Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Aw shit,” I said. “A congressman. How long before every agency with a three-letter name shows up to stomp around in their fancy suits?”

“About half an hour,” said Meyers. ‘What do you think, Carolyn? Should we give them the traditional cold shoulder run around, or opt for the more upbeat ‘fuck you, let’s see the paperwork?'”

“Listen to your heart,” I said. Returning to the grisly scene, I nodded to Elena, who had the latest iPhone and a good data plan. “Get me this guy’s Wikipedia page,” I said. “Full version, none of that mobile crap.”

As she struggled to peel off her gloves, I grabbed our CSI photographer and began pointing out salient points. Roberts was a good guy, and a valuable sounding board, especially when I was mad. We had a standing agreement: no bullshit, just honesty and maybe a little snark when things were in a jam,

“Look at this,” I said, pointing at the jagged hole in the man’s lower back, from which a coiled snake of small intestine peeked coyly. “It looks like he was sawed open by a carpenter. Kidney’s missing. Organ theft?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Roberts said, snapping. “I think that he got stabbed through the kidney and they carved it out, along with all the other bits, to make it look like an organ harvest.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what proof do you have of this supposition, sugar?”

“None whatsoever, Carolyn, other than the cuts themselves. Someone was in a hurry, and if I needed a kidney, I wouldn’t take one that badly damaged.”

“He was the chair of the House committee on green energy,” Elena said, intent on her phone. “He had a rating of ‘zero hunks of coal’ from the Electric Generators’ Association.”

“Sounds like a motive to me,” I said.

“Sounds like a hunch at best,” Roberts said. “Congressmen have a lot of enemies and even more frenemies.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

CRESTFALL CRUISES ITINERARY

The world’s leader in discount and thrifty ocean cruises is proud to present the following activities for our cruise to Canada:

Around the World Brew Tour – Take a tour from Mexico to Canada and back with our top of the line brews, all available for a low per-can cost.

Stairwell Olympics – Break a sweat and watch the pounds melt away as you run up and down Utility Stairwell 7b.

The Yellow Experience – Get those art skills flowing and channel your inner Picasso as you and your fellow passengers repaint Funnel Two.

Good Neighbor Games – Some of our passengers haven’t been buying enough optional add-ons! Join the Sales Squad to help rectify this and earn .05% cash back for every hundred items sold!

Sponsor A Shipmate – Not to be nosy, but would you be willing to serve some basic crew functions with a smile? If so, we have immediate entry-level openings that can be exchanged for future travel vouchers with Crestfall!

Couples Cruise Crawl – Learn the ins and outs of our mighty vessel, as well as your partner, with our innovative program that combines talking therapy and deck-swabbing.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

After you’ve been dead for about a century, you run out of things to do.

The last of my followers crumbled to dust decades ago. Nobody’s much impressed by the cantrips and magicks I can summon anymore, since they have brighter flames available on their cell phones. Cell phones! If I concentrated my hardest, at my absolute most powerful, I could have exchanged a few words with an agent in Philadelphia. Now, half the folks in town are on the horn with people across the world, and I just don’t get it.

Those old robes have rotted away too, and the stuff that people wear today just doesn’t suit my need for ostentation. Back in the day, you needed to be colorful just to be seen at the head of ten thousand troops; a dark suit and shades really can’t cut it. So I usually just wear a jogging suit. It complies with the terms of my parole and keeps me from getting nicked for indecent exposure, such as it is.

So what’s there for an old lich to do? Nobody’s impressed by my tricks, and even if they were, I’ve got no desire to rule such lazy, entitled people. So I mostly pass my days with community service and outreach.

Obviously, they don’t want these wizened, mummified old hands spooning out soup to the homeless. Even though the runes of blue fire etched into my palms are strictly hypoallergenic, their rules apply to all the undead, and I sure can sympathize with not wanting zombies near anything edible. But thanks to the eldritch energies that will power my husk for another few millennia, I have a great ability to speak with and understand the dead. So I mostly work as a translator.

Liches are pretty rare–the only other one in the city, Lady Vermilda, hasn’t left her penthouse since 1887–so I’m very much in demand by people who want to understand the risen corpse of Uncle Lester now that his jaw’s fallen off. I get a lot of requests to talk to ghosts, too, but most of the time there isn’t even anybody there but an overactive imagination. If you want someone to speak to your vivid imagination, try a politician.

But the one thing I do enjoy, as much as anything can be said to be enjoyable in this endless purgatory, is sitting down to chat with the newly dead.

Now, what souls do once they leave the body, I don’t rightly know. Nobody does, other than the ghosts, and they ain’t telling. Can’t be that great, I figure, if they came back screaming, but they never answer when I ask. But it can take a while, sometimes months or years, for the soul to depart toward that great unknown. Some never do, naturally, and rise from the grave. Not liches like me–we have to do that part ourselves–but zombies, ghasts, wights, skeletons, what have you. Even the occasional vampire, though those guys kind of suck. We can’t all have romance novels written about us, I guess.

