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“It’s a Dog-Eat-Chicken World Out There” Short Story by Michael M. Dewitt Jr.

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“Pop, there are some good dogs out there, the kind of dogs that go to heaven one day, but that dog ain’t one of them.”

I said those prophetic words to my father the day he rescued the troublesome stray from the animal shelter—paroled would be a better word—but little did I know the full extent of the trouble ahead. The dog in question was now firmly detained inside a cage in the back of Dad’s pickup as we drove to deal with his latest crimes. 

“I needed a good guard dog, and he keeps the foxes, coyotes and burglars away,” Pop had said that day in the dog’s defense, even as the mutt was gnawing up a good electrical cord, urinating on my tires and looking for a garden hose to eat.

  “He also keeps away the delivery man, the mail lady, and the Girl Scouts selling cookies,” I had retorted. 

Butch came into our lives rather abruptly, kind of like an ominous growth that suddenly appears on your backside, and I was itching to have him removed. Unfortunately, Pop was a lover of almost all animals. Any stray that showed up on his farm got a cot and three square meals a day, no background check needed, no questions asked. He even liked cats, that’s how bad it was.

Of course, my dog and family pet, Barkley, took up with Butch right way. He was always one to succumb to peer pressure and follow the wrong crowd. Soon, Butch had Barkley out all hours of the night, chasing skirts and cars, and hanging out with a pack of other unsavory felons. Before we knew it, all the unprotected maidens along Speed Limit Road became “great with pup.” Phone calls began pouring in from the owners of the dishonored lady dogs, demanding child support from the tramp or his owner.

Then the killings started. 

Reports began circulating around the neighborhood of missing, dead, and partially eaten chickens. For a while it was a mystery to everyone but me, but eventually one of the neighbors recorded video evidence from a home security camera and took it to the proper authorities. Sure enough, right there in black and white, was Butch, inside the man’s chicken pen with a hen in his mouth, while my idiot dog was standing there as the lookout, grinning and looking directly at the camera, his fluorescent orange collar leaving no doubt the accomplice was Barkley. It was like watching a Netflix true crime documentary where the accused gets caught red handed on tape. I made a mental note to buy him a new blue collar later in hopes of plausible deniability. 

For those of you who don’t know the frontier code of rural South Carolina, there is no mercy for a varmint that dares kill and eat a live chicken, especially a good, productive laying hen. My late Granny, bless her Southern heart, once “whupped” a chicken-tasting dog so bad that I confessed to eating the bird myself just to save him. Both the dog and I sat in church that next Sunday and took Jesus as our Lord and Savior. 

As we drove on our apology tour from angry farmer to angry farmer, from henhouse to henhouse, the county animal control officer’s warning still rang in my ears: “Shut that dog up and make amends to the property owners, or I’ll sock you with a hefty fine and have the dog euthanized!”

Even then, Pop still foolishly thought the canine criminal could be rehabilitated. But being an animal lover wasn’t Pop’s only flaw. He also suffered from honesty, with the occasional bout of good citizenship, so he willingly paid every chicken farmer for the dead birds or offered to replace their losses with chickens of his own. 

The final visit was with an old farmer everyone called Possum Pete. Possum was a neighbor no one associated with for reasons of both hygiene and reputation. He was sitting on his porch barefooted and wearing crusty overalls, a shotgun leaning against the wall behind him, waiting for us when we pulled up, dust billowing about from his dirt drive. The house was every bit of a hundred years old and in disrepair, and there was a foul smell to the place that I couldn’t describe at first. 

Surrounding the old farmhouse was the most motley assortment of ragged, run-down animals I had ever seen. There was a one-eyed calico dog, a three-legged hound dog with flies buzzing around him who may or may not have been merely sleeping, a gaunt milk cow with sagging udders and every rib in her body visible, an equally pathetic horse that needed shoeing, a pen full of the wormiest, sloppiest hogs ever to root the earth, and a small flock of mangy, free-range chickens pecking the bare dirt yard. One chicken had a broken wing that pointed almost skyward, a second had multiple pink spots of hide showing where it had been severely henpecked, and another was almost completely bald, as if Possum had plucked its feathers to butcher the animal for supper but changed his mind before throwing it in the pot. Outward appearances aside, in terms of meat on the bone you could probably butcher the whole flock and barely have enough meat for a chicken salad sandwich, and it would probably kill half of them to pass a decent-sized egg. 

