A Necessary Gamble

by Alexandria Cook

Click!

A cacophony of groans and cheers filled the room.

The woman across from Hera released an audible sigh of relief as she lowered the revolver, her forehead beaded in sweat. Although the two hadn’t exchanged a word, Hera gathered from the boisterous audience that her opponent's name was Red, presumably because of her mop of ginger hair.

Light from oil lamps danced off the revolver's barrel as Red slid it across the table—a bell clanged for the fourth round.

The crowd surrounding them went silent. Hera's hand shook as she lifted the gun, grip slick with their combined sweat. The cold muzzle of the revolver felt good against her temple, a macabre relief from the humidity of a flooded world.

Every cell in Hera’s body screamed as the hammer clicked into place. Red watched while chewing her thumb, her expression begging for it to be the final round.

Hera shut her eyes and took a shaky breath as she pulled the trigger.

Click!

The roar of the audience, stuffed like sweaty sardines in the small room, threatened to burst Hera's eardrums. She could only gawk at their reveling.

Hera felt nauseous as she slid the revolver across the table, the next round would be a fifty-fifty. The bell clanged again.

Silence fell as Red's calloused hand reached for the revolver.

For a long moment, the woman stared at the gun in her hands, as if debating walking away. They weren’t prisoners, but playing the game was the only way to stay.

“There’s only room for one.” They’d been told as the revolver was set down between them.

Hera wanted to bolt, but she knew outside the doors of the antique shop was nothing, a never-ending ocean. The floating Town Square had been the first thing she’d seen since her city had flooded. It was an eclectic collection of buildings connected like one giant, inhabitable raft. Hera knew she’d rather die than return to drifting aimlessly, and by the look in her opponent's eyes, Red felt the same.

Red took sharp breaths, tears budding at the edges of her closed eyes while she raised the revolver to her temple. As she pulled the hammer back, her breathing steadied. When Red opened her eyes, she wore a strange, dreamy expression. The woman looked at Hera with distant, tear-filled eyes. A soft smile pulled at the corners of Red’s mouth.

Bang! Thud!

The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the room; Hera was frozen, now more acutely aware of her existence. A suffocating feeling rushed over her as blood pooled on the table, dark as the depths of the never-ending sea.

After a moment of silence, a commotion erupted once more. Men and women settled bets. Those who lost complained; those who won celebrated. None attempted to move Red's body.

Hera barely noticed the rabble; she didn’t celebrate. Instead, she was transfixed by the peaceful expression now permanent on Red’s face. Hera couldn’t remember if she’d ever smiled like that.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Alexandria Cook is an endlessly curious aspiring author from the rainy state of Oregon. Tales of cryptids, fairies, and all forms of the supernatural inspire her. She enjoys exploring human nature through the lens of fantasy or horror. When she's not writing, she's procrastinating.

 

A Precautionary Tale of Late Night Studies

by Amelia Weissman

It was no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence when I first noticed it. I thought it was just a stray pencil mark, an impression of graphite left from one of the countless incidents in which I had chucked my writing utensil across the room in frustration. Studying for any amount of college final exams leaves most students in such a frazzled state that there should be an Olympic event for whomever accomplishes the most amount of physical damage to property thanks to the sadistic whims of their professors.

I most certainly would have been a finalist on that podium, so the mark on my wall wasn’t exactly remarkable - until it started to grow. Amid the constellation of other javelin-thrown pen and pencil spots, that one was the only one that changed.

Distracted from the microbiology text I was supposed to be reviewing but didn’t feel particularly inclined to at the moment, I licked the tip of my finger and scrubbed at the dingy wall to take the spot out. But it wouldn’t budge.

The smudge reminded me of mold, and I began to wonder if maybe this decrepit old building finally was falling apart at the seams. Then I witnessed an impossibility that made me start to question the wisdom of too many late nights mixed with copious amounts of coffee. The blemish, as big as my pinky nail, pulsed.

