It was a backyard party with an announcement. Bev’s promotion had been long coming and George Filmore had broadcast invited her coworkers and as many neighbors as he could get hold of. The two groups, unknown to each other and with little in common other than Bev, exchanged oil and water chit chat, slithering off each other without really blending.
Continue reading “The House Guest by Edward Ahern”
Diana Villanueva wanted to be the fastest runner in fifth grade, so her older sister, Sana, agreed to give her her feet. She pulled the butcher knife out of the top left kitchen drawer and gazed at her reflection in its blade— a wavy, dark tendril fell into her eyes. Sana tucked it behind her ear and grinned, flashing her white, crooked teeth.
She’d put the ad on Twitter only three days ago and already she had a customer. (Given, this first customer was her sister and the only payment she could offer was the $20 she’d been saving in her piggy bank, but nevertheless, it was a customer. Not that Sana would accept money from her own sister, so really, this wasn’t a customer so much as it was a favor). The ad read: Do you need a body part replaced? Perhaps you’re at the end of the list for a heart donor, you hate your jawline, you’ve always wanted a different eye color, or you have painful arthritis and are in need of new wrists. Whether the concern is medical or cosmetic, I can help you. Please contact Sana Villanueva at
(949)-929-1997
$200 for external organs, $400 for internal
Internal organs were much harder to trade, hence they were double the price. To switch noses was one thing, but to switch lungs? That would take a much larger toll on Sana, both physically and emotionally.
All of the women in Sana and Diana’s family had a gift of some sort. Diana could see and speak to ghosts, their grandma had been able to cure any illness, and their mother had been able to predict the future. Their grandma had died in a car accident, but their mother faced a much more unusual death. Back when they lived in Utah, she was murdered by a small town cult who believed her ancestral magic was the work of the devil. After losing her mother at nineteen, Sana had to become a mother to Diana. Not only that, but they needed to leave Utah and go somewhere where nobody knew who their mother was. Given Sana’s ability to perform instant, painless, surgeries both medical and cosmetic due to the super speed of her hands, she needed to find a place where people were focused on outward appearances. And since Newport Beach, California was a diet culture capital and only forty miles south of Hollywood, Sana would finally have the means to support her and her sister. Oh yes, her business would thrive here.
Despite Diana being eleven, she had already begun talking to the ghosts of their mother and grandmother. Sana could not hear or see them, but from what Diana told her, she knew their spirits were not at peace because Sana and Diana were barely getting by. The downside to moving to one of the most shallow places in the country was that it was also one of the most expensive places to live. Sana had a lot of money saved up from various retail jobs over the years, but her savings were going to run out soon. For the time being, they had enough to pay rent for a one-bedroom apartment, groceries, and bills. Diana had just turned eleven, but Sana hadn’t been able to give her sister much of a birthday celebration. A party was out of the question, and so was going out to dinner, but Sana still tried to make it special with a homemade meal of black bean and cilantro lime aioli quesadillas and a chocolate raspberry cake. Given the incredible speed, delicacy, and talent of her hands, Sana was an incredible cook. The sisters didn’t have much, but they never ate poorly.
But what Diana had wanted most of all for her birthday was a new gift. She wanted to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. Sana was tall and athletic, and her feet were just as fast as her hands. So she agreed to give her little sister her feet.
Sana held the knife over her sister’s ankles.
“Is it going to hurt?” Diana asked. She winced and squeezed her stuffed teddy bear, Osito. She was a little old for stuffed animals, but after their mom and grandma died, Sana wanted to let her sister hold onto childhood as long as possible.
“I won’t hurt you, mi cielito,” Sana said. “I don’t hurt people. I help them.”
Diana took a deep breath and smiled. “Okay.”
Sana took the knife and chopped off her sister’s feet, then switched them with her own. She stitched both of them up in under a minute.
“How did you do that?” Diana exclaimed. “There was no blood. It didn’t even hurt!”
Sana grinned. “Magic.”
It wasn’t long before Sana had a growing list of clients. Her sister’s friend, Xavier, grew tired of carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, so Sana gave him hers. When smoking three packs a day caught up to her neighbor, Joseph, Sana gave him her lungs. When a mother at Diana’s school became obsessed with the news, unable to digest the daily atrocities that plagued her newspapers and television screens, Sana gave her her stomach.