“Pop, I think you’re in luck,” I whispered before we climbed from the truck. “I don’t think those sickly, scrawny chickens are worth more than a couple dollars apiece.”

“That the livestock murderer you got back there?” Possum called, reaching for his shotgun. The gun, like everything else about the place, was also an old, ragged affair, held together with wire and duct tape. “He damn sure looks like a cold-blooded chicken killer to me!”

Butch was trying not to make eye contact with the angry farmer, or stare at the free-range chickens for too long. Apparently, that dog was smarter than I gave him credit for.

“Now hold on!” Pop called back; hands raised as we approached. “There’s no need for the gun. I’ve come to make things right and apologize.”

“You’re damn right you’re gonna make things right,” Possum said, spitting on the dirty porch floor. His spittle was brown, but I don’t think he was chewing tobacco. “I talked to me a lawyer, that big shot over in Hampton. He told me that I’m owed some restitution, compensation, and maybe even some reparations. Oh, and he also said something about my emotional infliction and pain and suffering, and I’ve got some actual and punishable damages coming to me, too, or else we gonna have to take this matter up before the Supreme Court there in town.”

“Hold on now,” Pop stammered. “There’s no need to get the courts and any crooked lawyers involved. You just tell me how much you paid for those chickens, or give me a fair market value of what they’re worth, and I’ll write you a check right now. Plus, I’ll throw in a few of my best egg layers just as my way of saying I’m sorry. We can settle this whole business right now, and I promise you it won’t happen again.”

An awkward silence filled the yard of the farmstead, save for the occasional cluck of the surviving chickens and growl of empty animal bellies, as the old farmer thought this over. Maybe it was the way the sunlight struck the porch, but I could swear that Possum’s yellowish, red-rimmed eyes kind of glittered and shined with some furtive, hidden intelligence, or was that pure evil I saw there?

“Fair market value, you say?” Possum asked with a sly grin, before putting his head down in renewed grief. “Well, that scoundrel right there killed 12 of my best chickens. My show chickens, at that!”

I found it strange that Butch had killed such a large and even number of chickens—an even dozen—but I kept my mouth shut. Pop had agreed to pay for all this, so I let him handle the negotiations. My dog was merely an accomplice, as it were, not the ringleader and primary suspect. 

“Show chickens?” Pop asked.

“You know, the kind you take down to the county fair and win a blue ribbon with. Yep, six of them poor lost souls were top-dollar, full-blooded chickens with papers! Struck down in their prime! I probably shouldn’t take less than $25 bucks a head for those.”

I took another glance around the yard at the mangy animal misfits. Most of them needed feeding, doctoring, and worming, and a couple needed rescuing and rehoming. There were a few that looked like they might not survive to see sundown. That three-legged dog hadn’t moved since we got there, so I was pretty sure by then that it needed a hole in the ground. But I sure didn’t see any blue-ribbon candidates.

“Papers?” I asked, astounded. “You mean like when you have a AKC registered dog with papers?”

“25 bucks!” My father blurted, more to the point. “Right now, I can buy chickens at the market all day long for only five or ten bucks!”

“And then there’s that half dozen of my heritage chickens your monster of a dog ripped to pieces,” Possum continued. “I’ll have you know those birds were descended from The Original Chicken!”

I had a feeling that this was about to get ugly and out of hand.

“The original chicken?” Pop asked, likely afraid to know the answer.