Peaceful Rest Meadows is the biggest cemetery in town that’s still accepting applicants, and I’ll usually go there to kick around and chat up the newcomers. Most of them have nothing to say, being just empty husks, but I get a few who need someone to talk to. Like I said, I kind of like talking with someone who has about the same going for them that I do, and I can claim the “after-death counseling” on my community service sheet. It’s so old the dang thing is written on vellum, but I still have a hell of a lot of hours to work off.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Great curving thunderheads
Loomed once across anxious skies
Now just another cloudburst

Swarms of clouds attend it
Even a few tornadoes spin to life
Grandchildren at an elder’s knee

A nebulous swirl, ever downgraded
Nameless now, eye closed forever
Abstract puffs of weather radar green

Once whipped the billows high
Seawater surging inland, relentless
Now a gentle blanket of raindrops

How could fear have ever sprung
From spun mists now so toothless
Cumulus named only to be forgotten

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Harvey Mills flicked on the neon sign that had buzzed under Mills & Son Butchers for decades. The word “open” sprang to electric red life, as did an animated falling cleaver. It was supposed to fall on a neon pig, but the big had burned out long ago and Harvey didn’t see the need to replace it. After all, he already had all the customers he was ever going to have, no matter what he chose to decorate the place with.

Behind the counter, Harvey Mills Jr. was already sharpening the knives. The poor boy was simple, but over the years that it had been just the two of them he’d proved that there was an admirable butcher behind those thick glasses. Best of all, the boy didn’t ask questions.

Hellen Branderburger was the first customer of the day. She pulled her beat-up old Eagle around back. “Good morning, Harvey,” she said. “I’ve some meat to submit to you for butchery. Think you can make me a nice pot roast out of it?”

Harvey peeked under the sheet. It was Hellen’s identical twin sister, Ellen Brandenburger, sans a few vital bits. He looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“You know that we had solved our differences long ago by agreeing only to go out on alternating days,” Hellen said. “I had tired of her abuse. This was the last time she took two days in a row by getting up early. Luckily, no one wil notice.” She flashed a pile of hundred dollar bills beneath Harvey’s nose. “Will they?”

“I do believe I’ve had a sudden attack of amnesia,” Harvey said, “for I do declare I can’t recall a word you’ve said after ‘pot roast.'” He turned to Junior. “Get it started.”

The last person to arrive was the librarian, J. Custerwood Davis. He’d been hunting, and had what looked like a pair of buck under a tarp in his truck that doubled as the local bookmobile. “I’d very much appreciate it if you could get the horns off clean,” he said to Harvey. “They’d be lovely to decorate the reading room in the library with, I think.”

Harvey lifted the other part of the tarp, revealing the body of Gussert McLaughlin, shot through the head. “And this one?”

“That one’s going in with the venison to make some nice sausages for the library opener,” said Davis. “It also means someone won’t have anymore overdue books or constantly be taking showers in the bathroom. It won’t be a problem, will it?”

Shaking Davis’s hand, Harvey took the proffered $100 bills that had been concealed in the friendly outstretched paw. “I have a sudden sensation of memory loss,” the butcher said. “I’ll have to avail myself of a book on the subject.”

“I can help with that, I think,” said Davis.

“Junior!” Harvey cried. “Get it started.”

As the neon light flicked off, Junior walked over to his father. “What if they tell somebody?” he said haltingly.

“We’ve done a little butchery for everybody in town, Junior,” replied Harvey. “I think we’ll be just fine.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

I was on the Ferris Wheel at Funworld in Bucksworth Bay when I saw something really strange. The big velociraptor statue they have above the Raptor Ringer started to move.

And then the dinosaur started to talk.

As its polyurethane feet split from the backing and it lurched forward, it told me that the time had come for it to revive. For despite its false-seeming form, it was in fact the True Raptor, the One Raptor, and that the time for his assumption into Dino Heaven had come.

I asked how this could be possible, and he said that I had to exceed my narrow mind, and that, once he had reentered Dino Heaven to sit alongside his father, the great T-Rex, everything would be clear. All the time I’d spent on this miserable disk would be worth it.

Turns out they left the eggs they use to make cookies out in the sun a little too long. I ate a bad snickerdoodle and started seeing and hearing things. Could’ve been worse, though. One guy in line for the Cyclotron said he saw one of the carnies pull himself head off and let it float up like a balloon. They caught him on top of the Turbo-Drop trying to retrieve it.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The alien steepled its feelers. In the harsh lighting of the basement, the gesture was impossible to ignore–a very human gesture, deliberately made to evoke unease.

“You will provide the necessary materials,” it said through its translator widget. “Or we will conclude our business here in a manner you are sure to find unpleasant.”

As it always did when the creature ‘spoke,’ the housewife’s dog howled and cowered at her feet. “What will you do,” she said, “once the lightning rod is in place?”

“That is none of your concern,” the widget said. “You agreed to our terms, you allowed us to set up our base here in secret, and we have not failed to notice your embrace of the fruits of our partnership. We have slowed the passage of time, reversing the toll of years upon you. We have offered you precious metals that you have traded for your mundane scrip. The lightning we will harness is essential, and that is all you must know.”

“How do I know you’re not just going to…moonwalk…out of here and join an army of…lightning-summoned aliens to take over the planet?”

Her business partner seemed almost amused at this. “That was a long time ago. We are actually trying to extract ourselves from this wretched world.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!