The Scenic Path of Human Artefacts

by Cate Gardner

You arrive at a fork in the road and you have a choice.

A Buddha statue tells you that your path lies to the left, noting that said path is leafy, dark and plain creepy. Beside him, a man with a guitar points to the right advising you to take the populated route with its souvenir shops, tourists, alien artefact museum and security cameras.

You listen to Buddha, right? Because the guy with the guitar, well he has no face.

Anita found the sneaker a little way down the path. Its sole covered in mud, its laces gnawed, and the foot that had once inspired movement severed at the anklebone. At that point, screaming was redundant. A sword swept out of the dark to sever her vocal cords. Anita’s disembodied head spun at dizzying speeds and landed nose down in the dirt. Unfair, she thought. Now she couldn’t scowl at her attacker.

A hand gripped hold of her ponytail and picked her up, dangling her in front of his face. The last remnants of her spit travelled across the air to land on his bulbous nose, his snot dripped blue, his tears welled green. Adding insult to obvious injury, he jammed her head down onto a branch--it scraped against her brain--and stepped back to take a photograph. A Polaroid--the guarantee of instant humiliation.

In a bizarre twist on the ‘who am I?’ game, her attacker stuck a post-it note on her forehead and the photograph of her rotting head on his. He sat and stared at her, while she just stared. She wanted to ask, “If I get it right, will you sew my head back on?”

The shake of his confirmed he was telepathic and unsympathetic. Several of the arms attached to his coat waved their fists at him. The non-blue tinge to their skin confirmed they’d once belonged to humans. Anita recognised the deer tattoo on the hand beating against the attacker’s chest. It confirmed that Red had not walked out on her.

I’m not playing. She pulled her tongue at the blue man and found she couldn’t pull it back in. She felt sick to her phantom stomach. Fall leaves dislodged with the shake of her head and the twig prodded into her brain. A few memories dissipated with the act, but sight, hearing and pain remained.

He pressed Red’s fingers to the Polaroid and pointed at her. If her fingers weren’t digging into the dirt, she’d rip off the post-it note and point at him.

And I am what became of your kind. She blinked.

He nodded and pulled her head off the branch when she would prefer he slammed his fist
down on her skull and ended this. Perched beneath his B.O. soaked underarm, and deaf from the press of stolen flesh against her earlobes, Anita joined him in the journey back to the path’s beginning. The man, he of the wise advice, continued to rest against his guitar, and she now saw that it was jammed into his butt and their attacker had pasted his missing face to Buddha’s backside.

The alien placed her head in Buddha’s lap, and then he waddled back down the path to wait for the next fool.

A duo of giggling girls stopped to take photographs of Anita’s head—now she was a celebrity—and the Guitar Man’s faceless skull. Their sneakers tripped against the yellow lead and woke Buddha. The sage advised them to take the scenic path.

__________

Cate Gardner's addiction to souvenir shops means she wouldn't have followed Buddha's advice. For once, her long suffering family are grateful. You now have two choices, you can visit her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com/ or you can read more Stitches, she recommends the latter.

Edible Flowers Perched above a Dying Landscape

Cate Gardner

A square of paper marked with the blood seal lay across Moira’s keyboard. With trembling fingers, she picked it up. Whispers stalked, following her along the corridor and waiting for the moment when she opened the note and read the words they already knew.

You’re evicted. Only, the powers on high had worded it in a more eloquent, tied with a legal-bow manner. She ran her fingers across her wrists. She hoped they cut deep and fast.

Moira screwed the paper up and dropped it in the recycle bin. She blinked back tears and offered her colleagues a salute before marching out of the building. She understood their ghoulish behaviour stemmed a little from relief. Today it was not them.

One last deep breath and the change in air knocked her sideways, reminding that the world no longer turned for them. A distant grumble caused her to shudder.

A man holding a canister of oxygen and a mask picked her up off the pavement. She grabbed at his arm, pulled the plastic mask to her face and drew in long breaths.

“Easy,” he said. “The air is thinner out here, but it will sustain you.”

“Thank you,” she said, despite his collaboration with the enemy.

He passed her a ticket marked 8A. “The ride from here to there is painless. In fact, you won’t remember a thing.” He meant to be kind. “It knocks for us all.”

“I wish my blood poison,” she said.

He backed away. No doubt, he’d heard the same line many times.

Regaining her composure, she watched similar scenes to her own unfold across the business district. Around them, ghost faces peered out from the myriad windows in the surrounding glass towers. She knew by their distant gaze that they looked out towards the barren fields.