And then there were the cosmetic requests. Another mom at Diana’s school wanted fuller lips, so Sana obliged by handing over hers. Another mom came asking for her hair, so Sana gave away her thick dark hair that her mother used to spend so many nights lovingly combing and braiding. Then once another woman saw Sana’s new thin blonde hair, she wanted it. So Sana gave that hair away too. Sana continued to exchange her body parts based on what her customers wanted. Her nose changed three different times in the span of one week. One day she had freckles, and the next they disappeared. Her appearance continued to shift until the day came that neither Sana nor her sister remembered what she had originally looked like when they’d first moved to Newport Beach. The one body part she refused to trade was her hands— for they were the source of her magic. Without them, her business would crumble.
It had been four years since she’d traded her feet with Diana’s— and at only fifteen, her younger sister had become the fastest runner in the state of California. Sana went to all of her sister’s competitions to cheer on from the front row. Sana won championship after championship, bringing in lots of money. As the success of Sana’s business and Diana’s athleticism continued to flourish, they moved into a larger, nicer home in the Port Streets. This new place was at the top of the hill, overlooking the other homes in the neighborhood and offering a full-view skyline of the city.
But still, the ghosts of their grandmother and mother continued to plague Diana day and night. Despite how successful and secure the sisters were, they were still not at peace because Sana was unhappy. Sana had provided a beautiful life for Diana and given them both everything they ever wanted, but her body was no longer her own. She did her stretches with Xavier’s guilt-ridden shoulders, digested meals with the anxious mother’s stomach, and walked downstairs in the dead of night with Diana’s slow feet. Even the breaths she took were not her own— they were that of her neighbor’s: the long-time smoker who wanted new lungs.
But still Sana continued to help people, to fix their problems by trading pieces of herself.
The last deal she ever made was with a classmate named Polly. They were both twenty-three and attended the same community college. And by then, the only parts of Sana that were still hers were her brain, her ears, and her hands. Sana stood in front of the mirror, and looked at the mosaic she’d become. From far away she looked like a whole person— like a complete, coherent being. But anyone who got close enough could see that none of Sana’s pieces fit together.
Polly wanted to trade brains with Sana. She was failing her classes not because she was unintelligent, but because she lacked Sana’a discipline to study long, hard hours and not procrastinate on her work. Time was running out as graduation approached, and Polly needed this degree. She needed it more than Sana did, who was already wealthy. Sana never agreed to give up her full brain, just the part of her mind that controlled discipline. It was a hard thing to part with, and Sana definitely didn’t need the money, even though Polly was willing to pay twice the usual price. The real reason Sana agreed to help Polly was because she felt sorry for the girl. Polly had always been kind to Sana when other classmates hadn’t. While people in California were not so extreme as to kill a person who held magic, they also avoided them.
The only time people spoke to Sana was when they wanted something from her. She was used to needing no one but herself and her sister, but it was still nice when Polly had befriended her in their calculus class. Polly didn’t even want the surgery at first—Sana had been the one to suggest it when she realized Polly was having a hard time in school. Besides, Sana had no shortage of clients. There was bound to be someone who was neurotic and perfectionist to the point of misery, someone who would want a more laid-back brain like Polly’s.
Polly had no idea how she would feel after the operation. She knew they wouldn’t be completely trading brains, and that she would only gain a piece of Sana’s brain, but still, she felt incredibly grateful that she would soon have a part of Sana with her. What would it be like, to be a person like Sana: someone who was always giving?
Sana walked across the cold tile floor of her kitchen. She opened the nearby window to get some fresh air. The sky was overcast; ravens circled the driveway. The two young women didn’t say a word to each other. Sana just switched up their brains with the same quickness she had used all those years ago on Diana’s feet. But the switch didn’t happen.
A flash of lightning struck the sky, and the two of them stared at each other. Sana was still inside her mosaic painting and Polly was still inside of Polly. The wind picked up and Sana felt a force pulling at her skin. At first, it was just a prickling sensation tugging on her arm hair. Then it moved deeper, below the skin, ripping away at her sunkissed hands and digging into the muscle. When the force reached the bone, Sana knew there was no going back. All of the parts of herself she’d traded were torn asunder. The evidence of her abnegation was strewn across the kitchen floor and sucked up through the window. Polly ran out the door shrieking, searching the streets for hours hoping to find Sana still in one piece, lying in a field or face-down in a front yard. But no such luck.
