Fantasy
All sorts of monsters live here, from Vampires and Werewolves to Selkie and the ever popular Zombies.
"You'll never believe what happened on the way over here." Bea fairly threw her bag down on the table as she arrived, throwing Gary's coffee mug into a spin. Brown droplets sprayed over his work shirt and dabbed the tabletop. Bea didn't notice and placed both arms right in the mess.
"No, what did you see?"
It never occurred to me to wonder why there are no more gods walking the earth. I've always known that there are.
In the old days, gods were born to gods, and even when one was born of human parents, the adult gods took it and raised it as one of them. But the adult gods have disappeared. Now when gods are born--a rare event, else we'd be overrun--it is always to humans. If the young god is lucky and smart, it learns to curb its power and live among us. If it does not, then we puny humans must deal with it ourselves.
"It's not my rule," said the sorceress, crossly. "It's a rule of magic, child. If you want a thing, you must be prepared to offer something you value as much in exchange. If you take my advice, you'll forget about this nonsense and speak to the young man on your own." She leaned on her hoe and watched the girl over her garden fence.
"But, mistress," said the girl, and began to offer some excuse she passionately believed in. The old woman sighed; there was never a drop of sense in them when they were fifteen and in love, or thought they were. Of course, if she'd had any sense herself at that age she wouldn't be living in this little hut on the cliff's edge peddling simples, so she tried to be kind. This latest girl was very pretty, although perhaps she didn't know it, with her gray eyes and skin a good deal paler than most of the people along this coast. She had probably been sickly and sunburnt as a child, and showed no sign of knowing yet that she'd grown into herself and could likely catch the eye of whatever man she wished.
"Where do you do it, young man?"
Peter glanced up from his book at the middle-aged woman--the only other occupant in the train compartment--and smiled.
There were four men in the tintype studio, but only one was dead. The dead man sat propped in a wooden chair, strapped into place. A duvet across the room held the two "cousins" who had carried him in for his portrait. The older and smaller of them sat rigid as a poker. The younger, slouching beside him, said, "We ought to of put him in the ground straight away, Doctor Bern."
"Phillip, your incuriosity is a constant astonishment to me," said the older one. He wore a neat tweed with just a few smears of blood and grave dirt on the cuffs. "I'd say you were entirely unsuited to this business if not for your talent with a hammer and stake."
There isn't room for us any more.
I ran my tongue over my fangs, scanning the crowd, inhaling the scent of warm meat. The thumping of hearts around me drowned out the cheesy Dixie Chicks song.
Then I saw her in vintage Gothic attire, her hair in a 20's bob. Crimson, horned-rimmed glasses sat on her nose as she sipped her Bloody Mary. With an outfit like that in a country bar, she was asking to be my dinner.
Mignonette yawned and slowly pushed open the lid to her coffin, unsure what she would find. It was not her custom. But then her real name was not Mignonette either, not from her old life where she had had a name filled with consonants, hard for those in the West to pronounce, as in Paris where she lived now. But what was a name? She was what she was, and if she should call herself "Mignonette," the ones she consorted with seemed not to mind.
"It fits you well, ma chérie," one had said to her only the past week. "Your delicate features. You say you had moved here from Eastern Europe. Does that make you a Communist?"
"You must come," she says. "My son is sick." Her hands, worn and wrinkled, twist together in the dim light that filters into my room.
"I'm not a doctor," I say.
Lucy bent over the shoebox, sifting through curling paper and cracked photographs. So many secrets. She'd been too young when her mother died. All she had now were these scraps of life: birth certificates, faded letters, notes from her grandmother in French. Receipts for harpsichord supplies, though the harpsichord was long dead.
Lucy's fingers stopped at the place she hated: her mother's death certificate.
Karlen washed the flecks of blood from her face and patted it dry, and as she ran the towel under her chin, she realized she'd missed a spot again. The towel was already stained, covered in streaks and splotches from other evenings, and she knew the new red mark would darken to match soon enough. She never quite managed to get all the blood on the first try.
