Issue 49 October 2017 Flash Fiction Online October 2017

Perfect for Halloween, because Halloween is all about monsters, and I love Halloween.

Halloween for my family is a long-anticipated yearly event. Only Christmas is more anticipated—and just barely.

Each year we fry donuts. Dozens of donuts. Nearly 200 last year. Half the neighborhood hangs out at our house Halloween night. No wonder, eh? No, you can’t have my address.

Our children—even at 25, 23, and 18—begin planning costumes, decorations, and pumpkin carving patterns months before. Pinterest has been on fire!

Last year the pumpkin theme was literary horror stories—Poe, Shelley, Stoker. This year it’s horror films. My son, 23, has been assigned The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The German silent classic, Nosferatu, is on the list as well. My job is to shop for a pumpkin tall enough to handle the high-haired do of the Bride of Frankenstein. A trip to our local farmer’s market is on the calendar.

All day we work side by side, my husband and I. We make our traditional dinner of Sloppy Joes with potato chips, make a big pot of warm spiced cider, roast pumpkin seeds, fry donuts until we’re covered in grease splatters and droplets of glaze. Our costumes are kitchen aprons.

But the day isn’t about costumes. It’s not about pumpkins or Sloppy Joes, or even the donuts. It’s about family, and it’s about love. Black and orange hearts.

As for this month’s stories, they are four of the most memorable stories I’ve read this year. They are pumpkin-plump with all the feels.

Happy reading, and Happy Halloween!

At night, the monsters come.

Niko lies awake and watches them circle, long spider legs black-on-black, fangs somehow gleaming without a hint of light. He pulls Daria closer, buries his face in her wispy blonde hair and breathes in, breathes out. They keep their distance while he holds her, but when he closes his eyes, he can hear their whispers.

Keep her now, friend. Some day soon, you’ll beg us to take her.

* * *

In the daylight, the monsters keep to the dark places. Niko could almost forget them some days, could almost convince himself they’ve gone, if not for the flickering shadow at the edge of vision, the brief brush of chitin against the back of his neck.

On the first day of autumn, Niko wakes bleary-eyed, showers and dresses and brings Daria her breakfast of toast and tea and a shot glass full of pills. He finds her sitting up in bed, phone in hand, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. He sets the breakfast tray down on her nightstand.

“Something good?”

Daria shakes her head.

“My sister. She sent me a link to an article about ginseng tea. Some guy in California is claiming it can totally detoxify your system if you don’t eat anything else for a week.”

Niko’s head tilts slightly, and folds his arms across his chest.

“Uh-huh. And that cures…”

“Pretty much everything, apparently. Funny none of my doctors have mentioned this, right?”

“Yeah,” Niko says. “Funny. Want me to pick up some ginseng on the way home this afternoon?”

Daria laughs, places the first two pills in her mouth, and washes them down.

* * *

Niko starts awake, eyes wide and frantic. He’d been dreaming of the monsters, their long legs enfolding her, their velvet-soft claws caressing her face. He looks up. Projections for fourth quarter sales are plotted in bright red and yellow bars on the screen at the front of the conference room. Niko licks his lips and swallows. His throat is raw. There are a dozen other people crowded around the long, glass-topped table. They’ve all turned to stare at him.

“Sorry,” he says. “I must have…”

The man standing at the screen raises a hand to stop him.

“It’s okay, Niko. Go home.”

Niko shakes his head. The others are looking away now, back at the screen, or down at their hands on the tabletop.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Please…”

“No,” the man says. “You’re not functioning, Niko. Go home. We’ll still be here when you’re ready to come back.”

* * *

“I’ve been thinking,” Daria says that night. She gives the steamed broccoli and brown rice on her plate a half-hearted poke, closes her eyes and breathes deep.

“What?” Niko asks, but his heart is pounding, and he already knows what she’s going to say.

“What if…” She opens her eyes. A single tear rolls down along the side of her nose, but her voice is steady. “What if we just… stop?”

He stares at her. She stares back, unblinking.

