Dominic Stabile

“We’re up here bakin’,” Les said to the man pissing on the back of his parents’ house. The man looked up, squinted at the two boys peeking down from the roof. We had crawled out Les’ second floor window, hoping for privacy.

“Nice to meet you, Bacon,” the man said. He zipped his fly and went back into the house.

We laughed and scooted to the wall. The window yawned above us, the noise of the party like distant radio chatter. Truly, it was more humid than hot. The shingles were slick with dew.

“You talked to that girl?” Les asked.

Every time he asked, it was like a knot loosened in my stomach. No one but Les ever asked about her.

I shook my head.

“You need to say something to her.”

“Every time I start to, I feel sick.”

Les sucked his teeth and said, “You just have to do it.” His voice never shook when he said things like that, a thing I envied about him.

We stared across the narrow yard. The dogwood tree and the dead garden were shadows in the orange fog.

“I could talk to her for you,” he said, and I looked at him.

“Why would you do that?”

“Why not?”

Still, his voice was steady.

“Because you don’t know her,” I said. “And I wouldn’t know what to say.”

He got up and paced toward the edge of the roof. He spat into the yard. His hands were in his pockets, and he stood in a cool way I could never manage — feet splayed out, shoulders rolled forward.

It took a moment for me to realize he’d pulled his phone.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Calling Dej. He’s got her number.”

“Why does Dej have her number?” I said.

I got up and started toward him. My foot slipped on the wet shingles, but I steadied myself.

“Give it to me,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said.

I reached for the phone and he jerked away from me, stepping closer to the edge of the roof.

I pulled back and said, “Watch the edge.”

“What’s up, Dej?” he said into the phone.

“Give it to me,” I repeated, reaching out again.

He swung back with an elbow, just missing my jaw. “Hold up.”

“Please, Les,” I said.

Les turned and looked at me. His features slackened in a familiar way. I wanted his sympathy, not a girlfriend. But it always made me feel like shit when he took pity on me. Pity was more demeaning than sympathy.

He lowered the phone and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, a three-dimensional triangle the size of a microwave floated out through his window and hovered between us. Its translucent, black exterior caught the afternoon light like a dark marble.

Les looked at me and sucked his teeth like I was playing a joke on him.

“I got to go,” he said into the phone and hung up. He put the phone in his pocket. He looked at his shoes and shook his head. After laughing to himself, he looked up at me. Purplish light from the triangle painted his face.

“What is it?” I asked.

Les sucked his teeth again, shaking his head. He stared at me.

The object began to hum, and the purple light brightened.

“Seriously, what is it?” I asked.

Les turned away and looked out over his yard. The fog had begun to thin. The dogwood tree had come into view, and I could make out the dead tomato plants hanging from stakes in the garden.

DOMINIC STABILE‘s bizarre fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Sanitarium Magazine, Atticus Review, and Fossil Lake III: Unicornado. He is a regular contributor to Manor House Productions’ horror podcast, which produces haunting audio dramas. His bizarro-noir book series, Stone, is published by Sinister Grin Press. Connect with Dominic on social media or at his website, dominicstabile.com.

Emma Munro

Ella tracked the untagged male to Costco. Like everyone else, he pushed a shopping cart, referred to a list and then selected goods. He wore the perfect outfit to blend in — minimal makeup, silk top, long flowing cardigan, soft flared culottes, and espadrilles. She wanted to grab him and holler, but that would expose his recklessness. Males had been torn apart for less, despite how few there were.

On her left, down past the freeze-dried mozzarella, he reached for a large bag of jerky. Ella palmed her tranquillizer gun and dialled a sedative dose. To camouflage the shot, Ella simultaneously coughed, dropped a box of snack bars and fired. The dart skimmed his bicep. Not surprisingly he spun away, darting back and forth between women bulk-buying for their households. His nimble footwork delighted Ella until she lost sight of him in small appliances. 
She dashed along the central aisle, checking left and right.

The male’s topknot flashed behind a tent display and disappeared.

“There you are,” she muttered. Wheeling about, Ella lumbered down the camping supplies aisle. No sign of him.

After several minutes, she turned a corner into the food court. Luck was on her side today. The male sat at a corner table stuffing purchases into his backpack. He looked around him constantly. Skinny but not malnourished, a rarity for the untagged. He’d need training; what male didn’t. But a woman had paid for those clothes and taught him manners, illegally of course.

“All right,” Ella whispered to herself, “this time make sure it’s a good shot.” She raised the dart gun. The dart glinted in the bright light, clattered to the floor. The male yelped and swung his backpack. Exposed to all, he fled toward the checkouts.

Women shouted to each other across the low tables and food counters. Shoot, shoot! He’s bolting. Get him.

Ella rushed, heart soaring at the thrill of the chase. A gang of women matched her pace, stamping, shouting promises. Hey sweet thing. Come home with us. We’ll do right by you.

