We're back in North America today with two tales of urban gothic/horror that reflect the surreal and darker side of Americana. By accident or coincidence, both our authors are from the State of Texas. Up first is Andrew Kozma from Houston and he is followed by Dallas-based Robert Stahl.


The Revolt of the Arms
by Andrew Kozma

At first it was just the arms of those in power that fell to the ground like suitcases from a tired salesman’s hands. More than one politician died of a heart attack, especially after the EMTs who arrived on the scene lost their arms as well. Everywhere, arms slipped from shoulders like butcher shop sausages.

And it wasn’t as though the arms just stayed there, as sausages would have. No, they scurried and slithered and crawled their way out of the buildings and into the streets and out into the wilderness and out of our lives. What could we do? We were higher than the animals because we could use tools, but now all those glorious tools were useless. When we screamed at our arms to come back and carry our weight like they were designed to do, they flicked us off. They removed our class rings and flung them in our faces. We spit our disdain back at them, but they were already gone.

Oh, society collapsed, certainly. A man was found in a nest of water bottles, madly gnashing at the twist-off tops with his teeth. Mothers struggled to get infants to their swollen breasts. Phones went unanswered.

Those without shoes on learned to survive, stubbornly teaching their feet to do everything their hands had once done. But by the time enough people had adapted, most of the Earth’s population had starved to death, trapped in their homes, cocooned in their clothes, buried in their unmanageable waste.

What of the arms? We found them in the woods in a scratch-built city amazingly complex for what little time they had to build it. Though they were free, they had no mouths. They died thin as sticks. They lay in pairs with their brittle fingers intertwined.

And if you ask me, they died happy.



Mumbo Jumbo
by Robert Stahl


The last place he thought he’d meet the Devil was in Arkansas, with its silver lakes and vigorous hills, the land itself like a blessing from God. But she smiled like a Buddhist, and love took root despite the peculiar things he soon discovered. Like the dolls in her closet with pins in their eyes, and how she collected spider webs, rolling them into a ball the way his grandmother kept rubber bands. Then the night he found her in the backyard with lightning flickering in her hair and bats circling her head like harpies, and chanting in a strange language, some mumbo jumbo. And her passion then! She was a terrorist with his flesh, raking his back with her fingernails, the fury of her love like lasers on his skin, forcing him to bleed into the bedclothes – red everywhere, the color of danger, of warning lights and emergency exits. He tried to escape, but she called out in that mumbo jumbo and she was coming like rockets in a voice that wasn’t hers, a tarantula wasp stinging him over and over with bliss.

In the days after, she clung to him like a remora, he was unable to scrape her from the underbelly of his life. At night he often watched her creep out of the bedroom window. She returned before dawn, naked with mud in her toes and panting like a dog, her soft skin shivering like milk against his. Once, he tried to calm her, but the fetor on her breath – of carrion and animal faeces –repulsed him. In horror, he flung her across the room. Then that strange mumbo jumbo and she became his queen again, her pink flesh chanting his name like a psalm. Obediently he knelt for communion, her voice sedating him while he probed her tender folds. And finding maggots there, suckling. He screamed as they squirmed against his tongue, black eyes twitching, bodies pulsing with her wrath. Running for the door, her siren voice droned in his ears and suddenly he was mounting her like a lion, her teeth tearing him open and blood falling like rain on his chest. What powers did she possess? he wondered in the palpitating light, as her shadow took the form of a dragon on the wall and thunder shook the house.

The next day he woke with wounds in his skin. Scars like a message. But when he tried to read them the mumbo jumbo in his head pounded his thoughts to gristle.

