Neptune’s Garden
by Lisa A. Koosis

Jacob opened his eyes to find moonlight had silvered a wedge of the bedroom wall, and her moon-shadow hovered within it. Her voice drifted in through the open French doors. “I’m planting. Go back to sleep.”

“Planting?” Propping himself up onto his elbows, Jacob squinted at the bedside clock.

She didn’t answer. Jacob kicked away the sheets, and the skin on his arms prickled as the sea breeze dried his sweat. He swung his feet onto the floor and padded toward the doors.

She was leaning over the deck railing, her hair curled in loose ringlets as it did after a shower. Her nightgown clung to her shoulders and thighs as if wet.

The breeze hinted of rain. Jacob thought of the little garden out back, its salt-coated stumps of failed azaleas and the bare, clawing arms of rose bushes. Rain wouldn’t help.

“Planting? Libby?”

“My new garden.” She turned to face him. Her nightgown, indeed wet, clung to her breasts. Her eyes glistened, trance-like.

Fragments of images fell across his memory. The night sky. Flames.

He reached for her, but she yelped when his hands touched hers.

“Lib?”

The glitter in her eyes dimmed, the trance broken. Her eyelids fluttered. Jacob caught her before she hit the deck.

*

Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Libby held out her hands. Though trails of tears lined her cheeks, she stayed silent.

Jacob wet the washcloth and dabbed her reddened hands, trying to clean the sores without tearing open the newly forming blisters. His hands shook. He rinsed the washcloth, and the reddened water swirled down the drain.

Picking fragments of shells from beneath her torn fingernails, he asked, “What were you planting?”

“I just wanted to plant something, Jacob.” One hand curled over her belly. “Something that would grow.”

He nodded. “What did you plant, honey?”

Her eyes met his, her wounded hands clutching him.

“The moonseeds,” she said, and then he held her while she sobbed.

*

After she fell asleep, he slipped outside, descended the deck’s stairs, past his surfboard, and onto the night-cooled beach. Sand rimmed the hem of his pajama bottoms like salt on a margarita glass. The moon loomed large in the night sky like a Sword of Damocles hanging above the Earth, a frozen giant meteor of pending doom.

Meteor. His breath lodged in his throat. Like a half-remembered dream he saw them, ghosts that burned his retinas, leaving an after-image all these hours later.

To the right, tendrils of pale green light rose from the sand. He started toward it.

Standing by the window, pushing aside the filmy curtains. “Lib, you have to see this.”

“What are they?” she’d asked.

“Meteors, I think.”

Moonseeds, the memory of Libby’s voice whispered.

His foot slid from beneath him, and Jacob jerked back, sitting down hard on the sand. Maneuvering to his knees, he peered into a swimming-pool-sized hole. Wisps of green steamed up from it.

Jacob stared at the hole. His heart chugged. If he blinked, maybe it would vanish, would, in fact, never have been there at all. Around the edges, displaced sand formed a rooster-tail pattern, and pressed lightly into the sand were petite, deliberate footprints. Toes spread out, they headed right for the hole.

Where the footprints ended, the sand looked smooth, as if someone had slid down. He peered over. Green steam still rose from a bottom that looked like smooth, black glass. Seawater rippled across it.

On the far side, the sand was disturbed as well. Jacob envisioned Libby, hair wild, cooling the smoldering meteorite with cold seawater before clutching it to her chest like a baby and carting it up the side of the embankment.

That’s not right. It would be heavy. Cumbersome. Impossible.

More footsteps led away. Jacob followed them until they disappeared into the ocean. He stood, letting the surf nibble his toes.

Then he followed another set of footprints home, where Libby still slept, bandaged hands folded gingerly across her abdomen.

*

He watched her over breakfast, an island of unstirred cream atop his coffee. Milk slopped onto the table as Libby tried to spoon corn flakes into her mouth using her bandaged hands. On the wall, the seashell-shaped clock ticked away minutes.

She dropped her spoon and shoved the bowl towards him. A tsunami of milk and flakes cascaded out and onto his lap. “You can’t take this away from me, too.”

“Take this away? Libby? Take away what?”

Without responding, she rose from the table and started to walk away.

”Libby!”

Turning to look at him, she crossed her arms over her chest, an organic X, a barrier between them.

