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by Katta Hules

with my heart on my sleeve
Wendy Brolga via Creative Commons

Bruises cover your arms like the smudges of red and purple lipstick around your mouth. Your fingers shake around the brown glass bottle. The Xs drawn on your hands washed off enough that the bartender didn’t even ask for ID. You’re glad, if there was ever a night you needed the alcohol, this is it.

No one knows who you are. You’re just another girl alone at the bar. The band plays behind you, some sort of caustic electropop. The volume makes the stool vibrate under you and another night you might find it pleasant. Tonight it makes you nauseous.

A man sits next to you. You cross your legs, the faint friction of your tights reminding you of the abrasions they hide. He looks at you, noticing the bruises even in the dim light of the bar.

“You okay?”

You shrug. “It’s done.”

He nods and pats your knee, ignoring your wince. “The first is always the worst.”

You take another swig and inspect the blood under your nails. Even your fingers feel sore. “It’s over. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

He grins and pulls you into a one armed hug. “That’s my girl.”

“Yeah, well.” Your lips twitch. “You should’ve seen the other guy.”

Katta HulesKatta Hules is an artist and a writer currently based in California. She is an Editor at TUBE. Magazine, and a freelance journalist for Arcadia Weekly. She is in the throes working on her first novel.

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by Danielle Dreger

Lorelei (age 4)

Project 365
Alan Kleina Mendes via Creative Commons
  • Fix spaceship with Jenna
  • Run through sprinkler with Jenna
  • Dance party with Jenna

Lorelei (age 10)

  • Finish Jenna’s present
  • Buy backpack like Jenna’s
  • Take Babysitting course

Lorelei (age 13)

  • English essay on Romeo and Juliet
  • Kiss a boy — Adam? Marcus? Steven? Adam?
  • Buy jeans like Jenna’s

Lorelei (age 17)

  • Finish applications/essays
  • Lose virginity – Adam? Marcus? Steven? Marcus?
  • Get highlights like Jenna’s

Lorelei (age 21)

  • Internship at law firm
  • Break up with Marcus for Steven?
  • See psychic

Lorelei (age 26)

  • Pass Bar Exam
  • Forgive Jenna and Steve?

Lorelei (age 28)

  • Get fitted for dress
  • Write wedding toast for Jenna and Steve

Lorelei (age 35)

  • Apply for Brazil visa with Jenna
  • Get Brazilian wax

Lorelei (age 37)

  • Pay last student loan/quit job
  • Borrow boots from Jenna
  • Meet Adam for cocktails

Lorelei (age 38)

  • Buy prenatal vitamins
  • Finish writing vows (and Adam’s)
  • Present for Jenna

Lorelei (age 55)

  • Sign up for triathlon with Jenna
  • Add Adam Jr. to car insurance
  • Hire divorce attorney

Lorelei (age 67)

  • Travel to Nepal with Jenna
  • Book club pick
  • Plan Adam Jr.’s rehearsal dinner
  • Start chemo

Lorelei (age 89)

  • Eulogy at Jenna’s funeral
  • Miss Jenna terribly
  • Miss Jenna horribly
  • Miss Jenna dreadfully

Danielle Dreger-BabbittDanielle Dreger wears many (baseball) hats. By day she is a teen librarian north of Seattle and by night she is a YA writer of stories set in the humid hell of Central Florida. Danielle spent her formative years in the Tampa Bay area driving into neighborhood signs, breaking curfew, and writing bad poetry before moving to Boston to become a librarian. She now hangs her Tampa Bay Rays hat in Seattle. Her short stories have appeared in Stratus, Driftless Review and Fiction Fix. She can be found online at www.danielledreger.com and Twitter @danielledregerb.

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Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So how do you get a notoriously slow reader to rip through a 260-page book in under a day, in the midst of a busy week planning for a birthday and a party and putting the finishing touches on a mile-long, post-move to-do list?

I guess you write like Lindy West does.

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by Davian Aw

100313TricycleGardens-11
Maggie McCain via Creative Commons

Tom finished the injection and watched her face with bated breath, searching Mara’s lifeless eyes for a flicker of awareness. He grasped her hand, hoping for warmth, but his wife’s body remained as cold and still as it had been since the day she died.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Thirty-five. Rain pattered on the tent of the makeshift laboratory standing stubbornly amidst the sleeping graves.