“Yep, them chickens that your dog kilt and ate came from a straight bloodline all the way back to the very first chicken that came over here on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock,” Possum didn’t miss a beat. By then he was grinning a mostly toothless grin from the porch while trying to feign grief and outrage at the same time, which is not an easy feat. “I’m no history scientist, but I’d be willing to bet before she got on that boat that chicken used to lay eggs for the Queen of England herself! Hell, for all I know that hen might have come descended from the pair that was holed up on Noah’s Ark! My granddaddy used to have papers on all that, but you know, Sherman burned them up when he burnt all those courthouses during the Civil War, so you’ll have to take my word for it.”

“I’ma have to ask at least $50 bucks a piece for those dead birds,” Possum added solemnly, shaking his head in mock grief, “But then I still have all this mental infliction and painful suffering to deal with.”

Pop’s face was turning a shade of purple. I wasn’t sure if it was anger, stress, a cardiac event, or just the strain of doing so much math in his head. I had stopped multiplying the math out after the first batch. I was hoping that he had brought his nitro pills for his heart.  

“But if you think all that’s too much,” Possum concluded with an undisguised, unapologetic smirk, “I can stop by and see the animal control officer on my way to the courthouse.”

By the time we pulled out of the driveway, I was beginning to suspect that Pop wasn’t that much of an animal lover anymore, and shooting that dog began to look better and better with each dollar added. But knowing Pop, he would let the felon off with probation and house arrest. We drove home in strained silence for a while before Pop finally spoke, mouth full of heart pills. 

“You can’t really blame the dog, you know. Dogs are predators, carnivores, and it’s their instinct to hunt and kill and eat things. I reckon it’s the way God made ‘em. And sometimes these things just happen.”

I looked in the mirror at the dumb dog hanging his head out of the bed of the truck. Butch was almost smiling, ears flapping in the wind, happy to be alive, to see another day and probably eat another chicken. I glanced back at the dashboard to the nitro pill bottle and Pop’s checkbook that were both just a little lighter than before. 

It’s a dog-eat-chicken world out there, but somehow, I don’t think canines are the only predators an honest man has to worry about.   

Michael M. DeWitt Jr. is a multiple-award-winning journalist, longtime editor of the 144-year-old The Hampton County Guardian, author of four books, including Images of America – Hampton County, Wicked Hampton County and Fall of the House of Murdaugh, and host of the Wicked South Podcast.  DeWitt’s work has been published in print and online around Gannett’s nationwide USA TODAY Network, and he has appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS’s 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and Netflix documentaries. 

  As a humorist, DeWitt’s award-winning Southern humor newspaper column, “Southern Voices, Southern Stories,” was published in newspapers from Cape Cod to northern California, and he has been a regular contributor for South Carolina Wildlife magazine, Sporting Classics magazine, and its online counterpart, Sporting Classics Daily.

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“Jack of All Trades, Revenant” Flash Fiction by Moss Springmeyer

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Nobody had seen him since the fall. After sheepherding, he’d come by Crooked Creek Ranch to bathe and leave his summer’s pay with my grandparents for safekeeping; had hooked up the field cultivator to spread and work the summer’s worth of chicken manure into a small alkali flat that was a thriving hay meadow in my grandfather’s mind’s eye; had been seen loafing and sipping on Picon Punch at the bar in the Basque restaurant in Mica; had stopped over at the Shooting Star Ranch to shine as a deft roper during their autumn branding and arranged to winter there in exchange for maintaining their tack and harness. As usual in the fall, he had scooped up his prospecting gear from the Dreaming Lion Ranch and headed south. That was the last anybody had seen of him. 

He would usually have been back as October’s warm spell, Indian Summer, was cooling, before bitter cold and deep snow were serious risks in the mountains. Here in the valley, he would set trap lines for the winter. Maybe he had sensed bad winter coming and headed south on the eternal search for gold (or golden solitude with no responsibilities), far enough south that the Sonoran desert held him, ever promising but never delivering, all winter long. But, then, he would have drifted back to the Beckworth Meadows by April in time for lambing, spring round-ups, and deep disking the vegetable gardens. Yet he did not come. People began to wonder if the early snow had caught him and the Tormentoso winter had devoured him.

