Normality
By C.M.Humphries


With the blade already slicing through the skin of her throat, all he could whisper was, “I love you.”

Clumsily falling to the ground like a tossed ragdoll, Garret’s mother fell, her arms pointed straight at her son as if she was reaching out to him. Abrupt and anticlimactic, Garret’s mother joined her husband.

Walks in the park, eating with silverware rather than flimsy, inefficient plastic cutlery were just two of the many things Garret longed for. He felt ravenous for normality. Rehabilitated by the Long Brooke Asylum, Garret started making goals for himself like anyone else. Like anyone else. Like anyone else, damn it!

Only one more obstacle divided desire from reality. Underneath her long blonde hair, disguised by her extraordinarily blue eyes and tremendously immaculate complexion, was a true heathen controlled by the same forces that declared Garret as subhuman; that he wasn’t like anyone else. Like anyone else.

His sister Morgan was a soul blessed by the very hands of God, but learned through books written by Lucifer. Despite her willingness to help others, she only wanted to destroy Garret. To put him in Hell again. Garret had never met the devil, so it was better off that someone who knew the monster would live in his eternal realm.

Tears burning down her cheeks, Morgan couldn’t control herself. Hovering over her parents as if she was performing a method of reincarnation, Morgan was awe-struck and paralyzed by rotten emotion.

“Morgan,” Garret said, his tone smooth and unvaried, “please don’t make this difficult.”

Morgan didn’t say a word. Slowly, she staggered backward.

Garret mocked her movements, only forward. “You need to help me.”

“Get away,” Morgan warned in a pathetic whisper. “Please, you’re fine.” Morgan started widening her stride. She was walking.

Garret parroted her movements. Stalked her.

“Oh God, please,” Morgan begged. “I’m not like them. I don’t think you should’ve been sent away.”

“Oh yes I should have,” Garret said through clenched teeth. He teased her with the blade.

She ran.

Garret went through the front door.



Out of the back door. A tree, a bush, a raccoon. Some dew, some birds, some stars. Morgan’s chest burned as she ran, but not because she was physically out of shape.



A gnome, a different tree, a raccoon sprinting away. Some dew, some birds, some stars. Garret searched for his sister, his knife always ready.



A different tree, raccoon tracks in mud, a gnome. Some dew, some birds . . . no stars.

Garret stood above his sister, leaning over as if taking a better look at her in the darkness of the night. Morgan turned around from facing the ground. She took a deep look in his eyes. Outside of a sudden blankness that lied in the forefront, she could see a soul searching for its way out.

Garret smiled as he helped Morgan to her feet. Falling from her throat, through her body, and out of her feet, the tension that had built inside of Morgan dissipated. Only the lingering notion that she did not understand Garret tarnished her composure.

“I love you,” Garret muttered as he whipped Morgan around so that her back lay against his chest. He pressed the knife against her throat.

“Why?” Morgan fought to ask. Her tears reflected the stars.

“Because I want you be like you.” The knife neared. Garret petted Morgan’s hair as she imagined him etching his initials in her throat.

Garret shoved Morgan straight up, holding her arms crossed behind her back. The knife flirted with her throat. A single stream of blood cascaded down her neck.

“Please, please, please” Morgan pleaded. “You don’t need to be like me.”

He was ready to achieve his goal.

“Fine,” Morgan said while trying to calm down. “But you won’t feel any better. You’re human too. You’ll feel guilt. Pain. Regret.”

Suddenly, Morgan felt free. Her feet touched the ground and the knife was no longer against her neck.

As he walked away from Morgan, wondering if she’d ever forgive him, Garret whispered, “I love you.”

Owls hooting in the night, stars illuminating the yard, trees rustling in the wind, dew chilling his ankles, and a harvest moon directing his path: Garret noticed these things, which meant he was outside. Alive and free. Like anyone else.


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I am a student at Ball State University and love to write fiction, particularly under the horror and suspense/thriller genres. In another life, I walk around the world. Recent publications include Full of Crow magazine and a novel coming soon from Wild Child Publishing.