His shoulders tightened. “What have I ever taken away from you?”

Libby’s arms fell back to her side, the white of the bandages contrasting with her black shorts. “I don’t know. Nothing. I’m…”

He wiped up the spilled milk and soggy cornflakes, aware that she was watching.

“I’m just not hungry this morning,” she finished.

*

After he’d showered, shaved, and booted up the computer in preparation for the day’s work, he ventured outside. He found Libby kneeling in the sand-strewn grass by her dying garden. Her shoulders shook as she pruned dead branches from the rosebush, her bandaged fingers fumbling with the spring on the shears.

“I thought we were over this.” He wanted to be over this. He ached to be over it.

Rocking back on her ankles, she wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “Well, maybe we’re not.”

“Libby…”

“Maybe I’m not,” she amended. “Maybe I’ll never be over it.”

He knelt behind her, putting his hands on her arms and pulling her back toward him. She sagged back, letting him hold her for a minute before she shook him off, and retrieved the fallen shears.

“I wished on those shooting stars last night.” She tried again to cut toward the plant’s surviving heart. “And my wish was answered. That’s why you can’t take this away from me, Jacob.”

He wanted to carry her inside and lock all the doors, to lock the world out. Instead, he retrieved a shovel from the garage and headed to the beach to fill in the crater.

*

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Heart of Ice
by Martin Livings

Lidja sits astride the deacon’s sodden corpse as he writhes, his erect penis cold and wet inside her. Sweat runs down the young sorceress’ chest, between her small breasts, as she rocks back and forth against the dripping body. Her hair, usually black, sweeps across her eyes in a golden blur. She tilts her head back, smiling, and looks to the corner of the guest room. There, next to the hearth, huddles the deacon’s betrothed, his beloved Gudrún. Her pale blue eyes are wide, and her perfect body is naked beneath the blankets because her nightdress is wrapped around Lidja’s slight body like a chameleon’s skin. The scent of the frightened girl still clings to it. The fire beside Gudrún seems to laugh quietly to itself in crackles and pops, amused by the girl’s terror. This in turn makes Lidja smile.

“Garún,” the corpse moans, bringing Lidja’s attention back to him. His face, though grey and bloated, is still that face she knows so well, the face she has imagined close to hers so many times before. His fetid grave-breath fills her nostrils. She breathes it in, savours it. “Garún,” he says again. He can’t pronounce the name, tongue black, swollen.

“Yes, my love,” Lidja whispers back to him. “Yes, it’s me.” The lie is the smallest of her sins.

He moans and settles back against the stone that lies in the centre of the room. It is the size and shape of a small bed, its surface flat and rough and smeared with the dirt of the field from which it came…

*

“Einn, tveir, Þrír!” the men of Myrká chanted, and in unison they strained to lift the massive rock. It came away from the muddy field with a sucking noise, and left a large, wet hole like an open wound in the earth and snow where it had lain for centuries, carried there by the passage of long-gone glaciers. It looked like the capstone of a grave, just as she’d envisioned it.

Lidja smiled, satisfied, from atop her gelding as she watched the men toil with it. She was impressed by their strength and dedication. The men, their faces red, chests bare and sweaty despite the winter chill, shuffled over to the cart, and with a single skilful motion deposited the rock over its side. The wooden wheels and axle creaked and cracked and buckled beneath the sheer weight of it, and for a long moment nobody dared speak or move or even breathe. But somehow the rickety cart didn’t collapse, though the wheels sank deep into the ground. The draft horses would make short work of that, however.

*

“How did you know it would be here?” the priest, Gunnarsson, asked. He stood by her horse, his robes tucked up into his rope belt to keep them clean. His legs looked as if they’d never seen the sun before, white as the snow that still covered most of the ground.

“It spoke to me,” Lidja answered, not looking at Gunnarsson. “Called to me. It’s waited here for me, all these years.”

The two watched in silence as the draft horses were harnessed to the cart. The animals seemed agitated, bothered by the proximity of the stone. Or perhaps it was Lidja’s presence that was upsetting them. It had taken her gelding many years of training to tolerate her, and even now she could feel it twitching between her thighs. Animals could sense her kind. They used to act the same way around…

“…your mother,” Gunnarsson said from beside Lidja, taking her by surprise. She’d been lost in thought.

