Stories

Welcome to Issue 21 of Zooscape!

The world turned upside down, and everyone went scrambling, trying to hold on to the past or find a new way of existing in the turmoil.  The world does that sometimes.  It turns upside down, and you find yourself lost in a swamp of confusion.

One of the most surefire ways of turning your own world upside down is to have children.  They’ll turn your world upside down over and over again.

I started Zooscape when my younger child started kindergarten, and I suddenly had a lot more free time on my hands.  I put Zooscape submissions on a long-term, indefinite-length hiatus when I discovered my older child needed more help getting through high school than I’d expected.

My world turned upside down, and the rest of the world got Zooscape.  My world turned upside down again, and the rest of the world had to wait to see if Zooscape would come back again or not.  Meanwhile, I made sure to store a bunch of stories up to keep you all entertained while you wait…

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Frog Song by Koji A. Dae

Don’t Cry by Ian Madison Keller

The Frog Wife by Rebecca E. Treasure

The Cloak by Erin Brown

How Fred the Opossum Mobilized the Microbes and Saved the Universe by Mary Jo Rabe

If Your Child’s a Dragon by Chad Gayle

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…and now that everyone has waited so patiently, we’re happy to announce that Zooscape will be re-opening to submissions on January 1st, 2025.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.  Also, you can pick up e-book or paperback volumes of our first 13 issues bundled into four anthologies, complete with an illustration for every story.

by Chad Gayle

“…it isn’t easy dealing with the problems of a troubled young dragon, as you already know. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to do it alone.”

If your child’s a dragon, there’s no need to explain your tattered clothes or the smoke rings round your eyes. We know how your eyebrows got singed, and we know you spent half an hour or more circling the parking lot because you really didn’t want to walk through those double doors. You didn’t want to take your place among us, to admit by your very presence that you’re afraid of your young dragon, nor do you want to acknowledge that the love you’ve always felt for the magical creature living in your midst is fraught, these days, with dread and disappointment. Most of all, you’d rather not divulge the secret that you’ve kept hidden from family members, friends, and coworkers for so long, the awful truth about the life you’ve been living, the fact that there have been moments, far too many now for you to count, when you’ve wanted to kick your dragon to the curb, to send them packing and to do your best, afterwards, to forget you ever loved them at all.

We know all about these feelings because our children are dragons too. We’ve felt your shame, your self-deprecating guilt, and your nauseating fear. Like you, we’ve all been burned so badly by our dragons that we thought our wounds would never heal.

And we all have our stories; mine’s probably not that much different from yours. Along with my partner, I pampered my dragon with love and affection, and together we tried to make sure she felt wanted, safe, and secure. As our dragon grew older, we told her how important it was to talk about her feelings, to learn to understand not only why she was happy but why she might be sad, and we did the best we could to help her figure out the place she wanted to occupy in this world. We tried to be there for our dragon; we did everything we thought we were supposed to do, which, as it turned out, was not enough.

What we didn’t see, or what we weren’t prepared to acknowledge, I should say, was the magnitude of the anxiety that beset our dragon as she matured. The first real sign of trouble came when we realized that our dragon had stopped attending flight school, which, as you are no doubt aware, puts a dragon at risk of becoming permanently dependent upon humans. At about the same time that we made this discovery, our dragon started smoking, and she smoked incessantly, filling our house with sulfurous fumes that kept me and my partner coughing for hours on end. Maybe you’re a member of the camp that believes dragons can quit smoking after they start. I happen to think that they can’t because I’ve spent the last two years administering anti-smoking punishments and potions and poultices to our dragon that never gave us more than a few weeks’ worth of clean air. But that’s my dragon — maybe yours is different.

Anyway, the smoking was the least of our worries. As her anxiety intensified, our dragon tore up the furniture and picked at her scales with her claws until her body was covered with sores. And she became bolder and more aggressive with me and my partner, thumping her tail menacingly against the walls or the floor as soon as we brought up her mounting absences from flight school.

Sure, it’s adorable when your dragon’s knee high and she whips your ankle with that little tail of hers, but it’s not quite the same when her head reaches the ceiling and a mere flick of that tail — which is as thick as a tree trunk — can break your femur or every one of your ribs. I don’t know if you’ve reached the point in your relationship with your young dragon where lines have been crossed and bones have been bent, but I’m sure you’ve had glimmers of how much worse it can get in the darkest of your dreams, nightmares in which you grapple with the questions I grappled with after I came home from the hospital that first time. Questions like, what if she hurts me again? What if she hurts someone else? I know these bones will mend, but how can the damage done to my heart ever be repaired?

I would love to say we worked out all of our problems on our own, that our dragon quit smoking, returned to flight school, and took a solemn oath never to strike me or my partner again, but the time for myth-making is over, my friends. As awful as it makes us feel, my partner and I had to admit that our dragon is better off living somewhere else for the time being, sheltered in a closed preserve with dragons her age where she can be monitored and privately tutored, and so we are in the process of finding a program where she can get the care that she needs without endangering herself — or us — any longer. Which isn’t to say that I still don’t find myself grasping at straws, searching desperately for reasons to keep her with us for at least a few more months, but I’ve accepted the recommendations of the wizard we consulted, and I’m committed to following through with this treatment plan because I know that we have to think not only of the health and safety of our dragon but of our own health and safety as well.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, as you try to get comfortable in your seat, how any of this helps you, in your situation, which is different in various degrees from mine. The answer is that although our situations may be different, the problems that we face with our dragons are very much the same. That’s why we all meet here in this great cathedral every other Monday night — to tell our dragon stories and to lean on each other during times of crisis and conflict. Because it isn’t easy dealing with the problems of a troubled young dragon, as you already know. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to do it alone.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we do try to support each other however we can. We come to this sacred place from townships all over this kingdom because we refuse to give up on our young dragons, because we believe in the possibility of a better future for all dragons, everywhere. We’re dragon people, in other words, and we’re proud of it.

Well, as usual, I’ve stood behind this podium a lot longer than I’m supposed to, but that’s because I’m so happy to see all of these new faces here today. Now I want to welcome you all  and tell you how much I look forward to hearing your dragon tales and to walking the road to recovery with you. We really like to think of ourselves as one big family, you know — but, be that as it may, I’m getting that hand signal from my partner again; yep, I can put a sock in it and yield the floor.

One very, very last thing before I open it up to the new parents and give you all a break by sitting down: if your child is a gnome, my apologies — you want the green room at the end of the hall.

 

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About the Author

Chad Gayle is a writer and photographer based in NYC. His speculative fiction has appeared in The Colored Lens and MetaStellar Magazine; his commercial photography has been featured in The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Husband to the world’s most talented veterinarian, he has witnessed countless stories of furry recovery and redemption that have given him a reason to believe in a brighter future and a better tomorrow for animals everywhere (humans included). He is also the proud parent of two amazing children and three rescue cats.

by Mary Jo Rabe

“Fred deliberately thought of nothing as he concentrated on soaking up impressions from the microbes in the pond.”

It turned out to be a perfect time for saving the universe. Fortunately, Fred the resident farm opossum was paying attention, as always.

After a long nap, some careful foraging activity, and resultant nibbling, Fred the opossum laid his moderately chubby body down on the brown grass and dipped the sticky claws on his front feet tentatively into the muddy duck pond.

The ducks flew off, quacking loudly in protest but acknowledging the potential danger of Fred’s presence. Completely unnecessary. Fred would never bother trying to kill a duck. Too much effort involved. Duck cadavers, marinated in the pond for a couple of days and covered with a crust of crunchy maggots, on the other hand, were a savory delicacy. He was more than content to let someone else take care of actually slaying the avian creatures.

To his relief, the pond water was more than satisfactory for his purposes today, both in temperature and in general viscosity. The air around Fred was cool and dry, which was pleasant since he was sensitive to temperatures for a few hours after waking up. Cool was better than hot.

Fred preferred cold water to remove the insect remains from his claws. His limbs were still quite agile for his advanced age, but it was to his advantage to keep his grasping appendages free of obstruction.

Mud was also quite useful as a soothing lotion for sore paws. An opossum that tended to his body parts tended to live longer, which was Fred’s constant goal.

It smelled like the hogs hadn’t been near the pond for a while. Fred’s pink nose on his long, thin snout couldn’t detect even a whiff of hog excrement, just overly ripened corn from the fields, a promising scent. There would be plenty of tasty, sated insects in the cornfields for dessert later.

The dark, deep pond — frequented by the farm animals but ignored by the human creatures — was hidden behind the three-story wooden barn, itself shabby with weathered planks that had been painted red in more prosperous times, now missing the occasional slab. The current humans weren’t concerned with appearances.

Fred found the structure imposing, if only in size. These human creatures were generally clueless about important things, but they did construct impressive objects for habitation, both for themselves and for their animals.

The increasing chill in the air meant that it was probably getting close to sundown. The sunlight was getting dimmer, which annoyed Fred somewhat.

There were no clouds, and he hoped that it wouldn’t rain. It wasn’t that he disliked rain. His thick, gray fur protected him from hypothermia, and he quite enjoyed shaking and shimmying to get the heavy raindrops off his bristly hairs.

However, Fred missed the light that clouds restricted. It was bad enough that the light receded every day, even though that made life safer for opossums. In the few hours Fred was awake during the day, he loved to watch the joyous play of sunbeams on plants and ponds, making their colors dance, a pleasure possibly unique to this planet.

Fred might be elderly, but he was certain that his body and mind were in excellent shape, if only because he kept both active.

There was still time before supper, and so Fred decided to slip into the pond for a quick, relaxing swim. He liked to feel supported by the water while he paddled around and opened his mind to discussions with the microbes who lived in the pond, probably his best friends on the farm.

As the ticks in his fur fell off and floated away, Fred swallowed each one with gusto. Crunchy ticks soaked in fragrant pond water made for a delightful appetizer.

Fred deliberately thought of nothing as he concentrated on soaking up impressions from the microbes in the pond. In structure, they were simpler creatures who, however, when united, far outmatched more complex creatures in powers of observation and analysis. He could only hope that he didn’t bore them with his thoughts.

The communication chain worked best top to bottom. More complicated creatures could send messages down to creatures with less complicated structures fairly easily. The less complicated creatures had no trouble taking these messages apart and analyzing them.

However, it demanded strenuous concentration for a creature with a more complicated structure to understand what the less complicated creatures were communicating. Their messages came slowly and were often interrupted. Fred had the patience and physical vigor necessary for listening. Plus, he enjoyed hearing from the microbes.

Most opossums ridiculed him for talking to the microbes. Fred got tired of explaining that he listened far more than he talked and that opossums were foolish to ignore sources of information.

Other opossums were just as receptive as Fred by nature, but they preferred to spend their time eating, mating, and sleeping.

Today, floating in the pond, Fred engaged in pleasant chitchat with the microbes, nothing serious, just comments on life in general. While listening to them, he thought he sensed something else, something not quite right in the universe, but nothing he could put his paw on. The microbes themselves had no worries they wanted to pass on.

After splashing around for many enjoyable minutes, Fred decided it was time to think about setting his refreshed legs in motion and joining the semi-feral farm cats for supper.

The felines did consume the occasional small rodent on the farm but also let themselves be fed outside the farmhouse by the somewhat capricious though kindly human creatures.

Fred and the cats got along well enough. It was only when a new cat arrived that Fred had to re-establish the pecking order ─ or, in this case, the order of growling, pawing, and slapping ─ for the feral but currently resident mammals on this farm.

Cats had to be reminded that opossums ruled. He had managed to acquire their respect one by one as they showed up at the farm.

For some reason feline tourism abounded in this area. Fickle cats always thought they might get better food at a different farm.

They were wrong. The occupants of this dilapidated farmhouse were quite skillful cooks. The repast they set out for visiting animals was always delicious; it just tended to arrive at varying times. Fred had long since learned to be flexible in his eating habits.

However, it was common knowledge, or perhaps inherited memories, that opossums shouldn’t go near humans, if only to avoid becoming a premature component of the food chain. Some humans were known to consume opossums, calling them tasty vittles.

The humans in this house didn’t use that kind of language, but a cautious opossum took nothing for granted.

Caution had its benefits, one of which was avoiding the necessity of “playing possum.” It was beneath Fred’s dignity to lie immobile, roll his eyes, draw back his lips, bare his teeth, and expel noxiously fumed secretions from his anal glands. It took far too many swims in the duck pond to rid himself of that stench afterwards.

Fred developed the habit of waiting for darkness before he approached the farmhouse to partake of the banquet the humans would offer. He always only ate after the humans returned inside.

It was getting darker, and so Fred swam toward the edge of the pond. Out of habit, he perked up his dark, rounded ears, not to listen to the motors of the tractors, combines, and harvesters on the farm, but to be open for any important information.

Opossums had a special talent for hearing, for listening to the grunts and lowing of farm animals, of course, but also for absorbing messages from other more complicated structures in the universe.

Most such data was boring, but every now and then Fred picked up on something useful. Way back when, his ancient ancestors had detected the behavior of an approaching asteroid and made arrangements to survive underground.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to warn the dinosaurs. They just didn’t listen to the pleas of primitive, tiny mammals. This was still the case today. Opossums couldn’t communicate with more complexly structured creatures because such creatures couldn’t concentrate on what the opossums said.

Right now, Fred could only be certain that he sensed powerful, individual thoughts from the six-legged creatures he intended to devour later. Flies, mosquitoes, and gnats, buzzing and humming contentedly, were busy selecting their own sources of nourishment in the cornfields.

Fred stomped out of the pond and shook the water off his fur. Feeling energetic again, he scampered around the barn and down the hill to the two-story, old-fashioned farmhouse, probably painted white some time ago but now displaying graying boards.

His timing, as always, was perfect. The screen door opened and a tall, female human, followed by her loquacious, diminutive offspring, brought out bowls of meat and milk and water. Today, as so often, the child seemed to understand the greetings Fred sent him.

When the adult headed back into the house, Fred jumped up the steps to the porch where the door to the kitchen was. Fred growled and then shoved his way through the crowd of cats, who submissively moved aside and made a path for him.

“Fred’s here,” the child shouted. Since the creature wasn’t even half the size of his parent, and since Fred only received benevolent telepathic thoughts from him, Fred wasn’t afraid of him, though Fred did feel more secure when the all the humans went back into the house.

Fred, of course, did have a distinguished opossum name, but after the child had started yelling “Fred” at him in such a delighted tone of voice a few years ago, Fred decided to claim it for himself. The name “Fred” brought about pleasant associations with the evening meal the humans provided.

However, survival instincts demanded that Fred wolf down the food and drink and then head for the cornfields before the humans could suddenly pose any threat. While his behavior might be considered rude, he consoled himself with the thought that the humans could always talk to the feral cats if they needed mindless repartee with their outdoor dinner guests.

Fred scurried over to the nearest cornfield, running until he was convinced that he was invisible to the humans. As expected, he found sufficient insects for his dessert crawling around between the muddy rows.

When he couldn’t eat any more of the tasty, crisp insects, Fred lay down between a few stalks of corn and looked up at the sky. This was the time of day when he was most awake.

Without the food the humans provided, he would have to be off hunting. However, with a temporarily full stomach, Fred could tend to what he liked best. As soon as the humans extinguished the toys in their house that lit it up, the cloudless sky gave Fred an excellent view of outer space.

He ceased all conscious thought, opened his mind to any impressions he might absorb, and concentrated on the stars.

Fred always loved those points of light, the hints of color in the black night. Fortunately, the air was dry and cloudless. He had a completely unobstructed view, which should have made him unreservedly happy, but he sensed something was wrong.

It took a while before he could comprehend the messages. He directed his full concentration upwards. The stars didn’t radiate their usual joyful contentment. A sense of apprehension pervaded, which was unusual for the stars and galaxies that generally moved with the abandon that the laws of physics allowed.

Although it was his habit to spend about an hour in the cornfields enjoying his dessert, this time Fred spent the entire night watching and listening. It took that long to make sense out of the feelings he was absorbing, to translate feelings into concrete thoughts.

There were just so many stars to listen to. Eventually he understood that they were all broadcasting the same message, however with varying details.

The universe was in danger because one of the infinite numbers of parallel universes was on its way to collide with this one. Since the parallel universe was larger, after the collision, the parallel universe would dominate the resulting, newly formed, compound universe.

The physical laws of the parallel universe were such that matter would be unable to form, and existing matter would quickly degenerate to pure radiation.

This prospect made the stars sad, which Fred the opossum could understand. Being an opossum on this farm on this planet occasionally had some disadvantages, but he had no desire to be turned into an unstable collection of meandering photons.

More to the point, however, how could this collision be prevented?

Fred knew when he needed to brainstorm. Whenever he was at a complete loss, he consulted the microbes in the duck pond. They always listened to him. Each individual microbe didn’t know much, but when they joined to a telepathic group mind, they often came up with excellent ideas.

Fred shuffled out of the muddy cornfield and, as soon as he was on firm ground, scurried over to the duck pond and dived in.

“Yo, microbes,” Fred began his telepathic message. “Listen up. We all have a problem.”

“One of the new cats steal your food again?” the microbe group mind asked.

“No, no,” Fred said patiently. “This is a real problem, unless you like the thought of losing your physical existence and being turned into pure energy.”

That got their attention. Fred explained that some stars at the outer edge of where dark energy pushed them had noticed disturbing changes.

Comparing observations, the shrewd quark stars came to the unanimous conclusion that a parallel brane of a universe was approaching the brane of this one. Collision was probable. The approaching universe was larger and would absorb this one, converting all matter here to radiation.

Fred sensed the uneasiness and uncertainty that this caused among the microbes.

“Any ideas on how we can prevent this?” Fred asked.

“Obviously this is more than microbes can manage,” the microbe group mind answered. “Tell your humans to build something or do something. They’re good at that kind of thing.”

“You know that they don’t have the patience to listen to me,” Fred said. “On their own, they won’t notice anything until it is too late. Then their building skills won’t help them.”

“Still, microbes don’t move universes,” the microbes said. “Maybe we should just go with the flow. Eventually this universe will peter out into nothing anyway. Why not be part of a radiant road show first?”

“Eventually is a long, long time,” Fred said patiently. “Think about it. You enjoy your one-celled existence, absorbing, expelling, moving about. You sense pleasure from the physical feeling when chemicals or life forms move through your membranes. I can’t imagine anything more boring than floating around in a cloud of nothing.”

“Hmm,” the group mind said. “Maybe you’re right, but we still aren’t capable of doing anything.”

“We have to come up with some idea,” Fred said. “Or else we lose it all. You microbes always have a solution to things. Find one for this problem.”