Then, a very old pickup truck rattled and clattered up to the Crooked Creek ranch house and out tumbled a disreputable looking bundle with a wild bushy beard and an unkempt mane. A pick and rucksack and a fat, 6’ square object (later revealed to be a cattail quilt) spilled out after him. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, futilely smoothed the mane, strode to the door, knocked, and then bowed respectfully to my grandmother. She stood stock still, then greeted him stirring warmth with exasperation. She jerked her head sideways. Obediently, Luke walked around the house to the patio facing east.

He set a wooden stool beside the galvanized metal washtub, then placed another nearby. He began shedding fabric, furs, feathers and cattail fuzz. Even stripped down, he still sported an unfamiliar fur. There was a terrible stink, but maybe he was used to it. He sat in sunlight, absorbed in simply being. He was the scrawniest man I had ever seen.

My grandmother came out in a canvas  apron and perched on the other stool. Luke hung his head and offered her his left arm — looking close you could see that his fur was not natural, but rather involved a ruin of weirdly dark and hairy waffle-cloth long underwear. Waffle cloth is normally a light oatmeal color, with bright narrow raised edges around square hollows, the squares about half an inch on a side. But not this version. 

She looked at his arm and then up into his eyes and shouted, “I’ve never seen a man go without a bath so long that his body hair’s grown through his Long Johns!” His body hair had wound its way through the waffle cloth, encasing him in an outer skin that was both him and not him.

With firm, deft, graceful movements, she began clipping the wiry hairs down close to the cloth. Remonstrating and occasionally expostulating — I could not hear the words — she eased the first two fingers of her left hand under the cuff of the sleeve, working it a little loose. She drew out a pair of nail scissors with the right hand, slid them in, and snipped. One square of the waffle cloth was detached. Relentlessly, but unhurriedly, she worked her way around that wrist. Luke regarded it with bemusement, blew softly on his newly bare wrist, and smiled. 

She snipped and lifted her way around the next row of squares, then the next. Onward, she worked her way up from the wrist, first clipping the hairs on the outside and then working underneath the fabric. Having trimmed the hairs on the outside meant that on some of the squares,  the hairs slid through when she lifted the cloth with the scissors. Then, with a bigger scissors, she cut off the fabric. 

On the stubborn squares, she eased the nail scissors under the fabric. She snipped the hairs one by one to free the cloth.

She and Luke began to sing. In some places, the fabric disintegrated as she worked. Shadows glided from the west. Finally Luke stood, naked as a baby, the long underwear in rags about his feet, some sores and angry patches on his skin. 

Cowboys who had been moving furniture during the weekly mopping of the house’s concrete floor staggered out, carrying huge kettles to pour into the washtub. My grandmother returned to the house. Luke folded his skinny frame into the tub and sat there for half an hour. Then he grasped the scrub brush, worked up a good foam on the soap, and scrubbed — wherever the skin was whole — from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. Then a dip to rinse. My grandmother returned, donned rubber gloves, dipped a washcloth in a bucket of clean water and carefully cleaned injuries and sores. After he toweled himself off, she set to work with the medicines. As the day waned, he was decorated, almost tattooed, with purple gentian violet and vermilion  mercurochrome on his sores and injuries, a wild and savage look, but recognizably human.

“Thank you Ma’am, Bless you for your kindness. Never again, Ma’am,” he promised. “Welcome back,” she said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, even if not a pretty one.” They laughed.

.Moss Springmeyer strives to express the world (s) in a grain of sand. Moss’s resourceful, ageing werewolf stars in  “Fur-Break”, Spring 2024 Altered Reality (p. 16).   https://www.alteredrealitymag.com/spring-2024-issue/ . “Choirboy”  probes the glory and cruelty of a very special gift in Story Block 2, Spring 2024 The Green Silk Journal https://www.thegsj.com/current-issue-spring-.html.

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“The Last Thing I Said” Flash Fiction by Niles Reddick

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My sister told me my mother had been crying off and on all day. Her ex-aunt-in-law hit a deer about six in the morning and was killed. She probably hadn’t seen the deer until it was too late because of the thick fog like pea soup. There were no skid marks, only tire tracks off the road, through the shallow ditch, up the embankment, and into a stand of pines. 

