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Beach Head

by Daniel LeMoal

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“Are you still alive over there?”

Alvy’s voice sounded weak, but it retained the bong-huffing tonality that had been his hallmark since he hit puberty. It grated at me almost as badly as the grains of sand coating my teeth. In my darkness, I could hear the sound of approaching water.

“C’mon Jim,” he continued. “If you can’t talk, just open your eyes for me.”

I opened my eyes, and was immediately blinded by daylight. When my vision adjusted, I found myself staring at a stretch of deserted beach. The seemingly decapitated heads of Alvy and Mikey Burdy lay before me, propped up in the sand.

“What the fuck?” I croaked, as both of my crewmates blinked tiredly at me.

“It’s about time you woke up,” Alvy said. “We’ve been deep-sixed.”

The ocean wind picked up suddenly, blowing more sand in my face. When I tried to raise my hands to shield my eyes, I found myself unable to move. I finally realized that my arms and legs were frozen in place, packed in sand that felt as heavy as concrete. Of course, I panicked. (Continue Reading…)

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Black Bargain

by Robert Bloch

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It was getting late when I switched off the neon and got busy behind the fountain with my silver polish. The fruit syrup came off easily, but the chocolate stuck and the hot fudge was greasy. I wish to the devil they wouldn’t order hot fudge.

I began to get irritated as I scrubbed away. Five hours on my feet, every night, and what did I have to show for it? Varicose veins. Varicose veins, and the memory of a thousand foolish faces. The veins were easier to bear than the memories. They were so depressing, those customers of mine. I knew them all by heart.

In early evening all I got was “cokes.” I could spot the “cokes” mile away. Giggling high-school girls, with long shocks of uncombed brown hair, with their shapeless tan “fingertip” coats and the repulsively thick legs bulging over furry red ankle socks. They were all “cokes.” For forty-five minutes they’d monopolize a booth, messing up the tile table-top with cigarette ashes, crushed napkins daubed in lipstick, and little puddles of spilled water. Whenever a high-school girl came in, I automatically reached for the cola pump.

A little later in the evening I got the “gimme two packs” crowd. Sports-shirts hanging limply over hairy arms meant the popular brands. Blue work-shirts with rolled sleeves disclosing tattooing meant the two-for-a-quarter cigarettes.

Once in a while I got a fat boy. He was always a “cigar.” If he wore glasses he was a ten-center. If not, I merely had to indicate the box on the counter. Five cents straight. Mild Havana—all long filler.

Oh, it was monotonous. The “notions” family, who invariably departed with aspirin, Ex-Lax, candy bars, and a pint of ice-cream. The “public library” crowd—tall, skinny youths bending the pages of magazines on the rack and never buying. The “soda-waters” with their trousers wrinkled by the sofa of a one-room apartment, the “hairpins,” always looking furtively toward the baby buggy outside. And around ten, the “pineapple sundaes”—fat women Bingo-players. Followed by the “chocolate sodas” when the show let out. More booth-parties, giggling girls and red-necked young men in sloppy play-suits.

In and out, all day long. The rushing “telephones,” the doddering old “three-cent stamps,” the bachelor “toothpastes” and “razor-blades.”

I could spot them all at a glance. Night after night they dragged up to the counter. I don’t know why they even bothered to tell me what they wanted. One look was all I needed to anticipate their slightest wishes. I could have given them what they needed without their asking.

Or, rather, I suppose I couldn’t. Because what most of them really needed was a good long drink of arsenic, as far as I was concerned. (Continue Reading…)

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The Things That Wash Up on Marble Beach

by M.O. Pirson

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The phone’s ring echoes through the beach house. The fifth time today.

I grit my teeth and grab the infernal machine, ready to send my daughter to voicemail again. Cassie won’t like that, but she has enough to worry about with the pregnancy and whatnot; she doesn’t need to hear the rasp in my voice, the pauses I have to take to catch my breath. I all but hear her shrill reprimands. It’s been months, Dad! Either make an appointment or I’ll do it for you.

The name lighting up on the screen isn’t Cassandra’s, however. I blink at the bright screen—‘Dept of Fisheries’—and answer with a grunt.

Roy’s voice carries over the line. “Hey Elias, you there?”

“I am, Roy. What can I do you for?”

“A report just came in. Mid-sized marine mammal or fish washed up near your place. You available to take a look?”

I’ve been doing contract work for the Department for years. ‘Take a look’ actually means ‘carry out a full post-mortem’, and I’m feeling closer to my grave than to my college years. I’m about to decline, pretend to be ‘out of town’, when my eyes drift out the window and land on a smooth, dark shape sprawled in the wet sand, as if a massive lead-coloured pebble had been left behind by the ebbing tide. Couldn’t be more than seventy yards away.

Something stirs inside me—a spark of excitement.