“We can’t do anything, but we might be able to function as intermediaries,” the microbes said after a long pause. “We’ll pass your news down to the molecules, they can pass it down to the atoms, and they can pass it down to the subatomic particles. We’re all forms of matter and, like you said, all have something to lose.”

“Excellent,” Fred said. “I could probably pass the message down as far as the subatomic particles myself, but I wouldn’t be able to hear their replies or suggestions. Just concentrating enough to listen to you takes a lot out of me.”

“Right,” the microbes said. “Each level of complexity can only easily understand communications from a maximum of one lower level. If we concentrate, we can hear the answers from the molecules, they can hear the answers from the atoms, and so forth. Eventually your message would have to reach dark matter and dark energy.”

“Perfect,” Fred said. “I’m sorry I have to involve you, but no one listens to the stars except me.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, though,” the microbes said. “There is a definite problem that the message could get garbled at every level or that it will turn out that no one can do anything.”

“Try anyway,” Fred said. “I have every confidence in you.” This wasn’t completely true. Fred knew that the microbes’ group mind had a capacity for thinking that was far beyond his. Unfortunately, microbes also had difficulties in staying with one project. They were spontaneous, more than a little flighty, and got bored easily.

He had no idea what to expect from subatomic particles all the way down to dark energy. Even if there was a general willingness to do something, Fred had no idea what could be done.

He could only rely on the microbes to initiate some action.

Actually, the sun was now fairly high in the sky, and Fred needed to find a safe place to nap. To get to the next little wooded area Fred would have to retrace his steps past the farmhouse. This seemed too risky. The child was already playing in the front yard. Fred could run fast, but possibly not fast enough.

There were a few thorn bushes at the back of the ramshackle barn. It would be uncomfortable for Fred to crawl between the barn and the bushes, but the location was unlikely to attract the attention of the human creatures. So, no choice.

“I’ll be back later,” Fred said to the microbes as he crawled out of the pond and walked reluctantly over to the bushes. Once he was between them and the barn, he felt invisible enough to sleep for a few hours.

Listening to the microbes and thinking about the fate of the universe must have tired Fred more than he thought. When he woke up, it was very dark, and he was hungry. He suspected that the cats had already consumed his portion of the supper banquet that the humans put out. He would have to survive on whatever he could forage.

First, though, there were more important things to take care of. He wanted to know what the microbes had accomplished, if anything.

He stumbled over to the duck pond and dived in. When he was physically surrounded by the microbes, it was less strenuous to listen to them.

“Yo, Fred,” the microbes broadcast into his consciousness.

“Yo, microbes,” Fred answered. “Do you have any news?”

“Yes and no,” the microbes answered. “We’ve been passing the news back and forth all day. We got answers and questions and then answers and more questions and then more answers. For the longest time, the only answer was that there was nothing that could be done. We’re completely worn out.”

“Thanks for trying,” Fred said. “I know this was hard work for you, always concentrating on messages from lower levels of structure. No wonder you’re exhausted.”

“We would have given up hours ago,” the microbes admitted. “But we didn’t want to disappoint you. You’re a good friend, Fred.”

“Thanks, but what is the current situation?” Fred asked.

“The short version is that it’s unanimous through the structures all the way down to dark matter. No one wants to let a parallel universe obliterate this one,” the microbes said. “Dark energy is still undecided.”

“Why?” Fred asked.

“Who knows?” the microbes said. “We’re awfully tired.”

“I know,” Fred said. “If the universe survives, it will be exclusively due to your hard work. The whole universe will owe its existence to you.”

“Yeah, well,” the microbes began. “Only if we succeed, and we are getting too tired to do anything more.”

“I know,” Fred said. “But could you make one more attempt? How about if you send down the thought that dark energy won’t have anything to do in the new universe. A universe consisting solely of radiation doesn’t expand. Any kind of energy would find itself paralyzed.”

“We’ll give it one more try,” the microbes said. Fred heard how fatigued they were. He hoped he wasn’t asking too much. He didn’t want to threaten their existence, especially if the whole attempt turned out to be in vain.

He waited and floated in the pond. He was starving, but it didn’t seem right to abandon the microbes after all they were doing.

“Success,” came the tired reply from the microbes. “Dark energy understood your thought that it had as much to lose as the rest of us. At this moment, it is calculating how it needs to steer the brane this universe is in away from the approaching one. It thinks it is doable. Dark energy just has to pulsate the rate of expansion instead of constantly increasing it. That should yank the universe out of danger.”

“Great,” Fred barked. “You really went to your physical limits and saved us all! How can I make it up to you?”

“To be honest,” the microbe group mind said. “We need reinforcements, additional, energetic microbes to support the group. Can you help us with that?”

Fred’s first thought was to sacrifice a few cats, but he quickly abandoned that suicidal prospect. If he attacked one cat, the others would make cat food out of him.

At that moment, a few ducks landed on the water. Ducks! The proverbial solution of killing two birds with one stone. Fred could attack some ducks and then dunk their cadavers into the pond for the microbes. Once sufficient microbes made their way out of the ducks, Fred could slaughter one duck for his own, long-delayed, evening meal.

Fred was tired as he quietly swam over to the first duck, tired but determined enough to swing a mighty paw and whack his first prey with his claws. It was no problem to then hold the creature under water for a sufficient length of time. The microbes deserved no less for saving the universe. Fred would eat later.

 

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Originally published in Pulphouse, Issue 18

About the Author

Mary Jo Rabe grew up on a farm in eastern Iowa, got degrees from Michigan State University (German and math) and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (library science). She worked in the library of the chancery office of the Archdiocese of Freiburg, Germany for 41 years, and lives with her husband in Titisee-Neustadt, Germany. She has published “Blue Sunset,” inspired by Spoon River Anthology and The Martian Chronicles, electronically and has had stories published in Fiction River, Pulphouse, Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Alien Dimensions, 4 Star Stories, Fabula Argentea, Crunchy with Chocolate, The Lorelei Signal, The Lost Librarian’s Grave, Draw Down the Moon, Dark Horses, Wyldblood Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies.  You can find her blog at: https://maryjorabe.wordpress.com/

by Erin Brown

“Her cloak held the warm, soft, stolen remains of all that the wolf had ever loved, all covered by a blood-red cloak and filled with that poison-sweet song, that venomous laughter.”

The wolf had the brambles to thank for the extra few minutes of life.  He had chosen to sleep in the tangle because it had grown a roof of snow, keeping him nearly warm through the winter night, as well as completely hidden.  As a result, when the smell of meat and spices and the sweetness of song roused his body in the early morning, the thorns arrested his instinctive pounce before his mind awoke enough to remember caution.  Then he recognized the voice.

The song was sweet as any sent to greet a morning’s sunlight, and the smell of the meat twisted his stomach into knots, but the voice made him curl up into a ball of aching bones and frost-tipped fur, and he swallowed a growl.  The song grew closer, and then he could see it:  the bright red cloak of the hunter girl.

The wolf glared as he watched her approach in her long red coat that dragged across the snowy ground.  Behind her, a fist-sized chunk of green and shining bacon was dragged along on the end of a thin rope.  It had long ago stopped marking a trail in juices and simply scraped its path across the snow, across her boot prints.  She walked slowly, singing all the while, and her crossbow hung by her side, pointed down, carried stiffly.  The wolf could barely tell if the ache in his belly was hunger, or hatred.  The words of her song silenced the few birds singing above in the bare trees.

Here little wolf, little wolf, little wolfie

Come to me, come to me

The winter is cold, and my gran needs a blanket

So I’ll never let you be.

The wolf restrained himself from snapping his jaws at the brambles, from tearing at the thorns until the way to her was as exposed as a throat.  As she walked, a bright red blotch against the whiteness of the world, black scratching the white sky all around by the barren limbs of the trees, her cloak flapped a little, and the thick grey lining showed itself.  The tops of her boots were fuzzy and brown.  The wolf knew them intimately.

Her boots were lined with the hide of his mother, the scent tainted by the girls own body scent.  Her cloak was lined with his brothers, their skins draped across her shoulders, or dragged across the snow.  The red hood on her head hid a mottled white fluff that had been the belly of his sister.  He did not know whose fangs made up her buttons, but to get close enough to find out was to get close enough to bite, and be bitten.

His mouth filled with bitter saliva, and it drooled down his jaw and froze in his fur.  The bacon, as hungry as he was, barely mattered.  The girl was stout and strong, and her smell healthy and hot.  But her cloak.  Her cloak held the warm, soft, stolen remains of all that the wolf had ever loved, all covered by a blood-red cloak and filled with that poison-sweet song, that venomous laughter.

There had been so many winters without his pack, his family.  All of the other packs had been chased away.  He was so alone.  Food would not stop his misery, just prolong it.  Only the cloak was home.

With the memory of love of family warming his hide like weak wet winter sunshine, the wolf stifled a whimper of desolation, but not enough to fool a hunter.  The girl stopped and spun around, and looked right into the bramble. She crouched down slowly. His brothers’ skins bunched beneath her, against the snow. His mother, his sister, all dead skins curled around her, to keep her warm.  It was intolerable.  The girl in the cloak laughed to hear him growl, and set her crossbow across her knee.  And smiling right into the wolf’s eyes, she sang.

Here little wolf, little wolf, little wolfie

I see you, I see you

The winter’s so long, and I’m cold and I’m lonely

I’m bettin’ you’re lonely, too.

She laughed at him, her mouth wide and pink, her white teeth so small.  She tugged the bacon forward and swung the rope so that the meat landed just a bound away from the brambles, and she laughed when she heard him whine.  But she misunderstood the source of his misery. When she had tugged the rope, the reddish-brown fur over her arm showed itself, and the smell of it caught the wolf by the throat.  It was a familiar hide, it was family, but the wolf could not remember who.  He was forgetting family, love, warmth, life.  He was forgetting!

The furs called like howls to his heart.  The girl kept singing. But the wolf only heard the silent songs of his family, all warm panting snarling playful recollections, loping across his memories of life before this red demon had appeared to them for the first time, so long ago.

There would be no more winters, either for himself or for this horror and her bow and her cloak.  This would end.  One of them would laugh, would sing the winter hot as blood again.  Only one of them.

The girl swung her crossbow up just as the wolf exploded out of the snowy brambles.  She had aimed for the bacon, where she thought the wolf was going.

But he was aiming for home.

 

* * *

About the Author

Erin Brown is a black, neurodivergent author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction. She has been published in Fantasy Magazine, FIYAH Magazine, The Deadlands, Midnight and Indigo, The Los Suelos CA Interactive Anthology, and 3Elements Literary Revue, with work in the anthology It Was All a Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right. Erin is also the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship in Creative Writing for Spring 2022.

by Rebecca E. Treasure

“I suspected he’d make a dreadful human. Something in me needed to know, needed to see.”

The bastard left me. Kissed the first pair of pert red lips under a tiara he found. Not a care for our hundreds of children, some of them still without legs, if you can believe it. After all we’ve been through. After all I’d done for him.

The jerk flouncing away with that princess is nothing like the frog I met. Found him moping at the side of the pond, his ribbit a pathetic ribbon of noise barely worthy of the name. When he hopped away from me, that wild look in his eyes, he nearly toppled into the mud sideways. I thought it was endearing — a frog so terrible at frogging.

More fool me.

I took him under my webbed toes, I guess. Showed him how to use his tongue for flies and moths and other things in the dark of the pool. Taught him to jump, leap, splash. The first time we clutched, our croaks filled the cattails and swamp grass with ecstasy.

It wasn’t until we’d been hopping around together for a few seasons that he changed. Just little things. He’d tell me some story or other about his past — before he came to our pond — and then get real quiet. Then he’d be extra nice to me for a few days, going out of his way to tell me how smooth my skin was, how bulging my eyes, how desirable the pinkness of my tongue.

When the tadpoles hatched, he showed such interest I knew something was wrong with him. Even thought the nasty, fish-like things were cute. As they grew legs and came out onto the muck, that most un-froglike pride in the twist of his lips faded to more natural disinterest. But a sadness, too, a sadness I could never explain.

I confronted him, just before winter when we would burrow into mud and shiver-dream away the season of ice and cold before emerging wet and hungry to the spring warmth. I didn’t want to hibernate next to a liar.

He came clean. Well, as clean as a frog can be. A human, he said, cursed by a witch.

Repulsive. Humans captured our children, shook them in jars, cooked their legs and called it a delicacy. Humans were disgusting.

He assured me he could never change, that I was his true love, that being a frog wasn’t as bad as the witch seemed to think. I believed him, that earnest gleam in his shining eyes, and snuggled close.

More fool me.

And then he did change, and he left me one late autumn. Dusk sheltered the pond in a golden glow, the bugs casting long, delicious shadows among the mist. I watched our children hopping among the stands of swamp grass, along the mossy logs, leaping gracefully into the deep-green scum of the silvery water. They were good frogs. They didn’t need me anymore.

He’d been a reasonably good frog — he fertilized my eggs, he seduced me with song once I taught him how. I suspected he’d make a dreadful human. Something in me needed to know, needed to see. What about two legs and endothermia had been worth abandoning everything we had? Abandoning me?

I croaked out a quiet goodbye to our children — only the nearest of them heard — and set off.

It wasn’t an easy journey, though he was simple enough to follow. That bastard had been a frog long enough his footprints dug into the soil as he leapt from step to step. My soft toes blistered after leaving the swampland, my skin cracked and bleeding before dawn spread across the now-rocky road. My croaks grew weak, my eyeballs drying out until I could barely see.

Early afternoon, a castle loomed out of the distance. Even with my fading vision, the spires and balconies caught the sunshine and demanded recognition, attention.

For a moment, I am ashamed to say, I envied them. Imagining the feasts and the comforts, the winters with the heat of a fire washing over me, perhaps in a lukewarm bath instead of the icy mud. But I didn’t cling to the moment, the daydream. What would my ancestors have thought of me, considering giving up the security, the predictability, of our pond for the temporary luxuries of humanity?

I came to a fork in the road. I suppose a human never would have noticed, but my parched vision saw the signs. To the left, in the woods, the call of magic. Lightning and cinnamon, sparking cold fire into the night sky.

The witch.

Why had she picked frogs, of all creatures? I wanted to know, maybe give her a piece of my mind for saddling me with the prince when all it took was one sympathetic pair of lips for him to abandon me. I gave the castle one more derisive glance and leapt into the woods.

I hopped into her hut from beneath the door. Odd, that. The door had such a gap it might have been made to allow small creatures to enter uninvited. Within the hut, there was lovely moisture in the air. My skin cried out, pleasure and pain as I began to moisten. I paused, healing, unsure why I had come.

A wrinkled hand scooped me up. Bulging eyes — unusually attractive for a human — inspected me.

“So. He found a princess after all, did he? I’m sorry he hurt you in the process.” She sighed. “I miscalculated. I thought, as a frog, he couldn’t hurt anyone. I was wrong.”

I resisted the urge to hop in anger, my broken heart thrumming rapidly against her palm.

“Perhaps he learned his lesson about manners?”

I licked my eyeball. All the answer she needed, as she sighed and set me on the worn pine of her workbench.

“So why did you come?” She bustled around, taking up a pewter bowl with tall spindly legs and a great arching handle. She dipped it into a barrel of water in the corner and set it near to, but not quite by, the fire.

My first thought was vengeance. Turn the bastard back into a frog. Turn him to a fly so I could devour him whole. Turn his princess into a fly, and him a frog… the thoughts soured before I gave them voice.

Would I let him drag me so low? He’d given me generations of beautiful children, after all. Joy in the evenings under the dancing stars. Many seasons of pleasure and companionship and pride in the help I’d given him.

The anger flared. True, but in the end he had betrayed me. If not vengeance, then perhaps a lesson — to teach him his place in the world, and the value of others.

The witch was testing the water in the bowl, now, with the back of her hand. She rummaged around on the overcrowded shelves, batting away a buzzing mosquito, and retrieved a smooth sunstone, brilliantly orange. This, she settled in the water.

What lesson could teach him his place if not to be such a perfect creature as a frog? Yet he’d still given all that up, our rich meals, our languorous days, our firefly evenings of clouds and chorus. He would never learn. I snatched the mosquito and, chewing, croaked in conclusion.

More fool he.

The witch, apparently satisfied with her odd creation, turned to me, hands on her waist. “You seem a perfectly capable frog, are you not?”

I croaked, confident, pleased she had noticed.

She shrugged. “Then what do you need the bastard for? Good riddance, I say. I know the princess, you know, and he deserves her.”

She cackled at my cringe. Nobody deserved him, I wanted to say.

“No, you misunderstand. She’ll turn him out. She knows her worth.”

I blinked both sets of eyelids, reassured. She rather had a point. There was little I’d miss, except someone to shiver with in the frozen months.

My worth was no less than a princess, after all.

She gestured at the pot and the stone, near to but not quite by the fire. “I have a bug problem and could use some company in the winter.”

I leapt across the space, catching the sunstone with my tired toes and dipping sore limbs into the perfectly lukewarm water. The stone had caught the warmth of the fire, or had a heat of its own, and soothed my spine.

The bastard may have left me, but it’s not like I was going to miss him. A deep flush of pride for our children pulled a satisfied smack to my lips, but the love was for them. Not him.

With a croak, I settled in for the winter.

 

* * *

About the Author

Rebecca E. Treasure grew up reading in the Rocky Mountains. After living many places, including the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Tokyo, she began writing fiction. Rebecca’s short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Zooscape, Seize the Press, Galaxy’s Edge, Air & Nothingness Press, The Dread Machine, Flame Tree Publishing, WordFire Press, Galaxy Press, and others. She is the Flash Fiction Editor at Apex Book Company and Magazine, a freelance editor, and a writing mentor for young writers. She currently resides in Stuttgart, Germany, where she juggles children, a corgi, editing, and writing. She only drops the children occasionally.

by Ian Madison Keller

“A healing spell tumbled from her lips by sheer instinct, and she held trembling hands over the head of the closest seedling.”

With a thought and a wave magic flowed from Queen Seuan’s hand and into the wood of her throne, reshaping it to a more comfortable configuration.

“Continue.”

The supplicant droned on, and she stifled the urge to abandon her royal duties and merge minds with her bonded, Tukura, who was out romping through the ornamental gardens. The blossoms at the end of her vine-hair curled open in pleasure at the thought, but her duties… always her duties first.

The sunlight tasted of autumn harvesting. Her seedling-children, growing tall in her hidden nursery plot, were almost ready to pull up their roots and become sproutlings. At least, all the seeds she’d bothered with. Not all her seeds got planted; cracked or blackened seeds never grew right.

