I met the Devil once in a bar on 54th street. Funny little fellow, wore a striped suit and tie that had seen better days, kept drinking water and calling it wine. And he said to me, the Devil did, he said: “You’re Death, man. It’s who you are. It’s what you do.”
I battled with deStruct-O on the edge of the volcano he was trying to reactivate. Toxic gases plumed and rocks flew. Dodging a careening boulder, he ever so slowly lost his balance and toppled into the caldera. I swooped down, scooped him up and deposited him outside the hot zone for the Agency team to deal with, then plunged back into the lava to deactivate the magma enhancer.
This story originally appeared in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine in December 2021
Leucosia sighed as she glided to the front desk for the afternoon shift. The holiday season was shaping up to be the worst--the incessant rushing, the constant demands, the haughty entitlement. Flame-haired Teles, the most experienced of the sirens, spent two hours mediating an argument between two lycanthropes who strenuously disagreed about whether to go through with a waxing and pedicure. Last week, the octomaid Manami expelled a leering kappa after he had gotten handsy during a massage.
"Go home, Violet," said Uncle Cornelius when he opened the door. "I haven’t heard from a single one of you in over ten years." His eyebrows were storm clouds in his craggy face, just as she’d remembered.
"I shan't," she said calmly, lifting her chin.
"Shouldn’t you be off at college?"
"I flunked." She’d avoiding practicing this conversation in her head too much, so her responses would be more natural.
It was late on a normal Friday evening, and Dan and I were sprawled out on the sofa in our little flat above the Cutting Edge hairdressing salon watching Netflix. Suddenly, a weird sound filled the room. Kind of like FFFFT! closely followed by the tinkling of falling glass. For what must have been a couple of seconds, everything stopped. Then Dan threw my arm off his midriff and jumped up, yelling, “What the fuck was that?”
“Um… Jingledeep?” said the barista. She was a tawny-skinned woman, scrunching a beautifully bejeweled nose as she scrutinized the name on the cup. She looked at the man next in line at the counter. He was middle-aged with a hairline that was losing both ground and color. He wore a perfectly pressed gray suit and black leather loafers that he probably paid someone to polish. He was looking up at her from his phone with a whole-body frown.
“I have a coffee for…Jingledeep?” she read, half an invitation, half a question.
It was a strange spring, the spring the bimbos appeared in Magnolia Close. The magnolia outside number six had been nothing but a whitish, ashy looking stump for years. But this spring a living crown of thin, whippy green branches burst out of the dead tree. It was as incongruous as a withered old man suddenly putting on a luxuriant blonde wig. The blossoms soon followed, fist-sized and creamy, giving off great wafts of scent. All the trees on the Close were laden with blooms; the branches sagged under the weight of them. Barbara said I was exaggerating, but it was true.
Keith left the community centre early, since his talk on the history of housing development in East Anglia had attracted an audience of just two people — and they turned out to have got lost on their way to the Mature Ladies’ Erotica Reading Group.
Arriving home to find Chet waiting on the doorstep did not make him feel any better.
(This story was originally printed in Curiosities Magazine)
1.
So you’re drowning in gambling debt and you have pissed off a girlfriend or three. On your smoke breaks between acts, you’ve been jumped by said girlfriends’ spurned boyfriends one too many times. The only thing left to do is disappear—with a bang, of course. You are, after all, a showwoman.
2.