

### The Green Door

A WIPpersnappers Anthology

"Layla's Examination" Copyright © 2020 Ibrahim S. Amin

"The Burnt Door" Copyright © 2020 Ani Brandt

"Talking to Dogs" Copyright © 2020 R.C.

"A Wolf's Dilemma" Copyright © 2020 Delphine Crown

"The Most Boring Story" Copyright © 2020 Janine Dillo

"My Huckleberry Friend" Copyright © 2020 C. Garrett

"364 Days" Copyright © 2020 Jessica Gray

"The Spirit Healer" Copyright © 2020 Victor Serrano

Cover by Ani Brandt

Contents

Introduction

Layla's Examination by Ibrahim S. Amin

The Burnt Door by Ani Brandt

Talking to Dogs by R.C.

A Wolf's Dilemma by Delphine Crown

The Most Boring Story by Janine Dillo

My Huckleberry Friend by C. Garrett

364 Days by Jessica Gray

The Spirit Healer by Victor Serrano

About the Authors

# Introduction

The prompt: An establishment called "The Green Door", run by a woman with one eye, and a theme of unfinished business.

The result: Eight tales as varied and eclectic as the authors themselves.

# Layla's Examination

by Ibrahim S. Amin

Layla's blazer marked her for death. She peered round the corner and scoured the pavement for enemies who might glimpse its azure cloth, the cyan griffin on its breast pocket, and descend upon her. Nothing. A few little kids trudged towards the local primary school, in short trousers and grey jumpers, still too young to wear either her grammar school's uniform or street clothes at the comprehensive. Neutrals. Layla could live with neutrals. But the older boys and girls...

" _Ignore them," her mum always said. "They're jealous."_

Her mother didn't get it. She boasted about Layla to the aunties in English and Punjabi and a smattering of Arabic, but Layla couldn't make her understand in any language.

" _Layla finished the Quran!"_

Layla crept around the corner.

" _Layla passed her entrance exam. Layla! Show aunty your uniform! Doesn't she look studious, mashallah?"_

Layla scurried along the street that led to school and possibly doom.

" _Layla got twelve A's at GCSE!"_

Layla stopped outside the newsagent's, scouted through its windows.

" _Layla had her interview and they gave her an offer. Law at Cambridge. Inshallah!"_

Layla tensed, ready to run, but the shop was safe. Two boys battered away at the joysticks and buttons on the _Final Fight_ arcade machine, a young man with a patchy beard stood at the magazine racks and gazed up at the things on the top shelf. Perv. She went inside, over to the racks. The young man twitched. He grabbed a car magazine, flipped through it, but didn't take his gaze off the scantily-clad women who decorated the covers above. Layla rolled her eyes and examined the comics. In her head, her mother's voice changed, dropped the gushing tone she used with the aunties, the one that proclaimed Layla God's gift to an unworthy universe, and hardened into the one she used when the two of them were alone.

" _Layla! There'll be plenty of time for these silly things after your A-Levels. Focus on your exams, not on—"_

Layla picked an issue of _X-Men_.

At home, her fantasy and sci-fi novels languished in a locked chest in her parents' bedroom, along with her _Doctor Who_ , _She-Ra_ , and _Thundercats_ videos. But a comic? She could hide it in her school folders, safe from her mother's prying fingers and the sharp tongue that followed each confiscation.

Rows and columns of chocolate bars glittered on the counter beside the register, brighter than the colours on the arcade machine's screen. Layla's tongue tingled.

" _Junk food will rot your brain!"_

But what was her mother going to do, vivisect her and dig through her stomach for the evidence? Layla grabbed a Trio and paid. The boys at the arcade machine whooped, probably because they'd beaten a boss or something, but she smiled at their support anyway.

She walked down the street, fiddled with her schoolbag, stowed the contraband, and—

"Posh twat!"

Layla looked up, stopped, and her shoes scraped against the pavement. Three teenagers emerged from Kebab Caliph. The two boys wore denim jackets and clutched donner kebabs that poked up out of paper. The girl had a baggy pink top, baggier hair, and brandished a can of Coke. Layla went to go around them. The girl blocked her.

"Excuse me..." Layla moved but the girl blocked her again.

"Oh, excuse me!" The girl mimicked her voice into that of a cartoon aristocrat. "Excuuuuse me!"

One of the boys sniggered and chilli sauce trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Layla's heart thudded. Sometimes this lot shoved grammar school pupils down into puddles. Today the street was dry, but... The girl's Coke can glistened. Sometimes they chucked drinks at kids in blue blazers, or...

"Lend us a quid," the girl said.

Or that. They'd taken money from a few of the kids in Layla's year, covered those muggings with a layer of laughter to disguise them as japes, smacked around one of the boys who refused to pay up.

"I..." Layla slipped her hand into her pocket, squeezed metal. Some of the boys at her school carried knives now, to protect themselves. Layla just had her keys. "I don't have any money."

"Lying bitch." The girl waved her can. Coke spattered the ground and the toe of Layla's shoe. "Give us a quid, or—"

"Oi!"

A man stooped through Kebab Caliph's doorway, stepped down onto the pavement, and straightened up. His hairnet flattened his black mohawk, smeared it across the shaved parts of his scalp, and a cartoon kebab frolicked amid the stains on his apron. Anwar's work garb wouldn't intimidate anyone. But his lanky frame let him loom above the three miscreants, and a person could do a lot with a bit of looming.

"Leave her alone."

The boys backed away a couple of steps, but the girl stood her ground.

"Or what?" She sipped her Coke.

"Or you're banned. All of you."

The boys looked at one another. The girl glared.

"Big fucking deal. Can get our donners at Hajji's." She glugged.

"Hajji's?" Anwar made a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. "Crap meat, crap naan, shitty portions, and the bloke who works there doesn't wash his hands when he takes a piss. Or has a wank."

The girl spluttered, sprayed Coke, and drops of it shone on Anwar's apron. She coughed. Sucked air into her lungs. Coughed again.

"F... Fine..." Then, under her breath, something that might have been "Paki!" or "Wanker!" but another cough smothered it.

The three of them traipsed away.

"Thanks." Layla nodded to Anwar.

"No problem."

The pavement now lay clear, and Layla made it to school unslain, past the wrought iron griffins atop the fence posts, the scramble of boys who kicked a football about and made the entire yard their pitch or battleground, through the main entrance. A storm of paper hung from the noticeboard by the doors. Layla sighed.

Fencing Club, _Dungeons & Dragons_, Debate Club, and countless other activities she'd loved. Before, she'd persuaded her mum. Argued that hobbies would strengthen her personal statement when she applied to universities, give her stuff to talk about at interviews. After the one at Cambridge, she'd even come back and thrown it in her mother's face. The lecturer played D&D too. They'd talked about that more than her A-Levels or her passion for studying law (which was fortunate, since she had none). But her mother had the last laugh.

" _Interviews are done. You have your offer, now all that matters are your studies and your grades. You can join your precious 'clubs' when you get to university."_

A few people nodded to Layla in her form room, murmured good mornings. She sat amid their conversations about TV shows she no longer watched because her mother considered them a distraction, about movies she'd probably never see...

" _After your exams! You'll have plenty of time for that after your exams!"_

...about the pubs or clubs some of them would sneak off to on Friday night.

The bell rang and everyone muttered through roll call, slouched through an assembly where the Head of Classics waffled on about some ancient statue which had a fancy back even though the place it stood in the temple meant no mortal eye would ever have seen it. Apparently this meant something. Then, English lit.

Layla took her seat and perked up like a warrior who senses battle in the air. Or, in this case, the promise of plunder. Last time, they'd taken a mock exam, written a timed essay on _Dubliners_. That meant...

Sure enough, Miss Kirkwood bustled into the room with a stack of papers in her arms, whirled around their tables, and tossed essays in front of their respective owners. The best students cheered their grades. The worst ones grunted. Sic semper, as Layla's GCSE Latin teacher used to say.

Layla's paper landed in front of her and she reached for it, froze, gawped. A red 'C' glared on the paper.

C!

"If anyone wants to discuss their grade, see me at the end."

C!

The lesson rolled on. Miss Kirkwood and the others discussed their new set text, _The Spire_.

C!

That red letter glowered at Layla, branded itself on her eyeballs, seared through to her brain.

C! C! C! C!

Eventually the bell rang. The other kids sprang up from the tables, crammed books and folders into their bags, raced off to more lessons or to smoke in the alley behind the school if they had a free period. Layla ambushed Miss Kirkwood at her desk.

"I got a C?"

Layla grimaced. Her words echoed inside her head, sounded like a child whining over an unwanted birthday present. But Miss Kirkwood brushed that aside with a smile.

"Look, you know the book better than anyone in the class. And you wrote a brilliant essay. But it didn't answer the question."

"Huh?"

"You wrote the essay you wanted to write. The one you'd prepared, after we looked at all those old exam papers. But this question wasn't quite the same. It was supposed to make you think about the text in a slightly different way. The exam board does that sometimes. You can prep for every single question they've asked in the past, but that doesn't mean they won't surprise you with something new in the actual exam. You need to adapt. Use your knowledge and everything we've talked about, sure, but tailor it to the question. Don't try to tailor the question to suit what you've prepared for."

"Oh..."

Layla shuffled away, out of the classroom, through the remainder of the day, and her brain throbbed. C! She'd almost never dropped below an A before. Even a B made her mum frown. C!?! And if it could happen in a mock, it could happen in the real thing too. One bad question. One thing she hadn't prepared for, that she wasn't ready for, and it'd wreck everything, destroy her grades, drop her short of what she needed for her university offer.

She mumbled the right answers in the rest of the day's lessons. Nodded along. But inside her head, a banshee screamed. Its shrieks raged when the final bell rang, tore through her skull on the way home, made a chorus with every car that rumbled down the road. A kid yelled something at her. He threw a chip that bounced off her shoulder. Layla plodded on, stared at the cracks in the pavement in front of her shoes.

C.

Failure.

Doom. Doom. Doom. Doom. Do—

"Huh?" Layla stopped, glanced over, and the word 'hi' echoed in her head.

Anwar leaned against the wall outside Kebab Caliph. A cigarette dangled from his lip, and his leatherbound notebook tilted from his hands, as though both might fall on his feet at any moment. Mathematical formulae danced with greasy fingerprints on the notebook's pages.

"Oh. Sorry. Hi."

"Something wrong?"

"I—"

"Anwar!" A man's voice bellowed from within the kebab house. "Get your arse back here!"

Anwar sighed, spat out his cigarette, ground it under his heel, and disappeared inside.

***

"Layla?"

Her mum called from the back of the house before she'd even shut the front door behind her. Layla winced. She slid off her shoes, went to the kitchen. Maybe her mother wouldn't rem—

"Well?" Her mum turned around from the hob, where several pots steamed and a chapati took shape. "How did you do?"

"It went fine. I..."

Her mother frowned, wiped her hands on a tea towel, and came over.

"Show me."

"It's—" Layla held her schoolbag against her stomach.

"Show me!"

"Fine. But..." Layla opened the bag. "Hey!"

Her mum groped inside it, yanked the _X-Men_ comic out from where it had hidden between two folders.

"Layla!"

"I just—"

Her mother spewed out a stream of Punjabi so fast Layla couldn't catch most of the words, only the general sense of disappointment.

"I'll put this with the rest." She dropped it onto the kitchen table. "How many times do I have to tell you? After your exams!"

"Yes, mum."

Layla turned, took a step towards the hall.

"Essay!"

"Oh." She hid her grimace, turned back, pulled it out of her bag. "It was a diffic—"

Her mum snatched it away, stared at it, and swore in Punjabi. A barrage followed. Both languages. She even threw a few Arabic exclamations into the mix, as though to alert Allah to Layla's atrocities. Only fragments of the onslaught reached Layla's brain, but they hit hard.

"...lazy, stupid girl... everything we've done for you... Cambridge... law... the community will think... God gave you gifts... disgraceful... work harder... your Aunty Nusma's daughter... three A's... she'll say... fail..."

She thrust the essay back at Layla, brandished the _X-Men_ comic instead, waved it in Layla's face.

"This is what you waste your time with, when you should be studying? This!?!"

She tore at its pages.

"Mum!"

Layla dropped her bag and essay, pages of blue fountain pen ink flapped, and she grasped at the comic but her mother shoved her back, tore and twisted. Pieces of bright paper fluttered to the floor. Cyclops fired his optic blast across a panel that had come away in a single scrap.

"Stupid girl."

Layla ran upstairs to her room, slammed the door, flopped onto her bed. Her eyes burned. In the middle of the haze, a piece of paper shimmered where she'd pinned it to her corkboard. Her offer letter. The one that promised her a place reading law at Cambridge, if she got the grades they wanted. And those three characters wobbled larger, bolder than the surrounding text. AAB.

She groaned.

Law. She didn't give a damn about law, but it'd been that or get bullied into aiming for medicine like all the other desi kids at her school. At least this way she could do fun subjects for A-Level. Read novels instead of chemistry books. Then go to university, break away, live her life, read, watch, play, and do the things she wanted. But not if she failed. C? C meant no place at Cambridge, and then what? Her dad might yield, let her find something else through clearing, but her mum would put a stop to that. Her daughter? Doing some lesser course at a lesser university? Never. Maybe she'd make Layla retake her A-Levels. Another year of this...

Layla lay there till the room went dark. Her face ached.

***

In the morning, as she plodded towards school, Anwar lounged outside Kebab Caliph. He held his grease-stained notebook once more, browsed his PhD notes whilst scratching at his hairnet and compressed mohawk.

"You okay?" He closed the book. "Those kids been bothering you again?"

"No. I'm going to screw up my A-Levels though."

Anwar held her gaze, waited, so Layla poured it all out.

"It doesn't matter how hard I revise, how much I prepare! One bad question in the exam and... and..."

"Listen..." He pursed his lips. His fingertips whitened on the notebook's cover, imprinted its leather. "There's... If you want, there's something..."

Layla blinked up at him. Was he going to offer her drugs? Would they help, or make her flounce around and sing pop lyrics like when that girl on _Saved by the Bell_ took caffeine pills?

"Anwar!" His boss' voice rattled the shop windows. "I'm not paying you to smoke!"

"I'm not even smoking!" He rolled his eyes. "I have to go. But if you come back later, I can help."

Layla bit her lip. Anwar was smart, writing a PhD thesis with a title so long and complicated no one else could understand or even remember it. He must've aced his A-Levels.

"I could come back in lunch hour."

"Nah. I'll be rushed dealing with all the customers. Won't have time to talk. After school? When you get out, it'll be quiet for a bit, till people get off work."

"Yeah. Okay."

Anwar went in and Layla headed to school, zombie-shuffled her way through her lessons, and tried to decide whether Anwar would give her study tips, drugs, or both.

***

Layla burst through the front doors of the school while the final bell still echoed, hurried down the street. A couple of boys came in the opposite direction. One of them might've been the chip-thrower, but she couldn't be sure. Layla clutched the keys in her pocket. But the two kids just babbled away about some band or other, passed her by without a glance, and she went into Kebab Caliph.

Anwar stood behind the counter. An old woman ate a chicken kebab at a table by the window, laid out on clean grey paper beside the black print of her broadsheet newspaper, but they had the rest of the place to themselves. Layla sat on a stool at the counter. In front of her, against the back wall, donner meat glistened on its upright spit, an elephant's leg of grease-dripping succulence. Her mouth watered. Anwar grinned.

"Want one?"

"Oh. I don't know if I have..." She reached into her pocket, a couple of coins scraped and clinked.

"My treat."

He laid out the naan before she could refuse, then shaved long strips off the elephant's leg, grilled them to a finish. Meat, salad, and sauce made a colourful mountain atop the bread. Layla rolled it up, bit into it. Glorious. At school, some of the kids claimed donner meat was rat, not lamb. But if rat tasted this good, who cared?

Anwar leaned his lanky frame on the counter, brought his face down to hers.

"I got three A's at A-Level."

Too much greasy goodness stuffed Layla's mouth for her to answer, but he must've read the look on her face, because he shook his head.

"I'm not trying to rub it in. The thing is, I had a really crappy French teacher. Worst teacher in the world. Maybe she didn't like brown kids, maybe she was just bad at her job. But she was useless. I'd've failed. But I got hold of the exam, got some help coming up with the right answers, and learned them off by heart. Easy."

Layla choked on her kebab. Anwar's eyes widened. He reached over, maybe to hit her on the back, but she swallowed it down, gasped.

"You cheated!"

He shrugged.

"I got my A's in maths and physics on my own. I got a first at undergrad, a distinction on my MSc. No cheating there. I earned my place on the PhD. And I might do something great with my research. Why should I have given all that up because of some stupid exam no one'll ever ask me about ever again? Why should you?"

Layla took another bite of her donner, chewed, ruminated. Anwar waited. Then, when she coughed, he opened a can of Fanta and set it in front of her. She washed down the debris. Orange, chilli, and meat mingled in her mouth as the bubbles settled.

"Where... Where did you even get it? The exam paper."

"You know Fleck's Palace?"

"Yeah."

She'd never been there, but some of the kids at school talked about the place. Like a shopping centre, but evil. That's what they said. A huge Victorian building in a rundown part of town, its many floors labyrinths of little shops and stalls where the boys bought weapons, the girls bought punk clothes, the pagan kids bought tarot decks and ouija boards, and everyone bought legal highs they bragged were banned in America and other countries but not here yet.

"There's a pub in there. The Green Door."

"Huh?" She frowned. All the times the kids had spoken of their adventures in Fleck's, they'd never mentioned a pub, even the ones who loved to boast about their binge-drinking.

"Not many people know about it. But the guy who sold me the exam, he drinks there sometimes, and that's where I met him. He owes me a favour. If you want, I'll phone him up, and I'll take you there. It'll have to be late though. He does his thing at night."

Dark alleys, creepy buildings, and pubs full of sinister men whirled around Layla's head.

"Couldn't... Couldn't I just give you some money? And you could—"

"He doesn't sell to middlemen. He'll only hand something over to the person it's for."

"That's—"

"Weird? Yeah, he's a weird guy."

Layla's lips hardened, and she had to force them back open.

"How... How weird?"

"He's not a nonce. Nothing like that. But he dresses like he's played too much Shadowrun. That's a—"

"I know it. Like cyberpunk stuff?"

"A leather jacket and an orc mask."

"No way."

"Told you he was weird." Anwar shrugged. "Besides, if you're selling stolen papers, would you want people to know what you really look like? But he came through for me. And I know he's sold the right stuff to a bunch of other people too."

"More exams?"

"And other things. Books, papers, passports. Whatever he gets his hands on. Got any cash saved up?"

The box in her closet, where she hoarded her birthday money, Eid money, rewards for good exam results... Layla knew the amount off by heart. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then said it. Anwar wasn't going to rob her, right? He nodded.

"That's way more than he'll ask for. Half'll do it. Should I phone him?"

Layla took a deep breath.

"Yeah."

***

The phone rang out in the hall. Layla scrambled from her desk, knocked over a pot of pens that rolled and rained down onto the carpet. The ringing stopped before she opened her bedroom door. Her stomach scrunched up. That meant—

"Layla!" Her mum's voice came from downstairs. "Layla!"

Layla groaned, went out onto the landing.

"Yeah?"

"Phone!"

"Oh..." Layla blinked. No interrogation? No explosion? "I'll get it up here!"

She took the upstairs phone's receiver off its cradle.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Layla!" A girl's voice. "I forgot what pages we're supposed to read for tomorrow and—"

The line clicked, as her mum put the other phone down.

"Who is this?" Layla said.

"Aish. Anwar's girlfriend. Let me put him on..."

"Layla?"

"Yeah. What...?"

"Your mum would've flipped out if a bloke called you, right? So I got Aish to do it."

"Smart."

"It's about tonight... Fayz is ill, so I'm working the late shift at Caliph. I can't take you to see Ludo."

Layla exhaled, and the tension flowed out of her muscles.

"Another night then?" she said. "Maybe next—"

"The thing is, Ludo said he won't be back at the Door for ages. He's only gonna show tonight as a favour."

"Oh."

"But you could still go."

"On my own? I don't even know where..."

"You know where Fleck's is, don't you?"

"Yeah, but..."

"Here's how you get to the Door..."

"Wait!"

Layla put the receiver down atop a tangle of cord, darted into her room. This was crazy. She wasn't going, was she? Alone? But... She grabbed pen and paper anyway, went back out to the phone.

"Okay, ready..."

He gave her directions and she scribbled.

"Don't worry about Ludo. He's weird but he won't rip you off. Good luck!"

Anwar hung up. Layla gripped the paper, crumpled it a little, sat on her bed. She wasn't going. She couldn't. She... But the AAB stared at her. And, beside it, the front page of her essay. That red C.

Layla's eyes hardened.

She waited. Her mum and dad went to bed early, same as always, because her mum got up early to pray and made him do the same. The crack of light under their door vanished. Layla put on a hooded jacket, crept down the stairs, put on her shoes. She opened the front door and it creaked. Her heart hammered. She closed her eyes, waited for the shout, but it didn't come and so she went, eased the door closed behind her.

Layla pulled the hood down over her forehead. If any of the local aunties saw her, recognised her, and told her mum... She walked fast. An old black man sat at the bus stop but no one else, and she squeezed herself into a corner of the shelter, eyed the street. The bus to the city centre rolled up. Desi driver. But he wore a Sikh turban. Not one of the faces she half-remembered from weddings or Eid parties then, not someone who'd know her, grass her up.

"You getting on?" he said.

"Y... Yeah." She stepped aboard, clinked her coins into the tray. "Town, please."

