FEATURED FICTION

Roger trudged awkwardly to the dimly lit bedroom and lowered me onto the bed; it spun slowly beneath me. A blanket settled over me softly as a mist, then a warm hand brushed my brow. "No fever." Roger pulled off my pumps, dropping them to the carpet one by one. "Did you feel sick this morning?"

"Doe." Something nagged at me from a corner of my brain. Sluggishly, I said, "The roob— stretched."

"What room— the living room?"

I nodded. "Bag and front." I made stretching motions to either side of my head. "There was light, and a voice."

"Someone in the house?"

"Doe. I can't explaid. It was... id my head."

"Maybe you were dreaming."

I frowned. It didn't seem like a dream. I sneezed.

Deirdre asked her parents for some Angry for her graduation. She'd had it once before, sneaking it from one of the grown-ups at a big family Solstice party, and had craved it relentlessly since. But in the way of parents, on graduation night she received a ration of Happy instead.

A great hollow, sterile disappointment woke in her. Obviously she couldn't be angry at her parents, and the irony of that chewed at her nerve endings and quietly gnawed her brain. She had never forgotten that first experience with Angry, how it had lit strange fires in her and given her such energy. She remembered the empowerment.

"I can't even take the stupid Happy unless they're around to supervise," she said the next day, complaining about her parents to her boyfriend, Alejandro.

"It numbs being underage," he muttered with a convincing sullenness. He had always been good at mimicking the drearier emotional states, so much that you'd think he was Feeling.

He keeps the names of the lesser gods when he kills them; thus he is known from steaming jungles to snowy pines by a thousand titles: Bloody Macaw, Raven the Clever, Itzamna who made writing, the Hanged God. Grandmothers still speak the old names: Thor the Hammer, Our Lord the Flayed One. He calls himself the Serpent's Head.

Only his victims call him Skinner.

Tod rubbed at his forehead with the sleeve of his Meltdowns hoodie, squint of concentration magnified behind his specs.  He could feel Doris’s eyes boring into the top of his head, and it was making him sweat.  He started to wonder if she could see his dandruff.

Then...eureka.

“Watch this.”

Tod’s fingers skimmed mischeviously over the surface, pulling letters and spelling out:

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M-O-T-H-E-R-F-U-C-K-E-R