Aunt Gracie (we still referred to ex’s as aunts and uncles) was on her way to the bread factory, a place that emanated a yeast smell throughout the region, and where she’d worked for thirty-five years, not because of the pay, but because of the health care. The large doe had destroyed the front end of her Impala, was thrown up on the hood and went through the windshield, and poor Aunt Gracie never stood a chance. 

All that detail had been shared with mother, along with the fact that Gracie was at the funeral home waiting on her only adopted daughter to drive in to confirm arrangements. Fortunately, Gracie had a funeral policy that covered everything, or she wouldn’t have had a casket, funeral, or an eternal resting place at the cemetery. In fact, it wasn’t clear what would have happened had she not had the insurance because her daughter couldn’t afford to pay it being a single mother, her working and trying to make ends meet as best she could. Perhaps, they would have simply cremated her, tossed her ashes out behind the funeral home by the swelling mound of soil from dug graves.

“Mother, why are you so upset? She divorced your uncle thirty years ago and moved off. He remarried and had children by his second wife”.

“Because the last thing I said was ‘Get the hell out of my house, you crazy bitch.’”

“Why in the world would you have said that?”

“Because your brother was a toddler and bit her daughter. Then, that crazy woman bit your brother. A grown woman reacting like that. She should have known better. I would have popped him for biting her daughter, but I didn’t even have time.  Then she said to your brother, ‘Well, how do you like that? That’ll teach not to bite somebody.’ He was a toddler for Pete’s sake.”

“Well, I’ll admit that’s a little off, but why are you feeling guilty about it when it was forty years ago?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry for my behavior, but a mother is going to look after her child, no matter what.”

“I’m sure she moved on and forgave you.”

“Well, knowing Gracie, she forgave me, but she never forgot it.”

“You going to the funeral?”

“I doubt it. I’d have to rearrange my teeth cleaning and my hair appointment. You just about can’t rearrange because they are so busy.”

“I know.”

Niles Reddick is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over five hundred  publications including The Saturday Evening Post, New Reader Magazine, Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, Citron Review, Hong Kong Review, and Vestal Review. He is an eight-time Pushcart nominee and three-time Best Micro nominee . His website: http://nilesreddick.com/. 

Connect with him on social media: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/niles.reddick.9

Instagram: nilesreddick@memphisedu

Twitter: @niles_reddick

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niles-reddick-0759b09b/

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“The Wind on the Wires” Short Story by Eolas Pellor

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Jimmy watched Anne coming in from her ride, leading Albion by the reins. He leaned against the side of the old truck and watched her, still not quite believing she’d picked him. You’d never guess she was a city-girl, to see her ride. Just like you’d never guess that Jimmy had grown up in the shadow of steel mills, breathing in the sulphurous reek from the coke ovens night and day. They’d both grown up down East, a long way from Alberta, and she hadn’t wanted to move out here, so far from her family.

They’d broken up over it for a while, when he first came out West. He thought she’d never join him. After a while, she came, though; he’d saved up and sent her down the train fare, hoping, but not really believing, she’d come. She did. Love is like that, Jimmy thought.

“How’d the ride go?” he asked her, lifting a last bale of hay onto the back of the pickup. 

“It was good,” Anne answered. “There was a coyote out over the ridge. She had her pups out for a romp.” Nothing would convince Anne that coyotes were vermin, and Jimmy didn’t mind that, even if none of the people round here understood. It was just Anne seeing worth where others failed to; she’d realised there was something more to him, as well, when no one else had.

He drove toward the barn, slowly, while Anne rode alongside him. The setting sun glinted off her blonde hair and Jimmy wondered what she’d look like riding nude. His erection was instant and uncomfortable and he was glad it had subsided by the time they got back to the barn. 

While Anne gave Albion a quick rub-down, Jimmy tossed the bales of hay off the truck. By the time he’d hauled the first one up to the loft, she was beside him, and put her hand on the rope. They pulled together, and one by one, the last bales were stored.

