Contributor: Sue Ann Connaughton

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Snap, Snap, Snip, Snip

Whenever he felt lonely, Beau dug out the puppet, talked to it, played with it, as though it were George. He made the puppet, himself, after George moved, by cutting and pasting a photo of George’s face, dark and grainy in that schoolyard-photograph manner, onto cereal box cardboard. For the handle, he taped a twig on the back. Primitive, but Beau was only six years old. He stored the puppet in a secret shoebox, hidden behind clothes in his wardrobe.

When Beau was ten years old, his grandfather died. He hunted through family albums for photos of his grandfather and used them as models that he drew onto a rubber ball. No matter how the ball rolled, his grandfather’s face was always visible, always available to play a game of catch.

Beau’s parents divorced when he was seventeen, just as he was leaving for college. It wasn’t a surprise; his parents had separated once before, so he was prepared. Beau chose a photograph of them together, smiling. He mounted it on black poster board. With a razor-sharp tool, he carved it into a jigsaw puzzle with one hundred, tiny, intricate pieces. It worked as a two-sided puzzle: a person could put it together with the expected photo side up; or for an added challenge, fit together the reverse inky side, without pictorial clues for a guide. After he finished the puzzle, Beau immediately dismantled it and sprinkled the pieces into his secret shoebox, tucking them around the puppet and ball.

At age thirty, Beau married Doria, whom he adored so much that he began shooting photos of her from their first date, in anticipation of the day she wouldn’t be around.

As their first wedding anniversary approached, Beau secretly crafted a special gift for Doria. He sifted through hundreds of photos and had the prettiest one enlarged on heavy stock: a photo of Doria descending a staircase in her wedding gown. He sliced it into precise vertical strips, which he wove into a form and molded into a basket with the rearranged image on the outer side. On the bottom, he attached curved strips of balsa wood, so the basket could rock. On their anniversary, the “paper” anniversary, Beau presented the basket to Doria.

She examined his offering, inside and out. With her index finger, she traced the intersections where her image fractured into abstraction.

His heart pounded as he braced himself for the possibility that she might laugh at his foolish gift and leave him right then and there. Why did he ever think he could reveal the fruits of his weird hobby to a woman as normal as Doria.

Doria set the basket in the center of the dining table and tapped it, lightly.

“What an ingenious construction! I’ve never seen anything like it. Look, Beau, how easily it sways at the touch of my fingertip.”


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Sue Ann Connaughton writes compact fiction from a drafty old house in the witch capital of North America, Salem, Massachusetts

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Author: Sue Ann Connaughton

Contributor: Manuel Royal

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Vingy was dead: first of all. He caught on fire -- well, somebody lit him on fire. Plus, he fell 300 feet from a revolving restaurant, onto a public fountain featuring a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid. That usually does it.

The fountain's flowing water put out the fire and rinsed a lot of blood down the drains, but Vingy's intestines and spine remained draped over the statue. The scene was cheerful in its color scheme (at first, until the blood darkened as it clotted) but, frankly, depressing in every other way.

Three blocks south from where much of Vingy was spread out so publicly, three dozen people had distributed themselves amongst a hundred chairs in a ballroom, mostly in the middle rows. They flipped through their seminar materials and waited for the main speaker, Reggie Vingy, to come out and explain how they'd get rich by badgering their acquaintances into distributing kits that would, at some point down the slope of an imaginary pyramid, allow somebody to sell somebody else a product, all using a principle that Vingy called Dynamic Value Exchange (DVE).

Vingy never showed; he was the late Reggie Vingy in every sense. Two senses, anyway. This became a family joke, repeated every Christmas when Vingy wasn't there to trim the tree. His children hung a Little Mermaid ornament and lit a candle.

His widow inherited the mantle of DVE royalty and strove to honor Vingy's legacy. And indeed, she ripped off many, many people, so perhaps somewhere Vingy was smiling. But definitely dead.


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Manuel Royal was born, like Tristram Shandy, with a broken nose. He will die. In between, he lives and writes in Atlanta.