A spark of panic through her bond jolted her out of her reverie, and she mentally left the throne room and linked her thoughts with Tukura.

Tukura sniffed the ground outside in the hedge maze; her hackles raised. <Intruders.>

<My seedlings?> Seuan sat up in alarm, the supplicant forgotten. Not again. She’d inherited her throne right after her first blossoming and was the last of her line, yet every year her garden was poisoned by saboteurs.

She came back to herself and signaled to her adviser to halt the proceedings.

Seuan didn’t wait; she stood and strode away. As soon as she passed through the vine curtain separating the private corridors from the public areas she broke into a run. A guard trotted after her although she ignored him.

<I’m sorry, Seuan.> Grief stabbed her but she couldn’t concentrate enough to see through Tukura’s eyes.

The maze passed in a blur of green and cobblestone paths. Her garden was tucked in a dead-end around a blind corner. A stone archway guarded the entrance. She’d spelled the arch to inform her of intruders, a spell which now hung in tatters.

Tukura crouched on the cobblestone by the tilled dirt, her ears splayed and tail curled around her feet. The double row of her seedlings, which just the night before had been tall and green now drooped to the ground an unhealthy shade of brown.

Seuan slid to stop on her knees in the dirt. Her fine court robes would be ruined and her adviser would scold her, yet she was beyond caring.

A healing spell tumbled from her lips by sheer instinct, and she held trembling hands over the head of the closest seedling. Her palms glowed deep red, the same color as her own blossoms, but the magic pooled with no-where to go. Dead.

She tried again and again, a dozen times, but every time the result was the same.

The sap in her tears stuck to Tukura’s chocolate brown fur. She hadn’t even known she’d started crying or when Tukura had embraced her.

“We’ll try again next spring,” Tukura whispered into her vines.

Seuan trembled. “I don’t have the strength for this.”

“It’s your duty to produce an heir. Succession fights will tear the Empire apart.”

The guard looked around, ears pressed flat. “Your Majesty, you should return to the safety of the palace while we investigate.”

Tukura pulled a sobbing Seuan to her feet and led her towards the archway.

“Momma, no cry,” a high-pitched seedling’s voice said.

Seuan stopped and looked around. Her children remained brown and still in the middle of the square.

“Who dares!” Her tears dried as her anger grew. She might be young, but she was still Queen and would not tolerate tasteless jokes.

“Momma!”

The voice was close. She peered into the green growth on the edges of the garden. Movement caught her eye, and she headed towards it.

The guard’s outstretched paw stopped her. He bounded over and roughly shoved aside the leaves of a broad-leaf thyme revealing the smiling face and shining eyes of a seedling.

Her mind jumped back to planting. She’d had thirteen seeds originally, but one had been black; she’d tossed it away into the bushes and forgotten all about it.

The seedling looked up and wriggled his fingers at her, struggling to move but still rooted. With a determined look he tugged one leg free and then the other, tottering in his new freedom.

Seuan scooped up her newly sprouted child, giving thanks to the Sun God while she cried tears of joy.

 

* * *

Originally published in Flower Buds.

About the Author

Ian Madison Keller is a fantasy writer currently living in Oregon. Originally from Utah, he moved up to the Pacific Northwest on a whim a decade ago and never plans on leaving. Ian has been writing since 2013 with nine novels and more than a dozen published short stories out so far. Ian has also written under the name Madison Keller before transitioning in 2019 to Ian. You can find more about him on his website, http://madisonkeller.net

by Koji A. Dae

“I said it felt like a butterfly, then a hummingbird. But when I was alone, singing to my growing bump, it was a tadpole.”

The pains start as little things. Stretching and hardening. Slow and steady and quite manageable. So I pass the morning breathing and walking.

“Like a fly ‘at can’t find a spot to land!” Mama complains and shoos me from the kitchen. I’m surprised she doesn’t take the fly-swatter to my behind.

Honestly, I don’t mind being shooed. Part of me wants my mama, especially as the pains start twisting and pulling, as if something rotten has settled low in my belly. But I’m determined to keep this secret for as long as possible.

Mine.

I put my hand over my abdomen and waddle to the porch.

The first time I felt the baby flip, it was like a tadpole bumping up against reeds. Such a funny, ticklish feeling.

Mama was horrified. “No Becca. Babies are beautiful things. A butterfly flitting from flower to flower. That’s what you feel.”

Ever obedient, I tried to imagine the baby as a winged creature, but the extra weight in my middle definitely felt sloshy. The best I could conjure was a rainbow trout whipping its shiny tail around. I said it felt like a butterfly, then a hummingbird. But when I was alone, singing to my growing bump, it was a tadpole.

So you can’t blame me if I want to keep this as my own for as long as possible. It’s not selfish. Not exactly. It’s just Mama has a way of twisting things, and⁠ once she voices her opinion, it has a way of drowning out any other reality that might be fighting to blossom.

Take this house. It’s a fine house, sure, but Granddad was willing to give me and Jackson Uncle Sammy’s old house as a wedding present. It’s a bit drafty but a perfectly good house with two more rooms than this one.

Mama wouldn’t hear of it.

“Too close to those swamps. You’ll never get any sleep for all that croaking.”

She had a point. The north side of Evergreen is a big marsh, which is different than a swamp, but heaven help you if you correct Mama. During mating season, the frog song echoes all the way to the town center, sometimes cutting off the preacher if he goes on too long. But was it enough of a reason to make Papa build an entirely new house on the south edge of town while Uncle Sammy’s sits empty?

The real reason came out after I told her I was pregnant.

“See. Could you imagine having a baby so close to the swamp? It could just toddle off and die.”

She had a real reason with that one. When I was twelve, I nearly drowned in the marsh. Maybe I had gone for a swim, but Mama wasn’t hearing any nonsense about her baby girl swimming in a disgusting swamp, so the official story was I slipped in. Either way, I was underwater so long I almost died. When they pulled me from the marsh, I was covered in algae. Some had gotten in my lungs, the doctor said, and I had a strange infection the hospital couldn’t make sense of. I slept for a week, and when I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything. Not about the pond or my life before it. I also had bad jaundice that yellowed my skin. My blue veins looked green beneath the new coloring, and that green spread all over whenever I blushed. The other kids in town took to calling me frog-girl.

The color never went away, and I never got my memory back. Maybe that’s why I was never afraid of the marsh⁠ — I couldn’t remember it doing anything bad to me. If anything, that strange body of water called to me.

But Mama wouldn’t hear of me venturing near it, so I appeased myself by straining to hear the comforting lull of frog song on summer nights until she moved me too far away for even that.

Now, I settle into the rocker Papa made when he learned about the baby. It has a long, smooth motion that soothes me. I close my eyes and listen to the chirping of crickets and the lazy near-silence of summer.

* * *

A pinprick on my left side jolts me from my daze. It’s sharp but manageable at first, but it keeps spreading. Soon everything is tightening. I breathe. Short, short, long, the way the doctor taught me to breathe whenever I had an attack of nerves.

These attacks were so normal to me, I had thought they were common. It wasn’t until I started high school in the nearby city that I realized the sudden wheezing, and muscle weakness was something to be ashamed of.

“Frog girl, frog girl,” the kids would call in the corridors. The nickname had carried over with a few kids from my town. “Watch out, she’s going to croak.”

And I would please them by wheezing in and out⁠ — something that definitely sounded of a croak.

When the seizures started, the school recommended Mama “stop the silliness with that country doctor and take me to a specialist.”

The specialist, funny enough, was called Dr. Greene.

* * *

How can something tighten and stretch at the same time? It’s like being ripped in two. I push my feet on the legs of the rocker to stop the motion, lean back, and let out a long, low groan. One that sounds like a croak more than my wheezing ever did.

There’s a clatter in the kitchen that would usually concern me, but it sounds distant beneath my moan, which vibrates my entire body.

Mama’s at my side. I don’t know when she got here, but she’s pushing my hair back and patting my hand and saying comforting words that cool me like sweet tea on a summer day.

Gradually, her words make sense. “That’s it, Becca. Good girl. Almost through it.”

The pain dissipates like sugar, and my whole body relaxes. The chair rocks beneath my sudden weight.

“It’s started.” I can hear the excitement of Mama’s smile. “Why didn’t you come get me?”

I flutter my eyes open. The world is just as still and bright as it was five minutes ago. “I like the rocker.”

She pats my upper arm. “Then you stay here. I’ll go in and get some water to keep you cool. You want anything else?”

I shake my head. It doesn’t matter what I say. Mama’s in charge now, and she’ll come back with whatever she thinks I need. I should be annoyed, but today, it’s a comfort to have someone else in charge. Let her call the doctor and Jackson. I’ll just sit here and become one with all that summer buzzing.

I do wish Jackson was here. He would hold my hand the way he used to outside his father’s office.

Dr. Greene’s office was fancy, with heavy furniture and a dark rug. I remember thinking it was like waiting for my baptism. It had the same old, polished smell as the church. But there was something else. At fifteen, I had felt like a giant among those eight- and nine-year-olds. But Mama had insisted I do it again.

“If you can’t remember your first time, it doesn’t count.”

I wondered if that was true. If so, did none of my life before I was twelve count?

The preacher had given a sermon, but I wasn’t half listening. I had this feeling that I’d be a completely different person after the baptism. The preacher would dunk me, and he’d pull me out changed. I started wheezing and croaking, asking myself if I wanted to change.

I swallowed it down, though, because the actual baptism was held in a pond near the church. When the preacher finished, we walked to the pond singing a low hymn, and one-by-one he dunked us in the water.

Mama wrung her hands the whole time, but her faith was more important than her fear. It was the only time she let me in the water. I nearly slipped on the wet bank, and I heard her sharp intake of breath as I wobbled and steadied myself. I splashed into the water before she could change her mind.

It was cold, and my dress clung to me in some places and floated up in others. The sensation of buoyancy made me grin. The preacher pushed me back, his pressure firmer than I expected, and there was a moment of weightlessness that took away all my fear.

But Dr. Greene’s office was more like the church part. Stiff and stuffy and what if I didn’t want to become the healthy young woman he was supposed to turn me into?

Mama sent me to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I calmed down the best I could and was coming out wet and splotchy when I ran into Jackson carrying a box.

I apologized and waited for some harsh comment about my green face, but it never came. I suppose the son of a psychiatrist was raised to be nice to patients, but it didn’t matter why. He was the first boy to be nice to me and, baptism-be-damned, I was determined to fall in love with him.

* * *

I’ve already forgotten the intensity of the last pain. I could almost stand up and go for a walk, but I’m afraid the next one is just around the corner.

There!

No, that was just a twitch. I adjust my position, easing the ache in my lower back.

Mama comes out with a bowl of water, an already wet rag hanging over the side, and a tray of snacks. The baby twists defiantly at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I grab the cup of water and take a deep gulp.

“Easy with that. You don’t want to get a cramp.”

I nod but take another gulp.

“You should eat something.”

Another twitch in my stomach.

“I’m not hungry.”

She sets the tray on a nearby table and pulls the wooden stool next to me. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll need your strength.”

“Did you call Jackson?”

She wrings the cloth out and pats my forehead. “No sense worrying him yet. You’ve got plenty of time.”

I want to ask what makes her such an expert. She’s only had one baby, and that was twenty- three years ago. But still, she’s had one more baby than I have.

Another pain comes. It’s like a wave rushing over me, building and building and refusing to crash, and I’m grateful for Mama’s comforting hand and the cool rag.

Then it’s finally receding like algae parting when a frog jumps off a lily pad into the water.

I give a final groan, and Mama hands me the water. I sip instead of gulping.

“The world seems brighter,” I say.

“Too bright? We could move inside.”

“No. I like it outside.” What I don’t say is I have the strangest urge to go to the marsh.

It’s not the first time the craving has struck me. Other teens would sneak into the city to see a film or go dancing. Me and Jackson snuck off to the Marsh.

It was my idea. Being near that forbidden water excited me as much as his nervous lips on mine. We found a willow tree whose canopy hung out over the water. We leaned against its trunk, and he held me for hours.

“Why do you love it here so much?” he asked me.

“It calms me. The water is so deep and still. It’s relaxing just being near it.” I hugged him, listening to his teenage heart thunder. “And I like sharing it with just you.”

Somewhere in the distance a bullfrog gave a deep belch.

“Well, and him.”

We both laughed, then kissed.

That night Mama noticed the mud on my shoes and the wet seat of my pants. She forbade me from ever seeing Jackson again, but she seemed more concerned with where we had been than with what we were doing.

I suppose she had a reason for that, too. My face swelled up that night. The next morning my eyes were nearly swollen shut and my skin was a deep, leafy green with pustules opening, secreting a light fluid like tears down my cheeks and neck.

Back to the hospital. They said I was allergic to a protein in some human saliva. No kisses for me. No marsh. No frogs. No boyfriend.

* * *

Mama helps me stand and ushers me around our front yard. She assures me that walking will ease the pain and help the baby come faster. But the next contraction brings me to my knees.

I pant hard, and she rubs my back. I go down on all fours and notice every blade of dark green grass. Jackson keeps our yard trimmed, and they’re all cut blunt at the top. If it weren’t for the pain, I’d want to cry. Instead, I cry out. This scream can’t be mistaken for a croak. It’s loud and pure.

“It’ll pass, it’ll pass,” Mama’s saying. And it does.

I collapse back onto my heels, my knees spread in a V to accommodate my low-hanging bump. The sun is too hot on my head, but I’m too wiped out to move back to the porch.

“Tell me about your birth,” I say.

“My birth?”

“I mean mine. Yours with me. What was it like?”

Mama moves my hair from my brow. “There’s not much to tell. You were in my belly, then you were born.”

“Was it day or night? Did it hurt like this?”

She cocks her head to the side and considers, then stands over me. “You don’t want to hear about that. Let me go get some water.”

I’m suddenly back in the pew before the baptism. She’s sitting behind me, whispering. “If you don’t remember, it doesn’t count.”

Looking at all those young kids, I thought, “I’ve never been that young.”

This is what I told Dr. Greene in our first session.

“And do you believe your childhood doesn’t count?” he had asked.

“I just wish my parents talked about it more. Everything they say makes me sound like the perfect daughter. No kid could be that good.”

He chuckled. His eyes were the same shade of blue as Jackson’s, and I thought it would be nice to make him laugh.

Mama comes back and wipes the sweat from my forehead and cheeks. I must be fully green now. Mrs. Becca Greene. Mama used to make me tan for hours in the summer, because brown was more becoming than green. Like she could hide me. Even now, she lowers her eyes instead of looking at my skin.

* * *

When I’m able to stand again, I move down the driveway, away from the house.

“We shouldn’t go too far,” Mama warns.

“I thought you said I have plenty of time,” I huff. Maybe too much irritation comes through my words, because she winces and falls a step behind me.

“Where are we even going?” Her voice is full of false cheer. Beneath it there’s a familiar reverberation. The same waver her tone held when she told me I couldn’t see Jackson or couldn’t go to the Marsh. It’s the same fear she had when she sent me into the city on the bus my first day of school.

By the time my next contraction hits, we’re well down the tree-lined lane, and I know exactly where my feet are taking me. Maybe the idea of the destination gives me a boost of adrenaline, or maybe the contractions ebb and flow naturally. Either way, this one doesn’t bring me to my knees. I brace off of Mama’s shoulders, and squat a little into the buzzing pain in my abdomen.

“Breathe,” she commands.

And, ever obedient, I do.

The pain passes, and I gasp. My gasp turns to laughter. I’m going to make it through this.

“Let’s turn back,” Mama says.

We’re close to the houses at the lower edge of town. People can probably hear my moans. They can see me sweating and squatting.

Mama doesn’t like when people see me as different.

“We’ll have to pull you from school,” Mama had said when I returned from the hospital. “Once this gets out, you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“But Mama, I just have another year!” I whined. “What am I going to do without a diploma?”

“Plenty of women get jobs before they finish their education. You’ll find some place that will accept you for you.”

“I’ll be fine,” I insisted. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and in our house, her word was final.

My only hope at that point was Dr. Greene.

“You’ve got a right to an education,” he explained in our next session. “She can’t keep you home against your will.”

“I can’t go to school knowing she doesn’t want me to,” I said, “She wants what’s best for me, and I can’t hurt her like that.”

He nodded gravely. “And Jackson?”

That’s when I learned that not everyone hated me for being different. Jackson still wanted to date me, even if my allergy meant we couldn’t kiss. At the end of the session, I rushed up to his apartment to find him. We hugged hard, and he held my hand. I felt the overwhelming desire to kiss him, but we just hugged each other tighter.

“You still want me?” I asked.

“My frog-girl? Of course,” he grinned.

It was the first time I didn’t mind turning green. I let a blush run through my full body and relished the heat of it.

That evening, I packed a bag and told Mama I was staying with Jackson and his family. “They’ll take me in until I’m finished with school.”

She grabbed my wrist and spun me around. “You can’t do this to me. I created you.”

I shook her off of me. “If I can’t remember it, it doesn’t count, right?”

Now, I shake her hand off of my arm again. I straighten as best I can and march down the middle of the lazy street. Let the neighbors look.

Mama sighs heavily and scurries after me.

* * *

We’re well past the church, and my contractions are stopping us at least once a block. I’m past the point of leaning on Mama. Every time the tightening starts, I drop to my knees. I end up on the pavement or in the grass, on hands and knees, whining and bellowing like some kind of animal. I grunt and groan and push Mama off when she tries to comfort me. The contractions are coming faster together, but they aren’t as drawn out. It’s an intense minute of squeezing death, then relief. I am quick to pick myself up and keep walking.

When we pass the turnoff to Granddad’s street, Mama realizes where I’m heading.

“No, no, no,” she grabs my elbow. “You can’t be serious, Becca. Not there.”

I want to tell her that I’ve read stories about women in Europe giving birth in pools of water. The baby just slips out of them. It’s supposed to be less traumatic for both baby and mother. But words are beyond me at this point. All I can do is breathe and walk, and hope the baby gives me enough time to reach the marsh. Because somehow, I know that’s where it must be born.

I’m kneeling again, and I look up to her. “Tell me about my birth.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t. That’s what you want me to say, right?”

She wipes frustrated tears from her eyes.

They’re so much like the tears that fell when she finally said, “Fine, you can go to school.”

Those tears weren’t of surrender though. Her allowance was accompanied by a list of rules so long I couldn’t help but feel I was the one who lost. I was to continue living with them. I could see Jackson but only with a chaperone.

