A Party to Forget

July 29, 2026July 21, 2026 ~ Nina D'Arcangela ~ 2 Comments

Pushing through the mist, I sauntered into the ballroom; my finery somewhat unrefined, my gait swaying with a slight hitch. I’d often heard tell of Madam de Vere’s elaborate soirées, but had no opportunity to attend—until now. One was not welcome at an after-life party without the requisite stilled breath, else those without take it from you.

I’d imagined a grand reception; privileges granted a seer of my strength and heritage. Surely they’d know I was coming. After all, the world’s loss was the losts’ gain…or so I deluded myself.

Many gathered to greet me, my Great-gran the first. Her eyes bore through me as they drew from head to toe. She pulled me into her chilled embrace, ripped the Cameo from my bosom. I stared in shock. For the lack of life left in me, I couldn’t fathom a reason for the hostility. Her alabaster countenance held the kind gaze I remembered from my youth, but her actions belied the placid façade.

Enamored with her reclaimed broach, she turned away, both distracted and disinterested. A ghoul leaned toward her ear, but before he could speak, she waved a dismissive hand.

“Nonna…” I croaked, distress broadcasting from my entire being.

She pivoted toward me, the semblance of her gentler nature gone. In its place a mask of pain, anguish, and anger. She jerked forward with a ghastly trill. The others took her cue, and descended.

∼ Nina D’Arcangela

Closeness

July 22, 2026July 15, 2026 ~ Miriam H. Harrison ~ 3 Comments

The mornings were usually filled with birdsong. Those songs would wake her while the sun was little more than colour splashed along the horizon. It was a gentle way to wake, and it made her appreciate the thinness of her tent walls, the closeness of nature.

But this morning was different. Instead of song, she woke to silence. A deep, total silence.

Silence seemed an odd thing to notice, but it chilled her. She sat up slowly, cautiously. The screen of her tent hid nothing of the forest around her. Evergreens and aspens stood as they always did, but their branches seemed strangely empty. Where were the birds who sang, the squirrels who chittered and scurried? Wherever they were, they knew better than to be found.

Like them, she felt a bone-deep instinct for stillness. She held her breath, somehow certain she was not alone. There was nothing to see, but she felt it: the patient presence of a predator.

What could she do but wait? She willed herself to be as small, as silent as possible. She saw nothing, yet she heard the slow, heavy sliding of something just beyond her walls. No footfalls, no scuffling. Nothing like the searching snout of a bear or the sniffing nose of a wolf. But larger, larger by far. And close. Closer.

For the first time, she regretted the thinness of her tent walls, the closeness of nature. Nature—or something like it.

∼ Miriam H. Harrison

The Despicable Pickle

July 15, 2026July 9, 2026 ~ Richard Meldrum ~ 3 Comments

Of course, he could have made his own sandwiches for lunch, but he was a traditionalist. It was woman’s work. He bit into the sandwich from his lunchbox and visibly recoiled. She’d put pickles in again, which he detested. He thought after their last ‘conversation’ she would stop doing this, but she’d started it again. It was simply to annoy him, petty and vindictive. He thought he’d made himself clear the last time. He threw the sandwich in the garbage, deciding she needed another lesson when he got home. She’d learn not to annoy him. She’d learn, not for the first time, he didn’t like wasting food and, more importantly, wasting money.

He entered the house after his shift, still in a foul mood. She stood in the kitchen, her back to him. He remained silent and walked up behind her. He wanted her to know he was angry, but it was a cold wrath. No need for raised voices, his retribution would come another way. She turned, and before he could react, the knife slid into his chest. She was silent too, she’d decided her revenge was going to be cold. He fell onto the kitchen floor. There was very little blood, but the damage had been done. She reached back toward the counter, picked something up and shoved it into his mouth.

The last thing he tasted was the sour, unpleasant taste of his least favourite vegetable.

∼ RJ Meldrum

Split Lip

July 8, 2026May 30, 2026 ~ Elaine Pascale ~ 4 Comments

My uncle has discovered multiple corpses while fishing. By multiple, I mean three.

He’s always alone. The corpse is also alone. The corpse always has female genitalia and strangulation marks on the neck accompanied by a broken hyoid bone. The lungs are water-free so the corpse did not become a corpse in the water. By that I mean, the woman was killed somewhere else.

The first corpse he found when he had been a freshman in high school. He swore he didn’t know the girl; had never seen her. There’s a picture from a school recital where he’s standing on the risers directly behind her, staring at the back of her head as if the Superbowl were being shown there. Maybe he said he didn’t know her because he had only been acquainted with her hair, standing behind her as he had been doing.

Or, he had lied.

