Fiction

The Valley of Kings, 1922. Obstinate and impatient, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon descended with their excavation crew into darkness.

“If they go down in that spirit, I give them six weeks to live,” joked reporter Arthur Weigall.

Carter—the self-made man, the scrappy adventurer—broke into the outer chamber, which released a plaintive gust. He clambered inside, the first soul in three thousand years to breathe that air. He paused before the sealed door which bore a foreboding inscription: You people who enter this tomb make evil against me, may snakes be against you in water and on land.

An awed hush fell over the scene. By candlelight, Carter hacked a hole into the pitch-black tomb. As he reached his torch into the darkness, his eyes adjusting to the light, what he saw shook him to his core—

A short story (in variations) by Jonny Aldridge.

Being a regular guy — that is, being downtrodden by the capitalist system as opposed to merely heterosexual and (possibly) patriarchal too — Hugh spent the best part of Christmas Eve alone at the Space, inputting the last lot of scientific data (which was not data science, or even rocket science, but still just as boring). At eight PM he was finally ready to log-off and head back through the dark but still partly leafy streets. Despite the Berlin Senate’s demands that the Hypothetical Ramessesium be immediately removed, the city still bore numerous traces of it: broken logos buzzing round the dirtier corners and continuing to remind everyone that yes, Lex Ramesses really was the master of their universe, while also revealing — or partially hinting at — the other, possible corners of it that he would one day rule as well.

Read an extract from The Ultraviolet Catastrophe by Susan Finlay.

No one knows why anyone else is here. The Swiss consul, for starters, is searching for his ex-daughter. The country, he says, is remote; others say that eventually, her mien spectral, she may well return. Some give instructions: For proper aftercare, boil your ear in salt water for fifteen minutes, twice a day. If excess itching occurs, drown a gibbous. If you are struck by the need to vomit, or find yourself coughing uncontrollably, it is far more polite to excuse yourself than attempt to quell in front of your party—gaping with fear, alarm, eyes eyebrowless—the tempest in your solar plexus. Two reminisce suggestively about the taking of the jewels; gloved, by night with torch and spear.

A short story by Shea Hellenthorpe.

When I became a ghost, I kept going but the world went slack. The living drifted like continents. Sneezes bloomed slower than the corpse flower at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which is where the blood clot got me. I quickly gave up on all that edification and headed south to Port St. Joe to see about killing my husband Swett.

At first, I passed time floating through cars, tapping French fries out of passengers’ gaping fish-mouths. Outside Nashville, I drifted into a hooptie in the eons-long process of crumpling into a semi. The driver’s ghost, newly released, took one look at me and fled.

A short story by Meghan Williams.

Things got sticky this week, Stephen told her, when the man he called the Russian went into the bathroom for private ablutions and the glass eye he took out to wash slipped through his fingers and rolled into the toilet stall. The first thing anyone heard was the unlockable bathroom door swinging open with unusual force. Then the surge of limbs pumping and a sense of their pluming wake as the panicked one-eyed man charged fast to the nurses’ station, holding the eye aloft between two fingers like a bon bon.

Excuse me. This requires antiseptic rinse. Excuse me, said the Russian.

Stephen was watching from where he always stood, near the nurses, flush against the wall.

The nurse made a gesture at the man with her chin, up and out and then back down to her phone call, to register the red fleshy backdrop where an eye should have been, the surprisingly large white globe and glassy brown iris pointed her way.

A short story by Mary Byrne.

The scar and its synthetic monofilament sutures served as the blueprint for an impossible metropolis, its keloid ridges rising into serrated spires that defied human geometry. Under his fingertips, the skin pulsed with a cold, metallic autonomy, suggesting a labyrinthine city designed by a malign intelligence – or a hydrocephalic child – to house the anxieties colonising his adhesiolytic abdomen. He sensed the surgery as a structural intrusion – the implantation of a sightless, erotic citadel within the interstitial tissue of his core. He imagined the sutures tightening – tension cables, anchoring this parasitic architecture deep into his viscera, preparing his frame to serve as the shuddering host for a future anatomy that he could no longer recognise as his own.

