillness—like something had passed.

Harvey left the cabin and hiked five miles until his sat-phone connected. He told no one what he saw. Just requested a chopper to retrieve the remains near Crooked Elk Pass.

He marked the cabin’s GPS in a sealed journal and buried it beside the road, beneath a split boulder.

Then he went home.

Three weeks later, Harvey sat in a cheap motel outside Missoula. Snow fell gently outside. His beard had grown in wild. Eyes darker now. He’d started sketching again—something he hadn’t done since Iraq.

One drawing kept repeating: a face. Not a child. Not a beast. Something in-between, with a hinge in its mouth.

The phone rang.

Blocked number.

He answered. Static. Then a voice. His cousin’s voice.

“Harv… you never saw it all.”

He dropped the phone.

And from the motel’s bathroom, a hinge moved.

Just once.

Not wind.

Not hinges.

Not again.

Harvey turned. Slowly.

And smiled.

“Come on, then.”

Picture of Fendy S. Tulodo

Fendy S. Tulodo

Fendy writes razor-edge stories about the fractures in the human soul. His characters claw through moral wastelands—rebels chasing redemption, power players toeing bloodstained lines. Every sentence dissects the raw nerves of choice when there are no clean hands left.

Department of Murderous Vixens by Don Money

“Number thirty-one.” The monotone call from the woman in horned-rimmed glasses echoes across the stark lobby of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I look down at the number thirty-nine ticket I’m holding in my right hand. So close, yet still so far away. At least I’m not the unfortunate lady with two young kids that just walked in and pulled fifty-two from the ticket dispenser. She lets out a heavy sigh as she realizes she’s in for a long wait.

“Number thirty-two,” the second DMV lady, a white-haired older woman who likely oversaw the transition from horse carriage licenses to motor vehicle registrations, calls out from behind the dark brown counter.

Several screams erupt from somewhere outside the building, and as I turn and look, there are a dozen people running past the windows. No one else seems to be paying much heed to whatever this commotion is that’s going down. It is the DMV, after all, and the unwritten and unspoken protocol is to just mind your own business until it’s your turn to face off with the license and registration gatekeepers.

I fumble with the tax assessment and insurance papers in my left hand, hoping for the hundredth time that this is all I am going to need to get my tags renewed. The door swings out jarringly, as if the person is pawing it open like they don’t remember how doors work. Absentmindedly, I look over to see who this latest victim of state governmental bureaucracy is going to be.

Right away, something seems off about the man standing there. He is the epitome of disheveled—suit hanging loose and ripped in places, hair messed up, slack jawed, and eyes bloodshot. Poor fellow must have just come from the tax assessor’s office.

His eyes roam hungrily over where the twenty of us sit waiting. My unease grows as he moans and shuffles toward the playful, squealing sounds of the young kids who sit with their mother. The man’s teeth gnash together and my fight instincts kick in.

Before I can make my move, the third DMV lady calls to the man in a gravelly voice that can only be attained with a pack a day habit, “Sir, take a number.” He keeps shuffling toward the children, so she waves her arm, points at the red ticket machine, and replies even louder, “Sir! You have to take a number.”

This catches the man’s attention, and he alters his shuffling path of travel toward the long wooden countertop. The man’s moan becomes more of a feral growl as he approaches. He bumps into the counter and with outstretched arms, swipes at her. Things are getting weirder with the man’s behavior.

“Sir, if you are here for the vision test, you still have to take a number,” Pack-a-Day says.

The sound of a car crash in the parking lot and more screams pull my attention in two different directions. The chaos outside and the man inside quickly become secondary as the door shatters open and dozens of people shuffle through the door. Bloody with torn clothes, they moan and advance on all of us gawking at them.

A young man seated in the middle of the waiting area is the first to realize what’s going on. He stands and yells, “Zombies!”

In the blink of an eye, the DMV flips from a nervous calm to full bore chaos. Screaming. Crying. Cursing. Praying. Running. Pushing. Shouting. Accusations directed at the government. Chaos.

The first zombie to reach the crowd grabs a man wearing a flannel shirt and drags him to the floor. The other zombies collapse onto the downed man in a fit of gnashing teeth and flailing arms. The man’s unwitting sacrifice has bought us a few seconds of safety.

I look around for something that could be used as a weapon and pick up one of the plastic chairs, holding it with the legs facing out to form a barrier. Several of the other able-bodied people follow my lead and we form an improvised shield wall. We may just be able to hold off the zombies until help can arrive. Surely the police department is on its way here to save us, but then I quickly realize this apocalyptic event must be happening all over the city. We are on our own.

The situation nose dives even more as the zombies finish their flannel appetizer, then eye us, the main course. Better to go down fighting, I think, and ready myself.

As the zombies close in, they are suddenly distracted by a series of bright flashes coming from the counter. The Older DMV Lady has swiveled around the license camera and is unleashing a blinding fury of flashes to distract the zombies. Along with the flashing lights, she unleashes a barrage of foul language that catches everyone, including the zombies, off guard. I am not sure if the lights or the profane use of their mother’s names are having the biggest effect, but the zombies turn and lurch toward her.

With the attack redirected from us, Glasses DMV Lady calls out, “Quickly, everyone over here!” She beckons us to seek refuge behind the tall counters.

Those of us with the chairs form a rear guard as the crowd is ushered through the half door to temporary safety.

Glasses introduces herself, “I’m Velma. Over there, working the camera, is Elenor. Please excuse her course language, she’s a big Samuel L. Jackson fan. And there, by the license plate cabinet, is Janice. What we need you to do is hang on to your numbers and as soon as we clear this out, we will open back up.”

Pack-A-Day, or rather Janice, has gathered a handful of vehicle license plates into her arm and turns back toward the zombies. “All right, Elenor, it’s your state authorized hourly break. I’ll take over from here.”

Janice jumps onto the counter and, with deadly accuracy, unleashes a torrent of license plates into the zombies. The plates sling from her hand, slicing into the attacking undead, decapitating some and dismembering others. I can’t help but wonder if this is something they train for at a DMV Boot Camp or if Janice is involved in some type of metal slinging projectile team. Her attack has decimated the front line of zombies. Unfortunately, at least thirty more have staggered through the door into the DMV.

Elenor laughs. “Oh no, Janice, if you think I’m going to let you have all the fun, you’re sorely mistaken. I will just double stack my breaks.”