“Stop?” Niko asks finally, stupidly.

“Yeah,” Daria says. “Stop. Stop the pills. Stop the doctors. Just… stop.”

In the dark space behind her, the monsters gather.

* * *

That night, Niko holds Daria as the monsters circle.

Stop, they whisper. Stop, Niko. She just wants to stop. She wants everything to stop.

Niko squeezes his eyes shut and pulls her closer.

She doesn’t want you anymore, Niko. She wants us now.

Niko breathes in, breathes out. And then, for the first time, he whispers back.

Please. Please. I can’t…

He opens his eyes. The monsters are close now, closer than they’ve ever dared come before.

I can’t let her go, Niko whispers. Take me instead. Leave her. Take me.

The monsters pause in their circling.

Niko.

He closes his eyes as the soft tip of a claw brushes his cheek, lingers there for a moment, then slowly traces the line of his jaw.

Niko. You think we get to choose?

The touch withdraws. When he opens his eyes again, the monsters are gone.

* * *

The next morning, Niko brings Daria her breakfast. Toast and tea.

* * *

For a while, Daria is better. Her hair thickens. She eats more, and mostly keeps it down. She takes up walking—short distances at first, but then longer stretches alone in the woods. Niko comes home in the evening to find her flushed and happy, curled on the couch with a book and a blanket and a steaming cup of ginseng tea. A month passes, then two.

For a while, Niko forgets about the monsters.

For a while, he forgets to hold on to her.

* * *

On Christmas morning, Niko wakes alone. Soft moaning pulls him out of bed, draws him into the bathroom. Daria’s there, curled on the floor, one hand on her belly, one hand on her head. Niko gathers her up, lifts her, carries her back to the bed. He can feel her heart fluttering against his chest.

Please, she whispers. Niko, please.

He runs to the kitchen, tears into the cabinet where they keep the pills, paws through the bottles until he finds the one he needs. The label says one for pain, and no more than four per day. Niko shakes two pills into his palm, hesitates, then shakes out a third. He takes them back to the bedroom, helps Daria swallow them, holds her until she sleeps.

* * *

Niko’s eyes snap open in the coal-black dark. Daria stirs against him, moans, presses at his arm where it rests across her chest.

Niko.

He can’t see the monsters, but he feels their hot breath on his cheek.

Niko. You can’t hold her forever.

Daria moans again, tries to roll away from him.

Niko, please. Let go.

Daria gasps and shudders.

Niko. Please.

It’s not the monsters whispering now.

It’s Daria.

Her hand grips his arm.

The monsters stand silent.

He breathes in.

Niko.

Breathes out.

Please.

Niko closes his eyes.

He lets her go.

 

Corbalk: The conflicting emotions created by First Contact (used especially in reference to a homeworld-centric species).

I learned corbalk in the basement pantry, seven years old. The smell of leather and gun oil, my father’s skin, pungent with bitter sweat. Sammy crying, his fear contagious as any virus, Mom shushing him, rocking him in the dim deep darkness, framed by metal shelves and boxes of Cheerios.

The rifle stood like a sentry in the pantry corner, Dad’s face lit by the blue eye of his phone while he looked for a safe place and surfed the news.

When the Bishkekk floated through our neighborhood, the gravity fields on their tanks flattened the flowers and set car alarms wailing.

I remember Sammy, still crying, Mom’s hand pressed against his mouth. He gasped, hysterical, shaking, struggling in her grip.

I ran upstairs, ignoring my father’s hoarsely whispered commands, slid into Sammy’s room and scattered books until I found his favorite: The Planets.

My father cursed under his breath, his knuckles white, when I slipped back into the pantry closet. Sammy and I sat in the corner, him sniffling as I turned the pages.

Saturn, I said. Look at the rings. We’re going to see the stars, I said.

My father shook his head and settled the rifle across his knees.