Tom pulled away with a wretched sob. Fifteen attempts. Fifteen failures. He let out a yell and swung his arm at all his useless, useless science. Test tubes and beakers crashed to the ground. Solutions bled into the soil. A year he had worked, since they’d got the diagnosis; a year, and all of it come to naught.

He collapsed by the coffin and gripped its edge in trembling desperation.

“Mara,” he begged. “Wake up. Please. Come back to me, Mara, please, please…”

She did not respond. Tom swallowed down tears. He touched her face in final caress and left a quavering kiss upon the cold skin.

He pulled the heavy lid back over the coffin and picked up the shovel to bury his wife.

Mara still did not move nor make a sound.

She couldn’t. But she was trying.

She was trying very, very, hard to scream.

Davian AwDavian Aw’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Stone Telling, Star*Line and Plasma Frequency. He lives in Singapore, and is the proud owner of a tomato plant with no tomatoes on it. Some of his published writing is linked over at https://davianaw.wordpress.com/writing/

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Signal to Noise
Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you’re thinking about reading this book, the first thing I recommend is that you check out either this Spotify playlist (created by your humble reviewer), and/or this YouTube one and familiarize yourself with some of the songs featured in the novel. In fact, you should probably do that even if you’re not going to read the book because it’s a very good soundtrack.

Anyway, the reason for the homework is that Ms Moreno-Garcia’s coming of age fantasy novel is set in part against the mixtape-and-vinyl music scene in the 80s. The book doesn’t require a comprehensive knowledge of the songs mentioned within (and you can tell from the length of the playlists that there is a lot of music featured), but certain scenes will make more sense if you’re familiar with key tracks. Being familiar with “En Algun Lugar” by Duncan Dhu, for example, will give a better insight into protagonist Meche’s state of mind during the 80s flashback sequences that take up half the novel. Knowing the melody and lyrics of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” will speak volumes about the relationship between Meche’s parents and crystalize a particular scene late in the novel. That sort of thing.

Because music in the book isn’t just a bunch of pop cultural references tossed in to give Meche a memorable quirk, it informs the book’s magical element. Once Meche learns she can use records and dance and music to cast spells, she draws her two outcast friends Daniela and Sebastian into a growing obsession with overcoming their teenage difficulties. This arc is the basis for the 80s sequences, all of which inform and tie into the present (or recent past I suppose, as it’s set in 2009) where Meche finally returns to Mexico City after a long absence to attend to her father’s funeral. It’s worth noting that neither the 1988-89 nor the 2009 segments are necessarily stronger than the other. Sometimes in split timeline novels one or the other will be more interesting which gives the other a filler quality where the reader is impatiently waiting to get back to “the good part.” Not so with Signal to Noise.

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by Dominic Daley

The Year I Made My Comeback
Thomas Hawk via Creative Commons

Eric gasped awake. He had been sleeping. Was it sleep? He remembered his arm sliding down the edge of his hospital bed sheets, the IV tugging at his wrist.

He was at the edge of a small blue room. In front of him, a staircase disappeared upwards, and a wooden table stood to his left. Eric gathered himself, got to his feet and saw that there was a sheet of paper on the tabletop, with words inscribed upon it in cursive and a ballpoint pen to one side. He looked closer.

Consider your life,

it read.

Ask yourself:

Did you do all you wanted?

Was there anything you would change?

Was it alright to have been you?

Please write any recommendations you can think of in the box below so that we can improve the experience for others in the future.

We appreciate your feedback.

Eric considered a moment. Then he crossed out the first and the last questions and wrote beneath the second:

A little less third-period maths. A few more friends.

Better brakes on mountain bikes.

And an easier way to shave without getting spots on your chin.

Then he took the stairs.

Dominic DaleyDominic Daley is a final year student from the U.K. His work has appeared in Songs of Eretz Poetry, Urban Fantasist – Grievous Angel, MicroHorror, Hellnotes, and 365tomorrows. He has a twitter (@APierAppears) and a WordPress.

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by R. S. Pyne

Eva looked terrible.

morning
M&S Weiss via Creative Commons

“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked, looking at her puffy, red-rimmed eyes and haggard features. She had always been so beautiful, expertly made up and not a hair out of place. In the early days of friendship, I was jealous of her, envying the fact that she appeared to glide serenely though everyday life. She was the swan on the surface of the water, but I felt more like the legs paddling like hell beneath it.

