Ex Muro
Dana William Paxson

ELECTRIC DAWN APPROACHES. I stretch my arm out before me into the corridor dark, luxuriating. The skin of my upper arm tightens and thins out where it becomes one with the wall in which I am embedded. It tightens and thins, but it refuses to break. Damn its strength!

Every so often in the slow-walking years I tried to rip it, tear myself free with these long heavy fingernails, and walk out into this darkness like those people who pass by me once in a long time. Jono is my name, the name I forgot for too long. Jono, who took so many men and women and hollowed out their skins and stuffed them lifelike and put them back in their places in life to be found making little endless movements and shedding endless tears.

Twelve thousand years imprisoned here, and no one remembers me, except to descend two or three hundred levels in this ageless underground City, to laugh and point and wonder at the man locked in the stone wall.

I will make them all remember me again.

Angels Over Israel: Three Slides
Lavie Tidhar

MICHAEL SAW THE ANGELS wherever he turned. Tiny in size, the angels hovered in the unmoving summer air, their wings rippling in the sun’s blaze.

Like butterflies, thought Michael before he tried to pet one of them. The winged creature attacked him then, its little face twisting in an animalistic mask of anger. Long sharp teeth bit into Michael’s finger and returned bloodied.

I won’t cry, Michael told himself over and over again, I won’t cry. And then surprised himself with the composure with which he hit the angel until the tiny body fell to the pavement. Then Michael stepped on it.

He remembered the sound the angel’s body made, like a balloon emptying gradually of air. His foot rose and fell until a black, oily stain remained alone on the ground.

The Art of Memory
Howard V. Hendrix

IN THE ORCHARD gentle rain falls, wet blackness on tree trunks. Autumn. Some trees persist in their old green confusion, some have turned to fire, some to bare branched ashes. Tense expectancy fills the air. Everyone in the orchard is waiting.

No one knows what to do. So everyone is waiting.

A woman picking apples looks up.

“A sky out of the dark ages,” she says.

Her male companion nods.

In the northern quarter of the sky from another time, dark specks like rags of cloud are moving swiftly, becoming figures, man shapes flying in low over the trees and fields. Shock troops in rocket packs and stealth combat armor. The man and woman run shouting through the aisles of trees. “Take cover! Take cover!”

But it is too late. The faceless stealth-armored soldiers land with gunfire and death. The apple pickers run, are gunned down, spill their baskets of bright red apples everywhere.

“Hey, Captain!” one of the troopers calls over his helmet battlecom as he perforates a family of four seeking refuge in nearby thickets. “What kind of heretics we got here?”

The Scarecrow’s Bride
Marina Fitch

EMMA GREY CAME TO ME in spring when the Earth still bore the scars of the winter storms. Early flowers—clover, milkmaids, poppies—bent beneath the wind as the old woman skirted patches of snow. Mother and I watched from the window. “You will be married in a week’s time,” she said.

I smiled, remembering the promise Gerard Malins made to me in the woods: to marry me despite my withered leg. I hugged the crutch to my side. “Is that why Emma comes?” I said. “Or will Ger ask me himself?”

Mother turned from me. “He will not,” she said. “You are to be the scarecrow’s bride.” I grasped my crutch tighter. In a village of nearly four hundred, surely there was someone else. “But Tess Dunne’s Mary is blind and Ginny Frye’s Anne has one arm—”

Outside, footsteps shuffled to a halt on the doorstep. “Your father and I couldn’t offer a dowry rich enough to please Ger Malins’ parents. A man wants money, they said, or a woman who can work beside him in the fields.”

The Case of the Detective's Smile
Mark Bourne

“THE MUNDANE BORES ME, Watson.”

These were the first words Sherlock Holmes had spoken all morning—a gray, frigid January morning of 1898. His statement so startled me that my coffee was jostled from its cup, speckling the morning Times spread out before me.

He lounged listlessly in his armchair before the fire, a hodge-podge of books and monographs littering the floor about his feet. My friend languidly waved his pipe before his face, watching the fragrant smoke rise in ever-changing patterns that veiled his features.

“And good morning to you, Holmes,” I retorted, dabbing up the coffee spill. I offered him a scone from Mrs. Hudson’s breakfast tray, but he refused with a directed wave of his hand. Smoke swirled in graceful curls about his solemn face. By this stage in our long association, I had learned his moods well, and I had seen this one before.

