It's Black Friday and we've two pieces of microfiction for you now – both sharing the theme of artistic creativity – by E.E. King. E.E. King is performer, writer, biologist and painter who was described by Ray Bradbury as "Marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought provoking. I cannot recommend (her stories) highly enough."

A recipient of biological research and art grants, she has painted murals in LA California and Spain, worked with children in Bosnia, crocodiles in Mexico, frogs in Puerto Rico, egrets in Bali, mushrooms in Montana, archaeologists in Spain, butterflies in South Central Los Angeles and lectured on cruise ships in the South Pacific. In her spare time she gardens and raises egrets, kittens or whatever small creatures happen her way. Our illustration uses her painting The Birds Rose Into TheAir

Her novel Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife (all you need to know to choose the right heaven) has recently been issued. You can find out more at http://www.elizabetheveking.com and follow her on Twitter at @ElizabethEvKing


How Novels Grow

Samantha Green was walking by the library one early spring afternoon, when a short story ran from the building, grabbing her by the leg. “Shoo shoo,” she cried, trying to shake it off, but in reply the story merely growled. It clung to her with sharp, pointed metaphors, piercing her tweed trousers, her socks and possibly her heart.

“Go, she cried. “Go back where you belong!” But the story held her fast with a plethora of adverbs, lurid description, purple prose and superfluous adjectives.

Samantha was a plain, mousey spinster, who always wore her grey brown hair pulled taunt in a sever bun, shoulders hunched beneath her threadbare sweater. Her eyes were dwarfed behind large, rectangular horn rims. But now, bettered by bromides, her hair unwound. Curling, golden locks cascaded down her now lithe, straight back. Her glasses melted and luminous, double-lashed eyes gazed, two crystal, violets at the leaf green afternoon.

Birds twittered around her, occasional taking the stray end of a strand of golden hair in their beaks and flying it away from her valentine, fragile face.

“Don’t…. Stop…” she protested weakly in dulcet, tones.  The story gave another firm shake, and Samantha’s once bitten nails grew long, pale pink with ivory moons.

With a final toss, similes, and analogies flying like sweat, it opened wide a gaping red tunnel of analogy and swallowed her whole. Giving a satisfied burp, it strode off in search of a hero. 


The Furry and the Damned

Gerald was a sculptor, gifted with the fires of creation, cursed with fathomless canyons of despair. Unable to extricate himself from a lightless, twisting passage somewhere in his frontal cortex, he shot himself.

He’d come back as a graceful tortoiseshell cat. The thing was... (it was after all, the Island of the Damned) he knew he still had it in him – the ability to mold a hunk of clay into something beautiful, something alive …if only he’d had opposable thumbs. 

Many were trapped on the island – the furry and the damned – artists, poets and painters. Now thumbless and voiceless – transformed into dogs and cats they foraged the island for rats and other prey. They dared not consider who inhabited the rats? What undiscovered Milton lay behind sharp, yellow incisors? What Michelangelo peered from small rodent eyes? It was bad enough not to create…but to destroy by dinner was both horrible and banal. Once, after picnicking on a particularly feisty mouse, Gerald remembered that the mouse had been missing its left ear. He could not sleep. Not only did he suffer indigestion, he was sick with other pain….What if he had just eaten Van Gogh? Gerald had always worshipped Van Gogh’s use of color. His mad, vibrant brush strokes, his almost sculptural dimensionality.  

The mouse had been wild. Gerald recollected a crazy, starry look in its eyes… He lay awake on the cold gritty sand, stomach and heart aching. The next day he was a wreck. He needed at least fifteen hours of sleep a day just to feel feline. He tried existing on sea grass. But he grew hungry and his vision dimmed. Gerald recalled reading  – when he was still able to read – that cats lacking the taurine, found in seafood and meat, go blind. He began to catch the occasional minnow, hoping that the hollow eyes of fish hid no inner spark – but it was no use. His eyesight was definitely worsening. Gerald had always feared blindness. His whole world was form and light, structure and color. He must again become a carnivore – Milton and Michelangelo be damned. Besides, sea grass made him vomit. 

Limping on cooling sands at twilight in search of sustenance, Gerald did not hear the soft padded footsteps behind him. He was grabbed so quickly and was by then so weak, that at the first pierce of needle teeth, this heart gave out. He did not even have time to notice, before final darkness descended, that the hungry, red furred, coyote who snatched him was missing its left ear.

