Marsha stood in the doorway, hands on her hips like Mom, exuding that older sister attitude Mark always adored. “Chuck saw you.” He pulled a dry T-shirt from his dresser and tugged it over wet, disheveled hair. “Better beat it,” he said, yanking out a pair of shorts. “Unless you like getting mooned.” She cursed
There was no mistaking the ziggurat for the mountains when I looked westward. The temple glittered with reflections of the sunrise and dwarfed the adjacent Rockies. I put the van into gear and pulled onto I70. There was no precise count of how many members of the Church of the Sun were in the ziggurat,
Illustration by Mark Scicluna by Christian Larsen Burge loved Klugman Hall like he loved an old friend. Smelling of generations of varnish, oil and lead paint, it was one of the few places that made him feel young, because goodness knew, he was older than just about everybody else on campus. The old building hadn’t
by Ron Scheer The town library at Prairie Creek fit into three old crates kept in a storage room where the school teacher lived. Virgil Case, the current teacher, used the books–or what was left of them–to teach reading. His young scholars cut their teeth on the likes of John Grisham, Louis L’Amour, and Reader’s
The City is Landing by Kristine Ong Muslim after Jacek Yerka’s “The city is landing” (first appeared in Linger Fiction #1, January 2011) We do not travel in spacecrafts. We arrive in hordes on the back of a dead planet. We carve out the whole city, whole villages and their inhabitants, then send them to
Time and space are dead and gone. Time slept through the lunch hour, and upon realizing the mistake, skipped out on the entire population of Planet Earth. I don’t know if it holds true for the entire universe, but it damn well might. We now float in a zero gravity soup of bodies of all
by Thomas Pluck When you make a pact with Satan, it doesn’t come with a protection plan like at the electronics store. It’s all like at the used car lot, as-is, and if the shit breaks down and throws a rod before you leave the lot then you are screwed, man: Satan’s sitting on the
Here are our themes for 2011. March issue – Prehistory – NOW CLOSED A land before time, or a time without lands? Submissions close on Feb 1, 2011. June issue – Exploration Adventure, discovery, internal navel-gazing… search hard, dig deep. Submissions close on May 1, 2011. September issue – Gothic Pretty perversion, the name of
My dearest Lucas, I have entrusted this letter to the representative of Assicurazioni Generali here in Prague, with strict instructions that it be sent with all dispatch to their Headquarters in Trieste and thence by fastest ship possible to New York. Assicurazioni has handled my father’s affairs in Central Europe for decades and their local
by Gerri Leen The house dominated the hillside, looking far darker in the fading light than it probably was. Arabella saw the coachman swallow nervously before he turned to her and asked, “Ready to go up there now, miss?” “Ready.” She climbed back into the hired carriage, nearly tripping on her woolen skirts as she