The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

Making them women of good carriage.

The raven stood on some sort of dollhouse conveyance, wheeled with spiny bug legs and shrouded in wings. A pill dropped from the polished beak and rolled away.

This is she!

This is she!

The raven pecked at Rima, urging her up. Rima jockeyed herself up off the grass painfully; the cold ground was unkind to old fractures.

“What the fuck are you?!?!” Rima tried to scream at the bird, but her voice was thin, suffocated by stars.

The raven took flight and Rima followed, to a building taller than the others.

Funhouse door!

Funhouse door!

Rima had a suspicion the answers were here. She walked through a door, went inside out. She grabbed Haylee’s hand. The music was not backwards, it was not out of tune, it defied all laws of physics.

At least the mirror maze was somewhat earthly.

But not what was reflected there. It looked like Rima, but it was hideous. Rima dressed in clothes Derek bought, Rima wearing her must-make-Derek-happy contours, Rima’s hair the wheat fields he ran through on idle fingers, or wrapped and leveraged her down stairwells with. Derek’s loss of face lumped out of Rima’s, like Joseph Merrick, an unbirth.

The Rima in that burnished glass was only an extension, a regenerated limb, of Derek.

She ran away, through a maze designed by M.C. Escher, Derek’s Ikea furniture on walls, ceilings, family portraits gone all Dali, Cheshire smiles lipstick-smeared in his favorite Bible Belt pink. She ran through kitchens papered in her drying blood, upended daybeds with muted Haylee dolls arranged precisely. She went topsy-turvy in a sea of suspended remotes, flash drives, Androids more human than she was allowed to be.

Somehow her hand found itself sculpted around wood, a childhood shape. She faced the falsely silvered walls, dared to stare into a pre-fab abyss at her monstrous marriage. Derek looked back, chewed a mouthful of certainty.

Always win.

His fingers found the well-worn garden path to her windpipe, took both of them down to the floor.

The killing floor…

Rima felt Haylee beneath her, heard the muffled crack, like a Thanksgiving turkey being dismantled by hungry hands.

The baseball bat dropped. Haylee squirmed, crawled out with gasps of pain. She picked up the bat, guarding the other arm, its wronged geometry.

If Sarastro does not through you feel

The pain of death…

Derek’s hands held tight; Rima was indeed losing this last fight. Haylee picked up the bat with a tiny scream, brought the bat up and over, down on Derek’s head.

Rasping, Rima crawled out from under his still form, picked up the bat.

With the raven’s wings on backbeat, Rima smashed the mirrors.

Smashed.

Every.

Last.

One.

The carnival was nevermore.

The carnival never was.

At 0233 hours, police responded to reports of an injured juvenile wandering the backroads of a Missouri town, her left arm broken and too much blood, not her own, splattered on her flimsy sundress. But whatever tale she had to tell remained encrypted. Her blue eyes only mirrored back the perplexed expressions of first responders.

In spite of the obscuring damage of a housewife’s desperate rampage,

Cause of death was crushing of cervical vertebrae one through four.

As autopsy reports will show, Haylee’s was the fatal blow,

a complicity none will ever know, from Rima on that killing floor,

who, thanks to wise but purloined counsel of Her Honor Judge Lenore,

will be a victim nevermore.

Another call, at 0552 hours, of a possible D.O.A. Paramedics found signs of life, but also one horrific crime scene. Watch Commander Peter Sonke almost passed out when he identified the nude and comatose woman in the empty field as his daughter-in-law, resplendently necklaced in entrails and blood.

A woman clothed with his son.

The Red Portrait

Mahlon Smoke

For the past two weeks, you were in a rut, out of ideas and nothing to do. Hands twitching for a pencil, paintbrush, a pen, anything to sketch and draw. But you never did. No muse would come to you and caress your hand as you drew, no inspiration in your mind but a black void that only consumed creativity. A poor artist struggling for an idea is a pathetic sight. You were no different from your fellow students who struggled like you.

But you are different.

You kept telling yourself that at least, you had to be different. You came from nothing and fought your way into this school: prestigious, rich, and influential. Something to get you out of that shitty small town with no artistic value. You weren’t going to go back and be a gas station owner like your father before you. Never. Not after he and your mother outright told you. “You’re not creative enough to be an artist,” your father said, and his words burrow into you as you stared at that white, empty canvas.

They needed to be proven wrong, and yet, the empty canvas stared back and mocked you.

Amanda, your closest friend, suggested a day out, something to take your mind off the slump and into the beauty of nature. Skeptical as you were, you played along, walking in and out of the stores, going to lunch, and pretending you were interested in Amanda’s project. You liked her, really, but were so wrapped up in your own thoughts that anything outside yourself was a chore to think about.

After lunch, the two of you walked along the street, looking at all the displays for an Art Crawl. Amanda was the one who really wanted to go: you didn’t want to be reminded of what you couldn’t do. But still, you passively observed the amateur paintings, knowing full well you could have done so much better.

Along the walk of mediocre artistry, you came across a quaint little antique shop. The shop was small, cute, a nice place to scout around and find rare gems. Outside was a display of more professional works collected over the years, stuff the store owner and his late wife found and displayed. All of them were there, except for me.

I was in the back. On the floor, obscured by a few statues and a desk with a few miscellaneous toys