Layla paused at the stairs to the upper level. Shouts echoed above. Leers, laughter. Drunks. She took a seat at the back of the bottom level instead, tucked herself into a corner again as the bus pulled out.

The first raindrops spattered the window halfway to the city centre. By the time they reached the final stop, it had become a downpour, drummed against the glass and the pavement outside. Layla thanked the driver. Went out into the wet and the cold and bent her head down, shoved her hands into her pockets, touched her keys, sloshed her way down the street.

Every time someone drew near, she glanced up, gripped metal. But they all just hurried past. The rain had cleared the backstreets that led to Fleck's Palace, and the only other people she saw either rushed to bus stops or car parks or else took shelter in the McDonald's that shone bright on a street of buildings that'd mostly gone dark for the night.

Fleck's loomed up. Boards blinded all its windows, but light glowed at some of their edges. Layla pushed open the door. Stepped into a ghost town. In the open space by the entrance, most of the stalls lay bare. A white guy with a ginger beard shoved assorted ornaments into bags and boxes. He looked up at her.

"Bit late." He smiled. "But I think..."

He mimed smoking.

"I think they're still open."

"I'm... I'm not here for... I'm going to The Green Door!"

"Ah..." He nodded. "Hope it takes you somewhere good."

"Thanks?"

He went back to packing his stock, whistled a tune that sounded like it was from a '60s song. Layla pulled out the piece of paper with Anwar's instructions. She headed deeper into the maze of shuttered shops and empty tables, up stairs that wound as tight as the ones in the castles they'd gone to on primary school trips.

The shop that sold legal highs was open, as promised. A couple of long-haired men emerged from it when Layla passed by, nodded to her, and she nodded back as though she came here all the time. She backtracked several times. Anwar's instructions had seemed easy enough over the phone, and on her piece of paper, but amid the haphazard warren of passages... Layla stopped, reread her writing yet again.

"You lost, love?"

A woman with black curls down to her waist leaned against a doorframe. Behind her, books lined shelves. Books and...

"Ouija board?" The woman glanced over her shoulder, followed Layla's gaze. "Really, we're closed. Just about to lock up. But if you want..."

"No, thanks. I'm looking for The Green Door."

The woman looked her up and down, arched an eyebrow. Then she shrugged. She turned off the light in her shop, stepped out into the passage, shut the door.

"That way." She fiddled a key into the lock and tilted her head. "Round that corner, then keep going. It's right at the end."

"Thanks."

Layla followed the passage past several side corridors, and there it was. Just a dark green door set into the wall. No sign. What kind of pub didn't have a sign? How would people even...? But those weren't the questions she'd come for, the ones that'd take her to university. So she opened the door. Went inside before they could entangle her again.

The Green Door.

Green... doors? Four more of them stood at the far end of the barroom, each exactly like the one she'd come through. Two in the wall opposite the entrance. Two that faced each other from the sides. Toilets? There couldn't be much space back there, given how far she'd walked through Fleck's, and the size of this place. Maybe they were just for show.

Several drinkers sat at tables in the middle of the room, including a couple of punks with bright orange and pink mohawks that put Anwar's to shame. Other patrons clustered at the row of arcade machines that flashed and chimed against the right-hand wall. Along the left wall, the bar—

"Hey!" The woman behind it blinked at Layla. Or... winked? A black patch covered her left eye, but her scowl definitely made it seem like more of a blink. "How old are ya?"

"Sev... Eighteen!"

"Then you'd better go on back out that door and come back when you're twenty-one, hadn't ya?"

"But—"

"The drinking age is eighteen here!" said a green-haired girl, without turning away from her game. She rattled a joystick, tapped a button twice. "Rule Britannia!"

The one-eyed barmaid swore, dropped her gaze.

"Lost track..." She shook her head, looked up at Layla again, grunted. "Well? Get your arse inside then, and close that bloody door."

Huh? The woman's accent... Hadn't it just been Americ—

"Door!"

"Sorry!"

Layla shut it.

"You here for a drink or for the company? Because the company's shite tonight."

"I... I'm looking for..."

Across the room, one of the green doors opened outwards, not far enough to reveal whatever toilet or broom closet lay beyond, and a figure sidled out through the gap, closed it behind him. A figure in a studded leather jacket. With a record bag slung over his shoulder, that bulged against his side. A figure with a broad green face. An orc's face. Layla gawked. That head belonged on the covers of the fantasy novels her mum had confiscated, on the stuff they sold in Games Workshop.

"Ludo!" the barmaid said. "I told you last time. This isn't an orc place. Piss off!"

Ludo strutted into the middle of the room, grinned. Tusks. Little tusks poked up at the corners of his mouth.

"What, you don't like my _mask_?"

The barmaid glared at him.

"Anyway..." He nodded towards the arcade machines. "If you're being fussy, that _Wrestlemania_ at the end is a couple of years wrong. _Wrestlefest_ would've been on-point. Better game too."

"Ah, fuck." She slammed her hand down on the bar. "Glitches."

"That's the problem with this place. Dumber on the inside."

"Just sell this kid whatever shite you're peddling and sod off."

"Fair enough. You're Anwar's friend? Layla, yeah?"

"Y... Yeah."

"Where's the big man?"

"He's... He's working tonight."

"No rest for the wicked. Well, grab a seat." Ludo gestured at an empty table, then went to the bar. "Usual."

Layla sat down. The barmaid picked up a pint glass, looked like she'd smash it into Ludo's face, but filled it from the Guinness tap instead. He looked over his shoulder.

"What'll you have?"

"I'm fine. Thanks."

"Suit yourself."

He brought his drink over, sat opposite her, and slipped the strap off his shoulder. The record bag thumped on the floor.

"Your mask..."

"Good, isn't it?"

"It's amazing! Looks so..."

"Real. Yeah. I used to work in special effects. Movies and shit. You know?"

"And the gloves..."

"Huh?" He glanced at his green hands. "Oh. Right. Yeah, would look pretty silly if they didn't match the face, wouldn't I?"

"I guess..."

"So, English literature A-Level?"

"Yeah! You've got it?"

"Of course."

"How? Do you work at the exam board?"

"Ha! No, I just get hold of things. I started with exam papers, so I still do that now and then. Nostalgia, you know? Safer than the other stuff too. No one's gonna stab you over exams."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure." He reached down. "Let me just—"

A crack echoed through the barroom, everyone turned.

"Oh, shit..." Ludo said.

One of the green doors had flown open and hit the wall.

"Wretched orc! Surrender the doomsday weapon plans or I'll destroy you with my superior technology!"

The... man?... who stood in the doorway was small, maybe Layla's height but much skinnier. His spindly limbs and torso barely filled out a red jumpsuit that might've been a kid's cheap knock-off _Star Trek_ costume. But the massive silver blaster gun thingy in his hands... That looked expensive. Stupid and cartoonish, but expensive. And the blue dome-headed mask he wore was almost as good as Ludo's. Lights flashed behind him. What kind of fancy toilets did this place have?

"Are you guys doing live-roleplaying?" Layla said.

Ludo didn't look at her. He jumped up, held his palms out towards the alien.

"Hang on! No need to do anything crazy. We can work this out and—"

"Hey!" The one-eyed woman slammed a pint glass onto the bar and beer sloshed over its rim. "I'm not having this! You both know the rules. No orcs in this realm, and no aliens anywhere that hasn't had first contact!"

"I mean..." The green-haired girl rattled her joystick, kept her eyes on the machine's screen. "If he's here, doesn't that make _this_ first contact?"

"Oh, sod off or you're banned and all. Ludo, take this shite somewhere else! And you, lower that blast—"

The alien pressed something on his weapon and it hummed, vibrated.

"Silence, one-eyed drink-slave, or I'll disintegrate this filthy establishment and every stink-beast here!"

Several drinkers yelled their disapproval at either the insult or the threat of disintegration. Cool of them to play along. And this was exactly the kind of fun stuff Layla would try to get in on at university, but... She coughed.

"Excuse me? Could I just get my exam? I've got the mon—"

Another green door opened. And on the other side a plain of grass rolled away to a distant forest and, upon the horizon, a castle's ramparts. A red moon shone down upon them all. Not a toilet then.

Layla's jaw dangled.

Something black flapped under the top of the doorway, bloomed into a column of dark mist, and a woman appeared amid the vapours. A cloak fluttered behind her, its raised collar framed her head.

"Ludo! I vant vhat you stole!"

Her teeth flashed. No, not just teeth. Fangs.

"Oh, this is just fucking fantastic!" the barmaid said. "All of you can piss—"

A third green door opened. A man and woman stormed through it, dressed in bits of fur and lots of muscles. A sword and battleaxe glinted.

"Orc!" The male barbarian raised his axe. "Return the sacred scroll or face the wrath of our thews and blades!"

"We can work this out," Ludo said. "I—"

The alien fired. A golden beam blazed, hissed, and a chunk of wall exploded.

"Stop him!" the barmaid said. "Someone bloody well stop him, before—"

The barbarians charged, ploughed through tables and chairs. Drinkers jumped up. Some fled, others hurled themselves into the fray, and more rushed over from the arcade machines, though the girl with the green hair played on. The alien fired again. The top half of the wrestling game melted and sludge dripped, steamed. A bit landed near the green-haired girl's boot.

"Oi!" She wiggled the joystick, tapped more buttons. "Watch it!"

Layla dropped under the table.

"Listen!" Ludo said. "If we all just—"

Light flashed. Ludo crumpled, sprawled on the floor a few feet from Layla, and charred meat smoked around a football-sized hole in his chest. Layla's brain screamed but her throat just quivered. All around her, people stomped. Crashed and smashed. And she'd gone insane or the rest of the world had gone insane and maybe whichever it was didn't matter because she was screwed either way, screwed and doomed by things worse than stupid kids who threw drinks because they didn't like her blazer, and if this lot didn't kill her, her mum would kill her, and she'd fail her A-Levels and—

And that shook through her skull. The only thing that either made sense or was mad enough to break through the rest of the madness. She grabbed Ludo's bag. Grabbed it, got up amid the melee that whirled around her, and ran. Ran for the one green door she knew didn't lead to alien worlds or vampire castles or places where people called muscles 'thews', the door she'd come through, the door that led to Fleck's Palace and rain and streets and the bus that'd take her home.

"Puny stink-beast!"

Light flashed and Layla yelled but nothing hit her, and over her shoulder one of the mohawked punks tackled the alien to the floor.

She threw the door open, blundered out into Fleck's, down one passage and then another, yanked the bag's strap over her head and its weight bit against her neck, dragged her to the side, and where the hell was the way out? Where—

A dead end.

She spun round, went back the other way, and—

"Halt, so I can destroy you with my superior technology!"

And the alien blocked her path, stood there in the ruins of his jumpsuit, levelled his weapon. The gun shuddered in his blue hands. A dent marred its side, as though someone had stamped on it, and three different places sparked and smoked. The barrel drooped a little near its mouth and the glow there flickered.

"I'll give you whatever the hell you want! I don't care! I just need my exa—"

"Die, stink-beast!"

The alien pulled the trigger. The gun shook but nothing came out, nothing came out and the alien yelled, slapped its side like it was a TV with a shitty picture, and Layla yelled too, yelled and ran and metal bit into her hand and her hand was in her pocket even though she didn't remember putting it there.

"Wretched—"

Layla lunged, and jabbed a key into the alien's eye. It popped. Green goo erupted and the alien shrieked and Layla shrieked too, but he fell and she didn't. She ran. Past him, past the shuttered shops, towards the stairs.

Someone moaned.

Movement flashed in the corner of Layla's vision and she twisted away from it, raised her keys like she was some kind of ninja. The barbarian woman stumbled towards her from the adjoining passage. The woman's right arm hung at her side. The tip of her sword scraped the floor, gouged a crooked line. She clutched her neck. Blood slathered her fingers.

"Holy... Holy ground." She staggered, banged her shoulder. "Hurry! She can't... can't cross... holy..."

The woman slumped against the wall. Her hand fell away from her neck, away from a mess of torn meat and seeping blood, and she stared into space. Vomit burned at the back of Layla's throat. But the foulness froze there, froze with the rest of her, because at the far end of the corridor a cloak billowed and the vampire grinned.

"Vun moment, little girl." Blood smeared her mouth and chin, glistened on her fangs. "You have vhat I—"

A man roared, the vampire whirled towards his war cry, and the other barbarian collided with her, barged her into a metal shutter that rattled and clanged. Layla ran. Down the stairs, those stupid narrow stairs like the ones in castles, bounced from wall to wall and almost fell but snatched at the bannister and steadied herself, broke out onto the ground floor, through the maze, past the empty stalls, out into the night and the cold and rain that lashed her face, and she kept going, sprinted, and the bag bashed her side.

The vampire's howl ripped through the darkness.

Holy ground! Mosques, gurdwaras, churches, cathedrals... Cathedral! The city centre had a cathedral! If she... she...

But the vampire didn't howl now. She laughed. Laughed because she'd spotted her prey, because she strode down the street over Layla's shoulder, faster than anyone should be able to walk, a stop-motion monster in an old movie. Her cloak fluttered behind her. Layla groaned. She'd never make it to the cathedral, to the holy ground the vampire wouldn't cross and...

And Layla stopped. Stopped in the light that pooled on the pavement from the windows of the one place on the street that still shone and beckoned. Stopped beneath the golden arches on its sign.

The vampire stopped too, stared at that emblem, scowled as though she tried to discern its meaning. And Layla went through the door. The vampire approached it, but slower now, human speed, and the scowl still marred the paleness of her brow.

"Holy ground!" Layla put her hands together, curled them, formed an M. "You can't come in here."

"Vhat temple is this?" The vampire's eyes flashed. "Vhich cursed god..."

"That one." Layla pointed at the plastic idol of Ronald McDonald that stood against the wall. "You can't come in, so just tell me what you want and..."

She patted Ludo's record bag.

"And I'll give it to you. I'll toss it out and you can go back to—"

"Are you two ordering something?" Behind her, a young man with freckles and a paper hat drummed his fingers beside the register. "Can't stay here if you aren't eating."

Layla groaned. The vampire's lips twitched and eyebrow rose. Layla backpedaled. The vampire lifted her right foot, hovered it over the threshold, eased the toe of her boot downwards as though testing bathwater and afraid to meet its chill. Layla spun round, sprinted past the empty tables and chairs.

"Wait!" The cashier held up his hands. "You can't—"

She jumped, clawed, scrambled over the counter, dropped onto the other side. The girls working the fryer and grill backed away.

"Help!" the cashier said.

"I'm not a bouncer!" the fryer girl said.

"It's our break!" the grill girl said.

The two of them legged it into the storeroom and slammed its door. A lock clicked.

"I'll call the police!" The cashier turned, looked for help, found none. "I'll—"

The vampire cackled. Her right foot rested on the floor, and Ronald McDonald hadn't destroyed her.

"A clever ruse, child."

She padded past the tables, sniffed the air, scowled once more. The scent of fries wafted. They had McDonald's in Russia now, but apparently they still hadn't made it to that place with the red moon...

"Er..." The cashier stared at the vampire. His legs quivered. "I... I'll call... the... the police?"

The police? Layla wanted to laugh and scream and cry. The police didn't carry silver. Or garlic. Or stakes.

"You can have it!" Layla pulled the bag open. Papers stuffed it, some loose, others inside folders. There were even a couple of scrolls, and a book bound in black leather. "Whatever you want, you can—"

"I vant your blood."

Layla groped around. Weapons! Kitchens had weapons! They had knives, and forks, and... cleavers? Did McDonald's have—

The vampire advanced, the cashier wailed, and Layla grabbed the fryer's handle. Its contents hissed and bubbled. She flung them, flung a torrent of oil and fries. The vampire screeched. Clawed at her face, clawed away half-cooked fries, clawed, and laughed.

"Oil? Oil is for besiegers, little girl. Not vampires."

Layla pulled the book from the bag, thrust it at the grill, and the vampire stopped laughing. Its pages caught. Flames danced, paper blackened, and... screamed? The book screamed and Layla screamed, and the vampire lunged and Layla tossed the burning, screaming thing at her.

Flames met oil. And now the vampire screamed with the book and with Layla and with the cashier, screamed and blazed and crumbled. Sprinklers burst to life. Water rained down, fizzed on a heap of ash and flames.

The cashier carried on screaming. But Layla's throat ached, and since there didn't seem to be anything left to scream about, she stopped. Closed the bag to protect the papers. Climbed back over the counter. She strolled through the sprinklers' spray, out into the night where the rain had ended and a one-eyed woman waited.

"Is she...?" The barmaid nodded at the window and the maelstrom of smoke and water on the other side.

"Yeah."

"Nice one. Not killed a vampire myself. Glassed one who got a bit handsy, chucked a couple out for fighting. Never killed one though. So..." She gestured at Ludo's bag. "Afraid I can't leave that thing with you. Most of the stuff inside doesn't belong here."

"Okay. But..." Layla opened it again, rifled through its contents, and pulled out a manilla folder. "This is what I came for."

"Fair enough."

Layla pulled the strap off her neck, grimaced, and handed the bag over. The barmaid slung it on her shoulder.

"What about the alien? And those barbarians? And—"

"We'll clean it up. Not the first time things have got a bit out of hand at the Door."

The barmaid strolled away, towards Fleck's Palace, then paused and looked back.

"Listen, kid..."

"Layla."

"Layla. If you've got a better offer, fair enough. But if you don't, you're welcome at The Green Door. Long as you want."

"In Fleck's?"

"Lots of places. You seem like a smart girl. You saw what was through those doors, and you heard what that wanker Ludo said, with that bloody big mouth of his. You know what the deal is."

"Adventures through time and space?"

"Yeah, that sort of shite. You want in?"

Layla gripped the folder with both hands, gripped the thing that would get her an A at A-Level, get her to university, where she'd study law, become a lawyer, someone her mother could boast about to all the aunties. She crammed it into the bin outside McDonald's. Then she followed the one-eyed woman, back to The Green Door and whatever lay beyond.

# The Burnt Door

by Ani Brandt

"People were staring."

I closed the door and looked across the hood of my car to where Katelyn stood. A slender dark figure against the bright background of terribly aged asphalt. I shot her a smile and slapped the glistening dark blue roof of my brand new truck.

"Of course they were. They know this baby can load twice as many cattle as their old rusty pickups."

Her brown eyes lingered on me and we both knew that wasn't why. I went to open the door for her and took her bag from the backseat. It was a delicate little black backpack with a surprising weight. I wondered about the mysterious heavy contents a little too long.

"That's mine! I can carry it myself!"

Katelyn snatched the bag right out of my hands, before I could disagree. So I chose not to. With just the tips of my fingers I gave the door a gentle push and took in the view from the hill we'd parked on. An ocean of a rich golden color, slowly bowing to the wind, held up the bright blue line of the horizon.

"Do you remember how we used to go to the fields after school?" I asked.

"I remember how a bunch of drunk guys tried to write a love letter to Jen Rensburg by rolling around on the crops and spelled her name wrong."

An involuntary giggle left my throat. I tried to suppress it and started coughing, as it mixed with what was left of the last sip of soda I had in the car.

Katelyn cocked her head. "Don't tell me that was you."

"Well, it wasn't _just_ me."

"Brian!" She slapped my arm with a flick of her wrist.

I barely felt it. Other than that thin smile she couldn't hide behind her pursed lips.

"She was kinda hot," I said, coming to my own defense.

"Could you be any more shallow, Coulson? She had seven siblings."

"So?"

"I don't think she or her family fully appreciated the gesture. Let's put it that way."

I felt my smile fade, as I looked for further explanation in Katelyn's face, but only found disapproval. She went on to stretch her legs from the long trip.

A thought crossed my mind and I stepped back to unhinge the tailgate. I reached for the lid of a long toolbox covered with checker plate. Katelyn carefully raised her head over one of the side panels. I closed my fingers around the smooth handle of my freshly sharpened axe inside.

"What do you need that for?" Katelyn asked.

I took it out of the custom bracket and checked the blade.

"To clear a path."

Katelyn sighed.

"You didn't bring all of your firefighter stuff, did you?"

I smiled again and closed the back of my truck.

"My turnout gear is at the firehouse, where it belongs. Not that I didn't think about it. But I guess they would rather see the proper dress uniform at the ceremony."

"If they put any more bling-bling on that thing, it'll weigh more than you do." She softened her words with a smile of her own.

"I don't think they'll hand out an actual medal of some sort. I mean, I didn't really do anything... That would be a bit too-"

"Too much effort."

"I was gonna say too expensive."

She shrugged. "Isn't one just an excuse for the other?"

I rolled my eyes at her. Yes, I was too tall and my shoulders too broad to make it look cute, at least that was what she had been telling me all these years. It always worked to lighten the mood, though. So I raised my hand in a slow, sweeping motion, as if I were painting in mid-air.

"I can see Mrs. Ogden being all over this. Just like she designed all the sports trophies."

Katelyn let out a half-laugh-half-sigh and shrugged her slim shoulders.

"Well," she said, "it was always a soccer ball, no matter what the prize was for."

I was about to protest, but the image of a narrow shelf appeared before my eyes. Hung right above my desk near the window, the midsection sagging deeper and deeper with every year. No matter how bent the wood was, no trophy would start to lean, as they all were tiny little soccer balls with a solid marble-colored base and a sticker that would soon start to peel off at the edges.

When Katelyn started walking, no eyes for the patterns the sun and clouds drew on the field-canvases that surrounded us, me and my axe followed.

Grass had conquered the gaps in the sidewalk. Close to the once bright walkway grew a young tree. I stopped next to it, stood for a moment, and started carefully sliding the still flawless blade down the stem.