She sealed the new deal by kissing my forehead. The site swelled and blistered, reminding me that life was going to be difficult, and I was going to need my Mama to get through it.

“Tell me,” I pant.

She drops to her knees, pretenses-be-damned. “I found you in the swamp when you were twelve years old. We couldn’t find your parents, so we agreed to take you in. The doctor thought it would be easier for you if you just thought we were your parents. You had almost died. You didn’t need to know your parents had abandoned you.”

My head aches. I stand, this time pulling Mama to her feet.

“Let’s go home,” she whimpers.

But I continue walking north.

* * *

“You got everyone in the town to lie about who I am,” I huff after my next contraction.

My defiance sounds the same as it did the day I told Mama I was marrying Jackson.

“You can’t marry that boy,” she had said. “Marriage is about family. How are you ever going to give him babies? You can’t even kiss without swelling up like some… some frog!”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said. By then I had finished school but hadn’t been able to get a job. The potential employers were not as cruel as the school children, but they didn’t want to hire a green-skinned receptionist.

“The doctor thought it was best,” she says again, as if it will excuse half a lifetime of feeling like I didn’t belong and not being able to understand why.

“Did Dr. Greene know?” I bite my lip. Tears blur my vision. “Did Jackson?”

The next contraction tears through me, and my scream goes low and guttural. It sounds too much like a bullfrog. No wonder the children always called me frog-girl. They weren’t wrong. To them I was an oddity from the marsh, not a human playmate they had grown up with.

“Jackson didn’t know.”

At least there’s that.

I get up and continue walking. The blurry edge of the marsh is in view.

* * *

I don’t make it quite to the weeping willow. The contractions start coming too fast and hard, and they take me down by the edge of the water about a hundred yards from the tree. Each one sets my skin on fire and shakes my bones. I weep and cry out and croak.

There’s no one around to hear, which Mama is probably grateful for, but I don’t care. I scream louder. Let them hear my frog song.

There’s a shift in my belly, and a slipping, and I feel the incredible urge to exhale and let the baby drop from me.

“Almost there,” Mama coos. She’s holding my hand and standing behind me, letting me lean against her thighs as I squat deep.

Another tightening and another woosh of exhale. Then a burning between my legs like the preacher’s sermons of hell.

Another.

Then a pop, and it’s over.

A beautiful, grayish-pink baby slips from me. I fall back, Mama lowering me to the wet mud as I reach for my baby and bring her to my chest. She covers my dress with blood and other liquids, and she’s squished up almost too bad to look like a baby, but she’s beautiful.

I cry and hold her to me, and Mama sits in the mud beside us.

“You did good,” she says.

I nod, but I don’t really hear her. Blood still rushes in my ears.

I bend my head to my baby’s. I nuzzle against her, smelling her newborn scent.

“Becca,” Mama says, “Don’t.”

I kiss my newborn’s head.

The pinkish skin turns gray. Then green. It puckers and welts. Her arms flail, then change, webbing growing between her tiny fingers. Her legs fatten. Her head fuses to her tiny body. She stares at me a minute longer, then hops off my stomach.

She’s small for a baby, but large for a frog.

She hops twice, then splashes into the water.

Mama cries. Real tears. Heavy, sobs. Surrender.

I don’t know how I’ll explain this to Jackson, but I do know that if you remember it, it counts.

 

* * *

About the Author

Koji A. Dae is a queer American writer living long-term in Bulgaria with her husband, two kids, and cat. Her writing focuses on relationships, mental health, generational trauma, and parenting. More of her writing can be found in Clarkesworld, Apex, and her website: kojiadae.ink.

Welcome to Issue 20 of Zooscape!

It’s easier to stare trauma in the face when it has the face of a cat. Art Spiegelman knew this when he chose to tell his father’s story, Maus, in the form of a graphic novel featuring mice, cats, pigs, and dogs rather than normal humans. It’s hard to look straight at the horrors and atrocities humans commit. Throwing in a little fur softens the hard edges, making it possible for us to reckon and wrestle with the harshness of reality.

Most of the stories in this issue wrestle with the darkness we have to face in this world, but they’re also beautiful, occasionally funny, and if you stick it out to the end, you’ll find one that’s just outright fun.

* * *

The Unbearable Weight of a Photograph by Jelena Dunato

The Last Life of a Time-Travelling Cat by A.P. Golub

Night in the Garden by Marshall L. Moseley

Proper Pedagogy by Jessica Cho

Rusty by Steve Loiaconi

Honey Harvest by Spencer Orey

The Three-Piece Giant by Gabrielle Steele

* * *

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.  Also, you can pick up e-book or paperback volumes of our first ten issues bundled into three anthologies, complete with an illustration for every story.

by Gabrielle Steele

“The top badger was terrible at playing its own game.”

Alana stood one step shy of the quaint stone bridge, gripping her sword as she stared at the furry red leg that stuck out from beneath the frayed edge of the giant’s shirt. The battered clothing suffered an abundance of arrow holes, and its original owner had clearly met a rather gruesome end. A shiny black nose was poking through one hole mid-torso.

“I say, giant, can you hear me all the way up there?”

“We– I can hear you just fine.”

The voice coming from the shadows of a heavy hood was far too high-pitched for a giant. How had the villagers fallen for it? It was bad enough they only had one bridge leading to the spring paddocks. But it wasn’t Alana’s job to point out such foolishness. Her job was simply to remove the so-called giant. Honestly, a real giant would have been easier to deal with. They didn’t have magic. The large red and gold puck badgers of the fae forest did. They were weak when docile but dangerously feral if offended. The safest action was to play along.

“Mighty giant,” Alana said. “This bridge is surely too small for you, and the villagers think it best you find somewhere more suitable.”

“We’re quite happy here, thank you.”

Alana fought the urge to roll her eyes. The top badger was terrible at playing its own game. “The villagers need to reach their paddocks. If you like it here, you can fish just as easily from over there.” She pointed at a rock jutting out from the riverbank like a small pier.

The top badger whispered something down to the middle badger, whose muffled whispers seemed aimed at the bottom badger. With as much grace as possessed by a newborn foal, the pillar of badgers turned towards the rock. Two snouts appeared – one from between shirt buttons, the other above the waistband. Stern whispers passed up and down the column, then the extra snouts disappeared, and the badgers shuffled back to face Alana.

“It looks awfully cold,” the top badger said.

“What if the villagers offer you a blanket?”

“That would be kind,” the giant’s chest said.

“Shut up, Rusty,” the top badger hissed; then he looked at Alana with narrowed eyes. “That shan’t do. We like this bridge. It’s pretty, and the fish don’t notice us so much.”

“Someone as skilled at fishing as you could surely escape the notice of a few fish. Now though, this might interest you. I hear the fish around here can’t resist creeping close to listen in on a good song.”

If there was one thing Alana knew well about puck badgers, besides their extreme dislike of being laughed at, it was that they loved the sound of their own voices, especially in song form. The sound had been deemed so terrible, there were tales of it shocking birds so badly they fell dead from their perches. Listening to an overtired child screeching for hours would seem a joy in comparison.

The giant turned to confer with itself; then it wobbled about, its clothes sagging and bulging as if a huge deathfly larvae were about to burst out. Just the thought made Alana’s hand shift towards her sword. The undulating stopped, and when the giant turned back, a different badger had taken the top position — it had much rounder, friendlier eyes, as well as a large golden hoop hanging from its left ear.

“What songs do the fish like?” the badger said, who sounded like Rusty, previously the middle badger.

“Tales of the open ocean, my friend. They long to swim in it, but alas, the salt shrivels them until they’re nothing but sea slugs.”

“Those poor mites,” Rusty said, looking sidelong at the river. “I’ve the perfect song to soothe their souls.”

As he closed his eyes and opened his mouth, Alana did two things. First, she shoved wax plugs into her ears which, being one of a problem-solver’s most important tools, she kept tethered around her neck. Second, she tossed a piece of stale bread upstream of the bridge, in a place where some scree blocked the swift current. Not a crumb escaped the gluttonous fish, whose dark shadows now filled the calmer channel.

Rusty closed his mouth, and Alana plucked her earplugs free before he opened his eyes. He whispered to the middle badger, who whispered to the bottom badger, and the giant staggered to the bridge’s low wall. It would have been easy to push them in and earn her coin, but Alana wasn’t interested in murdering such harmless creatures — harmless to those with the sense not to insult them, that is.

Leaning forwards, Rusty peered over the wall. “Well, I’ll be a–” But Alana never got to hear what, for Rusty’s foot slipped, and the giant’s head went tumbling into the river. The giant’s chest and legs screamed in horror, and each jumped separately to stand on the wall.

“Brother!” the shirt and trousers shouted together.

The pieces of clothing went flying, and both badgers dived in after their brother. In truth, Rusty would have been better off had they not. He’d already caught hold of a thick root and was busy pulling himself to the bank when his brothers slammed into him. He lost his grip, and the current caught all three of them. They thrashed about, making it painfully clear they didn’t know how to swim.

With a tremendous sigh, Alana unbuckled her sword and leaned it against the bridge wall with her pack. She pulled off her boots and socks, shirked her tunic and trousers, then dove into the frigid water wearing nothing but her smalls and the cloth that bound her breasts. Her chest froze, but she forced herself to breathe through the chill. Cold shock was the danger of rivers, one that had almost cost Alana her life as a child and that now had the badgers flailing as if they felt suffocated. All they did was waste their energy.

A fair swimmer, Alana caught up with the three silly creatures easily enough, but she had no way of hauling them all out together. She looked about and tried to form a plan, but the moment she was within reach, the fools caught hold of her. Two grabbed her arms, while Rusty wrapped his little arms around her neck, his vicious claws sinking into her flesh. Unable to move her arms, the weight of the badgers dragged Alana under.

It didn’t pay to be kind. She should have let them drown, given it was their own stupid fault. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to push them away to save herself. With all her might, she kicked her legs, driving them back to the surface.

Alana sucked in a chest full of air. “Kick your legs, you little weasels.”

Rusty’s claws bit deeper. Full of anger, the badgers would surely find the stubbornness to survive. Alana only hoped they would forgive her once they were safely ashore.

Together, the four of them kicked, churning the water like the flesh-eating fish of Murir. Alana steered them towards the left bank, where a thick root stuck out into the river, and beyond it… By the gods. It wasn’t the river that near deafened Alana. It was a waterfall.

“Make a chain if you want to live, weasels,” Alana shouted over the roar.

In a surprising display of intelligence, the badger holding her left arm shuffled down to her hand, followed by Rusty, who pulled himself around the other badger’s back. When the third badger didn’t move, Alana ducked him beneath the water for a few seconds, then bared her teeth at him. He soon moved across, settling between Rusty and the other badger instead of taking the end position. Coward.

“Grab the root, Rusty,” Alana yelled.

Hearing his name seemed to spur Rusty into action. They all kicked and stretched as they sailed towards the root with terrific speed. Rusty grabbed hold, sinking his claws in, but the speed of the river wrenched his paw away.

Alana searched the bank for anything else they could grab. There was a thin root just before the fall — their last hope. She flipped onto her back and started kicking against the current, hoping to slow them. The badgers did likewise, but their little legs were slowing. Even Alana felt drained, frigid as the river was. She kept kicking, pushing herself even as her chest burned for more air.

Alana wanted to shout at Rusty to grab the root, but she hadn’t the breath. He stretched his arm out anyway; then Alana did what she needed to. One by one, she prised the claws from about her hand, then pushed that badger towards the bank. Exhausted, she gave herself up to the river. Rusty stared at her with wide eyes, his paw wrapped about the root. Then the world tipped, and Alana took a deep breath before she struck the water far below.

Lost in darkness, Alana couldn’t tell up from down, or if she were conscious at all. Numbness had claimed her body. Her head struck something; then she faded into true darkness, the metallic taste of blood sharp in her mouth as she went.

* * *

“Is she dead?”

“Can we eat her?”

“Rats, the pair of you. She saved our lives, and you’re thinking about eating her?”

“I only asked.”

Alana groaned as her eyes slowly opened. Blinding light made her head pound, so she closed them again.

“Did you see that, Peapod?” Rusty said. “You can’t eat something that’s still alive.”

“What do we do with her then?”

“She looks badly hurt,” Rusty said. “I don’t think human legs are supposed to bend that way, and her head’s bleeding an awful lot. Say, Walnut, go fetch Old Willow. He’s not far downstream.”

“Right-o, brother.”

The world went blissfully quiet again, save for the hushed whispers of Rusty and Peapod. It sounded as though they’d moved away, or perhaps it was Alana who was far away. She couldn’t feel her body beneath her neck, and her head hurt so much she wished she’d drowned beneath the falls. A wave of nausea overcame her, and she vomited. With no way to turn her head, she began to choke.

“By the great lord’s fine stripes,” Rusty said.

“What do we do, brother?” Peapod said.

“I don’t–”

“Stand aside, stand aside,” said a deep, commanding voice. “Dear me, I’ve never seen one this injured before. My bag, little one.”

Over her choking, Alana heard the rustle of a jute bag being dragged over stone. Someone turned her head, bringing another wave of dizziness upon her. Her stomach emptied, clearing what had choked her.

“This is beyond my skill, my friends,” Old Willow said. “I fear to give her my pain tonic, for she has no control of her functions. You must call for the White Stag.”

One badger let out a little squeal of fright as another scurried away. Alana couldn’t blame them. The White Stag was infamous. They were both a stag of snowy pelt and a woman with unnaturally white skin, as if no blood ran through their veins. Indeed, that was probably true, because their favourite meal was the blood of men, particularly those who had recently dipped their wicks, be it in man or woman. Being a fair maiden upon a noble stag, it was easy for them to seduce any man. So Alana had heard.

The world seemed to get further away. Alana could guess her injuries. A broken neck and a cracked skull. There was no coming back from that. Old Willow would have been better to kill her himself than call for the White Stag, who was notoriously jealous of beautiful women. Perhaps Alana’s injuries were enough to protect her from a long, agonising life as a snowflake passing through flames and reforming in perpetuity.

Two badgers squeaked, and even Old Willow drew in a sharp breath. Swift hoofbeats sent bolts of agony through Alana’s head, but they quickly faded. Given how wet the ground was beneath her head, she must have finally bled out. It was a good life, but she shouldn’t have saved those damn badgers.

“Saving them is the only reason I’m healing you, human,” a melodic voice said.

As if by magic, which it probably was, feeling spread through Alana’s body. There was no pain, not even the ache in the tooth she’d been planning to have pulled. She opened her eyes and marvelled at the beauty of the stars above. Except they weren’t stars, for the sky hadn’t yet darkened. Laughter like the chiming of a tiny bell made Alana sit up and scoot away. Such a fair voice could only bring trouble.

“Humans are adorable when they’re afraid, don’t you think, Old Willow?” the White Stag said through the woman’s mouth.

Old Willow nodded quickly in reply, eyes averted. Alana couldn’t tear hers away. Both of the White Stag’s forms were beautiful. They glowed with a faint white light, and twinkling sparks of life floated through the air around them. Snowy felt coated the stag’s antlers, and the woman’s hair, even her eyebrows, were the same soft white. Her pupils, though… They were blood red.

Rusty sidled up to Alana and nudged her with an elbow. “You must thank them,” he whispered. Then he let out a whimper and scuttled away as the White Stag’s gaze moved to him.

“Thank you indeed,” Alana said, knowing one must always be polite and honest where fae creatures were concerned.

The woman grinned, and the stag snorted, tossing its antlers up and down. “It makes a pleasant change to find an educated human. There is a condition to your healing, however.”

Alana swallowed the stubborn lump in her throat. “And that condition is?”

“I rule the Araethan Forest here, so I have sensed you creeping within the border. You have always been respectful, which is why I have yet allowed you to live. I am sure you will soon find your healing to be a curse, however. You will live among us, solving our problems now, not those of humans. Stray from this task, and I shall undo your healing in an instant.”

Alana got up and lowered herself onto one knee, suddenly ashamed of her near-nakedness. “Your curse is a blessing, oh graceful one. To walk among magic folk and learn of your ways shall be a delight.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere with us,” they said. “Go with the brothers you have saved. They owe you a life debt, and it will take much work to pay that out.”

The woman climbed onto the stag, and they galloped away, lifting a hand in farewell.

“Well, I’ll be,” Walnut said.

“You’re lucky to have met her and lived,” Rusty said. He took hold of Alana’s hand. “Come now, lass. We’ll find you a place to stay. If we ask the trees nice like, they may give us wood for a cabin.” He tried to pull her along, but Alana tugged her hand free and turned to bow to the tall man-like creature who stood nearby.

“My thanks to you, Old Willow.”

“Off with you, lass,” he said, picking up his bag. “The White Stag will think you’ve rejected their gift if you linger.” He strode towards a willow tree downstream.

Rusty tugged on Alana’s hand. “Come now.”

Peapod took her other hand, and as they led her into the forest, Walnut danced ahead, singing a tale of the White Stag. If only Alana’s hands were free, she would have plugged her ears.

 

* * *

About the Author

Gabrielle Steele lives in Essex, UK with her husband and two mischievous younglings. She writes epic fantasy and speculative shorts, pitting poor souls against dragons, gods, and the occasional squirrel. You can view her ramblings on Twitter @eldris and find more about her writing on https://thellian.com

by Spencer Orey

“Bugs came in looking for a safe haven, then got so hooked that they’d pay anything to keep the honey flowing. I’d been one of them. I just hoped I wouldn’t be one again.”

It was late when she buzzed into my office in the shrub. This time of the year, I expected grasshoppers, maybe someone left behind in a migration. No such luck today. She was a mantis, same species as me, the kind I’d run away from before the cockroach war changed everything. These days, I didn’t see much reason to run. Better to sit still and let her eat.

“I heard you can find anyone,” she said.

Disappointing. But at least a job would give me something to do. “Sure,” I said. “When’s the last you saw him?”

“Her,” she said. “She vanished last night. After…” She ran a front leg up to straighten one of her antennae. “After she tried to eat me. I want her to know it’s okay. That I forgive her.”

Made sense. Some mantises got the hunger something terrible, couldn’t stop themselves from biting the head off of someone they cared about even when they knew they’d regret it later. Back before the war, I never would’ve understood something like that. Now, I knew we all had it in us to do something monstrous.

“Anywhere you think she’d hide?” I asked. But I already knew where to look. There was only one place any of us went when we messed up so bad that we needed to forget everything. The hive. The one place I never wanted to see again. It was always the hive.

* * *

By the time I glided in, it was late enough that even the fireflies were done flirting. They’d settled onto tall grass stalks, giving a final flickering show to some collector spiders in the shadows who were probably hoping for another chance at dinner.