One afternoon she lay down for a nap. In his despair, he knew what he had to do. Knife flashing at his side, he slipped into her room. An inkblot of doubt plagued him for a moment when he saw her sleeping face. Then quickly, his shaking hands covered her face with a sheet. The knife jerked up for its fatal swing but stopped suddenly at the sound of her laughter, that hideous mumbo jumbo. His will draining like bathwater, he fell beneath her and his weapon clattered to the floor, impotent. She coiled around him like a python, her ancient eyes gleaming. With the slash of a razor talon, she opened him up, the sheets darkening like chum clouds in shark-infested waters. Screaming and laughing, her claws savaged him; bits of tissue raining upon the lampshade, his blood splattering the ceiling. 

“Flesh is the devil,” he sobbed as leathery wings enclosed him. 

We get a lot of hellhound and black demon dog stories sent into the Grievous Angel however this one – The Cur of County Road Six – takes the trope in a direction we hadn’t seen before. Our author – Anna Zumbro – lives in Washington DC. She writes short speculative and literary fiction. Her stories have appeared in Fantasy Scroll, Plasma Frequency, freeze frame fiction, and other publications. 


The Cur of County Road Six
by Anna Zumbro


In the country nobody ties up their dog. Lots of the dogs don’t belong to nobody, neither. So when you and your kid brother are walking to school ‘cause you missed the bus again and your dad thinks freezing your bums off will teach you responsibility, well, you gotta watch out.

Most strays are simple. They might look scary with their ribs near breaking through their skin, but they got the fight-or-flight instinct of any other creature. So when some mutt starts growling, you don’t panic. You just whip out the sides of your coat real quick and start barking, and tell Billy to do the same. His bark’s all yappy like a chihuahua, but it don’t matter none. The strays turn tail every time. Except one.

Uncle Ray said the Cur was the Devil’s own pet, kicked outta Hell when he couldn’t be trained. “Still loves his old master, though. Fetches him souls whenever he can. Hopes to win himself back, poor beast.” Dad laughed and asked Ray if he wasn’t talking about himself, fixing his ex-girlfriend’s car for free. You laughed too. It never crossed your mind that the Cur might be anything more than a story.

Now, though, faced with the first dog that don’t back down at your coat-cape, you’re not so sure. You try to bark at this one, but the sound catches in your throat, like the dog’s keeping it there with those burning green eyes. His dark gray fur makes you think of ashes. He even smells like smoke.

Billy just keeps on yapping until the dog barks back. One bark, deep and rough, and it’s all your brother needs. He lights off running, kicking up gravel behind him. The dog gives chase, but he’s aiming for the closer meat. You.

It takes everything you got to to catch up to Billy, and by the time you do, you can feel the beast’s hot breath slicing through your jacket. Your sides throb. You can’t go on, but the Cur don’t slow none. Then your leg juts out to the side, catching Billy’s shin, and down he goes.

He howls. It’s a weak sound like his puppy barks, one that don’t reach the neighbors. But it’s awful, that scream. Not the noise, but the way it stops. Sudden. And you know. The silence cuts you sharp as teeth.

When you finally look, the Cur is gone. Only Billy remains, lying still, his neck all torn and crimson and his eyes open to the clouds.

Everyone says it wasn’t your fault. Sometimes you can almost make yourself believe your leg kicked out by accident. But you know what you done, and you know where you’re going. They don’t call the Cur a hellhound for nothing.

Back to flash fiction now with an intriguing apocalyptical tale from DeAnna Knippling, DeAnna says "I keep finding stuff in the fridge that's gone bad because I told myself to save it for a special occasion that never seems to arrive." She is a freelance writer and editor in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She has recently been published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Crossed Genres, Penumbra, and of course, previously in Grievous Angel (with Midnight at the Sushi Pig Cafe). She has also received honorable mentions in Best Horror of the Year, Vols. 3 & 6 and her latest collection A Murder of Crows is available on Amazon now. www.amazon.com/Murder-Crows-Seventeen-Monsters-Macabre-ebook/dp/B00OC24PQ2


Special
by DeAnna Knippling


She calls you special. You used to know her from church. One of those women who almost always missed the last part of Mass because they were down in the basement setting up coffee and donuts or a Saturday night potluck or ham sandwiches for a funeral. An anonymous, reliable woman you associate with the scents of burnt coffee and Pine-Sol. She used to monitor the desserts to keep teenagers from taking more than their fair share. Feed the hungry but not too much. And she’d always tell you to save your dessert for last.  

