Lucy’s knife scrapes across her plate, making a massacre of her soggy mozzarella sticks. For the fourth night in a row, it’s the only sound either of them makes. Larry doesn’t say anything. His eyes follow the path of a fly buzzing through fan blades on the misty smoker’s patio, glazed with sleep.

Lucy pulls out a cigarette. She doesn’t light it.

“Thank you for the dinner, Miss Lucy.” Larry says and smiles.

She grunts, her fingers tapping restlessly along the cigarette. Larry is surprised it hasn’t caught on fire of its own accord. But she reaches into her breast pocket…then her side pocket…then finally up her sleeves…until she lays a rumpled wad of dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, alright!” he says with an enthusiastic smile. The waitress comes to clear their table and doesn’t bother with receipts because, well, look at them. A tall man with clown makeup and a slept in suit carrying a shopping bag that smells of baby powder, and a girl who barely looks old enough to drink with a badly hidden array of knives on her person.

Larry stumbles out from the table, humming a snatch of an old Shirley Temple melody, and Lucy follows, looking over her shoulder every few seconds with poor subtlety. There’s an ugly silver rental car in the fenced lot, which the two of them climb into, Lucy in the driver’s seat, Larry first in the passenger, then climbing out and into the back. There’s a piece of tarp vaguely resembling a circus tent stretched over the rear windows, and bottles lined with dark red residue litter the seat. With a man plaintively staring from a car window and a woman swearing at a suburban intersection, the couple is on their way out of this town.

Larry Love had been claustrophobically close to forty a century ago, with a name that screamed identity theft, black ringlets well washed but never combed and the faint bulge of fangs beneath his full lips. His clothing had been picked out by his mother for much of his life and he’d never really stopped looking like it. A penchant for florals and frills that didn’t much fit together gave him the perpetual appearance of a lost first grader, just a little too tall for his age, or an acid fried vampire. He often smiled, but was careful of his teeth.

No one was quite sure how old Lucy was, probably because she had enough open warrants that she might actually need the fake ID’s for non-alchohol-related reasons. Probably not though. At five foot one, with pixie-like features, she sometimes seemed able to shapeshift from thirteen to thirty at a moment’s notice. Most likely she was somewhere in between. Old enough to drive, quite possibly young enough to count her parent’s income on financial aid.

By now they were on the highway and the suburban outcrops were growing more and more spread out. The mom and pop shops morphed into Arbys and K-Marts, which Lucy appreciated for the anonymity their locale provided but dreaded as Larry’s stream of commentary on the merits of different brands of onion rings and the relative hygiene of their sellers became more and more frequent.

“You don’t eat, man.”

“I still like to be an informed consumer.”

“Hey, does Walmart blood taste better than Target blood?”

Larry sniffed primly. “That was uncalled for.” He ran his tongue over his teeth as if they were new, never having completely adjusted to his supernatural state. “I was too polite to ask a lady for a meal, but we really must stop soon.”

Lucy checked the ratio of dead grass to cars outside; they were in country radio territory. “Rest stop. I get his wallet.”

He blanched, face turning as pale as his powder. “I…I would never do that sort of thing with a man. No matter how I may-”

“Cry at the thought of being loved and content?”

“Allergies!”

“You’re dead, Larry.”

“Well I simply will not sneak up behind a man in a dark alley and sink my teeth into his soft, creamy skin! I will not feel the ecstasy of his life-blood leaving his heart to become my sustenance! I will accost a beautiful, young woman, and drink her blood,” and further he continued with the finality of an equation “As God intended.”

“Okay, you can stop talking now. Like, really. Before I run over a deer and make you drink it.”

When they did stop, he scrambled out of the car, long legs tangling together, but closed the door gently. Lucy leaned her head back on the cracked vinyl of the seat, wondering if there would be a scream this time. There was, and after it there was a pitchy giggle, before the ugly slurping started. It really did sound like sucking a county fair slurpee with a broken straw. What an undignified end.

