Ashes to Ashes

by Joseph Sidari

I ruffled my feathers, and a cloud of dust billowed. I shook the soot from my head, dipped my beak to preen my underfeathers, and wondered: Who dumped me in this pile of ash? The wind blew, and an overpowering pheromone scent reoriented me. Right. Mating Day. My innate Phoenix senses told me that today, I needed to look my best to find a mate—or lose my immortality.

Okay. Way too dramatic. Every Phoenix got three ages—if they were lucky. Today was the first day of my second age. Phoenix were no longer immortal. Eons ago, sure. The world was a different place. Gods walked freely among mortals. Centaurs outnumbered wild horses. And there was only one of us—not like now.

I flapped my wings twice to disperse the rest of the ash and strode toward the mouth of the cave. A whoosh of flame and heat flashed to my left. Another on my right. Sulfur filled the air as two more Phoenix rose from their ash piles.

Yeah, being that First Phoenix—perched above humanity, watching civilizations rise and fall like the tides—must have been fire. Master of the sky, and all. But it also must have been monotonous. Hunt, eat, sleep, and then do it again and again until one day—poof. Flame out. Leave behind a pile of cinders. Then rise from the ashes and do it again.

Incinerate and repeat.

Power of the Worm

by Christopher Collins

Was I the one who started the fire? Was I the one who killed them all?

Be honest—that’s what you want to know. That’s what you’re dying to ask me.

Was I the one who crept through the frigid December pre-dawn to the three-bedroom home at 44 Evergreen Lane, dribbling a thin stream of gasoline from a grimy red can across a frostbitten front porch? Did I saturate the kitschy welcome mat that instructed me to wipe my feet before coming inside? Was I the one who dumped foul-smelling fluid over the walnut credenza and cutesy coat rack in the breezeway, who splashed it on the elliptical exercise machine gathering dust in the den?

Was I the one who tiptoed up the carpeted stairs to the cold hardwood landing, the can glunk-glunk-glunking beside me, trailing an eye-watering vapor as Dad snored and Mom was deep under a sleeping-pill spell?

Was I the one who lurked outside of five-year-old Tommy’s room as he slept, the cold yellow glow of his night-light flaring through the gap at the bottom of the door? Was I the one who, upon reaching my own room at the end of the hall, drenched my bed, my clothes, my movie posters, my video games, my whole life, saying to hell with it, to hell with everything?

You want to know: Was I the one who burned my family alive?

Lovesick

by Noor Lovelace

Disassociated from my body, my sweaty hands struggled with the front door’s deadbolt. The second the lock clicked, I ran inside my house, slammed the door, and steadied my pulse on the other side. Adrenaline left me air hungry as I wiped the moisture from my palms onto my jeans.

Demetria had waved at me from her porch, and I, a coward, had fled indoors. Like always.

Mom said hello, oblivious to my distress, eyes focused on the tablet in her lap. I hurried to my bedroom and shut the door. My backpack crashed against my wooden bed frame as I peered through the gap between my navy blue curtains. They swished against my puffer jacket and the sound grated against my nerves.

From my window, I watched Demetria flip through a magazine with perfect, pink nails. She perched on a wicker chair in a yellow summer dress, porcelain skin ignited by December sun that reflected off fresh snow.

I never could tell what color her eyes were. I never got close enough, but in my dreams, they shone emerald. For months, all I thought of was her.

The Night Man

by Ken Teutsch

Quite a while back, many, many years ago now, a new store appeared in my small hometown. Not just a new store: a new type of store—a type we’d never seen before. This store never closed. It had a name, but nobody ever used it. Everyone just called it the All-Night Store. I got a job there.

I got the job at the All-Night Store, despite my youth and my lack of experience in or any perceptible aptitude for retail, because I was willing to take the least desirable shift. It wasn't that others were afraid to take the “graveyard” shift, or that I wasn’t. The idea that working in a store, even late at night, might be a dangerous occupation wasn’t really a concept at that time, in that place. There was very little crime around there at any hour, and any violence beyond the odd drunken fight was practically unheard of. The last time any business in our town was robbed, it was the bank. The story was that it was John Dillinger, but it was really probably just some guy.