Janice scoffs. “You can’t do that Policy 3.2.4 clearly states that no employee is allowed to double stack breaks during off-peak hours or between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“Unless,” Elenor says, “the station supervisor signs off on it. What do you say, Velma?”

Velma looks up from where she is gathering the blank stock of driver’s licenses at a desk. “Approved,” she says and pulls out a big roll of tape from a drawer.

I am astonished at what is playing out before my eyes. In the middle of the zombie apocalypse, the DMV ladies have turned into action heroes. I watch as Elenor unplugs the optical vision screening machine and lithely hops onto the counter.

“Yippee-ki yay,” Elenor yells out as she dives off into the horde of zombies.

Instinctively, I look away, not wanting to see the dismemberment of the old lady, but instead of hearing her cries of pain, I hear Elenor manically laughing. I look out and see that she is holding onto the cord and swinging the vision machine like a mace. The room is filled with the thudding cracks of impact to zombie heads. Like a scythe cutting wheat, a circle opens around her as she clears out the undead.

The ladies have put a hurt on the zombies who have attacked the DMV. A small group of six people decide to make a break for it and seek refuge elsewhere. Velma tries to talk them out of the idea, but they are steadfast in their decision. I decide to stay here to help keep those who remain, including the mother with the small children, safe.

Just as the group makes it to the one remaining exit that had not been breached, a tidal wave of zombies burst through the glass door and wash over them, pulling them into a surge of bites and scratches. There are at least twenty new zombies that came in this attack.

Elenor yells over to Velma, “They still had their number tickets. In accordance with DMV regulations, any tickets that are unused but pulled must be recovered.”

“I’m on it,” Velma says back.

I look over at Velma and discover she has been busy. She has used blank driver license cards and tape to create a suit of bite protective armor to cover her body. Velma, not content with just defensive measures, has secured three letter openers to her right hand, making claws like Wolverine from the movies. She has transformed herself into DMVerine.

Velma dashes through the half door in the counter and rushes into the zombies piled on the escape attempters. In a vicious manner, she slashes away at the outer layer of undead bodies until she exposes the poor victims. Velma crawls into the pile of death and disappears. The writing mass of zombies close back in over the hole Velma created. I worry that one of these noble DMV warriors has finally succumbed.

Seconds pass and it seems time is standing still until a fist with letter opener claws pops out the back of the zombie on the top. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Velma stands up in the midst of a pile of carnage, and her left hand shoots high above her head, victoriously clutching six number tickets.

Another rush of zombies crashes through the door behind Velma and threatens to overwhelm her.

“Run!” Janice calls to Velma as she provides cover fire through a barrage of metal plates, slicing into the encroaching zombies.

Velma starts for the counter, but her path to safety is blocked as a dozen zombies break through a window, cutting her off.

A whooshing sound picks up in intensity and Elenor yells to Velma to duck. Velma drops into a baseball slide and glides across the polished floor under the spinning mace of Elenor. The improvised vision machine weapon cuts into zombies like a mower blade through a yard full of grass.

Velma climbs back to her feet and spins around, claws ready to engage any threats. Elenor slows the mace down and lets the vision machine come to a rest on the floor. Janice throws two more license plate projectiles, dropping the last zombie standing. The trio survey the DMV and find no hostile forces left to oppose them.

In the doorway, several zombies stumble in and survey the scene, looking at the trio of deadly murderous vixens standing ready to defend their sanctuary. Then they turn and shamble away from the DMV.

Janice opens the counter door and ushers the others and myself back into the lobby. “Sorry about the less than ideal condition of the lobby,” Janice says. “Now please find a seat, and we will be with you shortly.”

Janice returns to the counter as Elenor collects up the vision machine and returns it to its rightful place.

Velma clears her throat and calls out, “Number thirty-three.”

Picture of Don Money

Don Money

Don Money writes stories across a variety of genres. He is a middle school literacy teacher. His short stories have been published in multiple anthologies including with Vault of Terrors, Trembling With Fear, Shacklebound Books, Black Hare Press, Wicked Shadow Press, and Black Ink Fiction, and in Troopers, Martian, Stupefying Stories, Saddlebag Dispatches, and Stygian Lepus magazines. Don’s stories have won placement in contests in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Bullshit, Inc. by Jeremy Stelzner

Look, we all get tired of actors repeating the same folksy anecdote on late-night talk shows, NPR interviews, and whatever the new hip podcast of the hour might be. It would be easy to dismiss Public Relations as just another generational grift—like social media “bringing us together” or targeted advertising making the purchasing experience more convenient for users. But Public relations—the art of bullshit for power—can be traced, in one form or another, back to the times of Ceasar. His chief political advisor, Cassius Stultus, was known to have started his meetings with the mighty Julius by employing the famous phrase hoc stercus tauri est sed—this is bull dung but.

What a word, but. That one little world contains all the power of a proper PR campaign. Sure, a pop star ran over a migrant while high on poppers, but they donated $15 million to a charity that gives puppies to disabled children. Sure, that award-winning director did fondle young actresses during their auditions, but he fully financed thirty-six independent documentaries and feature films on a wide range of social issues, ranging from the conflict in the Middle East to the secret lives of trans Mormons. Alright, you got us: the senator did embezzle $11 million from one of his constituents’ action committees earmarked for inner-city public school equity grants, but he said he was sorry and donated a chunk of those stolen funds to women-owned businesses throughout the tri-state area. But I digress.

On the day I got my big break at Onzin Public Relations, I was having a coffee in Promenade Park. A group of pigeons gathered by my feet. They danced around my ankles, merrily clucking up, pausing their prancing only to peck on a day-old poppy bagel. I enjoyed their company because they were harmless. They enjoyed mine because back then, I was harmless, too.

Two skinny teenagers in black wool caps sat on a neighboring bench listening to music on their earpods while slurping whipped-cream iced coffee shakes. They giggled, snorted, and smirked wryly while texting one another smiley-face emojis to indicate to the other they were happy.

I put on my sunglasses so they couldn’t see me judging them. They were just so locked into their digital bullshit, and the whole wool cap in the middle of August was so cringy. I tried to remind myself they were just kids. Harmless.