But when Larry emerged from behind the graffiti scarred port-a-potty, he somehow looked cleaner than ever, his shirt unrumpled and unstained, with only a smear of red on his chin revealing the nature of his midnight snack.

Lucy was plenty used to the sight of blood (with enough proof that it might seem indelicate to ask), but something about the machete-mouthed manchild set her on edge, so her “get in,” sounded a bit harsher than usual. Larry made no reply, except to lick his lips gloatingly as she glared, and he returned to the back seat.

He’d been trying for some time to make his old Victrola work in the car, however jumpy, but antique wax pairs badly with worn highways, so finally he’d been given a fifty dollar smartphone that he could fill with as much music as he liked, none of it newer than the great war. Lucy occasionally growled complaints or sang Led Zeppelin with the melodiousness of an air raid siren, but Larry could have sworn he caught her mouthing the words along to “I Got You Babe” at least twice.

Today it was nineteenth century ragtime, with a frenetic energy that jangled Lucy’s nerves in the stillness of the car. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, spat curses at slow signallers, did anything she could to drown it out with something fucking normal.

Suddenly, without taking her eyes from the road, Lucy asked, “What does it taste like?”

Larry blinked. “Blood?”

“No, chocolate milk. Of course blood. It’s always blood, with you.”

Larry hesitated. In that moment between moments, as he sucked a pointless breath into his pointless lungs, he looked very very old. “It’s like velvet in your mouth. Peaches and cream. Milk and honey. Water and the Word. The Word made flesh. The forbidden fruit, and yet the sweetest and most sacred thing. Carnal desire. Like the kiss of a young…” He trailed off, his fingertips touching his lips, just barely. The buildings and billboards rushing by outside the window were reflected in his glassy eyes. And by the time the rising sun rays drenched his curls through the tarp meant to protect him, he was dreaming of sweet, forbidden things.

by C.G.

Ash stands in the yard, the night breeze brushing their harvest-moon skin. It’s cold (although, master of homeostasis that they are, they do not shift or shiver) and their bare arms prickle with scattered goosebumps that mirror the steady stars above. “Look, Olly, the Big Dipper,” they croon, but the dog continues to attend to his business, keeping his nose pointed firmly toward the ground. Ash sighs and shakes their head, already resigned to adoring him.

Absently, they tap their watch. It’s nearly ten, and they feel sleepiness tugging at every part of them with the blind insistence of a toddler. But they stand guard over Oliver all the same, their toes pressed into the edge of the dirt. Ash watches him until he finishes and saunters towards them, taking his time. Ash stoops to pet him, scratching the soft place behind his ears, burying their face in his warm fur.

Finally, they smile against him and give his head a quick peck. “Come on, boy.” They lead Oliver to the garage and he bounds inside towards the waiting shape of their mother.

Tired as they are, Ash pauses outside the garage door and takes another look at the stars. Their brain orbits through half-remembered names of constellations, dying galaxies and spinning plants, points and lines and pieces of physics that make impossible things make sense.

They also see that the stars are beautiful.

They walk inside to sleep.

Behind them shines Sirius, unblinking eye of Canis Major. Long ago, storytellers, faces glowing in fragments of firelight, told stories of the Dog Star that guarded the earth. The memory of perfect puppy love, strung together, lines of light, easy as magic. Beautiful as physics. A fact: Sirius spins closer to us each year. Maybe Orion stands waiting for the Dog Star, arms open. Maybe all dogs know a bit about coming home.

Now Canis Major stretches in the sky above Ash, half wrapped around the silhouette of one night-painted house, wrapped around one sleeping kid with harvest-moon skin, wrapped around a dog that couldn’t be anywhere else.

by A.J.

Once upon a time, there was a hill, with a tall tower at the top and a tangle of a forest at the bottom. In the tall tower was a princess with a dark river of hair and eyes like stained glass windows. In the forest were trees and soft shadows and flowers that smelled of saffron and the stars.

