Excerpt from Ogre Baby

Here is an excerpt from Ogre Baby, one of the stories in our upcoming issue, Teeth and Tongues, by author Ann Ewan:

Ogre Baby

           

The first time I saw a dead human, there were only eight of us smalls and I was just learning to stagger about on my new legs. The big ogre had slung the dead human over his back, so that he had to stoop down low to come into the cave, and we all ran to see what he had caught. He wasn't called "Tribe" yet, but just Big, the biggest of us, the one who brought food.

Grinning proudly, he pulled the dead human from his back and slammed it down onto the floor for us all to see. The human juice was red, not black like ours. "Real meat!" he said, especially to me, the newest, who hadn't seen something like that before. "The only real meat!"

He used his long curved claws to rip a hole in the human's belly and started pulling out the soft guts, shoving them into his mouth with both hands. The reek made me feel sick and hungry at the same time. My mouth filled with water, even though I knew I wouldn't get any food because I was the smallest and all the others were crowding closer, whining and slobbering. Hoog elbowed me in the face and Dross stepped hard on one of my feet.

            "Meat!" they cheered and begged. "Real meat!"

            One of the older ones asked, "New baby?"

            Big looked up with his mouth leaking red human juice and said, "No, this is old meat. Need fresh for new baby."

            While he was distracted, two of the smalls grabbed meat, and there was a loud crack as one of them, Croak, snapped off one of the dead human's hands. Big roared with rage and batted him away so hard that he hit the cave wall and slumped down, asleep or dead. Nip scampered out of range, with inside human meat dangling from his teeth.

            "My meat! You smalls wait till I say!"

            Big picked up the human hand and stuffed it into his mouth. The other smalls had scattered and I got a chance to edge closer, careful to keep my hands to myself. The human was shaped much like us, except where Big and Croak had ripped him, but the only hair he had was on top of his head. He was turning grey from lying around dead. His arms and legs were spindly compared to ours, and with that and the hairlessness he looked puny, more helpless than a dead deer. He had a belt with weapons, a sword that was a tiny model of Big's and a knife, but they hadn't done him much good.

            The other smalls began to creep back, pushing me out of the way. Big belched and suddenly crooked a fat finger at me to come closer. "You! Gerl!"

            The others fell back and let me through.

            "Heart meat." He held out the red drippy thing he'd just been snacking on. "Eat. Get strong."

Keep an eye on the blog for more excerpts from Issue 7. And if you'd like to pick up a copy, we'll be launching the issue at Kafein on October 5th. Check out the Facebook event for more information.

Lamiai Excerpt

This was one of the first stories that stood out to me from our batch of submissions for Issue 6. Anna Avdeeva has crafted a tense horror story that is also full of historical detail. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. Here is the beginning of "Lamiai":

Ancient Athens, 3^rd century BC.

"If you don't go to bed immediately, the Lamiai will come and get you," Melantho said.

The girl gasped and dropped the rag doll she was about to throw at the nurse.

"Oh, they will come," the older woman grumbled. "The Lamiai have black snake-like hair and long fingers with claws – all the better to grab naughty children!"

With this, she lifted her four-year-old ward and hoisted her into the crib.

 "I don't want to go to bed!" The girl made a face and waved her arms at Melantho.

"Don't be so difficult." Melantho unwrapped the child's thin chiton. "Close your little bright eyes. If you don't, Empousa will come. She is the Lamiai's leader and the most vicious of them. She snatches little children who refuse to sleep at night, carries them into the wild hills and sucks out their sweet blood.

The girl shut her eyes tightly and pulled the woolen coverlet up to her ears. If her mother was there, Melantho would have had to resort to long-winded blandishment, promises and lullabies: lady Timeia disapproved of horror stories, but Melantho had been a midwife, wet-nurse and nanny longer than Timeia a mother; she knew that fear was the most efficient tool for calming uncontrollable children.