By Steve Finbow.

I am a dog.
I am rabid.
I bark, I howl, I bare my fangs.
Spit drips from my mouth.
I feel my anger boiling in black froth toward every living thing.
As I run, I smell the fear and dread of people.
One girl’s scent draws me in.
I sink my teeth into her soft, welcoming thigh.

A short story by Greta Kaluževičiūtė.

The musket ball.

The museumgoer stares at it, a dull but once deadly sphere sitting stately and harmless in a glass case. A Rust Belt museum housed in a former Gilded Age tycoon’s manor. The exhibit is about instruments of war. The evolution of war. The musket ball. Its texture compelling. The surface of the moon, its myths and mysteries.

The museumgoer stares.

A short story by Kent Kosack.

After we sent the billionaires to Mars we sent the managers up into the mountains to plant trees and out onto the prairies to sow wildflowers, and although later the new forests grew up in unexpectedly tidy rows and the milkweed and the columbine and the goldenrod and the bergamot were all organized by color no one really minded, certainly not the bees. We were poorer, it is true, but even those of us that had been very comfortable before had to admit it was a better arrangement, that it had to be done, that once things began to change for the worse as they did, we all just needed to get used to being poor together. I felt sadder for the people who had never been as rich as I had been and could now never hope to know what it was like to see a sunset on a beach a thousand miles from home, or go skiing in the Rockies, or even to have a little piece of land to call their own, than I did for those who were even richer than I was, and who lost cottages and jet skis and walk-in closets and millions and millions of air miles, but that was just me. Some people felt more sorry for the rich folk than they did the poor and I get that too.

A short story by Robert G. Penner.

First thing: you. That old void in your head. It’s winter. The sun is an itch in your eye. There’s construction, of course; the sound wakes you as the streaky slam of your loosely hinged door concurs with the recognition of some meathead from Staten Island bent grimacing over a jackhammer that shatters the sidewalk and with it any hope of civility for the day, or room for thought, normotension, tinnitus-free ears—no, this probably prejudiced Italian who likely shares Nonna’s basement with his wife is shuddering and quivering above the destruction of the little patch of land that has had more ground broken than anywhere in the world besides some nameless city block in Gaza—proving your conspiratorial landlord right, all building projects in the city are scams, snow jobs for the mafia or the liberal elite or whites—he—Greek—somehow considering himself exempt—colluding to ensure everyone under the table is getting theirs except you and him—

A short story by Charles Hawes.

REACTION # 1: THE SONG, SHITTY REFUGE, BY ABSOLUTE FUCKING COWARDS
Nervous exultation. A conviction bordering on mania that says this is reality and always has been, even if you couldn’t see it. A desire to do. More importantly, a feeling that things can be done. As I hit Avenue du Parc and crank up the volume, I feel a youthful sense of significance blooming in me like the spring that will not arrive for at least a few more weeks. I’m the subject of a song, a character in a book or a movie, and everything I do is charged with meaning—even these endless failures and humiliations.

A short story by Glyn Rebl.

Two years later, it was quite the surprise to see Dahlia Diamond’s ‘Single’ status update on Facebook, complete with Divorce Party photos. Champagne at the Bowery Hotel bar with her besties and high fives with smirking, handsome men. Digging further online, I found a mention on a minor gossip site: ‘Stylist-to- the-stars Dahlia Diamond divorces jewellery designer Hunter Hennequin, brother to fashion giant Nelson Hennequin, citing irreconcilable differences.’ In her own words: ‘We still love each other and shall remain the best of friends. We continue to support each other in our work. Hunter is a rare talent.’ I couldn’t fault her diplomacy, but ‘rare talent’ was a stretch when attributed to outrageously priced silver pendants of naked girls riding dolphins and wolves. Whether he outsourced it or not, Hunter’s metalwork wasn’t even up to par, and all his clients were celebrities Dahlia had styled. I could only imagine her regret in signing a prenup.

Read an exclusive extract from Diamond Life by Anna Maconochie.