Twisted
By Rebecca L. Brown


She was always twisted, always sickened, a quick, slick wit in the thick of it, thrown into the fray the day she was born or torn from the one who bore her. They threw her in, drew her in, she knew they did- hid but they caught her; the man bought her soul wholesale. This is the moment when she snapped, when they tapped into the rage which burned inside her- churned inside her. The felt her crack, turn back towards them afire with ire and fled ahead of the moment which would hold them in it’s folds. She would leave none to grieve; fury had burned the yearning for mercy from her.

Then came the guilt, it spilt from her in tears for the years she had been held down, knocked around, when the ground had been pulled out from under her. Now nothing was left; bereft, she fell to her knees unable to appease the ghosts of most everything.


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Rebecca L. Brown (25) is a British writer. She specializes in horror, SF, humor, surreal and experimental fiction, although her writing often wanders off into other genres and gets horribly lost. Updates and examples of Rebecca’s work can be found on her Twitter page @rlbrownwriter or her blog Bewildering Circumstances (available at http://bewilderingcircumstances.blogspot.com/).

The Intruder
By Elizabeth Bill


The sound of a creaking stair makes the woman's eyes snap open and she's suddenly alert and out of her deep sleep. Her ears strain in the darkness but she could hear nothing but the gentle hum and whir of the ceiling fan and the crickets chirping outside. She tries to urge herself to go back to sleep but something simply felt off. The silence seems to be too quiet as if even the walls are standing in anticipation.

"Baby?" she mutters as she shakes the man lying beside her. "Baby, wake up. I think something's wrong."

The man groans and rolls from his side to his stomach. He glances at the clock as he pulls the pillow over his head. The numbers glow blue in the darkness. "It's four in the morning. Go back to bed."

"There's something wrong. I can feel it."

"It's probably just dinner," the man groans into the pillow. "You know spicy food before bed always makes you sick."

Almost as soon as the words leave his mouth, the man begins to snore again and the woman lets loose an exasperated sigh. She rises out of bed and pads quietly to the bathroom to take some antacids and some water. She screws up her bravery and creeps catlike through the house, glancing in corners and under the table for an intruder she's no longer sure is there. For her peace of mind she checks the locks on the doors and finding everything secure she crawls back into bed and drifts back into a sound slumber.

The next morning the woman rises and shuffles sleepily to the bathroom. She blinks in confusion at the knife resting in the sink and the pink stains left on the porcelain from where blood was rinsed away.

"Baby?" she calls out in confusion. "Did you have a knife up here?"

Only silence responds.

"Baby?" she tries again as she walks back to her bedroom. She stops in the doorway, morning sunlight calling her attention to what she didn't see as she blinked the sleep from her eyes earlier, words scrawled across the wall in blood. Her eyes slide down to the bed and she lets out a scream before passing out.

"Always trust your instinct."


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Elizabeth Bill is a teacher, avid reader, and self-professed nerd. She currently lives in Joliet, IL with her husband and cat.

The Rainy Season
By Brian Rosenberger


It's raining again. This time of year, it's expected. You learn to take careful preparation and plan excursions with caution. Don't leave the house if you don't have to. The elements don't play favorites. Of course, there are those that never learn, pay no attention. They think the forecast is a fool's game; anyone can predict the weather. You don't need tea leaves or Doppler radar or old rhymes of sailors. Just look out the window.

It's a gusher today. The clouds let loose the deluge. Cats and dogs fall and fall and fall. Old-timers could feel it in their bones, knew it would be a bastard of a storm. There are still a few town folk old enough to remember the old bitch. Those of us who stayed inside today remember her curse. We stare outside, our pets on our laps, and say a prayer for those who didn't.


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Brian Rosenberger lives in a cellar in Marietta, GA and writes by the light of captured fireflies. A collection of his poetry, And For My Next Trick ... is slated for a July 2010 release and a collection of his short stories awaits release in October. Additional updates can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~brosenberger.

