I swore to myself — and to Alan, not that he remembers — that I wasn't going to do this anymore. I've lost count of how many different Alans there have been, by now. Dozens. More. All of them have loved me, and one way or another that's fucked up their lives. I never meant for it to turn out that way, but that doesn't make it all right.
But like it or not, it belongs to me now. I tried to refuse it, and yet here it is. If I try to ignore it, it'll eat my house.
Once more, then. Just once more.
After all, things are different now. My mother, the usual catalyst for trouble, is dead. Aunt Hope won't seek me out the way her sister did; she doesn't hate me that much. I've learned such a lot — surely with no more outside interference, this won't happen again. Once last time will pay for all.
I pull the drawstrings of the pouch open and reach inside. It's a ring this time, a chunky, hideous signet ring inset with a huge green stone. I slip it on my finger, which immediately goes numb.
When I can see again, I'm standing in the doorway of the Nags Head at the Angel, Islington.
This is always where it begins. Sometimes her name is Kerry and sometimes it's Kelly; sometimes they work together at a bank and sometimes at a financial services firm, but they've always just broken up and he's always lost and vulnerable.
I look a little like her, except that I'm taller, thinner and have a larger chest. I didn't do that deliberately, it's just one of those complicated by-products.
It's a Friday in late June — it always is — and the day is beautiful and clear. The sky is a deep, dreaming blue, lightly gauzed in places with thin cloud. The street is full, shoppers and workers weaving in and out, sunglasses and bare shoulders and the sweet, drifting sound of a radio above the growl of the slow-moving traffic.
I push my fringe off my face, and walk inside the pub. The change from bright sunlight to dingy dimness is sudden, but I don't exactly have to wait for my eyes to adjust. They're used to darkness.
It's a deceptively big pub once you get inside, narrow but deep. At the bar I choose the stool right next to Alan and order a Bushmills, straight up. Irish whiskey is Alan's drink, and Kerry/Kelly hates it. She only drinks red wine, and is quite a snob about it. She doesn't like pubs, especially this one, which is why Alan always comes here to get over her.
I drink my shot. The bright heat burns out the taste of my mother's blood, and I order another. My hands are still itching. The barman serves me with a grin, and this time Alan looks up. "Bad day?"
"You have no idea." I pick up my refilled glass and hold it out. "Here's to better fortunes."
He nods and picks up his own glass. "I like that. To better fortunes."
We drink. "I had my fortune told today, in fact," I tell him. "She said I'm going to get together with the love of my life and live happily ever after."
The barman snorts. I slap my empty glass down on the bar and point at Alan's. "Buy you another?"
He laughs and swivels on his stool to face me. "Well, if it's written in the stars… who am I to argue with destiny?" He holds out his hand. "I'm Alan."
The barman is rolling his eyes now, but he still pours our drinks. I've actually always loved that slight formality of Alan's, that air of a bygone courtliness. Apart from him, my lovers have been as interested in eating me as fucking me.
I take his hand. "Jane. Very pleased to meet you."
He doesn't flinch from my touch, nor object when I hold on slightly too long for politeness. But then why would he? You can't tell, not physically. Not if I don't want you to.
Alan smiles, takes out his wallet and pays for the drinks. "Jane, would you like to go and get something to eat?"
I smile back. "Why not? Pizza would be nice."
© 2012 by Michelle Ann King
First published in Orbital Hearts: love's bitter ruins, edited by Thaddeus Rice, 2012.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Michelle Ann King was born in East London and now lives in Essex. She writes mainly SF, dark fantasy and horror — probably due to a childhood spent reading Stephen King and watching zombie films. She has worked as a mortgage underwriter, supermarket cashier, makeup artist, tarot reader and insurance claims handler before having the good fortune to be able to write full-time. She loves Las Vegas, zombie films and good Scotch whisky. Michelle’s stories have appeared in various venues, including Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra Magazine, and Drabblecast.
