My Forest Camp

At my forest camp, he collapses on to the mattress in my tent, and is asleep in moments. I pack my travel bag, leave him a note saying he can have the tent and everything in it, light some incense and put it at my tiny shrine to Lord Ganesh, say a prayer for him and the other strugglers around here, feed peanuts to the local monkeys, my friends for the last few months, and walk back along the path into the village and across the bridge over the River Ganges towards Rishikesh, to get a bus back to Delhi.

From Guest Contributor Stephen House

A Grass Dog

After my death, one half of my soul rose to the heavens, and the other half slept underground. My blood seeped into the roots of weeds. When the village held a festival, my daughter cut the grass and wove my halved soul into a dog-shaped chugou. She placed me beneath my husband’s bed. After a while, my husband tossed about and moaned in sleep.

“Don’t kill me!” he screamed.

My daughter stood over him and flung down her hatchet. His blood dripped through the mattress and onto the floor. I chuckled as I learned who had murdered me while asleep.From Guest Contributor Yuki Fuwa

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Yuki Fuwa is a Japanese writer from Osaka. In 2020, she was named a finalist for the first Reiwa Novel Prize. In the same year, her short story was a finalist in the first Kaguya SF Contest. Translated by Toshiya Kamei, Yuki’s short fiction has appeared in New World Writing.

Strange Sounds

A year ago it started like a joke. We were laying on our flat mattress together. Innocent. We were children.

Amadi was my brother, I was twelve. It came one night when we watched Mama and Papa do things underneath their sheets while she made strange sounds like she was in pain. When I slept that night, I felt it. Amadi took off my pants and put his thing inside of me. There was a pain like it was a needle, only there was breaking and entering, a salted liquid, and nine months later a child was on my breasts.

From Guest Contributor Oghenemudia Emmanuel

What We Might Deserve

The snarling saw cuts off and the groaning fir drunk on gravity takes its first step. A full ocean is born in the soughing fall and over four centuries whumps the earth like a five-dollar moll on a sprung stained mattress. And you stand there, hands numb and belly tight and you wonder why something so old saves its final words for someone like you. Someone who knows the glass bite of gin straight from the bottle while slouched at the tilt kitchen table as rain plunks a pan on the floor near the hot squat stove in the corner.

From Guest Contributor Casey Hampton

Reversal Of Fortune

I was seized by the worst criminals and forced into bondage.

My captors liked to punish me in cruel but creative ways. They'd force me to hold down a weighted lever that would release a cage door for a hungry tiger should I let go. They'd cover me in honey and let bears lick me clean. They'd fill my mattress with earth worms. They'd purposely leave open an escape route but recapture me at the last moment.

But none of their tortures pained me as much as knowing that it had once been my job to dream up these punishments.