Two of the smaller pigeons wandered away from the group like as if were strolling through the park on a first date, when a hawk swooped down through the gaps in the skyscrapers. He snatched them up, one in each talon, and squeezed his mighty claws into their little pigeon necks. The hawk soared away. He used his hooked beak to make quick work of them, ripping open their insides and snacking on their limp bodies. Back on the ground, their pigeon kin kept on cooing as if the slaughter never happened.

Meanwhile, the teenagers beside me missed the whole thing because they were busy posting memes of a sassy calico cat giving the President the stink eye. They both laughed. I didn’t laugh, though. I knew better than to get involved with that shit. Plus, since I’d sat down, I’d spotted over a dozen Oyer & Terminer agents, those champions of the 208th Amendment. Back then, O & T was part of the Justice Department’s Social Protocol Division. One such agent dressed in a serious black suit, popped his head out from behind a tree. He lowered his sunglasses, made eye contact with me, and placed his finger to his lips. Then he shimmied from the tree, did a forward roll on the wet grass, and sat beside the kids. They didn’t even notice.

Car horns honked from the street. The kids didn’t notice. The lights on Sixth Avenue were green, but the traffic had stopped. The kids didn’t notice. Taxi drivers arched their necks from their open windows, screaming out marvelous obscenities. The kids didn’t notice. A black unmarked van swerved through the gaps in the stalled traffic, screeching to a halt beside the entrance to the park. Three men in black tactical gear rushed up to the teenagers. This, they noticed, but they even had time to text a scared-face emoji to the other, the men thrust black bags down over their heads, hoisted them up, and tossed them into the idling van.

As the van sped off uptown, my roommate Janine adjusted her designer dress, sat down next to me, and crossed her legs at the ankles.

Janine was slender and graceful. Every touch of her golden hair and every movement of her delicate wrists were deliberate and served as further evidence of her perceived grandeur.

“Did you just see that?” I asked, my foot tapping impatiently on the pavement.

“See what?” Janine asked, looking around.

“That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“What?” Janine asked again.

“It happened right there. Right in front of me!”

“Get to it already, Desi!”

“A hawk just ate those two pigeons.”

Janine shook her head dismissively while handing me a tomato and pesto sandwich.

“What do I owe you, Janie?” I asked, rifling through my purse, pretending to look for money I knew I didn’t have.

“You’re an intern, sweetie. Save your money.”

“I’m not an intern. I’m in the executive management program.”

“You’re an intern,” Janine corrected me. She lowered her sunglasses to flash me one of her signature bitchy looks. It was a look of judgment.

Janine was a teacher who found posting embarrassing stories about her students more profitable than actually teaching. She created an anonymous social media handle, @TeacherRevenge, which had millions of followers and pulled in thousands of dollars in ad revenue each month. So, rather than meeting with students, planning lessons, or grading papers, she spent her days at school peeking around lockers, hiding underneath chemistry lab counters, and spying on children behind upside-down newspapers like some kind of Looney Toon’s detective.

“How many times do I have to tell you? If you want a seat at the table, you have to play dirty,” Janine explained. God, she’d never shut up about that seat and that table. She’d lectured me about it earlier that week. I’d hobbled home after a ten-hour day of delivering mail, snacks, coffee, and important messages to important people who made sure I knew just how important they were. When I walked into the apartment that night, Janine was lounging on the couch. Her dirty snakeskin boots were hoisted up on the leather ottoman. She was finishing her second glass of Merlot and a particularly nasty post about a dyslexic boy in her class who got an accidental erection during his presentation on erosion. Janine cackled to herself in the warped pleasure of the child’s humiliation.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“I do?”

“It’s that blouse,” she scoffed. “Desiree, get yourself a serious suit already! If you want a seat at the table, you need to look the part.”

“My nana always said not to judge a book by its cover,” I said proudly.

“Oh, sweetie. No offense, but your nana’s an idiot. That’s not how the world works,” she said. “This is why you’re still an intern, hon. Of course we judge books by their covers. That’s why books have covers.”

Janine was right. That confident smile showed she knew she was right. She sipped her wine, smiled, stared, and judged me for being so naïve. I fled to my tiny room, closed the door, and sobbed into a pillow for half an hour, crying quietly so that Janine wouldn’t turn me into a punchline on social media. Late that night, I snuck out to Kohl’s on 82nd Street and spent my last hundred and fifty-seven dollars on a new blue suit and heels. I was wearing the new suit that day at the park.

Janine pulled her phone from her purse like an old Western pistoleer drawing their six-shooter. “Look, I’ve got to run back to school,” she said. “There’s a poetry reading this afternoon. It’ll be hysterical. I’ll post.”

She stood, shielded her eyes from the sun, and looked down on me.

“Nice suit,” she said.

I smiled.

“Where’s it from?” she asked mockingly. “Kohl’s?” Her tight ponytail bobbed in the sunlight as she sauntered away to hail a cab. She’d always remind me not to bother with cabs. She’d say cabs were for professionals. She’d say I was better off saving what little money I had by walking.

You know what? It turns out I hated Janine. I hated how she treated her students. I hated how she profited off her cruelty. Most of all, I hated how she could paint this portrait of herself so the world saw her precisely as she wanted to be seen, while I was still a fucking intern, illustrating my life with watercolors in a rainstorm that never seemed to end.

Once Janine was gone, I figured I’d better get back to work. As much as Janine teased me about it, I was lucky to land the job. Onzin is still the oldest PR firm in the United States. You might remember that during the Civil War, they famously represented both the American Cotton Growers Association and the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Look, it wasn’t what I initially envisioned for myself. I studied storytelling at City College. But in all my time there, the only thing I learned was that I didn’t have the courage to tell my own stories. I took the internship at Onzin, thinking I’d help others craft their stories until I was brave enough to tell my own.

Onzin’s headquarters were located on the twenty-third floor of the iconic Tractic Pharmaceutical Building in Midtown. Back in the day, world-renowned architect Jasper Warbles was hired at great expense to design the office. He was tasked with creating a series of disorienting conference rooms to ensure the scales of power were always tipped in Onzin’s favor.

Outside the office, I found three more pigeons hopping around a garbage can. They were searching for crumbs to snack on. I watched them for a beat, breathing in the calm before the storm. And make no mistake: Onzin PR was a well-financed tornado of bullshit. I swear to God, every time I stepped into that building, the world tilted on its axis. Down was up, left was right, and distortions of reality abound.

