Issue 32

The night was humid and quiet. A blood moon peeked out from behind a curtain of silver-black clouds and the Milky Way was a shining sash across the sky’s breast. The low hum of dragonflies flitting about the fen was almost melodic against the silence of the heat.

The dark-haired boy sitting a few meters up the riverbank glanced up at the sky, brows knit. She should’ve been here by now.

Another boy of markedly smaller size stumbled up the bank towards his brother. His bare feet were dirty and his overalls were rumpled and distressed. “Jack-” he began, but was cut off.

“Not now, Billy,” murmured the older boy.

“But-”

“Not now, Billy.”

“It’s real important.”

Jackson sighed, halfheartedly brushing a lump of hardened mud off the right strap of his brother’s overalls. “What is it?”

The little boy grinned. “What d’you call a sleeping bull?”

“Now ain’t the time for jokes, Billy.”

“Come on, Jack.”

The older boy looked up at the sky once more, then back towards the darkened house. He wasn’t meant to be out so late, and Billy especially wasn’t. But the kid had insisted and begged and threatened to wake the whole house with his shouting, so Jack sighed and mumbled, okay, but keep quiet, and don’t bother me, to which the younger boy had nodded. Yet here they were – the moon was high, the girl was missing, and, try as he might, Jackson couldn’t get his kid brother to shut up.

“Fine. What do you call a sleeping bull?”
A grin spread across the boy’s face. “A bulldozer!”

Jack rolled his eyes but couldn’t suppress a slight smile. “You ain’t never seen one of those, Billy. Now back to the fen with ya – and don’tcha dare go into the creek!” He didn’t bother mentioning that he’d technically never seen a bulldozer either.

A few minutes passed and Jackson shivered. Not from the temperature, of course; the sticky heat was, if anything, simply uncomfortable. Especially on August nights like this one. No, it was the eeriness that was getting to him. The only light came from the red moon’s reflection on the creek. Even the fireflies weren’t flickering.

Jackson was eleven years old – full grown, he reminded himself – and he shouldn’t have been frightened by a little darkness. But the sudden absence of sound sent him shaking ever so slightly, and he suddenly found himself missing the incessant yammering of his brother.

“Billy?” he called into the reeds.

Silence.

He pushed himself up off his elbows. “Billy?” he repeated.

A tap on his shoulder and he let out a yelp, whipping around. There stood golden-haired Faye Clementine, a smile between her rosy cheeks and a little boy on her arm. “No need to shout so,” she grinned. “It’s just me. An’ look who I caught tryin’ to catch frogs without a net!” She playfully pushed Billy forward and he smiled bashfully up at her.

Jackson was silent for a moment, staring at her awestruck. Then he snapped out of it, shaking his head briskly. “I thought I told ya not to go into the creek.”

The little boy shrugged. “Faye,” he offered, “what d’you call a sleeping bull?”

She bent down to be at his level. “Dunno,” she replied, “what do you call a sleeping bull?”

“A bulldozer!”

The girl laughed aloud, and it sounded to Jackson like tinkling bells. “Have you even seen one of those, Billy?”

The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Nah, he didn’t. I saw one, though.”

“Did not,” Billy retorted.

“Did too,” Jackson replied. “When we went to town last year and they were still workin’ on the steeple. Remember?” He changed the subject quickly before his brother’s cursed memory could point out that the steeple had been completed for nearly half a decade. “Anyways, get outta here. Go play in the reeds for a bit. Miss Faye here an’ I have something to discuss.”

Faye giggled as Billy shot her puppy-dog eyes, then kissed him on the forehead, sending him stumbling giddy towards the water again.

“Reckon he’ll go right back to catchin’ frogs?” she asked.

Jackson shrugged. “If he falls into the creek it’ll be his fault, won’t it? Momma’ll kill him before the current sweeps him away anyways.” He laughed to make sure she knew he was joking. “Hey-” he said as she moved to sit next to him in the dirt. “Ya sure you wanna sit on the ground? Ain’t those church clothes?”

Faye grinned and sat down beside him. “Naw. Mom’s got plenty more. She calls ’em Sunday Best, I call ’em scratchy bastards!”

Jackson was a bit taken aback but managed to squeak out a response. “Why you still wearing ’em this late, then?”