Earlier that night, she'd left Peter with a kiss and a promise to be careful. Then she'd walked down to the park at the end of the block and sat under the big maple to wait, as she had every full moon for the past eleven months. Every full moon she would sit under the tree, take the folded snapshot out of her pocket, and remember the day the photo had been taken right in that spot. The tree had been bright orange with its fall foliage, and Wes had laughed as leaves were thrown into the air by sudden gusts of wind only to float gently down around them. He had been so happy that day. He had been happy, and so she and Peter had been happy too, all of them wearing silly grins with their hats and scarves, staring out of the photo with no clue that five months later Wes would be a monster. It was no wonder that Wes had been drawn to this place for his night of remembrance, the one night that he would recall who he had been. Remember his former life, and despise the memory.
She wakes up scared in the morning. She wakes up scared almost every morning. Still, it's a nice day. Summer. Blue sky.
She walks up the hill until she's downtown. It makes her feel better, having living people all around her.
Tabbitha was out of town. I turned off the light and stretched out over the entire bed. Was this a guilty pleasure? Was my loneliness supposed to quench my enjoyment of such luxurious space? I closed my eyes and dreamt of the barren vastness of Wyoming.
A yank of my pinkie toe awoke me. I sat up and scanned the dark room. There, at the foot of the bed--two bloodshot yellow eyes.
When I was a young boy, we used to take Dad's rusty pickup out to find the perfect tree. Dad always brought ropes because the wretch pines usually put up one heck of a fight. One time, a flailing branch ripped my cheek open so badly Mom had to stitch it up. I still bear the scar. With pride, I should add.
As I grew older, Dad let me swing Fungbrom's Axe. I chopped down my first wretch pine. My arms were torn and bloody, but once the wretches are free of their roots you can wrestle them onto a truck pretty easily. Dad was so proud he gave me a sip of whiskey, and I managed to keep it down.
Robbie killed monsters. He used a baseball bat, because they didn't give better weapons to ten-year-olds. It worked well enough. He'd cleaned out his room first, the slithering whispering things under the bed and the Chatterer in the closet. Then the attic, full of Flappers and Flutterers, and one that was more like a fog or a mist than anything solid. He'd poked holes in it with the bat, then swirled the bat around until the drifting fog-thing shrieked and funneled up through a crack in the ceiling like a tornado in reverse.
The last monster he killed was in the basement, where the strongest monsters always live, down near the earth and the dirt and the rot and the dark. The monster in Robbie's basement was a fetid, swollen worm of a creature, with a mouth of flat, grinding teeth. He'd hit it right between where the eyes would have been and kept hitting until it was a pulpy mass. It had taken him three days to finish breaking it into chunks and burying it in the backyard. Robbie's backyard was peppered with mounds of dirt, some overgrown now with grass, others still fresh. His neighbor Mrs. Cotterly thought Robbie was just a spectacularly bad goldfish-taker-care-of. Robbie patrolled the backyard nightly to make sure the monsters weren't coming back.
"I guess it's true then, Santos. All things come to he who waits."
I sniffed and wrapped a claw-like hand around my glass and took a healthy sip. It burned going down, and I inhaled in surprise.
The cavern reeked of brimstone, blood and magic. Artor the Sorcerer, stained with ichor and blood mostly not his own, limped past the sinuous corpse of the treasure's jealous guardian to claim his prize. Gold coins up to his ankles were just an impediment to walking, piles of jewels merely glittering distractions, neither of them more than trinkets to a master of the arcane arts. But there, in the back of the cavern, there was the true treasure. As Artor approached, he sensed something wrong. Hesitating, he peered closer. Not magic, not threat, not traps, but... disarray.
There, Grimwold's Gruesome Grimoire, bereft of pages, nothing left but a spine and empty bindings. The Beastly Book of Brell, thought indestructible, was apparently only nigh-so. Terach's Terrible Tome was recognizable only by scattered page fragments that nipped at his heels, barely worth the thought it took to immolate them. Scores if not hundreds of lesser volumes, tattered. An empire's ransom of irreplaceable lore, gone. Ruined, all of them.
