The Changeling

by Sarah Boudreau | Aug 12, 2021 | flash fiction

Some works of fantasy make you feel that they are not ornamenting reality so much as unearthing one of its most elemental components. Such is the case with “The Changeling.” It was at the story’s halfway point, with the appearance of the thread-people, that I found myself thinking, however implausibly, “Oh! This story is actually telling the truth.” Its emotional timbre is gently achieved, as a result of which I never resisted it, and whether or not it sought to move me, it did. I was impressed by how complete a narrative of the changeling’s life Sarah Boudreau manages to create and how saturated the story’s pages are in the way that life feels to him, expressing the sadness of a boy who begins his journey through the world by failing to belong to it and ages into a man who never does. From judge Kevin Brockmeier.

The little boy takes apart radios, old cameras, lawnmowers—whatever he can find that his parents won’t immediately miss—and he does so with the precision and ferocity of a crow picking at carrion. By the time he puts his puzzles back together again, hours have whisked past him. He won’t remember that his parents or his sisters have checked on him, opening the door to his bedroom to see him sitting hunched, tiny shoulder blades knitting together as he works.

Often, the metal stings his hands, irritating them pink before layers of skin turn hard and dry, then fall off. The doctor says he is allergic to iron alloys. In fact, he is allergic to many things, and he is resistant to many more. He rarely eats what his mother makes him, and his frequent headaches make him throw up what little nutrition he retains. Sometimes, he sits with his parents as they watch television in the evenings, and that is his way of telling them he loves them. The boy is not charismatic in the way that sick children are sometimes charismatic—he is a scurrying creature whose eyes will not meet yours.

His mother tries to be concerned, but, as she says, he is such a difficult child. His illnesses make him miss school so often that his teachers are unhappy, and they blame her. She is tired of him, but she will only admit this to her husband late at night when she is sure the boy is fast asleep.

The boy, however, rarely sleeps well. Some nights, it feels like his bedroom walls are humming around him and a current flows through his bones until they ache. His body moves without asking his mind first: he drags his blanket and pillow out of the house, and he makes a nest in his backyard, at the edge of the woods. Some nights, he makes it back inside before anyone notices. Some nights, his parents find the boy curled in the dewy grass. He tells them it’s quieter out there.

Once, when he is nine, he drops his blanket and pillow at the treeline, and his body walks him into the woods. A bloated moon lights a deer path, and he steps over fallen boughs and crisp leaves until he sees a small clearing. Here, a dozen figures sit around a ten-foot-tall pile of gold thread. It is stiff metal, thin and glinting in the moonlight, snarled into a heap. The people sort through it with long, elegant fingers, slowly untangling it and winding it around a giant wooden spool.

One of the thread-people smiles at him and beckons him to help. The boy joins their circle and they sit, working wordlessly, until morning. Unlike the metal of the machines, the thread does not hurt his hands. The untangling weighs down the parts of his brain that always feel like they are floating out of his grasp. When the sky begins to brighten, he walks back to his house, stiff from sitting for so long, but smiling.

He discovers that the thread-people work only by the full moon, and he keeps a calendar so he knows when to visit them. They make progress on the knotted mess, winding it several times around the spool, and though they rarely speak, the boy knows that the other thread-people enjoy their task as much as he does. Some of them he sees every month: the antlered man, the woman who can only whisper, the tattooed child, the man with birds in his hair.

One night, when he is eleven, he sees a boy who could be his mirror, but taller, with the hollows of his cheeks filled in. He doesn’t dare look at him for long, busies himself with the wire in his hands. He hears the whisper-woman hiss at the other boy, calling him rude for trying to meet his eye. His double never returns to the clearing to fumble his way through loops of gleaming wire, and the boy forgets about him.

The boy grows up. His mother hopes he will learn to converse with people, to look them in the eye, to smile warmly, but he never does. When he is a teenager, his classmates ask him if he is going to shoot up the school. When he is an adult, he becomes a mechanic and wears thick gloves to keep the steel from burning his hands. Here, he tends to machines in solitude and waits until he can join the good, quiet people in the moon-soaked clearing.

