Issue 114 March 2023

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Editorial: The Allure of Dark Fantasy

by Anna Yeatts

March 1, 2023

Dark fantasy has enraptured the hearts and minds of readers for decades. Its unique fusion of fantastical elements with dark, sometimes horrific aspects can transport readers to a world where anything is possible—and potentially perilous. The subgenre’s popularity can be attributed to its ability to delve into complex themes and characters, often exploring the darker aspects of human nature. Perhaps more than any other genre or sub-genre, dark fantasy allows readers to address difficult and often painful realities while maintaining a degree of emotional safety. 

The stories in this month’s issue provide a rich mixture of horror, suspense, and intrigue. We’re delighted to have three stories in this issue from FFO alumni, and we encourage you to read more of their stories in our archives.

Our first story, “About Her Bones So Bleak and Bare” by Matthew F. Amati, is a dark love story told with a Southern gothic voice reminiscent of Matthew’s first FFO publication, “The Cratch, Thy Keeper.”

Our second story, “Power is Love in the Devil’s Eyes” by Dafydd McKimm, is a cautionary tale set in a gritty nightclub. It’s a story that peers into the abyss of human nature, exploring the lengths some will go to achieve their goals. As the main character says, “we all know what men will do for love.”

”Wonderful Wounds Await You” by Marisca Pichette is a darkly gorgeous and visceral take on shapeshifting. The haunting literary voice and unique approach to the shapeshifter trope make it a standout addition to this issue.

Finally, this issue’s reprint is “Upon What Soil They Fed” by Jennifer Mace, a reimagination of the classic fairy tale Rapunzel from the prince’s point of view. It’s a creative and innovative retelling that will leave readers spellbound.

Enjoy!

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About Her Bones So Bleak And Bare

by Matthew F. Amati

March 3, 2023

The dead girl had never been a favorite of ours, and now she wouldn’t leave our yard.

I watched black birds wheel like burnt crosses over the fields. The sun fell, dragging the sky down with it until the last light shone on our freakish visitor.

Jinny saw her first, through the kitchen door. “Like a silver shadow, Pa,” she said to me. “Flitting from the shed to the silage pit.”

A trick of the dusk? But she moaned like a stricken lamb.

“Hell,” Mab spat, for my wife knew the cards our shit luck played. “It’s the Beezer brat. Hob, I told you to put this curse away.”

I flinched, as always, at Mab’s broken voice. I’d done the job, exactly as my black-eyed wife had bidden. No burial. No soil to sully her. Laid the girl’s body on the high ledge where the canyon falls from the field.

“You done it wrong, Hob. You was supposed to strow her bones for birds to take. Look!”

At first, the girl shook like a burnt stick struck by St. Vitus. Then she turned in a shaft of cloudglow, and it was little Lottie Beezer, all right. Twelve years old forever. Jaw gone where the blades had got her.

Moan, moan, and moan. The dead girl held something up in her left hand, but I couldn’t see what it was.

“What’s she doing there?” Jinny asked.

Mab’s head swiveled, black eyes on her child. “Where’s your silver pendant gone?” 

Jinny didn’t answer right away. Mab scratched the slate floor with a yellow toenail.

“On my lamp-stand.” But Jinny’s shaking voice told us her pendant was not on her lamp-stand.

We heard an owl’s meal scream in a far copse. Jinny cowered like a rabbit.

My back’s bent, too, child, I thought. Both of us, living our lives in Mab’s shadow, like falling claws could snatch us any second. 

Fear fades you, like sun scorches a cushion.

“You killed her, Hob,” Mab said to me, in a voice like gravel on grass. “The body was yours to lay out for birds.”

I told Mab (again) how it was an accident. “Fool girl crouched in the cornrows. In a hut made of husks. Fear froze her when the combine came.” Memory sickened me. How I hadn’t seen Lottie. How a scream pierced the engine’s roar.

(But it was Mab had told me to mow, before the corn was even ripe. “Some things,” she’d said, “you got to cut down before they get tall.”)

The girl danced closer now, to the foot of the porch stairs. She flickered like a worn old film.

Mab made a noise like chooks. “A mangled mess, that corpse. All ripped up with bits of blue blanket. Your blue blanket,” she croaked at Jinny.

“Wasn’t mine,” but Jinny’s voice gave her away.

Mab’s head jerked from side to side. Her hair was black as a well’s throat. At first I thought night was falling, but no – Mab was growing dark faster than the light failed.

“Who was Lottie Beezer waiting for in that corn-husk house? Stretched on a blue blanket? Who was she fixing to hide away with?”