She turned to the priest. “What?” she snapped.

“Your mother, Freya. I was sorry to hear about her passing.”

“Oh, such a nice way to put it,” Lidja replied bitterly. “I suppose you think she’s with your God now?”

Gunnarsson shook his head, solemn. “No, child,” he said. “Your mother burns in hell as a witch. As will you.”

Lidja laughed. “Ah, Father, at least we can agree on one thing.” She looked back to the stone, sitting there in the back of the cart. “But before I do, I can do something you cannot.”

“And what is that?”

“I can return the deacon to his grave.”

Gunnarsson didn’t respond. He just looked at the cart as well. The horses were secured to it now, and one of the men slapped them across their hindquarters with a whip. They whinnied, even more displeased than before, and dragged the cart across the field. The wheels barely turned, ploughing twin furrows into the soil and snow as it inched forward.

“It is not too late for you, Lidja,” the priest said at last, his voice soft. “God forgives all sins.”
Lidja’s eyes remained upon the stone. She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Not all.”

*

Lidja puts one hand flat against the rock, feels its chill, more cold even than the deacon’s wet, dead body. And getting colder.

The deacon spasms beneath her, inside her. It’s almost time.

Under her breath, she begins her incantation in a language old as the land itself. The stone beneath her hand turns colder still. The deacon seems unaware, lost in his undead ecstasy. He shudders beneath her again, grunts like an angry ape.

A freezing sensation runs through her body, starting in her loins and spreading out, filling her with ice water. She gasps as it threatens to swallow her whole; her mind flickers like a scrap of burning parchment caught in a blizzard. She struggles to remain conscious, to push the cold, empty darkness aside. She leans hard against the rock, continues the spell she memorised from the most potent grimoire that had belonged to her mother, before…

*

“Lidja!” Her mother’s voice cut through the gale outside, where Lidja was gathering firewood against the night. Something in her mother’s tone sent a twinge of fear through her stomach. She yanked her hatchet free of the lump of wood that she’d been trying to split in two and ran back towards the hut where she’d lived her whole life, just she and her mother, Freya, the most hated and feared woman for many miles. Freya the witch. Freya the demon. Freya the sorceress. And Lidja, daughter of Freya, tarred with the same brush. Her mother’s daughter.

She stepped into the hut and quickly closed the door behind her, to keep the worst of the winter wind outside. She shook herself like a wet dog, snow falling from her hair and shoulders, then looked for her mother. She wasn’t in the main room of the hut; the fireplace in the middle, its rough iron chimney going straight up through the roof, illuminated the scant furniture: a few tables, two straw beds covered in furs. Lidja was alone here.

“Mother?”

She crossed the room and pulled aside the deerskin curtain that separated the cooking area from the living space. Her mother stood in front of the rough wooden table that had always been there, her back to Lidja. A handful of small bones were scattered before her. Even from where she stood, Lidja could see the patterns they had formed, knew what it meant. Spirals of deceit, constellations of lies.

Her mother knew.

Freya turned, eyes afire with barely-controlled rage. “Lidja,” she said through clenched teeth, “what is the meaning of this?” She clutched a birch rod in her hands, one that Lidja knew all too well.

Lidja stood there in the entryway, eyes lowered.

“I see your intent, daughter,” her mother continued, anger simmering like a three day stew. “I see the past and the future. You know that.”

Lidja nodded, still silent.

Freya took a step forward. “Did you honestly believe you could hide this from me? From me?” she shrieked.
Still Lidja didn’t respond, kept her head down. She knew her mother’s temper, bore many scars from years of punishment. She knew the sorceress’ strengths. And her weaknesses.

“Hold out your arms, child,” Freya ordered her daughter. She was shaking with rage now, apoplectic. She raised the rod that she held in her hands so tightly that her knuckles were as white as bone.

“No,” Lidja murmured.

“What did you say?” her mother hissed. “What did you say?”

Lidja looked up. “I said no. I’m not a child anymore.” There was a strength in her voice that she didn’t know she possessed. She felt as if she’d left her body and was floating beside it, watching on, detached. She watched herself meet her mother’s gaze without flinching. One hand lowered to her side. “You can’t tell me what to do anymore.”