Turning away my sister feels like stomping barefoot on a nail. When I was nineteen and the car she warned me about gave out near Denver, Alice drove out to get me and never said I told you. Alice was the one who hijacked me from my own bachelor party and made me promise not to marry the girl who later got arrested for throwing a brick at a two-year-old. Alice is the one who always looked out for me, but I can't return the favor. I can't. It's too much to ask.
Rose knew the signs of death better than most. The second she stepped in the hospice room, she knew it was not far off.
The man on the bed was pale and thin, his skin like tissue paper, his hair a few wispy strands that made him look like an ogre. There was a well-worn bible on the bedstand next to him.
I finally pulled myself all the way through the apartment wall to find Dee had finished dressing in her Scarlett O'Hara dress. I always thought she was gorgeous even with her hair a mess and wearing that tatty robe Grandma Kinneson gave her, so seeing Dee dressed up like that would've taken my breath away, if I breathed anymore.
Unfortunately, she wasn't dressed like that for me: it was for Raymond. He was Rhett to her Scarlett. But look how that turned out.
Susan don't like zombie. Susan don't like dead things. Susan likes sunlight and laughter and cream teas. She never asked for the job, she never wanted it. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.
Zombies are stupid. Dumb as a box of rocks. Draw a line in the dirt and they'll go all glassy-eyed and follow it, shuffling along about two miles a day. "Gah, gah, gah."
Mom says, Don't Make Fun. Says, It's Not Nice. Says, It Could happen to Anyone.
They came for me on a Monday morning when I was too exhausted to hear the backdoor caving in. Only when their hands were on me did I realize that all was lost, but the dead didn't consume me. They dragged me out of the house, shambled the three blocks to the school, holding me tight in their rotted hands, shuffling in that loose-limbed, broken way that they had, until they'd pulled me up the stairs, through the front doors with their glass knocked out, down the hall strewn with books and abandoned backpacks, until we came to my room.
Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?
Doctor Victor Von Frankenstein entered his laboratory and froze. The lab was silent. The copper discharge spheres weren't sparking and the Jacob's Ladder was silent. The row of four glass tubes no longer bubbled. But what really caught his attention was the empty lab table. It still sat at its 45-degree angle, but the heavy duty leather straps were snapped and the monster gone. Was it terrorizing the villagers again? That's the last thing Victor needed. It had taken years to fix his reputation and get back his good name.
A dim light flickered from his office. Quietly he entered. The monster was hunched over the doctor's desk.
War came to my village uninvited. Demons who thought they were gods dropped a monster in our midst. The monster was Ao, a giant sloth of a beast with skin the color of carrots and eyes like rusted metal. My village chose me to lead the fight, though I was a farmer, not a warrior. There was no other choice. All of us were farmers.
The road that wound among our homes was empty, and sunset painted the sky the color of mangoes and coral. Our fields, once green with tea and rice, were dead and dry, the entire countryside destroyed by Ao's wrath. In the window of my son's home, my granddaughter watched, her tiny three-fingered hands clinging to the sill. My son marched beside me. Born before the monster came, he held his axe with perfectly formed five-fingered hands. Time in our village was so clearly divided--there was life before Ao came, and life afterwards. Life, and death. We twenty who remained fought out of desperation.
Monsters
All sorts of monsters live here, from Vampires and Werewolves to Selkie and the ever popular Zombies.
by Annie Bellet
To get:
Bear mace (?)
Dog food
Garlic (40 cloves? check recipe)
Lamb leg (enough to feed 5)
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by Sandra McDonald
My mother was the most beautiful werewolf in Brighton Beach. Four legs, sleek silver fur, and rows of well-brushed teeth that could rip your throat out. My father was a Russian immigrant who started a janitorial company that at one time serviced every public school and city building on Coney Island. As their only kid, I inherited the worst of both worlds: my mother’s were-curse and my father’s ruthless passion for cleanliness. Every month I transform into a magical creature who slinks along the city streets carrying a bucket and a mop.
Yes. I’m a were-maid.
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