Marshmallow Walls
Brittany Foster
I lay like all of the others, restrained and silent and calm. Cold and alone, like a single rock on a frozen shore. Content in my ignorance and blissful in my numbness. The occasional scream will penetrate these soft marshmallow walls, but more often than not it is completely silent here… until the voices come. The crying, pleading voices that consume me and slice through me like razor blades doused in vinegar. They come just before the pretty ladies in white. Those pretty ladies in white know how to make the voices go away.
My body is numb. So is my mind. I lack the capacity to communicate in totality. I am a wraith now, listless and dead but still living. Perhaps I always have been, but perhaps not. I lay, staring at nothing, day after day after day. Rubbing my face against the white softness that surrounds me.
Today I feel a strange sensation in my body. A tingling in my limbs and a spark behind my eyes, in that place that is often quiet and asleep. My consciousness is waking and I am afraid. My muscles contract and release as I begin to rock back and forth, back and forth, feeling my body press into the soft white. I see faces forming before my eyes. Screaming, terror-filled, pleading faces. I hear their voices, but I don't know what they are saying. They are covered in red, like candy apples that haven't been coated quite enough. The whites of their eyes and teeth are bright and stark in all that red. The faces become more clear, and they look… familiar? I feel a tug inside my chest. I know these faces. But how? Who are they?
I listen to the voices, trying to hear the words, trying to connect them to myself. My skin feels cold and bumpy as the crying voices rip through my brain and fear dances through my bones. Slicing, tearing, and slashing with barbed wire shoes. The faces blaze behind my eyelids, and I feel something. I feel that I loved those faces. I had something with those faces. Those red screaming candy apple faces. I remember a woman. All blue eyes and long brown hair. The subtle curve of her hip against my palm and the sublime smoothness of her skin. A whisper in the dark and lips against my ear. I remember a child with bright eyes and wild curls floating around her face, her small hands like starfish. I remember why I am here, and where I am, and who I was before.
I scream from the very depths of my insides, trying to drown the voices. Drown the pain and memory and loss. I hear someone yell and I don't know if it's me or just the memory of a voice. I thrash around in my bed. This torture, this pain, this memory. It's peeling the skin from my body and gnawing through my flesh. I scream louder and kick at the walls, trying to push everything out and away. I smell the sharp sweet tang of copper and remember the stickiness of blood on my fingertips. I throw my head back, hoping to end this in sweet blackness, but it meets softness. Everywhere is softness in this room.
I hear a click and it's the pretty ladies in white. But they aren't pretty to me anymore. They are salvation and damnation all wrapped in white and smelling of soap. I throw myself forward and gnash my teeth. I know what they have come for, and I cannot decide what I want: memory and freedom or ignorance and restraint? I feel like it would be blasphemy to forget the faces and torture to remember. The ladies come, making sounds that I can't hear. One holds my head against her white soft body, pulling my jaws apart. Warm wetness slips over my lip and down my chin. My skin becomes cool as the saliva dries. The other slips a hard white something into my mouth. I can taste the bitterness in the back of my throat, and I don't know if it's from the white thing or my own bile rising up. It is so far back that I have to swallow. In order to scream at those v
oices I need to get rid of that thing in my throat. I swallow and then I shriek. I can feel it leave my body in an unimposing and sorrowful way.
The ladies leave, watching me through a tiny window in my door. I lay, remembering, suffering, a tortured and dying soul, until the voices leave. I reach out to them, afraid to let them fade. The faces and the voices go away, melting into the darkness behind my eyelids. They are gone, and I am alone. I am restrained and silent, and calm. Cold and alone. Content in my ignorance and blissful in my numbness. Protected by these marshmallow walls.
© 2014 by Brittany Foster
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Brittany Foster is a wordsmith living in Canada with a passion for the dark, twisted, and macabre. She went to Ryerson University in Toronto where she studied Publishing and has been working with books, authors, and words ever since. She makes a practice of reading copiously, writing when she feels the need, and drinking vast amounts of tea with far too much sugar. When she is not reading, writing, working, or entertaining her husband and pets, she enjoys playing video games, gardening, and politics.