“I don’t know, Ma!” But Jinny’s voice called her liar once more.

Lottie appeared sudden and close by the door, waving the thing in her hand. It was the pendant, glinting silver in the sun’s last ray. She stretched her arms towards Jinny.

“Hob, I told you. I said put the little bitch where the birds would get her,” Mab said. “You failed. Now she’s come for us.”

“I put her torn tiny body where you said to, Mab. Where the wind blew around her bones. But Mab, I don’t think a bird’s going to take a dead girl anywhere.”

Unless, I thought, it’s a bird hatched from hate. Whom fear gave beak and claws.

Ma scratched the floor with both feet – skritch-skritch-skritch. Her arms were folded into the dark of her body. Her face was long and cruel – longer than a face ought to be.

“Shows what you know. Birds take them all away. All dirty ones who hide from decent folk in the secret, sighing corn.”

“All right,” Jinny said. “She waited for me. All right? Lottie was waiting for me. It was our secret house in the corn. It was my blanket got tore up. It’s my pendant she’s got.” She turned her face to Lottie’s skittering shade and sobbed.

Twin sable sheets of night rose from my wife’s sides. Her crooked feet grabbed at Jinny. 

Jinny dodged, quick as a fear-bent coney.

The door flew off its hinges. Silver arms choked Mab’s ruffled throat. Lottie shook like angry lightning, but would not let go.

Mab shrieked. She shot through the broken door, wrapped in Lottie’s writhing shadow. 

My wife spread her wings. With the dead girl clinging, Mab’s monstrous shape fled to the black part of the sky where the moon should have been.

Mab was gone. Had she always been what she became? How can a person know?

Jinny and I were still here. Lottie had saved us. Now maybe we could unbend our backs. Maybe we could unfade, be vivid the way living people should be.

Not all of Mab had gone. A sooty feather lay on the kitchen stones.

“Don’t!” I said, but Jinny stooped to pick it up.

Scars bear fruit. All over Jinny’s body, black pinions grow. But Jinny’s determined; she will not be a force for darkness. Her wings will be shelter, her claws rescue to those stranded on fearsome heights. And someday, soaring through fallow skies plucked clean of stars, she will find her Lottie again.

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND-THE-SCENES INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MATTHEW F. AMATI

FFO: How did the idea for this story germinate?

I was reading the early Scots border ballad “The Twa Corbies” Two crows talk about a dead knight whose corpse they’re planning to pick apart. We learn that the only witnesses to the implied murder are “his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.” (One assumes the bird and the dog aren’t guilty, but we definitely harbor suspicions about the girlfriend). It’s delicious, spare, and chilling. The ending lines are:

About his banes, so bleak an’ bare

The wind sall blaw, forevermair

Stevie Smith, reciting this poem for the BBC in her broad Northern English vowels, comments on “the terrifying universe around the edges of the poem.” That’s what I love in a flash horror piece, the implication of a terrifying universe, whose rules are only hinted at.

Power is Love in the Devil’s Eyes

by Dafydd McKimm

March 10, 2023

So I’m up on my podium gyrating my bits for the gawpers, when who do I see wriggling his way through the crowd? Mickey the fucking Fish.

Now I ain’t seen Mickey for a long spell, not since I used to prowl the docks. Never thought to see a Steader like him this far in, and especially not in a place as roasty toasty as Hell—no, not the one the ‘Calypsos keep ranting about on street corners; my Hell’s a club down on Five Below; tucked away tight under the ironwalks; crimson lights; ‘zik so loud it makes your ears bleed; heat turned up so far you sweat your own piss out; half full of gutter punks loading up on sleaze, half milords from the Towers, down here looking for a roll in the dirt.

—It ain’t a two-way street, wee jezzie.

That’s Sally Silklips, my old madam, whispering in my ear from the beyond. Always said it whenever I was going all dewy over some towerboy back in her bawdyhouse.

—It ain’t a two-way street. They can come down, but we can never go up.

I get it, Sally. I get it. Still, don’t mean I have to fucking like it, savvy?

But it ain’t just me that’s stropping tonight. From the way his gills are flapping like mad down the sides of his neck, Mickey’s got some nettles in his knickers, too.

—Get your fingers in them gills, wee jezzie, Sally used to say, and you can work a fishboy like a puppet. He’ll be squirting his salty load in a blink.

But Mickey sure as fuck don’t look like he wants to squirt tonight. I catch his eye, and he slides over to me, red as a smacked arse.

“Hey, Stacey,” he shouts over the ‘zik.

