King Me and King Me Again

Posted on by

Ordinarily, the sorts of notices you get by mail these days are quite boring and non-urgent, easily ignored, so you’ll forgive me when I admit that we didn’t open up the letter about Edmund for a week. It had a county return address, which usually meant that we’d forgotten to pay a bit of property tax or that —surprise!— all dogs need to be registered or risk being put down if found wandering about or possibly something truly, incredibly riveting like our voter registration cards.

It does not usually mean that you have a relative being released from a high security prison in a few weeks and that you need to collect them, please, in order for the conditions of their parole to be maintained. The correspondence inside usually doesn’t go on, then, to explain that the said relative committed the crime several hundred years before and has only now become eligible for parole. And even if it does say that, it doesn’t go on to explain that eight-hundred-year-old criminals are only permitted to go free if lodging with direct family members for the duration of their parole.

But that was what the county return address meant on this letter. Inside the envelope bearing the country return address was another, slightly more battered envelope with a royal air mail stamp on it, and it was in this envelope that we learned that Edmund was meant to come stay with us for a year until his secondary hearing by the District Court of Secondary Instances.

I had never heard of the District Court of Secondary Instances, but I’d never been to England, either, so what did I know?

Eight hundred years.

The letter did not explain exactly how he was still alive. Also notably absent was a description of his crime.

It would not be convenient to take Edmund in. We were not a very rich family. My father sold some sort of imaging software to doctors’ offices, which meant that he was away from home as often as he was home. My mother was a manager for a Dollar Tree. My younger brother was in college, studying to be a drunk. And I was a useless daughter who still lived at home, dating only her journal entries and sleeping only with her masters in English.

But my mother —surprise!— was as unable to turn Edmund away as she’d been to tell me to move out. So Edmund got on a plane and Harry (rarely sober little brother) and I got sent to the airport to pick him up. I had said I could go myself, because my Mazda barely fits two people, much less three, but my mother said that Edmund was a criminal, after all, and she would hate for my first sexual experience, at age 26, to be rape by a 800-year-old man.

My mother is hilarious like that.

Edmund flew into BWI, in Baltimore, and after parking the Mazda in one of the seven spheres of hell available there, Harry and I headed into the terminal. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting Edmund to look like. I anticipated a beard, at the very least. We were all pretty foggy on what was happening in British history in the twelfth century, which was when Edmund supposedly committed his crime. Twelfth century. Was that . . . Anglo-Saxon England? Vikings? Beards seemed like a safe bet. Beards seemed historical.

Continue reading →

Homefront

Posted on by

I close my eyes before I kill him.

Just in the final seconds as my swordpoint hits fast and straight through the hole in the chain mail under his arm. In order not to see the expression on his face, his eyes bulge, the gasp of breath when he realizes it was a killing stroke. There’ll be pink bubbles on his lips as his knees hit the muddy ground, and his own weight jerks his body off my sword as long as I square my feet.

It’s the worst way to do it, to not watch. Anything could happen, but I can’t do it any other way.

As he falls I look again, in time to turn heavily and block another attack with my shield. But Deck knocks the new enemy over by grabbing his collar and flinging him back. My brother stands over the fallen soldier and guts him before grinning at me through a blood-flecked beard. He’s just managed to grow it.

I lower my sword because the enemy band is withdrawing back into their forest. It was only a score of them, down to a quarter of that now, and their long shadows stretch back toward us through the trees, promising more tomorrow. And the next day and the next, through the gods know how many more weeks. Here on the southern front, there’s almost no winter to speak of, and so no pause in the king’s war.

Deck bares his teeth at their backs. “Run!” he screams after them. “Run from us!” And he claps me on the shoulder, making me stagger. I sink the tip of my sword into layers of fallen leaves for balance, thinking of how Captain would cuss at me for it. Your sword is your life, boy, don’t treat it like a stick – what if there’s an enemy behind you and you can’t bring the sword up fast enough? You want to do nothing but fling mud in some banger’s face as you die? I breathe through my teeth, as if I can stop the thick smells from sticking to my tongue: blood and rot and that sharp smell of the evergreens around here.

“Let’s go, Half,” Deck says, not waiting before he begins tromping back toward camp. I kneel down, ignoring the ache in my right thigh from an old scar, and set down my shield beside Deck’s gutted enemy. He’s clutching at his stomach, where blood leaks through the wide round metal joints of his armor, and I smell his death easily enough. But it won’t be easy for him, and I pull my dagger from the sheath on my gauntlet. He’s hissing and his big eyes stare up at the purple sky as I tug off the helmet skewed on his head and set my blade against his throat.