"Ten years, and nature is already taking back this corner of Hummington."

"Brian, stop it! There is no need for more young lives to end right here."

I pressed my lips together and pulled the blade away. Names popped up from my memory. Names with numbers, an age, a grade. I caught up to Katelyn.

Side by side we stood in front of a sooty facade. What felt like little pebbles beneath my boots, left a black trace when I dragged my foot across the sidewalk. The windows and door frame were of a pale gray color, sprinkled with hints of green paint, that had cracked and curled up. A weathered chipboard covered the former entrance. The color as faded as the rest of the building. A quick glance to the side, past Katelyn and down the street, to where the fields swallowed the town, to reassure myself I hadn't stepped into a black and white movie.

"No more Green Door, I guess," Katelyn said.

"Why would no one rebuild it?" I asked.

I reached for the wood that had been soaked in weather for a full decade.

"Yeah. And maybe rename it. The Nightmare Café. Relive where your kid took their last breath."

"Everyone loved it here," I said.

And I said it loud and angry. Katelyn took a step back and lowered her gaze.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"No, I am sorry. It's... it's been quite a trip so far. So um... do you want to go inside?"

A quiet nod.

So I grabbed my axe with both hands, looking for the best spot to aim for. But again Katelyn stopped me from slamming the blade into wood that wasn't even close to a fair opponent. She pointed at the empty screw holes. Putting my axe down I slipped my fingers into the gaps on both sides. A gentle tug and the board came loose, cracking and screeching as it did.

"Do you think there was someone here before us?"

"Only someone who has nowhere else to go would come here," Katelyn said, igniting her flashlight.

But the powerful light beam didn't reach far into the black hole. Even after all these years the burnt smell was overwhelming. The wind was first to explore the corridors, swirling around the blackened wood structures. Like a crispy skeleton holding up the walls.

"We have somewhere to go," I said, waiting while the dust settled.

I felt Katelyn's curious eyes on me. Those warm, brown eyes with just a hint of pain.

"We could always come back." I spoke into the dark ahead but I knew the kind of look she gave me. "Think about it for a moment. I'll find work everywhere around the farms. And you could open up an office. There hasn't been a lawyer in town since... I dunno. Ever?"

"And why do you think that is?"

I was prepared to lay out a future that was part silly, but part a welcome change of pace. But I was not prepared to give her an answer. Without waiting for one, Katelyn stepped into the dark entrance. I quickly followed. A crunching sound followed every step. My boots kicked rubble and tiny shards of glass around.

Three careful crunches later, I met up with Katelyn. She stood gazing into an open area. Daylight found its way through cracks in the chipboards that covered the windows. I lit up my own flashlight to fill in what the natural light only hinted at. Tables lay on the floor, furniture half eaten by the fire. What once was a bright red color in my mind now had a black tint. If anything from the seats was left at all. I followed Katelyn's eyes to the back of the long room.

"You were all the way in the back." I pointed my flashlight. "All alone without your friends. I never understood why you wouldn't sit with them that day."

"Girls and their silly fights," she said after a while. She added a laugh that was mostly a sigh and turned so I wouldn't see her wipe a tear from her eye. Something she normally did when she was angry, but I couldn't see what anger would have to do with this. "Field trips bring out the worst in people. And high school really is just a training ground."

"What are you saying? Did they say something to you? Or do something?"

Katelyn shrugged. "They were just being themselves. The bright future of Hummington."

Before I could ask any further, she continued exploring what once was the counter. I took a last look at the remains of the booth I used to occupy. It hadn't been a conscious decision. My friends had picked the spot and so I followed.

"Do you think your aunt will show up for the ceremony?" I asked.

"Do you think your parents will?"

My head snapped around to where the crunching steps betrayed Katelyn. The sudden movement must have startled her. So I took a deep and steady breath.

"It's quite a drive. And my dad says-"

"They didn't even get an invite, did they?"

"They know," was all I replied.

"Yeah, but they probably didn't want to set foot in the town that chased them out with an angry mob."

"They left because my dad had a new job."

Katelyn shook her head. "Which he needed after Grayson kicked him out. Because his son didn't survive the fire. But you did."

I shook my head violently like that would help get her words out of my ears. "You're wrong. They left on their own account."

She snorted. "No one ever leaves a town like this unless a tragedy propels them out. Look at the two of us. Would you have left? Would I?"

I couldn't answer that. I didn't want to. It wasn't like we never had that discussion.

"Your aunt still lives here," I said.

"Yeah, but nobody could hate her more than she hates herself. Or me."

She turned away to keep lingering in her own thoughts. There was no use waiting for her. I started roaming the ruins of our childhood. Soon I managed to push aside the memories. Every day I walked into burnt buildings. Every day I saw, smelled, and heard the same things. After a while I found myself in the pantry.

"Where did they say the fire started?" I asked.

A moment later I heard Katelyn's muffled voice from the next room.

"Um, somewhere close to where I am, I think."

I didn't like shouting. Not that anyone would give us trouble for breaking into the remains of the café. But it didn't feel right.

So I went looking for the door Katelyn had picked. To my surprise I found her in a corner of the kitchen that looked mostly untouched by the fire.

"This must be a mistake," I said, "are you sure this is it?"

"You're the expert." She shrugged and wandered on.

I took a closer look. By no means was I an expert. But I had seen a couple of kitchen fires. This looked nothing like them. Blackened beams in the front, white tiles in the back?

"Katelyn?"

I called over my shoulder, but didn't look to see if she came back. Instead I reached for the soot on the tiles and easily wiped it off.

"You trying to write a love letter in soot? Cause let me tell you, that's not as romantic as you might think, Brian."

Usually her dry comments would make me smile, but I couldn't shake a thought.

"Why were we all here?"

"Hm?"

"The whole school. How was it that we all ended up here at the same time?"

"Because old Mrs. Green invited us to come after the field trip."

"But how did she know that we were on a field trip that day?"

Katelyn rolled her eyes.

"Because this is Hummington, dummy. Where everyone knows everything. We spent most of the day here anyway. She would've heard us talk about it even when she dumped her hearing aids. We hadn't talked about anything else for weeks."

"She didn't have any kids, or did she?"

Katelyn shrugged.

"She was an old one-eyed lady with the only café in town. She knew everyone's business and we knew nothing about her."

Before she could move on, I touched Katelyn's wrist.

"Do you remember if she liked having kids around her all day?"

She stopped and gave me a skeptical look.

"Where are you going with this?"

I let her wrist go, not sure if my thoughts were ripe to say out loud.

"Who says the old lady didn't do it? Set the fire, I mean. Because looking at this... I'm certain someone did."

"You're thinking the old one-eyed lady torched her own café? Why?"

I blanked. All by myself I had everything laid out. It all made sense. Putting in words why I felt such a sudden certainty left me stuttering.

"I well... she... the one eye, I mean... and where did the money for the café come from? And she was all alone and maybe bitter and-"

"How Hummington of you."

I blinked at her.

"What do you mean?"

"She was old and had one eye, so of course she would lure children to her gingerbread house?"

"Don't be silly, Katey."

"She was taking enough shit from people."

"Why are you so angry? We're talking about our roots."

"Those aren't the roots of a proud tree, Brian. But those of a poison ivy. It swallows everything that gets in its way. And when it's done, no trace of individuality will be left. Whether you chose to be different or someone chose it for you."

"I love this town," I said firmly. "I love everything it did for me. Miss everyone I left behind. I miss the quiet in the morning. No highways that make your walls shake, no overcrowded buses and people who are so close and yet so distant. How everyone knew my name when I rode my bike down the street. The people here care about each other. You just have to let them."

"Did you ever care enough to ask how she lost that eye? Ask why Jen Rensburg got homeschooled after your oh so funny stint? Or care why that dark-skinned, curly-haired boy from fourth grade came and went without speaking a single word?"

There we stood. Face to face, close to each other and yet we were standing on different paths. Like two people on opposite sides of a river and our past roared between us. For a while I just looked at her, took in every detail I had come to love over the past ten years. I reached for her hand and gave her an apologetic smile.

"The kind of love you have," she said, shaking her head and looking for words, "for this suffocating little bubble of prejudice and paranoia..."

I took a breath to answer, but her expression stayed soft and loving and... forgiving? She held my hand tight between hers and lifted it up to breathe a gentle kiss onto the cracked skin of knuckles.

"I guess I'll never understand it. You know how I am when I can't wrap my head around something. Just never thought it would be you."

She returned smile and hand to me and we split again.

I wasn't ready to give up my suspicions, I just had to find the right name to attach them to. So I followed what I could remember from my days at the academy.

A couple minutes later I found myself approaching the blackest corner. Quickly I cleared what was left of the furniture.

"I think this is it," I said.

I wasn't even sure if Katelyn could hear me, but it had to get out of me. I knew it. For all those years they had been wrong. This was where the fire started. Right here in the back. Next to the very last booth.

"Katelyn!"

I grabbed the bench and dragged it even further away from the corner. The screeching sound filled my ears. So when my back hit a small figure behind me, I almost jumped. Over my shoulder, Katelyn stood in darkness. Her extinguished flashlight swayed at her side.

"This is it. The fire started here. I know it. We need to tell them and we need to do it before the ceremony."

"Are you hoping for yet another made-up award?"

My excitement crashed like a wave against her unmoving frame. So I pointed at the corner like it was too easily missed.

"This isn't about awards. This is about the truth! We have to stay, we have to figure out what happened here. I mean..."

I turned back to scan the corner once more. But I was so sure. So alive with that new realization.

"Oh! Wait! This is where you were sitting. But you got out. We both did. Just... I mean... this is a miracle, both of us surviving this."

She had to catch some of that excitement, she just had to. So I turned around again, and stared into the muzzle of a gun.

"Not a miracle. Rather a flaw in the plan..."

# Talking to Dogs

by R.C.

"When did you get so unhappy?"

Julien stopped and stared at his dog. He said, "What?"

The orange labradoodle blinked at him through the long curls shading her eyes. Her name was Mango and she had not talked to him before. This was largely because she was a dog.

The two of them stood in the middle of the sidewalk. It was five in the morning, and Julien was wearing his pajamas with a hoodie over top and flip flops. Mango had insisted he get out of bed and take her for a walk. He assumed to go pee, but apparently it was to ask him a question. The sun was right on the horizon and it skewed all the shadows sideways, long and reaching.

Mango's pink tongue hung out of her mouth. Nothing on her face visibly moved, but again she asked, "When did you get so unhappy?"

"What kind of question is that?" Julien replied.

Mango stared, blank dark eyes steady. She said nothing further.

"I'm not answering you," Julien said, shoulders up by his ears. "Because that would be crazy. And I'm not crazy."

He tugged on the leash and Mango obediently followed him home. She never went pee, but she did later, on his rug.

—

Mango was a gift. Or a forced gift, because he hadn't wanted her at all. Julien didn't really mean to become agoraphobic, it happened slowly and over a few months until one day the fire alarm went off from some burnt toast and he realized he couldn't actually go outside.

"I'm going to die in a fire," Julien said when he phoned his sister, Sammy.

"Can you wait until tomorrow? I've got a massage appointment today," Sammy replied, with the roar of traffic in the background. She was driving somewhere, because she was capable of going outside. Julien was not.

"I'm serious."

"So am I. I've had this booked in my calendar for weeks and my assistant kept trying to sabotage it. I think she has something against me relaxing. Maybe if I'm higher strung I get more work done." Sammy laughed.

"I can't leave the house, Sammy."

"Yeah, you can."

"No, I can't. I'm fucked up, Sam. I can't leave. Like, physically cannot set foot outside my front door."

Sammy gave an odd pause. "How have you been eating, then?"

"I order food and get it delivered. Have for months."

"And that means you're going to die in a fire?"

"My fire alarm went off and I couldn't make myself go outside."

"Oh wow. That's not good. Alright. Why not?"

Julien bit his lip hard. He said, "The 'why' isn't what matters, it's the... it's that I can't. And that's bad."

"I think the 'why' matters very much, but whatever. Listen. I'm going to have my massage, then I'll drive over. Try not to start any fires between now and then, and you'll be fine."

"Are you going to carry me out the door?" Julien asked his older sister, wary.

"Nope. You're going to walk out the door. I have an idea."

"What idea?"

"Bye!"

Sammy didn't visit often, because she was a three-hour drive away, and worked so often that the six hours total it took to come by was unreasonable. When she showed up, much later, she had an orange labradoodle in her backseat. He watched her unload the dog from the car. Not on a leash, but a rope tied in a circle around the dog's neck. It was awful.

Julien opened the door and addressed her as she came up the path from inside the doorframe: "What on Earth are you doing to that poor dog?"

"Inflicting her upon you." Sammy smiled. She had perfect teeth she'd paid for and dimples she was born with. She handed over the rope. "This is Mango. She's yours now."

"I don't want a dog."

"I don't care." Sammy stepped back. "I've got an early meeting. Bye!"

"Sammy. Sammy! Wait!"

Julien was unable to make his feet pass the threshold of his house. Sammy threw a perfect grin over her shoulder and hopped off, back to her car. Julien watched her drive away, heart sunk to his toes.

Mango stared at him, with distant elevator-music eyes, waiting on his front stoop. Julien let her in, and gently untied the rope. He called Sammy on his phone.

She picked up with the rush of driving around her. "I'm not taking her back."

"Where did you get her?"

"A co-worker. She found her on the side of the road two days ago, already been to the vet. No chip, got all her shots. But she couldn't take her. You can."

"I can't." Julien agonized. "I can't leave the house, I just told you that. I can't get her food or take her for walks or get her a collar that's not a fucking piece of rope."

"That is a pickle," Sammy said. "Good luck!"

His sister hung up. Julien cursed her name.

Mango ate the bagel he'd left on the coffee table as he paced the length of his house. He found her licking the plate.

"I don't think dogs are meant to eat bagels," Julien told her.

Mango turned her curly head and sighed.

"I can't take care of you."

The dog blinked, listless.

"I can't leave. Do you know what's out there?"

Julien walked to the window and parted his overlapping curtains to see the bland overcast sky. What was out there? No, that was the wrong question. Who was out there?

—

Julien couldn't leave the house to buy a proper leash. It was the cycle he feared so much: being in public scared him, which made him panic, and panicking scared him, which made being in public more frightening. So he had just stopped going out.

Mango didn't understand that. Mango just wanted some food and a walk.

Sammy called him the next day, when he was still in bed. She greeted, "So did it work, or are you just letting the dog pee on your carpet?"

"You have to take her back," Julien said. Outside his bedroom door Mango was whining and scratching the wood.

"Did you?"

"You're being cruel."

"I'm good at that. And I know you, Julien, and you're not cruel. You're going to get up out of bed and take that poor dog for a walk. I've got to get to my meeting. Love you!"

It took the entire day to go to the pet store. He had more than one panic attack. But he could not walk a dog on a rope.

Julien bought her an orange bowl and an orange leash, hands shaking when he passed his credit card to the cashier. Breathe. Breathe _. He's not here._ There would be no reason for him to be in a pet store.

Mango swallowed the food almost whole when he brought it home. Julien sat on his kitchen floor, head in hands, and tried to breathe through the pinhole his throat had become.

—

Julien was tall. He stood out in crowds. Even when he hunched his shoulders, his head was above the rest. He hated it more than anything. Sammy was short, especially before she started wearing high heels everywhere. Julien always thought it was a mistake that he was tall and she was short, because she had a presence when she walked into a room and Julien had whatever the opposite of that was. An absence.

Julien never felt tall. He was clumsy. He was too many limbs and not enough grace to coordinate them.

He worked at home as a computer programmer. Coding for hours in a dark room. Mango sat on his feet and kept her furry face tilted up at him. When he removed his headphones, Mango said, "When did you start feeling small?"

Julien jolted, and stared down at the orange labradoodle. He had written the first time off as morning insanity. Her tongue lolled out. He replied, slow and purposeful, "I'm not talking to a dog."

Mango did not point out the hypocrisy of that statement. Her ears stayed in a perked, listening position.

"I'm not," Julien said. He got up and made himself a cup of green tea. When he got back, Mango wanted to go on another walk.

It only took an hour and two panic attacks this time.

—

Walking Mango around the block was fine. He wasn't going to see _him_ there. And Julien had missed being outside more than he thought. Together, Julien took Mango down each sidewalk in a three block radius around his house. Safe. Just a tall man with his bright orange labradoodle lumbering at his side.

Mango didn't talk more. They walked. Julien listened, but she didn't say anything. It must have been a lapse. A blip in his fragile mental state.

Except one week into owning Mango, she spoke to him again. Julien dropped the orange bowl onto the linoleum, full of oblong dog food pellets, and Mango said, "When is your life going to change?"

"Please don't do this to me." Julien pulled his fingers through his dark hair, tugging hard like it might help.

Mango sat upright, ignoring the food she normally choked down at top speed. Her nose was wet. Her curls shone from the bath he'd insisted upon.

"I'm serious," Julien told the dog. "I can't deal with a talking dog right now. I've got a project due in three hours."

Her tail wagged against the floor, sending dog hair spiralling in the air. She made no indication of anything other than mindless dog patience.

"I don't know, okay. I don't know when my life is going to change. Can you eat your food? So I can run you around the block and get back to this project I don't want to do?"

The orange labradoodle yawned, stretched, and approached her food. She ate. Julien relaxed.

—

Julien started to leave the house as long as he had Mango. He'd take her to the store, Mango in the car with the window open. She would lay her head out and watch him with blank eyes, panting. He found he could leave, as long as he had Mango.

"When are you going to move on?" Mango asked him, standing in the backseat of his car. Her voice was one of a toneless female.

Julien jolted the wheel in surprise and almost crashed his car. He stabilized frantically, and with his heart pounding he demanded, "When are you going to get off my dick?"

Mango didn't whine, or make an indication she was even speaking to him. Her breath was in heavy pants from the run they'd been on together. Sammy had been so smug when he told her that he'd started running again.

His heart thudded against the back of his tongue for the rest of the drive home. Mango hopped out the backseat when he let her out, and trotted up the path to the house. Sat and waited on the porch, like she was just a dog. Just any dog.

Julien sat beside her on the porch. It was late, he'd been up for hours working and only went for a run in the park because Mango had given him a stare with her dog face, begging for more than just lying on his feet all day. The sky was dark and he couldn't see any stars, just satellites. Distant traffic hummed underneath it all.

"What do you want from me?" Julien asked Mango, careful not to look at her. He leaned back on his hands, feeling the heaviness that never truly left him these days.

Mango did not reply. She made no indication she understood. She made no indication that she spoke at all. A satellite streaked all the way across the sky, in a consistent mechanical swing. Julien watched it move, blinking slowly.

"It's better with you here, isn't it?" Julien offered. "I leave the house now. That's much better than before."

"When are you going to move on?" Mango asked again.

Julien sighed. "I'm not going to. He's always going to be there. He's... There's never going to be anyone else."

"When are you going to move on?"

Julien looked at Mango. She was eating his grass. He stood up and took her leash and brought her inside.

—

Sammy brought Mango some toys and Julien some wine. They drank it from plastic cups while sitting on the couch that Julien hated.

"Henry made me walk two blocks with him carrying it." Julien smiled sourly as he picked at a stray thread. "He'd got it from a garage sale. I told him it was ugly and he said it gave it charm."

"Don't you ever get tired of thinking about him?" Sammy reclined, hand on cheek and the other balancing her plastic cup on her knee.

Julien's throat hurt. "All the time."

"Then why do it?"

"I don't have a choice."

"You said that about not leaving the house, but I fixed that pretty quick too."

Mango, his reason for leaving the house, was asleep in her favourite place — lying across Julien's feet. She was heavy and warm. A spot of orange in his life. A slice of mango. Julien said, "That's different. Mango can't make me stop thinking."

"She did, though. It was your thoughts that made you stop going outside. But she made you go anyway."

"And how the hell is she going to get me to stop thinking about Henry?"

Sammy shrugged, finger tracing the rim of her cup. She'd drank barely any, meanwhile Julien had most of the bottle. "Hell if I know. But it's been months, Julie. And you're still acting like he left yesterday. I haven't seen you smile in God knows how long."

Julien felt stung, even though the drowsy haze of wine. He said, "That's because you never visit, Sam."

"I'm here right now, aren't I? And I'm sick of watching my little brother suffer. He broke up with you. It happens to everyone."

"You don't understand. You've never been broken up with."

Sammy rolled her eyes. Then she smiled, and it didn't light up her dimples. "I've broken up with a lot of people. It's not about not loving them, or not caring about them. It's about knowing that if you stayed together, it wouldn't be fair to them in the long run. Henry knew that it wasn't going to work. He was giving you mercy."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"At this point I don't think anything is going to make you feel better." Sammy put her mostly full cup down on the coffee table and leaned over to scratch Mango's furry ears. "Normally time helps, but you're just... stagnating. Sitting in your misery and wrapping it around yourself like a blanket."

Julien didn't appreciate the analogy. He changed the subject. Sammy frowned, but let him. Let him sit in his misery.

—

"When are you going to admit it's over?" Mango asked him, two weeks after she joined him. They were at the dog park. He had bought her a ball and she spat it on the grass before asking her question. Dark eyes staring at him, waiting.

"This whole thing, it's about Henry?" Julien picked the ball up. He threw it, a speck of orange, and it disappeared into the field.

Mango didn't move. She continued her unending stare, tongue flopped from her mouth.

Julien knew by now that at least attempting to answer the question meant they could move on. "He told me it was over."