I shake my head. It’s not reasonable, not in my state.

Then again, it might be the last time…

I clench my teeth, cast another look through the window. Sod it! I give Roy the answer he’s looking for. “Sure, you’ll have my report by morning.”

I cut the call and dial Duncan’s number, then take a deep breath, fighting the cancerous vice choking my sick lungs, and brace myself for the task ahead. (Continue Reading…)

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Too Little, Too Little, Too Much

By John Wiswell

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As soon as the adults leave him alone, Lark takes a shower to get the smoke out of his hair. He’s tall enough to reach the knobs all by himself. The only shampoo in Uncle Lee’s bathroom is coconut scented. This is Lark’s first time smelling coconut. He likes it. It smothers all the other smells as he suds up, like it’s erasing what he did tonight.

Buried in the towels, he cracks the bathroom door. It doesn’t sound like Father is here yet; he’s still busy with the police. Uncle Lee is talking to Lark’s brother, Brantley.

Uncle Lee asks, “You want some more cereal?”

Brantley says, “No thanks. I’m all full.”

Uncle Lee says, “Then why are you climbing on the counter, buddy?”

Brantley asks, “Where’s your fire extinguisher?”

“Oh. Oh. Let me show you.”

Lark rubs a towel over his head, drying out his hair as best he can, while he watches his uncle down the stairs. It feels wrong seeing an adult be so helpful. Uncle Lee actually lifts Brantley up so he can reach the white plastic extinguisher. Brantley hugs it to himself with both arms and looks up the stairs, at Lark.

Lark hides in the bathroom until Uncle Lee knocks for him. He pretends he was brushing his teeth.

“You’re such a man already,” Uncle Lee says, showing him to his room. “I don’t have beds in here. It’s going to be like camping.”

Lark and Brantley share a room that is too large with too little in it. The carpet is softer than pillows. They lie in sleeping bags that their uncle says they used when they camped one time when they were smaller. Neither of the twins remember that. (Continue Reading…)

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Something Stirring Underneath

by Laura Downes

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He came in with the rain.

There wasn’t much else for Gideon to do than watch the coffee brew. As each drop landed in the glass pot, it rippled out, distorting his reflection in the dark liquid. Just when he thought he could recognize himself again, another drop fell.

The diner was always quiet this time of night. He didn’t know why Helen insisted on keeping it open twenty-four hours, other than that was the way her mother had done it and nothing ever changed in this part of Mississippi unless it had to. So there Gideon was most nights, just him and the coffee maker and the murmurings from the TV on the counter. Not all that long ago, when he’d been in high school, it’d been a good time to get homework done, but now he didn’t even have that to keep him occupied. The TV was older than he was and only picked up two channels. Both played infomercials this time of night, but he had it turned on anyway, just to hear voices.

—peels and chops onions with just one tap. But what if you need them minced? Well, tap again and—

The bell over the front door was barely audible over the forced cheer of the infomercial host, his smile too wide to be honest as the machine in front of him reduced an onion into smaller and smaller pieces.

“Take a seat and I’ll be with you in a moment,” Gideon said, the rote words rolling off his tongue without him having to think. He’d follow up with an offer of coffee under usual circumstances, but one look at the boy in the doorway told him tonight would be anything but usual. (Continue Reading…)

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Chickamauga

By Ambrose Bierce

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One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure; for this child’s spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest—victories in battles whose critical moments were centuries, whose victors’ camps were cities of hewn stone. From the cradle of its race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a great sea had penetrated a third, there to be born to war and dominion as a heritage.

The child was a boy aged about six years, the son of a poor planter. In his younger manhood the father had been a soldier, had fought against naked savages and followed the flag of his country into the capital of a civilized race to the far South. In the peaceful life of a planter the warrior-fire survived; once kindled, it is never extinguished. The man loved military books and pictures and the boy had understood enough to make himself a wooden sword, though even the eye of his father would hardly have known it for what it was. This weapon he now bore bravely, as became the son of an heroic race, and pausing now and again in the sunny space of the forest assumed, with some exaggeration, the postures of aggression and defense that he had been taught by the engraver’s art. Made reckless by the ease with which he overcame invisible foes attempting to stay his advance, he committed the common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme, until he found himself upon the margin of a wide but shallow brook, whose rapid waters barred his direct advance against the flying foe that had crossed with illogical ease. But the intrepid victor was not to be baffled; the spirit of the race which had passed the great sea burned unconquerable in that small breast and would not be denied. Finding a place where some bowlders in the bed of the stream lay but a step or a leap apart, he made his way across and fell again upon the rear-guard of his imaginary foe, putting all to the sword. (Continue Reading…)

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The Gorgon

by Tanith Lee

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The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and, day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out.

Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess) was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbor or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes or the bottle glass of certain spirits.