Tag: fantasy

All Stories, Fantasy, Horror, Short Fiction

The Landovers by Frederick K Foote

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I’m Lloyd Landover (aka Low), and this is the first day of high school for my twin sister Linda (aka Falling Down Girl) and me.

Our Mom is Lidia Landover, and she works with numbers for the federal government. She’s not a mathematician, statistician, physicist, astronomer, actuary, or accountant.

Mom doesn’t solve math problems. She doesn’t create theories based on math. She plays very intently with every level of math, and somewhere in the results are stuff the government really wants. She calls her work “math doodling.” 

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All Stories, Fantasy

Penny Catch by Marco Etheridge

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A moment before the horror begins.

Imagine two ruthless creatures, each a child’s worst—and often last—nightmare. The first fiend
is a shape-shifting monster. He terrorizes and devours children in the guise of Pennywise, an evil clown. Pennywise gained public attention in a book by a famous American author. The book is purported to be fiction, but this was a ruse to hide the author’s desperate fear of the main character, Pennywise. Alas, the child-eating clown is all too real.

Our second nightmare is the officially sanctioned kidnapper and imprisoner of children, the notorious Child Catcher. This greasy villain from the land of Vulgaria came to notoriety in the documentary film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.

An ocean separates these two terrors, and we must be grateful for this small blessing. For if these monsters should ever meet… No! It is too horrible to contemplate! 

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Lingering Regrets by Michael Bloor

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Considered objectively, Alan wasn’t really one of the bad guys. Provided it didn’t cost him significant quantities of time and/or cash, he was okay about helping out unfortunate relatives, friends, or neighbours. He had a soft spot for rough sleepers, as long as they weren’t hallucinating. He claimed, with some justice, that when he was working he’d worn a hole in the arse of a perfectly good suit sitting on committees, but he remained willing to do the odd shift of volunteering here and there.

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All Stories, Fantasy

In a Flash by Marcus Delmont

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Diane tilted her head back to find the top of the slide, one hand shading her eyes, and thought: that’s very high up for an eight-year-old alone.

“Mom, can I go?”

Her eyes followed the slide’s downward arc, its twists and loops. Bodies zipped through the tube. Muffled cries reverberated outward to the ground. Her chest tightened.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Beggar’s Stone by Peter Biles

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The prisoner woke up in his cell on the edge of the sea early in the morning. He was to die this day, as planned. The sun was white as it rose over the water, and the sky was empty, and the horizon was a pale rind speckled with distant ships. Today there was a white stone on the sill of the barred window that had not been there before; an old beggar who’d been walking by, shouting nonsense about the end of the world, had put it there. The prisoner, a young man who did not want to die and believed he was justified in the murder he committed, did nothing with the stone and thought nothing of it until the early afternoon, when it grew hot in the cell and when he knew his hour of death was nigh. He was to be hanged with three other criminals who were way worse men than he. The guard dropped off a pot of delicious beef stew and a loaf of wheat bread, which he devoured, and then he began to pace the stone floor back and forth. “It can’t be,” he said, and screamed. “I am an innocent man! An innocent man!”

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All Stories, Fantasy

Judy Triton by Brian Stumbaugh

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The knock came just as she was serving dessert.

Actually, the knock came after she had navigated the one step down to the dining room from the Vrbo’s kitchen, a tray of warm crème brûlées balanced in her hands. She had just cleared the table— two large dinner plates awash with steak drippings, stained red globs of uneaten mashed potatoes— and had given them a quick rinse before moving on to the final course. Tony had remained at the table, leaning back and scratching his belly. He had even let out a soft belch, which made her smile. She pulled the tray out of the refrigerator, but not before checking the freezer for her emergency stash, her “just in case” stores. Then she had gotten to work torching the custard with her little portable blow torch. When she finished, she paused for just a second to admire the crusty layer of toasted sugar, then hoisted the tray and headed for the dining room. She went deliberately, putting one foot in front of the other. When she reached the table she set the ramekins down at their places, and that’s when the rapping had started.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Duster by Joe Ducato

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Powder flowed from his cupped hands into the pouch.  Samson had a satisfied mind after finding so many wild orchids in The Shallow Field.  Some even grew from the crack in Split Rock – and the string of many sunny afternoons that followed made for great drying.  It had all been a delightful surprise.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Lunalae By Robert Reece

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The first thing to disappear was the dull, half-moon circle on the fingernail of his left index finger. He’d never considered that spot in his life except for the day that he noticed it was gone. Then he remembered that he had thought about it once before. He smashed his fingernail with a mallet when he was a kid. He was trying to nail a novelty license plate that said “Future” to the back of his soapbox derby car. He made the license plate a carnival in Idaho for 1 dollar, and he made the soap box derby car in his garage one summer because he wanted to feel like he was living in the 1950s while every other kid was atrophying into gelatinous blobs playing video games. He didn’t want his dad to scream at him for using his special rosewood mallet he’d received at a Toastmasters convention instead of the old hammer in the toolbox, so he never mentioned that he took it to nail that license plate from Idaho. Even when his fingernail turned greenish purple and eventually fell off, he kept that hand hidden from his parents.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Poem That Changed His Life by Michael Bloor

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I was reading James Fenton’s ‘Selected Poems’* and was very taken by one called ‘The Skip,’ in which the poet decides to take his life and throw it in a builder’s skip, parked outside the next-door neighbours’ house. Then he goes down to the pub. And coming back home, half-pissed, he’s surprised to see that his life was no longer there – some bugger had nicked it. The next morning he wakes up, checks, and sees that there is in fact a life lying in the skip, but it’s not his: someone must’ve spotted the poet’s old life lying in there and decided to swop. So the poet takes in the other life, sodden from last night’s rain, dries it on the stove and finds it fits him like a glove.

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