Grimm's Home for Geriatrics
Rebecca Demarest
Staff Briefing Notes on the Residents
● Cinderella has been leaving her right slipper in the stairwells again. Please make sure to pick it up and return it to her when you find it; we've already had one staff member fall and we don't need a repeat of last year's run on hip replacement surgeries. We're not sure how she keeps getting out of her ward, so please keep an eye out for her fairy godmother or any talkative mice.
● Pinocchio has developed a splintering condition. I only bring this up as we need to make sure to keep Aurora well away from him. I hardly need to remind you all that her narcoleptic condition is triggered by the pricking of her finger and Pinocchio is leaving a mile-wide trail of splinters behind him.
● Little Bo Peep has been set off frequently over the last week, by whom, we're not sure, but please make sure to find and stop whatever joker keeps asking her where her sheep are. She's reached her limit on sedatives and the side effects are starting to show.
● Please remind the therapy dog handlers that Belle's room is off-limits. She keeps thinking up new ways to 'express her love' to the poor animals, trying to turn them back into her husband. The last thing we need is the ASPCA picketing outside. Nor do we need the publicity of having any of our residents arrested for bestiality.
● We discovered yesterday that Hansel and Gretel have been hoarding their arthritis and heart medications to use as markers should someone decide to lead them out into the woods again. Make sure when you give them their pills they actually swallow them.
● If you're serving on the cafeteria line, do not give Jack any beans; he has been burying them in the fake plants. In other news, we've discovered where the atrocious smell was coming from in Ward 2, and all the planters have been sanitized.
● Finally, Ariel has been restricted to sponge baths only. Her dementia has progressed to the point where she no longer remembers she hasn't had gills for decades and insists on running baths in an effort to prove to the staff that she can breathe underwater. Regardless of how persuasive she sounds, don't be fooled, she cannot.
That's it for today guys. Thanks for your attention, and may your day be happily ever after.
© 2014 by Rebecca Demarest
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Rebecca Demarest is an author, designer, and illustrator living in Boston, MA. She has had stories published in several journals including Epiphany and Far Off Places, and her first novel, Undeliverable, debuted in 2014. In her spare time, she crochets, gardens, and goes climbing with her boyfriend.
JC The Ski Bum
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
"Jesus taught me how to ski," the kid in the bright orange ski pants said to the middle-aged lady next to me on the chairlift.
She barked a sharp but friendly laugh. "You mean Haysus, don't you? Didn't know they had a Latino ski instructor up here." She waved a hand toward the day lodge, the bright lights for night skiing casting shadows on the run below us.
"No bullshit," the kid insisted, pushing his goggles up onto his camouflage ski helmet. "Jesus. No Latino guy, the real thing. As in Jesus the Christ. The Son of God."
"Come on," the lady bantered. "You can't convince me of that chunk of blarney, Thomas."
"No, really, Mrs. K. Jesus's a ski instructor up here. How else did I learn to ski so well in two seasons?" Thomas scratched the scraggly soul patch on his chin.
"You're a natural athlete, kiddo," Mrs. K said, shaking her head. "Even if you are full of BS."
"For real, Mrs. K!"
"Tell me another one, Thomas. I might just believe it."
We approached the ramp. Mrs. K put up the bar, sliding off easily with Thomas and turning left while I turned right. I kept an eye on the kid as they headed down the run ahead of me. Both skied with the lithe grace of experienced skiers who could pick up the flow of the slope and the fall line with the greatest of ease. I stopped in front of two fir trees, the front one with the top freshly snapped off, to watch Thomas and Mrs. K as they approached the terrain park.
Mrs. K avoided the first rail but stopped downslope from it. The kid did a 180 and started skiing switch, gliding backward down the black diamond slope without a pause, glancing back to keep track of the rail. He rode the rail gracefully, then dismounted with another 180 and raced after Mrs. K.