My office—if you can even call it that—was more like a closet with delusions of grandeur. There were no windows, just a small wobbly desk and a rickety wooden chair. One of the wheels had snapped off the chair months ago, and my many timid requests for a replacement went unanswered. When I was alone in there, I’d pretend I was being interviewed by a famous reporter, boasting about the perks of being an executive. I’d almost feel that swell of hope, until I remembered that in a place like Onzin, hope is strictly reserved for those who can pay for it.

After grabbing the coffee cart from the café, I hurried to Conference Room A, the one next to Conference Room Three. Donna Hawkins and Jim Merdas were at a long table, typing on laptops and swiping away on tablets while discussing the company’s most important client, the American Shooting Society.

Conference Room A had curved floors. It was only after some maneuvering that I was able to steady the cart. I placed a coffee carafe and a dozen warm pastries on the table.

“Destiny, the peppermint tea,” Donna Hawkins hissed. “We’ve discussed this.”

“I’m sorry, Donna. I forgot, honest.”

“It’s Ms. Hawkins, Destiny,” she corrected. “Don’t let it happen again.”

“My name’s Desiree, ma’am.”

“Who gives a shit?”

Donna certainly didn’t give a shit. Donna Hawkins must’ve taken classes at her Ivy League college to learn the art of making people feel small. Pretending to busy myself, I eavesdropped on their meeting, hoping to learn more trade secrets.

“Can we get to work, Donna?” Jim asked. Jim was a schlub. He wore an uneven brown beard, a backward blue Mets ballcap, an untucked shirt, and wrinkled khakis.

These two were like the odd couple, I swear. Donna sat upright. Jim slouched. Donna was clean. Jim was dirty. Donna used napkins. Jim used his shirt sleeve. They had nothing in common except their shared enthusiasm for grift.

“We’re in a real hole with the American Shooting Society,” Donna explained.

“Nah, we’re all set.”

“How do you figure?”

“School shootings dropped over the past two months, right? The cracks in the American Shooting Society’s public image are clean now. Job complete.”

“Jim, it’s summer vacation.”

“Exactly!” Jim crowed. “Their CEO likes numbers, and these numbers don’t lie. Zero school shootings in two months! Problem solved.” Jim placed his hands behind his head and leaned back in his comfy leather chair.

I wish I didn’t respect them, but Donna and Jim were like novelists. They could shape a narrative to their will. At Onzin, I learned that people like that get to tell stories however they want. People like that have real power.  

“Jim, you’re either an idiot or a genius.”

“Call me Jim Merdas, public relations God.”

“Using the third person now?”

“It’s warranted. Now, here’s what I’m thinking. I call the press and solve the problem, but then the A.S.S. won’t need to pay us hourly to fix the problem. So maybe…”

“I’m listening.”

“You know what they say about things that ain’t broke?”

“What?”

 “They say if it ain’t broke, then break it. Let’s pressure school districts to get the kids back into classes early. We say it’s because of something called, I don’t know, learning loss. Once those rascals get back in the building, there are bound to be more shootings; this is America, after all. Then, voila,” Jim said excitedly, clapping his hands like a magician finishing his act. “The A.S.S. would need us to clean up their shitty image again, wouldn’t they? And a ’round and ’round we go.”

The logic was nauseating. But people like Donna and Jim were masters in the art of distraction. They’d wrap up each lie in shiny paper and tie it up in a bow of silk ribbon. By the time they were finished, the lie looked so pretty that the recipient couldn’t smell the foulness of the shit packaged within.

“That’s some real outside-the-box thinking,” Donna said.

Our boss, CEO Skip Doodlebacher, would use that line. He was always on the lookout for what he called “outside-the-box thinking.” A portrait of his great, great, great grandfather, Mathius Doodlebacher, hung in the lobby. Mathius opened the firm nearly 300 years ago after making a fortune in the Dutch financial craze known as Tulip Mania.

Fighting to lug the cart out of Conference Room A, I stopped short when I spotted another O & T agent hiding behind the door. He had a pin on his suit lapel with an image of a gavel and a pen. He winked at me. Flustered, I pushed the cart into the hallway where I found Mr. Doodlebacher pressed up against the wall. He was hugging himself and hyperventilating. A framed motivational poster was on the wall behind him. It read Believe in your Selfie.

“Mr. Doodlebacher! Are you okay?” I asked, pouring some water into a paper cup for him.

“Thank you, dear.” Mr. Doodlebacher took a sip. His wispy, white hair was wet with sweat.

“Is there anything else I can get you, sir?”

Mr. Doodlebacher edged closer to me and whispered, “Is he still in there?”

“Is who still in there, sir?” I whispered back.

“The guy behind the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I used to love words, Desiree, I really did,” he said, pulling up his suspendered khakis. “There was a time when words like temerity or insatiable would really get my motor running. But now, with guys like that hiding around every corner, words terrify me. I have nightmares—actual nightmares—where I’m being chased down Fifth Avenue by the word oust. Oust? Can you believe that?” After looking in both directions to see if the coast was clear, Doodlebacher waddled off without so much as a goodbye.

I spun the cart around to get back to work and accidentally slammed into Frank, the only other member of the executive management program, knocking him over. Frank was a CrossFit zealot—maybe you know the type. He had a gift for weaving a CrossFit anecdote into every conversation.

“Sorry, Frank, didn’t see you there.”

I tried to help him up, but he didn’t budge. Tying to lift Frank was like trying to lift an iron anvil.

“Was that Mr. Doodlebacher?” he asked, standing.

“Yeah.”

“Did he say anything about the new position?”

“Nope. I should’ve asked him about it. I guess I just got nervous.”

“My CrossFit instructor says only the strong survive—that you can’t teach that kind of strength—that some people are just born alphas.”

“Mr. Doodlebacher? An alpha? I don’t think so, Frank. The guy’s so jumpy, like he’s walking around on broken glass.”

“Well, the carpets in Conference Room Room do have broken glass sewn into the fibers.”

“I hate that room.”

“Which reminds me, you want to take Conference Room Huh? this afternoon?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. They’re reviewing the Fairbanks account. It’s gonna be a thing. I just got my ulcer straightened out and….”

“Frank! I’ll take it,” I yelped, knowing that this was my shot.