“We’ll see about that!” The beech rod whipped upwards, above Freya’s head. She bared her teeth, ready to strike.

Her mother was a fine seer, could see the future and the past with a startling clarity. But, like all seers, there was one occurrence that was hidden to her.

Her own demise.

Lidja swung her hatchet without fear or anger, just a stony resolve. Its head sank into the side of Freya’s neck. The beech rod fell to the earthen floor, and Lidja let go of the hatchet’s handle. It stayed there, sticking out at an odd angle. Freya’s lips moved, but no words emerged, just a deep, wet burble. She shuddered, and blood coloured her lips, dripped down her chin like berry juice. She fell to her knees, her confused eyes finding her daughter’s. They held a silent plea for mercy. Too late.

Lidja reached out and grasped the hatchet’s wooden handle again. Pulled it free.

Blood gushed from Freya’s neck like a burst dam, a flood released. She collapsed sideways to the earthen floor with a wet thud. She didn’t move again. Beneath the body, the dirt drank deeply of her.

Lidja stood there for a moment longer, her mother’s blood on her hands, her face, her soul. Then she put down the bloodied hatchet and opened the rear door of the hut. She grasped Freya’s ankles and dragged her body outside, into the snow. It would be her grave, at least until the spring thaw.

She returned inside and closed the door, leaving her mother and her guilt behind. Freya’s casting bones were still on the table, still in the pattern that had betrayed her. She gathered them up, focused her will on them, and tossed them across the table.

When they came to rest, they showed her the rock, so clear that she might have been standing in the field next to it.

Lidja smiled. She had much to do, and not much time. It wouldn’t be long before the people of Myrká sent for her. She had to be ready.

*

The rock cracks.

Lidja looks past the squirming corpse beneath her, and sees that the stone is no longer stone. It has turned to ice, clear and blue like the glaciers to the north. And across its smooth surface, a delicate spider web of fractures radiates out from beneath her palm, spreading wider and wider until it covers the ice entirely. She looses a triumphant cry, thrilled by the results.

The corpse’s eyes open again, milky-white cataracts clouding them. He looks at Lidja, a troubled expression on his grey, dead face.

In the corner, Gudrún sobs.

The deacon’s head turns towards the sound. “Garún?” he slurs. His eyes return to Lidja. “Garún?”

“Shhh,” Lidja hushes. She leans down and kisses the corpse lightly on the lips. Her tongue darts out, just a little, tasting his cold, dead flesh…

*

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Meanwhile, here’s the first excerpt. This comes from the opening story in the anthology.

The Stain of the Psychopomp King
by Lucien E. G. Spelman

I was a nervous wreck the first day I saw my father. He was at war when I was born and through most of my early years, and although he would write my mother concise letters every few months (a page or two of neat handwriting meant to reassure her that he was still alive), he never wrote to me. I never knew him. As far as I as was concerned, he was only a legend and a photograph. A stranger.

The last letter he wrote to her said he would be home before my sixth birthday.

He kept his word.

On the day of his arrival I paced around the front window, waiting and watching until I saw the old yellow taxi pull up to the curb. The back door groaned open and out came my father, followed by a large, rough-looking dog that I thought must be a gift for me. A thought which only served to increase my anxiety. My father stood staring at the house. Squaring off with it as though he might lay siege to it. As though it were an obstacle. After what seemed like forever, he ran his fingers through his thick hair, hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder, and started up the walkway with the dog padding alongside. The dog cast watchful glances here and there, but my father seemed so calm, so sure of himself, that I immediately wanted nothing more in the world than to be him. To be with him. At the very least, to be alongside him. Like the dog was.
He reached the top of the stairs and saw me peeking out from behind the curtains. He offered me a wink, but as soon as I knew I was spotted I panicked and snapped the curtains shut.

My mom threw open the door and wrapped her arms around him so desperately I thought for one horrible moment she was trying to strangle him. There was always a melancholy desperation in my mom. My father smiled, hugged her back, and winked at me again. But it was clear, even to an almost six-year-old, that he would never be all the way home. His eyes told a dark story. His eyes told the world that part of him would simply be somewhere else forever.

The dog walked through the door behind him, eyed me warily for a moment, and finally offered me his ear to scratch.

My father shook my hand, then kissed the top of my head clumsily.