But still Mango did not move. Julien looked around the park. The sun was too hot today, it was making him sweat. There was a man with three golden retrievers trying to get all the leashes untangled. No one close enough to hear him talk to his dog. He said, "He made it very clear, especially when I tried to... I tried to convince him to stay. Henry told me it was over."

"When are you going to admit it's over?" Mango asked.

Julien's eyes burned, in a distant, painful way. He said, "It's over."

Mango turned and chased after the ball.

—

Julien started letting Mango sleep on his bed. It meant he always woke up with dog fur in his mouth. It also meant that she woke him at three in the morning with her toneless voice.

"When did you think this would help?"

"What?" Julien asked blindly, into the darkness. He fumbled for the lamp and squinted into the sudden light.

Mango was asleep on the side of the bed that used to be Henry's. She was breathing soft and carefully.

"When did I think what would help?" Julien asked. If he didn't try to answer the question she'd just ask again in a minute and wake him up.

Mango breathed. Doggish inhale, exhale. Eyes closed and curls hanging over.

"What part?" Julien said. "Having you? I didn't think you'd help, Sammy was the one who hoisted you upon me."

"When did you think this would help?"

"What would help?" Julien repeated, testy, tired. "The part where I was upset over the fact that my boyfriend left me and I stayed home? Until I got so scared of seeing him in public that I couldn't leave home? Because I was so sure if I saw him, I'd... I don't know. Break down and cry at the sight of him. Maybe get on my knees and beg him to take me back. Or just the heartache was too much. It was all too much. I didn't think it would help, I just didn't know what else to do."

Mango slept on. The question did not recur. Julien did not go back to sleep. He lay awake and stared at the ceiling and wondered what was wrong with him.

He called Sammy once it was a reasonable hour.

"Do you think I'm ridiculous?"

"Yeah, generally," Sammy said.

"I'm being serious."

"You usually are." Sammy's eye roll could be heard down the line. "No, I don't think you're ridiculous. I think you're... Julien. My little brother who cried when you accidentally stepped on a snail and woke me in the middle of the night as a kid worried that squirrels could get lonely. You're ridiculous but that's fine. I wouldn't want someone else."

Julien covered his eyes and tried not to cry. "But I... I've wrapped myself in a blanket of misery. You said."

"Yeah, that sucks. It was a little scary that you couldn't leave the house. I wasn't really looking forward to trying to figure out what to do if Mango didn't work."

"I still don't want to leave the house," Julien admitted. There were a lot of places he wouldn't go, even with Mango.

"Why?" There was a clicking — she was already at work.

Julien pressed his palm harder into his eye socket. "I don't want to see Henry."

"He wouldn't do anything to you. He's still the same nice guy you dated, just now you're not dating."

"It's not that. He... he broke my heart, Sammy." Julien's voice went choked and awful. "He ruined my life."

"No, Julie," Sammy said, with an uncharacteristic amount of gentleness. "He broke your heart, but _you_ ruined your life."

"We had so much built together," Julien argued. "We had a future."

"Sure. And that sucks to lose. But he didn't ruin your life. He wanted you to be happy, and he didn't think it would be with him. You're the one who's making your life hell, he's been gone for ages." Sammy sighed, and there was more tapping. "I'd hate to stop it here, but I've got to go."

"That's fine," Julien said, through a painfully sore throat. "Go."

"Are you gonna be okay?"

Julien turned to hug Mango beside him. "Yeah. Thanks for talking to me."

They hung up. Mango, thankfully, didn't say anything.

—

Mango stopped on the sidewalk, and Julien only noticed when the orange leash pulled taut. He turned, surprised. It was a fairly busy street, and there was a flash of dismay that she was going to talk, and _God, not now._

"When are you going to see him again?" Mango asked.

Julien recognized where they were. A green door. The Green Door. It was the pub the two of them used to visit all the time. And if he looked through the smudged glass he could just barely see a smiling man sitting at the bar. Henry.

"No," Julien said, and turned to walk away.

The leash pulled tight once again. Mango didn't move, her elevator-music eyes blank, tongue bobbing with her quick breath. A fixture on the sidewalk, waiting for his answer. People parted around her and Julien, heads turning curiously, watching them. He prickled with the attention and the fear was there, the panic was there, it was all there and it was too much.

"When are you going to see him again?" Mango said.

"I'm not going to," Julien replied, and tugged. Mango didn't move. "Mango!"

She never really answered to her name. Julien figured this was because it had been assigned to her arbitrarily by Sammy's co-worker — the dog itself had no actual attachment to such a thing as a name. One orange labradoodle remained unmoved in the middle of the city.

Julien was having a panic attack. He'd been afraid for so long of seeing Henry, and what he would do if he did, and now he was right there. Just through one door.

"I can't do this," Julien begged Mango. "Please, let's go."

Nothing. More strange looks. Julien's heart beat so hard he thought he might puke it into his hands.

Julien fell to his knees on the damp sidewalk. It had been raining, a while ago. It wasn't now but it might again. He begged his dog, "You don't understand. It's too painful to see him."

"When are you going to see him again?"

"Please stop," Julien said.

"Hey, dude, are you alright?" a passing pedestrian asked, eyes pinned.

Julien couldn't breathe. He was going to die. Voices swarmed and people were nearby and he was so dizzy, his neck so hot, the mortification of the situation strangling him until he couldn't breathe. One voice, toneless: "When are you going to see him again?"

And another voice said, familiar, after the creak of a door: "Julien? Are you alright?"

—

Henry brought him into the Green Door, where the one-eyed barkeep gave him an ice pack and an annoyed look at Mango. She didn't stop them from taking up a booth, the labradoodle folding underneath the table and lying heavily on his feet — silent now.

Julien was taking slow, deep breaths at Henry's instructions. His ex had talked him through many panic attacks in the past, and knew what to do. It was almost nice, for a minute, before he remembered everything else.

It hurt, just like he thought it would. It hurt so bad to see Henry's worried little frown and how he spoke so gentle and calm. The panic of being here, seeing him, was dying down. Because here he was, and that was it.

That was it. Here was the person he'd been so scared to see. And Henry was helping him through the panic attack, the absolute worst case scenario his anxiety had conjured up in order to keep him trapped inside his house.

"Are you alright?" Henry asked, once Julien could breathe. The bar was so familiar, the wood under his fingers. They spent so many nights sat just like this, except with legs and fingers intertwined, telling jokes and pissing off the one-eyed barkeep.

Julien looked at his ex and felt sorrow and nostalgia and pain. But he also felt the heavy weight of Mango on his feet. He wanted to ask, _when did you get so unhappy with me?_

He wanted to ask, _when did you move on?_

But it didn't really matter _when_. It mattered that it was over. Julien wove his hand in Mango's fur. He said, "Yeah, I'll be alright."

# A Wolf's Dilemma

by Delphine Crown

The bar, named after its green door, was bustling with activity, every waitress moving from table to table, holding trays full of food and beverage. The barkeeper - an older lady, missing one eye - was silently cleaning the glasses as she kept watch over the two girls sitting in a corner booth. Margot knew that the woman did not trust them; it was in her nature, like a scorpion's nature to sting was built into it. Perhaps the bartender could sense the werewolf, lurking behind the surface of the ill-fitting human skin she wore.

Margot, nursing an opium hangover, could've growled at the woman: her suspicions made the place reek even more than the girl herself did.

In front of her, Ethel tutted, as Margot tried to eat the stew she had paid for.

"I told you -" Ethel started, and Margot waved her off.

"Yes, you told me to not go to the opium den," Margot said, and Ethel huffed. "You told me many, many things."

"Recapitulate them for me, before we try and go back to the party you left in the middle of," Ethel demanded, and Margot, with an eye roll, complied.

She had too soft a spot for Ethel, even though there was no space for softness in her heart anymore. Perhaps she should kill her.

"Fine."

——————

The young lady of the manor jumped through the window of her third-floor room, the waxing gibbous moon illuminating her fall. Midway - somewhere around the middle of the second floor - the young lady transformed into the werewolf she was, starting her descent on two legs and ending it on four.

The pain of all her bones breaking and becoming something else was bearable. If it weren't, she would've ended her life long ago; after all, she had been transforming for the better part of her life. She was used to it.

Stalking through the garden, letting the dirt fill in the space between her paws, she would've hummed the sweet song the flowers produced when the wind passed between their petals, were her throat able to produce such sounds. Alas, she couldn't, not in this form.

So, instead, she contented herself with jumping the tall iron fence her father had installed, belly passing by the silver spikes with no space to spare, leaving the fur sizzled and smelling like burnt hair. As she fell, she once more became human, and passed hand through her too long hair to try and give it a sense of being adjusted.

It didn't work; the wind, smelling of factory smoke and alcohol fumes, simply messed it up again. The lady did not mind - she would always look beautiful. It wasn't simply a misuse of self-confidence; she knew that with her pale skin, angular face, long black hair, and purple eyes the color of lightning, she would always be guaranteed a spot as one of London's most eligible ladies. The only things that'd make her lose her charm in front of polite society were, luckily, hidden away by the heavy fabrics of the dresses she wore: the bites of the werewolves that transformed her into the creature she was, giving her body a litany of scars in raised hard edges and soft craters, like the surface of the distant moon.

The wind picked up, bringing her the smells of the outside world. She sensed two people, her keepers: Jeremiah, leaving the garden through the side door, and John, at the entrance. Tonight they would follow her, and she made a mental note to lose them in the opium den she entered. It wouldn't be too hard. John was easily influenced, since he hadn't been under her father's employment for long and therefore hadn't been as exposed to the degeneracies she brought, and Jeremiah had a small gambling addiction.

The young lady of the house sighed, feet bare on the ground, cold because of the snows of December, and decided that today she would follow her nose to the port. There was fresh meat there, she could sense it, fresh and tasting of sweet opium.

"Lady Edwards!" called one person she hadn't accounted for, and the lady turned, finding the maid that accompanied her, the cape she wore floating behind her as she ran. She was new to employment, naïve, and thought that the lady was yet another spoiled rich girl, one who just had a penchant for cannibalism.

Minor things, the lady supposed, she wasn't in the mood to correct. A cannibal lady of high society was common to the point of being blasé, but a werewolf? God forbid serving a _werewolf!_ Werewolves were wretched, low life creatures, poor to the point of resorting to petty thievery; no one of decent breeding would associate with a werewolf. Margot snorted at the thought.

She wasn't _that_ wrong about it: at the end of the day, the only difference between the young lady and any other girl was the amount of fur she shed.

Allowing the little maid to come closer, she stood silent underneath a shadow, in between the flickering flames of the oil lamps.

"Ethel, I already told you to call me by my name. Come on, try it, I won't fire you." Ethel huffed at that, approaching with a fur cape and a pair of shoes. The lady turned up her nose. "I don't need those."

"You do!" Ethel insisted, fussing around the lady, putting the cape around her shoulders with a flourish. She closed it with the gold pin, the one heavy and overwrought, an ugly thing her father had brought from Paris, and adjusted her hair, going behind her to do her job.

The little maid always smelled so sweet. Not as sweet as a fresh, tenderized opium steak, no, but sweet in a way that the young lady struggled to deny, the werewolf itching to get out and show its true colors. She was sweet in the way the fire crackling on a snow day was, sweet in the way someone smiled when handing you a glass of water on a warm day.

In terms of beauty, Ethel wasn't anything great: she was too thin, frail, with no meat to her bones. Her hair was a generic shade of brown, perpetually kept in two low braids, and her face was nothing special. The lady had eaten better flesh: sweeter, fattier, expensive, everything Ethel wasn't.

But the eyes - she had those black eyes with little flecks of silver that just _shone_ during the golden hours of the afternoon, that made her special. They reminded the lady of running at night, with only the expanding cosmos atop her head. Perhaps that was the reason behind the soft spot she had for Ethel.

"Is this really necessary, Ethel?" the lady drawled, and Ethel huffed.

"You're going to get a cold," Ethel replied, and the lady chuckled. If she was cold, it simply was a matter of transforming once more. "Margot, come on, let's go back. Your father will be displeased if he finds out you've ditched the party... _Again_."

Margot turned, grabbing Ethel's chin and forcing the lithe girl to look up. She smiled, too pointy to be natural. Her fangs were out, and tomorrow it would be impossible to hide it with a mere clenched jaw. Better to get her fill today, then.

"Let my father feel displeasure. Now, are you going to hit the dens with me, or are you going to scurry back home, dearest?" she purred, with a free hand on Ethel's waist pulling her closer, while the girl blushed furiously.

Ethel smelled so sweet up close, to the point it was a struggle to simply not sink her teeth into the curve of the girl's neck and tear her apart. She leaned in to do so, fangs protruding from her mouth.

"The dens?" Ethel echoed, as the smell of her skin - appetizing, fresh, like a lemon tart someone had just baked \- made Margot lose herself a little. "Are you out of your mind? Did you hit your head? Did you lose your wits?"

Ethel stepped back, breaking Margot's trance, and Margot blinked like a kicked puppy. Of course she was out of her mind, she was dying of hunger. What sort of question was that?

But, well. It seemed like Ethel did not wish to accompany Margot on a night out for some mindless fun. Her problem, really.

"The opium dens aren't a place for a lady of high society!" Ethel chided, and Margot, with an absent-minded nod, took off the cape from her shoulders, gently sidestepping Ethel.

She went to the corner of the manor, watching as Ethel, throwing her hands in the air for a moment, followed her.

"My lady, please, just be a normal lady and go to the nice ladies' club in St. James. I can even call the carriage for you."

"But I _don't_ want to." Margot kept walking, until she reached the spot where the loose brick in the wall was. Taking it out gracefully, she kneeled on the snow-covered floor, and Ethel let out a whine as she pulled out a set of sailor's clothes, which she put on the small wall that was the base for the iron-wrought fence. "What _I_ want is to go to an opium den and gamble my money until morning comes so that father can be ashamed his daughter isn't at the party he is giving to find her a husband."

And she wanted someone to eat, too, but Ethel didn't need to know that.

Ethel would've said something, surely, but she got distracted because Margot was taking off her dress, humming the whispers the leaves made on the wind, and Ethel let out a shriek as she covered her, once more, with the cape.

Margot wasn't sure what dignity she was trying to protect, really.

"I need to change, Ethel," Margot said, matter of fact, as if she were still in her room and not in the middle of the street. No matter, though. She undid the last of the buttons of her dress and stepped out of the garment, leaning down to grab the sailor clothes as she stood in her chemise. She sniffed them out.

"You could've done this at home!"

Yes, they were clean. She had thought the rain of the past few days would've made them grow moldy, but no. It would be a pain in the ass to get another set of those; it would mean _eating with manners_ , and Margot was _awful_ at not making her meals minced.

"But my clothes were here." She took a hand from underneath the cape to wave at the loose brick, and Ethel huffed. Margot put on the pants and the undershirt. "Did you bring socks?"

Ethel let go of the cape, but it didn't fall; at some point, she had used that ugly gift of her father's to keep it closed again. Maybe she should take it and use it to bet during poker; it would be a better alternative to having to bet her shoes again.

"Here you go, Margot," She took a pair of neatly folded socks from her pockets. Margot hummed a thanks, and put them aside, leaning down to grab the frankly too big pair of sailor shoes she also had stolen. "No wonder you did not want clothes, you already had them."

"Had you trusted me..." Margot rolled her eyes as she finished dressing herself, sitting down to put her socks on, taking off the cape and sliding the pin into the pockets of her pants. Ethel rolled her eyes, crossed her arms and went the opposite direction, disappearing from view as she turned a corner.

Margot summarily ignored her. She put on the socks and adjusted the shoes as well as she could, then threw the cape and the dress inside the garden. It fell on a rosebush, and Margot fought the urge to make sure it was ripped to shreds. Instead, she leaned down once more, grabbed the sack of coins she kept there, and put the loose brick back in place. She could smell John and Jeremiah close by, hiding in shadows. Margot waved at them.

The sound of trotting horses hit her ears, finding Ethel waving from inside a carriage as it stopped in front of her.

"Young _master_ , I found you a carriage," she said, with a smile, and the poor man driving the carriage looked vaguely worried. "Shall we take you back to the opium den, now that you're done with the business you had with the young miss?"

Margot cocked her head, smiling. The carriage driver did his best to suppress a shiver, but it did not work. She ignored him, though, because she didn't care. Instead, she slipped inside, stopping Ethel from leaving by putting a hand to her chest, and then leaning out to talk with the carriage driver.

"You heard the lady," she told him, rifling through her pocket to hand him a few shillings, shining in the light of the oil lamps. "And make it fast."

He nodded in agreement, and as Margot sat back in front of Ethel with a smile that offered too many pointed teeth, the carriage picked up speed, making both of them shake as it went through the streets of London.

"Ruining my reputation around town, are we?" she asked, legs crossed, hands on her knees, prim and proper. Ethel huffed.

"Might as well help, since you're so keen on it happening. Really, the ladies' club at St. James caters to people with your... Tastes."

_Tastes; all this work just not to say "hunger for human flesh"._ For a little maid, she could be so polite. Margot smiled, putting a hand to her face, leaning in.

"The club at St. James you are so insistent on me going to does not have the raw meat of someone who smoked enough opium to make their heart stop, Ethel." She rested against the seat, which smelled powdery enough to make her nose itch, badly covering the smell of human urine that was entrenched in the cheap material.

"You got the cheapest carriage around again, didn't you?" Margot complained, and Ethel gave her the most wry of smiles.

"Only the best for my lady."

Margot pounced on her, grabbing her quite forcefully as her hands found their home on Ethel's head, the maid's fearful eyes staring into Margot's hungry ones.

They reminded her of Nancy, who had the same eyes. Weren't the two around the same age? Nancy was nineteen, Ethel was just shy of eighteen. She would've thought them twins, or perhaps a very strange case of the same soul in another body.

But it was impossible, wasn't it? Nancy was dead and gone before her time, and Ethel was... Well, simply Ethel. Nothing more.

"Margot?" Ethel called, eyes wide and huge and fearful, and Margot kissed her forehead gently, scraping her fangs against the soft skin.

"You try so hard to be fired, my dearest," she cooed, sitting back in place, and Ethel huffed. "Too bad I don't plan on letting you go."

Ethel threw her hands in the air once more, and Margot simply chuckled.

————

The opium den smelled of sweat, human waste, and chock beer. Margot breathed deeply, savoring the accompanying smells of addiction, despair, and fear coursing through the bodies of the people inside.

"It's so..." Ethel started, and Margot looked at her. She had a wonderfully distasteful look to her face. John and Jeremiah caught up to them, and Margot gave them a discrete wave as Ethel thought of a word that wasn't rude, wanting to chuckle at her clear struggle. " _Rustic_."

Margot let out a laugh, shaking her head as she strolled in. Ethel soon followed after, finding her seat and ready to participate in a friendly game of poker.

The place wasn't too bad, if Margot was honest: it was clean, at least, and _mostly_ new. Sure, there were people lying on comfortable silk pillows on the floor, smelling terrible amidst the poker and baccarat tables, so many the waitresses had to avoid spilling beer on them. The air reeked, too warm and foul, but the place was _clean_. Margot had been to worse places before finally settling here.

"Timmy! Just in time, we were about to start a new game," greeted one regular at the tables, as Margot joined their game. His name was John Doe, and his face was as generic as his name. His companions were his usual two friends: Jonah and Elias, the latter sighing as he passed her a set of cards. None of them were worthy of description, really. John looked at Ethel, standing by Margot's side, looking at the cards in her hands. "With companionship, today?"

"Yes, I found this lost puppy on the streets and it has been following me around," she explained, not taking her eyes off the cards as she grabbed a cigar from Jonah, lighting it up without a second thought. Ethel rolled her eyes. "Anyway, I'm betting this ugly thing."

She took off the pin from her pocket, threw it on the table like it was some worthless trinket. Ethel gave her shoulder a rough pinch that went ignored.

"That looks expensive."

"It is. I nabbed it from some rich lady." Inhaling the acrid smoke, Margot hummed along, signaling for a waitress to hand her a beer. "Let's play, gentlemen."

She hated smoking, and only did it because it was expected from a man. The cigar did nothing to her other than let a foul taste in her mouth; drugs did nothing if she took them. Her metabolism was too accelerated to allow them to properly have their effects on her, so pure opium and nothing were the same.

Unless, of course, she went the second-hand route: if she ate the meat of someone under the effects of any sort of drug, she would be affected, too. It made no sense, but what part of becoming a werewolf did? Margot didn't question, and obeyed the cravings of her body by eating another's, lest she lose herself to the wolf.

And, besides, going to these sort of places allowed her to play games, which was always fun. The clubs for ladies Ethel was so insistent on Margot going were boring affairs, libraries full of books and an accompanying restaurant, places to sit and read, places to sit and crochet. There were no games, no drugs, no alcohol; a bore, if she ever saw one. Perhaps in a few years they would be better, but as things stood? No.

Not even the game meat was good: just boring old meat from people who had elected to die, and then been prepared for it for two weeks before being butchered. Margot hated the bland taste of it, lacking the seasoning the rush of a recent death gave. Perhaps weren't she a werewolf, it would taste good, but her tastebuds were too used to the grim taste of blood to ever think properly prepared food was, well, _good_.

After the third game, she was bored, though. The taste of beer coated her mouth, and she wanted to wash it down.

"That's it for me, gentlemen. Puppy, play for me for a while, won't you?" she called, while Elias shuffled the deck, forcing Ethel to sit down and handing her the bag of coins in her pocket. He glanced at her and nodded as Margot rose from her seat, wandering around, following her nose. She heard Ethel protest, but Jonah said he'd help her.

