Let the Free Fiction Roll - If the Illusion is Real

Saturdays are always good, but add good free free fiction and they're awesome!  We have fiction from a couple of cool sties/'zines that I haven't linked to before Goldfish Grimm's: Spicy Fiction Sushi and Hello Horror and two issues of the outstanding Waylines (I missed one so there's fiction from two issues at once.  Mea Culpa!).  There's also great audio fiction, flash fiction, and pulps.  Huzzah! [Art from "Samsara" linked below]


Fiction
• At Goldfish Grimm's: Spicy Fiction Sushi:  "Arcana of all Ages" by M. Bennardo. Fantasy.
      "Night had fallen during the wagon ride from Constantinople, and darkness had not added to the charms of the journey…"

• At Mad Scientist Journal: "Dr. Derosa’s Resurrection: Part I" by R.G. Summers. Science Fiction.
       "I knew that my family wasn’t going to make a big deal out of my eighteenth birthday. It would have been nice if they’d at least been there, but with Dad incarcerated in a Trongodian prison and Uncle Bruce doing business in Egypt, it just wasn’t going to happen."

Now Posted:  Waylines #4 and #5:

• "Chip's Six Attempts at Popularity" by Jake Kerr
     "Beside his Xbox and under his Star Trek poster stood his patched together temporal displacement device. It had taken Chip six months of painstaking and secretive work to finish it, and the theoretical models all looked dubious at best. But it was a chance, and a chance was all he wanted."

• "Samsara" by Rachel Acks.
     "But a year and a half from now, I'll get to hear your own complaints in something close to real time instead of a recorded vid. And I'll be oh-so-sympathetic, I promise, down on the surface of HD 108874. Or what did you say the Chinese techs were calling it - Dragon's Horn? Less of a mouthful at least. Maybe I'll take the vid feed on a little stroll through a grassy meadow, so you know what you're waiting for."

• "Cadence" by Samantha Kymmell-Harvey.
     "Laszlo selected a glass test tube from the rack on his bookshelf. Inside was a minute section of sea sponge wrapped in copper mesh. It was his newest model of vocal filter, designed to remove the poison from a rusalka’s voice."

• "The Elevator Man" by David Halpert.
     "For the mayor, however, it was the election that weighed heavy on his mind. He poured himself a fifth of scotch and rested his weary head. The stuff tasted like battery acid on his tongue but did the trick well enough. Like most people he longed to see the surface, not the made-up facsimiles that adorned the plasma windows but the real thing miles above."

Now Posted: Hello Horror Issue Four.

• "Canticle of Tongues" by Gabrielle Friesen. Horror.
      "I am entombed in a place of stone and walls. When the soldiers arrived, I ran and hid in shadows, hoping they would pass me by. They followed me into the caves. For days I stayed hidden, until exhaustion and thirst caused me to faint. I awoke in an enclosed room, damp as the rest of the caves."

• "Doug Looks" by Benjamin Revermann. Horror.
     "The halfway house is called “The Nuthatch”.  On his first day, Doug is sent two blocks from the Nuthatch to “Connie’s Kitchen” to work.  Given the choice between dishwasher and cook, he chooses dishwasher."

• "Mothers Nature" by Gary Clifton. Horror.
     ""Casper?" Margot smiled, her dark eyes reflecting the serene, beautiful bottomless depth of an isolated well.  "I take that as a high compliment from a man of your experience."  Detective Margot Platt had just apprehended Casper after a fourteen block foot chase through east Dallas.  A thousand hours of surveillance had finally paid off."

• "Stealing Three" by Chris Castle. Horror.
      "So what are we talking about here?” I ask, as he paces around the room.  It’s the same routine each time; twenty two steps to one end of the room and twenty one back, as if the room somehow shrinks every time he sets out on one of his mini pilgrimages."

• "Inside The Square" by Eric Huxley. Horror.
     "“What?” I mumbled to myself.  Who was calling me?  It was a crank call.  It happened all of the time.  No one really liked me.  I talked with a slight lisp.  Though it was barely noticeable, it turned out that it was a major, people repelling personality flaw.  They called me “lispy” most often.  I’d come to accept that as it was the kindest of the insults.  I’d gotten much worse, along with some bloody noses."

• "Old Tom" by Steven Finkelstein. Horror.
     "Tonight he wasn’t happy about being there. Even with the holiday pay, he didn’t feel like king of anything. Or maybe he felt his actual self, a menial wage slave, stuck guarding an empty building. Unskilled labor, because he couldn’t find anything better. It was good to have time alone with one’s thoughts, except when those thoughts kept going back to a sour and resentful place."

• "Pantechnicon" by Rob Boffard. Horror.
     "It wouldn’t stop pulling to the left. Every time Langa thought he’d got it under control, in the lane, with the steering wheel humming in his grip, he’d find it drifting over. On the edge of his vision, the white line would slip under the bonnet and then the clunk-ka-clunk of the cats’ eyes would come rumbling up through the car."

• "Oskalopl" by Graham Tugwell. Horror.
     "He’d found a book. He’d followed the instructions he found inside and he did something wrong, or did something right, and his little brother had died."

• "Motherhood" by Cristina Vega. Horror.
     "The baby’s formless, squashed face began to contort.  It had been making strained, breathless puffs that would break into shrill screams rivaling a mindless dog, deaf to pleas to stay quiet.  Her father would kick the family dog if it got too loud and she couldn’t do that with the baby.  Maybe if she stared ahead and kept pushing the cart down the aisle it would find respite in being moved."

Flash Fiction and Poetry
• At Goldfish Grimm's: Spicy Fiction Sushi: "The Mirror" by Arwen Kuttner. Fantasy.
• At Silver Blade: "Stardust" by Lindsey Duncan. 
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Backup" by Amanda Schoen. Science Fiction.
At Hello Horror:

• "Homecoming" by Kerry Hartjen. Horror. Poem. 
• "Cannibal School Picking Up Johnny" by Roo Bardookie. Horror.
• "The Landscape" by Richard Crawford. Horror. Poem. 
• "Still" by DW Gillespie. Horror.

Audio  Fiction
• At Every Photo Tells: "The Lonely Bones" by Harris Tobias. Science Fiction.
      "When a psychologist turns private investigator, he has to use skills he didn’t know he had." 

• At PodCastle: "Juan Caceres in the Zapetero’s Workshop" by Derek Künsken.
      "Begging for food would not work, dressed as he was in all his goblin finery.  He traded his white school shirt for a stained t-shirt to a kid whose goblin sickness had wrapped his fingers in fine scales.  Another kid, huffing into a bag of ground pixie, traded Juan Caceres his old shorts for the school slacks.  Only the kid’s fingers had gone green.  There was still time for him."

Other Genres

• Fiction at Online Pulps!: "Puzzle in Peril" by Robert Leslie Bellem, 1949, "No Cause for Alarm" by John L. Benton . 1938, "The Fatal Test" by Raymond Lester. 1919.
• Flash Fiction at Every Day Fiction: "Chaarging the Silver Slope" by Alexis A. Hunter.