As it turned out, the dog was not a gift for me, and my fears about him proved to be unfounded.

My father called him Hound (although he looked more like a shepherd) and he was a constant companion to our family, and a vigilant watchdog until the day he died.

Until the day they both died.

*

My father got a job as an ironworker at Yankee Steeplejacks and settled into postwar life the best he could. He went about his new life with gently imposing dignity, providing for my mom and me without complaint. He asked for nothing, rarely spoke unless spoken to, and in the evenings he played his trumpet in the basement. It was an odd choice of instrument for such a quiet man, but the type of music he played on the thing suited him well–wistful, melancholy strains and passages that would drift up through the heater vents. My mother and I would listen in the living room; she knitting; me alphabetizing my comic book collection on the floor, or petting Hound; each of us pretending to be doing something mundane, but in truth simply being carried away by the notes. Each of us trying to be near him.

*

He never mentioned the war or his experience there, but one sultry evening, there was a reminder of his time away. Suppertime; a staccato knock at the door; a man in uniform. My father spoke with him for a few moments in his own tongue. I had never heard my father’s native language before–only the residue of it when he flattened out his r’s or pronounced certain words with ”th” in them: zis and zat for this and that.

It was disconcerting. It seemed to widen the gap between us somehow.

As the man at the door spoke, my father became first crestfallen, then wistful, then determined. I watched the display with fascination. It was more emotion than I had ever before seen him show, and I could read it all without understanding a word. I suddenly hated the man at the door for his ability to move my father so deeply. Eventually, the man handed him a large map rolled into a tube, then saluted. My father returned the salute, barked out what sounded like an order, and firmly closed the door.

He excused himself from supper, and when my mother asked him what was wrong, he said a friend from the war had been killed, and then he said something strange: He said he would have to play him home.
He didn’t say anything more.

He went down to the little basement, and that evening he played all through the night and maybe even a little into the next day, because when I got up for breakfast, he was just coming up from the basement, eyes red, hair wild.

*

The first time I saw the stain, the tattoo, the whole tattoo, I was almost twelve. My father took great pains to hide it. He wore long-sleeved shirts all year long, even in the stifling New England summers, but even so, the marks and lines of it would peek out beneath his sleeves. He even hid it at home. He would dress in his room with the door closed, and he would never leave the shower wearing anything less than a long terry robe. It didn’t seem he was hiding it from my mother, though. Of course she had seen it. She could be in the room while he dressed. They even took a shower together once, on New Year’s Eve, my mom drunk and giggly from champagne. But he damn sure hid it from me. It was maddening. He was maddening.

After school one afternoon, sensing that the time was right, I rolled the dice and asked him flat out to let me see the whole thing. He glared at me at first, wounding me. Wasn’t I his son? Didn’t I deserve to understand his history? To be a part of his history? The hurt turned to anger, and I glared back. Fiercely (I thought). Piercingly (I hoped). And for some reason, that seemed to soften him. He broke from my gaze, shaking his head and muttering something to himself that I didn’t understand, and then finally let loose with a wide toothy smile. It was beautiful and terrifying. Like seeing a painting come to life. He laid the newspaper by his side and stood up. His callused hands worked the buttons of his flannel, seeming almost too big for the job. He folded the shirt neatly, laid it next to the paper, and then took off his undershirt. He stood for a moment regarding me, his undershirt balled in his fist, waiting for the inevitable reaction; his body was a mass of scars. The largest ran from his left shoulder across his chest and disappeared below the waist of his Levis. There were circular scars with pinched edges, tiny star-shaped scars in a constellation above his rib cage, a diamond-shaped scar at his throat. Each a secret history. He turned to show me the tattoo, and I was unsurprised to find more scars on his back, including one that looked like a burn running across the tattoo, warping it a bit. The tattoo was a line of music running from his left wrist to his right, across his shoulders and back. I knew the tattoo had notes of course, I had seen them on those rare occasions peeking out, but I thought there might be something more. A dragon or something. A mermaid. Felix the Cat. It was just music. He opened his arms out to straighten the staff, and let me have a good long look at the quarter notes and half notes scored in blue ink against his pale flesh.

Against the fading light from the window, he was a fleshy silhouette of a cross, scarred and irregular.

“Is it a song?” I asked.

“The bones of a song,” he said.