He’s doomed, and this will be better than him gasping and bleeding here until the wolf-priests come to collect our dead and burn the enemy overnight. This is the right thing to do. The good thing.

But I close my eyes again, while the knife pushes gently into his dirt-crusted neck. It’s got to be done. It’s just another practice thrust, Half. Do it.

And I do. I should’ve taken my gauntlet off first, but it’s already got blood soaked into the cracks and this spray won’t make it too much worse.

***

As I drink thick broth at the fire that night, my sword hand begins to tremble.

I set down my mug and clench a fist, tucking the offending hand against my side. I’ve only been back at the front for eight days. I should be good for at least twelve more before fatigue sets in, before I’m anxious again and jumping at the cracks from the fire.
Continue reading →

The Girls

Posted on by

“There’s something you should know,” he says.

We’re ten miles outside of Rosarita when he says it—too far to walk, too close to bail and head for someplace else.

“I’d rather not,” I tell him.

doll bag

There was a time in my life when the last place you’d ever find me was sitting in the cab of a busted pick-up truck with a strange man. That was before the blood disaster and the chaos though, and in the last six weeks, I’ve done all the things your parents tell you not to. I’ve hitchhiked, shared beds with disreputable boys, petted stray dogs, carried a gun with the safety off, driven on the freeway with no spare tire. I have smoked cigarettes and talked to strangers and crossed without looking both ways.

Behind me, there’s a muffled thump from the bed of the truck, but I don’t ask and I don’t turn around.

*****

We pull up to the little ranch house after dark, tires crunching on gravel. All the lights are on. The front door hangs slightly ajar, and none of it looks good.

I climb down from the cab anyway, keeping my hand in my pocket and my fingers around the bone handle of the stiletto. All the country nonsense about wooden stakes is just that. It doesn’t matter what you jam through their chests as long as it’s sharp.

He jumps up into the bed of the truck, stooping to fold himself under the camper shell. The flatbed is loaded up with canned food and jugs of water and sleeping bags, but the thing he’s after is rolled all the way up against the wall of the cab. In the dark, it looks like a giant lumpy moth cocoon.

I can’t help myself. “What is that?”

He’s breathing hard as he drags the bundle toward the tailgate. “It’s that thing I was telling you about.”

The thing is wrapped in burlap, bunched closed at the top and laced tight with baling wire. It is approximately the size of a person.

When he shoves it onto the tailgate, the glow from the porch light glints off something thin and glittering, fine as a web. The rough fabric of the burlap has been painstakingly woven-through with a network of metallic threads. It looks like silver, which means that it’s probably silver. And facing him there in the gravel driveway, I get it.

After all, the bundle is approximately the size of a person. keep reading…

Contest Winner!

Posted on by

Hey, all! Sorry this is a couple of days late – it’s been hectic around here!

The winner of titles contest is……..

…..

…….. MAIA! Of Pen and Ink: The Persimmon Journals!

Maia, email me at tessa.gratton@gmail dot com with your address and we’ll get your AMAZING PRIZES SENT OUT. “What I Call Memphis” was our favorite title, and the rest were quite good, too!

A couple of honorable mention: I loved “As I Die, Nothing More” by Azra as a title for my “Girl, Waiting,” and Amber from A J Breadcrumbs made Brenna and I laugh with “#honestlygeorgia”

Thanks for playing! We had so much fun going through your titles!

HALLOWEEN CONTEST!!!

Posted on by

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This week is the kick-off for our last 2011 contest! And it’s a doozy!

All you have to do, dear readers, is pick your favorite Merry Fates short story of ours and tell us what YOU WOULD have titled it!

Titling is tough stuff – sometimes it takes almost as long to title as story as it does to write it! Sometimes we get desperate and settle. Sometimes the story BEGINS as a title! So do your best, and enter as many times as you want, with as many stories/titles.

We’ll pick our favorite title on Friday, and doll out the prize!

Prize is signed copies of our books:

BLOOD MAGIC
THE SPACE BETWEEN
A SHIVER TRILOGY PACK
THE SCORPIO RACES

“The Sometimes Mermaid” by Lauren DeStefano

Posted on by

Atticus lived a hundred years, married twice, and loved only one girl. She became more a legend than a girl as the years went on. Her straw-blonde hair took on, in transit from one telling to the next, the pale white of a spirit. Her denim cutoffs and wicked grin became a billowing Victorian petticoat, her soggy daisy crown a shimmering tiara.

Death has a way of glamorizing all things, especially love.

But Atticus never wavered. He remembered his girl exactly as she had been the day she drowned. He remembered the small wet hills of her breasts when she was hoisted from the water, and the seaweed plastered to her arm like a patch sewn over a tear. He remembered the sound of his pocket watch ticking like her heart was in his hand, the last gift she would ever give him.