Like a gruesome heartbeat or the labored breathing of an undead creature, it was blatantly apparent that the spot on my wall was animated.

I turned away from the blasted thing to refresh my sight with something not quite so alien, but an insane physical itch commenced in my brain. Not a psychological manifestation, I could actually feel the gray matter in my cerebellum twitch in irritation as if a mosquito had injected its bothersome venom straight through my bony skullcap.

I whipped around to stare accusatorily at the damned black mark on my wall because I knew it had done this to me. The size of my fist now, the inky depths of its hateful pulsations seemed to laugh at my ire.

For as much as the thing repulsed me to the point of nausea, invisible tendrils of magnetic attraction pulled me closer to it. My legs walked robotically toward the wall until my toes were kissing the baseboard.

Being in such proximity to the thing, now the approximate size of an open textbook, I saw that it was not real but it was also more real than the dorm room trappings around me and the impending misery of tomorrow’s microbiology final. An insane urge to embrace the blackness while simultaneously feeling the chemical overload of cortisol and adrenaline screaming at my body to run trapped me at this infinite threshold.

The spot was not patient, however, and yawned open wide like a massive set of jaws until – well, let’s just say I didn’t have to worry about that test anymore.

While my disappearance left many baffled, eventually the novelty of the case died away.

Now it is a new semester though and there is a new inhabitant of my old room. She seems very studious, and I haven’t noticed too many of her friends coming over to visit. By the looks of her textbooks, she’s most likely a chemistry major which means a lot of late-night studying and paper writing which is good because I’m getting more than a little hungry.

I can’t wait until finals.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Amelia Weissman is a mom of six with her Master's in marine biology. She has been published as a scientific writer in research journals and as a fiction writer in Starward Shadows Quarterly ezine, Black Hare Press Anthology Year Four, and SpecPoVerse.

 

Feruna Gatlin dreams of another life

By Daniel Christensen

Being a three inch tall cyberpunk fairy ain't easy, not in a city like New Old Bedlam.

Ever since that brilliant madman Von Edsol Cartwright had cracked the dimensional rift tech, universes had been spun together like a tie dye shirt.

Orcs with nose rings and bioluminescent tattoos arm wrestling minotaurs in a cantina orbiting a brown dwarf star by equal parts sciences and magicks, New Old Bedlam got pulled into at least ten galaxies before winding up here.

She'd heard of at least 90 thousand Earth variants and easily half of them sounded like a paradise to Feruna. If only she could put together enough scrit to book a reasonably safe wormhole transit.

Maybe she should let that runt cyber dragon Kebrex take her on that date after all. She could sweet talk him into a lil bit of unsanctioned verse hopping, maybe.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Daniel Christensen is an author of poetry, science fiction, high fantasy and little blurb stories that bubble up out of dreams. His writing has recently been published in The Last Stanza Magazine, Harrow House, Four Tulips Magazine and Lunchbreak Review.

 

Dude, did that elf just go through a portal?

by J. Needham

The elf was even hotter than his pictures in the dating section of the LARP app.

Cassian had long red-gold hair, seamless elf ears that must have cost a fortune, and a green tunic cinched with a belt that made Lauren's SHEIN-purchased alchemist costume look cheap. Overall, he fit perfectly with Lauren’s Legolas-fuelled teenaged bisexual revelation.

She waved. “It’s me, Lauren! From the app.”

“Ah! My fair maiden.” Cassian waved back and practically glided over. “Cassian Riverrun, second son of the Great Uniter, hailing from the Cherished Lands.”

“Gosh, I’m so bad at roleplaying.” But Cassian was a natural so she played along. “Uhm, Lauren Black from Middlelake Township? House beside the only Arby’s?”

“Rejoice!” Cassian beamed. “Lauren Black of the Final Arby’s, how good to see you. I’ve crossed the Great Tree’s branches to this mortal realm to finally meet you. You enchanted me from the first moment I was given a mortal device and saw you upon the Kingsbury Fantasy LARP application.”