The princess, like most princesses, spent her days within the tower’s walls, smiling and feasting and dancing, seeing the world from a window that made it beautiful and terrible and small. Unlike most princesses, she was not a girl at all, but a changeling, a gift from the shadows of the forest. They had fashioned her out of little twigs and painted bark and flower stems and good solid oak. They had laid her in the royal cradle, threading wisps of shadow songs into her hair. They had stolen away the way they came. Now no one knew, of course, not even the changeling princess because they had charmed her so well. But still, the trees stretched out their limbs to the sky, waiting for her to come home. And the shadows of a forest run deeper than its roots and rivers.

One day, a shadow broke from the forest and became a sparrow. He perched on the window of the princess’ tower. She fed him breadcrumbs as a good princess does, and wished he would go away.

“Come with me,” sang the sparrow.

“Why?” said the girl.

“You are a wooden girl in a tall tower. You come from the trees, and to the trees you shall return.”

Something shifted inside her, a tug and an ache and the settling of weight. “Will the trees ever give me back?”

“Mostly.”

The princess nodded, unfolded the smile she kept in her back pocket, grasped the sparrow’s tail, and let him bear her into the sky and down the hill, into the arms of the trees.

The earth beneath her beckoned, so she kicked off her dancing shoes and squeezed the moss between her toes. She traced the bark of her mother trees and the veins of the leaves that mirrored her own. She felt her oak legs shift and carry her more surely than they ever had before. The rivers filled her hands with sweet water and fruits that tasted like the dappled sunlight between branches. Home, murmured the wild beasts and birds and shadows. Home, murmured her wooden heart beneath her breathing shape.

But she soon found that not all the paths of the forest were for her feet. Every time she made a turn too deep, a tree scooped her up in its branches and placed her back on the path it had laid out for her, strewn with flower petals and smooth, round stones.

“I want to know you,” said the princess, but the forest only pressed more roses into her palms and held her tighter in its vine-tangled arms. Yet the shadows of a forest run deeper than its roots and rivers, and so she felt her shadow-sparrow’s feathers tickling her ear again. He sang all of the forest to sleep, all except the princess. Then he lead her into the forest’s heart.

---

Once upon a time, I was a little girl who was getting less little every day. At twelve, my sister and I became aware of our status as the only girls at the Diwali party who hadn’t ever been to India. It didn’t much bother us – we connected to our heritage just fine via Slumdog Millionaire and microwave chicken tikka masala. Nevertheless, our family decided that we needed to set foot in the place where our father had spent twenty-one years of his life, where we had nine aunties and uncles waiting for us to come home.

After months of planning and sixteen hours of sky, I breathed my first Indian air, the taste of of spices and moonlight. It was warm, even at 2 a.m. in February, and so were the arms of the aunties and uncles who had come to greet us. A giddy, swelling rush bubbled up inside me as we sped towards the hotel in a car on the other side of the road, the road painted with street light and shadow, my ears filling with lilting Hindi I didn’t need to understand.

The days after were much the same. I saw the Red Fort and Taj Mahal, of course. I looked at sari fabrics at the market. I rode an elephant. I messed around in the hotel’s fancy glass elevator with the cousins, and devoured rotis fresh off the pan from the fingers of the aunties, who insisted I needed feeding.

But there wasn’t only laughter in the streets.

Every day our family braved the Indian traffic to see some new wonder of the city, we passed by lots of other cities that no one stopped to look at for so long. Tiny slums held up by cardboard and garbage and the scrawniest of hope. Laundry in bright reds and oranges dangling above the dust. Blade-boned people boxed in by shabby metal walls.

Of course, every time a girl with an armful of flowers (or once, inexplicably, a teetering stack of copies of The Fault in Our Stars) tapped on the car window, my parents and aunties and uncles told me and my sister not to open up. There were too many of them, and if you gave one even a rupee, you’d have to help them all. You can’t know what they’d do. You can’t fix the world, not like that.

I wasn’t naive enough to think my grownups heartless.

Nevertheless, I did, just a little.