His youngest grandchild, and the most intuitive, Mary, would sit by his favorite chair in the evenings and struggle with her knitting. “Tell me about the girl you loved,” she would say. She was a romantic creature; it showed in her large, dark eyes. She had a whimsical and restless heart. One day she would be tall. She would be a Queen of Spades, the boys folding before her like unworthy Kings.
Continue reading →

Midnight Crimes

Posted on by

What happens is this. I dream about him, not the first dream of the night, but the second or the third, after I’ve turned over a few times. He is not always the same, but I know it is him anyway. I dream he holds my wrists, his thumbs pressed into my veins, and he squeezes so tightly that I can feel his thumbs on my heart and I wake up because my chest is about to explode.

attic window

My new apartment came to me fully furnished. It was branded as a minimalistic European getaway. The landlord has used this general catch all phrase as an excuse to kit the apartment out with $200 of IKEA furnishings and a single abstract painting. The first afternoon I was there, I spent an hour looking at that painting, because there was nothing else to look at, unless you count the notably sleek knobs on the three kitchenette cabinets. It’s just an orange line over a red line, framed in a thin black plastic frame that says either you’re a cheap college student or a minimalist European genius.

And that night he is in my dreams. The first night, it is the fingers on the wrists, but he comes back the next night, and it’s something different. I had thought I had left him behind at the previous apartment, the previous city. But here he is, and I tell myself I’m asleep, I’m asleep, I’m asleep, even as he hangs me with a dog tie-out in what looks like this new apartment. He pulls one hand over the other, the tether pulled tight over a hook in the ceiling. This hook is how I know I’m dreaming, because I would’ve remembered a hook. It would’ve given me something else beside the painting to look at.

But it feels real as I press my hands to my throat, feeling the skin crush beneath the rope. I can’t breathe I can’t breathe

In the morning, I check my skin for bruises. I won’t admit to anyone that I do this. Like any minimalistic European genius, I have access to Wikipedia, and so I know all of the easily found facts about night terrors and sleep paralysis and panic attacks. I know that my lucid dreaming is a function of this miraculous mass of wrinkly brain inside my skull. But still, I look. I am so very afraid that one morning, I’ll find evidence of these midnight crimes. keep reading…

Jack’s Field of Bargains

Posted on by

There was a farm off highway 32, just north of the road, that the Linwood High School cross-country team drove past every Tuesday and Thursday during the fall semester on their way to the six-mile course near Lake Archer.

The farm was just a two-story cabin with peeling white paint and a collapsing barn out back. The silo’d been stripped of its tiles and looked like nothing more than a fat concrete smoke stack, and a massive old cottonwood shaded a pond covered in lily-pads. Between the silo and the tree was a fallow field a half-acre square, full of junk. It was organized in haphazard rows, and varied from tin can sculpture and tire flower beds, to trunks of porcelain baby dolls and old rotary telephones.
A hand-painted plywood sign declared JACK’S FIELD OF BARGAINS.

Tom Vanderpoel sat in the backseat of his teammate Evan’s rusty Chevy, forehead pressed to the cool window, as they sped at least ten over the highway limit. He’d only been running cross country for a couple of weeks, having moved to Linwood with his mom after she and his dad divorced over the summer. Up front was Evan’s girlfriend and star of the women’s team, Mary Jo. Her feet were up on the dash as she hummed along with some emo singer-songwriter and Evan performed a monologue on the injustice of Mr. Summers, the U.S. history teacher’s, epically long final exams. Tom didn’t mind, since it kept him from having to talk back, and he was struggling with himself for thinking Evan in no way deserved Mary Jo.

When he saw the sign, he interrupted. “What kind of bargains?”

Mary Jo set her feet down into the well and twisted around. “Oh, Jack’s. My mom says her dad used to be friends with Jack Dalling, and he used to say you could find your destiny in his field.”

“Seriously?”

Evan snorted. “It’s junk.”

She narrowed her eyes dangerously at her boyfriend, and Tom said, “Pull over.”

There was a dirt turn off about fifty yards down, and Evan swerved as his wheels fell off the pavement. He cursed, but continued on. The car filled with the crunch of gravel as the wheels kicked up a solid cloud of dust as they backtracked. He pulled to the side, the square nose of his Chevy pushing at tall yellow grass. Tom and Mary Jo shoved their doors open immediately, spilling into the same grass. It scratched at Tom’s track pants and he considered the likelihood of ticks.