You’ve got to understand, I was tired. Tired of the condescending looks. Tired of being called Destiny. Tired of the snarky comments about my hair, my nails, my wardrobe, my weight. Tired of wooden chairs with missing wheels. For fuck’s sake, I deserved wheels. I deserved more. After two years of working in that madhouse and living with a woman as ruthless as Janine, I’d learned, in order to get more, you need to take more.

 

Conference Room Huh? was where upper executives met. The room itself was triangular. Doodlebacher’s grandfather had a custom mahogany table fashioned to fit the bizarre space. His grandson, Skip, was at the head of that table with his legs splayed. He was practicing what, after years of observing men on the subway, I’d dubbed the manspread.

Doodlebacher’s eyes darted around the room. He was covered in American flags. His tie, his socks, his watch face, his pocket square, his pinky ring, and the seven pins he wore on his jacket all prominently featured the stars and stripes. He looked underneath the table in a panic, like a child checking beneath the bed for monsters, and jumped up when I pushed the cart into the room.

“Quickly, Desiree. Sit over there in the corner before he gets back,” he panted, pointing to an empty folding chair. He only calmed himself by engaging in a series of deep breathing exercises. Finally, he asked his creative team, “Shall we begin?”

The team featured ten Ivy-educated, multi-generational, multi-ethnic professionals.

Phineus Edgewood was one such professional. Edgewood, the Turkish octogenarian Director of Managerial Direction, was so frail that I often worried he’d break a hip by sneezing. He had wide, trusting eyes and always seemed to have a little bit of lunch stuck in his long white beard. “Sir, we were discussing the rebranding deal for the Indian Ocean.”

“Rebranding the Indian Ocean?” Doodlebacher asked. “Why are we rebranding an ocean?”

“It’s not okay to use that kind of language anymore.”

“Edgewood, I don’t think the Indian Ocean is named after what you think it’s named after.”

“Sir, the client thinks Native American Ocean would be more appropriate. Don’t you think that Native American Ocean would be more appropriate?” Edgewood asked.

With O & T agents lurking about, the team held their collective breath.

 “Let’s move on,” Doodlebacher said. That was his catchphrase of sorts meant to reinforce his position of authority.

“Very well, there’s a problem with the Fairbanks account,” Edgewood explained, opening a blue folder. He jerked his head around when Agent William Stoughton roared into the room and slammed the door to announce his arrival. He was in the same black suit they all wore, with the gavel-and-pen pin stuck to his lapel. Stoughton was the chief regional O&T commander. Word was he got the gig at the Justice Department because of his reputation for brutality, and his unwavering commitment to the cause.

“You’re in my seat,” he said, pointing at me.

I quietly rose and turned toward Mr. Doodlebacher for help. He was a good man. I trusted he’d do the right thing. That’s how he got to the head of the table, right? The head of the table? I was starting to wonder if I even wanted a seat at the table or if, like good advertising, I’d just been conditioned by people like Janine to think that I did.

“You didn’t start without me, did you?” Agent Stoughton asked, pulling out a notepad and a pen.

Doodlebacher motioned for me to move to the adjacent corner of the room. My job at that moment was to survive. If I stayed quiet, I couldn’t be judged. So I shut my mouth and hid in plain sight like an extra in my own movie while the scene unfolded around me.

“We were just about to start,” Doodlebacher said. “Can someone catch us up on the Fairbanks account?”

To my left, Elizabeth Newton wrapped her long auburn hair around her ears and bit down softly on her chapped lips. She forced her flush red face into a smile and cleared her throat. “Skip, as you know, the President’s production company, Patriot Hawk Films, has spared no expense on their big-budget reboot of the Pirates of Penzance,” she explained. “Our client, Heston Fairbanks, is the star of the final film in the Pirates of Penzance trilogy, Pirates of Penzance 3: The Shanty at World’s End. His public image requires some damage control.”

“Why’s that, Elizabeth?”

“It’s his role in the film,”

Agent Stoughton licked the tip of his pen.

“What’s his role in the film?” Doodlebacher asked.

“He’s the Pirate King.”

“That’s great! That’s the starring role.”

“Yes, but Heston Fairbanks isn’t a pirate.”

“I don’t see the problem, Elizabeth.”

She thought carefully about how to best walk the diction tightrope before declaring with the confidence of a carnival barker, “He’s taking the part from an actual pirate. You know how hard it’s been for them to find roles in Hollywood?”

 “Did you just say them, Ms. Newton?” Agent Stoughton interrupted, adjusting his tie.

“I apologize, Agent Stoughton. I meant to say sailors of fortune.”

“That might have been what you meant to say, but it’s not what you said.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not fair? This is America, Ms. Newton. You are, of course, free to say whatever you’d like, provided it doesn’t jeopardize public safety or we don’t like it.”

“But—”

“I have to report this.”

Elizabeth Newton’s face went pale. Her hands trembled. “Please don’t,” she begged.

“Pack up your things. They’ll be here soon.”

Her face turned white with fear as she fled the room. I should’ve been stronger. I should’ve stood up to those bullies. I should’ve screamed out, “What are we doing? You know what she meant!But I wasn’t strong enough. Not yet.

 “I’m sorry you had to see that. Let’s move on,” Mr. Doodlebacher started again. “We’re in a real pickle here. They’re tearing our boy apart on social media, and if we use social media to defend him, they’ll turn on us. So what’s our play?”

Donna suggested, “Let’s donate heaps of cash to pro-pirate charities like P.U.P. Pony Up for Privateers. We’d garner support from the non-profit community.”

“Not bad, Donna,” Mr. Doodlebacher said. Donna looked across the table at Jim Merdas and winked.

 “We should be careful though, Mr. Doodlebacher. Sir. You’ve never publicly stated you aren’t anti-pirate,” Jim said, winking back at Donna.

“When did I say that?”

“No, sir, you didn’t say you aren’t anti-pirate,” Jim explained.

“I didn’t say a lot of things, Jim.”

“Skip, did you just talk back to that man?” Agent Stoughton interrupted.

From the outside, they all seemed cordial enough, but as I watched them leaning forward with their wide, venomous eyes, it was clear they were plotting to slither around each other’s necks to move up that corporate ladder.

“No, William. I wasn’t talking back,” Doodlebacher explained.

“It’s Agent Stoughton.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then you admit it?”

“Admit, what?”

“You just apologized.”

“I apologized for the name, not about the pirates….”

Elizabeth Newton huffed back into the room. Her mascara was running. Her arms were scratched and bloodied.