And I thought myself more heartless still, as I drank cool bottled water from the car seat’s restraining embrace and imagined the bed I would return to that night, the omelette I would eat the next morning, each bite a flat and mechanical thing. Not a gift, not pure eggy gold.

I didn’t have any money. I didn’t speak Hindi. I couldn’t fix the world, not like that.
But when I saw a young woman with a tattered red sari and a face like mine and a baby in her arms, begging for a scrap of mercy from our pockets outside of an ancient temple to some less-than-merciful god, the Indian nights tasted more like broken glass.

---

Once upon a time, there was a hill, with a tall tower at the top and a tangle of a forest at the bottom. In the tower had been an empty cradle, but no one remembered that anymore. In the forest, equally forgotten, was a girl, sleeping without sound in the branches of a great oak tree. A princess with a dark river of hair and eyes shuttered closed. A princess of breath, of blood, of bone.

The wide-awake princess stared at the sleeper who shared her face. She fought against the wild thing snarling in her chest.
Silly girl. There can’t be a changeling without a change; she knew. But she couldn’t help but want to run away very far and very fast, because she didn’t want to know that she had stolen every sunset she’d seen framed in the tower’s window from this other girl’s closed eyes. She didn’t want to know that if it weren’t for her, there needn’t have been an empty cradle.

She hated that this was coming home.

She sank against the other princess’ tree, feeling the bark scrape into her back. She raked her fingers through her bramble-hair and felt a tear on her cheekbone like dew. She looked up at the shadows beneath the leaves above her.

“Wake up!” she screamed, louder than she intended but not loud enough. “Come home!”

The other princess did not stir.

The oak tree’s bark offered no handholds. There were no strong branches tucked within its leaves. The soil hid no ropes or swords or magic rings. The shadows made no sound.

A flesh-and-blood girl is too heavy to carry.

And so the shadow princess blew her a kiss, with the truest love a stranger’s lips can hold.

Then she followed the path out of the heart of the forest.

by A.J.

Jane shifts in the chair. Despite the rough powder blue fabric stretched over it, it is not soft, and she feels it pressing into her, flat and harsh. She has crossed and uncrossed her legs more times than she can count, but the one resting on top now has already begun to prickle with numbness and the one on the bottom feels hot and tense from holding its weight.

There is a TV with the volume down too low for her to hear anything but a quick and constant muttering. Faces flit across it, all of them bright with long-lashed eyes and big mouths, always open. A ginger haired woman laughs and shakes her head at a little boy with the same red curls. She looks about twenty-five.

A car passes across the screen. Jane closes her eyes.

She feels how badly she is slouching against the chair. The smooth wooden edge of its back buries itself in the space below her shoulder blades, and from there her back sags downward, inward. She imagines her spine buried inside her, clinging to every soft squishy thing with its angles, taking her with it as it curls. She tries not to imagine other things.

A magazine, filled with stories of lush dresses and lurid affairs, sits in her lap, partially wedged between her thighs. It is still cool, and she hears its pages bend when she twitches. She grabbed it at random off the stack by the front desk, thinking it would help, but she hasn’t opened it.

She reaches up and pushes her hair behind her ear, slowly, sweeping her fingers along her aching temple. Her hand still smells of Purell. Her other hand rests in her lap, with her forearm pressed against the side of her stomach. She likes the feeling of something heavy holding her.

Jane remembers sitting in a room like this six years ago with a hand on a rounder, softer belly. She sometimes misses that feeling of something being in there with her, something moving and alive. There was that stretch of two months after he was born when she felt as though her battery had been removed.

She is tighter, now, drawn in by time and sleeplessness. Her cardigan barely brushes against her skin. Despite the layers she wears, she feels goosebumps popping up on her arms.

Her foot is asleep.

When Jane opens her eyes, it’s at a “Ma’am?” sounding from somewhere close. Too close. She looks up at a woman in a white coat who does not smile.

“Your son.”

Silence.

“I’m so sorry.”

Jane closes her eyes again.

by A.J.