So it wasn’t fear or even mere caution that kept people from applying for that shift; it was just that people couldn’t grasp it. It took a wild leap to imagine keeping a store open all night in the first place. Even the streetlights went out at midnight, because why keep them on? A “night owl” was someone who stayed up until Johnny Carson was done. So a store open all night? Who would be your customers? No one but some kind of weirdo would want to go shopping at three o’clock in the morning.

Aha.

Down from the hills and up out of holes they came, drawn by the novelty of a lighted storefront, pallid or ashen gray, depending on the race. Only a few at first, looming up out of the shadowy parking lot in ones and twos, bumping against the windows like June bugs. They would carefully try the door as though expecting it to be locked, then ease inside as though expecting to be ordered out again. They would stand around blinking at the fluorescents for a while, then maybe buy a honey bun or a pack of cigarettes or, just as likely, simply use the toilet before staggering back out. Some I only saw once. But it didn’t take long before there was a crew of regulars.

I smiled, imagining what my mother and father would think had they seen some of the people I chatted with, there in the store all alone in the middle of the night, people whose real names I never learned, so I gave them names of my own. But they weren’t so bad. There was no real harm in Mr. Twitch and his frantic tales of being hounded by the Big Oil Companies over his gas-saving inventions. Sally Eyesockets was like something from a Big Daddy Roth cartoon, but she was pleasant enough. Burn Unit was disturbing to look at, but that wasn’t his fault. Who was I to judge, anyway? I was no prize myself, skinny and spotty, sitting there all alone every night, flipping through the dirty magazines kept behind the counter, or just listening to the radio, staring into space.

At some point, I realized that I actually liked the town better when the regular people were locked away. It was peaceful. My new comrades never hassled me, never asked a lot of questions about what I was going to do with my life. Bottom line: I liked my job.

Until I didn’t.

Circle

by C.S. Fuqua

Dylan collapsed to his knees in the doorway, helpless as his dad grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and sprawled her across the car’s front seat. Her head butted into the passenger door, her legs still dangling out of the driver’s side. His father stepped back and slammed the door once across the woman’s shins, again, and then again.

“You wouldn’t just go!”

He slammed the door again.

Dylan clasped his hands over his ears in a useless effort to shield himself from his mother’s familiar screams.

Freerolling

by Jeff Provine

The first thing I did after getting out of the hospital was head to the casino. You hear about all kinds of things happening when people are struck by lightning: suddenly hearing after a lifetime of deafness or walking again after an accident years ago. For me, I could read minds.

I like the term “read.” It’s a lot like that: glancing, skimming, or taking it slow to draw in deep mental impressions. No two books are the same. Some people have a running inner monologue like a ticker at the bottom of a newscast. Other people have flashes of images loosely strung together. I couldn’t understand people thinking in Spanish any better than I could if they’d spoken aloud or written it on a piece of paper.

Those few days lying in a hospital bed let me tinker with reading minds. There the nurses had songs running through their minds or kept a mental checklist they followed each visit testing my vitals. Crowds were a problem, something like being in Times Square with all those different flashing, streaming billboards. I’d have to focus hard on just one of the interns of the bunch the doctors brought in. Usually they were thinking about dinner or upcoming exams. I never mentioned anything about it to any of them; if I had, they probably would want to make me stay or take me somewhere else to study me. Maybe it would’ve made me famous, but I don’t want that. At the time, all I wanted was money. I just counted down to my release and made sure there was enough in my account for a rideshare to the casino.

My mother had offered to pick me up. I refused. The last thing I needed was to tap into every comment that came through her mind. The ones that got past the filter were enough. “I wish you’d be more careful.” It was my own fault I was struck by lightning, apparently, even though it came through the window.