Every full moon, he slides out of bed. He opens the door left scorched from the time he drank too much and tried to burn down his house with himself inside. Everything is so loud, he had said to the whiskey. My brain is so loud I can feel it.

 He makes his way through the trees behind his own house—though he is miles from the deer path, he knows he will reach the clearing if he walks long enough. He helps spool the ever-tangled thread, as he has always done. The other thread-people look at him sadly now, at his fast-greying hair and his tense, arthritic gait, as their bodies do not decay in this place. They welcome him back with pity and guilt.

In the morning, because it is all he knows, he will put down the gold thread and walk back to the loud, iron-studded world not made for him.

god at the side of the road

by A. Poythress | Aug 6, 2021 | flash fiction

“god at the side of the road” has the quality of folklore from centuries ago and worlds away that’s somehow been transplanted to contemporary middle America, a place that’s too new and too hopeful to understand the forces it’s confronting. It’s the narrative voice, though, in an unusually intimate second-person key, that gives the story much of its potency. From Judge Kevin Brockmeier

They say a god lives down by the side of the road.

They say it’s the god of roadkill and dead things and there’s no harm in letting it haunt the streets, but you know that ain’t right.

You’ve actually seen it.

If you take a right at the fork at the bottom of the hill, you’ll find it. It wears the hides of all those animals that get flattened by cars speeding by, all those opossums and coons and deer. It uses their broken bones and splattered organs to keep itself alive and moving and you can always tell it’s coming by its stink.

But you know it doesn’t limit itself to those crushed critters, not if it can help it.

It’s slow, that’s why it takes from those things that are already dead. All those broken parts don’t let it move as fast as it wants.

Maybe, back when the thing had first been born, or made, or however the hell it came into existence, maybe it was quicker back then. Back when it had its own limbs and skin and things. Maybe it was sleek and quick and took what it wanted. Back when people spent more time walking about, before cars were ever even thought of. Back when it had more access to its favorite prey.

See, thing is, animal scraps are just what it uses now, outta necessity.

You know what it actually likes, because you saw it take Billy from down the road, back when you were both still stupid and young. You’d warned him that he was too drunk, that he oughta let you drive instead, but he’d sworn up and down that he was fine, laughed that you were just being a worrywart.

Well, he was just as drunk as you’d claimed he was, and the roads were slick from a shower neither of you had known about. He took that right-hand turn going nearly 90 miles an hour. It was almost inevitable that the truck flipped the way it did.

All you can remember is the lights flashing off the asphalt, off the leaves of the trees lining that old country road. Then there was pain and you must’ve been knocked out for a little while after that, because when you came to, you were hanging from your seatbelt upside down.

Everything hurt, your head from the dashboard and your chest from the seatbelt still keeping you suspended. But it was what’d kept you alive.

When you looked left, you saw Billy with his head hanging half his neck, blood splashed all over the broken glass of the windshield. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and you could see his arm twisted the wrong way, a bone in his thigh sticking out from the skin.

And then, while you were shouting Billy’s name, begging him to be okay, some foul odor started filling up the truck. You thought maybe it was a cut gas line, but you knew the smell of gasoline, and this wasn’t it. This smelled like rotted things, fetid things, things left out under the sun so long that the only creatures that could possibly stand the smell were buzzards and maggots.

You gagged, bile rising strong up your throat, but you covered your mouth with both hands when you saw something reaching in past Billy’s window. It had long fingers tipped with black claws that gripped at Billy’s twisted arm and yanked his body right out the truck.

The sound of cracking and something wet filled the truck then, and you battled with your seatbelt until it let you loose. It hurt to land on the windshield, but you knew if you didn’t get out, whatever it was that got Billy’d come for you next. You kicked out the window and crawled from the truck, ignoring the broken glass cutting into you. Better to bleed than die.

