Happy 4th

Happy Independence Day to those who live in the US and my sincere sympathies to those for whom it is only another Monday. Many good things today, including a ton of great free fantasy stories from some of the great sites/'zines out there and a couple of cool audio fiction entries. So enjoy reading between the hot dogs and hamburgers.

The illustration is for "Maria’s Crossroads" in the fiction section.







@Fantasy Magazine: "Union Falls" by J. S. Breukelaar. Fantasy.

"But the girl was kicking off her other shoe and at the Casio before Deel had worked out but what. And what she pounded out with her feet was Meatloaf’s 'Bat Out of Hell.'"

@Strange Horizon: "One-Eyed Jack's" by Tracy Canfield. Speculative Fiction.

"She oughter do something about the Sing. She oughter do something about One-Eyed Jack's. But if she took one of them on, the other would have the valley to itself; and she wasn't certain she had the strength to fight them both, what with keeping one eye on I-79 every minute of the day."

Now Posted: Abyss & Apex 3rd Quarter 2011. Speculative Fiction.
"Death, Rebirth. An Heir, a Karakuri." by J.M. Sidorova.

“You are,” he agreed, switching to a careful English. “But you are an outsider. A foreigner. You can look in places we will consider inappropriate to look in.”

"Maria’s Crossroads" by Richard Marsden.

"She bit her lip, forced a smile and turned. Eligio stood across the street, under the orange glow of the forge. He had his apron about his waist and in his hand a hammer. Soot dusted his frame and his smile glowed white, in the fading of the day. He was a fine figure, and Maria knew that their twined fates broke the hearts of other girls."

"The Windfarmer’s Guest" by Lucas Ahlsen.

"On clear nights the moon bathed the land in azure. The windfarmer habitually climbed the main turbine to take advantage of the vista. It reminded him of the green times, before Earth Rot ravaged the land of its flora. But those visions only came to him in dreams and moonlight."

"Holes" by Rajan Khanna.

"Roughly the size of a tennis ball, it hovered, chest-high, above the road. It changed colors, swiftly cycling through the visible spectrum before disappearing, reappearing a moment later to start the cycle again. I wanted to touch it, but held myself back."

"Black Horticulture" by David Tallerman.

"There before me, crouched upon its flattened hilltop, was our monarch’s grand second home. There was the manor he’d built to keep his family safe from the turbulent state life of Pentigern, known as the most protected building in all the seven lands. There, in short, was the place they called the Green House."

Now Posted Clarksworld Magazine #58. Science Fiction.
"Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika" by Gord Sellar.

"The city of Plzeň, once famous for its lagers, will be famous someday for this little wooden-walled workshop instead. Humanity's nonhuman descendants will wander its reconstructed streets, making pilgrimages from the ancient brewery (site of the first grand mutiny) to this tiny workshop where the Lasherites trace their own singular lineage. "

"Frozen Voice" by An Owomoyela.

"They've made us wrestle sounds slippery as fish or burly as bears through our throats. They've made us stumble through conversations, even human-to-human, that we can hardly say. We can't pronounce our names. They named me Ulrhegmk, which in Hlerig means little mountain thing."

@AE: "Planetsmith" by Chris Stamp and Lynda Williams.

"They had hardly taken half a dozen steps when the clear yellow sky lit up with a crack of white-and-blue lightning, a single arc that stretched from horizon to horizon, rippling outwards for a second or two before dissipating."

Now Posted: Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #9. Fantasy.
"Dome of Florence, Part II" by Richard Marsden. Fantasy.

"Mahir continued to berate Filippo, both in heavily accented Italian and in his own dialect as well as a few choice curses from long-dead languages as they..."

"Demon-Fang" by R. Michael Burns. Fantasy.

"Having no means of crossing this life, I make swordsmanship my hiding place. –Yagyū Muneyoshi, Heihō Kaden Sho, 17th Century Somewhere in the deep of night,..."

"Of Caustic Salts and Casting Pits" by Scott Andrews. Fantasy.

"Turusha squeezed the draft-scarab’s reins and fought the urge to scrape her itching wrists against the seat of the cart. The line of creaking..."

@Beam Me Up: Episode#268 "Manifest Error" by Gary Cuba, read by Paul Cole and "Silicon Valley" by Duncan Shields. Science Fiction.

"'Manifest Error' - What would you do if you found that a delivery is late…..by a century! I describe the tale as an “uplift” story for the real world. [. . . and] a piece of flash fiction from Duncan Shields called 'Silicon Valley.' Duncan’s story tells the tale of a future where all the humans have disappeared in-explicitly."

@Clarkesworld: "Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika" by Gord Sellar, read by Kate Baker.

"The city of Plzeň, once famous for its lagers, will be famous someday for this little wooden-walled workshop instead. Humanity's nonhuman descendants will wander its reconstructed streets, making pilgrimages from the ancient brewery (site of the first grand mutiny) to this tiny workshop where the Lasherites trace their own singular lineage. "