The Place Underwater

by Stephen Niedzwiecki

He felt it as if it were happening again. The burning in his nose that he soon felt in his chest, the water pouring into his mouth and lungs as he gasped--slowly sinking down beneath the waves. But the burning turned into a warmth, the sinking felt like floating, and fear turned into elation. The depth around him seemed endless. For a moment he thought that this was what comes after. Then someone pulled him from the void.

He didn’t know how long he had drifted off as a light suddenly cut into the dark from behind. Eliot, one of the expedition engineers, stepped out onto the ship’s deck and gazed out over the water.

“Can’t sleep either?” Mark asked.

“Jesus!” Eliot exclaimed, taking a step back. “Scared the hell out of me. Can hardly see anything out here.”

“Takes a minute to adjust. Looks real pretty afterwards.”

Eliot stepped on the lowest rung of the railing and leaned over to peer into the water as waves broke around the ship. “Gonna be going way down there tomorrow, think we’ll find it?”

“Damned if I know,” Mark shrugged. “Even if Ellis’ readings aren’t right, I still get to be one of the few people to dive the Mariana Trench.”

Kidney Pie

by B. Grae Curtis

Farmer Keets wanted kidney meat for kidney pie, but there weren’t any cows. There was a crumpled up old dog belonging to that couple down the way, but something worse went on in their house than did in Keets’, and anyway the dog was probably diseased. And Keets couldn’t bring himself to take from Clark Musterford’s harvest, not after what he’d done to Clark’s youngest. But in this place, there weren’t too many more options.

So he’d have to find the meat himself. Long ago, he’d given up on finding beef for the usual steak and kidney pie—it was too rare a meat on the Highway, and he liked just kidneys better, besides. But he couldn’t give up his kidney pie. He had it every single day, and now had only about three weeks’ meat left for it. Going without was simply not an option.

So, on that brutal late-fall morning, Farmer Keets pulled on his thickest fleece coat, and settled an old moth-eaten toboggan over his head, and yanked some socks over his hands because he had no gloves. He stepped out of his front door and directly onto the overgrown underbrush, curling its thin thorn fingers into his pantlegs as it did every day; his little one-room shack had never had a front stoop, or a yard of nice trim grass, or even a well-worn dirt path leading up to the main road. Whatever mark he left on these woods always disappeared by the end of the day.

Dry, curling leaves hung from their sickly branches, rattling like a thousand diamondbacks as the wind blew harsh. Crows called in their eerie voices before and behind him, and squirrels hopped through fallen leaves afar off, but no living thing dared to approach him, as it had always been. He wandered about for a while in this lonely, muted, soulless place, glancing around in the vain hope of seeing a color other than grey and pale brown, until he happened upon the creek.

It changed positions every few days, but he always managed to stumble upon it if he only searched long enough. It was the only thing that could get him out of the woods and back to the Highway: any map or memorized directions only got him lost deeper among the trees. But if he followed the creek in the direction it flowed, he’d always get back to the main road. For the few years he’d been living in this place, this path had always proven true, even if the rest of the wilderness could never be trusted.

Riddled

by Richard Weems

By my count, I’ve outlasted thirty-two or -three other fosters so far. Hard to nail it down exactly because there was one in a tattered hoodie who slept in the other cot one night, hood up and back to me, without ever saying a word. Lit out before I got up, but by dark, there was a tattered hoodie, curled up and back to me but in the opposite direction, hood also (still?) securely in place. Didn’t matter, ultimately. Two days later, someone new took that spot.

And the fosters who didn’t make the cut? Found tangled in razor wire outside the power station, blue with hypothermia under the Parkway overpass, choked by stale pizza crust in the dumpster behind Pizza Boys. Some met more direct ends: back of the head mashed by a cinderblock, thrown in the river with hands and feet bound to a barbell plate, soaked with gasoline and force-fed a road flare. No police investigation, no moment of silence at school, the cadaver packed off with no fanfare.