I scuttled to the door, where two cockroaches accepted my entrance fee and waved me through without any questions. Maybe they still recognized me from the old days, or maybe I still looked hopeless enough to belong in a bad place like this.

Even from the doorway, the sweet smell hit me hard. Here I was, back in the trap, after everything I’d done to stay away. And the hive was one hell of a trap. Most bugs didn’t need to sleep, but staying outside at night wasn’t safe, especially when the weather turned cold. That’s where the cockroaches came in. After the war, when there was nobody left to stop them, they’d colonized a beehive and expanded it into a business. Bugs came in looking for a safe haven, then got so hooked that they’d pay anything to keep the honey flowing. I’d been one of them. I just hoped I wouldn’t be one again.

The front parlor was crawling with flies, most of whom wouldn’t see the sky again. I shouldn’t have blamed them for wasting their short time like this, but I did. Drinking sugar water until your legs curled was no way to live. And that’s most of what I tasted in the air, watered-down honey, dripping down the walls and into the troughs. Bigger bugs were in the back. A few locusts crouched around a trough of what was probably alfalfa honey, based on the flowery spice. I even spotted a wasp, slinking away.

“Ah, the private eye returnsss,” a voice hissed to my side. “What’sss bugging’ ya today? Heh heh.”

Roach. He ran the place. We had bad history together from the war.

“I’m looking for a mantis,” I said. “A dame. Seen anyone like that tonight?”

“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.” Roach’s wings twitched. He knew something alright. He always did. “What’sss it to you? Finally looking to get your head bitten off?”

Right, a bite. Just like in the war, when Roach led my friends into an ambush, and the wasps bit off their heads. Nobody had been able prove he’d led them into trouble on purpose. We all suspected the roaches of being malicious, but they kept getting away. Except, when the war ended, it turned out only the cockroaches had survived without taking heavy losses. The rest of us — wasps and mantises and all the other bugs who just so happened to be the cockroachs’ natural predators — discovered we’d had our numbers thinned out. Sure, we were furious, but we were broken. Nobody could fight anymore. Any talk of revenge died in places like the hive, where we all tried to forget what the cockroaches had put us through while we gave them everything we had left. But not tonight.

“Listen up, you larva.” I lunged forward and grasped Roach’s front leg, ready to snap it free. “How about you tell me where she is, and I’ll forget I saw you here tonight.”

“Maybe I sssaw a mantisss back in framesss,” Roach hissed, legs spindling around as he tried to slip free.

I let him go. “Good. Thanks.” If she was back in the frames, things were even worse than I’d suspected. I might even be too late.

“Wait. It’d be a pity to lose a good cussstomer.” Roach massaged his leg. “Surely it can’t hurt if she ssstays a couple more daysss. How about it, old friend?” He reached out with one of his legs, offering me money, a thick roll of bills.

A bribe. A good one at that, more than I was being paid for the job. More than I’d been paid in a long time. Whoever this dame was, she had to be a real high roller to be worth that kind of cash. That or someone was paying to eat a mantis, maybe a frog on the outside. Money like that could buy me a month of the good life. It’d be easy to do as Roach said, to back off and then come pick up whatever remained of the dame’s corpse. But I didn’t need anything else to keep me up at night.

“Keep your dirty cash, Roach.” I scuttled away, past a table of centipedes, all the way to the back wall, where a rhinoceros beetle guarded the doorway to frames. I paid him and went inside.

Most bugs either couldn’t tell the difference between sugar water and orange blossoms or just didn’t care. But anyone who stayed in the hive long enough developed a hard craving for something stronger. And that’s what you could get from frames.

It was a loud place and darker than the main floor. The far wall was packed with bee drones hard at work making honey for the cockroaches to sell to the rest of us. Below the wall, honey dripped down into a trough before it got piped elsewhere for dilution and distribution. But tonight, it wasn’t just bees buzzing. Something else buzzed too. Something familiar. Something bad.

I twisted away as a stinger darted at me from the side. A wasp. I raised my forelegs in defense, ready to strike back.

“Hey you two! Cool it before you anger the drones,” someone called from inside the trough.

“I recognize you from the war,” the wasp slurred at me. She only had one wing but kept buzzing it like she could still fly if she tried hard enough. Honey clung to the sides of her mandibles and her eyes. She’d eaten so much she couldn’t even see straight. I didn’t recognize her. Chances were, we’d never met. But she could still hate my species.

I raised my forelegs higher, ready to slash. It’d be a good fight, just like the bad old days.

The wasp wove to the side, looking for weakness. And as she moved, I saw the bug who’d called out from the trough. It was a beetle, blue shell resplendent against the thick orange of the honey. Next to the beetle was the mantis dame. She was in bad shape, drooping in place, wide-set eyes too heavy. No way she’d last another few days of this. The cockroaches had set her on a path to her death, same as they’d done to the rest of us. My fighting a wasp would just play into their plans. I had to get her out of here.

I lowered my forelegs. “We all did bad things in the war. Things we regret.” Even talking about the war made little memories flash up at me. Stingers. Broken eggs. Cockroaches hissing with laughter. “Right now, I’m here on a job.”

“What kind of job?” The wasp feinted striking at me a few times.

“I came looking for that dame over there. Someone wants her home safe.” I decided to try getting honest. “Someone who loves her. Someone who wants a fresh start.”

“Love, huh.” The wasp’s wing stopped buzzing. “Not a lot of love around here. Not a lot of fresh starts either.”

“Not enough,” I agreed.

I scuttled closer to the trough. The mantis dame had her head lowered into the honey for a long bite. Her legs were already shaking badly. It wouldn’t be long until the roaches fished her out and fed her to whoever was paying.

When she came back up, I said, “Your gal sent me to find you. She wants you home.”

“Home? I don’t deserve a home,” the mantis dame said, voice heavy and slurred. “I tried to eat her. I lost control.”

“No, you almost lost control,” I said. I looked over at the wasp. The two of us, we’d done bad things we couldn’t take back. But this dame, she hadn’t done anything bad yet, just come close. She’d found out she had limits, same as the rest of us, and it’d scared her. I said, “You almost went over the edge, but you stepped back in time. That makes all the difference.”

The dame slurred something I didn’t quite catch, except, “…safer alone.”

“How I see it is, you want to pass your life alone, that’s your business. You can do that after you get out of here,” I said. “But if you run away from too many good things just because you’re scared, you’ll end up like the rest of us, trying to forget your way through a bad night. And trust me, eventually, they’re all bad nights.”

The mantis swayed a little in place. I could see she was almost convinced. Maybe she’d been telling herself the same thing before the honey got to her.

The wasp buzzed closer to her. “Go while you still can. There’s nothing for anyone here but bad memories.”

I offered a foreleg. “Let’s get you back to someone who cares about you.”

For a moment, I thought she’d tell me to leave again. Nothing I could do about that. Sometimes, my pedantic lectures didn’t work, no matter how honest I let myself get. We all still got to make our choices, no matter how bad they could be.

The mantis took hold and stepped one leg out of the trough. I could smell the honey on her, wildflowers, always something special. I remembered my old sweet stupor and suddenly, all I wanted was to climb into the trough myself. But if I did that, the mantis dame would lose her courage. And I didn’t need any more drinking buddies.

We headed toward the door. The mantis stopped, then turned back to the wasp. “You should come too. We can find you a place to stay.”

“It’s too late for me, kid,” the wasp said. She gave me a quick salute, then buried her mandibles in honey. She’d made her choice, as much as I hated to see it. I saluted back.

I said, “Let’s get you home.”

Roach was waiting for us outside of frames. Then I found myself staring into the eyes of the rhinoceros beetle. Up close, she was ugly, sickly white with spots. Before I could tell her to move out of the way, a second beetle slammed into me from the side. I tumbled to the ground.

“Too bad you couldn’t sssee thingsss our way,” Roach said. “Girlsss, let’s give our friend a good long drink, on the house. I’ll take thisss other one to the collector.”

I twisted and slashed with my forelegs, but the two beetles held me with their horns and pushed me to the nearest trough. I kept fighting even as they shoved my face toward a honey trough. They pushed harder, and then I was sinking in. I twisted my head to the side, but that sweet stickiness seeped onto my face, coated my antennae. It was the cheap stuff, thin and runny. Sugar water. And it smelled wonderful. I tried to lift my mandible away, but the beetles pushed my head fully in, and warm honey seeped over my face and into my mouth, my first taste in far too long. I opened my mandibles and took a full bite. Then another. I stopped fighting, and when the beetles relaxed the pressure on me, I pushed myself the rest of the way into the trough.

I started eating the honey. Then I ate some more. I ate for a long time, letting it all fade, losing track of time, losing everything. I’d forgotten this bliss, how memories could fade into perfect empty sweetness.

Then someone ruined it. They pulled my head out of the trough, then pushed me out, onto the sticky ground. The mantis dame. She said, “Looks like you get a fresh start too.”

“Perhapsss we can come to an underssstanding,” Roach said.

She let go of me. I heard a buzzing of wings, followed by a hissing scream. With my vision still blurred from honey, I saw things in little flashes. The mantis dame bit hard into Roach’s head. Far away, a rhinoceros beetle had lowered horns to charge our way across the floor. I had to help, but I was weak and slow. I wouldn’t reach her in time.

One wing buzzed loud. The wasp leaped through the air and came down hard, stinging the rhinoceros beetle in the side. The beetle screeched in pain and slammed into a trough of honey. Flies scattered into the air. Hatches opened around the floor, and hordes of cockroaches came hissing out to keep the peace. Some of the other bugs poked their heads out of the honey in languid interest.

Roach was flailing in the mantis dame’s grasp. His head was gushing fluid from his bite wound, but he’d live. The mantis must have stopped herself from killing him.

She said, “Let us out of here now, or we’ll kill you all.”

My limbs were still sticky and heavy. I could barely stand.

“Let them go!” Roach hissed. “Get them out of here!”

The mantis dame released Roach and grabbed me, pulling me toward the door. The cockroaches made an aisle for us, hissing in anger. The wasp buzzed close with us, darting forward with her stinger whenever a cockroach came too close.

And then we were out in the night. I still wanted to sink into honey, away from all the memories flooding back. But I knew better than to give in. And this time, maybe not all of those memories would be bad. The night was full of predators, but right now, it was a night full of bugs who could still forgive each other. A mantis had forgiven herself enough to try living again, and somewhere out there, her lover was waiting for her to return. Maybe that was enough to earn me another day.

 

* * *

About the Author

Spencer Orey (he/him) is a writer living in rainy Denmark with his insect-loving family. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and his short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tales from Fiddler’s Green and Flame Tree Press’s Lost Atlantis anthology. He has a PhD in cultural anthropology, with academic interests in magic, mobility, and media dreams that he loves to weave into stories. You can find him online at www.spencerorey.com or @spencerorey on Twitter and Mastodon.

by Steve Loiaconi

“You’d be surprised what people will admit to when a mangy terrier is standing over them with a whirring power drill in his paws.”

Whenever there’s a crisis in Action Cove, the mayor calls in these jamokes.

Sparky is a labradoodle who tools around in a modified fire truck. Siren, the German shepherd, drives an excessively armored police car. Then you got Splash, a collie with a hovercraft; Slate, a boxer in a bulldozer; and Sting, a chow chow in a little yellow helicopter.

They take orders from Cash, an inexplicably wealthy 15-year-old with a good heart and a quaint notion of justice.

I got to hand it to them. Most days, those pups do a decent job of keeping the peace. Saving cats in trees, stopping petty crimes, putting out warehouse fires, and whatnot. Then they sing a little song and take a nap.

But a town whose entire law enforcement and emergency response apparatus is handled by talking dogs makes an attractive target for hardcore criminals. There are cases when they’re out of options, when the clock is ticking and lines need to be crossed.

That’s when they call me.

My name is Rusty, and I don’t mind getting my paws dirty.

I’m mostly Jack Russell with a hint of Doberman and a pinch of pit bull. Cash says he likes me like he likes his coffee: small, fast, and mean.

I don’t think he’s ever had coffee.

Half the time, I don’t even need to touch a guy. You’d be surprised what people will admit to when a mangy terrier is standing over them with a whirring power drill in his paws.

Up in the watchtower, I fill up my dish with black coffee. Slate is running an obstacle course; Sting is watching cartoons; and Siren is filling out some paperwork that she thinks is very important.

“Councilman Calamity is at it again,” Splash says, nudging the pages of the newspaper with his nose. Groans rise up from the rest of the team.

This stooge, Councilman Chatsworth Calamity, keeps looking for ways to shut us down. Whether it’s proposing budget cuts, advocating stifling new regulations, or — as today’s front page reports — signing contracts for some prototype robot dinosaur police force, the dude is a constant thorn in our paws.

“That city councilman is only still breathing because you twerps won’t let me off the leash,” I say, under my breath but loud enough for everyone to hear.

“We can’t just go around assassinating people,” Siren barks.

“Won’t isn’t can’t,” I say, lapping up a mouthful of coffee.

“Cash said no.”

“Yeah, well.” I glance out at the setting sun. “Cash says a lot of things.”

Sparky stumbles into the room.

“Everybody coming to my show tomorrow?” he asks.

There’s a chorus of of-courses and wouldn’t-miss-its.

Sparky is putting on a one-man show at the theater downtown. I’ve seen him rehearse. It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s cute.

They’re always so damn cute.

“Any of you guys read my erotic Kojak novella?” I ask.

The room goes silent.

I emailed them all copies weeks ago, and it’s only 75 pages.

“Who’s Kojak?” Sting says.

It takes every ounce of restraint in my wiry little body not to leap across the room and rip his throat out.

The flashing lights on our collars break the tension.

“Cash needs us,” they howl in unison.

Everyone shimmies into their shiny uniforms and lines up for the briefing. I hang back by the window.

“We’ve got a problem, doggos,” Cash says, standing before a massive computer screen.

He taps his keyboard and brings up a mugshot and a map.

“This guy’s a demolitions expert from out west. The state police nabbed him speeding down Route 27 north of town. When they pulled him over, he couldn’t stop bragging about the bomb he placed somewhere in Action Cove. He said it goes off at seven p.m.”

We all turn to the clock on the wall. Quarter past six.

“Rusty,” Cash says, “I’ve been questioning him for over an hour and time is running out. It’s your turn.”

I nod and push past the other dogs.

“His name is–”

“I don’t want to know his name.”

I pick up my work bag with my teeth and slouch down the hall.

“Zap his nuts!” Slate shouts.

Always with the nuts, this guy. He doesn’t appreciate that there’s an art to this. None of them do. They just turn their heads, eat their yummy treats, and play their silly games.

I slide open the door of the interrogation room. Under a spotlight in the middle of the blood-and-dirt-stained linoleum, the thug sits chained to a metal chair.

He laughs when he sees me, like they always do. I lay my tools out on the floor, making sure he sees the array of knives, saws, and needles. That stops the laughter right quick.

This is the fun part. I spring back on my hind legs and swing my paw across his face. Then I hit him again and again. And again.

I wail away until hitting his jaw feels like punching a bag of kibble.

“Still not talking?” I grunt.

I retreat to the corner, and I relish the panic in his eyes when I return. It ain’t easy to carry a flaming blowtorch between your teeth without singing your fur, but it’s worth it.

“Stop,” he mumbles. “Please stop.”

My tail wags.

I power down the torch and sit attentively.

“It’s under the lighthouse,” he says, coughing a gob of blood and teeth on the floor. He gives me the deactivation code, and he tells me who hired him. I’m not surprised.

I march out of the filthy room, my head held high.

Cash lays out a plan and the rest of the team springs into action. They hurry down the slide to their vehicles. Action Cove is saved again.

“You’re a good dog, Rusty,” Cash says before he launches himself down the slide.

“No, I’m not,” I grumble. “And that’s the way you like it.”

As they race off to complete their mission, I curl up in the dark and weep.

 

* * *

About the Author

Steve Loiaconi is a journalist and a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program. His fiction previously appeared in Griffel, True Chili, the Good Life Review, Samfiftyfour, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as the anthologies Dracula’s Guests and P is for Poltergeist.

by Jessica Cho

“…they pulled strings from theories, tangled and untangled equations, sliced through Gordian knots with claws as sharp as Occam’s razor.”

When the doors of the Universities across the world first opened to them, the cats, for all their sheddings and shortcomings, took to those academic halls the same way they took to sunbeams and soft places.

They paced through their research with a hunter’s single-minded focus, ears high and alert for any sounds of interest, ferreting out facts like mice from the walls.

The linguistics department welcomed their nimble voices, well versed in a wide range of sounds, but even more their subtlety of jaw and gesture, their ability to communicate across oceans of silence.

From laboratories and lecture halls, they pulled strings from theories, tangled and untangled equations, sliced through Gordian knots with claws as sharp as Occam’s razor.

To all indications, they excelled.

But in the quiet depths of a building of cracked stone and creeping ivy, lies an old tabby, his body curled in proportions the envy of any Renaissance painter, who understands that chasing knowledge is an exercise as futile as chasing dust motes — imagined specks that disappear as soon as they’re grasped.

He sleeps undisturbed, a scholar in perfect repose, for he knows the key to understanding cannot be found in study or debate. The language of the Universe is neither math nor science, but rather the frequency that thrums in perfect resonance, the sound at the centet not a roar, but a purr.

 

* * *

About the Author

Jessica is a Rhysling Award winning writer of SFF short fiction and poetry. Born in Korea, they currently live in New England along with their cat Mushroom, who, as far as anyone knows, has no aspirations of higher learning. Previous works can be found at Fantasy Magazine, khōréō, Fireside Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. They can be found online at semiwellversed.wordpress.com and on Mastodon @jcho@wandering.shop

by Marshall L. Moseley

““Phoenix!” I said. “Mouse isn’t waking up!””

“Mouse?” I gently reached out and tapped him with my paw, but my little gray friend lay inert. Still.

We had been playing in the grass the way we always play. The game – you know it, I’m sure – was cat and mouse. Our respective species had once played it in deadly earnest, but over time, after the garden’s MedNanites gave us minds and we’d become friends, we played it for fun.

I hadn’t shaken him that hard. I’d shaken him harder before, and he’d always lain still for a moment, and then bounded up with a cheery “Good one, Cat!” and we’d go on with our play, or wander down to the stream to sip some water, or over to the food trees for some kibble.

The Phoenix would know what to do. I left my friend lying on the grass and ran out of the meadow and up the short grassy hill to where the giant bird was always perched on a rock at its top.  As I ran I looked up at the skydome, and its plates were no longer a bright sky blue, but darker, like I remembered dusk being before the escape. And there were cracks in them.