“Stop the meeting!” she shouted through her snot and tears. “Agent Stoughton, you must take Mr. Doodlebacher away!”

“You have something to report, Ms. Newton?” Agent Stoughton asked excitedly.

“He’s a distant lover!” Newton shouted.

“He is?” Edgewood asked.

“I am?” Doodlebacher asked.

“And he’s a misogynist!” Newton added.

“Lizzy, how could you say something like that?” Doodlebacher asked.

“Well, Jesus, you’re a man, Skip!”

“I’m a man?” Doodlebacher questioned.

“We’ll look into it,” Stoughton said.

“I won’t stand for this any longer!” Edgewood yelled, rising heroically from his chair. “I’ve known Skip Doodlebacher for thirty years! He’s an American patriot. Look at his tie, for Christ’s sake!”

“Sit down, Mr. Edgewood, or you’re next!” Agent Stoughton warned. His team of O & T agents rushed into the room. “What took you so long?”

“We got lost,” an agent explained. “What kind of Conference Room is called, Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Exactly.”

The agents shrugged, black-bagged Elizabeth Newton, and dragged her from the room while Donna and Jim remained across the table, giddily texting away. Agent Stoughton squeezed past Edgewood. He took hold of Doodlebacher’s white hair and slammed his head into the table four times, breaking his nose, dislocating his jaw, and knocking him out cold. After sacking Doodlebacher, Stoughton wiped the old man’s blood off the table with his Department of Justice hankie, zip-tied his limp hands behind his back, and hoisted him over a shoulder.

“I’ll be back,” Stoughton said, striding out of the room.

With Doodlebacher detained, most of the executive team fled the room. Only Edgewood, Donna, and Jim remained.

“What do we do now?” Edgewood asked. “Onzin’s reputation is at stake here. We have clients. Someone must take the lead.”

I could hear Doodlebacher’s empty chair calling out to me. Here was my chance. My heart was pounding. I was breathless. It was like I’d been suddenly plowed over by an avalanche of hope.

Donna perked up. “It can’t be Jim. I reported him for speaking in the third person without cause,” she gloated.

Jim shot her a dirty look, one that suggested he’d put Donna in front of the annual American Shooting Society stockholder firing squad if he could.

“It can’t be me,” Edgewood said. “That job would kill me dead.”

“Didn’t you die in 2015?” Donna asked, giggling. She stood confidently, straightened the creases of her designer gray suit, and said, “Boys, the seat is mine.”

Jim toyed with his phone, looking up at Donna with a maniacal grin. “I’m sorry, Mizz Hawkins,” he said with a tone that made it clear he wasn’t actually sorry. “But your promotion might not be so smooth. I just reported you for mocking the elderly.”

“Prick,” Donna said, flopping back down.

“Bitch,” Jim said.

While the two of them daydreamed about how to best destroy each other, I stepped up and approached the table from the corner of the room.

“Where do you think you’re going, Destiny?” Donna asked.

“It’s Desiree,” I said, edging between the wall and the point of the triangular conference table. “The agents will be here for you shortly, Ms. Hankers.”

“It’s Hawkins.”

“Who gives a shit?”

I reclined into Mr. Doodlebacher’s lush leather chair. It was soft and smelled like opportunity. I eased into a healthy manspread and said, “Now, Mr. Edgewood, let’s move on.”

After the O&T agents disposed of Donna and Jim, Edgewood closed the door and locked out the madness. We spent the afternoon in a collaborative refuge of creativity and goodwill. We spoke openly about the Fairbanks account, without fear of judgment. We found truth in each hoc stercus tauri est sed in a collaborative refuge of creativity and goodwill. After a few hours, we had put out the fires.

“You’re quite good at this, Desiree.”

“Thank you, Mr. Edgewood.” I smiled so hard that the muscles beneath my chin cramped up. “That’s kind of you to say.”

“It’s getting late, though.”

I turned my neck toward the bank of windows along the hypotenuse wall. The tired sun was starting to set in the crimson sky. “Would you look at that? Time flies, I guess,” I said, checking my watch and brushing some lint off my new blue suit. I grabbed a blueberry pastry from the table and took a bite. It was sweet and salty and flaky and warm.

Edgewood packed up. “I hope to see you here tomorrow morning. Let’s say 10 a.m. in Conference Room Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Indeed.”

I left the office that evening with strong and steady steps, measuring each stride in the possibility of what tomorrow might bring. I tossed the remaining pastry into the trashcan in front of the building. The three pigeons from earlier were still there. One of them was merrily snacking on a pizza crust. The other two were dead, flopped over and limp, lying in a small pool of purplish pigeon blood. The dead ones had peck marks on their chests and wings. One was missing an eye. The other had his foot ripped clean off. They must have killed each other. What silly birds. I shook my head, stepped over their mangled corpses, and hailed a cab.

Picture of Jeremy Stelzner

Jeremy Stelzner

Jeremy Stelzner’s stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the 2024 Coolest American Stories, The Stygian Lepus, Across the Margin Magazine, The Jewish Literary Journal, The After Happy Hour Journal of Literature and Art, and Prime Number Magazine, where his story “The Thin Line” was awarded runner-up for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at the Harvard Extension School and teaches high school literature and journalism in Maryland. You can find his work on his website or reach him by email at jeremystelzner71@gmail.com.

The Hungriest Tuesday by Lawrence Dagstine

It was a starving town. In the Norman Rockwell-like setting of Canaan Hollow, being “hungry” had an unsettling connotation. The residents’ grinning faces and cheery nature showed all the traits of helpful neighbors, yet a cult-like shadow loomed over the community’s serene avenues. Unwelcome visitors, often arriving lakeside, were welcomed only on Tuesdays; the mayor or sheriff and his deputy practically insisted on it, and no traveler entered a home unattended. Truth be told, the townsfolk’s hunger was not for customary dishes; they craved darker sustenance. They fed on more than the goodwill of their neighbors.

