by Hal Matthews
“My favorite?” asked Mel. “No, no, no. You don’t get to have favorites in our line of work, kid.” He sipped loudly at the last of his coffee then hung the empty cup off the edge of the table, wagging it until the waitress saw.
“Fine,” said Mandy, trying not to roll her eyes. “Then don’t call it your favorite, call it your ‘most memorable.’”
Mel gave his salt and pepper beard a few pensive scratches. “Not sure I can pick just one.”
Continue reading Changing of the Guard
Leave a CommentHe came in on the spring wind, when the snow had melted and revealed again the pallid stone from which the skeleton spires of the Lost World reached skyward. It had been a harsh winter and a fair number of the Junkfolk had gotten their fires snuffed out by the cold, Fyn’s pa among them. It had soured the spring for many of the tribe. But when the man came jangling down the alleyway that morning, he seemed to carry a sweetness on the air with him.
Continue reading The Big Magicks
2 Comments“Can I draw you?”
Gwen looked up from her book. A tall, gangly man was standing beside her booth, hiding beneath the hood of a black zip-up sweater. Draped across one shoulder was a bag loaded with art supplies and he wore a goatee that looked as though it had been penciled on. He was the kind of guy that had never passed up the chance to hit on her in college, the kind that would constantly brag about reading Dostoyevsky or never shut up about how pop music and summer blockbusters were “killing art.” So she said, “I’d rather you didn’t,” and returned to her book.
The man sighed, letting a patch of messy bangs spill over one eye. “Please?” he begged. “It’s for this color study, it’s due tomorrow and your hair is—well it’s just the perfect shade of red.”
Gwen raised an eye from her page and gave him a second look. “Fine,” she said, waving to the bench opposite her. “But only if you keep quiet.”
Continue reading Trompe L’oeil
1 CommentRex had grown slow. He creaked and rattled with nearly every step now, and frequently his legs would even shift beneath him, teasing the inevitable collapse to come. It might have bothered others, trying to keep up with numerous chores while slowly descending into immobility, but it didn’t bother Rex. He was good like that. He liked to be busy, liked the work. There was a peculiar peace he found into the monotony of it, a comfort in the repetition that had helped keep him sane over the years.
Leave a CommentCaptain Sirius Driggs pulled his plasma pistol from its holster and thumbed the hammer. The air was thick, both with condensation and tension, but Driggs kept his cool while the patrol of pygmy warriors passed on the other side of the tree line. When they’d disappeared, he let ‘Ol Trusty drop back into its holster and stepped free of the jungle brush. “Shouldn’t be too much further, what does the map say?”
2 CommentsThe city was quiet, just like all the others. And when the morning mists receded to reveal that all they’d hidden were more mammoth, empty buildings, RJ’s heart sank a little. There was something nice about the haze, the boy thought. It was almost like he couldn’t tell how different things were. He’d been young then, but on the foggy mornings before the bunker he could remember the city being washed in that same eerie calm, that same solemn silence that now haunted the world’s empty shell.
Leave a CommentPiper stood frozen on the porch, splintered floorboards creaking beneath her. To her left, something rattled and she nearly went backward down the steps before realizing it was only the ancient wind chime that hung at the corner of the old mansion’s wrap-around porch. Just beyond the fence, bushes tittered with laughter. She narrowed her eyes in their direction. “Laugh all you like,” she called at them. “You candy-asses couldn’t even get past the front gate.”
The bushes quieted and a second later a representative for the five boys who had followed her from the home popped up and shouted back. “Crack all the jokes you like Pippy, but you don’t get a dime of our money unless you go inside.”
Continue reading Beyond the Veil
Leave a CommentIt was hot. The kind of grueling, unrelenting hot that made everyone in the tenements aware of just how claustrophobic their living quarters were and fertilized the deep-seated hostility they all carried around because of it. Even out on his balcony Joc could hear the man across the hall cursing lividly at his broken AC unit. And in the plaza a dozen floors below, friction built between a couple, their argument growing ever more animated. Joc shook his head and, after lighting a cigarette, turned his attention out across the river.
Continue reading Across The River
Leave a Comment“It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” Carrie said turning to Dom, his olive skin glistening in the light of the setting sun.
“Maybe,” he said, propping himself up and plucking a strawberry from the basket they’d brought. “But aren’t you glad it did?”
Continue reading A Sort of Sweetness
Leave a CommentIt wasn’t until late in the night, after the thunderous cries of derision had long given way to silence, that Dan Skeevy emerged from his dressing room. Clad in a heavy coat that masked his dwindling figure, he slunk his way through the Jodorowsky until he reached the docking station near the bow. The gatekeeper’s eyes narrowed as he scanned Skeevy’s identification and when he opened the door to Maxson Station he told the actor that the vessel would be leaving at eleven the following morning, and that if he was smart, he wouldn’t be on it. Skeevy might have let that fester, let it pry at his fresh wound, had his attention been diverted immediately after stepping onto the station.
Continue reading Kind of Skeevy
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