Melantho adjusted the coverlet so that the girl wouldn't suffocate. She walked around the gynaikeon strewn with rag-dolls, laying with their embroidered faces up or down like city-dwellers after the plague, which, thank gods, passed this household by. Melantho picked them up and placed them into a big basket. Then she straightened her back with a grunt, perched on the edge of her own cot and trimmed the wick of an oil-lamp which had been smoking quietly on the night-stand by the headboard.

"Nani, nani, mikro nani..." she chanted to the girl who remained immobile under a weight of fear. Soon enough the child let out a sigh of relief and went limp, very much like a rag-doll with flaxen hair herself.

Pre-sunset glow seeped through a tiny window closed with a stretched sheep's gut; on its way to the windowless women's bedroom it waned and wore out. Darkness fell swiftly; soon lady Timeia and her sister-in-law would come back from the inner courtyard, where they had been enjoying the last of the fair weather, looms and spindles in hand.

Once the girl had been settled, the nurse had every right to go to bed herself, but it seemed a shame to waste the residual light and warmth of the dying day. With a glance she made sure her ward was sleeping and went into the women's chamber. The gloomy corridor in front of her was empty, but the room behind her suddenly held its breath. Melantho froze in her tracks. Someone sighed, adjusted a rustling garment. Melantho crossed her fingers against the evil eye and looked back. The girl was quiet. The nurse recovered her wind and scurried to the exit as fast as her grating joints would allow. 

Anna Avdeeva is a poetess and fiction-writer. Her main interests are linguistics and ancient history - things that connect people through time and space. She recently graduated with a BA in Greek and Roman studies and currently works and resides in Ottawa, Canada. 

An excerpt from Justin Joschko's Statues

Our next excerpt is from a great story with a  mysterious feel and a fast pace. I found the tone and description just right to allow me to be in the same place as the characters... whether I wanted to be there or not. The descriptions were familiar and drew out the imagination, rather than force it.

... I have now spent more time than I would like at my key board reflecting on how to use a certain phrase... it isn't going to happen. It might be easier to draw blood from a stone... So, I present an excerpt from Justin Joschko's Statues.

Dawn came in full plumage, its brilliant colours undiluted by the light pollution that leaves city sunrises looking washed-out and grainy – old footage poorly stored. I greeted it amicably on our veranda, a mug of green tea cradled in my lap, then went inside to wake the others. We’d agreed on an early start. Tonya was already awake, reading by the sunlight streaming through the slightly parted curtains of a nearby window. Kyle, however, required some prodding, shaking, and a semi-serious threat from both Tonya and I that we would leave without him. Grumbling, he dressed, and the three of us set off.

The road undulated beneath us, rising and falling with the land and weaving around large outcrops of stone. The radio dissolved into static as we progressed and by the time we approached Verde, we could hear only the purr of the engine and the occasional rustle of one of us shifting in our seat.

The town came suddenly and without fanfare. A small sign, its edges jagged with rust, announced our arrival at Verde, population 300. The trees spread out, revealing a single road lined on each side with clapboard buildings, a few tributary cul-de-sacs branching off from time to time. We stopped the car and got out.

“Well,” Tonya said, “it certainly doesn’t seem occupied.”

“Told you,” replied Kyle.

The town was windswept and solemn, its air heavy and somehow stale, though the surrounding forest should have produced the opposite effect. It felt wrong, though there was nothing overt that would have made it so— there were no shattered windows or spray paint tags or other marks of vandalism, no signs of poverty or despair amongst the disappeared populace, no apparent natural or chemical disaster that might have driven the people who had once lived here away. Only the statues.

Tonya was the first among us to approach one of them.

Justin Joschko is a freelance writer residing in Ottawa, Ontario. His work has appeared in echolocation magazine. He writes and draws the weekly web-comic series Flannery Row.

An excerpt from Hungry Hungry Ed by Tyler MacFarlane

I was a zombie fan before zombies were à la mode (...ice cream.... delicious...). I shouldn't complain that they are now. We have The Walking Dead (AMC, not the graphic novels, I linked to the trailer) because of it, or at least it certainly helps. So long as zombies don't go the way of vampires and werewolves in things (yeah things) like Twilight and such we'll be ok. I'm not judging (I am), I haven't read them and they're for a different audience. If they get people to read, it's all good.