The second corpse had been found after he had graduated from high school. He would have been college age, but he never attended college. He had been working at my grandfather’s office and by that I mean, he checked in to the office when it opened and then spent his days lollygagging and doing things like fishing and finding corpses. There was no connection between him and this corpse except for the fact that he was wearing a sweatshirt from the college the corpse had attended when it had been alive and that college was an obscure, women-only school states away from where we resided.

When asked about the sweatshirt, he had said it had been “a gift.” He swore he had never visited the campus. I wondered if maybe this was another memory glitch with him, or if he was lying.

The third corpse had been discovered when I was a little boy. I remember my mother talking to my father about it through clenched teeth. She said, “two is a coincidence; three is a pattern.” By that she meant that she didn’t believe that my uncle “accidentally” found these bodies. At this point, very few people disagreed with her. By that I mean, most people were suspicious of him.

“Ever since mom died,” my mother had said in a low voice to my father but I was still able to hear it, possibly because I had my ear pressed against their bedroom door, “he’s been acting like a maniac.”

“Your mother went so suddenly, it was a shock. And he had been just a boy, just a kid. I don’t think he ever processed it properly.”

“We should have let him go to the funeral, to say goodbye. We thought he was too young, that it would disturb him too much. What did we do?” It sounded as if my mother had started to cry. Listening at the door, I felt sorry for her and more than a little afraid of my uncle.

So when I was a teenager and my uncle asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him, I was both intrigued and a little scared. I had no idea that we would find a fourth corpse on this trip and if I had had an idea, that might not have been enough to prevent me from joining him. By that I mean, I had never seen a corpse and while I was not chomping at the bit to discover one, I was not averse to the experience.

We trekked into the woods until we reached the lake and then we walked a bit around the perimeter until my uncle declared, “This is the spot.” He laid down his cooler and removed his backpack that folded into a small chair. I also had a chair and my mother had packed a sack lunch. She had insisted I bring a folding knife. “For the fishing line,” she had explained. The look in her eyes told me the knife was meant for more than tangled line.

“This is where you usually go?” I asked, trying to find out more about “the spot” and why he picked it.

“Nope. Never been here before.”

Again, I wondered about my uncle and his relationship with the truth. “Then why here? How do you know this is the spot?”

“Because this is where the action is…by that I mean, where the action will be.”

When he choked on his own laughter, I realized how much I favored him. We were both tall and lanky, outdoorsmen, and we had a similar pattern of speech.

“How do you know?”

He pointed at his lip and I could see that there was a split down the middle almost as if he had taken a fishing hook himself. It hadn’t been there before.

I grimaced. “Do you need…help with that?”

He shook his head. “That’s the sign. We have to hurry and catch something…an offering.” He scanned the water. “An offering for an offering,” he mumbled.

We baited our lines and waited. Blood dripped slowly from his mouth, but he didn’t seem to mind. I drank one of the sodas my mom had packed and tried to determine if it was too early for some of my sandwich. I was just about to pull the Ziplock bag of chips from my backpack when my uncle’s line grew taught.

“Here it is…” He began to wind the reel, biting his lip despite the injury there. Before long, a crappie appeared just beneath the surface of the water. My uncle laughed and grabbed the fish, examining it as it gasped in the air.

“Despite how it looks, by that I mean it struggling to breathe, I’m not strangling it,” he told me. “I’m not doing anything to it. He doesn’t want me to.”

“He?”

My uncle didn’t answer. Instead he reached into his backpack and pulled out a small container. He poured liquid butter on the fish before tossing it to the center of the lake.

I couldn’t believe what I had seen. “Why did you do that?”

“Well, I couldn’t just make a bare offering. I mean, we are civilized.”

The water bubbled where the fish had landed and a hand appeared to be raking through the surface of the water. Even from a distance, I could see that the hand had webbing between the fingers.

“Wh-what was that?” I sputtered. I was glad I hadn’t eaten any of my sandwich or chips as they would have likely made a reappearance as my body spasmed with fear.

“That’s Vodyanoy…Vody I call him.”

“You…you…call him?”

My uncle nodded, nonplused. “Known him a long time. By that I mean, we have a deal.”

The water rippled again and an old man appeared. His skin was green and his features were frog-like. His torso was visible but his legs were hidden in the dark water. My first thought was that he resembled an amphibious Viking. This might have been due to his beard being braided with algae and his shoulders being covered with scales that looked like silvery armor.

“You know the drill, Vody. An offering for an offering,” my uncle called. “No such thing as a free meal.”

My uncle turned to me and whispered, “You know, he can catch his own fish. I think he just has a soft spot. By that I mean, he’s trying to do the right thing.”

Vody sank beneath the surface of the lake and all was still for a few moments. More bubbles appeared at the surface and there was a bit of a commotion as Vody pulled up a body of a young woman. By the neck.