Everything seemed so easy for her. When I got to know her better, she trusted me enough to let her guard down – to show the real Eva who had worked so hard to mask her insecurity. If anything, she had even less self confidence than I did but she did a better job of hiding it.

She muttered an excuse but I saw the thick bandages on both wrists – clear evidence she had tried to take the easy way out.

“Let me help,” I said. She stared out of the window as if expecting the Grim Reaper to make a house call.

She wanted oblivion but I refused to give it to her.

R. S. Pyne is a short story writer/research micropalaeontologist from West Wales. Previous credits include BĂŞte Noire, Albedo One, Aurora Wolf, Neo-opsis, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Christmas is dead..Again – a Zombie Anthology and others.

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by Anna Hawkins

“Long ago, mankind walked the earth beneath a young sun, and we prospered. But no more.” The Emperor stared into a holocorder, his face expressionless. His image was being projected to every receiver on the planet.

“Our transports will be leaving soon.” The Emperor took a deep breath. He was helpless to save these people. The Council’s breeding programs would not allow it. He turned away from the holocorder, listening to a voice muttering offscreen.

“My Lord Emperor,” the voice said, “Your transport is waiting.”

I’ve betrayed them, the Emperor thought as he turned back to the holocorder.

rno via Creative Commons

“I am so sorry,” he whispered. A tear traced its way down his cheek. “I would not have it be this way.” He balled his hands into fists to stop their shaking. “I would take you all with me.” His tears were flowing freely now. Men and women across the Earth cried with him, in sadness and in anger. The offscreen voice spoke again.

“My Lord! It’s time.”

The Emperor’s face hardened, but his eyes remained wet. People from Council-approved genetic lineages would flee aboard their interstellar transport, leaving billions behind. They might find a new planet to call home, but was it worth this?

The Emperor stood and saluted as the broadcast ended.

Anna Hawkins is a graduate student at the University of Houston working on a Ph.D. in plant community ecology. In her spare time, she likes to write science fiction, fill her walls with her own paintings, and take care of her collection of weird houseplants. She’s currently working on her first novel.

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by Monika McGreal Viola

Mad Hat Variation 6
Michelle Robinson via Creative Commons

The remembrance of time not yet passed pulls her under as she laments the loss of her youth. She picks at her cuticles and scrolls down her Twitter, keening for the moments in the days before. And the coldness of the people makes her angry, and she mouths mutely to those frosted life forms, Do You Not Know How You Behave, can you not melt out your hearts, please give back to the world the empathy it has lost… her hollow howl, again and again and againagainagain, hastening the thud and flickering the eyelid, and she’s swallowed whole, hole holee holeee, falling down into it, Alice before she’s met the Mad Hatter, the Mad Hatter before he’s accepted his bipolar disorder, sinking lower together, sipping their tea and eating their crumpets, all the time asking the world to find some balance, to breathe hard into the plastic tube while squeezing with thumb and index finger — please, follow the instructions — puffing and wheezing, each attempt sucking air out of the lukewarm night, driving her dizzy, dizzy like the lecherous lilt of the world as she slides sideways down her seat, lamenting the mornings where problems were contended, where the following of white rabbits ended in triumph over red queens.

Monika McGreal ViolaMonika McGreal Viola’s work has appeared in Hermeneutic Chaos, AZURE, Icarus, Thirteen Ways Magazine, PennUnion, and Common Ties. Her poetry also has been twice shortlisted for the Fish Anthology Poetry Prize. Find her at www.monikamcgrealviola.com

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SirensToday we’re going to dive into a new ironSoap feature meant to help spread the word about new or upcoming books by digging in a little with the authors or contributors on some key storytelling aspects: world-building, character, and editing. Since this is the first such feature—for fantasy anthology Sirens—we have all three being discussed by different contributors to the project.

So what is Sirens? It’s part of Rhonda Parrish’s Magical Menageries anthology series, which also includes Corvidae, Fae, and Scarecrow. She sums it up thusly:

Sirens are beautiful, dangerous, and musical, whether they come from the sea or the sky. Greek sirens were described as part-bird, part-woman, and Roman sirens more like mermaids, but both had a voice that could captivate and destroy the strongest man. The pages of this book contain the stories of the Sirens of old, but also allow for modern re-imaginings, plucking the sirens out of their natural elements and placing them at a high school football game, or in wartime London, or even into outer space.

Sounds great, right? Now let’s check in with a few of the contributors to hear their thoughts on some of those elements of storycraft.

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