I crouch down so we can hear each other. “Hey, Mickey. What you doing here?”

“I’m looking for that pretty-boy fuck boss of yours,” he says. “Know where I can find him?”

Boss here’s a canny-looking bit-o’-rough. Calls himself Diavolo. Looks like a swiver all right, but really, he’s frosty as a nun’s snatch. Up on that balcony all night long, making sure his dealers aren’t slacking on pushing his new stash of mantablast—that designer fizz from the Seasteads what’s been flooding the Innards these past few months. Shit’s made him ’bout as rich as a fucking penthouser.

—It ain’t a two-way street, wee jezzie.

Fuck—I know, Sally, but who really gives a shit what level you’re on if you’re up to your dick in bubbly and beluga?

“What you want him for?” I ask Mickey.

“I gotta talk to him about Marlena.”

Marlena’s one of the girls here. There’s a look in Mickey’s eyes, real feverish like.

Oh Mickey, I think. You poor fuck. You’re in love.

So I say, “Alright, Mickey. I’ll take you to him.” And as I lead him up the stairs, I’m thinking, Mother Delilah, the things some men will do for love.

When the Boss sees Mickey, he spreads his arms and says, smirking, “Mr Fish, what can I do for you?”

“We had a deal, you piece of shit,” Mickey spits, breathing hard now in the heat of it all.

The Boss’s goons start to move on him, but the Boss waves them down. “No, no, boys, let the fish speak.” Sick fuck is enjoying himself.

So Mickey carries on: “You said if I got you the mantablast—screwed the Sharks—you’d let me and Marlena be together. You’d arrange for her splicing. You’d let us . . . have a life.”

The Boss don’t answer, just grins even wider than before.

“I did what you asked,” Mickey says. “Now keep your promise.”

Then the Boss finally pipes up. “Why the fuck,” he says through a smile full of teeth, “would I let one of my best girls go and turn herself into a disgusting, slimy fucking fish bitch?”

Mickey’s gills start flapping like a flag in a ‘phoon. “You lying piece of shit—” he starts.

But the Boss cuts him short. “Chop this stinking water-breather up, boys,” he says to his goons. “Then feed him to the fucking alley cats.”

The goons rush him, but Mickey’s a lionfish splice—more dangerous than he looks.

Out shoot his spines—and the goons are down, blood spewing from where he stuck ’em good and deep in the neck.

In a blink, Mickey’s on top of the Boss, venny needles at his throat.

“I’ll—kill—you!” he screams, and although I can hardly believe it, I see the Boss is scared. Fact, he’s shitting himself. He’s a blink away from losing everything he’s got, all his fucking riches, all the influence he’s bought, his whole carefully constructed world. He’s like a newborn babbie, terrified, plastic.

Another blink and I’m up behind Mickey.

I slip my fingers deep into his gills, Sally Silklips style. And I squeeze.

He freezes. A weird sound, like a trapped rat, ‘scapes from his throat, but the spike tickling the Boss’s jugular don’t move an inch.

Now he’s got one up on Mickey, the Boss gets to his feet, pulls a knife from his boot, and cuts poor Mickey’s throat quick and clean as a fifty credit jerk-and-squirt.

Blood pools about my fingers, warm and thick as cream. I yank ’em out, and Mickey slumps to the floor.

Then I walk away.

Oh, Sally would have been pleased as Punch. I don’t say a word. Leave him wanting more like she always told me to. Leave him staring after me while I sway my ass back and forth ever so subtle like.

‘Cause I seen it—the look in that cold devil’s eyes. Love.

And we all know what men will do for love.

Sally was right, about girls like us never being able to rise out of this shithole.

So I don’t plan on going anywhere.

I’m going to rule in Hell.

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Wonderful Wounds Await You

by Marisca Pichette

March 17, 2023

Please check your skins at the door.

Fumbling to undress, exhilaration mixes with fear. A decade you’ve waited to find your ticket to this—an experience like no other. Our promise:  to untether your mind, unbend reality. You will not be the same when you leave.

Now your transformation begins. Unzip your beiges and browns, handing them in their soft, scarred, flabby drapes to the woman with a praying mantis face. You think she is a woman. No. You feel she is. You need no other evidence, as her body retreats into the moist embrace of darkness, multi-faceted eyes focusing on more than you can grasp.

She has hangers, you see, of quartz and willow. Mock skeletons will hold your skins rigid, keep them from wrinkling for the duration of your stay.

