Midnight Folk
Lavie Tidhar

MY NAME IS SAL PARADISE, and I’m a private investigator.

The skies outside my shoe-sized apartment’s windows were like a dull grey numbing pain that perforated through the urban landscape like a burrowing worm, eating away at the rows upon rows of identical brick houses. It was winter, and I was alone.

I wasn’t always a private investigator. I used to be on the road. I’ll tell you about it later.

I arrived in London, England, one rain-drenched evening in November, looking for nothing more than a refuge, a safe-house, a place where I could be alone and where my past could be safely filed away in the great sweaty tumbling reams of paper that were left behind me in New York when I fled my old life.

I took the train to town, in turns sweating and freezing as the aftershocks of Benzedrine hit me repeatedly. I was a washed-out boxer getting pummelled on the ring of life, and the punches were coming in like a pile-up of cars on the Golden Gate bridge, fast and painful and without an end in sight. The people on the train, gentle Englishmen and delicate girls with pale, beautiful faces, looked at me in alarm but left me to my thoughts. I came to learn England is a place where the mad are—not revered, no, but allowed a quiet respect, a space around them like a shield of protection and comfort.

Another Kind of Glamour
Richard Parks

TTHE FAIRY BELLFLOWER woke me out of a sound sleep. “They’re at it again, Puck,” Bellflower said. I didn’t have to ask who. Just ‘what.’

“All right…all right!” I brushed off the vines and cobwebs, then paused a moment to commit a particularly stimulating dream to memory for later reference. “What did Oberon do this time?”

I knew better than to hope that it was Titania who’d started the row. If that had been so, Bellflower would be waking Titania’s favorite, not me.

“I’m not sure,” Bellflower said, her winsome little face scrunched in concentration, “but I think he told her the truth.”

“Oh, hell,” I said, fully awake now. This wasn’t like that business with the Indian boy or a harmless bit of infidelity. This was serious. “Which truth, Bellflower? Think carefully—this is important!”

“I’m not sure,” she repeated. “I wasn’t there for that part, Cowslip was.”

The Brotherhood of Trees
Michael Jasper

EVERY MORNING THAT WINTER, just as the black night began to melt into the first red fingers of day, I went running in the forest behind our house. Fred was still snoring and twitching in his light, carpal-tunnel-induced sleep, and his eyes would be red when he woke after too much dreaming about line after line of code. Me, I’d be refreshed and sharp and focused, thanks to my new routine of jogging with the hounds.

We’d never wanted kids, Fred and me, not back in the days when our love was still athletic and young. So we got dogs instead. Not a bad tradeoff, in hindsight, due to how hard Fred worked and the long hours I’d started to keep myself after fifteen years at the firm. We loved our nieces and nephews, and we ignored the awkward moments as the kids adjusted to having two uncles living together in one house.

We always got the dogs in pairs—first we had greyhounds (former racers, docile and loyal), then lap dogs (Fred’s choice, not mine), and even mutts (from the pound, always grateful and at our heels).

But these two, Boris and Cloris, were something else. They were beagles. Forget lethargic Snoopy lounging on top of his doghouse. When I took these two running through the frozen woods behind our house, it was all I could do to keep them from pulling my arms out of their sockets, one leashed, furry ball of energy per arm. They tore up and down the trails, baying louder than all of our previous dogs together could’ve mustered. God help me if they saw a squirrel or caught scent of a deer.

East of Eden and Just a Bit South
Being a True and Accurate Account of How Cain Found Himself a Wife

Ken Scholes

I WAS IN LINE AT THE SUPERMARKET, fixing to buy me some beer, when I decided to tell my story. I’d just seen the headlines on the papers saying JFK had been successfully cloned by alien tax professionals and Elvis was living his life as a woman named Loretta Stills in New Jersey. Way I figure, a bit more truth can’t hurt:

My name is Cain. The Good Book is flat-out wrong about me.

Most folks ask two questions about me. They want to know why I killed my brother. They think it was about sacrificing unto the Lord and such. My brother, Abel, with sheep; me with vegetables. Fact is, the Lord Almighty His Own Self is a meat and greens man. I should know. I had supper with him often.

No, that is not how it happened at all. And furthermore, I did not kill my brother. Not exactly anyways.

And the second question: Where did I find my wife?

Now I’m gonna tell you.

Things We Sell to Tourists
Marissa K. Lingen

GRANNY JEN DIDN’T WANT THEM to think she was ungrateful. She liked being taken on vacation, and she knew her son-in-law didn’t have to pay for her share. So she had not said a word when they stopped at Phil’s House of Cheese. McBain’s Freak Show drew no protest. She kept her mouth shut at the World’s Largest Outhouse and the mutant farm.

Then Darren pulled the minivan up to Crazy Bob’s Museum of the Twentieth Century. The façade was festooned with old-fashioned Christmas lights and painted with a psychedelic mural. Granny Jen’s daughter Alison turned around to her. “We thought this would be fun for you, Mom!”

“Come on!” said Darren. “It’ll be fun! And we can get out and stretch our legs, shake the stink off.”

The grandkids were already running across the parking lot, ten-year-old Tina easily outpacing seven-year-old Jared. “Slow down and wait for your grandmother!” Darren hollered after them.

“They don’t need to bother with me,” said Granny Jen.

“Oh, no, Mom,” said Alison earnestly. “This is your museum. You can show them all the things that are like what you had as a kid!”

“Lovely,” said Granny Jen. She felt a headache coming on.

Virulence
DJ Cockburn

THE STREET CHILDREN CAME from nowhere, as much a part of Davao City as the aroma of chicken frying on sidewalk grills. They just appeared between me and the Public Health Laboratory, pointing to their mouths and piping “Hey Joe, hey Joe”. The security guard stepped forward to chase them off, but I threw a few coins after them.

“You shouldn’t do that, sir,” he said in his precise English. “Now they will wait for you to come back and annoy you again.”

I wondered how he kept his white uniform looking freshly laundered all day in the glaring heat of the Philippines. I could feel sweat running down my face, and my shirt felt like a dishrag where it clung to my back.

I mumbled something about supposing so and retreated into the air-conditioned cool of the lab.

“Hi Tony,” said Karla. “The director was in earlier. He’s sure we’re looking at dengue fever.”

Her voice was a monotone, and I noticed that she didn’t say what she thought herself.