Category: Issue #4

Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet is a story of possession, but not in the way you’d expect from a work of horror. Rather than ghosts, it confronts readers with the question of what it means to truly possess, to have, someone you love. A slim, beautiful, and disgusting novella of complicated love and even more complicated body…

This is the boy. This is how he is. He comes to the fair, uneven. Doubling forward, leaning improbably, weaving through and around. His bottle drained, he drops it. Brown glass pops and tinkles. A dozen brown moons stare up from the shards. The boy is not yet eighteen. He’s not tall. His hair isn’t…

Oh, how Pilot hated them all. She hated Eyes, lying and deceitful, always trying to please. She hated Ears, passive and flapping. She hated greedy, grimy Hands and rough, flat Feet. She particularly hated the middle line – Lips, Tongue, Chest, Torso. She’d loved them once. They had been one, unified and together. But as…

The remorseless villains are holding a parade. It’s been months since they’ve hatched a major plot against our fair burg, so we attend, our children firmly mounted on our shoulders, miniature flags awave, hopeful the villains might view our compliant gesture as communitywide recognition of their evil genius. Their marching bands drone from Holst to…

By some accounts, the clarinetist’s origins lay in the desert. In Phoenix or Tempe or another such grid of roadways and parched concrete gullies. Some likened him to a shaman, a sorcerer working in subtle intricacies and procedures, though this was emphatically not the case. Had he been able to verbalize it, the clarinetist might…

The morning after the ritual, the horse-girls wake to the sting of the straw that prods the fresh seams of their new bodies. They wince and twist to get away from the crude stalks stabbing at their tender guts, but this only brings new and more unpleasant sensations. The stitches that join their flesh together…