I never told Dad I had looked out Sammy’s window. I saw a Bishkekki soldier moving alongside the tanks. Long silver limbs, large eyes set on stalks, tapered fingers grasping the handle to a plasma cannon. One eye turned toward me. It looked at me for a long moment. The long fingers tightened. The eyestalk swiveled forward again, and the Bishkekki army floated onward.

I poured over that book. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to be ready to learn about the Bishkekk, about space travel, about their language, their customs.

Sammy’s eyes kept turning up from those glossy pictures of our solar system to look at the rifle.

* * *

Fislehn: 1. A distasteful action necessary to positively influence the character of a loved one. 2. An extreme act of love.

My language partner, Aklen, taught me fislehn when I was twenty-three. “This war,” he said, his manacles flashing under the harsh fluorescents of his cell, “is fislehn.”

“This war is an act of love?”

“A terrible act for the betterment of humanity.”

“That makes no sense.”

He blinked his eyes sideways, the Bishkekki equivalent of a shrug. “You cannot grow beyond this planet in your fractured state. You needed a common enemy.”

I visited Sammy’s grave that night, a drooping bouquet of irises in my hand. I kissed the top of his headstone. Three years gone, at the Battle of Berkeley. If he had gone into xenology, maybe he would be beside me. Maybe.

“This war is fislehn,” Aklen had said.

A year later the global government formed, and the war shifted. Within two years, the Bishkekk surrendered and withdrew from the planet.

Stellar jump drives. Food modulators. Gene twisters. Solar sails. They left all those things behind. No weapons, though. They hadn’t forgotten any of those.

* * *

Inzahmil: To learn the connotative meaning of a word through context and/or experience.

I was invited on the first ambassadorial mission to the Bishkekk home planet.

My first night planetside, Aklen walked with me along a raucous stream. His delicate finger directed my eyes to an unremarkable yellow star. Home. “You are feeling aleel.” He said it gently.

A pinprick of light from the sun, older than the pyramids, had followed me here. If I stood there long enough I would see light born in the same moment as the light that filled my backyard as a child. Light Sammy and I had played in, been burnt by. Light that had filled the oak tree with golden cobwebs in the late afternoon. Light that washed over my brother’s body, his eyes unseeing. Humanity’s light.

* * *

Aleel: 1. A combination of wonder, pride and homesickness, caused by seeing one’s homeworld at a distance. 2. Having traveled far, but at great personal expense. 3. The deep sadness experienced after a life accomplishment.

“Aleel,” I said. I knew the word.

 

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction (2015). Reprinted here by permission of the author.

1. “Upon the Waves,” by Bethany Kano.

This story was included in an anthology you bought on our fifth date, when we hit up Chicago’s FantastiCon. You laid our day’s haul (enough books to fill a suitcase or four) on the hotel bed and immediately began reading.

“Holy. Crap,” you said after a while. “You need to hear this.”

You then read me this story, playing each part as if you were performing for the world’s largest audience. You puffed out your chest as the sailor. Flopped about on your belly as the flounder. When you hissed the sea serpent’s dialogue into my ear, I nearly shivered out of my skin.

Later, while we were making out, I accidentally knocked the book onto the floor. You examined the damage done and said we should give it a medal.

“Turquoise Heart,” you said. “For injury in the line of booty.”

I found the anthology while sorting your belongings. It’s sitting on my bookshelf now. Maybe I’ll be strong enough to read it someday. Maybe not. What matters is this memory, enshrined forever in the dent on its spine.

 

2. “The Whale Wife’s Lament,” by Alexis Yang.

It wasn’t the lyrical prose or sparkling dialogue you loved; it was the whale wife herself. You’d imitate her around the apartment, whale song made dopey and adorable.

“Hiiiiiiiiya Claaaaire, hoooooow yooou dooooooing?”

I was grilling us quesadillas when you told me how jealous she made you. “Bigger than a house, yet impossibly graceful. Exploring all those crevices and trenches and whatnot.”

“But unable to live outside of the ocean.”

“So? Maybe the sea is the place to be.”

“And you’d give up all this?” I flung out my arms to take in our apartment. It was tiny, but it was ours. Books lined every wall, covered every surface.