The girl let out a sound of indifference. “Needed to look my loveliest for a date with Jack Aiken.” She reached out with two soft hands to pinch his cheeks. “Let’s get them apples shinin’!”

Briefly shell-shocked, Jackson hastily gathered what was left of his wits and tried to look at her in a loving but not weird way.

She was silent for a second, before punching him gently in the arm. “Don’t lookit me like that. Y’know I’m just foolin’.”

“Yeah. Yeah, foolin’.”

There was a pause. She seemed lost in thought for a moment, before turning back to face him and grinning wide. “Wanna know why I asked you to come down here tonight?”

“Course. Wouldn’t want to muddy up my pants for nothin’.” He laughed again and it sounded vaguely like a mouse being squashed.

Faye gestured towards the sky. “T’sa blood moon tonight. There hasn’t been one in years. Know what that means?”

He shook his head.

“It means, Jackson Aiken,” she huffed as she steadily rose and offered him a hand, “That tonight the red fireflies are fin’lly done hatchin’!”

He took her hand and stood without actually putting any weight on it. “Red fireflies?”

She nodded, eyes wide, as if she and these fireflies were in on some otherworldly secret that no one else knew of. “Yeah. Red fireflies. They get laid at the end of every blood moon, and at the start of a new one, they get hatched.”

He watched her as she spoke. So… they’re hatchin’ now?”

She nodded again with a passion. “An’ we’re gonna catch some!”

“But Faye–” he spoke tentatively, never wanting to see her beautiful smile falter “–ain’t no fireflies out tonight. I been watching for a long time now and there ain’t even any light other than the moon.”

She looked at him peculiarly. “Don’t be ridiculous!” She laughed. “Why, there’s one now!” She pointed at something that Jackson didn’t see. “And there’s another!” She pointed at something again, and this time, Jackson could’ve sworn he saw something –  whether it was a gleam of starlight caught in the bright blue eye of Faye Clementine, or a streak of moonlight dancing across his vision, or truly a faint flicker of a red firefly, he’d never know.

“Come on, Jackson!” She danced down the riverbank, into the reeds. “Don’t even need to go into the creek!” She turned back once more to meet his transfixed gaze.

It must have been something, though not until he was much older did Jackson Aiken realize what. Something about Faye Clementine’s smile, something about the way the dragonflies were singing to him now, something about the moon smiling down on the two of them. Something about the August heat and the murmurs of the crickets, and her, and Jackson Aiken abandoned all hesitation.

And Faye grinned wide as he bounded down the riverbank to meet her, into the tall grasses of the fen and beyond, to catch red fireflies all through the welcoming warmth of the night.

 

 

 

Tallulah Conolly-Smith is a fourteen-year-old writer from Queens, New York. She will be attending Stuyvesant High School starting in September.

It was a cold and lasting winter that clutched Livingston in its skeletal hands. Bleak expanses of ice and snow stretched out from the settlement’s angular walls. Lean trees — dead, for now — reached their frozen fingers to the blue-grey sky and the lifeless block of clouds drifting slowly, impassively onward like a mass of corpses down a frost-fringed river. A cutting gale would rise and howl before lying and dying again. All was motionless but for the scratching, creaking bending of the trees. No beasts left tracks in the still and biting snow. No birds sang in the frozen air, so crisp that a breath brought with it slicing ice and pain.

The people of Livingston hadn’t been ready.

They’d learned to fight monsters; they’d learned how to hunt, and to survive. They’d fallen, again and again, until only the strongest among them remained. But the people of Livingston hadn’t been ready. They hadn’t been ready to fight weather instead of monsters, to plan farms instead of battles — to survive winter, rather than apocalypse.

Mayor Dreggs’s wife, struck by the irony of the situation, had been seized with a laughter which halted only with the final sputterings of her heart. Many had died already in these deadly throes of winter, and the necessary arrangements had been made for each of them before burial — and then, when the ground was too solidly frozen and the survivors too weak, before burning. Mayor Dreggs himself set alight the pyre for his wife, and was ashamed to feel glad for its warmth.

The people of Livingston hadn’t been ready.