The City in Morning
Carrie Richerson

TODAY, for the first time in weeks, the fog has lifted from the valley below and the city’s towers rise like silver and gold blades above the river’s bright blue swath. I stand in my garden, the morning’s icy dew soaking through my sneakers, surrounded by a vegetable certainty, and feel a familiar attraction. It has been a long time since I visited the city.

I pick a blushing pair of McIntoshes for my basket, then gather the last of the tomatoes. The green ones I will fry or pickle, but the last of the vine-ripened ones are dense, scarlet globes of infinite possibility, like Baby Bangs waiting to happen. My teeth tear through the tender skin of one, and ruby juice explodes over my lips and trickles down through my beard. I am still picking seeds out of my chin hairs as I return to the house.

As I slice a tomato onto Donald’s plate and freshen his coffee, he does not look up from the newspaper, but he is aware of my every move and his hand unerringly finds mine as I put his cup down. A quick squeeze and release, a smile of thanks, meant for me but directed at the newspaper.

“I thought I might go into the city today. Is there anything you need?”

My voice is a shade too casual. For a moment longer Donald does not raise his head, but I see his nostril flare with a deep, silent breath. Then he looks at me at last, fastens his liquid, dark eyes upon my face and examines it as though memorizing every detail. He raises his hand, the strong, callused artist’s fingers starting to reach for mine, then changes his mind and sweeps the hair back from his face instead. He wants to ask me not to go.

Dia Chjermen's Tale: The Delmoni Atrocity
Kij Johnson

WE TELL THESE TALES, we who lived on the Ship. We do this so that our home planets and our time on the Ship will not be forgotten—so that we will not be forgotten. To the men of the Ship, our planets were once disobedient fiefs, then nonrenewable resources. Our grandmothers and mothers were objects to fight over, breeding stock. But we have always been more than this. It has been more than six hundred years since this story was first told, by my twenty-seven-times grandmother, Dia Chjermen. The way it is told, she cried silently for a month after Delmoni was destroyed and she was taken aboard Empire Ship Delta. And then she stopped crying, and wiped her eyes, and told this tale to the women of the Ship. And now I tell you, so that Dia and Delmoni will not be forgotten.

We knew of the Ships, and called them Blood Ships. They existed only to punish. They traveled to a recalcitrant planet, and they destroyed that place, and they moved on. Depending on where it was when it started its trek toward a planet, a Ship might take years to arrive, or decades or centuries; but it would inevitably arrive. It was said that each Ship carried a hundred thousand fighting men, or a hundred million, or a billion. There was one Ship, a dozen Ships, a hundred. What did we know except horror stories?

The War Inside
Mark Budz

“I KID YOU NOT,” Rick said. “The quim here will fuckin’ blow your mind.” He glanced at me with glazed black eyes that looked like small puncture holes in his round, heavy face and took a long swallow of San Miguel. “So, what do you think?”

We sat on metal barstools in the Old Nam, a Denver strip-joint that had opened up on East Colfax a few months earlier.

“How the hell should I know?” I said. “I’ve never been to Vietnam. I have no idea what it was like.“

“You will,“ he said. “Believe me. This is as close as you’re going to get to the real thing.”

According to Rick, this was his second time. He’d stopped in two weeks ago, and had only now gotten up the nerve to come back. It was that intense, he said.

Another Saturday Night in Georgia
Lorelei Shannon

SO THERE WE WAS by the Edge of the Gauntlet, breathin’ fire, spittin’ nails, ready to tear the world to pieces. Billy Ray looks at me and grins, the ugly snaggletooth sumbitch. “You ready to die, shithead?” he says.

“See you in hell, needledick.” I pause to scratch my balls, showin’ him I ain’t scairt.

Jesse Lee, who was takin’ a piss in the woods, saunters up. He’s the old man, the champion, still alive after playin’ the Gauntlet for three summers. Ever’body says his luck’s gotta run out soon.

He nods at me an’ Billy, blinks his eyes, yawns like the whole thing bores the shit out of him. I hope I look half as cool as he does.

The girls is on the sidelines, goin’ crazy. Raylene bats her black eyes at Billy. “See you when you win, honey,” she hollers, and shows him her pink tongue. Little slut.