I ran up to the Phoenix and stopped. He no longer stared straight ahead, looking sleek and regal, awaiting questions or requests. His rainbow plumage was ruffled and sticking out everywhere, and his head was down.

“Phoenix!” I said. “Mouse isn’t waking up!”

“Fazzit… fa… failure… system,” the once regal bird said in a voice I didn’t recognize. Instead of his gentle baritone, he spoke in a monotone, almost like he wasn’t alive. “Neutron star… gravity well… MedNanites offline… gravity shear imminent…” He lifted his head and looked at me, and for a moment he was back. “I can’t fix it, Cat. I’m so sorry. It’s–” and then his head dropped.

He was gone.

I turned and ran back down the hill. I looked up; the plates were darker now, and there were more cracks. All around me I heard a faint creaking sound.

Mouse was where I’d left him. I looked up at the skydome one last time. Then I laid down and curled myself around him, and as the sky went dark and the wind howled, I mourned my friend.

 

* * *

About the Author

Marshall L. Moseley has been writing fiction of one kind or another for forty years. His screenplay, WILDCARD, placed in the top three of the third season of Project Greenlight, and he appeared in the show. He subsequently optioned it to Dimension Films, a division of Disney. His stories have appeared in ROAR 6 and Inhuman Acts, and he was nominated for a Cóyotl Award in 2015. He is a member of the Wordos Professional Writers workshop in Eugene, Oregon.

A. P. Golub

“So I wait, flitting in and out of Stjepan’s life like the ghost of what wasn’t — like revolution and socialism and the idea that there won’t always be someone trying to take advantage of someone else.”

Stjepan saved me when I was a kitten 56 years ago (his time, of course). My own time has been spent less… linearly. He recognizes me, I think, when I curl at his side on the hospital bed. He doesn’t say anything, but his hand scratches under my chin like he used to do. His hands are frail. Not like they used to be. I am thinner now, and my fur isn’t thick and soft like it once was.

Soon, he will be gone, and I will go, too.

But for now, I want to pretend that I am just a cat, and he is still a young man.

I can still purr, rumbling my old body as loud as any kitten can.

* * *

He found me in the mud on the riverbank. Stuck fast and exhausted, I was done. Then Stjepan picked me up, cradling me in his big, strong hands muttering about how there were better ways to kill a cat than by drowning. I could tell by how he held me close that he wouldn’t try any of them on me.

I wanted to tell him the truth — that it was my own bad luck that saw me in that mud.

Cats don’t have nine lives, but some of us are born with a gift of time travel, the gift of flitting through the years and lingering where we will. Mother said we were only supposed to use the gift when in danger. Of course, being a kitten, I used it to try to steal cream.

And that’s how I wound up on a muddy riverbank in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the darkening 1930s. Of course, cats can time travel, but we can’t talk, so couldn’t correct Stjepan.

He took me home and gave me a bigger bowl of cream then the one that got me into this mess.

So I stayed.

* * *

Stjepan talked to me like I was a human, telling me of change, labor rights, land rights, and strikes. He told me that once we weren’t a country; then we were a country. One day, he said, the people would build a better country: he honestly believed this, even as members of his party were imprisoned or killed.

Even as he hid his own beliefs to keep work, to stay alive.

One day, we wouldn’t even need countries, he said. The people would abandon such constructs. And what is a country but a construct? What is a movement but seeds, planted by others, that will bloom in time? Stjepan booped my nose as he said it.

I suspected he’d had too much to drink that evening.

Still, I liked that he respected me enough to tell me such things even if I didn’t understand any of it. Cats need no country, and our movements are always our own. Humans put such constraints on themselves. Maybe, maybe I did understand it, in that I understood that Stjepan wanted to be more like a cat.

He said he was going to move to the city.

Purring, I laid on his lap. I ignored the pull of time, wanting me to leave. I imagined it felt much like the pull of the promising future felt to Stjepan.

* * *

We didn’t make it to the city.

War came again to our country that wasn’t/was. And Stjepan wanted to fight.

He cried as he said it. He cried because he would be leaving me with his sister, Marija, and because Stjepan’s future would be born in blood. Could anything beautiful be born from blood, he whispered, as he stroked my whiskers. I pressed my head to his hand.

His fingers ran under my chin (scritch—scritch—scritch).

“You’re beautiful,” he said, “and you were pulled from mud.”

* * *

Marija is kind.

She is kind to me, and she is kind to the people who come to her house.

They come at night, exchanging whispers and letters. There is fighting in the hills, but it spills over to these late-night meetings. It spills over to our life, in the way people disappear.

The enemy is the invader/the enemy are those we drank with/the enemy is—

Eventually they come for Marija.

I run.

* * *

I am not proud of this.

When the door slams open and men rush in yelling, I dart right through their stomping feet and out into the cold, lonely night.

Marijia is shouting back. Something crashes. Screaming.

Then silence.

I wish there was gunfire. I wish there was some certain ending.

She is gone, and she will not come back.

* * *

The future Stjepan saw had Marija in it. The future I try to run to has Marija in it.

But as I run through time, that future slips out from under me, like an unstable shelf or book laid half-off the counter. I cannot find the future. I am lost in the dark. At first, I think I am cursed for running. As if a cat could have stopped those men. As if a cat should die making a stand. That’s something Stjepan would do, not me.

Then I think that humanity is cursed, for killing so many infinite futures. This is closer to the truth, but it does not help me, lost in time.

I want to find Stjepan.

But the future twists away from me as more lives are extinguished. Each one was a path, a connection, a possibility gone. I run on through the darkness, unable to find the future I believed in, that Stjepan told me about.

We are always one step behind the future that will be.

* * *

One step behind means abandoned houses and empty camps. It means smoldering fires, put out just in the nick of time. It’s cold and everyone’s suspicious, even of a cat.

It’s the way blood drips off the wall.

There’s a body there — not Stjepan’s.

* * *

After the war I learned that Stjepan got a job in a factory, that he left the party, that he was a mechanic.

But curse or bad luck, I never see him.

There is the scent of oil and a swinging door.

I find a note — half-drafted, to Marija. Stjepan believes she escaped. He thinks she must have eventually made her way to the US. He tells himself that she thinks he is dead, and that’s why she didn’t come back. He knows for a fact that she took me with her.

This is how he protects himself from the reality that his sister is gone. He can’t see me because in his mind I am safe with Marija. Sometimes I think I could push through these futures, walk into the room and demand cream, meowing as loudly as ever. He’d pick me up, scratch my chin, and then his heart would break. I can’t bring myself to do it.

At the end of the letter, he says he hopes I am getting enough cream.

* * *

One step ahead, one step behind.

I do not have it in me to destroy the future Stjepan imagines for Marija and me.

So I wait, flitting in and out of Stjepan’s life like the ghost of what wasn’t — like revolution and socialism and the idea that there won’t always be someone trying to take advantage of someone else. Slowly, I gather my own years, live my own lives. I know there will come a time for Stjepan when his reality and the life he’s imagined for Marija will blur and fade together.

He’ll be waiting for me at the end. I will take him to the future.

* * *

The monitors at Stjepan’s side beep slower than I think they should, not that I’m well-versed in matters of the human heart. But the sound feels wrong. Stjepan isn’t mechanical beeping, fading away, he’s hope and strong hands. A hammer coming down steadily — like the heart should. The scent of iron and grease and the gift of cream.

“Mačkica…” His breath is reedy. He doesn’t finish his sentence.

I curl against his side, rolling into his hand and purring harder. Here is my past, and the future we should have had.

We will leave together soon, in the way dreams flee upon waking.

—in the way things are until they aren’t.

 

* * *

About the Author

A.P. Golub is a speculative fiction writer residing in central Virginia with their partner, dog, and four cats in varying states of domestication. They’re a graduate of Viable Paradise writers’ workshop. Online, they can be found at apgolub.com or lurking on Twitter and Instagram as @andtatcat.

by Jelena Dunato

““According to the Shifter Control Act, you’re required to wear these.” The officer hands them silver pins in the shape of a wolf’s head.”

Roza runs down the corridor towards the bursar’s office, unladylike, her freckled cheeks red with exertion, auburn ponytail trailing behind her. Leather soles of her new oxfords slip on the polished floor and she skids past the door, flailing, gripping the doorknob in the last moment. Locked. She checks the clock above the notice board. Two minutes past four.

She sighs, ready to try again tomorrow, when a leaflet pinned to the board catches her eye. Secret Society of Shifters and Their Nefarious Protocols it proclaims in thick, greasy hectograph ink.

“Roza!” Lena’s footsteps echo in the empty corridor behind her. “What are you doing? We’re all waiting for you!”

“Reading,” Roza says softly, catching her breath as a slow, viscous shudder travels down her spine like a fat slug.

Lena, in a man’s shirt, her flaxen hair shorn by some mad artist, twists the corners of her mouth downwards as she glances at the leaflet. “Not that rubbish again. Why are people so obsessed with shifters?”

“They’re afraid of things they don’t understand,” Roza says.

“They’re everywhere around you, hiding in plain sight,” Lena reads from the leaflet and laughs. “Nonsense. I don’t think I’ve ever met one. Have you?”

“I don’t think so,” Roza lies in a smooth, well-practised manner. Her identity card is a fake, the genetic test that got her a place at the university a forgery. Can’t be too careful, her Papa always said, and she’s glad she listened.

“C’mon, don’t waste my time.” Lena grabs her hand and pulls her down the corridor. A minute later, they’re outside, running down the gravel path leading to the immense lawn. Hundreds of students sit on colourful blankets, enjoying the June afternoon.

“Lena! Over here!” somebody calls, and the two of them find themselves among Lena’s usual motley group of painters and actors and architects.

“I think you know everyone,” Lena says, “except maybe…”

A dark-haired young man is sitting on a yellow blanket, peeling a hard-boiled egg, his white shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. He’s broad-shouldered and lithe in an attractive sort of way.

“Franz, this is Roza,” Lena says. “Roza, Franz.”

“Sit down.” He pats the empty spot beside him. Roza takes her oxfords off and kneels down awkwardly, her pencil skirt too tight for lounging. “Egg?”

“No, thank you,” she laughs. Somebody pushes a paper cup filled with spritzer into her hand.

“Smile!” Georg, Lena’s photographer boyfriend aims a bulky instant camera at them and clicks. The camera whirrs, producing a slightly blurry image of Roza and Franz. She tucks it absentmindedly into her purse.

“So what are you studying?” Franz asks. His dark eyes gleam, focused on her face.

“Biology.” She pulls a carrot from a bag of vegetables and takes a bite. “You?”

“Mechanical engineering.” Still holding the egg in his fingers, he flicks his wrist, waves his other hand, and the perfect white ovoid suddenly appears on his neighbour’s plate. “And magic, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

The conversation between them flows without hindrance. They chat about their plans for the future the whole afternoon, impervious to sunburn and strange looks from Lena’s crew.

“It’s time to go,” Lena pronounces when the sun slips behind the Arts building. “We must get ready for the play tonight.”

“Ah, sure.” Roza brushes the crumbs off her skirt. She’s not really into the avant-garde art of Lena’s circle, but she likes the relaxed crowd. As the others turn and leave, Franz touches her hand.

“A quick drink?” he asks.

She’s had enough to drink, but still she follows him, feeling like a naughty child. They amble through the winding, cobbled streets of the town till they reach a small cafe with live music. It’s packed, but she doesn’t mind standing close to him. His hips attract hers like a magnet, and half a dozen cigarettes and two glasses of wine later, she finds herself glued to him, dancing to a slow tune. He bows his head, she lifts hers, and their lips meet in a long kiss.

She should go home, it would be the proper thing to do, but there’s something strange in the air that night. The sky above their heads is shiny and brittle like a glass bauble, the laughter is too loud and nervous and everybody is drinking as if the world is going to run out of alcohol. Beneath the glare and din, Roza senses a deep, slow thrumming; the fate marching towards them. So when Franz says, “Come with me,” she follows once again, light-headed and giggling.

He has an attic room in the old town, five creaky flights of stairs leading up to a lopsided door. A single bed, a sink, an ancient armoire and a desk — good enough for students, poets and rats.

His slim fingers unbutton her blouse and slide under her bra straps. She pulls his shirt out of his trousers and over his head and inhales his scent, entirely human, yet intoxicating. His lips slide down her hot skin, the tip of his tongue writes passionate verses. Her flesh is light and supple under his gentle hands, and she lets him touch her, feel every inch of her, slide inside her.

For one dizzy, blinding moment, she wonders if he can see what she is, if her skin is transparent like a parchment before a candle, revealing the foul secret of her shifter genes. She shudders, and he pauses immediately.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks.

But no, humans have a poor sense of smell, and they have no way of telling a shifter from a human without genealogy or a blood test. It’s a ridiculous fear fuelled by those cursed leaflets appearing all over the campus. She banishes the thought and pulls Franz closer, skin on skin, mouth on mouth as their bodies merge, sailing the waves of pleasure together.

Afterwards, they share a cigarette, and she briefly considers shocking him with the story of her childhood, of running on four legs through the ancient green forests, of cuddling with her sister beneath the earth, safe in their den. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind. But she doesn’t know him, not really, and is unwilling to break the gossamer bridge of affection between them. There’ll be time enough for awkward revelations.

They remain bunked in that room for a week, darting out to get bread and strawberries and cheap wine. Running up the rickety stairs to fall on the narrow bed, breathless, and make love again and again.

While he sleeps, she searches his desk. Engineering, math, some history and poetry. No incendiary pamphlets, no tractates on the treacherous nature of shifters. No hate. When she slips back under the sheets, she feels guilty and mad. Franz sleeps; silver moonlight plays with the sharp shadows on his face. He is gentle and funny and talks about machines as if they were live creatures. He’s a great dancer and an even greater kisser. In a kinder, more normal world, she’d be wondering if he were The One.

Humans cannot marry shifters; it was outlawed a year ago.

As dawn pours its golden light over the rooftops on the eighth day, someone knocks on the shabby door. “Roza? Roza are you here?”

Franz groans in his sleep, but Roza recognizes the voice. She rushes to unlock the door.

“I travelled for two days and turned half the town upside down to find you,” Hana says, flushed from the climb. She looks leaner than before, and fiercer, her red hair in two perfect plaits, her eyes burning. “Papa wants you home immediately.”

“What? Why?” Roza bristles.

“Haven’t you heard the news? We need to report to the census office by Sunday.” Hana peers over her shoulder, curiosity softening her features. “Oooh, I see. Handsome. Does he know?”

“Shut up,” Roza hisses, pushing her sister out. “Wait here.”

She gathers her things quickly as Franz yawns and rubs his eyes. “Family emergency,” she says.

“I’ll call you.”

She kisses him quickly and manoeuvres out of his arms trying to pull her back to bed. One last glance at his unshaven face and she’s out, running down the stairs with her sister.

* * *

Things sour quicker than Roza can follow. The peaceful, happy village she left to go to university is grey and quiet now; the villagers’ eyes cautious and hard. The school is turned into a temporary census office, but instead of the kind old headmaster, a young uniformed officer sits at the desk. As Roza enters with Hana and her parents, she sees the local genealogy register opened on their family page, their real identities written down in a meticulous hand.

“According to the Shifter Control Act, you’re required to wear these.” The officer hands them silver pins in the shape of a wolf’s head. “Don’t leave the village, or you’ll be arrested.”

At first, Roza remains shut in her room, refusing to accept this new reality where people stare at her from afar but cross to the other side of the street when she comes near. The other shifter families sometimes visit furtively, and she hears her father talking to the men late at night. She refuses to socialize with their daughters; they have nothing in common but the cursed blood.

Hana is laid off from her teaching job. Roza knows how hard she worked for it and how much she loved it, but faced with her sister’s furious eyes, she doesn’t know what to say.

“They can’t do this to us,” Hana fumes, as she reads the smuggled newspapers aloud to Roza. “The Government now says they want to intern us for our own safety.”

Roza wonders if she should write to Franz, explain the situation, but words fail her. What could she say? I’m sorry I forgot to mention that I’m an animal. She could only get him in trouble.

The Government starts taking shifters away to an unknown location and the first bloody uprising breaks out – and is brutally put down – in the capital. All shifter families receive Government-issued pills “to restrain their dark nature.” A girl in the village bleeds to death, but the rest of them are forced to report every Sunday to the hard-eyed officer and swallow the pill before him. No one can shift anymore.

A young man Roza went to school with spits the pill before the soldiers. They drag him into the yard unceremoniously and shoot him.

The shot echoes in Roza’s ears for hours afterwards, rendering her numb.

“They’re coming for us,” her father says one evening. “It’s time to move.”

Roza fills her backpack. Warm clothes, a toothbrush, soap, some food. Leafing through her notebooks, she finds the photograph. The two of them, sitting on the yellow picnic blanket. A long-lost version of Roza, laughing into the camera, a paper cup in her hand, her hair a flaming halo. And Franz in half-profile, holding a hard-boiled egg, looking at her. It weighs almost nothing, so she pushes it into the secret pocket in her backpack.

Two days later, their father wakes them up in the middle of the night, and the whole family trudges across the fields, into the woods, to the old forest track. A van with its headlights off waits there. Hana and Roza enter and squeeze themselves between the silent people sitting inside.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” Roza asks her parents, her voice suddenly very small.

“We only had enough money for two,” her father replies. “Don’t worry, we’ll stay here in the woods.”

“No, you mustn’t—” Roza tries to contradict him, but the driver shuts the door and cuts her off.

She cries holding Hana’s hand as they move through the night forest. When the pills wear off – if they wear off – their parents will be able to shift again. But they can only stay in their shifter bodies for a day or two. A shifter who stays longer risks forgetting their human self and turning into a real animal.

Looking at the indifferent moon through the dirty window of the van, Roza thinks that’s not such a bad fate.

* * *

They get new identity cards and jobs at an ammunition factory in a drab industrial town where nobody cares who they are, and new machine fodder is always welcome. Hana joins the resistance immediately, slipping off in the night to attend secret meetings, whispering about propaganda and diversions and shifter troops in the mountains.

Roza pretends she’s normal and ignores Hana’s rage. She stubbornly treats this life as a nightmare that will pass soon, if only she remains small and silent and keeps her head down.

While Hana disseminates illegal pamphlets that attack the Government, Roza wears her one tight dress and goes out with other factory girls. She lets men with greasy hands feel her up in filthy bars that reek of stale cigarette smoke and piss. She thinks of Franz as they shove their tongues down her throat. Soon those men are replaced with boys in badly fitting uniforms, and then they disappear as well. What began as a cleanse turns into a war that spreads across the borders. A general draft spares only those too old or too crippled to fight.