But on the seventh day of February — not that any had been able to track the movement of the calendar — the silence beyond the walls was broken by the groaning and the creaking of a carriage’s slow approach. Those people of the settlement with enough energy to spare gathered along the top of the wall, their attention arrested by the dark antique carriage and the team of corpses which pulled it on. Eight decaying bodies, tough and rotting ropes tied around their peeling forms, were pulling their vehicle wrought of wood and steel slowly, immutably onward, across the snow to Livingston.

Confusion, disgust, fear, hate, and hope churned within the walls of Livingston in response to the strange carriage’s crawling approach. Finally Mayor Dreggs emerged from the dark confines of his home like a ghost among the living, and called two of his most trusted to his side. The three departed alone. The heavy gate built into the town’s southern wall slid shut with a rough clanging behind them as their feet sank step after step into the deep and stinging snowfall.

The world was silent bar the quiet crunch of threefold footsteps in the snow, departing from the north, and the eightfold tread of roving copses and the creaking groans of their antiquated vehicle rising to meet them from the long-disused highway far to the south. The air smelt of the cold sharp clarity of an over-frozen world.

And the three lonely figures trudged forward through the snow.

As the two parties neared, it became clear at last who directed these servile dead: a man sat along the bench at the carriage’s peak, wrapped in layer upon layer of coats and cloth, hands covered by gloves and feet shod in a pair of heavy boots. A wide-brimmed hat turned downward hid what of the driver’s face was not masked already by the scarves heaped about his shoulders.

Without a word the corpses creaked and halted, and the carriage rolled and slowed to a crackling stillness several dozens of feet away. Dreggs and his cohorts, though impatient and yearning for their homes’ walled guard against the wind, had learned how to wait. It was a skill honed and perfected by those who survived — waiting, and knowing when not to. Gently a light dustfall of snow began to descend, swirling, from the sky, and still the figure atop the carriage remained obstinately motionless.

Richard Dreggs would not be the first to falter. He stood just as still, just as resolutely unwavering, even as the gusts cut through his bones and the stinging snowflakes settled on his brow, beard, and hands — one more exposed to the cold than the other, resting as it was on the revolver holstered by his side. Raphael and Maria sensed his resolve, he knew, and followed suit. The snow built slow, soft, gnawing walls around their boots; still they would not falter. The eight corpses swayed gently from side to side, faces locked firmly upon the three even without the eyes to see, heedless of the dangerous cold and of the railroad spikes jutting from their bodies, holding their reins in place; still, they did not recoil.

And then the doors on either side of the carriage creaked firmly, finally open.

Abruptly a great clamor of clank and clattering broke the silence of the scene as two imposing figures leaned slowly out, one from each door. Dense iron helms were proceeded by suits of armor, and two men dressed in the full regalia of medieval knights stepped heavily down the carriage’s sides, landing and sinking simultaneously through the ground’s thick cover of snow. Absent was any indication of firearms; in their stead was a broadsword slung across each knight’s back. Each took a single step back and became as inert as the figure still waiting over the restless dead.

A pair of pale hands reached out from the vehicle’s dark interior and gripped the door’s frames, and slowly the fourth and final stranger emerged.

With deliberate, slothlike movement he seemed to unfold from his vehicle and step almost daintily down the rungs affixed to its side. Old black dress shoes sank into the frost, and the man twisted to face the three. His head was masked by a veil of dark, loosely-woven fabric hanging from his round and broad-brimmed hat. He wore a suit and tie, inkblack stains against the pure white wall of snow stretching out behind him. Reaching one arm back into the carriage, he withdrew a briefcase of ancient, cracked leather, and the two knights began marching in tandem as though signaled. As of one mind they shut the carriage’s doors, then strode forward, past the businessman, past the corpses, and halted before the three representatives of Livingston. Their cumbersome frames dug deeply into the snow.

Dreggs, for his part, did not move. He watched these strange proceedings almost impassively, determined now to play his part through to the end. One armored knight stood only a few short feet from Raphael, who now could see the webwork of scrapes, cracks, and chips in the suit; the dull, bilious gleam of old metal forgotten and resurrected anew. The helmeted man towered over him and stared straight ahead, a statue which would stand there, resolute, until the end of time. The masked businessman followed close behind, sombre veil swinging softly with the arrhythmic lope of his stiff-gaited steps and carrying his thin, black briefcase in one hanging arm.

He stepped just ahead of the two knights, then fell still.