A soldier’s life is worth that of a hundred citizens. The words scrawled in graffiti across streets not paved with gold. That epitaph she knew concealed the bold new truth—all the soldiers were dead and the law bowed to a new dictator.

The Revoking of Emancipation, Statute 101-B: Citizens have the right to eat, sleep and work in the towers until such time as the state requires the donation of their blood and organs.
What the wars had not killed, the new legislations would destroy.

“Line up, line up,” a collector with a megaphone called from a bus numbered 8A. “See the hand of progression at work. You stand on the threshold of an exciting new future. Document your final thoughts and your words will be etched into history.”

Or be deleted from it, Moira thought.

“Climb aboard. We will ensure your memory lives on in the Hall of Heroes.”

Moira turned around, pulled her arm all the way back and hurled her briefcase at the collector. It hit him on the nose. She marched up to the bus and grabbed the megaphone from his startled fingers.

“Hear my words,” she called to the evicted. “See your boss choke on their vomit after drinking poisoned coffee. Watch a vacuum cleaner suck them up as if they were nothing more than a stale cornflake. Don’t take this. Staple their butt to the desk and type them a letter of eviction.”

The lack of applause shocked. “Have they snipped off your vocal chords? They murder us and you do not even whimper.”

With the continued silence, Moira threw the megaphone aside and climbed aboard the bus. She pressed her hand down on the horn and released a primal scream. They had left her with no other choice. She started the bus engine, closed the doors, knocking the man off the step in the process, and revved the engine.

“Next stop, the end of the world,” she shouted to the empty seats.

The avenue spun by in a dizzying stream of glass, metal and concrete. The convenience of living on a rock perched high above a ruined landscape meant it was a long way to fall. Tipping the vehicle over the edge, she crashed through the windscreen, somersaulted clear of the bus, and came to rest alongside all the other broken flowers that lay scattered in the dust.

With the final flickering of her eyelids, she saw her blood run deep into the cracked earth by means of a swollen tongue and knew it was not rocks that had split her skull but teeth.

__________

Cate Gardner hopes the future is bright. Her stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Postscripts, and Necrotic Tissue. You can visit her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com
or you can read more Stitches; she recommends the latter.

Nobody Smiling

by Cate Gardner

Vern Gobel won by a margin.

That is by the margin in my notebook where he scrawled threats in pencil. Or rather where he had one of his minions scrawl them for him. The words have faded now. My thumb has run over them so often they are just a blur.

The silence in the auditorium, peppered with nervous coughs and the scraping of chairs, makes my ears hurt. No one in the crowd is looking at me, but they should. I fuss with my signet ring, running a finger over the R and trying to ignore the tightening in my stomach. Lulu Adams was a good, fair candidate. Her policies were sound and, despite the blood gushing from her neck wound, bloodless.

She is looking at me. Holding onto her throat and peering up to the back of the auditorium.

She knows.

The headmaster’s left eye is twitching, his fingers drumming against grey flannel. He wants to say something but Vern’s henchmen have sewn his lips together with garden twine.

Vern clears his throat, then clears it some more. His voice is a not-quite-broken squeak that doesn’t reach this far back. All I see are his lips moving. Not that I care what he has to say. Not that anyone here cares. We all just want out.

He points towards the wall and we don’t need a window to visualize the black smoke that hangs over the rival Eberhart High. Science experiments go wrong, everyone knows that, especially when you add dynamite to the formula. A few dazed, misguided students, who believe they voted Vern into office, wonder how they could have missed the combat policy. It was all there in black and vicious white. Of course, without the right light it is impossible to see the white words written on white paper. I believe I invented that code.

Vern Gobel’s photocopied manifesto begins with a confusing paragraph on how one day he doesn’t want to be just the President but the President. I’m guessing he means of the U.S. and not of some nameless global corporation or of the school. A smile twitches at the edge of my lips as I envisage Vern as a fifty-year-old bone thin geek handing out cookies and badges to kids.

Of course, they would be cookies laced with cyanide or fertilizer. Badges fastened to fat cheeks by means of safety pins.

Lulu looks at me now with the blank eyed stare of a dead girl as her blood drips from the stage onto Mrs. Mendelssohn’s birds nest. The math teacher’s shoulders heave up and down.

The dull whine of sirens penetrates the thick walls of the auditorium. In quick succession the doors bolt shut as Vern’s henchmen, a collection of science club geeks, stand guard at the doors. They fold their puny arms and I wonder why we don’t rush at them. They would break with the slightest kick.