Her beauty fades and so does Hana’s. Their glossy hair becomes brittle and dull. Hana hacks it off, Roza brushes it every night, crying, and hides it under a scarf during the day. Their bodies turn gaunt and tired, their bones creak in protest as they move. Their faces are hard and unfamiliar. Roza struggles to recognize her own reflection.

She sometimes wonders what happened to Lena and her artistic crew. Are they still at university, protesting this madness, producing sharp, furious art? Or have the boys been mobilized and girls sent to factories, so now they look just as harrowed and hopeless as Roza?

One night, the factory explodes and when Hana comes home, her face is bruised and her clothes torn and dirty.

“Close call,” she says, grinning. “They don’t know who I am, but they soon will. Time to move.”

As Hana packs her bag, Roza feels rage flaring in her chest. “Why do you always have to go and do something dangerous?” she says. “We could have stayed here, safe.”

“You want to stay here?” Hana asks, incredulous.

Their tiny room at the boarding house has mold growing in the corners and perennially smells of cabbage. A prison cell would be more cheerful.

Roza hisses, refusing to answer, and grabs her backpack. It’s winter outside, she dresses for the cold and tucks the photo in her breast pocket.

“Why do you keep dragging that stupid thing around?” Hana asks.

Roza wants to hurl back something sharp and hurtful, but in the end, she just says, “Because I liked him. Because it was real.”

The pity in her sister’s eyes cuts her deep. “That world is gone,” Hana says. “And everyone who inhabited it. Those people are dead.”

“No. I’m not dead. And neither is he, I know it.”

Hana shrugs and pulls on her boots.

“Where are we going?” Roza asks.

“There is a base in the woods,” Hana says. “For those who have nothing left to lose.”

* * *

They meet a group of desperate men and women before dawn. Roza keeps her head down, avoiding their eyes. She doesn’t know who they are, she doesn’t want to know. They leave the town and head straight for the woods. It’s freezing cold. The untouched snow reaches up to their knees and there is no path, but Hana leads them with grim determination.

When the sun rises above the mountains, they hear barking in the distance and know they’re being followed.

They trudge on stubbornly, hungry and exposed.

“We should shift,” Roza says. “We’ll move faster on four legs.”

“No,” Hana retorts. “We leave no one behind.”

Roza looks around and makes a quick tally: the ragged fugitives look half-dead in the morning light. Perhaps not all of them are purebloods, and some of them might be too old, too exhausted, or too poisoned by the pills the Government fed them to shift. So they continue slogging beneath the snow-laden pines, armed soldiers hot on their trail.

This deadly landscape in the sharp claws of winter terrifies Roza. Her toes are numb and every muscle in her body screams at her to stop. In order to keep moving, she slips away. The blurry photograph in her breast pocket, tucked under five layers of clothing, pokes at her ribs. She thinks of Franz’s kisses.

The photo is the only vision of the future she can muster. An unfinished business of the two people who fell in love one summer night. Perhaps she’ll find him again, in the next town, next rebels’ base. And then it will be easier to live through this evil, and fight it together.

She doesn’t realize she’s sobbing until Hana’s hand finds hers and squeezes it hard.

“Almost there,” Hana says, her breath a white, frozen cloud. “Up this hill and across the old railway bridge. The rebels should wait for us on the other side.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I have my sources.”

Roza bites her lip and pushes on. While she wasted her time torn between daydreaming and despair, hundreds of grim, stubborn people fought the Government.

“This base in the mountains has a new leader,” Hana says. “A hero, determined to take back what is ours. It’s time to turn around and bare our fangs.”

“I’m scared of fighting.”

“They need other skills too. Nursing. Cooking. Teaching.”

The idea sounds more optimistic than anything Roza has heard in months. There are people like them, organized, led by someone who has a plan.

A shot pierces the silence and Hana falls with a gasp, pulling Roza down, a bloody rose blooming in the snow beneath her.

“Run!” someone screams, as the soldiers pour out of the woods, with their dogs and their guns.

Roza still holds Hana’s hand, though her sister’s eyes are empty, the side of her head blown up. She forces herself to let go and bolts behind the pines, running for her life. She expects a bullet any moment. It doesn’t come. Five seconds pass, then ten, then twenty.

She almost dares to hope she escaped, when a voice says, “Stop.”

He stands before her, a soldier with a raised gun. She closes her eyes and says a quick prayer. Time trickles away.

“Roza?”

She opens her eyes. The soldier removes the scarf that covers his mouth.

“Franz.” She gasps.

The gun shakes in his hands. “I always hoped I’d find you, but…” His eyes study her face as if there’s something crucial written on it. “Tell me you’re not one of them.”

The anguish in his voice breaks her heart and she finally manages to tap into Hana’s rage. She wants to tell him he’s an idiot poisoned by the Government’s lies. A brainwashed fool. A murderer.

But the snow and the blood and the gunshots echoing in the distance wipe away all reasonable arguments. Her sister is gone and Roza is too furious and desperate to care what he thinks when she says, “I’m not a monster, you are.”

And then, keeping her eyes on the barrel of his gun, Roza wills her body to shift. As her clothes fall to the ground, the photograph slips out. It lies on the snow, a perfect rectangle of fiery colours.

She stands lightly on her four feet now, a sleek young fox. Thick red fur protects her from the cold. She waits for the bullet.

Instead, Franz lowers his gun and picks up the photograph. He presses it to his chest.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I never—”

Shots thunder among the trees. Eyes locked on each other, they both know no words are powerful enough to carve a future for the two of them.

His gaze follows her as she turns away and dashes into the woods.

 

* * *

About the Author

Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer, and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts.

Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and Mermaids Monthly, among others. She is a member of SFWA and Codex. Her novel Dark Woods, Deep Water is coming out from Ghost Orchid Press in September 2023. Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter and cat. You can find her at jelenadunato.com and on Twitter @jelenawrites.

by Deborah L. Davitt

“So it was that she found herself ten thousand feet above the sea, racing through clouds heavy with rain, chasing a trio of galleons laden with treasure that were running before the wind — but the seabound vessels couldn’t match her airborne craft for speed.”

The gibbet creaked under her weight as she shifted in place, coiling her tail up, out of reach of the crowd here in Port Royale — most of whom wanted bits of her fur as keep-sakes, it appeared. They’d probably fight over her earrings and jewelry when it came time for her corpse to be removed from her tiny prison.

Not that they’d have a hope of making her earring’s luck work for them, of course.

But that’s what she got for being famous — the Dread Pirate Grace Morraine, scourge of the skies. Her great flying ship, the Elektra, couldn’t save her now.

She licked a paw and straightened her whiskers. There was no point in going to her death untidy.

Guardsmen pushed their way through the crowd, leveling their halberds to do it. The raucous noise of the Parrot and Monkey voices in this tropical port of call faded as those good citizens sidled away from the guards and their sharp-edged weapons. “Oh, good. There’s to be a trial after all,” Grace said, rising to her feet. The gibbet swayed around her. “I thought you were just going to let me raisin away in the sun for the fun of it.”

The guardsmen — Dogs to a man — winced. “Come along,” their leader said, producing a key and unlocking the door of the swaying gibbet. “The Magistrate wants to see you.”

“Do I want to see him?” Grace wondered out loud.

The Dog closest to her grinned crookedly. “Oh, yes. He’s about to make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse.”

The Magistrate was, of course, a Poodle. Long of nose, disdainful of expression, with curls of hair piled atop his head. (Grace was sure it was a wig, well-powdered.) “Grace Morraine?” he said, regarding her through his pince-nez glasses. “There are two ways this meeting can go.”

She stared at the pitcher of water at his elbow. She hadn’t had so much as a sip in two days. “I’m listening.”

“One, you can say no, and you can go back to your gibbet.”

“Let’s say that I say yes.” She flicked her tail insouciantly, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Do I get to live?”

“Aye. You’d take this letter of marque,” he held up a piece of paper, “and you’d agree to continue your depredations on the shipping lines, leaving, of course, the ships of your countrymen strictly alone.”

She felt her eyes widen. “And the catch is?”

“You sell the cargos you capture to us. For a price we set. You pay your taxes. You become–” The magistrate barked out a laugh. “–an honest citizen.”

Grace considered this. With the only other alternative being the gibbet — a gibbet she didn’t see herself getting out of anytime soon, and the Elektra someplace distant, waiting for signs that her captain lived or died — she didn’t see that she had much choice. And yet, could she trust the magistrate?

All signs pointed to no. He’d find some way to swindle her out of her freedom, soon enough. There might be political pressure on him to show results against the podencos soon, and he might not have the manpower to do it without pirates on his side.

Still, trust him or not, she didn’t have much of a choice. “Where do I sign?”

“You can make your X right here — oh, aren’t you clever, you can sign your name.” The condescension made her twitch, but Grace soothed herself to expressionlessness. Her hackles didn’t even rise.

Well, hardly rose, anyway.

“Congratulations. You’re no longer a pirate, Grace Morraine. You’re a privateer.”

Within a week, Grace found herself back aboard the Elektra, her second-in-command yielding the tiller back to her hand with surprising grace — she’d always had Eason marked out as an ambitious sod who’d take control of the ship and not cede it back without putting it to a vote among the crew. “Privateering’s not a bad move, for the moment,” she told her crew, half Cats, the rest Parrots, Monkeys, and the occasional Badger. “Anyone who signs the marque lifts the death sentence against them. So we chase the podencos and take their cargo. Same as we would have done anyway.”

The crew accepted her word, to her great relief. She hadn’t wanted to have to recruit new sailors if the crew as a whole had been too disgruntled at the change of their fortune’s winds.

So it was that she found herself ten thousand feet above the sea, racing through clouds heavy with rain, chasing a trio of galleons laden with treasure that were running before the wind — but the seabound vessels couldn’t match her airborne craft for speed. “Bring the lightning cannons to bear!” Grace shouted, touching the pearl hanging from her ear for good luck.

The Elektra began her dive-bombing routine, letting hot air out of the balloon, reefing her sails, and plummeting towards the galleons. Grace plunged the tiller forward, adjusting pitch and yaw, as her sailors clung to the rigging and belted themselves to the cannons. Lightning sparked in her cannons, and then shot out, blue-white, across the dark indigo of the sea below…

And then the thunder of the cannons hit her, and Grace whooped in joy, ears ringing. This was life. This is what made life worth living, the glory of the hunt, the thrill of the chase. She didn’t play with her kills — oh no. But she circled the galleons, strafing their decks, sending crewmen — all Dogs, all podencos, leaping overboard to avoid the blue-white lightning that sizzled fractals into the wooden decks, and set the sails on fire.

A ragged volley of answering fire came from the galleons — their lightning was red, and shorter-ranged, so Grace danced the Elektra just outside the reach of their cannons. “Just surrender, you daft buggers!” she shouted in a gap between thunderclaps. “Heave to, and prepare to be boarded!” Her fur bristled from the electricity ambient in the air, making her look twice her normal size.

The three galleons slowly surrendered, lowering their flags. She could see sailors throwing buckets of sand on the flames, buckets of seawater. Trying, desperately, to save their own lives by putting out the fires.

Eason, a pure white Cat with a black eyepatch that concealed a missing eye, came to stand at her side at the tiller. “You want to go down yourself?”

“No, I trust you to handle it. The terms are that they turn over all their gold and gems, their wine and liquor.” The first would make the Magistrate happy; the latter would keep her crew happy. “They can keep their tobacco and cotton. We don’t have the hold space for that, anyway.”

“We should get a second ship, so that we do have the hold space.”

She shot him a sidelong look. “And you’d captain her?”

“I’ve proven my loyalty, haven’t I?” Eason countered.

“With the spoils from these three lovelies, we might be able to afford a second ship,” she agreed after a moment. “And yes, you have.” For the moment, Grace thought, but she kept her misgivings tucked behind her eyeballs. Give him command of his own ship, and he might depart on the next fresh breeze, and all her hard-won spoils with him.

Of course, the reason she was letting her executive officer lead the boarding party was because she had a niggling feeling that once the goods were hauled aboard, he’d just up and leave her on the galleon below.

On the other other hand, he could have just left her in port, without a ship to turn towards privateering.

To trust, or not to trust. The eternal conundrum.

Grace hovered the Elektra over the lead galleon, and the descend ropes dropped, sailors from her ship swarming down with Eason, while still more sailors with muskets stood at the railing of the Elektra, giving them cover in case the podencos decided to get frisky.

Then box after box of gold bullion began winching their way to the Elektra’s cargo hold. Barrel after barrel of Madeira wine — to the cheers of her crew. Each galleon was scavenged completely of its wealth, and then the Elektra, groaning a little under the weight, headed for the clouds once more.

“It’s a good life,” Grace told Eason as he came back aboard. Her tone was nearly a purr.

“If you can survive it,” he agreed, and for a moment, that knife’s edge was back. To trust, or not to trust.

But she put out her paw, and he took it in his, and she hauled him over the rail and back aboard. “Set course for Port Royale!” she called to her crew, and their cheers drifted down from the sky, touching even the waves below.

Tomorrow, she’d have to deal with the Magistrate. The sure-to-be-rigged ‘legitimate’ markets of Port Royale, which would surely try to shortchange her on the price of gold, the value of the gems, and the cost to repair the Elektra where the galleons’ crews had pockmarked her underbelly with musket balls. Tomorrow, she’d have to deal with taxes and credits and debits, the lack of honor in her fellow creatures, and more.

But today? Today she was sailing into a sunset, and a glass of rum waited for her in her quarters. Tomorrow could take care of itself for a few hours, while she basked in the glow of the present.

 

* * *

About the Author

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-nominated poetry collections, The Gates of Never and Bounded by Eternity, and her chapbook, From Voyages Unending, see www.edda-earth.com.

by CB Droege

“These were the monsters I had been sent to kill? It was clear that these two were anything but monsters.”

The plan was that we would drop onto the airstrip, clear the LZ of lizards, then the plane could land, and we’d off-load the heavy artillery. It didn’t quite go down like that, though. During the drop my chute got tangled, and I was steered off course, dropping me just off the beach outside the fence. I was sandy and dripping, much of my equipment waterlogged and useless, including my radio and gun, but I was the lucky one. After coming ashore, I watched the plane circle for another ten minutes, then it flew off north, back toward the mainland. It was clear that the rest of the team was not able to clear the LZ as planned, and they were likely dead.

“Some kind of big dumb lizards with big dumb teeth,” Harris had told us during the mission briefing on the plane twenty minutes earlier. “Apparently, some rogue scientist opened a portal to an alternate earth populated by giant carnivores, and some of them got through.” It was always some idiotic scientist. Those people are dangerous: opening portals, doing genetic experiments, or signaling alien spacecraft. Science should be outlawed if you ask me. “The scientist and his crew are dead,” Harris continued, “but a construction worker and his family are trapped in the event zone. We’re being sent in to take the beasts down and rescue any survivors we can find. Luckily, the whole place is closed up with fences, and it’s an island anyway, so containment shouldn’t be complicated.”

I was the only survivor, other than the pilot, and he would be home and safe soon. I was wet and cold, and night was coming. I needed shelter, and in the distance, I saw a small cabin up against the fence, so I set out. I was half a kilometer away when I spotted movement. I was happy at first to see another person, but the movement was strange, alien, so I ducked behind a nearby tree, and took out my spyglass, which was luckily waterproof. From my cover, I spied the cabin, and saw Talon for the first time, though I wasn’t calling him that yet.

He was in front of the cabin, standing where the grass turned to sand. He looked like a raptor with a nearly horizontal spine, supported on two thick legs. His trunk was balanced by a thick tail that nearly brushed the ground. His body was covered in heavy wrappings, including what looked a bit like a turban on his head. His forelimbs ended in three-fingered hands, and he was bending over a firepit, with a flint and steel, attempting to start a fire.

The door of the cabin opened, and another came out, the one that I would eventually call Lizzy, once we were amicable.  She was dressed in similar wrappings as Talon, making it clear that these were intentional; not just dressings, but clothing. She took a few steps down toward the beach and made some growling sounds. After a few weeks, I would come to understand some rudimentary phrases in their language, and they in mine, but at this point, I only really noticed her teeth, which were mostly flat. I remembered enough from biology class to know those were the teeth of an herbivore, though I later discovered that, while they never ate the flesh of the rodents I caught around the cabin, they would sometimes catch and grill fish.

Lizzy spoke with Talon for a moment, and he spoke back, and then she returned to the cabin, and he to his fire-building attempt.

These were the monsters I had been sent to kill? It was clear that these two were anything but monsters. They were people. Cold people trapped in a strange land. Of course, I would learn about the real monsters later, the terror lizards who had also come through the portal, and the three of us would have to work together to survive once they eventually broke through the fence, but this first day the only challenge was diplomacy. I wasn’t really thinking about things like ‘first contact protocol’. I was mostly just wet and cold.

I set my waterlogged gun aside, in case they would know what it was, and I approached their camp slowly and with hands raised, not understanding then that this was a sign of aggression in their culture. Lizzy came out, and we three faced off for a few minutes, not understanding each other at all. The misunderstanding didn’t last though.

My first bit of real diplomacy was showing Talon how to use my lighter.

 

* * *

About the Author

CB Droege is an author and voice actor from the Queen City living in the Millionendorf. He loves wizards and time-travel, but has an irrational distaste for time-traveling wizards. His latest books are Ichabod Crane and the Magic Lamp and Other Stories and Quantum Age Adventures. Short fiction publications include work in Nature Futures, Science Fiction Daily and dozens of other magazines and anthologies.  He also produces a weekly podcast, in which he reads other people’s stories: Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast.  Learn more at cbdroege.com

by Val E Ford

“He had taken it as his job over their several lifetimes, the killing of them both, so they could be together again. But Katy never remembered it being like this. Never such a choice.”

“Come with me…” Liam’s voice was scratchy from the tubes that had been sustaining him during the last bout of pneumonia and worsening health. He fumbled to unzip his fleece jacket with the hand that wasn’t holding hers.

An image burned itself into Katy’s being. She knew truth when she saw it; it was one of her gifts, to see the in-between spaces, and this was one, this was for her a liminal moment. She had to walk off this bridge alive today.

“Not this time, Love.” Katy stared wide-eyed down at the roiling floodwaters, hooked her knees through the space between the metal railings and moved her grip on him from a hand hold to a wrist hold. “You come back home and do it the hard way.”