“Isn’t it late in the year for coyote pups?” Jimmy asked her as they walked back to the house. Jimmy didn’t care what the answer was, really, he just liked to listen to Anne talk.

“I think it happens sometimes,” Anne said. “Maybe it’s a second litter. It was a good year; maybe there were enough mice and prairie dogs to feed them.” He watched her mouth form the sounds and thought about kissing her lips.

Anne had left the stew simmering since lunchtime; the aroma filled the kitchen as they came inside. After he washed up, Jimmy set the table while Anne laddled a generous helping onto his plate. Her own didn’t hold half as much.

“Are you feeling OK?” Jimmy asked, as he took a biscuit from the pile in the middle of the table.

“I’m fine,” Anne asked, but there was something in her voice that made him look at her more closely. She smiled at him and he could see her resemblance to the photograph on the wall. It was a picture of a silent movie star – Ann Dunn who had been famous back in the early days of Hollywood. Anne was named after her. Jimmy had never seen any of her movies, and Anne had told him that many of them were lost. Still, it was something to be married to a star’s grandniece.

“I called Dad earlier,” Anne said, pushing the food around on her plate. Jimmy suddenly felt unsettled; he often worried that Doug had never forgiven him for marrying his youngest daughter. Anne always told him that was silly; their elopement was long forgiven, if not forgotten. 

“How are they doing?” he asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.  Wherever Anne’s father was mentioned, his voice took a defensive edge. That was ridiculous, though. Jimmy had proven he could take care of Anne to Doug, to everyone.

“Pretty good,” Anne said. “You’re not mad, are you? I know it’s expensive. I just really needed to hear him and Mom.” She got up and fetched Jimmy a beer from the fridge while she spoke. Her hips moving under the tight, faded denim, distracted Jimmy. She didn’t take one for herself, but he was thinking about other things and didn’t notice. 

“He said Mom was wondering when we’d give them some grandkids.” Jimmy was about to say something flippant, when he glanced over at Anne. Her face was tilted down, as if she was looking at her plate, but he caught the flash of her blue eyes looking up at him through her bangs. 

She was hanging on his answer, though he didn’t know why. He took a pull from the bottle, then scooped up a forkful of stew, while he thought about what to say. 

“Aren’t we still kind of young to be having kids?” It wasn’t true, really. He was going to be 24 soon; Anne would be 20 in the Spring, but still looked like the 16 year-old he’d met working at the drive-in. 

“Not really,” Anne said. “My friend Karen has three kids already.” 

“Yeah, I know,” Jimmy replied. Karen had gotten pregnant with her first before she finished high school. When Anne dropped out to marry Jimmy, Doug had been furious that it was the same thing. It wasn’t though; Anne had made him wait until they were married. 

“I just think that we should get more settled first, you know?” he said.

It had seemed such a good idea to get married. Well, it was, but they’d rushed, Jimmy thought. He hadn’t got a real job, and Annie hadn’t finished her diploma. After a week their savings ran out and Anne had to move back with her folks. Jimmy had come out here but, to be honest, he’d been a bit of a jerk, leaving her behind. At the time, knowing his cousin had a job waiting for him out here had seemed important.

“You’ve been managing the ranch for a year now,” Anne replied. “We’ve got the whole house to ourselves.” His cousin owned the ranch, and another one besides, now. He’d given Jimmy a job and, bit by bit, Jimmy had worked his way up to manager; not bad for a guy who never finished high school.

“I know,” Jimmy agreed, grudgingly. “But, we’re still just kids. We should have some fun.” He wanted to say he couldn’t imagine Anne with babies when, almost at once, he saw it in his mind. It wasn’t a bad idea, but he didn’t feel ready; he still wanted to enjoy their time together. Kids were such a distraction; surely Anne could understand that.

“I guess,” Anne said, her tone flat. That was never a good sign. She picked up her plate and took it over to the sink. She’d barely touched anything. The phone rang, two shorts and a long; it was for them, but Anne made no move toward it. Jimmy hurried over to pick it up. 