She’d be kind to him, she’d take care of him and protect him. She had to get to him before any of these women remembered how close they were to rows and rows of weapons.

“Please,” the male cried from somewhere in the crowd.

“He is mine,” Ella bellowed. “I saw him first.” She crashed toward his voice, shoving women and shopping carts out of her way.

He’s breaking.

The male burst into a clear space not twenty feet away. He leapt across a closed checkout, spectacular in full sprint, backlit by the waning sun.

Ella darted him. He flung his arms out wide. Then he twisted and sunk to his knees. Ella hurried over, reached around his shoulders and supported him against her chest. The second dart had struck him dead in the heart.

“Are you okay?” Ella gently clipped his earlobe, tagging him. The tag winked red, then blue: registered. Legal.

He blinked.

“You’re mine now.”

EMMA MUNRO lives in the Blue Mountains of Australia with one wife and two cats. Her stories have appeared in Hashtag Queer LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology Vol. 1, Hello Horror, Pure Slush, Cosmos and other places. She was born in the year of the Tiger and collects books beyond her ability to read. She’s an avid couch-dreamer, gardener, and bush-walker, and is a sucker for life’s simple pleasures: food, coffee, friends, and reading. She reads for Flash Fiction Online. You can find her at www.emmamunro.com.au.

Joshua Storrs

Six nameless months passed before we noticed the statue of a crazed horse on the lawn of the old courthouse. Some could sense we put it there, but none remembered why. Black onyx, it rears back, eyes wild, tongue flailing. There’s a mark on its forehead.

Tonight we crowd around it. City council’s giving an award to the man who wrote the book about the statue. The rest of the town’s shown up to protest. We’re upset about all of it — the award, the book, and the statue. Makes us uncomfortable.

We can’t remember what happened in those six months after the statue showed up. Didn’t even see it till there were already leaves falling. Only thing anyone could say about that summer was that it was hot. That was eight years ago.

It’s a quiet town — the amnesia could be from boredom, but that wouldn’t explain why it feels like there’s folks missing. Nobody we can name, but there’s less of us now than there were before.

We’re still not looking at it, not really. We’ve got our signs and our flashlights and we’re closer than most of us are comfortable with, but we’re looking past it, at where the podium’s set up. The mayor’s saying some words about the man who put the town On The Map, as he says.

Really it was a professor who started it. Came in from New York a couple years ago on some kind of grant to study “Midwestern sculpture.” Ended up going nuts looking at the thing all day. We stopped looking at her, like there was some word of warning we forgot to pass on. She went back to New York and raised some hell at her university over the mark on the thing’s forehead. The story ended up in magazines. If anyone put us On The Map, it’s her, but that wasn’t the kind of On The Map city council could be proud of.

So this local man wrote a bestseller in response to the controversy. The book didn’t actually answer anything. It condemned the woman in New York and her pretentious attitudes about small town Midwesterners. The book confronted the statue, defended it, said it was a symbol of pride for a misunderstood people. Didn’t even mention the missing people. Its author knew just as much as anyone, which was nothing. But it started one of those “National Conversations,” and soon everyone had an opinion.

A handful of folks at this protest just want to go back to not having an opinion. They don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to think about the unsaid warnings that could have saved that professor’s brain. They don’t want to think about the six months that they can’t think about. But to get back to all that not thinking, they’ve got to hold a sign a while.

But for most of us it’s about those missing people. No names or records show anyone missing, but there were gaps in work schedules, shifts with no one to cover them. There were cars in parking lots that didn’t move for months before finally getting towed away, no owner on the registration. There’s a footprint in the air of this place, something we can’t see or taste, but still squeezing the air from our lungs.

The author’s knuckles turn white as he grips the podium and tries to speak, but we’re out-shouting the PA system. We’re not as angry about the statue as we are about someone being proud of it. He’s looking at the speech on his phone, but the screen keeps turning off because he can’t get a word in edgewise. He goes off script. He takes the mic off the stand and charges us with it. He tries to move around the statue to get in our faces — shouting, pointing, not looking at the crazed horse any more than the rest of us — but we move too, circling the statue opposite him, keeping it between us.

The cord of his microphone wraps around the base of the statue. This thing that puts our guilt in the center of town for us to glance at every day — to catch out of the corner of our eye as we eat breakfast across the street — something we don’t want to look at, but of course we do. This symbol of our delirium.

The cord wraps tighter. The man’s circles get shorter. The statue of the crazed horse stays between us. We are a vortex spinning round a bottomless pit. Falling closer, the friction lights a fire, and we drink his words like fuel.

JOSHUA STORRS is a finalist for the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction for his short story, “Holy Ground,” which he sold to a journal that never published it and then disappeared. When he’s not shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the name of God, he makes comic books with his friends, which you can read at JoshuaStorrs.com. Joshua lives in Pittsburgh and goes by @Bloombeard on twitter and instagram.