On the Monday afternoon before the hungriest day of all, along the ragged dirt path between the asphalt and the public park grass, a child in tattered clothes with dried blood under his fingernails walked to Bobby’s Grocery, kicking a bitumen chunk ahead of him. After four blocks, he was completely absorbed by it. A breeze off the lake carried the sweet air of mud, rotting wood, a slight fishy smell, and other unexplainable decay. He detected the sweetness of old grease, a sharp whiff of gasoline, fresh tires, spring dust, and, from across Main Street, the faint essence of tuna casserole at the Bottomless Catch. A stout figure in blue overalls with an unkempt beard waved and disappeared inside. The boy sucked on his fingernails and kicked the chunk at the curb, then lofted it over the sidewalk to Maxwell’s Grease Shop. He followed the chunk a few more doors south to Bobby’s window, which displayed expired canned goods and a mournful cardboard pig marked with the names of cuts. An old man sat on Bobby’s paint-peeled bench, silver hair as fine as spun glass poking out under his green fedora, snoozing as the late afternoon sun reached under the faded brown canvas awning up to his belt.

He was not Bobby. Bobby was the gaunt man in the white apron who had stepped out the back door of the store, away from the meat counter, to get a breath of fresh, meatless air. He stood on a rickety porch that looked across the lake, butcher knife in hand, a stone’s throw away. The beach there was stony; the sandy portion where visitors docked was four blocks back to the north. A frail girl, perhaps one of his, stood on the diving dock, plugged her nose, and executed a perfect cannonball, and he heard the dull splosh. The sun created a trail of shimmering lights across the water. It was about to set. It would make quite a picture if you had the right lens, which nobody in this town had. And on top of not having a camera, nobody had a computer, smartphone, Wi-Fi, or other post-2000 technological gadgets, either.

The woods surrounding the twisting roads and hollow were filled with red oak, maple, spruce, pine, birch, and thick brush, except where cows were slaughtered. The municipal boundaries, nestled inside an old Native American canyon, included unpopulated pasture and cropland with wheat, corn, oats, and alfalfa—God’s way of keeping this farmland hidden and discouraging newcomers. It also housed about three hundred people, mostly in small white framed houses with buckets of blood and guts on their porches, large vegetable patches with curious gravemarkers, and modest lawns. Many yards featured cast-iron deer, small windmills, clotheslines, plaster animals like squirrels, lambs, elephants, and other eerie taxidermy. At each driveway’s end were white and gray painted rocks, a bed of petunias and wilted tulips with a white tire, and some had a shrine in the rock garden. The Blessed Virgin stood demurely behind an old 19th-century nunnery, her eyes averted and arms slightly extended, above a bed of peonies and marigolds. She stood on a tall brick pedestal, meeting the boy’s gaze with deep sadness for the world’s sufferings, including what happened on Tuesdays in this town.

It was a quiet community where you could stand in the middle of Main Street for much of the day without being in anyone’s way. Not forever, but as long as you wanted. It felt like a “township” or a “burg,” a sleepy place six days out of seven where life had a peculiar charm and moved leisurely. People drove old cars, nothing modern or fancy. You could find Studebakers, Ford Fairlanes, even one or two Bel Airs, and Dodge and Chevrolet Sport Trucks for heavy transporting. But what were they hauling? What was in the back of those pickups? The double white stripe was for show, as were the six parking meters. Six was all they could afford. Merchants called it downtown; others said uptown.

Most men wore their belts low, accommodating their prominent bellies, some large enough to have names of their own. These men were elders, and they didn’t hide their obese stomachs in loose flannel shirts. The excess adipose told a different story; they were still consuming or digesting something (or someone) over time. They let them hang free, patting and stroking them as they stood around and talked. The buildings were two-story red and whitewashed affairs, crafted by bricklayers with false fronts, trying to be inconspicuous. The first stories had newer fronts of aluminum, fake marble, stucco, and fiberglass stonework, meant to appear modern. But that was all deception.

There were telltale signs of decay in certain areas, if you knew where to look. The crack in the sidewalk that no one had bothered to repair. Even a few rusted, uneven streetlamps flickered uncertainly at night. The creeping ivy snaking up the sides of buildings, thick and stubborn, like a forgotten hand reaching for something it could never touch. This particular district was where they celebrated the most important day of the week.

The boy didn’t have a name, but that didn’t matter. He was one of the many children in Canaan Hollow who were patient, who knew what Tuesday meant. He understood how sacred this day was to the town. Things had happened long ago in this place, dark and terrible things, in the silence and cravings of forgetful generations. Tuesday was the day of ceremonial hunger beyond the stomach.

The boy stood there purposely, as the night cast long shadows over the crooked streets and footsteps stirred on the sidewalks. He sat at the edge of a bench and waited. Windows opened, doors unlocked. He watched as the old automobiles and once-empty square with its dried-up fountain hummed with eerie anticipation. Residents from nearby houses gathered in clusters, hushed voices mingling. A couple of nervous glances were exchanged; some voices pitched low like a choir of ghosts. At the heart of it all was the mayor, a towering figure with a face as unreadable as the stony cliffs looming over the lake. His eyes were dark, almost black, glinting with the same coldness that now chilled the air. Beside him stood the sheriff, a man with a flesh-embroidered hood and the broad frame of a bull. For a law enforcement official, his demeanor suggested someone who had long forgotten the difference between right and wrong. Together, they orchestrated the ritual in a practiced dance that had proceeded for decades.

Now pushing his way to the front of the crowd, the boy felt the static in the air teasing the hair on his arms. He stood with the townsfolk, waiting, watching. Here was a sacred rite that united the natives in ways outsiders could never fathom. This square was where the procession began, where the butcher’s table was placed, surrounded by old wooden crates and neatly arranged flowers, though the bright hues couldn’t mask this particular day’s dark purpose. There were even buckets to collect the blood. Everything was gathered and rightfully portioned. Nothing went to waste. The boy’s mouth watered at the intoxicating smell of roasting meats mingled with the earth and pungent bodies.

One young girl jumped up and down because she couldn’t see. She begged her mother, “Can I have a piece of that young girl’s leg? I’ve never had leg before. Oh, please, Mommy. She’s already dead. Been dead since last week.”

A guy in a newsboy cap looked at his watch and mumbled, “Almost midnight. Tuesday again. I never get tired of this. I’ll get the freezers cooling.”

Putting on meat-packing gloves, his partner added, “The spare parts, like the bone marrow, go in the warehouse. Don’t let one vat go empty. Everybody gets fed. That’s the rules. And save the bones. They can be ground down to make seasoning.”