“Macard residence,” he said. The link crackled a little; the wind on the wires made it do that, sometimes. The voice on the other end sounded very distant.

“Is that Jimmy? It’s Doc Nicholson here.”

“Yes Doc,” Jimmy answered, puzzled why Doc was calling. “What’s up?” He was distracted enough by Anne’s behaviour to miss the joke.

“You tell that little wife of yours her test came back,” Doc Nicholson said. “The answer is ‘yes.’ Congratulations.” Mystified, Jimmy set the phone black in its cradle. He turned to ask Anne what that was all about, but the screen door was swinging shut behind her. Jimmy followed her out on the porch. 

She was sitting on the double rocker, crying. It reminded him of the night they split up; Anne had cried then, and so had he, but not in front of her. When she refused to move out to Alberta with him he’d been certain that getting her diploma was more important to Anne than he was. But that wasn’t it at all. 

“Why are you crying? What’s going on, Anne?” Jimmy asked. “The Doc said the answer was ‘yes’, but what’s the question?” She looked up at him and shook her head. Jimmy sat down and pulled her into his arms. For a moment she struggled as if she wanted to get away, to get some space, but then she relaxed and lay against him.

“If you think I’m crying now, you should have seen me when I saw those coyote pups,” Anne said. “It was like they were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

Suddenly, Jimmy knew the answer. She lay her head on his shoulder, and he stroked her long hair, as the twilight deepened. One of the coyotes howled at the rising moon. Then its mate joined in.

Love is like that.

Eolas says: “My short stories have been published in Grim & Gilded, The Word’s Faire, Pulp Lit, and Agnes and True. My novelette “Party of the Second Part” appeared in Raiders of the Lost Plot: the 2024 Fark Fiction Anthology. My website is: https://sites.google.com/view/eolaspellorwriter/home“

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“Mushroom Searching” Flash Fiction by Zary Fekete

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These days there are many books, many pages, all promising, but the right way to begin is to ask grandmother. Which grandmother? Choose one. They are all correct and never lie. Nagyi or Nagyika or Mamikam. From Pest or Dunantul or the Alfold, they each have their secrets. They were all young once. Their routes led them from little country hamlets and acres of chipped Communist blocs, down through the decades, past wall after wall, papered with propaganda, each sign promising something just beyond reach, not quite true. But the mushroom recipe doesn’t lie. It just requires the right path.

Choose favorable weather. Just after a rain followed by a humid sun, hidden away in the shadows of the forest. Not a stir of breeze among the wet trunks. The only sound, the drip drip of soaked leaves and the tiny scurrying of beetles and ants among the underbrush. Bring along a basket lined with embroidered cloth for collection and grandfather’s sharp knife for exploring beneath rotting logs, make sure you aren’t bitten by something waiting in the soaking darkness. Wear the right clothes. Tuck your tights into stockings and tie petticoats around knees. Wrap each leg carefully so nothing can be caught in the grasping, greedy branches. Walk carefully. Hold hands. Pick a partner. Step where she stepped. 

Watch the ground carefully. Remember the legend of the boy who wouldn’t share his bread while he walked with his friends through the woods. He had a full mouth every time they looked back at him, so he spit out each guilty mouthful. The bread-droppings left a trail. They transformed into mushrooms, and that’s why when you find one there are always more nearby.

Once your basket is full bring it to the village examiner. Some mushrooms are safe, but some carry poisonous secrets. Some promise succor but silently wound. Some sing sweet songs but echo with a hollow gong. All taste sweet and feathery on first bite, but some have dark pools in their past. Bring home the good ones, but throw the rest into the stream and watch them float away.

Finally, prepare your soup. Mix the mushrooms with the right broth. Thin-sliced for clear soup. Thick-chunked for heavy stew. The mushrooms will take on the flavor of their companions. In this way they make good neighbors. They don’t betray secrets. They keep what is given to them. They protect what is beneath them. The preserve the family lineage deep below the earth.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social

This piece was originally published in Papers Publishing journal.

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