Maybe it’s the hacksaws and sharpened kitchen knives putting us off. Maybe it’s the frozen stare of Mr. Adams, the gym teacher. When muscle and brawn lies stupefied by fear then we should all sit very, very still and not attract undue attention.

Did one of the students just look at me? A sly glance. It only takes one person to whisper and the fact of this sham election will swarm through the crowd.

Oh joy, Vern is pointing at me. I think he’s encouraging everyone to clap. Some students are doing so in a regimented sarcastic fashion. Though the kids from the school newspaper are having problems. It’s hard to clap when the class president has chopped off your hands.

__________

Cate Gardner is a writer of all things odd. You can find her stories online at Arkham Tales, Three Crow Press and Every Day Fiction. She also has stories forthcoming in Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Dead Souls, Sand, Necrotic Tissue and Space & Time. You can find her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com/ and at http://catephoenix.livejournal.com/

The Marionette Manipulator & The Headless Bride

by Cate Gardner

Reginald ignored the tap, tap, tap of the branch against his bedroom window. He pulled the pillow over his head as the glass screamed and he hid beneath the duvet as the window smashed on his bedroom floor.

Someone coughed, and Reginald was certain he wasn’t that someone, which was strange as he was the only one in the room. Or rather he should be.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

This startled Reginald most of all because although he believed he could have coughed and not realised there was no way he sounded like a girl; his voice had broken thirty years ago. He dared to raise his head above the pillow.

The scream definitely broke through his lips.

“‘I would marry you, if you lost your head’, my neighbour assured me. Turns out he’s not only big and fat, he’s a liar.”

The woman placed her head on his pillow, and sat her body down in his chair. Dried blood caked the collar of her blue dress and stained her chest.

“W-Well,” he stammered. “Y-you’ve not exact-exactly lost your head. It’s s-s-sitting on my pil-pillow.”

“Moot point.”

Reginald edged so far back he fell out of the bed. His head thudded against the bedside table and his elbow jarred against the floorboards. Space distorted, making the door seem miles not inches away. Feet shuffled as she circled the bed. Sad eyes looked down at him.

“He did the same thing,” she said. “Fell with a plop. Well his head did anyway.”

“W-What do you want with me?”

Though he hated shaving, he preferred his head attached to his neck. He liked to think of it as something other than a quirk. She offered him her hand, and being a gentleman, he accepted it.

“Sorry about the blood.”

“N-not a problem,” he said, wiping his hand down his pyjama top. “M-may I ask if it is your or his blood.”

“His, of course. Nobody chops off their head wearing their best. Will you help me?”

“I don’t know what you w-want me to do.”

His fingers gripped his neck, as if afraid she was about to pull an axe from beneath her skirt. She giggled at his reaction. She bent forward and pressed her hands to her lips to stifle her hiccups.

“How do you speak without the proper bits connected?”

“Magic, I guess. Shouldn’t you be more concerned that I’m dead and doing anything?”

“It does unnerve me, I cannot deny that. Though, you seem amiable enough and if you wanted to chop off my head you’d have done it already.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I spent a few hours trying to convince Bert we should be together, but he wouldn’t stop screaming. Well, not until I chopped off his head. I didn’t expect it to kill him.”

“So now you want to be my wife.”

“Goodness no, you’re so ugly I wouldn’t even if you buried your head up your butt. I like to be clear about these things, unlike Bert. I require your services as a marionette manipulator.”

“A what?”

“I’ve seen you playing with puppets in your back garden. I have binoculars. You are excellent at making the dead things move.”

“They’re not dead, they’re dolls.”

“Are they alive?”

“No.”

“I rest my case.”


__________

Bert Brocklebank lived in an ordinary terrace, on an ordinary street, with a view of the graveyard he very much wanted to be buried in. When mad Liza dislodged his head from his neck, he knew instinctively to play dead. He was in the midst of sewing his head back on—his hobby was taxidermy—when the back door opened.

“You naughty, naughty beautiful man,” she said. She leapt up, clapped her hands and dropped her head in the process. Her skull smashed like a dropped pumpkin. Her body collapsed to the floor as dead as it should have been four days earlier.

The thin man who accompanied her picked up her body and slung it over his shoulder, closing the door as he left. Bert watched from his bedroom window as the man attached strings to Liza’s arms and legs and sat her down for a lover’s picnic.

__________


Catherine J. Gardner is a writer of all things odd. You can find her stories online at Arkham Tales, Three Crow Press and Every Day Fiction. She also has stories forthcoming in Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Dead Souls, Sand, Necrotic Tissue and Space & Time. You can find her on the web at http://fright-fest.blogspot.com/ and at http://catephoenix.livejournal.com/