I loved that place. I still miss it.

“You’d be there too,” you said. “We’d hold fins and wander. Sing to each other every waking moment. Adopt a pet porpoise. Open the Pacific’s first all-you-can-gulp krill café. What more could you want?”

“Nothing,” I said. “So long as I’m with you.”

You sidled up to me and planted a sloppy kiss – a whale’s kiss – on my cheek.

“Thanks for cooking,” you said. And then, for the first time, you collapsed.

 

3. “Seaweed Tangles,” by Jason Milthurst

Two days into your last hospitalization, I bought every speculative fiction magazine our local bookstore had. When I got back, you were lying in bed, half-lost in a briar of wires and tubes. I dumped the magazines onto your lap and said you weren’t allowed to go until we’d finished them all.

“It might just be the drugs,” you said with a grin, “but I’m swooning, missy.”

Your stamina for fiction had always been greater than mine. Around midnight, you woke me by slapping an issue of Octavia’s Dream against my knee.

“Check out this merfolk story,” you said. “It’s so friggin’ sexy.”

You were right, of course. When I finally dragged my eyes from the page, you were gazing at me with a flushed expression.

“Get your fine self over here,” you said.

I crawled into the bed, careful not to disturb any of the devices attached to your body, and you pressed yourself against me. The corners of your eyes were trembling. There was a hitch in your throat.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Life’s short.” You hugged me tighter. “Let’s be lewd while we still can.

 

4. “Depths Arise,” by Scarlett Montgomery.

I read you this story in those last days. You had become so frail, drowning in your sheets, drifting in and out of consciousness. You spoke in fractured sentences about “the deep” – a phrase I tried hard to ignore, its metaphorical power too obvious, too wrenching.

It was a terrible reading – my voice kept breaking and the blur of tears made me miss whole sentences – but you were so kind. When I finished, you squeezed my fingers and whispered two words that may have saved my life.

“All right.

 

5. “The Still Waters of Dawn,” by August Cleary.

Six months after you passed, our friends invited me to Comic-Con. I could feel you shoving me out the door, hear your voice telling me, “It’s time, dummy.”

How could I refuse?

When I reached California, I brought your ashes to the edge of the Pacific and buried them on a quiet stretch of beach. I then sat beside you, reading aloud from an anthology you had left on your bedside table.

That’s where I found this story. It’s about a young dragon with a broken wing who learns that swimming is much the same as flying. You would have loved it.

As I read to you, each word seemed like an invocation, a prayer unspooling from my mouth and into the sand where you lay. I imagined my voice nourishing you, your ashes pulling together to form an egg. So I kept reading, my voice firm, singing into the wind. And when I finished, when I finally left you, I gave your book to the sands.

I read this story only that once, but I somehow memorized every word. For months, I would recite them while lying in bed at night. They carried me until I could once again carry myself.

I hope this story really is magic, that you one day hatched and made your way to the surf, riding the currents far and deep. I hope that you took one last look at dry land and then, with a mighty flick of your tail, swished off into the blue.

It’s what I choose to believe. You’re forever exploring the endless sweep of the ocean, as strong and powerful as a dragon. Or a serpent. Or a whale.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what type of creature you’ve become. What matters is this: You’re gone from my world, but you’ve found another.

We lose three good men our first hour on Siren. Not to air tank malfunctions or sledge accidents. Not to the frigid cold that freezes our gauges and locks up our drills the moment the sun falls behind the horizon. We lose them to the damn music.

The creaking, grinding, strumming noise that echoes through the ice beneath our feet. The sound of ice shelves, the weight of small moons cracking and shifting in the darkness below. Seeping up from the depths of this planet’s chilled ocean, through the metal of our boots, and into our bones.

The song that makes men wander out into the dark. Away from the landers. Away from air and heat. The song that gave this planet its name.

We knew it would be here—the ice that makes it is the only reason we are—but we didn’t know it would be so different. So irrefutable here on the surface, without two dozen kilometers of thin atmosphere to soften its weight.