Which can mean only one thing, as far as I can tell: Margie’s is a gauntlet where the agency lines up their hopeless cases like soda cans in a convenience store cooler to see who makes it through. After all, there are only two cots, and I share my room with whoever shows up next: boy, girl, or prefer not to say. What did the ugly fucker in that movie say? “There can be only one”?

The Matinee

by George Larson

My icon at the time was Beverly. We had been going steady for the past two months, and she wore my class ring on a chain around her neck. That meant I owned her, or so I thought at the time. Funny how kids think of things. We were fifteen and in love, or at least what passed for it. Smitten was an old-fashioned word, which applied to our situation. Horny was another. Besides raging hormones or whatever, Bev and I were sympatico. We were on a date, heading to the Rialto for a Saturday matinee. And not just a regular matinee, but a double feature in 3D, with two of the scariest horror films to boot. It was to be a date I would always remember, because I could not forget.

We stocked up on sodas and buttered popcorn, paying the outrageous prices. Bev insisted on a box of Jujubes, her favorite. I vowed next time we would sneak in candy to avoid the costs. No matter; we were in heaven as we entered the main theater. Nothing was going to spoil our date.

Bev was sort of an enigma. Truthfully, she was wrapped in a riddle of sorts. She just transferred to my school from a Podunk out-of-state town I never heard of before. She was a beautiful young woman who kept to herself, at least for the most part. She also didn’t make friends easily. I wasn’t sure why, since she possessed beauty, brains, and a great personality, which might be intimidating to others. I guessed she was simply shy. Standoffish, as some people might say.

Foxtails

by EC Dorgan

I rush out of exploding spruce trees, hair aflame, screaming. Mountain pine beetles shriek, shells popping. Flames leap along treetops and when I reach the road, there’s a wall of fire chasing me.

I’m on the highway, hours later, hazards on, inching forward through acrid smoke. Tree skeletons smoulder on both sides of the road, occasionally sparking into red flame. The sky is a fire cloud. There’s no sound of mountain beetles now.

When I joined the queue of cars, the fire marshals giving directions didn’t notice I was different. No one asked for my vehicle registration. They didn’t see the sheen in my eyes or realize my car was stolen.

I drive for hours before the sky lightens. Smoke thins and traffic moves faster. Trucks with flashing lights appear at the side of the highway, and firefighters in fluorescent coats direct me to a parking area.

I park the car. All around me, people spill out of vehicles, lugging suitcases and dogs on leashes. There are so many kids, I can’t count them all.

I step out of the car. A building looms in front of me. People are going in, but my instincts say to run. But where would I go? My home has burned. There’s nothing left for me.

I’m still hesitating when a fire marshal walks up to me, gesturing angrily. I push down my fear and follow the crowd into the evacuation centre.

(Foxtails was originally printed in **The Skull & Laurel** in 2025.)

To Catch A Name

by Nico Martinez Nocito

I cobble him together, that imagined nighttime boy, out of hawthorn boughs and apple blossoms and the gentle, thumping rhythm of my own heartbeat.

Then I hide him in my garden.

The body is nearly invisible among the overgrown tangle of zucchini vines, and, anyway, anyone who sees him will just assume he is one with the weeds and grasses. After all, those are as much part of him as the consciousness I have yet to imbue him with. Until I give him his name, my name, he will be just a pile of scraps, eminently forgettable.

“Merlin,” I say, and he appears.

Did I forget to mention that names have power?

He lands beside the bean trellis, almost stepping on the spiky, covert bundle of nightshade with a disgruntled clumsiness that makes it clear he was half-asleep moments earlier. Surely, he now wishes that I didn’t know his name and still thought of him as the old wizard who stole into my garden at night to take plants too illegal for him to grow himself. But names cannot simply be discarded, forgotten. They must be freely given and accepted, or yours will cling to you forever, eating away at your very flesh until you and it are inseparable.

“I am not simply a lapdog to be summoned at will,” he says.

“I know,” I tell him. “What if I said I was ready to cast the spell?”