The dragon must be hundreds of years old. She leans on the door frame and spits a flame just big enough to light her cigarette.
“Don’t expect me to fight for you,” she says.
I look at the no-smoking sign on the door and tell her I don’t expect that kind of thing from a roommate. Game of Thrones is so overrated. Never be a fan.
She nods, passes by me, and walks into the apartment as though she owns this place.
Continue reading “Movies Can’t Show What is Like to Live with a Dragon by Ann Yuan”
It all happened once upon a time about, oh, two and a half years from now. It was a warm summer morning, a Saturday it was, in the backyard of an ordinary house on an ordinary street in a most ordinary town, Sandusky, Ohio to be precise. But that’s all that was ordinary about it; the little girl certainly wasn’t. And as for the stranger… well, he was aptly named.
Continue reading “One Hellava Morning By John Doble”
Our house was what dreams were made of—a hazy vision of lost grandeur, countless rooms, and long corridors leading to an airy parlour. A crumbling gilded ceiling glittered in the light seeping through tall windows. A polished table with a deep, glassy sheen, where I sat my laptop, stood on the elegant curve of Queen Anne’s legs. Georgian bookcases were crowded with dusty oil lamps, their glass chimneys catching the cold, sterile shine of fairy LED lights. A heavy marble fireplace, its mantle cluttered with birthday cards, roared into the night.
Continue reading “Timeless Sympathy by Hana Carolina”
1880, Charleston Settlement, Oregon Territory
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Hope was getting old. The thrill was gone, and her wiccan skills were diminishing due to her lack of enthusiasm. Oh, she could still raise a demon, but they were low rent, stereotypical evil and talked too much; most tended to live in the past with little thought given the future. And she could still impress the hell out of the feeble-minded, but public schooling was cutting into the ignorance she had so long depended on. Educated people tend to ask questions. They see a three-headed frog and attribute it to science instead of witchcraft. Bastards.
Continue reading “My Fair Wiccan by Leila Allison”
Tuesday. It was as dead as a doornail Tuesday night in my bar, The Rusty Spur. No games, fights, or anything else worth watching on the TV. No controversy or shenanigans in our town or county worth the spit needed to talk of them. It was as if this part of West Texas was caught in a kind of dull-as-dust malaise.
Continue reading “Eight-Ball Blues by Frederick K Foote”
Once more I see myself, 11 years old, standing at the corner of the lane, and gazing through the wire-mesh fence. My three companions stand beside me. It’s late summer, early evening, the sky a bold and ever-deepening blue, the day seeming to go on without end. But gathering in the alleys and in the eaves of the houses, around the doorsteps and the feet of the lampposts, shadows are thickening, and already a scent of autumn sharpens the air. And before us, harbouring its own shadows, stands the witch house.
Continue reading “The Witch House by David Calcutt”
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Enter the Adverb Queen
Daisy trotted into my office then up the small critter ramp that runs from the floor to my desktop (Cats ignore it, they’d rather leap up and give me a heart attack). She began speaking without a preamble.
Continue reading “And a Geep Shall Lead Them by Leila Allison”
Thor shall put to death the Midgard Serpent, and shall stride away
nine paces from that spot; then shall he fall dead to the earth, because of the venom which the Snake has blown at him.
Völuspá, Stanza 55
The Æsir gods sat around the great table in Valhalla’s dining hall, waiting. Some took desultory sips of the mead in their drinking horns, yet there was no wisdom to be gained from the magical mead, for all that remained to be learned was the outcome of Odin’s ride to consult with the embalmed head of Mimir about the meaning of recent portents. Had Ragnarøkkr, the day of the world’s final battle, arrived? Would evil god Loki and his children overcome the Æsir? What could the gods do to prevail against Loki and his cohorts?
Continue reading “The End of All Things by Matias Travieso-Diaz”
Every morning, the Archivist arrived just before the sun burned off the smog. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the Memory Tower…the east wing…Department of Significance. The lift doors opened and he unlocked his office with a key labeled VANITY in scuffed gold.
Continue reading “Ecclesiastes by Zark Fekete”
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