_Good luck_ , she thought. Jonah was a terrible player, who couldn't hold a poker face to save his life.

It was a good exploit, though. She had procured herself a few good things thanks to Jonah's fortune and lack of luck.

No matter, though. Her stomach was starting to rumble, low and dangerous as a wolf's growl.

———

Finding prey was easy in this den. Convincing them to let go of the pipe was harder. Margot, however, was pretty used to it, knew how to make them follow her to their deaths.

She simply didn't have to let their pipe go; that was what was entrancing them. Margot dragged them away with promises of a stronger, more lasting pipe dream, and they - little zombies, necromanced into life by her sweet whispers - nodded along, rising from their comfortable, silk pillows whose vivid colors had started to fade from sweat and grease, and went with Margot to the back.

Margot knew this opium den like the back of her hand, having been going to it since she was fifteen, so it was easy to lead the opium-drunk victims-to-be into the servant passages, humming along promises that their next dose was close. It would be: nothing was more stimulating to the senses than death.

She led him out of the door and into the smelly back alley, and slid to rest against the wall, watching as her victim of the hour stumbled around in the dark. The light of the oil lamps in the street did not reach this far, leaving her victims blind, but Margot could see perfectly.

She transformed into the wolf, paws hitting wet cobblestone with a clean, precise sound.

The light rain that was falling was going to ruin her hair. _Ugh,_ washing it was such a pain. Better get it done with quickly, then, she decided, getting ready to kill.

Stumbling in the dark, the man didn't notice when the wolf jumped on him - but maybe he noticed when her jaws closed around his head, crunching until the sweet taste of opium hit her tongue. Then, it was simply a matter of losing herself, until she was human again, scraping at the stone for the last dregs of blood with bloodied fingers. Was the blood hers or that of her victim? Both were bright red.

A cape fell gently on her shoulders. Margot barely felt it, not until Ethel forced her to her feet. She knew her secret was still well kept; the alley was too dark to allow to see more than a vague outline. A hunched over wolf was the same height as a sitting human. She would be alright for another month.

"You got Jeremiah on the baccarat tables and John smoking, but I guess I'm smarter than them." She sighed, passing a hand through her wet hair. "Come on, I know a place."

"Do you?" she slurred, but by the face Ethel made, it hadn't come out as that, the syllables tripping on her too-heavy tongue. Allowing herself to be raised to her feet, Margot noticed she had eaten messily again, her clothes, once a navy blue, now a deep black. She would have to find another set; this one would feed the furnaces.

Ethel didn't answer. Margot was busy, stumbling in her own feet, brain full of fog, wading through it to try and catch words in her mouth, like a child trying to catch snowflakes.

She liked to think that this was how to be human: dumb, soft, wandering minds with no thought to chase like a wolf after its prey. Margot _should_ know what it was like to be human, but she had been transformed so young - six, barely old enough to remember her dead mother - that this state of being, of keen senses and fast thinking was more natural to her than breathing. To always be paying attention, looking around, suppressing the wolf, making sure it did not kill anyone Margot deemed undeserving.

Sure, she didn't do much suppressing - if it wanted out, it would claw out, and clawing its way out of her body hurt more than allowing the transformation to occur on her own terms, at her own timing - but what little she did was cruel.

There had been one memorable time where she'd just gone off the rails: it had been at her younger brother's fifth birthday party, and she'd been eleven and moody. It had been the night of a full moon, and no matter what, as she cussed her father, begging for him to let her out for a few hours, just so she could be at her best behavior during her brother's party, he had ignored her pleas. She still obeyed him, at that age, and so did not go out when he told her not to.

She managed until the middle of the party, all the while feeling like her skin was pulling taut, ripping at the seams. Then, at some point, she slipped to the gardens, transformed unseen, and ate three of the guests, running away before some overzealous partygoer shot her.

Her father knew it had been her. Margot had never obeyed him again after that incident. It could have been her brother, mangled beyond repair in her jaws. She did not want that, and neither did her father: they simply didn't speak anymore about her comings and goings, her assigned wardens her father's looming shadow over her as she wandered from den to den, getting herself high.

The drugs helped. Opium dulled the senses, made her human for a few hours, made the wolf fall asleep and have dreams of her mother. Sure, perhaps she shouldn't be using drugs as a crutch, but it was what she had at hand. What else there was left for her? Nothing worked but drugging herself until she reached a semblance of humanity.

Ethel opened the door of a bar - green door, plaque announcing its name atop it, squeaky on the chilly wind and giving her the beginning of a headache - and the heat that bathed her was comfortably terrible, like a second skin clinging to her wet self.

The people around the bar were dressed weirdly, as if this place were a masquerade instead of a bar: some in the styles she'd see in old paintings, others in clothes so odd they barely seemed like fashion. She would've given it more thought, but the mere _idea_ of it pounded her head, and Ethel whisked her away to a corner booth, away from the mysteries presented to her.

———

"So, what do you have to say for yourself?" Ethel asked, as Margot, more sober - even the second-hand meat trick didn't last long on her body, fading away after two or so hours - licked clean the bowl of stew. Her fingers reeked of grime and copper, giving the last dregs of the food an unpleasant taste.

"That I should get another man to eat?" she suggested, and Ethel groaned. "It was tasty. Perhaps you should try it! Nothing like cranium bones to give the brain some texturing."

Ethel made a retching noise, and Margot, chuckling, set the bowl aside, putting her elbows on the rickety table.

"Fine, fine, Ethel." Margot yawned, stretching herself. "Guess I should go get bored to death by that awful party."

Ethel shone when she smiled, rare as it was. Margot found that making her smile was nice, although it did come at a cost.

"Finally! If we leave now, I'm sure you could send off the first few guests." Ethel clasped her hands together. Ethel's eyes shone in the low light, stars reflecting her back.

_A morsel for another day,_ Margot decided, rising up at Ethel's prompting.

"I can appear like this, right?" she asked, gesturing to her clothes, full of blood splatters and other assorted dirt, and Ethel paused, with a frown, eyeing Margot up and down for what seemed like five full minutes.

"Perhaps a bath, first. You smell like a wet dog." she sighed, frowning, and Margot let a howl of laughter out. Oh, if only she knew.

# The Most Boring Story

by Janine Dillo

I didn't know what to write.

The blankness of the page was blinding. Even more so with the surrounding darkness of another far too late night. Or was it early morning already?

The old house creaked, tiny noises everywhere, as if an army of mice scurried through the walls.

Sighing, I pushed back my chair. No use. My concentration was gone. Another wasted evening. They piled up lately.

When I closed my eyes, the empty page still gleamed through my eyelids. The breeze coming in through the open window got caught in my shirt. Sitting there, leaning back so far my head lolled and was spinning lightly, I knew exactly how John felt. If only I were able to convey that feeling into words, to put these words on the page.

I couldn't simply skip over his agony and write an ending where he finally had an answer, had his own story wrapped up and finished. If I did that, everything important would be missing, and who would be interested in a story like that?

When I heard someone breathe lightly behind me, I was too exhausted to look up. I knew who entered the room, anyway. Her footsteps never made any sound, as if her feet weren't even touching the ground.

"Don't you need any sleep?" Cara asked, her voice gentle, as if she didn't want to interrupt any deep thoughts I might have been having.

"I can't, I'm writing." I sat up again, pointing at the monitor.

"Certainly looks like it." She stood beside me and bent over to use the mouse. Scrolling up, she found the most recent bit of writing I had been hiding, hoping that would keep me from getting distracted and trying to rewrite old sentences instead of adding new ones. That was what I'd been doing for the past hours until I finally managed to stop.

Whirling strands of hair tickled my nose when Cara turned to take a look at me. "In yesterday's version, didn't John decide to do something about his story?"

I pushed back my chair even further and stood up. "I know. That didn't work out yet."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I couldn't clearly make out her face, but the screen behind her made the tips of her hair shine like the wheat fields of my childhood in the late days of summer.

Right now, her words were still soft. Yet I knew I wouldn't be able to keep her from getting angry. I couldn't even blame her.

I went over to the door and turned on the lights. The sudden brightness made me squint, and when I got used to it, Cara stood by the window, hands on the frame. The wind played with her hair and the wide arms of the dress she wore. She probably didn't expect to get back to sleep later.

Maybe she didn't even want to hear me talk about the story. But not talking about it, not telling her anything, wasn't an option. I didn't want her to think I believed she wouldn't get it because she wasn't a writer like me. That had never been my intention, and I had to make sure she didn't just know that but could feel it too, always.

"I really thought John had made the right decision," I said, still beside the door. "Then I realised making a decision isn't necessarily enough. Sometimes you might decide to do something but still can't do the thing."

She snorted. "That's why you've been up all night? You could have come to bed the second you noticed that deciding to do something and actually doing that are two different things. We've talked about that before."

"This isn't about me wanting to write without being able to put down words. It's about John's decision to write the next chapter but not being able to because it just isn't that easy." My fingers drummed on the doorframe. Not being able to find even just any kind of word was the worst that could happen. "Of course he wants to but if he could just sit down and write, he'd already have done that a long time ago."

"Then why are you still trying to write when you can't either?"

"I didn't want to stop without any progress."

Cara touched a little figurine that stood on the windowsill, making it wobble. "Didn't you just tell me you found out that his decision alone wasn't enough?"

"Yeah, well ..." I rubbed the back of my neck.

She turned around, a fine line between her brows. "We've talked about this before."

I took a step forward. "This isn't in any way like before. I was planning on writing."

"But you didn't actually write. We agreed that you'd only stay up when you're actually writing. As in, producing words, not staring blankly at a screen for hours on end."

"That's part of the writing process."

Cara shook her head. "What about not getting any sleep and therefore threatening to collapse at any given moment?"

I raised my hands in defence. "I guess I could use more sleep but it's not that bad."

"Last year. Dad's birthday party." She crossed her arms.

" ... right." I vaguely remembered the incident. The party itself not so much. What had her father even looked like? "I was sick back then."

"That's not the point. You should have stayed in bed instead of sitting in front of a screen all night long for half a week."

"I was writing." I went over to my desk. I definitely wouldn't be writing anymore tonight. "You even came over to complain about the loud typing noises."

I saved the document, clicking on the button twice to make sure.

"Do you really need me to express a certain level of anger before you actually listen to me?"

I heard the light tapping of her foot on the floor but didn't look up since I still had to shut down the computer.

Stretching my arms, I turned to look at her. "See? I just finished, no need to get angry with me."

"That's what you should have done hours ago."

"Well, I did now, didn't I? Isn't that what's important?"

"You think so?" She pushed a strand of her hair behind one ear. "I had been waiting for you. I was getting worried and wanted to check on you in case something had happened, when in fact nothing happened at all."

I scratched my nose. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to cause you trouble. I won't do that again."

"You've said the same thing before." She shook her head. The strand fell back in her face. "We agreed that you wouldn't pull more than one all-nighter in a row, and you would leave the computer once you're not actually typing anymore."

"Do I get a second chance? I swear I didn't do this on purpose. I would have stopped but I really thought I could start writing again any moment."

"There's only one second chance," Cara pointed out. "And you messed that one up quite a while ago. How many chances do you think you can get?"

"I said I was practically writing just now!"

"You were not."

"It's not my fault I can't get that story to work!"

"Aren't you the writer?" she sneered at me. "Go fix it or step back from that story until you can."

"It doesn't work like that." How many times did I already try to make her understand? But she never really got it.

"Isn't that chapter still in there where John abandons his own story to reconcile with his family?"

"He can't. I already know that won't work out and he'll learn that eventually, too, and find out that he can't just stop writing. He's a writer. He has to write."

"Nobody expects you to stop writing altogether. I want you to take a break, that's all."

"Well, I don't want to take a break!"

"Fine." Her voice was so quiet I wasn't entirely sure I understood her correctly.

"Fine?"

"I get it. Writing's important to you. I knew that before, but I've had enough of this now." She didn't once raise her voice.

"Don't make me choose between writing and you. That's cruel."

A dry laugh escaped from her lips. "You still don't get it, do you? I don't want you to stop writing."

"Then don't tell me I should!"

"That's not what I said. I want you to put an end to your unhealthy habits."

"How do you know what's good for me?" I stepped forward. "I don't need you to take care of my health."

"You're right." She smiled bleakly. "It's not my job to take care of you. It's yours."

"I'm fine. I know when to stop."

"You don't. But I do." She turned around.

"Why won't you just tell me what's wrong?" Why did she have to make everything so complicated?

"I already did. And more than once, too." She went over to the open window, and turned to face me again. This time, there was sadness in her smile and her eyes. "Remember when we first met?"

"Uh ..." I wasn't quite sure what that was all about. "We met at this bar by the sea, right? The ... Red Roof?"

She shook her head. "The Green Door."

"Oh yeah, right. There was this barkeep with only one eye. And there were all kinds of weird folks there. But how is all that important right now?" Was that her way of stopping our derailed discussion? Didn't seem like her to abruptly change the subject, though.

"Back then, you said you saw stories in every single guest who was there that evening. You even told me one."

"The story about that girl in a nobleman's attire?" I scratched my chin but stopped because the rasping noise irritated me. I might have forgotten to shave again. "She disguised herself to find a princess for her brother but in the end she stayed with some old dragons in their lair, right?"

"That was a great story. Back then, your eyes glowed and you couldn't hold your hands still because you had to underline every important part of the story. It's been a while since I've last seen you that eager to tell a story."

"That doesn't mean I don't want to tell John's story. I really do."

"I know. But it doesn't work, right?" She rubbed her forearm. "When we first met, you were so avid. Now you're only behaving like a maniac. I can't deal with you when you're like this. I can't help you out and ultimately, I'm not the one that has to fix you."

"I never expected you to fix me."

Sighing, she faced the window again. The outside was still tinted blue, although less so than earlier. "Face your problems and solve them. If you find out why you can't write like before again, and if you can help John finish his story, you can find me again."

"Find you where?"

"At The Green Door."

Cara leapt out of the window and dashed through the garden.

When I reached the window, she was gone.

"Cara?" I shouted.

I swore, then crossed the room, ran through the corridor and pulled open the front door. It banged against the wall, then came to a halt. I stepped on the porch.

"Cara?"

Someone on the sidewalk slowed down but then sped up again. Cara. She wore a backpack. Had she planned all this and left her bag by the gate?

I stood on the patio, watching her disappear at the end of the street. The sunrise painted the sky above her in a light apricot tone as if to greet her with the beauty she deserved.

Even though I didn't really know what was wrong, I was sure she didn't want me to follow her.

When she was completely gone, I went back inside.

The house was silent now. I couldn't even hear the usual creaking of the hallway floor beneath my feet. I still smelled the shampoo she always used, a note of jasmine and lavender and something I could never quite find out. I went through the dimly lit corridor, back into my workspace. There was no way I'd be able to sleep now.

So I turned on the computer again and collapsed into the chair. Waiting for the computer to finally work was terrible.

How did this all happen? I had always known that Cara needed her own space. I was fine with that since I needed my space, too. But why did she have to leave now?

I opened the document and scrolled down to the scene where I had stopped. The place and situation in which neither John nor I knew how to proceed further.

I still didn't know. No use asking John, either.

I stared at the constantly blinking cursor. Cara could have helped me. She would have, too, usually. I still didn't know what was different today.

Sighing, I put my hands on the keyboard. The screen didn't seem as bright as before. Might have been because the room was lighted by the colours of the sunrise.

Eventually Cara would calm down, realise she had made a mistake by running away, and come back. She'd never done anything like that before, so surely she'd notice she had overreacted. Usually she just disappeared to her room after a disagreement, knowing I would understand the signal to leave her alone.

At least I knew where to find her, if she didn't come back on her own. The Green Door. Her mention of that place might mean that she wanted me to go after her eventually. In any case, her vanishing couldn't be forever, or she wouldn't have told me about The Green Door.

Better get back to writing now, though. Maybe she needed a few days to spend on her own. To meet up with some of her friends who frequented the bar. She couldn't have seen them in person for a while now, since it wasn't located in the city.

In fact, I couldn't recall her meeting up with anyone since we moved together. Of course, she always mentioned names I couldn't remember, sometimes because they were overly complicated, and frequently called others on the phone. But she'd never tried to find someone beside me to talk to in person. Still, when I had first met her, she'd been chattering and laughing with just about everyone at the bar. In this house, though, she had never once mentioned The Green Door up until now, so she must have found another way to keep up contact with everyone.

The last time she mentioned the bar was our second encounter, at a party hosted by a guy we both knew. I wouldn't have remembered her but she recognized me from before. Told me she'd love to hear another story sometime. Or rather, she asked me whether I could tell a story about some kid another guest had brought with them.

At first, I didn't really know what to say, since I never expected anyone to ask for a specific story. If people asked, they usually just wanted me to look at everyone in the room and then tell them something, though they seldom let me have enough time to actually think about whose story I might want to tell.

Cara, though, she decided for me and didn't even ask whether I was fine with her pick. Yet, she was so eager to hear a story I couldn't let her down and say I didn't have a story for a kid like that.

Maybe it had been because of her smile, too. Her shimmering eyes, as if she thought I was the best person in the whole world. The best storyteller, at least. And I couldn't let down a fan, now could I?

So I made up the story of a warrior's son who ran away from home to find some kind of magical elixir to cure his sister's illness. The kid just looked like someone who was neglected by his parents because of an ill sibling. It didn't really make sense for him to be at the party then, but that wasn't all that important.

John was still waiting, though. I stretched my neck and put my fingers on the keys to type away. And let my hands relax the next moment.

What to write?

I rubbed my neck, then took a sip of water from the bottle I kept on the desk. The thud when I put it back down startled me.

I shook my head. This wasn't the first time the house was this silent. This was just like when Cara was sleeping upstairs. Maybe imagining her still being there would help.

It didn't. If this was a usual day, I could just wait for her to come look after me after she got up. It wouldn't be long until then. I'd pretend that I got up earlier this morning instead of having stayed up all night. I'd tell her I'd hit a wall, explain it to her, and together we could find a solution. One that worked out, this time.

In about two hours, no more than that, I could start writing again. Cara would make coffee and come back to give one to me and drink the other one beside the window, waiting for me to let her know whether the solution we had found worked.

But Cara was gone.

"John, we have to work together now." At least my voice sounded deep and confident. As if I had a plan.

John and I, we were in the same situation now. Cara was gone, just as his family had left him. I knew I couldn't abandon the story to go and find her again. John couldn't either. Neither Cara nor John's family would believe that they were needed.

Yet, we both had difficulties writing. But we had to finish these stories. To prove that we had actually learned something.

It was just that I didn't know what Cara wanted me to learn. Or rather, how to learn that lesson.

How did anyone find out how to finish a story? I knew I had finished stories before, just like John did. Why wasn't John able to do that this time?

Why wasn't I able to finish this story?

Cara could have simply told me, if she knew. But she didn't even say anything. John's family didn't tell him anything because he needed to find that out on his own to actually learn. But that didn't mean Cara had to do the same.

I looked at the text. John was sitting at his desk, just like I was.

Maybe getting back into writing something, anything, would help. I started describing John's room, probably not for the first time. I'd have to cut that out, but editing was work for later.

Now, I focused on adding as much detail as possible. I even looked around to integrate parts of my own interior. Only then did I notice I hadn't switched off the light before. That probably was why it didn't feel like the screen was blinding me before, instead of the sunrise. Maybe Cara really was right about me needing more sleep.

My eyes got caught on the figurine on the windowsill. Cara had gifted it to me as a surprise present. Told me she'd seen it in a shop window and thought it fit me, although she refused to explain in which way.

The figurine itself wasn't all that pretty. It was some kind of monster, probably. Or maybe a fantastical creature. Almost human-like, if it weren't for the big fangs in its mouth, pointing downwards, one of them a broken stump. There were chips here and there in its green and brown dress, where the white of the porcelain flashed. Cara had probably found it in the secondhand shop down the street.

I stood up, went over to the window and brought the figure back with me to put it on the desk beside the monitor. Cara had never asked me for its story.

"Sorry to take you by surprise, Jack, but this is a first draft after all."

Jack was still sitting in his chair when I went back to the text. He rubbed his chin, looking out of the window, waiting for inspiration to strike. He could wait forever.

But I couldn't let him do that. That'd be the most boring story.

For him, rediscovering a special decorative item in his room wouldn't suffice. That'd be weird and nobody would believe that to be the source of his epiphany, even if I remembered to write that object into the story in another one or two scenes or situations. Although that would be editing work for later, anyway.

I took some notes on where to implement the other element I'd just thought of. Writing the ending of the story first was far more important than fixing scenes all throughout the manuscript. I had to pin down the ending to find out what exactly I had to change, anyway.

So I started typing. The sun was already high up in the sky when I first took a break to eat something. The sun was setting when I suddenly woke up, back aching and lying face-down on the keyboard.

Groaning, I stood up and stretched. For a brief moment, I thought I couldn't stand normally anymore. There was a hollowness in my stomach, but when I looked at the document, I knew I wouldn't be able to eat now.

Sitting back in front of the monitor, I deleted the last part where I had pressed random keys with my face. When I reached the most recent story part, I found John in a feverish haze, hallucinating, lightheaded, and yet frantically laughing.

I closed my eyes, consciousness slowly drifting away like a cloud in my head. I flinched, opening my eyes again. My head spun. Cautiously touching my forehead, I stood up and left the room.

A few minutes later, I sat back, a pot of coffee and a filled cup beside me. Deeply inhaling the rich bitterness. The cloud in my head slowly dissipated.