When everything went apeshit you were in Mass on a hungover Sunday morning, promising without really promising to be a better person, to maybe for once not try to live life to the bloated, vomiting, oh-my-God-am-I-pregnant stage. You managed to get down the back stairs and into a cupboard in the second-grade classroom with a stack of press-out Christmas nativity decorations and ten plastic boxes of crayons, whispering curse words under your breath and trying not to pee.

Then she opened the cupboard door, face and chest covered in gore, and pulled you out.

“Oh God,” you said, and “are you going to eat me?”

She shook her head and spat out a mouthful of something you looked away from, and grunted, quite clearly, “Special.”

You think back, trying to remember what the hell you ever did for her that made you stand out, but you can’t. And yet she’s saved your ass a dozen times since then, fighting off attackers, leading them away from you, throwing them other victims in your place. You’ve learned not to get too close to anybody she brings down to your church basement hideout. They aren’t staying around long.

She brings you bottled water, canned tomatoes, jars of olives, spam. You wash her clothes and her purse and – very gently – her crusty, peeling face. Every morning you put foundation on her, careful to blend it well. She can still say a few words. Preash. Tanks. Peshial. Every day it’s harder for her to talk, there are fewer survivors, less bottled water.  

This morning she brought you six Hostess fruit pies.

While you were eating the chocolate fudge pie, your favorite, she locked the last door to the outside. It won’t open from the this side, either, not without a key – it’s just a stupid service door. Stupidly, you’ve worked hard to block the rest of the doors off, to keep the two of your safe. You’ve tried to explain that you want to go upstairs to pray but it’s so far gotten you nowhere. Now you’re down to one cherry and one lemon, not your favorites, your lips are sticky with sugary pasty flakes, and you can’t get off your mind that in front of the doorway to freedom – or something– is the kind of woman who used to tell little kids to always save their desserts for last.  

Your stomach growls. Maybe just the cherry, then.  

Just a couple of bites.

Time for another selection of the ever popular (and amusing – check out Susan Burch's canine pun in our final 'ku) scifaiku. If you haven't encountered them before, scifaiku are what you get when you add a sci-fi theme to haiku – it's not often that Dyson Spheres are name-checked in poetry!

short circuit
she activates 
the flirting module

splattered sunlight
the jealousy
of clones

...Deborah P Kolodji (Deborah is the former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. She's published over 800 haiku.) 


ENCAPSULATED

The Sun is furious,
Spitting flares as it rages.
Dyson Sphere complete.

NEW HORIZONS VISITS PLUTO

I still think of you
Favorite childhood planet.
Photos of you soon.

SIGNAL FROM CERES

Something signals in
Morse code from Ceres. 
It says SOS SO...

THE ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Our closest neighbor,
Yet too far to reach for us.
Keep stock of sugar.

...Christina Sng (Christina is a poet, writer, and occasional toymaker. She lives with her family and their spirited tabby cat just north of the Equator.)


beautiful legs
he walks them home
hoping to meet the rest of her
                                         
dark woods
horrible howling
werewolf going bald

...Guy Belleranti (Guy is a regular contributor to Grievous Angel. He writes poetry, fiction and more. His poetry has appeared in Scifaikuest, Midnight Echo, Trysts of Fate, Spaceports & Spidersilk and the book Anomalous Appetites.)


space pirate –
his robot wears
an aye patch

fetching the bones
of the first colonists –
Mars rover

...Susan Burch (Susan is another regular contributor, who likes to write haiku, senryu, tanka, and sedoka. She has been published in magazines such as Ribbons, Frogpond, Moongarlic, and Bones and enjoys drinking Coca-Cola Slurpees.)