Back on track... Tyler MacFarlane. Tyler (I want to talk about Fight club) brings us Hungry Hungry Ed. It is a must read in my opinion. It is also to date the only story we have printed with zombies. It turns out they know how to run a print machine so we may use them again, they're here, our actual printers.

Enjoy the excerpt!

Ed pauses, reconsidering the gravity of the situation at hand. He raises a contemplative finger to his mouth and chews the digit to the bone whilst pondering his surroundings. He stumbles awkwardly about in a circular motion, his tortured mind unburdened by the repetitive action. The thoughts literally ooze out of Ed’s ears. He knows he’s just a player in the game of post-apocalypse life. He knows he was born into a pre-determined set of rules – a system of symbols, semantics, and truth values. Ed continues to think, and surveys what he has to work with. He didn’t pass go, didn’t collect $200 – he ate the monopoly board. Life is as subjective as the hunger pangs in his stomach. Truth value: Ed’s hungry. Semantically speaking, very hungry. That’s my justified, true belief, anyways.

[...]

The doorknob cowers now in the face of Ed and Murph’s morbidity, quivering and bending with each wildly awkward blow. Perspiration, blood, and guts spill out over the cold ceramic floor. Hunger permeates the charred remains of the MacFarlane’s old house. The undead brothers strike with the force of all things unholy. Three terrible, deformed arms beat continuously against the doorknob. The arms beat and beat; they beat themselves into stumps of purpose, of eminent destruction.

My name is Tyler MacFarlane, and I’m from Whitby, Ontario. If I’m not reading, writing, longboarding, or making music, I just might be dead. In which case, I’d chase you down to eat your brains (after having suffered a radioactive metamorphosis, of course). I’m a teacher by trade, but stuck on a long waitlist for a job, so I earn a living in general construction and carpentry. I completed my Honours Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto, studying Philosophy and English. After that, I moved to Australia to undergo a Graduate Diploma in Education, and graduated this past December. Somewhere between surfing with penguins, chasing kangaroo, and long roadtrips, I decided to start marketing pieces of my writing. So here I am, a 24-year-old teacher without a classroom, passing time writing stories about cute things like zombies. Thanks for the read!

Cecelia

Here is an excerpt from my own story in the upcoming sixth issue of Here Be Monsters. This is the introduction. We'll be posting excerpts of all 9 stories leading up to our launch on March 16th. Thank you for reading -- Alex

Why would I kill Cecelia?

That's what I asked myself after I got my new meta. It had been hooked up to me for all of three seconds before it made the call. It had been overly polite because it wasn't used to me yet.

Piotr, it had said, I regret to inform you that you are going to murder Cecelia Olyeander.

I had been so excited to get one of the new Blue Sky models, too. It wasn't making a good first impression though. What do metas know? I thought.

They apparently know to contact the police when they detect your so-called intent to kill their creator, because not long after this declaration, a cop came around to my apartment.

He was short, heavy, and dressed in a white dress shirt with a brown coat and pants: all of which made it clear he was kept on for his brain. “I'm Sergeant Sabinetti,” he said as he sized me up. I was standing in the doorway, instinctively blocking my apartment from view.

“Hello, sergeant. What's going on?”

He narrowed his clever eyes for a quick moment, probably trying to decide if I was a bad liar or just thick. “Mr. Malkis, you've been informed of criminal intent by your meta, that's correct? In this case, it's quite serious. You've been told you're going to commit murder.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but I didn't think that it would call the police. I mean, you can't arrest me for what the meta said.”

“We should speak about this whole situation. May I come in?” He was feigning concern for me, the confused citizen accused of murder by a talking phone.

I am not merely a phone, Piotr.

You can call the police, so you're a phone to me.