Flying Saucers: A Love Story
By F. Osorio


He saw her the day the saucers appeared. No one expected it. There was nothing about the day to indicate that something extraordinary would happen; the sun rose and people headed to work in its soft red light filling the city streets with cars, honks and curses. There was nothing different – nothing; until, coming around a corner, moving into the open – there, something. At first glance there was no recognition, no tinge of anything familiar, so you you look away, but it stays with you like a strong light. And in that moment of looking away and still seeing it catches, “I know that.” Looking back to confirm your suspicion you see that you see that you don't know it, but because of movies, tv, books, magazines that unknown is intimately familiar. That was how it was for him when he saw her.
She was looking up, many people were and more were beginning to. The morning light played tricks with the color reflecting gold off of the blue-gray. There was an eerie beauty to them; one that suggested salvation or destruction. Once he saw her eyes he couldn't look away, caught in a hypnotic beam, he was powerless to move. His eyes locked onto hers, and hers on the things in the sky. Nobody moved; deep in
trance, not even the sound of cars smashing into each other could shake them out of it. For awhile, the only sounds were tires screeching, metal bending, glass shattering and then nothing. Nothing moved or squeaked, no one ran or scream; everyone looking. Then with surprising grace, though still startling, she moved her head down and looked at him. As if waiting for that cue everyone started talking with eyes still locked on them. The talk had the tone of wonder and amazement, “where'd they come from?” “what do they want?” “There are so many!” They did not join the growing discussion, caught by invisible waves they saw only each other. When someone suggested, “this is the end,” panic an fear began to replace curiosity; talking grew louder and more frantic; movements jumpy and hurried, as everyone tried to get somewhere else. It was that unidentified fear that compels people to run it the same direction without knowing what from.
If you weren't looking you would have missed the small crescent opening: an invitation. He responded in kind. When the sea of people reached its most turbulent, they started to move towards each other. Through the shifting masses of people, pushing and shoving for every step, the distance seemed nearly impossible, while up above they remained motionless. When they made it to each other, came face to face, a hum filled the air. Low ad soft, it penetrated into everything adding something childish to the city and its people. They took another step, deaf to the sound of the crowd, only listening to the hum, and they began to feel a warmth move into them, soft and dull like the hum. It seemed an invitation to take another step, and they did. Reaching their hands out to take the other's and feel the heat, stronger now. Their smiles growing bigger and the heat more intense. Then....
Nothing. There was nothing to move or squeak; no one to run or scream. The city was empty except for the buildings and streets. No eyes were turned to the sky to watch as the saucers slowly left.


- - -

Lead Poisoning
By KJ Hannah Greenberg


Harriet pulled her hoodie closer to her face. Despite the fact that her golden hair was entirely hidden and that her lab coat, which stuck out beneath her polyester outer garment, masked all of her curves, she felt exposed. Even the simplicity of her orthopedic-looking shoes and the unnuanced quality of her stride failed to provide comfort.

Harriet glanced neither at the ground nor at the sky. She used no Ipod or cell phone and whistled no happy tune. Nonetheless, they pulled up next to her. With great punctuality, the dented jalopy slid next to the sidewalk. Young men issued from its windows. In two different languages, they called out “Missy,” and “Girly.”

Harriet looked forward and walked accordingly. Her cheeks brightened. Her eyes sprung tears. Every time she traveled to and from work, they taunted her.

No other young women, whether sassy redhead or deep brunette, dark hued or light, tall and wide, or short and thin, received similar humiliation twice a day.

Until she grew wings, Harriet would continue on as the object of their mockery. No buses served the site of the region’s lone manufacturing plant. No private vehicle fit into Harriet’s modest salary. Only the sidewalk, which wound from Harriett’s caravan to the Higher, Further and Farther Company, where she worked as a bench scientist, could transport her.

Other than the upset she suffered from the wayward young men, Harriet was content. She labored at helping Higher, Further and Farther retain its world class standing as a manufacturer of small, impossibly expensive widgets. Harriet specialized in identifying compounds capable of containing hydrogen fluoride. Her colleagues treated her well.