Time seemed to stop moving. The boy heard the low hum of voices, the swishing of worn aprons, their black and white checks stained with red. The citizens of the hollow moved as one. Their footfalls were heavy but deliberate, each man, woman, and child guided by instincts older than the lakeside itself. Their faces under the blood moon had an oddly detached look, as though they had become part of something larger, something sinister.

The first new victim was brought forward, an old man unknown to the population. Judging by the whispers, he had come into town just a day before, a stranger standing by the lake with a rowboat, unaware of his fate. His face showed kindness, and his eyes held a youthful curiosity. Simple innocence made him easy prey. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, the wind tugging at his coat, and for a moment, he seemed quite happy, like a man who had unexpectedly found an oasis. He didn’t see them coming.

Bobby was the first to emerge from the shadows, butcher blade in hand. The crowd watched silently as the ritual began. There was no hesitation, no mercy in the butcher’s movements. Then other grocers, meat cutters in their own right, joined him. Two hardware store owners, toting hatchets, entered from the opposite side of the square, and a tall, lanky man with an ice scraper emerged from nearby bushes. The mayor gave a nod. His voice was soft but commanding, like the whispered wind carrying the scent of decay. Then he muttered ancient, hollow words while the sheriff picked up a giant woodcutter’s axe. A minute later, the other residents closed in on the man.

The boy felt his pulse race; hunger emerged within him, carving out his throat as if to make room. The ritual was performed with purpose and reverence, as if it were a secret handed down through the ages. The townsfolk treated the victim like an offering, their voices rising in harmony as they formed a circle around him. With wide-open eyes, the boy saw how the man’s struggles slowed until the ritual’s weight rendered his body limp. His blood thickened and pooled on the ground, then into the supplied buckets, completing a necessary detail that would satiate the town for another week.

Although life left the man, part of him was devoured right there in the square. Then he was dragged around the corner, leaving a trail of red. Smirking and glistening with another Tuesday’s evidence, the residents withdrew, fading into the shadows like specters satisfied with the night’s grim work. Tiny utterances flowed from those who remained, their whispers scattering into the renewed silence that blanketed the atmosphere once more. Yet, in the boy’s chest, hunger gnawed still.

As the town slowed back to its torpid rhythms, the boy walked home. His stomach churned, not with hunger, but with something darker, like a memory within a memory. The houses of Canaan Hollow faded into silence, flickering into darkness, mere paper stars against the fog-lit sky. Men ambled back to kitchens, rubbing overfed stomachs. Women with hollow eyes and lacquered hands lingered over pots that were too deep, bubbling too slowly.

Long ago, the boy learned that feasts always followed the Tuesday sacrifices; a grim tradition. The townspeople cleared their bowls for these special church sacraments, reserving them not for ordinary fare, but for a specific offering: flesh. But not just any flesh. It was the flesh of those who strayed too far into the hollow, deceived by the mayor’s sweet smile or the friendly chatter at Bobby’s Grocer. Sometimes, if the supply exceeded the demand, they would end up on the menu at the Bottomless Catch. This was no genuine kindness, nor was it kinship.

The boy stood before his home, a familiar green wood house. Peeling paint over mismatched shutters attested as much to his blood as to his home. Inside, the table was set. A sweet, pungent, savory aroma came from the kitchen. Mother, in her Heart is in the Kitchen apron, stirred a big pot with a large metal spoon. Her face was pale yet serene, and she had purposely stayed up as though this was a casual late night. Smiling at him, her eyes glinted with that familiar emotion. She never questioned the tradition, never asked where the meat came from. She didn’t need to. It was simply delivered to her doorstep, and it was simply life in Canaan Hollow. “Sit, my son,” she said sweetly, like the whisper of leaves. “Dinner’s up.”

The boy slid into his seat like he had done a thousand times, his heart beating strangely fast, but he paid no attention to it. This was no place for doubt. Only hunger. Only need. She set a plate before him; steaming, red meat drenched in gastric juices that shimmered in the light. The boy trembled slightly as he grasped the fork, but did not falter. There was a cadence to the ritual—an art, slower, more deliberate, and purposeful. He cut into the tender flesh, the knife slicing through it with affectionate ease. The meat was sheer perfection. Soft, warm, seasoned with something he couldn’t name. He brought a piece to his mouth, and the taste—God, that sumptuous taste—was like nothing else. Sweet, rich, almost addictive.

His mother watched him eat; her eyes never left him. He didn’t need to look up to know she was watching him, as she had every Tuesday, for as long as he could remember. The boy hesitated for an instant, the fork halfway to his mouth, and a thought momentarily entered his mind: What if I didn’t? What if I stopped eating, just one Tuesday? But, no, that thought receded before its roots could take hold. He clawed at hunger and unlocked what would happen if he didn’t partake.

After all, this was a feast, and he had a belly to fill.

The boy’s gaze followed his mother’s movement, crossing the room to the stove, then to the cabinet where jars of pickled vegetables and preserves sat. His heart stopped as he noticed something that shouldn’t have been there. Jars of excess meat. Slabs of it; fatty deposits too. Not the usual cuts of pork, beef, or chicken. No. These were different. The labels were faded, almost unreadable. But there was no mistaking the shape of the flesh inside. The subtle, almost untraceable curve of a jawline. The delicate curve of a shoulder. A vital organ or two… or three. A hand, frozen in time, wrapped in the amber hue of the pickling juices. A shudder ran through him, but his mother turned back with a jar steady in her hands. “We all pull our weight,” she said, her voice calm, as though detached from any emotion. “Without sacrifice, the town’s appetite is never fully sated. We each give what we can, and next week it’ll be somebody else’s turn.”

The boy’s stomach twisted in a way that had nothing to do with the food. The reality slammed down on him, and he finally understood what it was to belong to the hollow. And at that moment—the ritual still going on all around him—he knew there would never, ever be an end to the hunger. Not for him. Not for anybody. Not until the last bit of flesh had been consumed.

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Lawrence Dagstine

Lawrence Dagstine is a native New Yorker and speculative fiction writer of 30 years. He has placed over 500+ short stories online and in print periodicals during that period of time. He has been published by houses such as Damnation Books, Steampunk Tales, Wicked Shadow Press, Black Beacon Books, Farthest Star Publishing, Calliope Interactive, and Dark Owl Publishing. Some of his recent small press book releases include The Paraplegic, Small Favors, and The Nightmare Cycle. Visit his website, for publication history past and present.