My eyes shifted from the music to the scars and back again. A few notes, the ones on the burned skin were difficult to read, compressed and discolored.

I soaked him in. I soaked in the notes. The lines. The bars. The fanciful “S” that I would learn later was a treble clef.

“Enough?” he said, breaking the spell.

“Enough,” I said, but frankly I could have looked at him forever. Each scar held a tale, and if he wouldn’t tell me, then I would’ve been content to stand there and make them up. Just to have the fable. Just to have the story of him.

He pulled on the t-shirt, grabbed the flannel from the couch, and patted me on the head.

“Why don’t you go play with your friends,” he said, and headed for his cave downstairs.

I pretended to leave, but when he was out of sight I went back to the couch and sat there watching the dust motes chase each other in the fading light and listened to him play.

*

My mother never helped when it came to solving the mystery of my father. She could be maddeningly obtuse when she wanted to. I would try and trick her into offering information about him, but she never took the bait. It became a kind of game between us. I once lied to her that kids at school were making fun of me because they thought my father was a German spy, and she said to tell them he spoke with a Scandinavian accent, not a German one, but if they wanted to discuss it further, she could send him down there if they liked. That put an end to that.

I was determined to solve the mystery of my father on my own, then. I would spy on him when he wasn’t looking, the scars and the notes and the war and the language framing him, gilding him sometimes: a warrior hero. Tarnishing him others: a Nazi spy. But mostly just blending together, creating a haze, making him more arcane, more impenetrable.

I did it on my own. I crept down the stairs, terrified that he would come home early and catch me. I pulled the chain on the single bulb hung from the floor joists, which seemed to cast as much shadow as it did light, and was almost disappointed with the simplicity of the room. A music stand with a tattered, leather-bound book of sheet music standing on a round Persian-style rug, threadbare where my father stood. His trumpet sat in an open, old brown and silver case next to the music stand, gleaming in the single light. As I crept forward, Hound moved from the shadows, and began to growl and whimper at me. I had no idea he was there. I had no idea even how he got there. When I last saw Hound he was in the kitchen, quietly napping by his dinner dish. I jumped, startled. Guilty. He must have snuck behind me. I spun around and caught his eyes, pleading with him silently not to make any noise. He ignored my pleas, and the growls and whimpers became barks. Loud and purposeful. I heard the kitchen door slam.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I executed a panicky about-face, and ran up the stairs, straight into my mother. For the first time in my life, I saw a flash of her anger. She grabbed me by the arm fiercely.

“Would you like it if I looked in your closet? Under your bed? Between the mattresses? In your secret places?” she said. She was shouting. She had never shouted before.

“No, Ma’am,” I said, flushing, eyes brimming with tears.

“Leave people their safety,” she growled.

I’m sorry! I thought, You never said it was a rule. Nobody ever said it was a rule that I couldn’t go down there, but I said nothing; I just looked at my shoes.

And then, all at once, the anger was gone and her face was round and soft and kind again. It was as if she were reading my mind. She brushed back my hair.

“Go and play outside,” she said, gently this time.

They always seemed to want me outside.

*

My secret, guilty pleasure was to go and watch him high in the buildings downtown, walking fearlessly across the beams. He would stop sometimes and gaze out into the distance, out to the sea, just standing there with one hand in his pocket and the other wiping the sweat from his brow. At those moments, from that distance, I felt closer to him than I ever had, my tiny little father up in the skyscrapers. He seemed vulnerable. At those moments I could almost imagine I knew his secret heart.

Once, on a particularly windy day, I played hooky and went to watch him. I was worried because another steeplejack had died the month before–buffeted by the wind until he lost his footing and slipped, prayers and admonitions splitting the air as he fell. I watched him fall, but never told my father. I wondered which was the last word to escape his lips as he landed between the tables at the outdoor café with a wet thump. God, probably.

I arrived at the worksite just as the lunch whistle blew, and my father turned and saw me. The blood drained from my face, and I ran away so fast I left my lunchbox sitting on the sidewalk. That evening when I got home from school, a note was sitting on my bed attached to the lunchbox, and next to a brand new King Silvertone trumpet. It said:

I would prefer you attend school. – Dad

I assumed he meant to give me lessons, but he never brought it up. Finally I asked him over dinner one night if he might be willing to teach me, but he said he didn’t know how to teach, and then changed the subject in his simple but firm way. My mom put her hand on mine under the table and held it like that until dessert, eating awkwardly. The next day there were three trumpet instruction books on my bed: 20 All Time Hits–b Flat Solos, Sugar Blues for Trumpet, and The EZ TRUMPET METHOD Instruction Book–Beginner to Advanced.