Mary Jo was in shorts, and squealed as she dashed to the tractor path where all the grass was flattened out. “Asshole!” she called back at Evan, who snickered as he stepped onto the safe gravel and came around the car to join them.

Crickets chirped and tiny winged bugs scattered around their heads, buffeted by the dry breeze. Overhead the sky was pristine blue, unbroken by clouds. As sorry as Tom usually was to have come here instead of going with his dad to Wisconsin, he had to admit at least to himself that this much sky was awesome, in that old sense of the word his Junior High English teacher had tried to get her kids to understand.

The three of them stopped at the junk field, near where a man sat in a beach chair. His face was tanned and cracked with wrinkles like a dried up riverbed, and an old John Deere baseball cap shaded his sharp blue eyes. “Hey there, you kids. You come to trade?”

“Trade?” Tom said.
Continue reading →

Half-Way Home

Posted on by

Before it was a mental institution, it was a military site. And before that, it had been some kind of depot or shipping yard. One of those big industrial compounds that’s full of gravel and always smells like diesel or coal.

attic window

By the time I was around to see it though, it was the mental institution—over two hundred acres of pretty white sanity, with the main facility was at one end, taking up a full city block. The rest was a huge expanse of poison-green grass, studded with twenty-five identical halfway houses and a hundred cultivated oak trees.

I didn’t wind up there, if that’s what you’re thinking. At least, not in the normal way, assuming that being institutionalized can ever be called normal. I wasn’t crazy, is what I’m saying. I just went there every week.

The place was pretty much like other mental institutions—or at least, how I imagine they’d be—except for one thing. In the very middle, bordered on all sides by the halfway houses, there was a soccer complex.

It was one of those community-enriching things, some sort of philanthropic effort to give back, but mostly it was just uncomfortable and weird.

Every week, I sat alone on the bus, then filed down onto the grass and stood apart from the other girls, because even though all of our shirts matched, there was something else, something undefined, that made us different. They never stood too close to me.

“Keeks,” they said sometimes, making sympathetic faces and sucking in their cheeks. “You should really come out more. You want to maybe grab a slice after the game?” Because the thing is, they weren’t mean.

Just oblivious enough to somehow always forget that I hated to be called Keeks. That my name was Cassandra. That I would never be normal enough to spend an afternoon at Marlo Brothers Pizza with them.

I brought my homework, because it was easier to scribble formulas for area and gravity than to try and act bright and uncomplicated while the other girls lounged in the shade, laughing behind their hands. I was never self-pitying enough to think that they were laughing at me, and when they called me Wednesday Addams, I even kind of liked it. Better than Keeks, anyway. They were just looking for empty fun, watching the boys who went by in their grass-stained socks and rumpled, sweaty jerseys. I tuned it out.

But I always listened when they told dirty jokes or started talking about the mental institution.

On a cool, golden day in September, Britney Marsh said, “My dad told me that in the 50s, they used to do, like, water-therapy and shock treatments—that a ton of kids died in places just like this.” keep reading…

“Sell Out” by Jackson Pearce

Posted on by

I wish I had a better talent.

Painting. Playing the violin. Woodcutting, even. Anything.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if it manifested differently. Through a handshake or something. A tap on the shoulder. Hell, a slap on the ass, even. At least that way it’d be over fast, and it wouldn’t involve me kissing a corpse.

But I make a lot of money per kiss, and it’s stupid money, easy money. It’s this or join the family business, and taxidermy isn’t for me. The only thing creepier than kissing a dead human is peeling the skin off a dead animal and pretending like that’s a normal way of acquiring a new centerpiece for your living room.

“New assignments,” my boss says, slapping a pack of paper down in the middle of the room. It’s thinner than last week—with the prices the company charges for a kiss, I’m actually surprised it’s not thinner still. We only get a fraction of the money, but it’s hard to get hired as a self-proprietor in this field. It’s like people think that if they go through a company, it’s all on the up-and-up. If they go through an individual, it’s dark magic.

I think companies like mine spread those rumors. Keep prices up, so we’re only kissing the rich.

My boss clears his throat. “We’re short on women this round. Sorry . . .”

A guy to my right cusses under his breath. “I’m so sick of kissing old white guys.” A few of my coworkers mutter agreements till our boss glares, shuts us up. He passes out the papers. Name, address, a time. Nothing more. We don’t really need to know anything else.

Elise Snow. 706 14th Street. Tuesday at 7:00pm.

I fold the paper crookedly and shove it in my pocket.

***

I know Elise Snow.

Or, I knew her. A long time ago—I haven’t seen her in almost a decade, since fifth grade, I think. The little rich girl in school, Shelton county’s very own princess—and she had the pageant crowns to prove it.

I hated her.

Continue reading →