We sat in my kitchen (or living room, depending on what you prioritized). “I'm not here to arrest you or even accuse you of murder,” said Sabinetti. “When we get a call from one of those,” he said, pointing at my head to signify the meta interface glued behind my ear, “we have to come as soon as we can. Most of the time, we're too late. Other times, we get there and the suspect confesses. I had assumed you'd be one of the latter cases, since you couldn't be murdering Cecelia Olyeander right now.”

“Why? Where is she?”

“She's doing a press conference -- for Blue Sky.” He looked surprised that I needed to be told this. It was the first genuine emotion I'd seen from him.

“Oh,” I said, “I hardly think about Cecelia anymore.” And I was trapped.

The Timely Demise of Entropy

What?! It isn't a Thursday or anywhere near the end of the week and we are posting... How did this happen?

Given that Issue 6 is launching and it contains 9 stories, we will be posting excerpts of the stories throughout each week (plus our usual weekly post) leading up to the launch.

I'm not sure if choosing an excerpt is an art form or something that would best be done with a mathematical formula.

Kim Goldberg's The Timely Demise of Entropy:

            i.b. noone was last seen tossing pebbles into the duck pond. The morning of the phone call, a small raft made from alder saplings had washed ashore near the footbridge. Its only passenger, a damp Tim Horton’s box stuffed with poems scrawled on sugary brown napkins. Their original sequence was unknown but also fairly irrelevant. It was, however, imperative that the poems be shared as soon as possible so that i.b.’s creative animus could be released from this realm and allowed to deconstruct the next. Jano’s replacement, a bouncy summer student majoring in Leisure Studies, told the pomopos the Bengal was free that very night.

           The mathematicians from the University (joined by a few theoretical physicists) were squabbling about a disqualified answer on quadratic equations and scarcely noticed the poets file in. The poets, catching fragments of disjunctive argument, assumed the mathematicians were out-of-town pomopos come to pay their respects.

  
BIO: Kim Goldberg is an award-winning poet, journalist and author. Her poetry and prose have appeared in  Literary Review of Canada, Geist, Tesseracts 11, Zahir Tales and many other magazines and anthologies. Her latest books are RED ZONE and Ride Backwards on Dragon. She practices the esoteric martial art of Liuhebafa and teaches Kung Fu For Writers on Vancouver Island. Visit www.pigsquashpress.com .

An excerpt from Duane Burry's “Electricracy”

So it was not easy for me to find an excerpt that I felt represented my story for our first edition of Here Be Monsters, but I think this works. The title for my story comes from combining technocracy and electrickery. As always there are things I see in it that I feel I would like to improve... but I will refrain. A sample of the third story should be here soonish. Thanks again.


The modifications performed on Queln took. One after the other. Week after week the procedures were successful on him. The sci-mage, Zinntar, turned out to be not only one of the best, but one of the most caring. Those who ended up under his hexes and blade were in good hands even if some of his experiments did not succeed or work as expected. Very few of his subjects died. As the mods became more popular, heavy handed industry moved in, laws and regulations to control the implantations and changes were put in place. Slowly the system became safer, but not because industry cared for the people, but because industry saw the money that could be made if things were controlled. Procedures like those performed on Queln and the junk kids of that period were never done now, except for underground. Queln himself was still learning years later of what his modifications could do. It was a subject that was a guarded secret for him, a part of his life that he shared rarely. Standing in line to be cut and hexed so he could have food and shelter for himself and one other person was a time he would rather forget. It was a symbol of his failure, a symbol of his family's failure, of his social failure, of his lack of strength. But he had bowed to the harsh world, opened himself to Zinntar's blade and hexes and here he sat, before a person who had come to the procedures years later after they had been refined, perfected, rendered safe and undetectable for the right price. Was he disgusted? No. He was awestruck and proud. This beautiful girl before him could experience what she could from the mods because of what he and others had been subjected to. Maybe he was angry at the injustice of it, maybe deep down an ember of despise, or anger, or rage was birthing, but for now it was imperceptible.