“Ha, you’re good at this,” Lauren said with a grin. Weirdly good. “Well, how’s about we do that whole date thing?”

Cassian took her hand, eyes glistening (was that rainbow eyeliner?). “I would love nothing more.”

They walked in stride, stopping at stalls as Cassian appraised every piece of jewellery.

“It's quite impressive that you’re an alchemist at such a young age. You must be, what? Two hundred years?” he asked.

Lauren tapped the potions superglued to her belt. “Twenty, close enough. And you’re—?” Way too pretty to be real. He looked like he modeled eyewear.

“Two hundred and thirty, though I can assure you I have ample experience uniting warring factions and preserving the forests.”

“Ha… yeah. But for real though, what do you actually do?”

Cassian blinked. “Are you disappointed I’m not an elven warrior?”

“No, it’s,” weird that he was cagey about his real job, but whatever, “totally fine.”

“Excellent!” He lifted up an Evenstar necklace. “Then please, Lauren Black, accept this as my token.”

“Uhm, thanks?” Lauren pulled it around her neck.

“Huzzah, the courting gift has been accepted! We shall go then to be wed.”

“Pardon?”

Cassian turned and with a flick of his wrist summoned—

Lauren choked. “I-Is that a portal?!” An elvish forest city shone through the sparking oval.

Cassian held out his hand. “To the Cherished Lands, my beloved!”

The LARPers around them stared as if this was a performance, but Cassian stepped in and actually went through the portal.

It was real?!

“Wait. You’re an actual elf?”

Cassian frowned. “Of course? Are you not an actual alchemist?”

“No?!” Lauren threw her hands up. “Cassian, all of this is pretend. It’s fake!”

“Oh…I see.” Fat tears welled in his eyes. “How foolish of me.”

“Wait, no. I meant the roleplay festival, Cassian. I didn’t mean the—”

Cassian drew his outstretched hand back, the portal closing around him.

“—date!” she finished to empty air.

“Wow,” an off-brand Witcher whispered to a fairy, “they really upped the budget this year.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
J. Needham is a cryptid who lives somewhere in the North with their fiancée and evil little dog. They love writing about queer people—both the heroic and morally grey kind. BLUESKY

 

The Stream Nymph

by Howard Brown

The hike up Pebble Creek trail was a bitch, a climb that left the two friends fighting for breath that day in early September of 1986, as well it should, considering they were at around 7000 feet and neither had been in-country long enough to acclimate. Still, they humped the climb without complaint, knowing full-well what lay waiting once they passed the 6k marker, left the trail, and bushwhacked down thru the brush and dead-falls to stream-side.

***

They’d discovered Pebble by accident a few years before, having fished Slough Creek for two days, then heading over Bliss Pass and back down the Pebble Creek trail just to avoid the monotony of coming out of the woods the same way they’d gone in.

At a certain point on that trek, one of them had said, “Okay, let’s see what sort of dinks there are in this little, piss-ant stream.” But to their surprise, the fishing was superb; not exactly the hogs they’d caught in Slough, but healthy enough Cutthroat, and in prodigious numbers. So, when the fishing slowed elsewhere, they always came back to Pebble.

***

And that’s what had brought them back on this particular day. The fishing was every bit as good as they’d anticipated and by two o’clock, they were ready for a break. They ate some lunch, then continued to sit and let time slide, filling the long, pregnant moments with idle talk. There was no rush; they had the whole afternoon out in front of them. And there was the dope they’d scored the night before in a Cooke City bar which they had yet to sample.

It proved to be some heavy-duty weed and after a few tokes they were content to lean back against a fallen log, listen to the murmur of the stream, and watch the banks of cumulus drifting across the autumn sky.