Here, it’s all we can think of, all we can feel, all we can dream. The music of water humming through our flesh. Turning us into instruments.

And we are instruments. Of the colonies, the corporation, or the planet, I’m not certain. All I’m certain of is the pay waiting for me once we’re through, and the ticket it’ll buy to somewhere warmer and greener than this.

We lose two more hands off the build site before we finish the first sound occlusion chamber and finally get some sleep.

* * *

I hold Chalia to me as the music falls away, replaced by the beat of her heart and the whisper of her breathing, and the sandpaper rhythm of my dry skin on hers.

Through the window above our heads, a small green dot hangs in the star-speckled sky. Water is scarcer than gold in this system, and the colony planets have dumped trillions to fund the outpost here. They’d give anything to own Siren’s ocean and its music. But not me. I’d take Chalia’s song over this planet’s any day.

She kisses my ears with wildfire in her eyes and the lingering scent of exhaust on her skin. “You only say that because you have no ear for music.”

When I wake in the night, the song is back. Not from the floor, but from Chalia’s lips. She hums it so softly that I barely hear her, but even that is enough to terrify me.

Our sleep shift ends, and we’re roused by loud knocking as a new pair walks in to take our bed. Their eyes are bright with that same mad fire, the same persistent tune on their lips. Chalia merely grins and touches her faceplate to mine.

“Not all which is beautiful has to be dangerous,” she whispers. But I know otherwise.

* * *

I lose her halfway through our next shift. One moment she’s perched atop a scaffold, the plasma torch in her hand burning bright. Then, she’s lost to the darkness.

I search the whole build before I’m certain she’s gone. Everyone I ask gives me the same distant stare. They haven’t seen her, though we all know where she went.

I strip a tracker from one of the sledges and follow her into the night alone, not bothering to ask for help. The guidelines are strict. No one who leaves the build will be rescued. As far as I know, I’m the first one who’s tried.

Beneath my feet, this world is breaking, dancing along to some beat I can’t fathom. Each note, resolute, as the ice cracks and grows, stretching in the warmth of the dayward side, contracting here in the shadows. An entirely natural phenomenon, they promise, but the strength of the song still makes me shiver.

My helmet’s dampeners should block it out, but even the engineers underestimated this planet.

* * *

When I find her in the morning, I’m certain she’s frozen, her body stock still with her arms at her side. She stands alone like a tree on bare desert, her black suit framed red against the rising sun. Around her, the ice steams with the new day’s warmth, and I feel the ground beneath my feet shudder.

“Chalia!” I scream as I sprint towards her, and her eyes burn so bright they stop me in my tracks.

“Listen,” she whispers, staring down at her feet.

I do listen. To the sound of my heart pounding time in my ears. To the crash of my breath through my ventilator. And I suddenly realize what I don’t hear. The planet has fallen silent around us.

Chalia reaches out her hand. “Right here,” she says, a wonder in her voice that I can’t comprehend. She draws me near and wraps the cold metal arms of her suit around my own.

“This is it,” she says. “This is where the music begins.”

I listen but hear nothing. Only the sound of her suit scraping up against mine. “I-I don’t hear anything.” 

And then I do. A horrible, deafening roar as the ground beneath our feet splits in two. A few meters away, the ice cracks like dropped glass, until we’re standing on the edge of a gaping canyon. Somewhere deep in the darkness below, there’s the sound of water moving. Of a hidden sea lapping up towards the stars.

We stand in silence. Just the wind and our breath, until I’ve convinced myself we’re really alive.

“Nothing?” Chalia replies with a grin. “You only say that because you have no ear for music.”

She would stay here until she froze, I don’t doubt, or until the ice swallowed her in the next fault line. With nothing but the song to keep her company, just like all the others.

I take her hand and lead her back towards the build, towards the landers and domes huddled like birds on the horizon.  She hums that same, soft tune the whole way, and her voice is the sweetest song I’ve ever heard.