THE GIRL WHO PAINTED DEATH by Amy Bennett-Zendzian

She painted from her dreams,
shadowed and ominous.
Her paintings were as dark
as the room was light...

Once upon a time a farmer’s wife stood looking out of her window. “If only I had a daughter with hair the color of our wheatfield,” she sighed, “I would love her, even if she could speak no more than the wind rustling through the sheaves.”

And soon enough a little girl was born to the farmer and his wife; her hair was a golden as ripened wheat, but she never made a sound. They named her Hush, and she learned to write and draw, chattering away as gaily through her scribbles and drawings as any child ever did through speech.

The girl was as pretty as a picture and as good as gold, and no one ever minded her silence, or the way she had of staring as if drinking them up. Hush drew things into herself and poured them out again in paint.

By the time she was a young maiden the farmhouse was decorated with Hush’s paintings, beautiful things that glowed as if with an inner light. But one day the farmer’s wife fell ill. Hush sat by her mother’s bedside, stroking her hand, but her mother did not respond.

Days went by, and her mother worsened. Hush and her father sat silently together as the mother’s breath slowed, and finally stopped. Hush looked up through her tears to see Death standing at the head of the bed.

But Death was not looking at her mother. He was looking at the painting behind Hush, a golden summer afternoon. Then Death looked at Hush. “There is little beauty in my home,” he said. “Come to my house, paint the most beautiful picture of your heart for me, and I will spare your mother.”

Hush nodded.

At the empty castle of Death the dead souls filed by the arched windows, silently, endlessly. Death brought paints and canvases and brushes, and gave Hush a wide dark room lit by many candles. “Paint,” he said.

Hush painted. She painted from her memory, the animals and landscapes and people she had loved every day of her life. But she felt that something was not right, and tore the canvases apart. 

More paints, Hush wrote to Death. Silent, he brought pots and tubes and jars from all over the world. He bought colors she had never seen before, heavy blocks that had be ground into fine powder and mixed with water.

Hush painted. She painted from her imagination, storybook creatures and mysterious grottos and fairy lights dancing. The wondrous pigments gave her paintings an ethereal quality they had never possessed before. Yet still something was not right, and again Hush destroyed her paintings. 

More candles, Hush wrote. Death brought tall white pillars and surrounded the easel with flames so that the room was as bright as noon. The souls filing by the windows shielded their eyes with their withered hands.

Hush painted. She painted from her dreams, shadowed and ominous. Her paintings were as dark as the room was light. Grim faces seemed to leer from her backgrounds, and her subjects grew strange and tormented, mouths twisted in silent screams.

She did not destroy these, but sat troubled, looking at them as they dried. Death came to look at her latest works. “You can no longer paint beauty,” he said. “You must return and I will take your mother.”

Hush raised her hands in mute despair.

“One last night,” he said.

All night Hush sat in front of her canvas. Not a single beautiful image would come; her mind was in darkness and turmoil. Finally she began painting, slowly at first but then faster and faster, as the candles burned lower. When morning came she collapsed to the floor and slept.

Death returned and looked at Hush’s final painting. It was not beautiful. It was a portrait of Death himself, and he saw that it was more terrible and magnificent than anything she had painted yet. He leaned in and looked closer, seeing himself the mirror of Hush’s despair. She had drawn him into herself and poured him out again on the canvas. 

Hush awoke in her own bed, with her father and mother holding her hands on either side, crying with joy at her return. Hush squeezed her parents’ hands and smiled. But she did not understand why Death had sent her back and spared her mother when she had not fulfilled her promise.

She stood by the window, staring out at the wheatfield. As the wind rustled through the sheaves, she felt her heart lift. She picked up her brush.

Amy Bennett-Zendzian holds an MA/MFA from Simmons College and an MA from Boston University. She is a Lecturer in Writing at Boston University, where she teaches courses on fairy tales. She has published poetry in Gingerbread House Literary Magazine and the NonBinary Review, and her short plays have been produced around the Boston area. Follow @FairyTalePapers. 