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Author: Manuel Royal

Contributor: Heather Haven

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Wallace Pitkin had not seen a dentist in 43 years. It was not just that he was a firm believer in if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but as a child, his father had experienced a horrifying incident. A sloppy dentist and a wayward Novocain-filled needle had left one side of Pitkin Senior’s face paralyzed for life.
It was then a family tradition was born. All the Pitkins learned to deal with tooth pain in the same way: aspirin, Tylenol or ibuprophen, washed down with significant shots of whiskey.
During Mr. Pitkin’s end-of-the-year physical the doctor noticed the swollen left jaw coupled with the standard Pitkin foul breath.
“You know, Wallace,” The doctor said, looking into Mr. Pitkin’s hazel eyes, “the health of your teeth affects the health of your entire body. I’ve been telling you for years to see a dentist. Now I can’t okay you going back to the loading dock until you have them taken care of.”
“But I only got one more year and I can retire with full benefits,” Mr. Pitkin replied.
“It’s the best Christmas present you can give yourself. Don’t come back to me until you get your teeth fixed.”
For three eight-hour days Mr. Pitkin had his mouth worked on by a dentist who sweated profusely and cursed under his breath. Mr. Pitkin refused to have Novocain but the laughing gas had done him just fine. Even the crabby and corpulent Mrs. Pitkin, with whom he hadn’t shared a kiss for 15 years, looked pretty good to him at the end of day two.
On day three, Mr. Pitkin was leaving the Gardner, Zucker and Langusto Dental Compound when he realized he was enveloped by the faint sounds of music interspersed with occasional chatter. It was with him wherever he went. If he opened his mouth it got louder. If he closed his mouth and put his hand over his jaw, the volume decreased. This was good for when he was trapped in an elevator or in line at the grocery store. Mr. Pitkin liked the music. It soothed him.
Feeling very mellow, Mr. Pitkin returned home and his wife met him at the door. He grinned at her broadly. His mouth played “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.”
“What the hell is that?” she demanded.
“It’s my new fillings. They’re picking up this 24-hour a day radio station.”
“Well, turn it off. I can’t stand Christmas music.”
“I can’t turn it off. Besides, I like it. Get over yourself, fatso.”
Mrs. Pitkin hauled off and hit him across the face as hard as she could.
He slapped her back.
She picked up a nearby frying pan, swung, but missed him by several inches.
One thing led to another.
Céline Dion warbled “O Holy Night,” while Wallace Pitkin strangled his wife.
The lawsuit of Pitkin vs. Gardner, Zucker and Langusto is still pending. But the music lives on.


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In my career, I have written flash fiction, short stories, plays, comedy acts for performers, and novels. I am the author of the Alvarez Family Murder Mystery series and the 2nd book of the series, A Wedding to Die For, is a finalist in the EPIC best eBook mystery of the year, 2012. Yowser!

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Author: Heather Haven

Contributor: Ron Koppelberger

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He consumed the savory bee wrought toil of honeycomb and syrup in great gulping gasps, adamant in his swallowing cadence. “GGGGGGGRRRRRRRROOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRR!” the bear grumbled and rumbled in sticky sensations of satisfaction and belly full fashion.
The zodiac sparkled heavenward and the wind coursed through his dark ebony assay of fur in refined miasmic mists, the perfume of bears and wild beasts in frenzied fuming hunger, wild in tandem with a rare rose and the drizzle of pine sap drifted in the lazy tendriled currents.
The baby cooed and the bear nuzzled its tender flesh, just a bit of honey and the chewed remnant of a briar hare, the baby suckled and ate. Laughing the baby touched the mother bear with outstretched fingers, tiny wrinkled and pink.
The bear drizzled a bit of honey from it’s maw and amber droplets of honey sang in dewdrop nourishment as the tiny child cooed a lyric cry of survival and adaptation. The lyric of bears and man, babes and wild claims of springtime miracle and as our elders say the mystery of the baby perfect in wild and tame, in bond and instinct, the mistress sings,

“Vanguard in reflection

Souls in perfection,

A tidy boarder breached

The lord in angels we beseech,

The lyric tale of babes and beasts,

Mans amend to the festival and the feast,

He portends the light in the wood

And the glow in what could,

The first burning passion in human force

And divergent shades of summer course,

The cleft between will and untamed lands of harvest mill,

Asserting the covenant between bear and babe,

Mystery and rave,

In ancient sums of harmony and song,

In rest of days eternally long.”

*And the babe was named chance for the wont of mans unease with the world.


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I love to write and have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. If I can touch the reader with the gift of dreams then I have done my job.

