'Black Snow' by Amanda Woodard

They took you away this morning, meine liebe, my love. They said you were too sick to work, unfit, unessential. And I didn't know at the time. I didn't know where they would take you or what they would do to you, but I knew you would not come back.

He grabbed you, the soldier, and took you out of the line they had stood us in, and shoved you into another one, and you screamed my name. “Please! Don't let them take me!” you cried. I reached for you, but the soldier struck me down.

“Zuruckbekommen! Get back in line!” he shouted. “Or you're next!”

And I did. I gathered myself and stood back in line, and I cried silently to those who could not help me, to those who bore tears of their own.

God, please, forgive me, meine liebe, for being a coward. I was too afraid to follow you where I knew darkness would swallow us both. Please, please, understand that I hate myself for letting them take you away.

I didn't know how to let myself die.

They have me shoveling mud now, another purposeless task to keep us busy. Though the hot summer sun beats down upon us, it starts to snow. Black snow coats my boney hands, my uniform, the handle on my shovel. It cloaks the sun in shadow. And for one glorious moment, I am too stupid to understand. I don't know. I don't know, at first, what they had done to you until a woman near me begins to sob.

Confused, I go to her to offer comfort. “Was ist los?” I say. “Why are you crying?”

“My sister—my sister!” That's all she says, but she points at the snow, and at last, it dawns on me like the surrounding blackness, the unveiling of your mysterious prison. Your secret hiding place in the dark.

I fall to my knees, but I am too shaken to cry. I just stare at the ground, the little bits of you that are left.

“Get back to work!” yells the soldier. “Aufstehen!” But I can't move. I just start to breathe. I gasp in the smoke of the dead until I choke and vomit from it, so that I might taste you, fill my lungs with you, hold you close to my heart one last time.

I see the barrel of the gun in the corner of my eye, and I know I should move—my very life depends on my mobility—but my body has finally surrendered to the horror that faces me. Only after I betrayed you did it finally let me go. I am so, so sorry.

As the gun clicks, one last warning—or, perhaps, just an announcement, a clear annunciation of what's to come—I shut my eyes tight and look past the darkness and force myself to see your face. I'm coming for you, meine liebe. I will never leave you again. 

'Out of the Bag' by Sonya Oldwin

He sneaks in past midnight again. Work, he claims. But I’m not stupid.

I turn on the light. I pick a long, blonde hair off his sleeve. Proof.

‘I can explain.’

‘Spoken like a true cheat.’

‘There is nobody else. Look.’

He opens his bag, takes out a gorgeous sequinned dress and a blonde wig.

‘I am the other woman.’

'Thanksgiving' by Jemima Pett

Alexander climbed the ramp into the pod. He sat on his bench looking at his meagre rations, wondering what to eat. His store of emergency meal tablets from the last ‘ship was nearly exhausted. Ten years of dirt farming had yielded good corn at first, but the saved seed had a poor germination rate.  Yet, there was a patch down in the lee of the red cliff that looked different.  What would his father have made of it?  Alexander wished he’d been able to learn more from him.  Grow one league, rest the second, spread waste on the third, sow on the fourth.  Round and round.  Put enough by for nightfall. Keep the dirt firm and try to shelter it from the wind.

He decided to save his flour for Thanksgiving, and unwrapped half a meal tablet saved from two days earlier.  As it dissolved on his tongue, flavours he could not name spread through his mouth.  He let them linger, then washed them down with half his ration of water.

On the comms. unit was a message from Elena: ‘let’s pool our meals for Thanksgiving’. His six neighbours formed a strangely silent community, exchanging messages every moon-rise to prove they weren’t alone on this dirtball.

He dimmed the glows, lay down on his bed and let his bones stretch out - the weight of the day’s exertions scrunched them together. He slept.

The unaccustomed sound of the alarm woke him. He rolled off the bed, fumbling for his boots, and stretched out for the comms. There was an intruder in the silo. Strange. Intruders were unknown. The corn silo was all he had till the next harvest.

 

Outside the wind tore at his coveralls and flattened the silo door against the wall, giving it no chance to rattle or bang. The catch was undamaged. What sort of intruder could be there?  He stepped in, fully alert, picking up a pitchfork just in case.  A figure, silhouetted by the light from the clear roof, was filling a bag with Alexander’s corn.

Having spoken to no-one in six months, Alexander gave no warning.  He charged at the intruder, who sidestepped, but not fast enough - the pitchfork hit him.  He staggered; Alexander wheeled round and charged again.  The intruder knocked the pitchfork to one side; it bounced off the side of the silo and hit him hard on the head. He fell to the ground, half in, half out of the doorway.  Alexander stood over him, his head reeling with anger, and brought the pitchfork down into his chest.  The intruder twitched and collapsed.  Red liquid seeped through the coveralls.  Alexander watched, fascinated.  He hadn’t seen blood since his father died.

He took stock of the stranger.  Standard build for a survivor:  thin, almost emaciated, wiry body and upper half, strong thigh muscles and glutes. He turned away and sent a message on the comms. unit to his friends.

“Thanksgiving dinner will be steak this year”.

'Dear X' by Grant Faulkner

Dear X,

I loved you more than anyone could.

Love, Y

Dearest Y,

Funny. I didn’t realize that. How are you?

Best, X

Dear X,

I cut my guts open for you. I’m bleeding.

Love, Y

Dearest Y,

Sorry to hear about the mishap. I hear there are remedies for bleeding. Or it just stops after a while.

Cheers, X

Dear X,

The bleeding won’t stop. I’m split open.

Love, Y

Hey Y,

Can you believe this weather?

Yours, X

Dear X,

Why are you talking about the weather?