All that was left of Sana was a pair of ears on the kitchen table. Two small, soft ears that her sister eventually hung up on the front door. They lived on a busy street so Sana still heard the world move onward, including all of the grievances her neighbors had with their bodies. But there were no more requests she could fulfill. All that was left of her was her own two ears.
Image by feet-Art from Pixabay – a pair of feet just laying there.
Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck …
The rhythm of the boxcar rumbling down the track reminds Billy of a song he wrote a long time ago, back when he was still playing for nickels and dimes outside the lumber yards and cotton mills along the Mississippi River. Although he hasn’t sung the thing in years, he can still remember the words.
Continue reading “Boneyard Blues by John Vander”
Her nose took the impact, it canted left and snapped perfectly at the bridge. Her mascaraed eyes watered until her vision became a myopic smudge. She staggered, tripping on the raised step between lounge and diner. (A design feature she always hated but he insisted on.) ‘It will define the individual spaces’, he’d said. Another blow staggered her. She remembered her Interior Design professor screaming ‘NEVER BREAK THE FUCKING SPACE,’ as he came in, on, or often just around her slut of a best-friend flatmate. That exalted mantra had stuck, her friendship hadn’t. Her fingers skittered along the edge of the kitchen top, too cold, too polished, nothing to cling to, to hold, to grasp. Her father’s words came to her, ‘you can’t trust stainless steel,’ he’d say, ‘unnatural stuff, use wood, wood has an inherent trust, copper an earned one, stone, who the hell uses stone nowadays?’ He always chuckled at himself when he said that. He also warned her. “Look for the comfortable, the homely, ‘hugge,’ as the Dutch say. No cold marble, no hard granite, no slippery steel and definitely no injection moulded impervious shiny plastic. An interior, my gorgeous girl, is a mirror of soul.”
Continue reading “Seeds by Peter O’Connor“
The spell called for a dead man’s hand. Not just any dead man but, according to the manual, “the hand of the man who killed one most dear.” That put old Elizie in a bad spot. It wasn’t that she would have minded sacrificing someone close to her. The problem was there was no such person. The only solution was to have someone else perform the ritual.
Continue reading “One Final Ingredient by Lamont A. Turner”
I didn’t think I would remember you.
I thought when the world changed I would change with it. And on the outside, at least, I did. Here I am, after all, in my Balenciaga coat and Jimmy Choos, striding along past ranks of fresh-built luxury apartments. Queen of the World. Only I made a mistake, top of my long, lifetime list, because inside I stayed the same. I remember how things were before. I remember every day of your life I was part of.
Bethany Frances Tate. My daughter.
Continue reading “Unfinished Business by Rose Banks”
Rata baboon-leered as the twenty stone clown started to sweat, the meth ravaged copper coloured flesh peeling back from his skull, rubberized dead slug lips baring his yellowed teeth.
Continue reading “The Child of Smoke by Alex Sinclair”
“Standing in the necromantic pit, in the depths of the crypt of his tower the Dark Lord could feel the Wyrd Work of the King. He could sense the deceitful and untrustworthy akashic forces leaving him and coming under the King’s command – inexpertly at first but with growing confidence the young monarch wove the patterns.
There is no such thing as mundane disbelief on the wretched, glittering streets of New Orleans. No doubt lives among the connoisseurs of gin and light. No hesitation hides behind distorted Mardi Gras masks, only creatures moving lithely through the crowd of wayward travelers. The city breathes in a cacophony of sound. Even the steel factory rattles distantly, like a drum beat. Yet, as Thomas O’Clery stood in the braking trolley car, inhaling the piss and bourbon stench of the city, he felt only a cold numbness. Neither the driverless carriages, or the preternatural weight of hot summer jazz, like a voodoo queen’s curse, could frighten or arouse him. Not anymore.
Continue reading “The Tale of Thomas O’Clery by Jessica Powers”
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