New Fiction: We get Seasonal with the Solstice & some Christmas Miracles

Two new pieces of fantasy flash fiction for you now on our new-look Grievous Angel zine. Both stories – Four Christmas Miracles by Rachel Rodman and The Longest Night by Gerri Leen – have an appropriately seasonal feel to them. (Although who knew the Trojan Horse had a festive dimension!) And, please spare a thought for our authors who have had to wait months from acceptance until the Holidays Season came around and we finally published their tales.


Four Christmas Miracles
by Rachel Rodman

1. Three wise men, copulating in the straw, father a thrice-wise child. They dress him in gold, anoint him with myrrh, then remodel his forehead, using scraps borrowed from Frankenstein's monster. Later, taking the name of Ramses, the boy will singlehandedly construct the City of Rome, while passionately declaring, “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!”

2. A snowman, brought to life by action of magic top hat, passes unharmed through the Magic Fire. Then, he claims his Valkyrie bride, who sleeps on the top of the mountain. In consummating their union, he begets twins upon her: one, an extraordinary deaf-blind girl, whom an astonished world will afterwards call Helen Keller; the other, a philanthropic boy, fixated on fruit, who will take the name Johnny Appleseed.

3. A wealthy miser is visited by a series of ghosts. The first, the scarecrow, forces him to revisit his agrarian childhood, and the trauma of the Irish potato famine. The second, the tinman, confronts him with the evils of the Industrial Revolution, which occupy his present. The third, the lion, warns him of a disturbing future, in which genetic manipulation has so blurred the distinctions between humanity and other life that animals can talk and men assimilate their nutrients via root-like limbs, extended into the soil.

4. A woman cuts her hair in order to purchase a watch chain. Her lover sells his watch to purchase a set of hair combs. “How tragic!” they cry. Then, with a coordinated heave, they cast their useless gifts into the embers. The action produces a massive fireball, which whooshes up the chimney. In the blaze of it, the Big Bad Wolf is incinerated, together with the One Ring of Sauron, and Odysseus' Trojan horse. A contingent of Greek soldiers, badly burned, tumble onto the grate, yodeling like sugarplum fairies.


* Rachel Rodman writes weird fiction and equally non-fiction. You can read more at http://rachelrodman.com


The Longest Night
by Gerri Leen

He can feel it. The moment the old god dies – the longest night of the year.
Staring into the darkness of the cave, he fingers the handle of his athame. The darkness mimics the gray murkiness that’s dogged his life ever since the summer solstice.

He lost his wife on the longest day.  

“I’m here,” he thinks he hears the wind breathe. It’s a chill wind – he should have worn his heavier cloak, should have drunk his wife’s chamomile tea to keep the fasting from making him dizzy.  

He’s lost without her. He fails as surely as crops do with no sunshine to make them grow. His magic withers, his tinctures lack potency, and even her old cat hisses and bites him.

He wonders how long before the people search for a wise one who is not so broken.  

The moments pass. The ritual is done and he’s been lost in thoughts of things long gone rather than what is to come. He quickly says the closing words –what he does is for everyone so he must pay attention. 

The athame pulses in his hand as if it’s a living thing.  One quick thrust with the blade and he could be with her.

He puts the athame on the altar and moves by memory around the block of stone. He’ll gather up his things later, when death by his own hand does not seem so tempting.

Outside, a half moon shines. He’s hungry but lacks the will to eat. He will go to bed and if the gods are kind, he won’t wake up, but lately the gods seem far from kind.

As he trudges home in the cold, he hears a soft cry, a mewling sound ahead of him. Just off the path, he finds a kitten, small and dark, shivering as it wanders. He picks it up, feels it burrow into his neck, and lets it crawl under his robe. He grimaces as the kitten kneads his skin with its needle-like claws.  

But then he smiles as the sound of its purr vibrates into his skull.

He’s never had a familiar of his own. He never needed one. He had his wife.

Peeking under his robe, he asks, “Are you for me?”

He barely makes out the kitten’s eyes, but the purr gets louder.

He hurries home and puts the kitten on the chair next to his wife’s cat, who hisses at him then at the newcomer, then turns and faces the other way and goes back to sleep.

He realizes the kitten must be hungry, and probably the cat is too, although it would be beneath her dignity to ask him for food. He finds some bread and cheese and takes them over to the chair and shares the cheese with them.

The cat only bites him once. The kitten eats happily.  

He forgets to think about his wife for a moment or two.

It’s a start.


* Gerri Leen lives in Northern Virginia and originally hails from Seattle. She has work appearing or accepted by: Nature (Futures), Flame Tree Press’s Murder Mayhem anthology, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Grimdark, and others. She recently got the editing bug and is finalizing her third anthology for an independent press. See more at http://www.gerrileen.com