Plugs

Ken Brady’s latest story, “Walkers of the Deep Blue Sea and Sky” appears in the Exquisite Corpuscle anthology, edited by Jay Lake and Frank Wu.

Trent Walters, poetry editor at A&A, has a chapbook, Learning the Ropes, from Morpo Press.

David Kopaska-Merkel’s book of humorous noir fiction based on nursery rhymes, Nursery Rhyme Noir 978-09821068-3-9, is sold at the Genre Mall. Other new books include The zSimian Transcript (Cyberwizard Productions) and Brushfires (Sams Dot Publishing).

Read Rudi’s story “Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch” at Behind the Wainscot.

The Ballad of Octavia and Mr Head

by Jonathan Wood

It’s a beautiful thing.

Some people have a hole in themselves. Mr Head had a hole in himself. It was in his face. People found it off-putting. Women found it off-putting. They could not stare lovingly into his eyes. He had no eyes. He had a hole. They could not stare lovingly into a hole. Rather they tended to scream and run away.

This made Mr Head lonely. Loneliness made him cruel. He was especially cruel to cats. Cats tended to try and crawl up his leg and go to sleep in his hole.

Octavia had a hole in herself. It was in her soul. She had no soul. She had a vacant parking lot where her soul should be. She was cruel to many things. Cats included.

One day Mr Head met Octavia.

Octavia did not scream. She did not run away. Instead she reached out a hand and plucked the cat that was sleeping peacefully in the hole in Mr Head. She opened her mouth and vast tentacles reached out from between lipstick-stained teeth and wrapped around the cat. The tentacles were purple. With a screech the cat was sucked inside.

Suddenly Mr Head felt full. Tentatively, heart quivering, he reached out his hand. Octavia reached out with hers. Barely daring to believe, Mr Head took Octavia’s hand.

Then she ate him.

And she felt full.

It’s a beautiful thing.

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