When not working, Harriet enjoyed Barney, her parakeet, a songmeister willing to perform except when his seed box was empty. She also took pleasure in the view of expansive sky and of a portion of the Bitterroot Mountains, which filled her lone picture window and which was too beautiful to be captured even on postcards. Plus, the corner grocery store carried her favorite breakfast cereal.

Sometimes, Harriet would take her leave of Barney and of the view to join Higher, Further and Farther’s scientists in the wilderness. The group would fish, roast beer cans and to look at a ceiling of stars unlike any they had known when attending MIT or Cal Poly. During those trips though, Harriet remained at a loss as whether to sit and chat with her peers’ toddler-laden wives or to go a field, literally, and to seek to identify rock species with her colleagues.

Often, Harriet compromised, electing to stay close to camp with the other women, but choosing, concurrently, to add to her rock collection. It was in that fashion that Harriett had successfully gathered flakes of silver, shards of talc, a very small gold nugget and a large specimen of vermiculite. That vermiculite, in fact, had become the basis of her most recent bonus; Harriet had suggested to a lead scientist that the element might be useful, bonded with sodium silicate, as a high temperature insulator.

Consequently, Harriet had conducted a series of experiments involving her pouring hydrofluoric acid into aggregates of sodium silicate mixed with vermiculite. Thus far, she had burned a hole in her favorite work table, in her lab coat and in the heel of one shoe. Though she arrived at work at dawn and stayed until dusk, a means of stabilizing her solution eluded her.

Harriet’s scholarly frustrations were compounded by the shortened days of winter. Since she was entirely unwilling to walk home at night, she set up a lab at home. Surreptitiously, she began to convey small amounts of hydrofluoric acid. Every time she filled her container, a vessel resistant to that fluid’s reactivity, she thought about ways to replicate that container on an industrial scale.

One sunset, when Harriet’s mind overflowed with the minutia of her latest attempt to create an inexpensive substance with which to hold hydrofluoric acid, Harriet failed to register that she was being followed by the auto of jeering boys. They cat called and tooted, waved in exaggerated gesture and otherwise were more insistent and louder than ordinary. Nonetheless, Harriet remained mired in her mental mathematics.

When at last Harriet realized that the young hoodlums were once more trying to provoke her, she responded as though she were a somnambulist. She reached into her front pocket, where she had illicitly stored a vial, and, without so much of a conscious thought, lobbed the container at the boys’ car.

Upon impact, the polyethylene tube, meant to hold caustic acid, but not to resist shipping problems, imploded. Pieces of the projectile flew into the air and the innocent-looking liquid began to seep out. Some of that liquid spilled on the toughies nearest it. Some of that liquid dripped into the hole, which it had already purchased in the dashboard, onto the engine below.

Afterwards, Harriet made a permanent visit to her sister in Milwaukee. It was not so much that she minded that she had damaged the thugs’ aluminum-silicon engine blocks as it was that she was a bit concerned that the youths might retaliate. They suffered third degree burns. One ruffian had gone into cardiac arrest, too.

Thus it was that Harriet found herself walking along a different sidewalk en route to a new job at USA Poison Management, an organization housed in Milwaukee County’s Research Park. Harriet was now responsible for finding alternatives to polyethylene glycol and gastric lavage. She just wished she could get the cyclists to stop bothering her.


- - -
KJ Hannah Greenberg and her hibernaculum of pretend hedgehogs roam the verbal hinterlands. Sylvan creatures to a one, they fashion stories from leaves, shiny bugs and marshmallow fluff. Some of the homes for their writing have included: AlienSkin Magazine, AntipodeanSF, Bards and Sages, Big Pulp, Morpheus Tales, Strange, Weird and Wonderful, Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, and The New Absurdist. When not disciplining her imaginary friends, Hannah serves as an associate editor for Bewildering Stories and writes literary criticism for Tangent.

Von Singer, Dr. Bloodlukov and Elias Castillo
By E.S. Wynn








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The verb crumpled the milk because colorless green ideas sleep furiously.