First, I put John to bed while drinking my first cup of coffee. Then spent the second one having him knocking on a green door with splintered paint and talking to a guy with suspiciously pointed ears, while a one-eyed woman stood in the background, arms crossed, listening. I'd probably cut her out later but for now I let her stay. After all, her bar had helped me meet Cara in the first place. Maybe I should let Cara read that part later, nobody else would get that reference, anyway.

John didn't buy a magical elixir like the kid Cara had seen at the party. He paid for information on his family that had left him behind. But now, finishing his own story wasn't only a matter of showing them he had learned, but also a way of putting down his experience in a new world he was only beginning to understand. A world in which his family had disappeared, not because someone had done something to them, but simply because of the vastness of that world, of many new opportunities.

I bridged the gap between this conversation and John's reunion with his family during the next two cups of coffee. The cup stayed empty while I wrote the last few scenes, sitting in a room only lit by the brightness of the screen.

I saved the completed draft of John's story twice under different document names, put the documents on a stick and turned off the computer.

Usually, I'd throw a little celebratory party, but that would have felt weird now. Cara wasn't here and I wasn't even finished, since, in a way, meeting up with her again was part of that story.

So I changed into a new set of clothes that smelled less, packed the figurine and the flash drive, and went to the train station. That way, I could sleep on the way towards my destination.

The coastal town lay in darkness when I left the small station. Gas lamps created tiny bubbles of orange light here and there, leaving the streets mostly in blueish darkness. I had first been here years ago, searching for a lighthouse that matched my mental image.

Back then, I had been writing a story about a family living in a lighthouse that served as a connection between different realities. In the end, I hadn't found what I'd been looking for. Tired, I'd entered a bar to fetch a drink. So The Green Door had to be somewhere around.

I walked around town, looking for a door sign. I noticed quite a few green doors, none of them matching my memories.

Few people were still in the streets. The rushing sea sounded like static noise. I almost expected the lights to hum and flicker, but they weren't electrical.

When I went around a corner, I caught a glimpse of a girl entering a building, hair glowing orange in the light of the gas lamp next to her.

"Cara?" There was no way she could hear me now, standing at the other end of the street and whispering her name.

Silently, the door fell shut behind her. I wasn't entirely sure it really had been Cara.

Even though the door was dark, the street lights were bright enough to reveal its green colour.

I went over, noticed an unremarkable sign stating the name of the pub. I'd finally found the right place. It must have been Cara.

Reluctantly, I raised my hand. She wouldn't expect me so soon. Or maybe she did, thinking I'd come here to pretend I had found a solution when in reality I hadn't. Would she even believe me?

I finally pushed open the door. Warm laughter greeted me. My eyes wandered across the room. The one-eyed barkeep stood behind the counter, talking to a green-haired woman who looked like half of her body belonged to a gigantic spider. Maybe she came from a costume party nearby.

Cara sat on a bench in the back of the room, gesturing towards someone I couldn't see. The room was dimly lit, but even so, her hair shone.

When I reached her, she was alone. I opened my mouth, not sure what to say to her, but she noticed me and stood up. This time, she wouldn't so easily be able to run away, since there was barely even enough space for the two of us in between the table and the wall. She could only try and jump over the table, but hopefully she wouldn't do something so strange where everybody could see her.

She frowned. "Do you think you can simply talk to me again and everything's fine?"

I raised my hands and showed her my palms. "That's not what I came here for."

"So you found out what's wrong that fast?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Remember that girl dressed like some kind of prince or something?"

"The one I mentioned before leaving?" Her eyebrow stayed up. It was a miracle she could do that.

I probably shouldn't have worded it like that. "There was this fed-up kid at that party, too. Also ..." I produced the figurine from my bag. "This one. That's what had been missing. Reality's far too boring for me to write it."

"I suppose it is." Her gaze fixated on something behind me, just for a moment, then she looked back at me. "Remember that girl that looked like a baron?"

"Not sure she looked exactly like that." What even separated the clothes of a baron of those a prince wore? I probably should have looked that up before, for all the stories I'd written that dealt with nobility.

"Well, at least there was nobility involved, wasn't there?" Cara asked.

"I suppose there are different kinds of nobility," I said, scratching my chin. "In any case, here's the story if you want to read it."

I took out the flash drive. She accepted, promptly putting it into her pocket.

Cara looked over my shoulder. "Now, back to that girl."

"What about her?"

"She knows part of the story you told me years ago," Cara said. "She'd be delighted to hear the rest from the person that imagined it in the first place."

Cara looked over my shoulder again, then raised her hand.

"She's here today, too? What a coincidence."

"You might say this place harbors a certain kind of magic." She smiled, then took a step back. "Go talk to her."

I turned around. The girl in a nobleman's attire flashed a smile at me while coming closer.

I cleared my throat. "So you want to hear the story?" Obviously she did and we both knew that, but sometimes, producing meaningful words was hard, especially if you couldn't go back and edit them in later.

"I wasn't expecting to meet you so soon." Amusement sparkled in her eyes, but even with the poor lighting in the bar, I could see harshness in them, too.

"I guess nobody did."

She tilted her head. "About that story ... Cara said something interesting about the ending?"

"That you'd abandon the search and run off to a bunch of dragons?"

She nodded. "In fact, I didn't stay with them for long. So that wasn't really an ending."

I squinted at her. "You're kidding me."

"Just because that's the place I could have ended up for the rest of my life, doesn't mean that I did. Some stories never end."

"But that story wasn't real! I just made it up." I turned around to confront Cara, to tell her she didn't need an accomplice to let me know she didn't believe I would change.

She was gone once again.

"Shouldn't you be happy your story actually happened?" The girl leaned against the table, arms crossed.

"No." I threw my hands up. "If that story is real, I didn't learn a thing after all. If that story is real, how can I still keep writing? I just realized I can't write reality. If that isn't the case, then why couldn't I finish John's story?"

"You're not even questioning whether or not I tell the truth?" the girl asked.

"There's no way Cara could have walked past us, and I surely would have noticed her climbing over the table. That's a solid wall beside us, and a solid wall behind me. No door, not even a window she could have leapt through."

I let out a sigh, then scanned the room. Pointing towards another guest, I said, "And that thing? There's no way a human could make a costume as convincing as that, so that must be an actual giant snake with two heads that act on their own."

"That's what you think. Maybe it's so dark you can't really see the difference between someone who dressed up with effort and the being they pretend to represent," the girl suggested. "Maybe you're so tired you didn't notice Cara walking past before you started talking to me."

"Or maybe I'm sleeping." This could be some kind of delirium because I'd fallen asleep on the keyboard again. "Is this the kind of story in which I wake up in the end to learn that everything that just happened was just a dream?"

"That'd be the most boring story, wouldn't it?"

# My Huckleberry Friend

by C. Garrett

The only reason Britt Hillard came to this place anymore was Magnolia Brixby.

The Green Door was a bar mostly because its patrons believed it to be. Honky tonk seemed too kind of a word for it. More accurately, it was an old Mrs. Winter's chicken shack whose regulars never quite got the news it had closed up. No one seemed sure when they made the switch from being served chicken to being served alcohol. They didn't even seem sure why it was called The Green Door; the door was painted red, like it had always been. The bar was open only for a short time in the year 2007, a year remarkable only for the heat of its summer. It was remarkable, too, because of Magnolia Brixby, but no one except Britt Hillard seemed to remember her at all. Magnolia was the best thing that had ever happened to the whole place—to the bar, to the sleepy, no-name Southern town that held it, and to Britt herself.

Britt came into the bar from the side door. Though it was painted a brilliant, assaulting green, no one else seemed to notice it. No, their eyes slipped easily from one pool table to the next, each in a different state of decay, with no mind for the luridly-colored door on the wall behind them. If anyone ever saw it (and it did happen sometimes; there were such a perceptive few), they'd find, upon opening it, that it only led out to the broken-up blacktop parking lot out back and not to where Britt Hillard had come from, which was a laserskating rink in Tanzania in the year 2567.

For all their lack of notice for the door, the patrons of The Green Door sure noticed Britt once she had closed it gently behind her. It wasn't so much like it was in the movies, when someone walked into an old Western saloon and the piano player stopped and every head wheeled toward the intruder. It was slower, much less cinematic, and at least one woman snorted a laugh over the rim of her Bud Light. The sentiment was the same, though; every head in the place eventually looked toward the woman who had appeared on the far side of the pool tables. Their eyes plainly said what their lips didn't have to: _you ain't from around here, are you_?

Britt rolled her eyes. _Townies._

If she was to be honest with herself, she had outgrown this scene years ago. If she was to be _really_ honest with herself, there was never much for her here in the first place. The year 2007 in the South was a narrow time, full of white men riding high off the last few years of the Bush administration and boys coming in with hand-me-down fake IDs in their pockets and inherited rage in their hearts. They had so much to rage about in the South in 2007. The Gays. The Blacks. The Illegals. The Pinko Commies who spoke out against the war. Britt was something to rage about, too. There was always something a little unsettling about being around a time traveler, for normal people. Something other.

That she had never been able to find it in her to try and conceal her queerness didn't work in her favor either, probably.

But sometimes, when she came in hot like this, there was a glitch in the system which left paradoxical egg on her face. As she walked past the first pool table, Britt looked over her shoulder as smoothly as she could muster, which was, all things considered, much more smoothly than the last time she'd done this here. The same sign as ever hung on the wall there, a neon number advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon against a mirrored backdrop. It reflected Britt and red light back into the bar. She rubbed the ring she wore on the second knuckle of her ring finger. The device only changed her Council-issued jumpsuit into one of a few predetermined outfits for the decade and area of the country an agent visited. This time, it had selected a pair of fitted denim jeans, a plain navy t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes she would never smoke rolled into its left sleeve, and a pair of gray Chuck Taylors that were a little too artful to pass as naturally distressed. Suitable, if a bit more butch than she thought was strictly necessary, especially given the time.

It wasn't what she was wearing, then, that kept drawing suspicious eyes. Just her.

With a confidence that comes only from being faced by a situation too many times to count, Britt walked past them all—a pair of ladies in their late forties, looking more out of the timeline than Britt herself in their 1980's best; a teen boy clearly too young to be out like this; men, each looking so much the same as the one beside them, in jeans not unlike Britt's and in cowboy boots and in their pints. Habit— _duty_ had her scanning their faces, assessing each as a threat to the timeline. She made it through about half the faces in the bar before she reminded herself she was off duty, and that no one came this far back anymore, anyway.

No one except her and, maybe, Magnolia Brixby.

Britt slipped onto a bar stool when she reached them.

"Evening," she said to the back of the barkeep.

"Just a minute, hun," she said into the ice chest she was bent over, loud enough for Britt to hear.

She took a moment to consider the woman. Decades ago, when this had been more of a hub for her sort than it was now, the barkeep had been a standard issue Council model, for safety and surveillance. But the android had been recalled years ago now. This replacement was unfamiliar to her—permed brown hair, down despite the humidity that couldn't even be escaped indoors this time of year in this part of the country, faded cut-off jorts, legs for days. She looked like the kind of person anyone would remember, especially Britt, who was trained to remember people.

The barkeep turned, fixed her eyes on Britt.

Fixed her _eye_ on Britt. Just the one, and a patch that distorted the Confederate flag material it was made out of. Britt's lips pressed into a thin line. There was so much of this time she didn't miss at all.

It was only ever Magnolia Brixby she missed, really.

"What can I get you, sugar?" asked the woman with the racist eye patch.

"Two of whatever domestic you've got on tap, please," said Britt.

The barkeep looked skeptical at such a small, girly voice coming out of such a tall, boyish frame, but nonetheless said, "sure thing," or rather, _sure thang_ , and smiled as she turned to her work.

Last time she had been here, Britt had been carded by the android's replacement. She shook her head to herself. She was getting older.

"Is there anything else I can do you for?"

"Actually," said Britt, leaning a casual elbow on the bar, and then leaning her chin casually into her fisted hand, perching. "I was wondering if you've seen a friend of mine. I'm supposed to be meeting someone here tonight."

"What's he look like?"

"She, actually." Britt paused just long enough to realize she had no definite way of saying what Magnolia Brixby might look like anymore, and then just a half beat longer to redirect. "And it's easier to say she's got the most beautiful smile in the whole place than to tell you what she looks like. All teeth, my friend, but they're good teeth. Seen anyone like that?"

Britt watched it play over the woman's face—Britt's own boyish appearance, the short shave of her brown hair on one side, the _beautiful smile_ , the _she_. The bartender's face soured, her lips pinching to a pout below her eye patch.

"No, I ain't," she said. "Reckon you shouldn't, either."

And she turned, and that was that. Britt sipped her beer. Budweiser. It was as reliably bad as the South's view of queer folk was at this point in the timeline.

It was foolish, visiting. And yet here she was, at the same bar stool that had been as good as hers all those decades ago, next to an empty one that had been as good as Magnolia's, when they had been a matched set.

Britt wasn't even sure why she did this anymore. Why she did it at all. The thing of it was that part of her thought if she went to the place she and Magnolia used to go, did the things she and Magnolia used to do, maybe one day—one day she'd find her there, doing the same things, like the decades and centuries between them never really happened to and around them. Like they were the same, still.

It had worked exactly once, when she was twenty-five.

Maybe that was the real reason. It had worked, showing up and haunting this old place of theirs like a ghost, one time. One time, barely a year after their assignment together had ended and they'd been shipped off to separate ends of the timeline, Britt Hillard had come to sit on this very bar stool and then suddenly Magnolia Brixby was sitting there, too. They had laughed like they used to, and talked like they used to, and then when the bar closed down at 3 o'clock in the morning, they had kissed and touched by the lake beside the parking lot like they used to. The only difference was this time, they weren't prohibited by Council doctrine from doing so, and so they kissed longer, and they touched longer, and when the sun came up and Britt had to leave for assignment in Occupied England, she did so with Magnolia's contact code in her communicator and a promise to think about what she'd asked.

_I'm in_ , was all she had sent in her first message.

_I mean it,_ she'd said in her second message the next day.

_Magnolia Avis Brixby, just say the word, and I am there_ , she said in a third, but then after that, she contacted the Council Directory. Magnolia's comm had been deactivated when she quit the Council six months prior, and she'd never picked up the service again as a private citizen.

So this was a fool's errand. Britt knew it as surely as she knew the beer was watered down. Still, she sat with both, each making her feel a bit hazy.

She didn't do much more than watch her cups and listen to the karaoke. It was always karaoke night at The Green Door. It was a draw for the locals, who sang songs like "Strawberry Wine" and "I've Got Friends In Low Places" and "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off." When Britt and Magnolia had been stationed here, they had always picked the oldest, most anachronistic selection any given night had to offer as a sort of inside joke. It was usually something like—

"Moooon River," sang the person on stage, holding the microphone too close to their lips.

They would be full lips, Britt knew, with an attractive pinch at the middle of the lower one, painted a red too bright for the decade. They were the same lips that had debated more than once exactly what the lyrics of the song meant by _huckleberry friend_. Some nights, those lips swore up and down it meant a precious, perfect soul. Others, they were positive it was a person as seasonal and brambly as the berries suggested. Britt turned just to make sure—a formality.

Standing on the stage was Magnolia Brixby.

Britt had been right about the smile. It was the most beautiful thing in the whole bar, and it was turned on Britt Hillard alone. At its right corner was a special curl, one Britt had once recognized as being only for her. It seemed to say now, _I've been waiting all night, and where were you?_

There was nothing else she could do (there was nothing else she could ever do, when it came to Magnolia): Britt watched, the smile on her face a little too stupid-looking to be smooth. When she finished, Magnolia gave a complicated series of bows that not many people applauded. Britt's raucous clapping made up for it. Like it was what happened every night, Magnolia walked over and took the empty seat beside Britt, the same one she always had.

"Give me your smokes," she said, raising her fingers at the bartender—two, a peace sign. "I'm all out."

It took Britt a beat to realize what she was talking about, to register that she was really there and talking at all, before she cocked an eyebrow at Magnolia. "These are part of the suit, Mag. They'll taste like shit."

This, really, was a moot point. All cigarettes tasted terrible. Not that she would know; Britt had never smoked, and they had banned the growing of tobacco entirely in the 2120's.

"Better shit than nothing at all."

Britt unrolled her sleeve and handed the pack of cigarettes to Magnolia. With practiced fingers, she opened it, tapped one out, and set it smoking with a pack of matches from the cut glass bowl on the bar. The smoke was more blue-tinted than it should have been and smelled suspiciously like smoldering fabric.

The barkeeper silently slid each of them fresh drinks—two more Buds, two whiskey sours.

"Is it totally lame," asked Magnolia, fishing out her cherry from her glass and dangling it by her lips. It was almost the same shade of red. "To say it's really good to see you, Britt?"

Britt shrugged. "If it is, then I am lame, too. It's really good to see you here, Mag."

Magnolia would never know how many times she hadn't.

"Of all the places in the world," Magnolia mused, like it was something to muse on. She bit into her maraschino cherry, pulling it from its stem with a snap. As she chewed, she twirled the stem with her fingers and looked around the place. Britt followed her eyes, lighting on the jukebox which still played old 45s, the tables and booths left over from when the bar had been a chicken shack, the picture frames bolted into the wall, displaying the faces and autographs and testimonials of local country singers. "You never quite got it out of your system either, huh?"

The part of this place Britt had never quite gotten out of her system was sitting beside her on a bar stool, tucking the toe of her beaded flat behind a leg of Britt's stool.

"Yeah. I guess, for all the horribleness—" Britt's eyes drifted to the barkeep again, and to a pair of young men in the corner, who eyed the pair of women with a mix of contempt and lasciviousness. "—it has something of a charm."

"Girl, please." Magnolia fished into her second drink, neither of them sipped yet, and plucked out the other cocktail cherry. "You know the only charming thing in this whole town, ever, has always been me and you."

Britt laughed. It wasn't an altogether kind sound.

"All right," she said. "You're right on that one."

"You're looking good, Britt," said Magnolia. "Well-hydrated. Fit. Skinny as hell, though. Does the Council even feed y'all anymore?"

"Not as well as they fed us when we were here," Britt admitted. Tanzania still did great things with maize and fish, but there was nothing that could stand up to Southern-fried chicken. "You look great, too, of course." And she did, her white shirt striking against her dark skin, her curves spilling over the waist of her lowrise jeans, her hair, natural curls, adding another half foot to her slight height. If there were wrinkles at the corners of her wide eyes, Britt would never see them. Magnolia was timeless. "But you always look great."

"I've not even taken a sip of my drink and you're flirting with me already."

"Well, it's not my fault you're slow."

"You know, this is fair, this is fair."

The pair of them passed a handful of moments like they used to: quiet, in their drinks, smiling at each other.

"The Council hasn't put you back on this beat, have they?" Magnolia asked.

"What? Oh. No, I'm off duty tonight. Just visiting. They've got me in Tanzania. After the gem trade dried up—"

"Yeah, I know." Magnolia shook her head. "Well, good. I mean, that you're not assigned here. I don't think I could handle you in this place without me."

Britt had tried it, once—brought her current partner, Mavis, with her to The Green Door. It had been a bit like trying to show an Academy friend your old favorite hometown haunt—it just didn't match up. They were of two separate worlds: one with Magnolia, one without.

"Yeah." Britt nodded. "I don't think I could handle it without you, either."

She wasn't entirely sure she could handle it now, with her. Britt had been here so many nights alone that to be anything else seemed impossible. Magnolia's steadily-emptying rocks glass assured her, at least.

"So other than work, what have you been up to?"

Britt thought this was a bit of cheating. Magnolia knew there wasn't much to the life of a timeline agent other than work; that was kind of the gig. Nights like these, when she could get away from her corner of existence, were so few and far between that it was painfully embarrassing she spent them in a no-name Southern town in a year remarkable for exactly nothing at all.

"Nothing much, really," said Britt. "You know how it is. The door I'm guarding now is in a laserskating rink, so I've gotten pretty good at that? God, it's always something, isn't it? They'll never station me somewhere in an office, with a nine-to-five. It's always going to be a laserskating rink, or last time it was a rum-running joint, or—"

"A shitty karaoke bar in Tennessee in a time no one cares about," finished Magnolia. "Britt, if you look so lustful after a nine-to-five office job again, I am going to have to smack you upside the head. That shit's not for girls like us."

_Girls like us_. It had been so long since she'd heard her say those words. Even though they were women now, she wanted to believe there was still an _us_ to be like.

"What about you?" she said instead. "How is civilian life treating you?"

"You heard about that, huh?"

Britt cocked her head. Magnolia had said it like it was some secret.

"Well, yeah." She didn't want to tell her how; that it had been shortly after the last time they'd sat like this, when she'd been ignored and desperate. "Word gets around the Council, eventually. Especially when it's... you know. Someone like you."

Magnolia laughed, and here was the thing about that: Britt had missed the sound so terribly it made her ache to hear it. She had thought after all these years that she had kept an accurate memory of it alive in her head, but no, no; it paled in comparison to the round sound of this, sweet and brash and unladylike. Britt laughed, just hearing it, for the joy it brought her. She felt, too, like crying, for missing it, and for having clung to such a pale imitation for so long.

"You mean a loud-mouthed bitch with too much time on her hands?"

"No. I mean a promising recruit with her whole career ahead of her."

"There you go again with that nine-to-five shit, Britt."

"No one on the Council works a regular nine-to-five, Mags."

"You know what I mean."

"I think people—" Britt. She meant Britt, herself. "—were just surprised you washed out."

Over the rim of her whiskey glass—the second; when had the first emptied?— Magnolia grinned. It wasn't as open as the one that followed her laughter. It was tight-lipped, wounded.