When you got out and finally got a look in front of the truck, you saw…that thing, face buried in Billy’s chest as it tore into him. It looked up, back at you, and you could see a grey-blue loop of intestine hanging out of its mouth. Sharp white teeth, eyes different colors and shapes, hair that looked more like mangy fur hanging down its back. It crouched on two legs and had two arms, but you couldn’t tell what sort of animal those came from. It was all covered in rank pelts and the slime of decay.

You’d heard of the god of roadkill, everyone in town had been told the stories, but you’d never realized that you counted as roadkill, too. Meat smeared across the asphalt was still meat, after all.

It started to rise onto its back legs and you took off, no matter how much every step hurt. You ran and ran, not stopping until you came to the first farmhouse down the road.

The sheriff never found Billy’s body—just a smear of blood leading from the wreck into the woods. No one believed what you said you’d seen that night.

They say a god lives down by the side of the road, but you know better. It ain’t no god.

It’s something else altogether.

The Bone Child

by Meagan Johanson | Aug 2, 2021 | flash fiction

I found the development in the final section of this story genuinely frightening—a dark fantasy in which the element of fantasy is so mysterious that you barely perceive the darkness until, in a glimpse of blood and teeth, it overpowers the page. Judge Kevin Brockmeier

Her chest is as tight as a rosebud, as she listens for the delivery mice in the dark, the soft skitter of their feet on the kitchen floor as they drop off last night’s collection.

For this to work, they need to be perfect. Gleaming. Unblemished. The fresher, the better.

Of course, she tried the traditional ways first. Countless mucking men in her bed. Loose, easy pulls, over and over: Ned, from HR. Steve, from high school. Anyone she could lure up from the bar downstairs. Wisps of online hookups. All of them, depository shadows leaving nothing behind but laundry and a thinning hope.

Barren didn’t change what she wanted. Or the human inside her, grown desperate.

She thinks about the still-sleeping children, new gaps in their smiles, as they wait for the morning to see what she has left them under their pillows—although the mice do all the work now, in exchange for all they can eat.

She thinks about pancakes and pizzas. Christmas and birthdays. Swings at the park and summer night strolls. Warm, even breaths. Small hands to hold.

When she is sure the mice have gone, she retrieves the delivery bags, scatters the contents on the counter like dice. She runs her fingertips over the jagged edges, searching.

Bone magic was finicky—for good reason. Risky even with the fae in her blood, and she holds them up to the light when she finds them: two perfect pulled wisdom teeth. She turns them in her palms, checks for stains, scars, divots, cavities, anything that might send an old spell awry.

Satisfied, she presses the teeth into the loose, dark loam of the terra-cotta pot, whispers prayers she knows she shouldn’t.

Her heart opens wide like a mouth.

*

In the day, she puts the pot on her sunny window sill.

In the night, she hides it away from the mice, in a box beneath her bed.

*

After ten days, the first white emerges, two pale crests of bone, no bigger than pumpkin seeds. Something inside her own belly warms, and she wants to brush away the flecks, slip her fingers gently beneath the ground to warm it, to cradle what she knows is now growing.

She thanks long nameless gods instead, wonders what she must give, if the old mores are true.

In the day, she puts the pot in the sun.

At night, in the box, safe and sound.

*

One month and the first of the transplants, full arches of spines sticking up from the ground.

Two months and most of their bodies are out, sitting upright, chins tucked between knees. A thin layer of skin coats them both, glistening, translucent like milk. Veins, blood, organs pulse.

Three months and it’s a boy and a girl, she can see. Their hands are still roots underground. Their ears: soft whorls, flushed pink.

She fights the urge to lift the heads and see.

At night, before bed, she sings.

*

It is almost morning and too soon, she knows, when the wet squeal wakes her from the pale.

She turns on the light. Her pulse fills her ears.

On the carpet next to the bed, the box is overturned, ruined and bent, terra-cotta broken and spilled. A trail leads to the bathroom: of blood, perlite, mouse heads, mouse tails, fingernails, and dirt.