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Author: Ron Koppelberger

Contributor: Drew Hays
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It started like the common cold. Jeremy Ashell sneezed mucoidal yellow gristle and rubbed his nose tender with brown tissues from the schools bathroom. When he got home, he coughed his way into his living room, standing up, holding a plastic electronic guitar as Aerosmith blared from the speakers. He was 9, and had no prior history of seizures, but thats what his parents thought he was having as he screamed and shook while they held him, pinned and flailing within his space, to the linoleum. In the panic, they didn't pay much mind to the slackness of his skin, or the heat he failed to give off at all.
They bound his wriggling, panicky form to the bucket seat of their rheumy van and took him to St. Martys. The nurses were frightened, and two EMTs with tense forearms hoisted his kicking legs and bucking head onto a gurney where he groaned and bit at his cloth facemask. The Doctors hurriedly spoke of blood tests, and pretty much everyone thought it was rabies from the get-go. He was such a biter, one remarked, that nobody thought to take his temperature until after he was tranquilized.
Noting the absence of a heartbeat after a shocking read on his temp, the staff at St. Martys assumed they had ended Jeremys life, and apologized profusely to the parents, who were now in a state of emotional and physical drainage. Phil Ashell had been bitten.
When he got home, Phil poured a foaming splash of Hydrogen Peroxide on the gouge in the space between his thumb and index finger. Threads of red ran like jellyfish tentacles off of his forearm and into the sink. The wound was not quite bleeding, but had a wet sheen to it, and contracted lightly with his slowing pulse. He looked in the mirror and shook his head while wrapping a strip of gauze in a tight sleeve on his thumb. The horror and shock of his sons death were not yet upon him, as the horror and shock of his son biting him with salivary lips and teeth and savage eyes still flared ubiquitously in his memory, and he could only shake his head and turn out the light as he muttered about his luck and life. He stood in the hallway and looked out the window, hoping to see his wife pull in from the hospital so he could comfort her, and be comforted in kind.
He needed a drink. As he walked to his office his knees cracked aloud like billiards and pain shot through his thighs. Spasms took his quadriceps for a moment and he stood panting in the hallway for a moment before straightening with an ache and made it to the office, where he sat down and poured some gin he kept in a sandblasted bottle under his desk. Pain slithered sharply and angularly through very perceivable regions of his brain, though the more familiar vague glower of a conventional headache was present as well. He looked down at the wound, and saw a wet red circle. The bandage was quickly loosening and bloating with blood that seemed remarkably thin, almost less substantial than water. And then he stopped looking.
His eyes pinkened and reddened and ran soaking with crimson as the heart beating in his chest gave stronger and stronger beats, each farther apart until it imploded and froze. His blood turned to sludge in his veins as dying platelets made a stew of his circulatory system, and his limbs contorted and stiffened as nerves went haywire and muscles locked up. He stumbled towards the bookshelf and fell against it, as the cage of his muscles constricting his frame quivered and jerked. His jaw slackened, his eyes rolled lazily, and his legs began to shuffle. He chewed thoughtlessly on his own lip, which tore away loosely, and staggered out of his office.
The rumble of the garage door buzzed the house, and the shadows of the furniture stretched and shifted as the headlights of an SUV shone inside, and Tina Ashell pulled into the driveway. She grabbed the corn chips she had picked up on the way home and walked inside the house. Phil was holding half of Fritz by the tail. She screamed, and the sound was inhuman.


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I am a counselor from the United States. I like to write, and I'm working on getting the punch back in my words.

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Author: Drew Hays

Contributor: E.S. Wynn
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Creak of tin as hinges bend against dust, against age. Silvered paint flakes, splinters, catches golden, attic light. Fragile crackle of faded paper, old hands trace folds, smooth them. Dear Robert, the letter reads.

I hope you are doing well. I'm eight. My name is also Robert.

I smile, no mention of a date, but I know when it was written. I know why, who's idea it was, how silly it seemed at the time, how necessary it became as I aged.

Mrs. Patterson says that I have to write you a letter. You're fifty eight years old now. I bet you look like Grandpa Irwin. Does he still have a swimming pool you can swim in?

“In heaven, maybe, if that's the way of things.” I whisper. “Grandpa Irwin died over forty years ago.”

I bet you have a flying car. I wish Dad had a flying car. We could go zooming in the clouds. We could fly to see Grandma Ethel and Aunt Ruth in Florida if we had a flying car!