“Jesus,” one of them whispered at length, spotting movement on the far side of the creek. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Looks like a blond chick with a fly rod to me, dude,” the friend replied, coughing as he exhaled a final lung-full of smoke. “And she ain’t wearing nothing but a fucking fly-vest and a pair of Tevas.”

“Far out,” the first man added, sotto voce, then called out across the stream, “Having any luck, honey?”

The figure paused, turning. “Haven’t really seen anything worth casting to,” she shot back, as an incredibly long, forked tongue darted out from between her lips and snatched up a moth fluttering just above the surface of the water.

***

In all the years that followed, the two friends reminisced endlessly about their encounter with this creature, which they came to refer to as the stream nymph. And while they could never quite bring themselves to believe she’d been anything other than a hallucination—a bizarre apparition from a shared dope-dream—they never found the courage to make their way back up the root-bound trail to Pebble Creek again.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Howard Brown is a retired attorney who lives with his wife, Ann, and wily feline, Stormy, on Lookout Mountain, TN. His short fiction has appeared in Louisiana Literature, F**k Fiction, Crack the Spine, Pulpwood Fiction, Extract(s), Gloom Cupboard, Full of Crow and Pure Slush.

 

Ghosts

by Selene Ibarra Rubio

Rain pattered on the train’s roof as it glided through the hills surrounded by crumbling mountains. I observed the other souls on the train- a pale little girl with a hospital gown, an elderly man with a missing arm, and a female with numerous slashes. And I- my tattered suit, bloody violin case, and bloody thighs with dangling skin and exposed bone- couldn’t remember how. I’d asked the charred man ahead. He said that was common for new souls. He told me I’d remember eventually as we voyage on the never-ending train ride; but I still felt I’d forgotten something.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Selene Ibarra Rubio is an eighteen-year-old woman. She is currently attending San Jose State University for a degree in mechanical engineering. She also has an upcoming story publication with Collective Tales Publishing in their new anthology "Darkness 102: Lessons Were Learned."

 

A Griffin’s Ransom

by Catherine Brown

I crouch, hidden in the dragon’s garbage pile. It reeks of fresh blood and ancient decay. Her snores reverberate off the stalactites and the phosphorescent walls of the cavern.

I mustn’t fail. Her gold is my cherished griffin’s ransom. I creep past the hollow ribcage and snaking spine of an elephant.

Cramming gold in my pack, I take only what I can lift.

Silence. My knees tremble. Her left eye opens, revealing my distorted reflection in her inky pupil. It wasn’t a snore. It was a purr. She’s not purring now.

I grab my pack and unsheathe my sword.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Catherine Brown’s flash and short fiction has been published in Havok Magazine, The Offbeat, The Veggie Wagon Journal, and a 2 Elizabeth’s anthology. Her short fiction has been a finalist or placed in multiple writing contests, including the grand prize in the Chanticleer Book Awards SHORTS Contest. Website: https://www.chbrownauthor.com/

 

Time Zone

by Nina Welch

The bartender at Zelda’s, est. 1955, is a time traveler. Eighty-year-old Betty enters the bar at twilight and magically turns 21. She steps out and she’s ancient. She goes back in and orders a martini from the handsome bartender and is intrigued by his questions.

“What do you know about life?”

“Not much, I’m only 21 or am I?”

“Do you have any sense of time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Time in between.”

“I feel strange.”

“Like time standing still?”

“Is this the in between zone?”

“Yes, do you want to come go with me?”

“Not out the front door.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Nina Welch’s short stories, Green Lizard Lounge, What’s Your Opening Line, and Good to Go, have been published in Literally Stories 2024 Anthology. Her poetry was published in Rats Ass Review, Aaduna Press for National Poetry Month, and Girls on Film and Fandango-8 chapbooks. She graduated, Cum Laude, from the University of Arizona in 2001 majoring in Media Arts. She lives in San Clemente, California and is a contributing writer for the San Clemente Journal.