"Is that what they say happened?"

Britt pursed her lips.

"You know what, no," said Magnolia. "It's fine, it's fine. We're old friends, me and you, so who gives a rat's ass what they say. Who even are _they_? Not me or you, that's who." She reached her glass forward, clinked it with Britt's empty one. The bottom of the glass left a pleasant haze around the room, blurred and gentle at the edges.

"Well?" Britt asked, and this was gentle, too.

"Well, what?"

"Well, how is civilian life treating you?"

"Oh, girl," said Magnolia, and she laughed again, and Britt laughed again. "You know, the world is my oyster, and all that sentimental bullshit. I've got no one to account myself to, and so I go where I please, go when I please. It's bliss."

"How did you swing that?" If you left the Council, your traveling privileges were supposed to be revoked indefinitely.

"A little bit of credit in the right hands and you can do anything you want. You know how it is."

She did not, in fact, know how it was; Britt was a low-level Council member, born to two low-level Council members. The only right hands for the credits she made were her own, and her landlord's. Mostly her landlord's.

"Yeah," she said anyway, nodding like it was the truth. "I do."

For a moment, they were quiet again, looking at their glasses (a new round arrived; they drank), and then at each other. She was beautiful, Magnolia, and Britt was made bold by loneliness and watered-down beer, so she looked with exacting attention to detail. This time, she was determined to remember her right: the freckle at the corner of her right eye, small and heart-shaped; the curious shade of her eyes, a brown which was at once universal and entirely her own; the exact curve of her jawline and the soft place where it met her neck. She didn't want to have to memorize these parts of Magnolia so minutely, but part of her knew she had to. There was an inevitability working against them.

There hadn't been, always.

And maybe it was the beers talking, or that troublesome bedfellow loneliness again, but Britt was bold once more.

"Hey. In all your timesetting, did you ever make it out to Seattle?"

Magnolia cocked her head to the side, lips turning down just-so.

"You know. Seattle, 1992."

For another moment, which felt like a very long time to the timeless Council member, Magnolia's expression was vague, her eyes whiskey-wide. And then, a flash of recognition: "Oh yeaaaah," she rolled. She tilted on her bar stool towards Britt, reaching out and catching her shoulder for stability. Britt didn't mind. Her hand was warm on her skin even through the thick fabric of her t-shirt. "Damn," she said. "I haven't thought about Seattle in a minute."

It hurt, a little, hearing that, but the warmth of the smile Magnolia gave her made Britt feel a little less bad. She herself thought about Seattle at least monthly. Weekly, if it was a bad one. Sometimes, Seattle kept her up at night.

"Yeah," she said. "Me either."

"But being back at this place? Now?" Magnolia grinned, showing the gap between her teeth. "It's all I can think about."

"Yeah," said Britt. "Me, too."

"What was it we were going to get? An apartment." She leaned her elbow onto Britt. It wasn't bony, but the shoulder where it was anchored was. Britt grinned into the pain. She'd missed this. Magnolia's face went light with the look of remembering things, and it was very close to hers. She could smell whiskey and bad uniform cigarette smoke and something else essentially Magnolia on her breath. And then: "Yes. Hell yes, it was an apartment on 2nd Avenue, wasn't it?"

Britt nodded. The motion of it transferred from her head to her shoulder to Magnolia's elbow and then all the way to Magnolia. Her double chin wobbled. Britt wanted desperately to kiss it.

"So you could be in the middle of all the action," she said.

" _Hell_ yeah," said Magnolia. "And so I could rock flannel forever. And bring some Black Girl Magic to that whole scene."

"Grunge was so white," said Britt, which was what Magnolia herself had said as a kind of call to arms on the stool across from her so many nights so long ago. "They need a bad bitch like you."

"They _do_ , though. And, you know, a scrawny little side piece like you, too. Everyone needs their arm candy."

"And Igor," Britt added.

For another moment, Magnolia's face slipped back in drink and time. "Oh, _yes_ , Igor! The cat!"

" _Our_ cat."

"Fucking Igor, man," Magnolia said, shaking her head. She tapped another cigarette out of the pack on the bar, lit it. The smell was still off, enough that the man who had bellied up beside them to order a drink scooted a few bar stools down to escape it. Neither woman cared. "How could I forget Igor?" Britt didn't know; she hadn't. "What did we say we wanted him to be? A little black and white fuck. Like me and you. Ha! Short hair?"

"Yes. And I think in one version of the plan, he had three legs. Or maybe it was one eye?"

There was that impossible laugh again. Britt shifted her hand forward and pressed her palm to Magnolia's knee, as if she could hold on to the sound.

"It was one eye!" Her hand rose, still holding the cigarette, and covered one of her own eyes. She stuck her tongue out. Somewhere down the bar, the woman with the eye patch grumbled. "Igor, man. Hadn't we imagined a whole room for him? I remember we imagined a whole room for him. The Igor Room. The one with the most windows, so he could look out and see the whole of Seattle. His kingdom."

"He would be a very lucky boy," said Britt, and she drank her beer. "Our cat child."

"I mean, yes," said Magnolia. "But can you imagine two queer bitches like us in _1992_? Look at these clowns here." She jerked her head towards the pair of good ol' boys in the corner. They eyed the points of connection the two women made with biblical disdain. "And this is a whole decade and a half later."

It was nothing, in the scheme of the timeline. Britt shrugged.

"It's a different part of the country, too," she said. "That's why you picked it, wasn't it? It was on the cusp of not being entirely shitty."

"And so I could live down the street from my man, Eddie Vedder. Mhm."

And it was the loneliness, again, which made her bold, or maybe it was the final knowledge that Magnolia was really here. She could feel her beneath her palm. She remembered the last time they'd sat like this, and what Magnolia had asked. Britt's fingers tensed around her knee, pressing dimples into the denim there.

"And, you know. So you could live with me."

"Out of the timeline." Magnolia tipped her glass at Britt. "So I could settle down with you."

There was nothing more radical or terrifying Britt could think of than stepping out of the timeline. She didn't remember a time she hadn't been on it, traveling from one green door to the next since before she even had her own key. It was her whole life. No, more than that. It was all of Britt herself. Without it, there was nothing left of her.

Then there was Magnolia, sitting on the bar stool beside her, her skin warm beneath her palm.

And so Britt said what she wished she had said the last time they'd been here.

"Let's do it."

"Hmm?" hummed Magnolia into the rim of her drink. The cut glass made a discordant sound against her teeth.

"Let's go, right now. Seattle." If she did it just right, she thought she could even time it before the animal shelters closed. Igor would be waiting. "Let's do it, Magnolia."

Magnolia's head tilted to the side, making the part in her curls shift, sending those coils to cascade slowly into a new place. For a moment, Magnolia only looked at Britt. There was something in her eyes Britt had never seen before. She thought it looked like possibility, stretching out and shining in the reflection of the bar light in her brown eyes.

And then Magnolia laughed again, that beautiful, round sound.

It ripped through the space between them.

Magnolia tilted farther forward, leaning her head on her hand so it pressed her elbow harder into Britt's shoulder. Her hair, soft and scented like gardenias and shea butter, tickled against Britt's skin. Britt didn't laugh. She did smile, though, as much as she could manage. It wasn't much.

Magnolia couldn't see it. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was just a better smile than it felt like. It pulled, jagged, at Britt's lips.

"Oh, Britt." Magnolia laughed. "You're a riot."

"Ha," Britt said. She tried again, to make it a sound and not a word. "I know, right?"

"Lord," she breathed, straightening herself. "Can you imagine? If we believed all that... that _mythology_ we built up for ourselves back then?"

"Mythology?"

"Lord, yes." Magnolia caught the eye of the bartender and raised her fingers for another two drinks. "Just all that poetic bullshit. The apartment. The coffee shops. Fucking _Igor._ We were such sentimental bitches, weren't we?"

And the thing of it was this:

Britt didn't have to imagine she believed all that mythology.

She paid triple premium in credits at the commissary for coffee beans from the original Starbucks on Pike Place in 1992. It tasted like shit, stale and burned, but she bought a new bag every week.

She'd met Eddie Vedder once, in the year 2034, when he was a very old man. He'd come into the community center where she was on temporary assignment, filling in for someone on a weekend. She'd gotten his autograph on a napkin. It was made out to Magnolia Brixby.

She had a bot at her apartment, which was nothing more than a small, semi-sentient pod that kept her important dates and a log of upcoming assignments and summaries of historical context for each. When she had first brought it home from the Council, she had snipped the corners off a report on the kitchen table and taped them to the top of the bot, like little ears. Its file name on her comm was Igor.exe.

There were any number of things Britt Hillard wanted to say to Magnolia Brixby then, but what she said was this:

"Yeah," said Britt. "We were."

Magnolia shook her head. "Seattle. Of all the places in the world."

Britt wasn't sure what she expected, but whatever it was, she had expected it for a long time. She didn't think it was this.

"You know," she said. "I have really missed Magnolia Brixby."

And Britt was sure she had, wherever she was, which she now suspected was in her imagination.

"Girl," said Magnolia Brixby. "She has missed you, too."

# 364 Days

by Jessica Gray

364 days sober. If Mary subscribed to all that AA crap she'd get a chip tomorrow, but she doesn't, and it's not like she'll make it there anyway.

Tomorrow would be 365 days, one whole year sober. A milestone Mary Ricci has only made it to twice since cleaning her life up, and only because of leap years.

She knows how today goes, has followed the same pattern every year since _that year_. It's a wonder she can even trick herself into thinking this year will be different. But this year will be different, it _has_ to be different. She's known for years she can't go on this way, but knowing that and actually implementing it are two very different animals. She hasn't been ready, doesn't want to let go and uses the already-strong-and-will-only-get-worse-as-the-day-goes-on craving to justify her misdeeds.

It's always next year, next year I'll be better, next year I'll get my shit together, then the next year comes and she repeats the tune. It's one she knows well, but it's time to end the song.

Today she will not fail. Her thirties won't fall victim to the same bad behaviour of her twenties. She will stay in her apartment and on this couch, watching whatever comes on her TV.

It's time to let this habit, this self destructive behaviour go. If she can manage sobriety for 364 days she can manage one more—even when that day is today.

It's times like these she almost wishes she followed the program, had someone in her corner she could call over to prevent her from going to the Green Door tonight. But she tried that bullshit once, couldn't get over all the ridiculous religious undertones—and also if she's really honest with herself she doesn't want anyone to stop her from doing what she always does. Mistakes are much easier to make when you aren't accountable to anyone, when no one cares what you do.

She's been trapped in a cycle that ends today. No matter the pain, the grief, heartbreak and longing she _will not_ set foot in the Green Door. She's smart enough to know if she goes in, she will drink, and if she drinks it's back to day one.

She wasn't always like this, not at all. She grew up a prim and proper Christian girl, she sang in church choir, led the youth group and confessed to sins like coveting another's outfit.

Before she turned eighteen she had a life, a family, a whole future ahead of her. A boring, stifled, traditional future ahead of her, but a future no less.

Then she met Jared Matthews. At just eighteen years old she met the love of her life, and she thanked God for that miracle, until God turned his back on her and her whole life went to Hell.

At least Hell has good wine. She misses a good glass of wine, the smell of it, sweet with that hint of decay, the taste of it, smokey and sour, the feel of that slightly bitter aftertaste sitting in your mouth. Even after all these years, she can still replicate it in her mind perfectly. She wants a glass, badly. Salivates over the mental image. Wants to satiate the craving that's only grown more intense as she lusts over a glass. She just wants a taste, just one drink, just to satisfy the craving. She won't have more, she's better than that, stronger than that.

But it's never just one. That's the problem. As much as she thirsts for the taste of it, the real addiction is to the feeling it brings, that pleasant loose-limbed nothing-can-go-wrong feeling that inevitably makes everything go wrong. And if the alcohol makes you tired, just add some cocaine into the mix, it'll wake you right up—at least that's what Jared said the first time she tried it, when she was far too drunk and falling asleep in their corner booth. It's a line she repeated over and over. It was a pick me up, like a cup of coffee but stronger, faster, better.

She shouldn't be thinking of these things, but it's better than the alternative. Better than thinking about him, how he's gone, what _she_ did...

Wine, red wine, or maybe white, a cool crisp glass of Riesling, that sweetness that blooms on your tongue, the warmth as it goes down your throat that settles in your belly. Not as sharp as the burn of a shot of whiskey—and God, what she wouldn't give for one of those right now. She could use some warmth, something to ease the tight, clutching feeling in her chest, something to push away the tears that will inevitably fall.

She makes it two whole hours before she breaks down, before she's sobbing over the one picture she has of him, her mind flashing back to that fateful night. It was her fault they were at the Green Door in the first place, it was she who suggested he have another hit and stop being such a buzzkill, and she who went off to score more drugs, leaving him all alone.

Jared was dead when she got back, so high it took her a while to realize he wasn't just sleeping. It was ruled an accidental overdose, and the coroner was right about the mechanism, but not the blame.

Jared's mother is the only one who sees it, is the only one who recognizes the truth—that Jared Matthews would still be alive if it weren't for Mary Ricci.

It's been eight years since Jared took his last breath in that little corner booth all alone. Eight years since Mary felt whole. And seven years of throwing her sobriety down the drain on this day.

A smart person would have never set foot in the Green Door again, not after all she lost there, but she's not a smart person, never has been. Just ask her parents. She's all alone in the world—your everyday, average, ordinary, total screw up that hurts every single person that cares about her.

She has no one and nothing, only vague memories of a life spent drinking herself into oblivion and getting high off her ass. She doesn't even know where the majority of the places they went to were. But the Green Door is special, not just because of all she went through there, but because of all that happens there. To most passersby, it's a seedy, shady pub they'd rather avoid, but to those who have experienced it, who are able to see beyond what's immediately apparent, it's an incredible treasure trove of people, experiences, creatures, and timelines.

It's that last one that always brings her back.

She only had a shitty cell phone back then, no camera, used solely for texting and calling to get more drugs. That's where all their money went, booze and drugs. So she doesn't have any photos of them to reminisce over—they lived in the moment, never stopped to memorialize it because what did that matter?

It matters to her now, when she cannot change it. She tells herself that if she had more pictures, if she had mementos of him she wouldn't need to do what she does.

But she doesn't and it's nearing six o'clock. If she's going to go to the cemetery she needs to go now, before it's too dark. It's just a goddamn stone, it's not him, not anymore, but the thought of not going, of not talking to him, is horrifying, and it spurs her into action.

The wind is cold against her face as she waits for her ride to arrive. The driver tries to talk to her and she answers nonchalantly while staring down at her phone, but he doesn't take the hint and starts again. When the driver tries a third time, she flat out ignores him and he finally shuts up. The silence, as always, is her friend, the only one she has and the only one she wants.

It starts to rain as she enters the graveyard, and isn't that just perfect. She doesn't have an umbrella, isn't in a raincoat, hadn't been smart enough to check the weather before she left, but at least no one will be able to tell she's crying.

The volume of rain seems to increase with the pace of her tears. When she reaches Jared's stone they flood down her cheeks as the rain comes down in fierce volleys, while the wind howls. The awful weather adds to the miasma of despair that emanates here.

She places a hand on the stone, far too hard and cold to be reminiscent of Jared. He was light, life and passion, had a way of speaking that drew everyone in and this unflappable charisma that lit up a room. He doesn't belong here, in this. It's all so wrong.

But she does as she always does, and starts to speak to the stone with a shaky voice. She tells him of her year—not that there's much to tell, she works a crappy diner to afford the rent on her sketchy apartment, and keeps to herself. She knows he would do this for her, would do far more than this if the roles were reversed, so she tries.

She jumps back, her heart ratcheting into her throat as her monologue is interrupted by a sharp crack of thunder. For a brief moment, she imagines getting lucky and being struck by lightning right here, being put out of her misery for good. Nature's own version of the electric chair to punish her for her many sins.

But no such luck, it was just that one crack, no others, and so she continues her story, daylight dissipating as she goes on and on about nothing, the rain finally starting to abate as her story winds down.

She's chilled to the bone, needs to warm up, should just go home, but she can't imagine a cab driver would want her soaking up their car, and there is a place just up the street...

It's always so easy to excuse it once she's here. She could lie and say she'll just walk by, or she'll only go in for a second, but it's past that point now, no use denying it.

She shivers as she grabs for the green door, entering the place she said she wouldn't, when deep down she knew all along she'd end up here.

The barkeep greets her with a sad smile, the older woman's eyepatch a seafoam green today, bringing out the hazel in her good eye. Mary means to tell her she likes it, but then the barkeep is holding up a set of fresh, dry clothes and she feels more tears prickle in her eyes.

She doesn't cry over the kindness, she's better than that, but she does take the clothes with a thank you, sliding a ten-dollar bill onto the counter when she thinks the barkeep isn't looking. This woman has shown her more kindness than anyone in her entire life, and never lets Mary repay it. She fails at her efforts to tip the barkeep for her kindness, an eyebrow quirking out over her eyepatch that has Mary snatching back the bill. Somehow with only one eye the bartender still manages to see everything.

She'll get it to her later, will tip her well for all the drinks she's about to have. Even blackout drunk Mary Ricci is a generous tipper and they both know that's where this night is headed.

It's amazing the difference fresh, dry clothes make. She's still chilly, but the feeling of no longer being soaked and soggy is such a relief, she nearly cries again.

It's on her way out of the bathroom that she notices the reserved sign on that corner booth, and another in front of her spot at the bar, the one with the perfect view of that corner booth.

The barkeep prepared for her, even with Mary's insistence last year (just like all the years prior) that she wouldn't be back. That has the shame coiling, winding tighter as she utters the words:

"Glass of Merlot and a shot of whiskey."

An eyebrow arches up over the eyepatch, the barkeep's other eye and brow somehow steady.

"Thought you were better than that," is the comment Mary gets. She doesn't flinch, though she wants to, instead keeps her eyes on the barkeep, raising her own brows in a silent challenge.

Sighing, the barkeep pours a glass of Merlot, the one Mary's mouth has been watering for all day, all week, all year. Once the shot is poured both are placed in front of her, then the barkeep is gone, muttering something about how she can't watch this.

Just another person Mary's letting down. The last one who ever had any faith in her.

That should make her drop the glass, should have her grabbing her sopping clothes and making her way out of here.

But instead, she throws back the whiskey shot, relishing the burn as it soothes the ache in her chest. Then she downs the wine, forgetting all about savouring that taste she's been salivating over.

She's warm and pleasant feeling, but also ashamed. That awareness, the recognition of how wrong this is needs to go, so she orders another.

And another. And another.

Then she watches, watches as the world around her goes swirly, until she can see all of the layers of time.

This is the hard part. The intoxication that gives her the gift also makes it nearly impossible to focus in on the right thread of time, and to block out all the rest. She has to push away all the noise, has to somehow focus when the world has gone swirly.

If she just had the fucking gift she wouldn't be like this, but she was never blessed with anything, is never enough, will never be enough.

She misses the right thread the first few times, pulls at the wrong ones, and doesn't grab hard enough. It takes time, but time brings less focus until she has to grab blindly before the wave pulls her under.

Seven years of doing this, of searching out this thread are what save her. It feels right in her grasp, as it all settles, as the swirls become a haze, then a cloudy picture.

And there _he is_.

Beautiful, alive, breathing.

And there _she_ is.

Dirty, vile, and high as a kite.

She wishes she could change this, wants nothing more than to walk up to her past self and shake some sense into her, but that's not possible, at least not for her. She's heard that travel is possible, but has never met anyone that could, and all she can do is sit and watch.

So she watches, watches as she passes him the baggie of cocaine, and watches as he goes off to the bathroom to snort it. That is the moment that she killed him. All Jared wanted to do was go home and go to bed, and if she'd only let him, he'd still be alive.

He stumbles on his way back to the table, obviously too far gone, but her past self is too damn high and too concentrated on scoring more drugs to realize. She stares at him, sitting there, and he's hazy, it's all hazy, the alcohol pumping through her veins distorting what she wants to see clearly.

Her past self gets up from that corner booth, doesn't even kiss him goodbye or tell him what she's doing, just leaves him on his own, half passed out for what are his last moments.

She watches as Jared's head slumps down onto the table, letting out a choked cry as he starts to convulse, her heart cracking and splintering all over again. She wants to look away, wants to leave this, wants to be anywhere else. But Jared died all alone, all because of her. This is her punishment for her crime, she will sit and watch his last breaths, no matter how much it hurts.

He deserved so much better than to die like this. She gets angry all over again about the fact that _nobody_ notices. It takes ten minutes for her past self to finally stroll over, and another five to realize what's happened.

Mary pulls herself back to the present as soon as her past self notices, unwilling to watch her own selfish reaction.

Jared is gone, and even though it's been eight years since that night, she feels the pain of it like a knife in the gut, made worse by what she did to be able to see it.

She can't do this again. She says this every year, but it's true. Look at her now, stupid drunk, so bad she can't even get herself home now, can't even get her ass off of this barstool. She's an utter failure. A drunk, a loser, and a murderer.

She sets her head down on the bar, letting her eyes fall close as she tries to work up the strength to move.

"Just fall asleep, darlin'," says the barkeep, and Mary doesn't even bother to look up at her, "I'll make sure you'll be okay."

That sounds ideal, the seductive edges of sleep are already pulling at her vision, and she lets herself be pulled under.

When Mary awakens, it's to an empty bar. A bleary-eyed look at her watch as her head throbs tells her it's six in the morning. Her stomach pitches and her whole body shudders (which brings with it a wave of nausea and aching pain in her joints) as the barkeep sets a shot of whiskey in front of her.