I look out the window, eyes finding the sleek, pill-shaped box I call a car. Its usually vibrant ePaint soaks light with a dark, dull gray while the cells recharge in the afternoon sun. Automatic, fast, elegant, but not a flying car.

Or maybe you have a rocket pack. I'd like a rocket pack.

I look at the car again. It's a classic now, one of the older C23s from before the last major police action in the east. One of the few still left, now that the entanglement grid has replaced the old SmartWay road system. I haven't seen a rocket in decades. Orbital shuttles and 'breakers run under their own power now. Even model rockets have gone out of style.

Do you still have dogs and cats in the future? I want a puppy but dad says no.

I smile again as I remember. Dad managed to hold off the puppy until I was in sixth grade, but it was mom who finally brought home Spot. I still remember that face. Bull-terrier mix, beautiful brown-tan swirled fur mixing with white. I grew up with that dog, took him with me to college, had to take the pet deposit out of my student loan to keep him. If it wasn't for him, I probably never would have met Karen at the dog park. Never would have met Bruce. For fourteen years, Spot altered the course of my life, and when he finally passed, I couldn't imagine life without him.

I think writing you a letter would be cool if you could write me a letter back. It seems dumb that you can't. Mrs. Patterson says that time travel will always be impossible, even for letters.

That was the thinking then. Just like today, we thought we had it all figured out. I remember being fifteen, seeing the announcement of an accepted, grand “theory of everything.” Five years after that, large-scale, machine-assisted research at the Sagan Institute rewrote practically everything we knew about the universe. Now it's possible to manipulate time in ways that seemed like fantasy back then. Rules for past-time interaction are strict, but a few words of comfort or a vague letter rarely requires anything more than autonetwork approval these days.

Well, that's all I can think of to ask you.


Sincerely, Robert Era.

I blink, and the software in the modified lens of my eye comes alive with the colors and displays of the OverNet, interfaces at the speed of thought and pens the words of my mind onto a ready document already aimed for a family fax machine fifty years in the past. The letter my mind writes comes immediate, short, soft, vague.

Thank you for the letter, Robert. The letter says. No flying cars yet, but the puppy was worth the wait.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over thirty books

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Author: E.S. Wynn

Contributor:Eric Boyd
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Enter text here.

Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to. Normally, I only went on the computer to find apartment listings, harmonicas, and pornography. This writing page seemed interesting, though. The idea of a computer telling someone who they were like, sounded like, wrote like, was funny. It was funny in a sad way, because it was probably true. Everyone sounds like everyone, now; nobody is nobody anymore. Who would I be like? Who was I? Who was Fredrick Anderson?
I looked over a few older stories, and none of them seemed good enough. I wanted my best work to be analyzed! If I put some piece of shit I wrote while I was half-drunk… No. That wouldn’t be right. Maybe It would say I sounded like Kerouac? Hemingway or Joyce? Were my sentences short? Were they long, drawn out sentences with bullshit similes; the tallest sunflowers, bending against an unforgiving, dying sun? What did I write? Why? Who knows. Who cares. I did. No idea why.
Questions are stupid. Don’t ask, I thought. Just go.
GO.
I didn’t mind sending my stories to magazines, editors, friends, my girl. As long as a piece was ready, I didn’t care who saw it. People are forgiving because they are stupid. Nobody reads things. When they do, they think it’s good, because they have nothing to compare it to. But still, everyone I had ever shown a story to said I was a genius. I agreed. “Someday,” someone had once told me, “the name ‘Fredrick Anderson’ will be known. You’ll be known!” It felt good to hear that. It felt very good to have a secret like that. Nobody in the world could take that away from me. I had always been writing.
My girl, Lucy, and I had spent months sending letters to one another while I was in jail. Before that, there were movie scripts. Song lyrics. Poems and prose. Rants. Banter. Crap.
I had always written. Always. It was easy! All I had to do was sit around and steal people’s memories. I overheard conversations on payphones, buses, grocery store lines; I overheard entire lives. There is no boring. I spent hours and days thinking about other people’s moments, turning it into something of my own.
I stared at the computer screen. Who would I be like? My eyes hurt. I tried calling a friend. They didn’t pick up. I needed something to help. Forcing myself to write was never easy. I needed something to help me. There was a bottle of Jameson in my freezer. I put some honey on the rim of my glass and poured the whiskey in, mixed with water. It tasted good, but it didn’t do anything. It didn’t help. I just fell asleep.
“Are you awake? Fredrick? Hello?”
“What?” I put the telephone up to my ear.
“Were you sleeping?” Lucy asked.
I didn’t even remember picking up the phone. It was 2AM.
“Yeah, I’m up. I’m awake. Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I just can’t sleep.”
“Oh. I was trying to do a story.”
“Ah, being brilliant as always. Anything good?”
“I don’t even think I wrote anything. I had a couple drinks and fell asleep."
“NyQuil and whiskey again?"
“No NyQuil. That was just when I had that cough last week. It’s better to be proactive, I think.”
“Uh huh, sure. I’ve heard that before.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“I’m just not tired. I’ve been playing with the cat for a while. He’s funny."
“The funniest.”
“Do you want to go? You sound tired?”
“I’m fine. Did you hear about those old engineers in Japan?”
“No, what about them?” Lucy asked.
“It’s awful, but sort of beautiful, I guess. With that nuclear reactor cleanup shit, a few engineers have gotten radiation poisoning, and they’ll probably die. At least they’ll get cancer. These are younger people, going into these reactors and trying to fix everything that fucked up with that. I forget how many of them there are, but they’re getting sick. They’re dying.
“But now there’s a group of about three hundred retired engineers, all over sixty, who are volunteering to go into these reactors. These aren’t random people, they worked in reactors or whatever. They’d know what they were doing, and they’re willing to die. They don’t want to see anyone getting poisoned when they don’t have to. It’s sort of wonderful."
“I guess I should be moved by that," Lucy said. "I don’t like thinking about that kind of stuff, though. It makes me cry."
“Yeah. It’s pretty selfless though. You wouldn’t see that in America.”
“No, probably not.”
“Fuck, those guys that helped clean up on September Eleventh can’t even get healthcare.”
“I know. On TV I just saw a dentist commercial where they were doing a promotion to have a free X-ray. They should just say ‘free radiation!’ while they’re at it.”
“Idiots…”

I talked on the phone for a while longer before saying goodnight. Then I used the bathroom, ate a slice of bread, and went back to the computer.
I started typing.

'Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to…'

When I was finished, I turned on my internet, which was still dialup, and waited about ten minutes to open the writing analysis page. I put my story into the page and hit ‘enter.’ I waited almost five more minutes. My internet was very slow. I waited. Who did I write like? Who was I, now?

YOU WRITE LIKE:
ERIC BOYD

“Who in the Hell is that?” I said out loud.
I laughed. It couldn’t say a writer I had at least heard of? I had no idea.


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Eric Boyd was born on October 16th, at 3:33AM, 1988 in North Carolina. He briefly studied a the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Eric currently lives in Homestead, Pennsylvania. His cat's name is Oscar.

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Author: Eric Boyd

Contributor: Tess Pfeifle
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People always strive to return home, but it is harder for some. The wish to return to one's homeland is a natural and inescapable feeling. Without a home one is doomed to wander aimlessly, with no real direction, no driving force. Leaving home for a different country is more often than not a huge undertaking. The cultural confusion often drives the new comers to madness. This often leads to a harsh break with their old culture, in hopes to assimilate to the new culture. When one leaves their home,they soon come to the relization that they have to come back...eventually.

My brother, Kian left Ireland when I was very young. We lived in Sligo, a beautiful small town, near the Rosses Point beach. Our happy clan consisted of my brother, my mother, my father and I. Sadly, our family was broken up when Kian decided to become a man. Kian and I shared a special kinship that only growing up in Ireland can bestow. Despite our age difference of eight years we spent a lot of time together. He showed me the hollows where the Sidheog dwelled and told me of their king. The King of the Faeries named Finvarra, Kian always warned me that he stole pretty little girls like me, for brides. Kian pointed out the jagged rocks strewn precariously along the coast, where the Selkies sat on warm rocks and confused the captains of ships with their haunting songs. Kian always made sure I never looked to the left while travelling, for fear I might see two magpies and fall upon very bad luck.

