Coming Home by Maria Alexander

My mouth is sour with whiskey and the loaded shotgun lays heavily across my lap in my sofa chair. This is my Christmas Eve ritual.

I hate Christmas. The holidays. The time for families to gather to share love and good cheer. Bullshit. I try hard every year to forget there is a Christmas precisely because it reminds me of my family, but this fucking world won’t let me. They’ve romanticized a nightmare.

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Bagged by David J. Schow

We kicked in the door of the crypt with an aluminum battering ram and did the sweep-and-spread you usually do when trying to cover unknown space. No bloodthirsty monsters attacked. Our own blood was up from the first bag of the day; maybe I should tell you about that first.

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Love Me Tender by Thomas S. Roche

They hurtle south on 15, the desert sands raining upon them like a plague of locusts. They blast the radio through Cedar City and St. George, Fado singing harmony on “Blue Suede Shoes” at the top of his lungs. Outside of Mesquite, they pause for ref reshment, Senor Fado leaning back in the seat and chuckling while Andre does his job, for which he will be paid in artistic and spiritual coin. Afterwards, Fado puts the Caddy in gear and floors it, sending a bewildered Andre sprawling in the seat, cursi ng in three languages as he wipes his chin. Andre calls the Senor a foul name. Senor Fado responds in kind, laughing, and Andre pouts fetchingly. Afterwards they stop for blue-raspberry slushes at Mesquite’s only Meat Market and Convenience Store.

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Black Roses and Hail Mary’s by Maria Alexander

As he awoke under the cement overpass, Jonathan heard the distant growl of cars, his own raspy breath, and the old woman’s gentle weeping. The last thing he remembered was Kiro and Sushime cackling over the squeal of tires, although those sounds had escaped into the smog hours ago. Wiping the long, grimy strands of his dyed dark brown hair from his face, Jonathan opened his eyes blearily, gravel biting his back through a beer-stained t-shirt. Steel-tipped black boots, leather pants ripped at the thigh – Fuck! – and a head full of heroin dreams, rolled by his best “friends”…

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Two Cents Worth by David J. Schow

GARAGE SALE, read the sign. I saw the chromium-yellow tagboard, with its big black cartoony arrow, on my way back from the bus stop, stapled to a much-stapled phone pole. The address on the sign was dead between my building and the phone pole. Ever since de-zoning, re-zoning, or whatever other catastrophe acceptable to the City Council’s bribed lackeys had befallen this former “neighborhood,” the residential blocks had been carved, sliced and diced to please the developers until some bloated fat cat with a cigar in his mush, incipient cancer and a string of embezzlement acquittals had pronounced it “good,” like Frankenstein’s Monster sucking watery soup.

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The King of Shadows by Maria Alexander

“Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.”
– Puck to Oberon,
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act III, ii

The funeral was today.

I wrote a film some years back about morgue workers. I watched tape after tape of interviews, the mortician’s assistants telling frightful tales about bodies unrecognizable from their wounds, which they dressed and coated with layers of cosmetics. They had learned to make Death rosy-cheeked and peaceful.

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Welcome to Weirdsville: They Who Lurk Below by M. Christian

Be cautioned: this month’s expedition into the odd and the unusual has a certain … well, shall we say Miskatonic atmosphere– a shuffling, looming presence that waits just on the edge of our safe domain to ravish our bodies as well as our very souls.

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