dreamszilla

A real estate bargain turns out to include some unwelcome extras in Bruce Costello's creepy tale. First impressions are far from good. A macrocarpa hedge, grown into trees, shadows the whole property. The house has rotting timbers, sagging spouting, dog's leg downpipes and lichen-covered cream paintwork, stained ginger from a rusty roof. The only tidy thing about the place is the diminutive real estate agent. Wearing a dark suit, white shirt and wide tie, he waits on the ramshackle veranda, watching the prospective buyer negotiate the broken path to the front door. "She's a bit rough," the agent says, looking up at the client, who's tall and upright with a scarred forehead, "but a good doer-upper with heaps of potential. Feel free to wander around. There's nobody living here." The client starts with the kitchen, which has a coal range, a bench with peeling green formica and walls stained nicotine-yellow. Cobwebs dangle from the ceiling a...

via American Short Fiction https://ift.tt/3CjnUgY

A reprint of Tim Macy's dark-as-pitch story about a cash-strapped couple whose life is changed by a magical teapot. The old woman running the roadside antique stand spoke with a heavy eastern accent. She skirted the table with two limping legs, hidden by loose, draping leather pants and no shoes. John couldn't help staring at the woman's black toes, as if she had once suffered frostbite. Everything about her seemed to have once suffered an altering cold. Alice and John were on their way home from visiting their oldest daughter in college. They had only stopped so John could stretch his sore back. Alice had been sleeping the entire drive, or pretending to sleep, while thinking about all of the money they had given their daughter as a loan. They had secretly had to scrap the idea of a small vacation so she could retake her algebra in the summer. The old woman approached John's wife. With her long fingers she pushed a brass teapot into Alice's hands. The trans...

Henri Colt tells of two European musicians with feelings for each other. Imre was the illegitimate son of a destitute Hungarian priest, presumably descended from King Stephen and Giselle of Bavaria. I was the son of an Orthodox Jew who escaped to a secular life in Paris. We met in high school, or rather, at the music store next to the school, where my heart fluttered while we played guitars instead of doing math. Discovering our musical talents, we hustled microphones from a street artist and traded money for an amplifier. Imre's knack for melody and the emotional expression of his falsetto made my lyrics, secretly written solely for him, surreal. After graduation, we rented a flat near the river. Our reputations grew, as did our success with women. My curly black hair and eye shadow sparked a bad boy image that rivaled my friend's angelic blond and blue-eyed disposition. They treated us like community property, and we played along. "Maybe you and I should have se...

In Matt Zandstra's post-apocalyptic tale, two struggling farm boys discover a scrap of ancient technology that can talk to them, and try to sell it without being discovered.  Here is how my brother and me killed all those people. It started with the landslides. Or, really, on the day after, when the rains had cleared. Our house sits safe on the rocky side of the hill, the last in a row of ruins. But we farm a few terraces half a turn round where the land is green and lush. Or it was. Pasture and crops had slumped in the night turning whole sections of the slope to slurry. Larry and I dragged the harvest cart round to see what we could salvage. We looked down at our fields from the path. Where there should have been rows of beets and tomatoes and beans and potatoes was just a slick of mud and broken up grass and bits of fence. It was as if the world had melted over our lives and smothered everything. We must have stared at the mess for ten minutes before Larry said, "Wel...