When Kian was eighteen he left for American and we never saw his ruddy irish cheeks glow with lively color again. He lived there for many years, sent us postcards and eventually called when he could afford it. Kian sent us money and gifts on holidays but he never gave us what really wanted, to see him again. Kian married a woman named Anna that he had met in America, she was an accounant. Kian sent us glossy pictures from the wedding. His bride carried lilac and kept her bridal boquet in their house. How Kian could ever let her do this was beyond me, every good irishman worth his weight in salt knew never to bring lilac into the house. Their marriage was bad luck to begin with, not to mention, they were married in May, the worst month to get married according to irish lore. Kian and his wife eventually had two children, a girl and a boy. Our mother was devastated when she learned their names, Tyler Collin and Lily Aileen. Their Irish heritage hidden amongst their middle names. He called often, we called back to talk about our seperate lives. I heard his voice lose the irish brogue he spent eighteen years gathering with every passing year.

Kian had a sudden heart attack and died, he was too young. Kian was barely fifty and my family was completely surprised. We flew over for his funeral, met his American wife with her black pantsuit and black eyes and two children covered with a smattering of freckles and good intentions, proving they were our kin. We talked with them, Mother and Father did not cry though, and neither did I. Kian had been dead long ago to us, just a ghost that could write and talk. We watched his American friends and family bury him behind a stone church with huge green doors. At least it was Catholic, at least they did that much for him, for his long ignored heritage.

We returned home and felt a sting from the empty mailbox and the phone that sat in silence. One day, barely a month after the funeral there was a knock at my parents door. My husband Carrick and I had come for dinner as was a tradition on Sunday’s. I got up from the table, making sure my chair did not tumble over as I stood up, a tell-tale sign of bad luck. I opened the door and there stood Kian, his skin pallid, when he opened his mouth I could smell the rot. His eyes were glazed over and his hair still had dirt in it. I kissed him on the cheek, we had been expecting him, it took it him a longer than we thought to arrive I lead him upstairs to his old room, white and blue and laid him on the bed facing north. In the morning we would bury him in the grave we already had dug for him before we went to the funeral in America. People always return home, as a final resting place, even if they have been gone quite a long time.


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Irish belief: The dead of Ireland won’t be settled until they are buried in Ireland.

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Author: Tess Pfeifle

Contributor: E.S. Wynn
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You will find the box in the dust and webs at the far end of the attic– you know the one, crouching under a stained and moth-rotted rag that will disintegrate in your hands as you touch it. Eager fingers will trace the lines and sigils burnt into the lid, move along the sides, flow with the patterns of the arcane script, tracking each glyph, almost tasting them with your fingers as you absorb the antiquity of the ageless box. Lips will purse as levering thumbs are driven to find purchase, to free the secrets locked within. Your tongue will set between teeth as you work at the age-pitted and neglect-rusted hinges, the thickly swelled lid, ignoring the strange way that the entire box seems to reek of time’s own feeble attempt to keep it sealed, to rot the box into oblivion and cast into the void whatever is sealed within. Thumbs will flex and harden, work loose the cracking wax seal, forcing movement, prying and cracking. All around you, time will seem to slow, reality to tense, and then the final catch will gave way, lid coming free, hinges shattering in a flash of crimson light.

For one terrible moment, you will catch a supernatural inkling of what you have done, the brush of dread and fear that comes from some other, deeper sense still as yet undescribed by science. You will hesitate, your hands frozen, unmoving. Within the shattered box, a wad of impenetrable void will seethe and flex before your eyes, stirring and swallowing the light as it reaches out of its pitted prison in thick, ropy coils, bending and obliterating the very fabric of reality wherever it touches. Fingers will jerk involuntarily, spasm on the current of a pulse, a throbbing blast of vibration that will crack suddenly and roll through the air around you, raising the tiny hairs on the back of your neck. The call of potential and power eager to be released will thunder somewhere within your skull, move and spread steadily, sweeping through flesh like the touch of some cold, spectral hand. Electric chills will cascade across arms, charge the air with tingling bites that slice into nerves, spasm through fingers. All at once, your sight will begin to blur, to darken, to turn red at the edges and then burn to black again. You will draw one last deep, gasping breath, fighting it, fighting the darkness, the blurring, the cold spreading outward from your chest, sewing its way viciously through your arms. All at once, you will stand, try to put some distance between yourself and the box, the darkness, but even then you will not escape His grasp. Hands will raise, flex before searching, sightless eyes. Lips will part, quivering on an edge of growing fear. I cannot see, you will think, and the thought will drown as the tingling within you turns slowly to burning, a throbbing stitch of pain working its way through every limb, every vessel and vein in your body.

