Previously published in The Golden Key We’d been in the kitchen a long time and the food was all gone. Burckhardt found me in the corner where I’d appropriated a chair and was defending it with my life. His lips were raw steak below blueberry eyes. “You always do this,” he told me. “Pretend you’re…
Tag: Short Story
The Girls
There are three of them today, the blonde, the brunette and the new one – striped pink. Not that their hair has anything to do with the quickening of Gina’s pulse. So she tells herself, as she turns the corner from the bus stop and sees the girls loitering on her street. Gina doesn’t think…
This Blasted Horse
Shhyes, all of younosey parkerslurking behind trembling lacepottering in perms and dowdy dressesbutt outdon’t say itI don’t want to hear a word not a peepthing is, this blasted horse he doesn’t sleep and I’m not sure what he does when I sleepif I…maybe he squeezes into the lift, goes for a canter round the streets,…
Five Stories in Which the Devil Appears
I A woman is walking to her car with a bag of groceries. Her young daughter is waiting inside the car. The woman has instilled in her daughter a powerful fear of strangers. The daughter thinks a strange man will try to kidnap her if he sees her sitting in the car alone, so she…
98 Ianthe
Previously published in Shimmer. You used to be in the band; now you work on the asteroid. People you have to work with, they ask about it all the time when they find out. And they always find out – somebody always tells them. They all want to know what that’s like. “You used to…
Empty Frames
They are in a field in one of the two town parks. This is the larger, nicer park, and so this is the park they like to take their children to on the weekends so that they may soak up the things that magazines say they should be soaking up. Children like jumping in colorful…
The Keepers
Carla and I draw our blood in the auditorium. They collect our specimens in Dixie cups and send them to a laboratory. Do it! Do it! they urge us. We disrobe and I masturbate onto their microscope slides. My performance improves when I look at Carla’s breasts. My performance diminishes when I look at Carla’s…
Red Feathers
Seventeen-year-old JD DeMondo is positively flapping with excitement, straining against the straps on his seat. He is inside a giant metal bird. This bird is way up high in the sky. The sky is the best colour. This is JD’s first time on a plane. He got the window seat. He is on his way…
Infestation Miracles
Miracles swarm in the Mississippi delta in summertime. The blooms overwhelm me, reminders of what lives between the lived-in spaces at the limits of my vision. Where do they come from? Who created them? Are they a blessing from above, or a curse from below? Most importantly, should I call an exterminator? * A miracle…
The Lotus Eaters
The endocrines are absorbed by the altered receptors of the brain.Therefore the rodents start to cuddle. It is deeper than the sea, even if it’s a rodent’s brain.Though all mystery can be measured. There’s nothing in the body a surgeon’s knife can’t find. The subjects I’ve observed don’t even notice the needle anymore.We’ve put them…