Feast Night

by Edd

A dozen crystal chandeliers hover above the Amazon rain forest, illuminating thirty square meters of greenery. A single parti-colored macaw bursts from the canopy, flinging itself across the sky into midnight darkness. A pair of dusky titi monkeys cling to each other, chittering softly.

The canopy of the forest smoothes itself, becoming more solid, more level. Branches climb here and there, twine themselves, become rough then more polished chairs and a great rectangular table.

Leaves widen, become cup-shaped and dish-shaped. They float up to the table. Guavas, acai berries, and mangoes give up their juices. Ten squealing tapirs rise above the canopy, their heads rip themselves from their bodies, and numinous fires roast the bodies.

The heads pile themselves on the table.

One moment the only sound is the faint plop of fat dripping from the carcasses. Then twelve chairs sink under the weight of unseen beings. The thirteenth chair remains unused.

Meat and juice disappear bite by bite, sip by sip. Bones fall through the forest’s canopy. By the time the meal is over the cups and plates are sodden, decomposing. Holes appear in the table. The chandeliers dip one by one to plunge into the jungle. The chairs decay and crumble.

The thirteenth chair is left. Finally it too decays. When the last of it drops away it is as if a presence withdraws from the world. Night once more claims the jungle.

See Scenic Eavoa!

by Rudi Dornemann

Towering colonnades, thickets of spires, mountainesque domes, quarter-mile-high statues — the best way to see the city of Eavoa was from the air. And the best person to show it to you was Zaglevall Nunnin.

That was the gist of the posters Captain Nunnin had posted all over the dock district. He was behind the broadsheets that documented the troops of zombie macaques in the city’s upper reaches. Argive Flell — who ran the observation towers which Nunnin’s broadsheets happened to mention were not entirely secure against zombie monkeys — distributed his own broadsheets pointing out the sharpness of the beaks of pterodactyls and puncturability of zeppelins of Captain Nunnin’s fleet.

They tolerated each other’s excursions into the popular press, and wrote off their competing staffs of writers, typesetters and printers as the cost of doing business until a particularly lurid etching of a woman trying to wrest her baby from a foaming-mouthed macaque had tourists shuddering at the thought of the observation towers.

“This is outrageous!” bellowed Flell, after he’d burst into Nunnin’s office. “You know the zombie virus suppresses symptoms of all other diseases! A rabid zombie monkey is a medical impossibility!”

Nunnin shrugged. “The engraver’s hand slipped — cramps from all that atmospheric cross-hatching.”

“Irresponsible!” shouted Flell, still winded after the ladder climb up to the aerostat that housed his rival’s office. “Libelous!”

“Your viewing platforms are still open-air?” said the captain.

“So? No monkey’s going to scale a thousand meters of electrified fencing to reach them.”

“But — theoretically — they could,” said Nunnin, tilting his chair back.

“And — theoretically — flocks of giant Quetzalcoatlus could start migrating from the plains,” said Argive. “A pterosaur bigger than one of your balloons — that’ll make a lovely illustration…”

Nunnin was out of his seat. “They’d snap their wings in the outer colonnades! Anyway, our engines would scare them off, just like the small ones…”

Outside the window, a pterodactyl flew by with a macaque on its back. The monkey prodded the flying reptile with a gnawed shinbone.

“Isn’t one of your towers in that direction?” said Nunnin.

Argive nodded. “Did you see that monkey steer that ‘dactyl right over the engine end of one of your zeps?”

Nunnin was busy emptying his safe. “Need a lift out of town?”

“I believe I do,” said Argive.

Another pterodactyl flapped by with another macaque.

“I believe I do.”