And then a chorus of a thousand voices will call out as one, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once, rising on a rapturous howl that pounds inside your head like the throaty call of the hollow and formless depths of some forgotten, otherworldly hell.

Hic iacet L’Thaaun. Rex L’Thaaun! They will cry out, and the sound will freeze your skin, turn your blood to jagged ice. Forgotten instincts will awaken, the overwhelming urge to cower, to contort your body into a fetal ball and scream, to rip at skin and slash flesh, letting the blood flow, letting it run free to coat the unseen world with viscous crimson. The chorus of voices will rise in a terrifying cry, almost screaming for the spill, clamoring for the sacrifice until a single voice rises above them like the embodiment of a moldering plague, a breath that rots flesh and turns bone to ash and sand. The words will have no sound, no meaning your ears can grasp, but to some forgotten part of your mind, some fragment of instinct passed on through untold eons, the words will come as unignorable instructions, instructions whose execution only that darkened vestigial corner of a forgotten past will understand how to perform.

Mortal anchor: Receive your god.

And then. . . nothing.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over thirty books and chief editor of Thunderune Publishing.

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Author: E.S. Wynn

Contributor: Mario Esquer
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“The eyes are always the hardest to capture. . .” He bent over his easel and studied his inspiration.

He had gone from the cerulean blue penthouse studio he lived in down to muted shadows of the city to rescue her.

Left the secure world of his colors and canvas then descended into the writhing darkness of a metropolis in its death throes. He fought his way through the polychromatic riot of the panicking masses. All the way, always just a scant block ahead of the crimson tide of horror and death.

He had found her then, found his lover amongst her family in the affluent neighborhood of rouged brick and gray stones. It was the place he had been told all his life he was not good enough for, that the affluent and pastel colored angels did not smile upon the lowly such as he. A bright silken angel had noticed him however. Golden haired with azure eyes, the creamy marble–like goddess had noticed his passion for creating master works, works which displayed the tragedy and futility of living in a dark world full of sorrows.

She told him his paintings rivaled the masters. Yes, she had seen his passion, promoted it tirelessly around the art circles and highborn of which she was a member, and then, when he was recognized as a success, she fell to his passion, came to him in an affair for which her own people had rejected her. She feared that they, the sullen navy blue and slate gray suits of her father and betrothed who lorded in their ivory tower of money and position would not approve. She was proved right; they did not approve and together her shadowy captors conspired to forever keep the lovers separate.

As he arrived at her brownstone flat they were greedily loading her and their other possessions into their German made car, its chrome and metallic black paint no doubt headed to a waiting pristine white private jet which would wing them away to safety beyond the horizon. They planned to escape to the emerald of the Bahamas, perhaps, or the sage of the Azores. They tried to push him away as he approached, but he had risked his hands, lithe and delicate, stark in their dark completion-- the tools of his trade, to strike her captors and lift her willingly out of their coach. Together they escaped her world, down the charcoal colored side streets littered with discarded lives and livelihoods. The rainbows cast by the trinkets of the world being swallowed by the dead. The dead that walk, casting darkness before them.

The mauve and indigo faced monsters set upon them a few scant blocks after, and though they escaped with their lives, one had tasted the flesh of a fallen angel. The two lovers made it back to his towering, glittering high-rise, and now finally, with the moans of their demon subjects below them, they lorded over all alone.

“The eyes, the eyes…” he whispers to himself. "I must get the eyes right."

After a lifetime of capturing the crimson emotions and blues of the human soul on canvas; why was it was so damn hard to express the creature’s lack of any resemblance to the strikingly beautiful woman his lover had been. The opaque void which filled her dead gaze and violet traced rotting face had captured his artist's interest. Her lifelessly writhing frame was tied to the trellis railing. It presented him the greatest challenge of his life. Pedro mixed a little more acrylic white into the mottle of colors on his palate.

She, his lost seraph, his love Sarah, would be his alone, always, and his final, greatest, unpresented masterpiece. . .

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A Teacher, student, who lives with his family in the 'burbs. Mario Esquer has an appreciation for most fictional genres which speak to mankind's desire for more than what is. Occasionally, he even creates a work himself. (Generally speaking he also does not tend to speak of himself in the third person.)

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Author: Mario Esquer