I shook my head and prepared to follow them down the easier slope that angled off next to the terrain park. Jesus the ski instructor. Heard a lot from kids, but that? Mountain kids learned to ski quickly, especially if they had any athletic talent.
The faint scrape of metal edge on snow followed by a surprised warning Yelp! startled me. I looked up to see a big burly man careening in my direction, skis fixed in a snowplow wedge, sliding downhill far too fast for an easy stop. Before I could move away, he rammed me hard, sending me flying onto the sharp points of the broken tree, leaving me with just enough time to regret not wearing a helmet before blacking out.
It hurt like hell when I woke, lying on the snow next to the trees. The guy bending over me wore a red jacket — instructor jacket or ski patrol, I wasn't sure which. Icicles from the light snowfall crusted the ends of the reddish-brown hair poking out from under his helmet.
"You all right?" he asked, and I realized I'd heard him repeating that question for several moments before I was actually conscious enough to register what he was saying. The night ski lighting seemed to create a halo around his head. "Are you all right?" he repeated.
"I hurt," I said. "Hit my head, I think." I waved a hand somewhere toward where I thought the tree might be. To my surprise, moving my arm didn't hurt too badly.
He rested a bare hand on my head, and the pain lessened even more. For some reason I thought I saw a faint shadow of a divot in his wrist.
"He gonna be okay?" came from a harsher voice, much like the panicked yell from the guy who'd clobbered me.
"You got away with it, Pete. This time," the red jacket guy said.
"JC, look, you promised me this would work!" Pete blubbered. "I didn't want to hurt anyone."
"I said it would work if you listened to me and did what I told you to do," JC countered. "But no, you had to go and try this slope, see if you had a hand for tricking. I told you it wasn't clear."
"Didn't think it was that hard," Pete muttered.
"Yeah. Wasn't that what you said about crucifixion?"
Pete grumbled and pushed up beside JC to look down at me. "Look, man, I'm sorry. I miscalculated. You gonna be okay? What's your name?"
"His name's Casey," JC said.
My head was feeling better but I wasn't quite sure I was hearing them correctly. I must have really rung my chimes when my head smacked that trunk.
"I think so," I said slowly. I wiggled fingers, toes, and legs. All there. I ran my hands up and down my sides, surprised that my parka wasn't ripped and that I didn't have long pieces of wood sticking out of m
e. I did remember hitting those splinters, and a faint soreness suggested I'd remember it more tomorrow.
JC ran his fingers along my neck, then down my chest. "A few aches and pains, but nothing big. Don't think we need to call for a backboard — good thing, Pete. Be hard to explain what we're doing over on this run, because I'm not supposed to bring beginners over here. Why don't you get Casey's equipment, and I'll put him back on his feet?"
Pete muttered assent, while JC turned to me and helped me sit up. Now I could see the name plaque on his coat — JC, no further details. Odd thing though. He still seemed to have a fuzzy halo around his head.
Pieces started to come together. Pete. I looked over at the burly guy gathering up my skis, shaking his head mournfully as he looked down at one bent pole, and a ski woefully out of camber. He had that faint glow about his head as well. I looked back at JC. He'd slid his goggles up on his head, and I could see faint marks across his forehead. Goggle imprint, or something else? I squinted, but still couldn't make it clear. I began to doubt again.
"Up on the count of three," JC said. "One-two-three!" He eased me up, with less effort than I expected.
Pete trudged up. "Dude, his skis are wrecked." He offered up the ski bent the wrong way, along with the twisted pole.
JC made an annoyed sound and took the crooked ski. He pulled off his left glove and I spotted the shadow of that big divot in his wrist once again, before his parka slipped back over it.
"Pete, all it takes is a little twist and this stuff goes back into shape. It's not rocket science." He started to turn away from me.
"You taught that kid to ski, didn't you!?" I blurted. "Thomas. He said Jesus taught him how to ski."
Pete raised a brow at JC. "Thought you were going incognito, JC?"
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #2 Page 10