Acid licks up the fist of her throat, as she leaps to her feet and runs to the bathroom.

She knew there would be differences between a bone child and a human. She knew, but still folds herself over the sink and vomits into the porcelain.

What she sees, sitting upright on the tile, is a baby boy—her baby boy—strong and plump and smeared with blood. In his mouth, he crunches something, working his jaw from side to side, chewing with a full set of teeth. They are sharp and long and barely fit in his mouth. In his hands, he tugs at the mangled body of a mouse, rips a leg off with ease while she watches. When he coos up at her, and smiles, a red slip of entrails drips out and down his chest.

She knows the answer, even as she asks herself: Where is my girl? She knows, as she yanks back the shower curtain. As she looks behind the door, in closets, under beds. When she picks up the box, sifts through the dirt.

Back in the bathroom, the mouse is gone, and the boy is a mess of crimson. He crawls towards her, leaving a smear of blood on the tile behind.

She looks at herself in the mirror, as the boy tugs on her leg and tries to stand. Her pale, crow-scratched skin. Red hair with strands of glittering gray. She could be a new mother, flustered and frayed. A long day gone, and a long night ahead.

In the bath, she carefully cups soapy water over his head, washing the blood from his skin. His eyes are clear and brown, like hers. His hair, too, floating licks of red.

When she dries him off after, with a big fluffy towel—when she hums the old songs, starts to file his teeth, sways the dance all mothers seem to know—her heart could be a bird in her chest. A flower unfolding to the sun.

Blue Mama

by Emma Brewer | Jul 22, 2021 | flash fiction

Without thinking too deeply about it we presume ourselves to be adequate parents. The baseline assumption is that we would do anything for the babies; we would fight, we would kill. Tonight somehow they outnumber us, although there are still two of them. The one who was born first has learned to escape his crib and howls for his twin to join him; the smaller twin rages to be let out. It’s been three hours of bedtime and we have given up. We’re crouched on the floor in our room, staring into the baby monitor’s small window, where they appear as if in the bottom of a fish tank: murky, grayscale, dull but for the flashes of eyes as they scream. This is when we see her in the monitor. We see her body, her drifting hair, the billowing arms, each one reaching for a twin’s mouth. She’s between the cribs, a cloudy heart between cages.

We’ve always understood ourselves to be proper parents, quick in a catastrophe, selfless. Maybe we can blame the day we’ve had. Because I spent today assisting that one surgeon who hates me, and after we removed a six-pound mass from a sleeping golden retriever, and I — swiftly, sublimely — stitched up the incision, he whispered think fast and slipped the tumor into my arms and watched me drop it, watched the flecks of blood smatter while it wobbled at my feet. And you, arriving at yet another job interview, realized you’d worn your sneakers and scrambled to buy new, unaffordable dress shoes and — panicked, sweating — threw your own shoes into a dumpster outside the interview. And of course, of course they were already gone when you went digging for them after.

We believe, we have faith, that we are sufficient parents, and we’ve spent the evening laughing at our failures while negotiating pieces of nourishment into the babies’ mouths and then our own, while somewhere deep in ourselves a light shutters, a sun darkens, bones prickle in the sockets. We see her at the same time. Through the crackling of the monitor we hear our younger twin say blue and our older twin say Mama. We see her reach for their faces and what happens is a pause.

Inside the pause we recognize each other. The pause is prolonged by each of us witnessing the other one pause. That horror drifting over our children’s bodies could be a demon thirsty for innocents, could be a witch with a pair of wicked changelings, could be an apparition born of shared delirium. She may be stronger than we are, she may lack our feeble need for rest and protein, our shameful limits; she may want nothing more than to draw from an inhuman wellspring of patience and sing our children to sleep. And you and I, we hold our breath to see what will happen, to find out if the ghost haunting our nursery is a better parent than we are. We take a long terrible moment, before pelting to the room, before flooding it with light and sound.