"Oh God," Mary groans as she slowly pulls herself up to sitting from lying in the booth. How she ended up over here is anyone's guess.

"Drink up," the barkeep urges, and oh God, _no_.

Just the thought makes her gag a little. She is far too hungover for that. Why on earth would she ever do that? She can feel herself growing green as she recoils from the liquid.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a second, taking a breath as she wills everything in her body to slow and steady.

"Take the shot," the barkeep urges, and there is absolutely no way.

She feels sick enough from the shame, how it slithers up her spine as she starts to feel worse and worse, her body punishing her for all the poison she ingested.

"Please take that away from me," she begs weakly, looking up to find the barkeep smiling down at her.

She wants to ask what the smile's for, but the barkeep takes the shot away and she sets her head onto the cooled wood, closing her eyes to alleviate the pain behind them, but quickly reopening them when the world starts to spin.

She grunts, moans and tries to work up the energy to move across the room.

Before she can, a pint glass full of a green concoction is slammed down onto the table, so hard the crack of it against the wood reverberates in her head.

"Drink up," is all she's told. Not what's in it or why, but it's an instruction she doesn't question, at least not until she takes a sip.

It's bitter and vile and she gags as she swallows the thick, sludgy substance that somehow coats and relieves her dry throat. After five more sips she starts to feel like a human again, and by the time she's finished the glass, her hangover is completely gone. Where was this stuff all of her life?

"Y'know you've always taken the shot before, darlin'."

"What?"

The answer just leads to more questions, "It's how I know you're ready."

"Ready? What the _hell_ are you talking about?"

Mary watches as the barkeep pulls off her eyepatch, and a veiny, bloodshot black eye that seems to have no iris and is too small for the socket appears, where Mary had always thought no eye sat.

The barkeep's usual hazel eye stands in sharp contrast to the grotesque hidden eye that gets popped out into her hand.

Mary thanks God she's not still hungover because her stomach lurches. She's always been unnaturally creeped out and disgusted by eyes, but seeing this one, like this, she's starting to think it isn't such an unnatural fear.

"Take it," the barkeep urges, holding it out in the palm of her hand.

"Why would I do that?"

"You daft girl. I'm given' you the gift of sight."

"Sight?" Mary asks, before her mind clues in.

_Sight._ The barkeep is offering her _the gift_ , holy fuck.

"How do I..." she trails off, shuddering as she pictures removing her own eye to put that one in its place, which unfortunately turns out to be exactly what she has to do to accept the gift.

It takes a while for her to gather her courage, she's not totally convinced this will work, but the barkeep is the only person she trusts, and she has to try.

It's surprisingly painless to remove her own eye, all sensation numbed by the concoction the barkeep gave her. She doesn't look at it once it's out, afraid she'll lose her nerve completely. The bartender takes the now bloody, disconnected blue from her, as Mary blindly reaches for the new-to-her eye.

This is by far the oddest thing she's done in her life.

Once the eye is in she looks around, moving her gaze up so she can see all the layers on this booth, pulling at them to attempt to watch her past self (she usually passes out in this booth). But as she attempts it, her right eye still sees the barkeep, is fixed on their time, and it's only when she squeezes it tightly shut that she can grasp onto the strands she wants, sliding in just in time to watch her three-years-ago self down the offered shot, something she has no recollection of.

She realizes now it was a test, one she failed for the last seven years. She's not sure why the barkeep chose her for this, why she was willing to wait for Mary to get her shit together before passing on the gift, but she's so grateful.

The truth is the barkeep is the closest thing she has to family these days, even though she only sees her once a year.

"I wouldn't keep that in all the time, tryin' to focus on the present and all the pasts will cripple you if you aren't careful."

Mary can see how that would happen, opening both of her eyes and seeing two different things is disorienting and headache-inducing.

"Is that why you always wore the eyepatch?"

"No. Darlin', I haven't put that thing in in a _long_ time. I kept it hidden in a dark jar just waitin'."

"Waiting for what?"

The barkeep looks at her like she's stupid and drawls, "Why, someone to pass it on to."

"But why me?" Mary asks because she cannot for the life of her figure out what made the barkeep choose her. She's a thirty-year-old fuck up, not someone special.

"Why not you?"

She doesn't know what to say to that. She wants answers, but she has a feeling she's not going to get them. The barkeep, though someone who always looked out for Mary, has always been secretive. They've known each other for twelve years, and Mary doesn't even know her name for God's sake.

"Would you call us friends?"

The barkeep eyes her curiously before answering, "Aye, I would."

"I don't know anything about you."

"No one does."

"But isn't that lonely?"

The barkeep just shrugs. "I talk to people. You know that."

The conversation is starting to make her head spin, or maybe that's her inability to keep one eye shut. She keeps opening it, even though it makes her vision scramble.

The barkeep must see Mary's grimace, because she pulls off her eyepatch, and offers it to Mary.

"Oh, no I can't take that, it's yours."

"You can bring it back tonight if you want."

She wasn't planning on coming back, she never comes in on days that aren't yesterday. But she has the gift now, has the eye, and it would be a shame to waste that.

She can see other moments, can see the happy moments, all without getting shitfaced.

This is a game changer.

"I'll see you, tonight."

The barkeep looks at her sternly. "You have a drink and I'm takin' my eye back, you hear me?"

"I won't, I promise. You don't need to worry about me."

The barkeep smiles, this broad, genuine grin that makes Mary smile back in return.

"Good girl. But everyone needs someone to worry about them, I'm not gunna stop as long as you come around here."

Mary wants to respond with something nice, something to show the barkeep how touched she is, but the next words out of the barkeep's mouth are, "Now get outta my bar, some of us haven't slept yet, and have to work later."

So she leaves, and though it's day one all over again, this really is a new beginning. No more day one of 364. It's day one of a new life, day one of being able to see, day one of having someone in her corner.

Sobriety will still be a struggle, but she has no excuses left, and it's as freeing as it is terrifying.

# The Spirit Healer

by Victor Serrano

The specter lurched out at me, a flashing green ax missing me by a hair as I ducked low, urging my horse onward. I turned in my saddle, grabbing my dwarven flintlock pistol, and whipped it back at the wraith pursuing close behind. Eyes narrowed, I aimed down the iron sights and squeezed. A plume of gray smoke spat out from the muzzle. The musket ball smashed into its exposed ribs. The wraith recoiled, and I twisted back to look forward. The trail was coming to an end now, the forest giving way to the scattered homesteads and outlying farms around Raven's Rest.

I blinked furiously, holstering my pistol without attempting the laborious process of reloading. Three days and three nights I had been on the move, and this was my second horse, foaming at the mouth as I urged it forward.

I didn't want to remember what had happened to the first.

"Just a little further now," I said to myself, my lips cracking in the heat as the terrain around me opened up. I took a final glance back. A faint green glow was spreading along the edge of the forest.

We were almost at the village. The trail I'd been following widened into a dusty street. I brushed sweat and dirt from my brow, my hand trailing down the metal chain connected to my amulet. I gave it a tight squeeze.

A villager paused from his labors; a thin man in coarse linen. He appeared to be fixing a fence post that had slid out of position after last night's rains. It wouldn't do much good against the vengeful spirits which pursued me.

The villager squinted at me as my horse cantered into town. Driven by desperation, I'd had to ride further into the wild Imperial outskirts, following rumors of a magical tavern that could spirit me away.

"Come on now, come on," I muttered, urging my exhausted horse through the single street. I was not by nature a cruel man, for cruel men so rarely learn spirit healing, but I was a desperate man—and I knew, all too well, how brutal desperate men can be.

"Almost there..."

I patted my horse's flank. Ahead of me, a dwarven villager frowned at my approach. With his legs splayed wide and a bushy black beard, he had an air of solidity about him that put me in mind of the miners I had once preached among.

"The Green Door," I sputtered, half sliding out of my saddle and half falling. I ignored the horse as it staggered away and instead focused my feverish gaze on the startled dwarf.

"Er... that way." He hooked a thumb down an alley. "But sometimes it doesn't... Hey, preacher, your horse!"

I ignored the horse, limping down the alley, saddlesore and weary. The specter seemed to have stopped at the edge of the forest, but I doubted what passed for civilization here would be able to stop it if it came for me. The wights and skeletons I could outride, but the specter always seemed to appear just behind me. I clutched the glowing teal amulet at my chest.

_You've done more than enough already,_ Elina's soul said, echoing in my head as she lingered between death and the afterlife. _Better I remain tied here for eternity than the both of us. Save yourself..._

"No," I muttered, half in tears, sniffing away as I looked around. "No, no, no..." I paused, eyes widening as I spotted an unremarkable green door. Strange, I thought I'd looked there first. With the fog of exhaustion and emotional turmoil, it must have just gone unnoticed. I stepped over to the green door, wincing at the agony in my body, and rapped my knuckles against the wooden door.

I paused for a moment.

Then impatience overcame me, and I pushed my way inside. The cool interior was a soothing balm after days of riding, but it took me a moment to adjust to the dim lighting.

"Close the door," a woman's voice said. "You're letting the heat in."

I stepped in and shut the door behind me with a loud clang. Though the rumors had spoken of a tavern, I had never seen a common room like this. It seemed to curve all around in a wide circular arc, with green doors placed uniformly every few paces, and a circular bar in the very middle. The architecture didn't make sense to my eyes, but Raven's Rest was unfamiliar to me. The only commonality in the descriptions was that the tavern called the Green Door had a magical aura about it.

Though I may be a lackluster spirit healer, the tavern gave off a powerful sensation of magic. Out of respect, I doffed my travel-worn black hat and studied the room. Two women were speaking intently at a table nearby, their voices low, wearing peculiar clothes. Their language sounded like nothing I'd heard before. Licking my dried lips, I limped toward the bar, where a lean woman with an eyepatch was wringing out a dishcloth.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Not just me," I rasped, taking a seat at the bar. "I've heard you can help others. That you're the answer to people's problems."

She scoffed, wiping the bar counter with her rag in slow, methodical motions. The aged wood almost seemed to sparkle as she moved along. "I'm nobody's answer to problems," she said. "But I can be a step to the solution. People need to solve their own problems."

I nodded. "I was hoping you could help with that. Got quite the problem."

"Hmm." She paused. "I get travelers like you, from time to time. I'll listen to your tale, but you look like you could use a drink first."

I nodded, fumbling for a few coins. "Elven brandy, if you have it. Neat."

She whistled, turning and rummaging through her extensive collection. "I don't get that request too often."

"Got a legion of the dead after me," I said, watching with a ravenous thirst as she filled up a glass and slid it over. I grabbed it and swallowed, feeling the brandy burn its way down, then slammed the glass back down on the counter.

"Shit, again?" The bartender looked over at the door I'd used. "They see you come in?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "When I got into Raven's Rest they seemed to keep their distance."

"Raven's Rest?" the bartender asked, tilting her head.

"Yeah." I blinked, the brandy not doing a thing to help my exhaustion. "You know... the village we're in?"

"'The village we're in,'" she repeated with a chuckle. "You're not really _anywhere_ , friend. But you can get to where you need to be going."

I was too tired to make an issue of it, so I merely shrugged, putting my fate in her hands. "There's a soul in need of release here," I said, tapping the amulet. "I'm a spirit healer, and I've been entrusted with the souls of the miners around Hardscrabble Falls. Unfortunately... they were not the first to make it there. Nor the first to die there."

The bartender stood there patiently, listening to me ramble on, and even giving the occasional nod. It had been my habit to avoid taverns and bars, and the only times I would spill my guts like this would be in prayer to the gods above. Still, she listened with all the polite grace of a seasoned spirit healer.

"Some great treachery must have occurred in the distant past, for restless spirits still haunt the land. It was them that descended upon Hardscrabble Falls, butchering the miners; a force of undead wraiths that only grew in number as the defense wore on." I breathed out slowly, squeezing the empty glass. "I gave last rites to those I could, but the soul of one poor woman was caught in between. I thought I'd die there, with those few left barricaded in the general store, but they knew she'd linger for eternity if her soul wasn't released."

I clenched my jaw at the memory. I had never seen such heroism, and from miners I'd frankly despised when the minister had sent me out to tend to their souls.

"So they led a charge, giving their lives so that I could take Elina here to give her a chance at peace. They knew they'd die, and drift off to the afterlife, but they couldn't bear to let her linger."

The bartender nodded, as if this sort of story was commonplace. "Do you know where she needs to go? Or why?"

I shook my head, grasping the teal amulet. "Sometimes I can hear her speak to me, but she's said nothing about it. Just that she has unfinished business."

"So how did you capture her soul?"

I blinked. "Why, it's a simple enough procedure for any spirit healer," I said, noticing the bartender's blank expression. "There aren't spirit healers where you're from?"

"No," she said bitterly, then seemed about to say something more. She shook her head. "So what happened next?"

"We got out."

I bit my lip until blood ran. The pain was too fresh and raw to speak about now. She seemed to pick up on that, pouring a half measure into my empty glass.

"This one's on the house," she said, corking the brandy and setting it aside. "I think I can help with your problem."

Draining the glass once more, I rummaged in my pockets, though there was little of any use. I still had a handful of powder, but my sword had been left in a wraith's skull leagues back, and my ammunition was spent... or almost spent. As if in some flight of fancy, I had stuffed a single lead ball into my right boot, in case suicide seemed the best option.

I had come close—but somehow held that demon off as well.

Unstringing my boot, I belatedly realized that I must look a fool, though the two women had already left. As far as I could tell the tavern was empty; just table after table, with carved dog statues along the walls beside the green doors. I pried the ball loose and put my boot back on, tying it back up nice and tight. I wrapped the ball in a bit of cloth. Then I began loading the flintlock pistol, a bit of powder scattering on the counter, and holstered it at my side as the bartender returned.

"The Green Door has a location for you," she said, then frowned at the specks of powder on her counter. "I just cleaned that."

"Sorry," I said, stepping off my barstool and hobbling over to the indicated door. "This one?"

"It's lit up," she said, clearly annoyed. Indeed, a few glowing runes could be seen on the green door, though I did not understand what they meant. I knew some of the liturgic signs, but this was far outside my limited understanding—if it was even the same language.

"Where does that lead?"

My sense of awe grew as I approached. I may not be the brightest of men, even when I'm not sleep-addled and pursued by the vengeful dead, but I had gathered that we really weren't in Raven's Rest.

"Couldn't say," the bartender replied with a shrug. "The Green Door knows where you need to go... the rest is up to you. Truth be told, I don't understand it myself. There's some form of magic here, that's all I know, and it forms into the perspective of the viewer. You see those, over there?" the bartender asked, pointing to a pair of carved dogs beside the door. "What do you see?"

I frowned. "Statues of dogs carved out of wood."

She chuckled softly. "Haven't heard that one before. It's different for everyone. I just see... well, never mind what I see." She sighed. "I have my own form of unfinished business." The bartender nodded at the door. "Take care of yours."

Gritting my teeth, I stepped forward, pushing the door open. I stepped outside, taking in the scenery—a cobbled path leading through trimmed grass and pine trees, a chilly mist all around me. I glanced back.

"Thanks for..."

I fell silent, not seeing the tavern at all, but instead an ornate marble fountain in what looked to be a park. After a moment I sighed, straightening my jacket as the chill set in, and noticed a park bench beside a lake. The surface was covered in a thin layer of ice.

There!

The voice in my head, along with the sudden pulsing sensation of warmth from the amulet, jerked me into motion. The spirit of Elina had been silent for so long that it now came as a shock. I stepped past the cobbled path and into the light gravel around the park bench, touching it gingerly.

We used to sit there, Tad and I.

"What happened?"

My breath drifted in the cold air as I spoke.

A plague hit us two summers ago. It took all of Kazhmer by storm, spreading from town to town along with the wagon trains. Tad was just fine in the morning, feverish by the afternoon, and dead before dawn. We never saw it coming.

"Kazhmer," I said to myself in wonder, thinking of the distant Northern lands. "Oh, that's right, you're Kazhmeri," I added, remembering the woman who'd been so charitable to me in the first days of my ministry at Hardscrabble Falls. The miners had been a tough bunch, and rarely opened up to me, but Elina had always treated me with kindness. I never realized she'd left a whole life behind in the far North. The amulet throbbed at my chest.

Tad... I will join you.

A crack sounded, and then another. I took an uncertain step back just as a skull smashed through the icy surface of the lake. Baleful, glowing orange eyes in an empty skull stared at me as the specter that had dogged me for days emerged from below. It hovered in the air, water dripping off its skeletal frame, hefting the glowing green ax that had cleaved through at least a dozen miners. Finding my voice, I gripped the amulet tight.

"Still with me, Elina?"

I drew my flintlock pistol and aimed at the wrathful skull, its ax resting on its skeletal shoulder. Then I lowered my pistol a hair. A slow trail of mist drifted from my nose as I gently exhaled. My arm steady, I aimed for its left kneecap as the specter struggled out of the icy lake.

I fired.

The lead ball smashed into the specter's left shin, spraying bone splinters as the wraith roared in rage.

Together...

All at once, I felt the sensation of Elina's spirit leaving the amulet. Glancing down, I saw that my soul crystal had faded away to a gleaming white. I stood rooted to the spot, seeing that no other wraiths were pursuing me, besides the specter that had so persistently followed my retreat out of Hardscrabble Falls. The specter struggled to rise. It staggered forward, sloshing through the pond, slow enough that I had a chance to flee.

But I wasn't running any longer.

"Just you?" I holstered my empty pistol and pulled off my spirit healer's amulet. "Fine, I can take you."

Concentrating on my inner well of energy, I raised my amulet up high. The wraith was bounding toward me now, splashing ashore, raising his ax up high. Where before there had only been a weary fear inside me, I felt a burning rage now—a level of venom and anger that was not my own. My fingers squeezed against the amulet.

"What happened to you?"

The specter slowed and lowered his ax. Through his floating skull I thought I could sense a feeling of utter annoyance with me. Then he dematerialized, and soon disappeared entirely, as the amulet clasped in my hand began to burn. I set it back on, glancing down at the smoldering orange gem set in the sacred silver of a spirit healer's amulet.

Vengeance!

"Hush, hush," I whispered, breathing in the cool air. A flight of geese passed overhead, indifferent to my concerns. Glancing down at the park bench, I patted it one last time. "May your soul rest easy."

Feeling a tugging sensation, I turned, looking to where the spirit of the wraith felt pulled. It would be a long trip, I knew, and through the cold and unfamiliar land of Kazhmer... all to put this malevolent soul to rest; he who had led the butchery of the poor folk of Hardscrabble.

Still, I had taken my spirit healer's oath, and this was just one more tormented soul in need of peace. "Hush, hush," I said, treading along the cobbled path, as I held the glowing amulet against my chest. "Don't worry. I'll put your soul to rest."

# About the Authors

Ibrahim S. Amin

Ibrahim S. Amin was educated at the Manchester Grammar School, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Manchester. He wallowed in education for as long as he could, earning his PhD in Classics & Ancient History. At that point he ran out of excuses and joined the real world — where he now writes to support his unhealthy takeaway addiction.

His previous books are _The Monster Hunter's Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Mankind from Vampires, Zombies, Hellhounds, and Other Mythical Beasts_ (published in Italian as _I Fratelli del Vampiro_ ), the graphic novel _Jihad Squad_ , _Clara Mandrake's Monster_ , and _Gorgon Street Girls_.

You can learn more about them, ask him questions, and read random musings on his Goodreads author page, or endure his rants on Twitter (@Ibrahim_S_Amin).

Ani Brandt

ANI BRANDT is a former junior journalist and cartoonist for Mitteldeutsche Zeitung and has written articles for every school publication she could get her hands on. With an extended background in professional photography, theater and pushing-deadlines-to-their-limit, formerly known as American Literature Studies, she has been wrapped up in the creative arts ever since she was old enough to realize that Sharpies do well on wallpaper.

Completely unbeknownst to the NYT bestseller list or esteemed circles of fiction writers, she has been relentlessly at work, creating a vast science-fiction universe, which she keeps rebooting every ten years or so to keep things fresh and frustrating. While she wouldn't last a day in her own novels, readers can expect an action-packed version of Friends meets Scandal.

If you want to reach out to the Harz Mountains based mom-of-one, come find her on Twitter: @NikVharelly & Instagram: hubsibubsifee

R.C.

R.C. has been writing non-stop since 2010 and has no intention of ever stopping. You can find them elsewhere if you look into the void.

Delphine Crown

Delphine Crown is a writer, technically, even though their single braincell is always thinking about milves.

Janine Dillo

Janine Dillo usually writes long stories in German rather than short stories in English. Mostly character-driven fantasy with varying subgenres. Sometimes writing about video games.

C. Garrett

C. Garrett has quit a lot of things over the years but could never quite shake writing. Her work is informed by her experience as an anxious, neurodivergent queer girl growing up in the American South. When she's not catching feelings for her characters, you can find her in the garden growing flowers, seasonally flip-flopping between coffee and tea, or doing bad accents with her Sunday D&D group. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, their dog and cat, and a handful of houseplants.

Jessica Gray

Jessica Gray is a lawyer who writes fiction in her spare time. She's usually strapped to a computer with a cup of coffee, and if she's lucky one of her cats will join her and contribute their ideas. While she doesn't yet know how to translate the 'zzzzzzzzzzx' that gets added to her documents as they walk across the keyboard, she hopes to one day share their brilliance with the world.

Victor Serrano

Victor Serrano is a freelance fiction writer and editor. He is currently working on his epic fantasy series _Chronicles of the Spice Wars_.