Cover: Amanda Bergloff @AmandaBergloff

Follow her on Twitter @karenleestreet

and

Check out Karen's books

Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead

HERE

AND

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru 

HERE

HUNTER'S MOON by M.P. McCune

Their grey bodies surrounded her.
Their howls swept through her
like a winter wind...

When she first met the wolf, he was a man. He sat on a fallen tree trunk by the side of the path leading to her grandmother’s house, clothes perched uneasily on his slight frame, his clean-shaven face luminous in the trees’ shadows. They acknowledged each other with a nod, as people do when they meet in the woods, and he fell in step beside her. His silence wrapped around her like a blanket, protecting her from the sharp edges of the sounds of the forest: twigs snapping, squirrels scolding, the cry of a horned owl. When they reached the clearing where her grandmother lived, he walked on, leaving her with a farewell glance to mark the place they’d parted until they met again.

The house treated her like a stranger. Its windows stared blankly as if they’d never seen her before and the boards of the front porch shuddered indignantly at her touch. Shadows spilled out of the half open door, lapping at her feet until an undertow of darkness pulled her inside.

The next morning, the whiteness of the girl’s skin alternated with purple bruises, resembling the pattern of sunlight filtered through tree leaves.

“It’s hunting season. We don’t want anyone to mistake you for a deer,” her grandmother said from behind her, draping a red cloak over her shoulders. The girl shook like a wet dog, throwing off her grandmother’s touch.

The girl had a closet full of shawls and sweaters from past visits: “to protect her from the wind,” “to shield her from the sun,” “to keep the rain off,” “to keep the warmth in.” Curious glances stuck to pretty clothes like flies to a web, keeping anyone from looking beneath them.

“Run along now! I’ll see you next week!”

The man joined the girl on her way back. Wind fluttered the cape, exposing her arms. They walked in a silence brittle as ice. When they reached the forest’s edge, he loitered under the trees to listen to her mother scold her loud enough for the people at the end of the street to hear: “Just look at you! How many times have I told you not to leave the path, it’s dangerous! There are wild things in the woods, you’re lucky you only had a fall!”

The next time she saw the man, he was a wolf. He sat alone in the meadow between the village and the woods the night of the full moon, staring at her window. When their eyes met, he nodded. She climbed out and followed him into the trees. More wolves met them one by one until restless grey bodies surrounded her. Their howls swept through her like a winter wind, scooping up her voiceless anguish and carrying it with them out into the air, leaving her empty. She fell asleep in their midst but woke up in her own bed. Muddy footprints too large to be her own trailed to and from the window.

Every week the man waited for her at the edge of the forest, until the day of the next full moon. She walked slowly until the sun sank, then raced the moon to her grandmother’s house. Light streamed through the windows and the open door. Her grandmother’s body sprawled across the floor, dozens of wolves eddying around it. One nodded at the girl. She nodded back.

“Wolf! Wolf!” the girl cried as she ran into the woodcutter’s cottage. “In my grandmother’s house! It attacked her! I think she’s dead! Help!”  She turned without stopping and ran back to the house. The woodcutter snatched up his axe and followed.

The girl stopped at the door and pointed wordlessly to a lone wolf worrying the body of the old woman. The woodcutter pushed past and ran inside. When the wolf leaped at him, he knocked it to the floor with his axe. He chopped off its head and kept chopping until it was all in pieces.

“What was your grandmother thinking to leave the door open like that!” he asked.

“She was expecting me,” the girl said. “She didn’t want to have to get out of bed to let me in.” She burst into tears.

He reached over to pat her hand, but stopped when he saw his own was covered in blood.

“You’re safe now,” he said. “It was a lone wolf, not a pack. You can stay with me tonight and I’ll walk you home in the morning.”

“I’m not allowed to go with strangers.”

The woodcutter was at a loss. “But you can’t walk home through the woods by yourself at night!”

“I’ll stay here.”

“By yourself?” He glanced at what was left of the wolf and her grandmother.

“The wolf’s dead, so there’s no danger. Besides someone needs to clean up and watch over her body.”

The woodsman hesitated. “You’ll shut the door after me?”

“I will.”

