Two Portions of New Fantasy Fiction

Two new pieces of microfiction for you now. We've fantasy in the shape of The Button Box by Jamie Lackey and yet more fantasy with The Boy in the Picture by Morgan Crooks.

* Jamie Lackey has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her novel Left-Hand Gods is available from Hadley Rille Books. Find more at http://www.jamielackey.com and on Twitter @anyaselena.
* Morgan Crooks grew up in a hamlet in Upstate New York and now teaches ancient history in Massachusetts. He lives with his wife, Lauren, near Boston. You can find him at http://ancientlogic.blogspot.com and on Twitter @raponikoff


The Button Box
by Jamie Lackey

The cardboard box on Frederick's stoop was dented and soggy and unexpected. The handwritten return address had spidered out into the wet cardboard, leaving it completely illegible.  
    
It rattled when he picked it up.  
    
He dumped it on the kitchen table with his overdue bills and forgot about it until the next morning. The now-dry cardboard had gone brittle, and the tape peeled away easily as he picked at it over his bowl of cereal.  
    
The box was half-filled with buttons. No two of them matched. There were pink buttons and purple buttons and yellow buttons. They were round and square and oval and hexagonal. The flat buttons had two or three or four or seven holes. As he dug down, he started to find shank buttons. One was a swirl of red and blue plastic, the next was covered in stitched silver leather. One was shaped like a duckling.    
    
Frederick dug through them, looking for a card or a note or an invoice or something.  
    
But there were only more buttons. A green faceted button, a gold-edged navy blue rectangle button. A crystal button that threw tiny rainbows when the sun caught it. One was shaped like an egg and cold to the touch. Another gave off a faint hum when he picked it up.   
    
Who could have sent them? And why?  
    
At the very bottom of the box, he found one that he recognized. It was a tiny tyrannosaurus in green-black plastic, and it was from what had been his favorite jacket when he was eight.  
    
It had fallen off at the zoo, and he'd cried at its loss. His mother had consoled him with a large dish of Dippin' Dots, and he'd pretended that it helped.  
    
He transferred the other buttons to a new box, taped it up, and wrote his return address on the corner.  
    
Then he left it out on his stoop, confident it would find its way to where it needed to be.  


The Boy in the Picture
by Morgan Crooks
    
I looked down at a smiling boy running through trees in a pool of broken glass. This picture followed me through high school, college, and my first apartment. My father never had a chance to take many pictures of me and so I treasured it, kept it safe in a golden frame, sealed behind glass and out of view. Why look back?
    
As some point in the trip to Boston, the frame had broken, scattering bits of glass everywhere in the packing box.
    
I fished the picture from its frame, and brushed off the glass. I’d always thought the image unusual. Had I even owned a red and blue vest? My expression in the picture puzzled me; I wore a smile below wary, watchful eyes.
    
On the picture’s back was an inscription: my name; the address of the home where I’d grown up; and a date now only three weeks away.
 
*****
    
No one asked why I took September 24th off work. Even my mother assumed I returned for old things. I made for the woods as soon as I could, and spent hours tramping through the sugar maples, looking for that one right place.
    
I held the picture at an arm’s-length in front of me, maneuvering until I had the right angle and distance. Despite the years, somehow I knew when I had found it. I looked up from the trembling picture.
    
There ahead of me, perhaps only a few steps away, a maple bore the imprint of a tiny hand, as though its grey bark had once been as pliable as fresh dough. I put the photo away, pressed down my left hand into the mark, and found it made a perfect fit.
    
I stared at it, astonished.
    
“Come on son, we’re heading home,” came a voice.
    
My dad put down his camera, beckoning to me. I ran to him, the sun pouring down on leaves cast aside by my swift feet.