You clutch your ticket to your bleeding chest, close as when you found it on the corner of a park bench. Forgotten or deliberately placed, you don’t know. You believe you were chosen. You hope you belong.

Around you it is dark but not black. You are delicate, nervous and stripped as you are. Wipe your muscles on curtains of Spanish moss as you cross the foyer, daubing blood from your lidless eyes. Aye-ayes perched in alcoves spotted with lichen welcome you to the most immersive production running today.

Exit the foyer, following slick limestone steps. The bannisters are stalagmites, sigils carved by bats or glow worms or visitors like you—though there’s no time now to pause and study their secrets. The line is shuffling fast, and you slip on the blood of others as you follow them down, down.

What you see next we promise to remember.

The steps end, swallowed in smoke that smells of opium and sandalwood. You stand before an arch that may be alabaster or bone. Empty sconces tell you where walls retreat.

Before you enter the ballroom on the raw and clotting heels of others, you take a crustacean from a seawater casket under the arch. Horseshoe, hermit, mermaid’s purse stained with ink and salt. Claws grasp your unprotected flesh, dig nerves from unwary muscles.

When you have adorned yourself in exoskeletons, your body creaking with chitin, knuckles barnacled beautiful, we invite you to dance.

The ballroom floor is a lake of masks. Foxtrot over wooden, velvet, leathern faces laughing and sobbing at your pasts. Wade like newborn turtles from soft deflating eggs to the center. It’s easy to see.

The chandelier is made of silk and owl pellets. Fish eggs glow pink as tongues longing for drink. The movement you glimpse between bulbs is caused by moths. Too many to count. Too many to name. Too many.

Come, now. Follow your fellow shadows over masks, under moths—to the ballroom’s cracked center. But please—have your tickets ready.

Some are on a fragment of license plate (American or European, usually), rusted paint chipping under flayed fingernails. Others are writ in gum bound with mint-scented foil, lint clinging restless to the edge. Many of you hold mussels carved with tonight’s time, still others a palmful of dust.

Yours:  three inches of yellow ribbon embroidered in surgical thread. A time in lemon juice, revealed by fire. Your fingers shake. Your mouth, dry with desire, gasps glitter air.

Shuffling in a red crowd with black in the gaps, dripping brine onto commedia dell’arte faces (themselves empty, actorless), approach the stage you’ve waited so long to feel.

Under a chandelier wafting notes of low tide, you see it.

It is like a cactus stretched over a Mercedes, a swimming pool inverted onto a car wash, a lamb crossed with a scorpion. Do you hear it—the singing? We ask you to concentrate, now. What you see and hear may not enter through eyes and ears. But you sense it nonetheless.

A bassoon, or maybe a spoon only, held up to the Pacific wind. Wooden windchimes muffled by too much moss. Waves cresting waves. The music you came for fills the missing parts of you, animates phantom limbs. Recalls memories not yet made.

If you wish to, sing along. We do not take your tongues for a reason.

You sing. Do you remember what your skin looked like, felt like?

You sing.

Before the coda, you are encouraged to place your face on the stage. You feel the tune. You bleed notes. You hear gravity.

Now you know the song is ending. Your time is running away into corners too dark to see. We urge you across to the other side, music dripping from your uncovered veins—a stubborn leak. Through two-dimensional cubes and spheres with just one side, you crawl until you enter the foyer. Again.

It’s different on this side. You don’t recognize the drapes of spider-silk, lizards black and yellow curled in their centers. We assure you—it is the same as you left.

Your ticket spent, it is time. Detach your crustaceans and bury them in rose petal compost. A man with the face of an asp trades you a pair of shoes for your lungs. Pull them out. Put them on. Walk through the marbles arch, admiring cat’s eyes—thousands of glass orbs reflecting on your own unblinkable eyes.

You are now in the coat room once more. The first skin you touch is the body you’ll bring back. It is no more familiar to you than the one you shed on entry. A child with raccoon hands helps you dress.

Dressed anew—your body unchanged underneath, your mind irrevocably altered—you collect a survey on sequined aluminum foil. Use dishwashing liquid to fill it out at midnight. When you’ve finished, fold it over the wings of a sparrow. It will find its way back to us.

This visit may be done, but we welcome you back again, no matter what skin you find yourself wearing.

When you return to us, your hands will carry our next invitation, scrawled on the object you most forget.

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND-THE-SCENES INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MARISCA PICHETTE

FFO: What other work of yours would fans of this story most enjoy?