“Katy… I can’t… I’m burning. It’s time. We have to go.” His voice extended into the realms beyond her ear’s ability to hear, and the essence of his elemental fire gift burned through their connection as he sent the command she’d been dreading ever since they’d realized he’d be living disabled for the rest of his life after the car accident. “I can’t live this way.” He sat on the balustrade, and his free hand pulled up on the orthopedic brace to lift his leg over the rail as she tugged at him to prevent the move. Even ill he was a great beast of a man and beyond her physical control.

He had taken it as his job over their several lifetimes, the killing of them both, so they could be together again. But Katy never remembered it being like this. Never such a choice. But maybe it had been; memories of other lives came on slowly, mostly after they found each other again. This time was different, maybe it was just that her attitude was different.

“I love you, Katy. We have to go.” His elemental fire was licking along his outline, breaking through into the air around him.

She fought his blazing command, bringing up the blessed coolness of the earth and binding the heat, sending it through her body and out her pores to meld with the wind and let it be carried away. “I’m not going. I’m not ready. You get back down here before you pull my arm off.” She started fighting his fire for him too.

“Katy! We. Are. Doing. This.” He swung his other long leg over the railing. “It’s just a step, Love.” He smiled and took it.

Katy tried to pull him back over the edge, but his mass only took a second to lift her off her heels; her knees around the rails were the only thing keeping her out of the air.  And by the moment she stopped trying to save him and instead save herself, his grip on her arm was winning. So, she breathed in the power of her connection with the spaces between and sent it flowing down the shining fluid pathway that anchored their souls together, down into the spaces between the cells of his heart muscle, and by the time she was done, so was he.

“Goodbye, Love,” she told her soulmate as his dying fingers slipped from their grip on her arm. He finished his long falling step into the flooded river alone. “We’ll find each other again,” she whispered as her tears followed him into the encompassing water below. She braced herself against the moment when their connection blazed and disappeared, and then she sat on the cold concrete for a long time taking in what it meant to be alone.

Over the next few weeks, Katy took to wandering the streets at odd hours on foot and in her car. She was unsettled, lonely, not sleeping, going long stretches between eating until a smell awoke her hunger and then she couldn’t stop. At first, she cried at silly things, sometimes everything, but after a while numbness crawled out of the crater inside her soul, and she started a new routine. She’d walk at first light to the bridge and cross, following the path along the shore until her feet didn’t want to go any further, and then she’d stop for a while, breathing in the sea air before walking back.

And then one day, like sun through a break in the clouds, she felt the moment he returned. And she cried because they were off kilter. A soulmate in diapers wasn’t an easy thought. But the crater inside her eased, and she slept well again.

And so, she started living again too. She started seeing clients once more, telling them the truths she saw in the spaces between their current selves and the ones they would become. She sketched for them their liminal scene, the one that might change them, the image that burned in her mind as she sat with them. And before they left, she gave them the picture along with whatever words seemed right. Often no words were needed; sometimes it was just a hug.

She was finishing a session with a client who had come because she was feeling upset with her marriage, and yes, she needed a hug. The picture had been of the client’s next-door neighbor opening the door to a motel room, and familiar shoes were sitting beside the bed. That hug went on a while, and when the woman steadied enough to step into her new life, Katy opened the door.

A squeal sounded under the woman’s foot as she walked out. A fluffy black and white Mountain Dog puppy cried on Katy’s doorstep, and when she picked it up, she knew.

“Hello, Liam.” A vision of herself and the slightly older puppy at obedience school with a chain collar and a leash filled her head. And she smiled, perhaps a little too long.

And so, Katy had a dozen years of friends and gardening and working and good doggie companionship, until the day Liam the dog started flaming and his wide muzzle and sharp teeth gripped deep into her lower leg, piercing the skin as he tried to pull her over the edge of the riverbank.

As she fought him, a vision filled her mind, she saw a huge set of balancing scales in a spotlight on a table. On one side a mess of her long hair and longer skirts showed the pile of bodies to be herself as she had been the five times Liam had drowned her. On the other side of the scales, she saw Liam lying pale and sprawled in his unzipped fleece jacket, seaweed in his dark hair as a spotted dog was lowered beside him. The scale barely righted.

“Fuck you, Liam! I am not dying today!” Her leg was on fire, and anger churned through her as she fell over the bank. They both rolled through the dried grass and blackberry vines and into the water. She hugged the big beloved dog, and with a practiced breath, she stopped his heart and watched him flop into the shallows.

When she got back home alone that night with stiches and burns on her calf, her tears were back, and she swore off pets.

When she woke up on Saturday morning, Katy took her graying head to the hairdresser and her sore knees to the gym, and she opened all the windows and burned sage in their house and pounded on her drum and let her towels and sheets dry in the sunshine.  Then she vacuumed dog hair off the couch and out of the corners and smiled as she made lasagna and savored their favorite meal alone.

Three months later a fuzzy black and white kitten crawled out of a stroller that a couple little girls were pushing toward her down the sidewalk. His littermates cried, their faces popping over the edge to see where he had gone. Katy picked him up, kissed him and ran to catch back up with the girls. “Enjoy this one, Love,” she whispered to the kitten. Katy scratched his ears and gave him to the youngest child. Liam the kitten yowled and bit the child. The little girl dropped him looking heartbroken.

Katy grabbed the kitten as he dashed around her legs, thumped his nose with her fingernail, and swaddled him tightly in a dolly blanket before handing him back to the child. “He’ll be better now I bet,” she told her. “He told me his name is Liam, and he loves tuna.”

Liam the cat was her constant companion as she worked in the garden and sat on the porch. But she never let him inside their house, and she never fed him. He attacked everyone who came to the house, even the UPS deliverywoman. At midnight every night for a month, he scratched and yowled until the screens were shredded.

When summer was heating up and Katy couldn’t take the hot air anymore, she took down all the screens to have them remade with scratch proof materials and reinforced with grating. She was opening the back of her car, parked on the busy street in front of the screen shop, when she was struck in the shoulder by a flying twenty-pound black and white and burning fuzzball.

She stumbled and flung the cat away and nearly fell in front of a bus that slammed on its brakes. “That is IT, Liam! You want war?” she said, looking around and patting out the places where her shirt was scorched.

Then she felt the connection snap, and she was alone again in this world as the bus rolled away from a squished black, white, and red form.

The next morning, Katy woke up with mosquito bites layered over yesterday’s burns and scratches, so she made a special trip to the store for bug spray and let off a great blast before going to work.

Her first client of the day was Doris, who really just wanted to know somebody loved her. Katy’s talents failed her. The only image in her head was of Liam choking and burning, so she put Doris’s plate of cookies into a sandwich bag and reassured her that children leaving home for college was a good thing as she walked her to her car. Then Katy quickly drove back home and opened all the doors and windows.

She found Liam hiding under the couch and let him spend the next day on her arm, drinking and dying as mosquitos do. And when he was gone, slow salty paths traced her cheeks as the drops of her tears fell beside him and upon him. She buried his tiny insect body beneath their favorite rose bush and sat on her knees remembering when they had planted it.

She longed for solace, for a full life with him, the children they had never had and the feel of his arms around her. She reached her essence deep into the soil and let the energy that lives between flow upward into her being. She brought the power up into her heart and let the imbalance of betweenness affect her, let the spaces between cells and molecules disrupt, and felt her death nearing as the gentle rhythm broke.

And then the earth beneath her feet became hot and heavy, and a drop of fire fell from the thorn of a rose and broke her concentration.

“Thank you, Liam,” she whispered and cried a while, but didn’t attempt it again. She sat out in the cold night air feeling the beauty of being alive fill and restore her.

At midwinter, their connection renewed as he entered the world again. And when the image came, she could barely believe the beauty of it. Liam had chosen a new way. He was a preemie whose head was misshapen, and his heart was barely clinging to life. So, she moved 100 miles and went to the hospital and volunteered to do some cuddling.

272 long days after Liam came into the world as a teenage addict’s infant son, Katy held him as he took his last painfilled natural breath. And then she held the now sober mother, their once great, great, grandchild and helped wield the shovels and sing the prayers as the baby, Liam, met with the earth.  And a few days later, she brought the girl home with her.

When she felt Liam enter the world again at midwinter, she felt expectation as the days grew longer and spring once more filled her garden. And then one afternoon at the end of a nap as she rocked on her porch, a vision of the scales appeared again, nearly evenly balanced.

She started walking again, saying her goodbyes to everything she loved, wandering pets, laughing children, the woman girl who was growing in her own ways.  She walked often over the bridge and down nearly to the ocean, and eventually she started seeing a great sight, a black and white seal swimming along with her as she walked. And one day when Katy was ready, she took off her shoes, her knobby tender old feet exposed to the rocks as she waded into the cold water, and they went diving. And with her last breath she also took his.

 

* * *

Originally published in ROAR 9

 

 

About the Author

Val E Ford loves life and all the messy complications of being temporarily embodied.

by Kai Delmas

““Naughty, naughty wolf.” She wags her red-stained finger at me.”

I skulk among the roots and fallen branches of ancient trees. My hackles rise at the scent of fungal growth and decay. This is my dark forest and I am its wicked wolf.

The mice and rabbits scurry from my presence. They know their fate if they dare linger when I’m hunting. But such tiny rodents would only satisfy the hunger I feel for a short time. I seek larger prey, for the pit of my stomach is deep and hollow.

My ears prick up and I raise my snout. The birds’ chirping falls silent and a different song fills the forest. And with it a current flows through the air. Sweet. Red. I can taste it.

Strawberries.

My prey is near. My tongue lolls from between my teeth, my paws quicken, drawing me closer to that luring scent. Saliva drip, drip, drips as I make my way.

I find her path, follow the footsteps she’s left in the muddy track. I listen to her soft song and take in the rich smell of strawberries that linger where she treads. Her red cloak billows up ahead.

I rush down the path and prepare to pounce, to swallow her whole, to fill that hollow belly of mine and end the gnawing hunger within.

But something isn’t right.

She turns, freezing me in my tracks. Clear blue eyes and rosy cheeks greet me. She pops a strawberry into her mouth, chews and smiles, red dripping from her chin.

“Naughty, naughty wolf.” She wags her red-stained finger at me.

My jaw is ready to snap. Bite those little fingers right off. But all that I can muster is a guttural growl.

“This isn’t how our story goes.” She pulls another strawberry from her basket and bites down on its soft, red flesh.

My hunger grows and I want to lash out but I cannot. The clear blue sky above the treetops ripples and shimmers. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I…

I shake off the wrongness that comes over me and watch the girl place a large rock into her basket.

I try to open my mouth, to question the girl, but my throat tightens. My teeth clench as I stare at the girl.

Her lips stretch into a wide grin, more wicked than mine ever could.

“It’s simple, really. Off to grandmother’s house I go.” She lifts another rock into her basket. “We meet and you go on ahead. Then we meet again. That’s what happens every time. Forever and ever.”

A shiver runs down my spine; my fur bristles and I’m overcome with cold. A rushing sensation is all around me; everything I see is blue and I cannot move beneath the rushing stream.

I drag in deep lungfuls of air and look back at the girl, her fingers red and sticky. The endless pit that is my stomach growls in protest and dread. But there’s nothing I can do.

This isn’t how our story goes.

I turn to leave and bound into the woods.

Her voice trails behind me, “See you soon.”

* * *

I find grandmother’s house. My very own footprints lead me there. They always do.

The hollowness of my stomach has grown, yet I feel heavy and sluggish. I creep up to the open door, my belly dragging on the forest ground.

Before I can announce my presence to trick the old woman, the scent of strawberries rushes over me.

“There you are.” The girl sits at the kitchen table, her smile wide and full of teeth.

“We’ve been waiting for you.” Her grandmother’s mouth stretches dark and terrible, mirroring her granddaughter’s.

My legs quiver and I drop to the wooden floor. They grab my heavy body and lift me onto the bed, belly up.

Too overcome with wrongness to speak, I whimper.

They cackle as the girl heaves her basket onto the nightstand and her grandmother pulls large shears from beneath the bed.

The girl opens her basket to reveal dozens of stones. “This isn’t how our story went the first time.”

She takes the shears from her grandmother and jams them in my gut. She cuts — snip, snip, snip — as if my skin were nothing but cloth. I can only watch in shock as pain washes over me.

She digs around and removes her hands, red and sticky. The scent of strawberries becomes too much to bear. I retch to no avail.

“You see, this story of ours has long been over.” The girl begins lifting the stones from her basket to place them inside my stomach. “But it will never be over for you. You’re wicked and you must pay for your wicked ways.”

I squirm but cannot get off the bed.

Cold envelopes me and the stones in my belly drag me down, keeping me at the bottom of the stream. I cannot move. I can never leave my sins behind.

“You’ve done this to yourself.” Grandmother dons her glasses and sews my belly up with tight stitches made of red thread.

“You deserve every second of it.” The girl pulls me out of the bed. My limbs stiff, my belly heavy with stones.

She leads me outside to the stream behind the house. Brings me to the edge.

I don’t resist.

I know she’s right. It’s too late for me to change.

She shoves me into the rushing water.

I sink down, unable to swim or move at all.

I’m cold. The sky ripples above me through the rushing stream.

All I can do is dream.

Of my dark forest. Of my paws thudding along the damp earth. Of the sun setting through endless trees.

Of the girl’s footprints in the mud and how I follow her scent of strawberries.

 

* * *

 

About the Author

Kai Delmas loves creating worlds and magic systems and is a slush reader for Apex Magazine. He is a winner of the monthly Apex Microfiction Contest and his fiction can be found in Martian, Etherea, Tree And Stone, Wyldblood, and several Shacklebound anthologies. Find him on Twitter @KaiDelmas.

by David Penny

“She accepted Death’s courtship. Afterwards, darkness was clear to her as water to a fish, and she knew no fear from unseen things.”

“Listen well, my precious ones, and I will tell you of our Mother, the Goddess of Secrets.”

The alley cat nosed more newspaper around her kittens. Cruel wind chilled all their bones. She licked stray whiskers, soothed hungry cries. They clamoured for her story.

* * *

In the beginning, the world was light. Many Gods, bright and cruel, roamed the land. People were of all shapes and cowered from the God’s self-important wrath. The God of Death was born from necessity and laboured eternally. You see, Death was smaller, less important in those times. He was just, and fair, and implacable in his kindness. Death did not know all then, and some survived when they should not, but that is another story.

One bright moment among many, a woman fled from the unkind Gods. She was beautiful, with graceful limbs and curving tail, proud as an arched whisker, and sharp of wit as a well-groomed claw. The Gods chased and laughed and fought amongst themselves for the right to claim the spark of joy in her heart. She was afraid.  The world was light with no dark places to hide. Death knew her and waited by her side. She begged Death, not for life, but for spite, to keep her joy away from the cruel Gods.

Death obliged, and hid her inside himself, the single unlit place in all creation. He gave her a choice — stay with him in darkness forever and be safe or leave into the light and meet her end with the other Gods. If she left, her spark would die with her, because Death had no power over other Gods at that time.

She stayed, and wept, alone. Death was also lonely, for no one whispered love to him in those times. He came to her softly in her first night, and she was blind, afraid.

Yes, my darlings, Gods can visit inside themselves. They drink paradoxes like we drink cream.

Death whispered kind words and gave her a gift, not of light, for that was beyond him, but of shades and shadows. He stole the black behind the moon, wrapped it with tender words and presented it on bent knee. She accepted Death’s courtship. Afterwards, darkness was clear to her as water to a fish, and she knew no fear from unseen things.

A joy shared is a joy doubled, so she shared herself with him, and Death claimed part of her spark, freely given. This was her plan. Death was a kind prison, but prisons chafed. She resented the freedom Gods gave themselves. She whispered her anger in Death’s ear and made up a secret that Gods could die. In love, Death believed her.  No more were Gods immortal in the world.

Death summoned himself for the first time. He slew a cruel, brilliant God in her name. The divine corpse-void brought the first proper darkness into the world. Death hid the dark in him to conceal his deed. Death grew, and the woman could stretch out once more. She murmured soft praise to her lover. The Gods did not see, for they could not conceive of their own destruction.

Again, she drew Death into her to share her spark of joy. Again Death slew in her name. Death grew once more. Three, and three, and three again were slain for her. She danced through the halls of Death and sang her joy through the echoing chambers of Death’s love for her.

The Gods knew treachery now, and came to kill Death, but Death would not come for himself. With the strength of her song inside him, Death threw back all who tried. The Gods discovered fear and withdrew from the darkness of his touch. Light flickered in the world, dangerous to all the people, for the void claimed any place where the divine light did not fall.

Death came to her once more for wisdom. She whispered into his ear. The Gods, so fearful of his touch, were herded outside the world, locked behind the void corpses of the nine, plucked from the body of Death, left where their Godly light touched the people but could not harm them. The woman filled to bursting with the nine-fold doubling of joy now returned to them. She bore Death’s shadowy children, every night, for many nights, each with a sliver of their shared joy. These shadows became night and filled the corners of the world where the light did not touch. People became safe in the darkness for the first time.

At last, she lay exhausted, curled inside a Death too small to contain her. Their last child and only daughter, with eyes that saw all, and ears that heard all, nestled in her arms. Death whispered all his secrets for there was no other way to express the fullness of his love. He shared his divinity as she shared joy. Unconfined at last, the Goddess of Secrets padded away from the safety of Death for the dark patches and secret ways of night. Her daughter followed, soft and sharp, kind and vicious.

All shadows whispered to her, and she knew all, from love found in the shade of a tree to the shadow of evil inside a twisted heart. She whispered all these secrets to Death, and none could ever hide from him again.

Her daughter’s children, and children’s children bore the co-mingled spark of joy from nine divine deaths. Death honoured each one, in memory of his undying love.

* * *

“And that, my kittens, is why you must watch everything, and peer into all spaces, so your Mother of Secrets can whisper to her love. Do this, and you can greet father Death as a friend until the ninth, when you will go with him forever.”

The alley cat licked her kitten’s foreheads once more and whispered her love into their ears. The wind blew colder. The kittens slept, for now. She looked up to see her friend, Death, waiting at her side, the fourth time for her. He stroked her kindly, once, and stroked the cheek of her youngest, and weakest, who blinked awake, eyes wide but unafraid. Death took only his due and the kitten tumbled back to sleep. They all slept soundly. Tomorrow was another day, and there were kittens to feed.

 

* * *

About the Author

David Penny lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, where he also plays host to their perpetual house guest and cat Louis.  When not writing, David likes to fiddle around with a violin and spend far too many hours prepping and running various TTRPGs.  He works in the civil engineering field, but would rather read stories of all kinds than more technical documentation.