Remember when you were kid and walking to school and your best friend warned that you should never walk on the cracks in the pavement? Suzanne Conboy-Hill, who we last saw in June, is back with a cautionary tale about just what has/had/could happen if you do! (If you are wondering about the title - Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance”.) Suzanne describes herself as a British writer "with no genre allegiance". Her flash fiction and short stories have been published by Fine Linen Literary Journal, Full of Crow, Zouch Magazine, and Cut A Long Story amongst others. She was a finalist in the Lascaux Short Fiction Prize 2014 and she once met Isaac Asimov and can be found at http://www.conboy-hill.co.uk 


The Spooking of Einstein
by Suzanne Conboy-Hill
 
 
"If you walk on the cracks, the bears will get you."
 
"No, they won’t."
     
But they did. Not bears exactly, more trans-dimensional, multi-versal, quantum-coherents with no sense of humour. Bert concluded this from the instructions they gave him which made as much sense as some he’d seen in self-assembly kits where literal translation gave rise to absurdities such as, Take bradawl which is slippery when wet and refrain from washing child inside out. May contain nuts.

Bert was wrong of course as there are no such creatures, at least not since the multi-dimensional, trans-versal, quantum-entangleds had wiped them all out. They too had no sense of humour because, being singularities, every joke that ever was or ever would be, existed simultaneously in each of them, which was helluva dangerous so humour had naturally been selected out. Darwin is/was/will be very proud.

Bert, whose abductee function was to be that of mediator at a ‘Big Bounce or Big Bang?’ conference, puzzled over a new edict, Do not inhale while adjusting the direction of the companion mind. It must cooperate with rescue at the lighting of the red lamp but not linger thereon. This set him off chuckling, then chortling, his shoulders shucking up and down like an old car on a bad road. Then he sucked in a mighty breath for the full LOL, inadvertently relocating the entire community of multi-versal yada yadas to the moribund nuclei of some bunged up alveoli he had lost the use of when he started smoking at age fourteen. They tinkered therein super-deterministically and fixed a bit of errant DNA. Einstein is/was/will be a little bit spooked.

Back on the pavement, his mediator role precipitously curtailed, Bert reconsidered his response to the question of cracks.

Three new poems this week: ​all sad and touching in their own way. We start with dark fantasy - Sometimes Like Blood by Evelyn Deshane, before moving on to science fiction - Crossing and Memorial by Jeffrey Park.


Sometimes Like Blood

When it rains, the ghosts go outside.
The house's skeleton offers no refuge when
they can feel the rain water, sometimes like blood,
run through empty veins again.


* Evelyn Deshane has appeared in Plenitude Magazine, The Rusty Toque, and is forthcoming in Tesseracts 19: Superhero Universe. Evelyn (pron. Eve-a-lyn) received an MA from Trent University and currently studying for PhD at Waterloo University. For more information visit http://evedeshane.wordpress.com


Crossing

The great craft’s fusion pile
having gone cold 
centuries ago,
it continues its slow progress
between galaxies,
crew members feeding old books
into the firebox
one painful page at a time.
​

Memorial

I laid her to rest 
on the dark side of the moon,
gently covered her slender bones
with lunar dust
and piled-up rubble, 
and placed her pearly skull 
atop the cairn,
tipped slightly upwards.
That way, when chilly Neptune
ranges above the horizon,
the twin craters 
of her eye sockets
will once more be tinged 
with a familiar and much-beloved 
shade of blue.


*Jeffrey Park lives in Goettingen, Germany where he is Lecturer for Scientific English at the Georg-August-Universitaet. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com

This week we welcome back Beth Cato, a regular Grievous Angel contributor and the author of The Clockwork Dagger steampunk fantasy series from Harper Voyager. Her website is at http://BethCato.com Beth's two poems take a fresh urban fantastic look at two women from the world of myths and legends: Death (yes, she is a woman) and the goddess Hera. Death is one of a set of four poems on the Riders of the Apocalypse, also featuring Famine, Pestilence, and War.


​Riders of the Apocalypse: Death

Death incarnate doesn't often ride
a pale horse these days
instead she prefers a white SUV
(the stick figure family on the back window
is a holdover from a previous owner)
she texts as she drives
sometimes drinks her latte at the same time

her current day job is cashier at Walmart
usually check-out 19, where cigarettes are sold
she offers laden advice to customers
"don't enjoy that sunlight too much"
"I hope you don't drink this in one weekend"
"enjoy time with that baby"

she's been Death for a very long time
but most people don't understand
that she never actually kills anyone
folks manage that quite well on their own


Hera Herself, at 8'clock Tonight

on the premiere episode
of her new reality show
Hera has finally left Zeus
after thousands of years of infidelity

she starts over in New York City
a modern woman
no worshipers
a few thousand dollars in the bank

[excerpt] "What do I put on a resume?
Former job experience: goddess?"

she needs a place to live
maybe even a new love
but most of all
she's an immortal in search
of new meaning in her life