From that point forward, when he was playing in the basement at night, I would go practice in my room, leaving my mom alone to knit and listen to the strains of this discordant duet. Eventually I got good enough to be able to jam along with records, performing duets with Armstrong and Eldridge and James. But never my father.

*

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The Stain of the Psychopomp King by Lucien E G Spelman
Heart Of Ice by Martin Livings
Neptune’s Garden by Lisa A Koosis
Dust by Naomi Bell
To Die For by S D Matley
The Franchise by Joe L Murr
Clip Notes by Marty Young
Blood on Green by Victoria Anisman-Reiner
Cargo by Aaron Polson
Nepenthe by Felicity Dowker
Yellow Water Pike by Derek Rutherford
Surveying The Land by B D Wilson
Nightwork by Robert Neilson
Hand And Cradle by Trent Roman

Cover art is by the awesomely talented Australian artist Halinka Orszulok.

You can find Dark Pages now at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Don’t forget you can also order the book directly from us – details on the Contact Page.

Treat yourself to a sumptuous feast of dark fiction today. While you’re at it, treat a few other people too. You won’t regret it.

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The Stain of the Psychopomp King by Lucien E G Spelman
Heart Of Ice by Martin Livings
Neptune’s Garden by Lisa A Koosis
Dust by Naomi Bell
To Die For by S D Matley
The Franchise by Joe L Murr
Clip Notes by Marty Young
Blood on Green by Victoria Anisman-Reiner
Cargo by Aaron Polson
Nepenthe by Felicity Dowker
Yellow Water Pike by Derek Rutherford
Surveying The Land by B D Wilson
Nightwork by Robert Neilson
Hand And Cradle by Trent Roman

These stories represent an excellent selection of dark speculative fiction, including fantasy, sci-fi, horror and just plain weird. The authors are a truly international bunch. We have representatives from Australia, Canada, UK, Ireland, USA and the Netherlands.

This is going to be an excellent collection, certainly one of the must-have books of this year. We’re now getting into the editing and production phase. We’ll give you a sneak peak at cover art when we can and announce a publication date asap. It will be in the first half of 2010.

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As decisions are made a Table Of Contents will be made public.

Thanks to everyone that submitted, good luck to you all and here’s hoping we can release an excellent anthology.

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Brenton lives in Adelaide, South Australia with his wife and two of his three kids. His oldest child allowed reality to hit him hard earlier this year with the arrival of the first grandchild. Hopefully the second is still a few years away.

While living in a quiet suburb and spending many boring hours ensuring remote connection services remain working for a government department is his daily façade, inside his head is a world of darkness and twisted depravity struggling to emerge.

With over a dozen stories of his own published through venues such as 52 Stitches, Yellow Mama and others, and with new work to be seen in Night to Dawn and in the much anticipated APEX Anthology ‘The Blackness Within’, among others, in 2010, Brenton is finding his voice as a writer. He has been reading and passing comment on works of a dark nature in renowned venues such as HorrorScope, Australia’s Dark Fiction Weblog, and Black magazine, and it is behind the scenes where he has discovered a passion of which he was unaware.

Whether reviewing titles or sifting the slush pile for Aurealis, one of Australia’s most respected venues for the publication of short stories, Brenton has found a strange sensation (a mixture of anticipation, joy and frustration) creeping through his body at the possibility of finding the next gem hidden beneath the often blurry words. After a quick mental check-up and a strong dose of antibiotics, the next logical step was to consider editing an anthology of dark fiction – enter us here at Blade Red Press.

Brenton continues to pen dark shorts and flash fiction, but has recently finished drafting something just a little different. To learn more, visit his blog Musings Of An Aussie Writer.

We’re very please to be working with Brenton and we’re confident that he will put together a stunning collection of dark fiction for our first anthology. With over 150 submissions received already, Brenton certainly has his work cut out.

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Get writing and good luck!

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