Love, Y

Dear Y,

I finally found the perfect beach!

xo, X

'Sloth' by Dale Hay

The maskmaker’s shop never opens before 11 o’clock in the morning and it shuts for an hour’s siesta every afternoon.  Señor Abrines knows that he is considered a lazy, slothful man, and he does little to deny that charge.  Only his son knows that Señor Abrines can only shape and paint his masks in the dead of night, when the demons in his dreams wake him, jolting his tired brain with their jeering laughter.

When that happens, Señor Abrines rolls carefully away from his wife, rises from their bed and tiptoes downstairs, the demons’ faces still imprinted on his retinas.  He brews a cup of café con leché and takes it with him into the workshop.  He mixes a new batch of papier maché.   Plunging his hands into the cold wet mess, he shapes horns and bones and eye ridges, moulding the soggy strips of paper into a demon.

Guillermo almost always wakes up at the sound of his father’s footsteps on the stairs.  When the sun rises and Señor Abrines has nodded off, his head drooping over his paints and brushes, Guillermo creeps into the workshop and pushes aside the drying demon masks.  He tidies up his father’s worktable, then helps his mother rouse the little ones.  Señor Abrines always slept late into the morning, not hearing the bells summoning the villagers to mass, calling the children to their lessons.

When the sun reaches the top of the sky, Señor Abrines sits outside, on the shadowy veranda of his shop, on the edge of the plaza.  The women and their babies gather on the benches, underneath the trees.  Las perezas hang down from the highest branches, upside down, hardly moving.  They ignore the cries of the fruitsellers, the women’s laughter, the children’s angry squabbles.

Like Señor Abrines, these sloths are awake at night.  In the darkness, they too see the demons.  But now, in the heat of noon, they make little effort, except what it takes to cling with their toes to the tree limbs.

After his siesta, Señor Abrines drinks another cup of café con leché and dusts his masks.  Their demonic faces haunt him, their eyes black holes in the dim light of the shop.  

Tonight the demons will taunt this man again, invade his dreams, inspire his art.  But for now, while the sun is in the sky, Sr Abrines ignores his demon muses.  He leans back, sips his coffee, savours the quiet of his empty shop.  He clings to his perch, still, silent, in the soft moist heat of a dusty afternoon in the mask shop by the plaza.

'Finding Amelia' by Martin Porter

Amelia, I have been thinking of you.

As I walked down the main street, beneath the red roofs and white cirrus, I saw you wearing a brown leather blouson, tight blue denim jeans neatly tucked into tan leather flying boots and I said, “Amelia, I thought you had fallen out of the sky and were lost,” but you did not even look at me.

You just passed me by.

I have not stopped thinking of you.

The sky is blue today, unusually blue and cloudless. I lie on the slightly damp green grass and listen to the scraping of insect carapaces against the grit of the soil, closed eyes staring upward at the red light filtering through my eyelids. It hurts to open them. There is an aeroplane flying overhead, I can hear it and I know if I look I will hear you saying, “The heavens make such a bitter master, throwing down rejected lovers, wasted and crumpled.”

I whisper, “Amelia, why did you give up your freedom to hold hands with such a demanding spouse?”

You do not answer.

I cannot stop thinking of you.

One day I will sail the sea, turquoise above the shallows, dark blue and deep in mid-ocean. I know that I will find you there, fallen, the gulls' daughter. One day I will take my canoe and fly with the breaking surf over the coral like you once may have done. I might find a sole of a shoe in the fine white sand, delicate as the aerial mist of drifting water in the high cumulus that builds over these atolls and I will ask, “Amelia, will you continue to hide in this uncertain boundary between sea and sky, teasing both deed and desire?”

And I will never stop thinking of you.

'American Gothic' by Ewan Lawrie

'Looks like it should hev those two miseries in frunnuv it,' he said.

I tried to look away from the chaw-stained teeth. The juice he spat landed an inch from my steel-capped toes.

'Miseries?' My back hit the door of the pickup as I stepped away.

'We ain't far frum Cedar Rapids, friend.' He punctuated this last with another jet of juice near my boot.

I already knew that much, and began regretting stopping to ask this man for directions.

A tall man, thin and stooping, he carried a three-tined pitchfork in a claw-like hand. He looked like a country parson dressed for helping a church-member. His cheap round glasses had tarnished metal frames and the lenses looked as thin as Cellophane.

'Couldya tell me how ta get to the nearest town?' I asked.

'Mebbe,' he said.

''Wanna smoke? Change from a chaw? Only, I ain't got a light is all.'

I pulled out a pack of Luckies, shook two out, offered him the first.

He flicked a horny nail on the red phosphorous of the longest match I ever saw. He saw me looking at it.

''S a Lucifer, my friend. Only kinda matches I got.'

We smoked a while. The smoke curling around his head put me in mind of something.

'You don't live in that house, do ya?'

No one could. It was all rotted clapboard and glass-less windows – and it looked as though my new friend should be careful with his matches around it.

'Naw.' He drawled it long and rasping. 'I'm frum the next town along.'

I ground out my cigarette, it had hissed when it landed it his tobacco juice.

'Which way?'

He held out a long and crooked finger, pointed along the road ahead.

'Thanks, Mister,' I said.

He put his hand on my arm , it felt hot through the plaid shirt.

'You go the other way, friend. Back the way you came.'

He gave me a glare as I shook the clawed hand from my arm.

'What's wrong with your town?' I leaned towards him. He didn't step back.

'You'll get there soon enough, friend. Everyone does.'

The truck started first time. By the side of the road a broken sign lay on its back, giving passing crows not quite enough information:

'Gehenna Pop.. .'

First Published on ABCTales.com