MP: Some similarly decadent stories of mine are:

“Seven Shots at the Ultimate High” Interzone #294

“At the End of Purple Meadow Road” Fireside Magazine, Issue 102

“Everything You Once Were” Flash Fiction Online, September 2022

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Upon What Soil They Fed

by Jennifer Mace

March 24, 2023

I once visited a home where brambles had grown so high that they drank all the light before it even touched the walls.

I’d left my keys out front, in the van full of dry ice and slabs of meat with its slow-growing retinue of flies. When I knocked, the door fell open instantly, like the occupant had materialised at the sound, conjured into being by the rap of my knuckles. Or perhaps just pinned to a shape.

The woman invited me inside in a voice bland as the worn floral carpet beneath our feet. She looked a half-step from familiar, like a Tesco’s at two in the morning, all beige and washed-out like old linen. Limp hair, tired skin. Someone’s aunt, perhaps, or an English teacher.

They’re fond to death of camouflage.

I held my breath as I crossed the threshold–I always did, back then. Had to keep my pulse down somehow, keep the fear at bay. It’s not easy, convincing a stranger to buy. You got to learn to read people. Who they are. Where they’ve been.

What they want.

There was a kid on the floor in the living room, mucking silently with some blocks, and I remember wondering how the hell he ever saw the sun. The thorns pressed up against the window so tightly that it felt like I’d boarded a submarine. That at any instant, the glass might burst. Leave us covered in crystal and wound through with bramble, strung all about like shrike kill.

She didn’t have any clocks. I remember that, too. That sense of being unmoored from time. You can’t just take out your phone to check in the middle of a house visit. No one buys if you look like you can’t wait to get away.

So I sat on the carpet and opened box after box. Steak and swordfish, pungent smoked haddock, marinated butterfly chicken breasts. Fillets of turkey sliced fine like pale misshapen fingers. I talked her through ‘em. Hit the selling points. I’m good at my job.

But you know, I don’t think she was listening. Her eyes were dark as long-dried blood, and I couldn’t catch ‘em for an instant.

The kid managed to get into the discards when I wasn’t looking. The room was claustrophobic with houseplants; there were tendrils crawling over the coffee table, twining with the furniture, disappearing into the seams of the upholstery like rivers vanishing into the earth. Before I noticed him doing it, he’d started draping ‘em with meat. Half defrosted pork-chops hung from the vines like slowly dripping baubles.

I would’ve flipped my lid, but that’s not how you make a sale. Besides, she paid. Paid for the whole lot, in fact. With a credit card of some brand I never saw before nor since.

Took me three tries to get the machine to take it.

I’d had scratches after, all up my legs, pale bloodless holes in my skin. The vines had caught me up, wrapped me like a lover or a shroud. Their thorns dug so deep they left little specks buried beneath my skin, down where tattoo ink lives forever.

I’ll show you, if you want. See? Like tiny freckles.

Took me a while to notice the blackberries, fat and glistening among the leaves. Can’t say I’ve ever seen blackberries grown in a house.

She asked if I wanted to try one. Plucked a berry right from where the thorns were digging into my shin. The juice was redder than it should’ve been. Smelled like copper.

I don’t like fruit, though. Never have done. And I was on the job, besides. She’d bought out all my stock.

Customer like that, well, you keep trying, don’t you? I told her I’d more out in the van. Wouldn’t be a moment. Tugged free of those vines best I could. Made it to the door. Got the thing open, though it tried to stick in the frame.

The sun had already crossed the sky when I stumbled out, dizzy as a fairground, cold as fever. Behind me, a thicket had swallowed the house like the swamp would a corpse. When I got back to the van, the flies had vanished. I think the brambles took ‘em too.

It changes you, a sale like that. You get a sense for ‘em. The house on the corner with the oak tree you can’t look at head-on. That one estate tower where the clouds don’t quite line up with the rest of the sky. Those pale college students whose front step smells like vinegar and overheated tin.

You’ll learn. Survive your first one, and you’ll learn.

Because there’s one thing you should know, in our line of work, about folks who live in houses like that:

They’re always, always hungry.

Originally published in Syntax & Salt, January 2020. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND THE SCENES INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR JENNIFER MACE

FFO: What is the story behind your story?

JM: Upon What Soil is alarmingly autobiographical in some ways: I actually did spend ten weeks, one summer, selling frozen meat door-to-door out the back of a van. The general public is not particularly kindly disposed towards door-to-door salespeople, even the earnestly enthusiastic 18-year-old kind, but luckily, the worst that happened to me on my travels was the odd bit of unwanted nudity and many, many door-slams. (Although the nice couple with the bramble-eaten home did buy rather a lot of pork.)

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