“He’s too rough with them,” my uncle explained, “it’s like he doesn’t understand how fragile the throat is. Even though it happens to him every time.” He shook his head. “Crazy old man keeps dragging them girls down to his lair. He thinks they’ll serve him there.” He lowered his voice further, until it was just a notch above a whisper. “He doesn’t understand breathing. By that I mean, that lungs and water don’t mix.

I was astonished. This creature was responsible for the bodies and somehow my uncle knew how to find him.

Vody pushed the body toward the shore, the small waves he made carrying it to its destination.

“That’s a good chap!” my uncle called, “Good Vody!”

My uncle wadded into the water and retrieved the woman, gently moving her to the sandy shore. “Now her family can have closure. You know, a proper burial.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing? The bodies you’ve found…” I couldn’t believe what I had witnessed.

My uncle stood over the young woman but his eyes were on the horizon. “It’s important to face it,” he said softly, “by that I mean, everyone deserves the chance to say goodbye.

∼ Elaine Pascale

Hunter’s Moon

July 1, 2026June 15, 2026 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 4 Comments

Leroy Dyson stood against the wall of the observation deck and studied the men and women of his seven-person crew. Six-person crew, he corrected himself. There were only six others now on Moon Base Freedom, although over the next two years half a dozen more ships would arrive with cargos of supplies and settlers.

Normally, the steel emergency shields over the windows of the observation deck would be up to reveal the black sky and bright stars. No one here was afraid of the sight of space. But Dyson had closed those shields now. Considering what was happening, he needed them closed.

“All right. Let’s get started,” he said.

The hubbub faded. Gazes turned to meet his.

“Where’s Samuels?” the geologist, Mark Howard, called.

“That’s why I wanted this meeting,” Dyson said. He paused, and then: “Samuels is dead.” Now he had everyone’s full attention.

“But I just…” Heather Tate started, and stopped.

“How did it happen?” Ed Carmichael asked in a hushed voice.

Dyson looked around the room. Twenty minutes ago, there’d been a body here. And blood. He and his second in command, Lana Jackson, had cleaned up the mess. There’d been a lot of mess.

He glanced at Lana. She offered him a reassuring smile. He looked back at the others. “Samuels was murdered,” Dyson said. “Lieutenant Jackson and I found the body right here.”

“Oh my God!” Heather blurted. The hubbub returned, twice as loud for having been gone.

“Who did it?” Mark Howard demanded.

Then everyone realized that, since the entire crew except for the murder victim was here, the murderer had to be here too. Pupils dilated. Silence rampaged in. People put distance between themselves and others. Eyes darted left and right, trying to look everywhere at once. Gazes locked, then fled from each other. Terror built.

“You already know it had to be one of us,” Dyson said to answer the question he’d been asked. He glanced again at Lana. Her face was strange and he knew she was remembering the body parts and the low gravity roll of smelly copper-red droplets across the observation deck’s floor. Samuels had not died easy.

“How long had he been dead when you found him?” Howard asked.

“Not long.”

“Then it could have been anyone,” Jessica Rollins murmured. “None of us were together. The base is so big. So many places to hide. So—”

“A big question is why?” Howard interrupted. “Why was Samuels killed?”

“I suspect he surprised someone doing something they didn’t want anyone else to see,” Dyson said.

“Like what?” Howard demanded.

“Lana and I have an idea about that,” Dyson said, glancing at his second in command. She was so beautiful to him, and he’d been sleeping with her since before they left earth. His gaze shifted to her belly, and it almost seemed as if his look could penetrate straight through her NASA-issue coveralls and into her womb. She was pregnant, though no one except he and she knew it yet. He smiled when he thought of how theirs would be the first baby born off earth.

“What kind of idea?” Heather Tate asked. “And what are you doing to protect us from this murderer?”

Dyson looked at her, and sighed.

“Nothing,” he said.

Again, there was silence, and confusion. Dyson pressed the control button that opened the shielding over the windows. The steel covers began to rise. Star shine flooded in through the thick glass. And then came a brighter light. Moon light from all around them. A streaming silver fire that bathed them all in ghostly luminescence.

Dyson looked again at Lana and imagined their baby being born under the glow of this new world. Their new world. Theirs alone.

Lana shuddered, began to change. Dyson felt his own spine starting to curve, felt the coarse hair erupting all over his body. The crew began to scream. Dyson didn’t care. He scarcely heard them over the crackling of bones rearranging themselves inside his flesh. And his thoughts were on other things, on how his race would finally have a home world of their own, and of how a steady supply of live food would be coming on the other ships over the next months.

The window shields clanged all the way open. Dyson and Lana began to howl as into the room poured the savage radiance of the moon, a moon that is always full when you’re living on it.