The man in the suit stood, straight-backed, and pulled a small, crumpled card from a pocket and held it aloft, arm stiffly outstretched.

Maria and Raphael looked to their Mayor.

Dreggs himself waited. These strangers had delayed long enough; they could stand a few moments more.

A quietly howling wind arose and crawled whisperingly along the snow-clutched ground. Dark dead branches scritch-scratched in the forlorn breeze as the snow persisted in its cruel and unrelenting downfall. The two lines of shambling corpses swayed behind the businessman and his guards, ice collecting in the hollows of their bodies. The driver’s dark hat was being slowly painted white. Finally the Mayor straightened, snowdrifts tumbling from his shoulders as he shifted, and then trudged forward to take the card from the businessman’s still hand—

And stopped short.

A new chill crept up Dreggs’s spine; yet he could not tear his eyes away from that terrible hand.

The creased and crumpled card was held between fingers of smooth, unblemished bone; some few muscles, tendons, dried and mummified, stood dark against that bleached and skeletal hand.

Richard Dreggs let out a shaky breath and watched his body’s warmth dissipate out into the cold, unforgiving air.

And finally saw, at last, that no such breath escaped the man before him.

 

 

 

 

C.S. Ramsey is a hobbyist writer inspired by a love for science-fiction and fantasy, and driven by a critical nature. “Herald of the Horde” was written after ten seasons of “The Walking Dead” convinced the author that it was time for something new.

 

 

The woman who came in was older than my usuals—forty, maybe, judging by the wrinkles that lined her face like paper that’s been creased over then smoothed out again. Water dripped off her coat and pooled on my welcome mat. It squelched as her heeled boot stepped onto my wooden floor. She held a parcel in her gloved hands, wrapped in a beige towel.

I smiled. “Welcome to Cathy’s Promise Repair Store. I’m Cathy. How can I help you?”

“Yes, yes,” the woman waved her hand. The wrinkles on her brow deepened from lines into grooves. “I read your sign. I have an old promise I don’t need anymore, and I was wondering if you’d want the parts.”

She handed me the parcel. I lifted the towel off to find a cardboard box, slightly damp in one corner from the rain. An uneven object sat inside, the right size to fit snugly in my hand, coated by a thick layer of dust and grime. I turned it over in my hand, knowing what broke it—neglect, same as usual, the ending fate of every promise that’s been stuffed in a box and left in an attic and forgotten.

“What was the promise?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t remember. Only children believe in these things.” She glanced at her obviously expensive wristwatch.

I wiped it clean, the grit and dirt crumbling apart under my handkerchief, keeping silent despite the decades of promise-repairing bubbling on my tongue: the boy who promised true love, the soldier who promised to come home, the mom who promised to defeat the disease. Instead, I ran the rag under some water in my sink, and scrubbed.

When I was done, I let out a breath. It was the finest promise I’ve ever seen, cut into a mechanical bird with a glass body, the smooth surfaces shining in every color. It lay lifeless, encrusted with rust and gap-toothed where gears had crumbled apart. At its heart, a simple sentence: ‘I promise to never change myself for anyone else.’

I passed it to her and saw the change, a brief raise of her eyebrows as her memory hit her.

Her pepper hair fell in front of her face, framing the stress lines stretched taut on her forehead. For a long while she was silent, staring at the little bird cradled in her palm. Outside the window, the rain glimmered on the cobblestone street, superimposed by her reflection framed by golden oil lamp light. “God, what happened to me?” Her voice cracked. I imagined her back then—a young girl, beautifully naïve like they all were, who still believed enough in magic to spend a fortune on an enchanted promise.

“It’s not too late,” I murmured.

“Can you fix it?” she turned to me. From her face I could see how she felt—lost. “I have the money. Whatever you need.” Her eyes glistened, much like the puddles of rainwater outside.

I smiled. “Of course I can.”

And I got to work.

 

 

Kylie Wang is a Taiwanese writer who grew up in Hong Kong and is now a high school student in California. Her short works have received 35+ awards and publications, including from YoungArts, the Scholastics Arts and Writing Award, Paper Lanterns, and Bluefire. Her debut novel, a co-authored Young Adult novel titled Stuck in Her Head, was published by Earnshaw Books in 2023. You can find her on Instagram @kyliewangwrites or on her website at https://twoteenauthors.com.