Once he left, the girl reassembled the wolf’s carcass. As soon as they touched, the severed pieces knit themselves back into one whole and the wolf opened his eyes. He nodded.

They dug a hole together behind the house, then dragged the body outside and rolled it in. The girl shoveled in clods of dirt that fell on her grandmother like blows.

Before they left to join the others, the girl covered the grave with the red cape.

 

M.P. McCune lives in New York City with her family, which includes a bearded dragon. She primarily writes flash fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in Atlas and Alice, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Mythic Picnic Tweet Story Project and The Vestal Review. She frequents Twitter as @MPMcCune2

Cover: Amanda Bergloff @AmandaBergloff

THE TURNIP AND THE TRICK by Madison McSweeney

"They can't still be vengeful, after all this time.
They'll take their treats and go..."

Rose could feel the weather turn as she set the carved turnip on the stoop. The wind took on a crisp, wintry chill as it whisked orange and brown leaves across the fields, and the sky, blue just yesterday, seemed profoundly grey. The turnip wobbled before finding a precarious balance, its ghastly face grinning malevolently at the road. Rose shuddered and shut the door behind her, her hand landing unconsciously on her rounded belly.

On the other side of the door, a black plastic tub sat on a wooden stool, filled to the brim with generous heaps of wrapped candies, dried fruits, and full-sized chocolate bars: Hershey, Aero, Coffee Crisp, KitKat. She wondered, with no shortage of bitterness, if she shouldn’t have bought more of the latter.

The little monsters were partial to KitKats. 

The afternoon of October 31st, Rose’s nearest neighbor paid a visit.

Nancy McCarthy had given birth just two months prior, and her daughter yawned agitatedly as she gently pulled her from the car seat. She’d been nervous about this visit; thankfully, Rose was pregnant again, which eased the tension somewhat.

As Rose greeted her at the door, Nancy dutifully admired the turnip, but laughed at the tub of candy. “Are those going to survive ‘til Halloween?” she asked.

Rose’s reply was uncharacteristically humorless. “Yes.”

Nancy wasn’t sure how to respond. “I wouldn’t think you’d get trick-or-treaters all the way out here. We never do.”

Rose’s tone didn’t lighten. “One year, we did.”

Nancy didn’t see how this was possible – Rose, like herself, lived on the outskirts of a farming community, where there was rarely any foot traffic, and certainly not at night – but she didn’t want to argue. “Better safe than sorry, I suppose.”

The visit progressed with similar awkwardness, with Rose giving terse answers to even the pleasantest of questions and the prominently-displayed photo of her first child adding a morbid air to the proceedings. Nancy chastised herself for thinking like that; but nonetheless, it was true.

It was only as she pulled into her own driveway that she realized the cause of her friend’s distress, and cursed herself for her ignorance. It had been around this time of year, two autumns ago, that Rose had lost her son.  

I should sleep, Rose thought, as the sky grew dim and the sun sank below the cornfields on Halloween night. She looked to the candy tub and mulled just leaving it on the porch next to the jack-o-lantern – but if she did that, there was the chance that something else might abscond with it before her visitors arrived. No, that wouldn’t do, she decided, placing a protective hand on her swollen stomach.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to her unborn child, speaking to herself more than anyone. “They can’t still be vengeful, after all this time. They’ll take their treats and go.”

And so the sky grew darker and the night grew colder as Rose sat in the den with the window half open, waiting for the goblins to arrive.

She was alerted to their presence not by a knock on the door or the ringing of a doorbell, but by the thwack of an egg hitting the side of the house, cracking and smearing yellow and red goo across the window glass.

At first, Rose thought the red guck was an optical illusion, a trick of the fading light; but no. It was, in fact, the remains of a half-formed baby bird, expelled from its tiny womb and left to rot on her porch. Her teeth clenched, and she was consumed with hatred for them.

She could hear them outside now, laughing like demons and chattering like squirrels, and for a moment she found herself filled with the wild hope that if she just ignored them, they would go away. No treats for you, she imagined herself hissing; go suck the meat from the defenseless eggs you stole from their mothers’s nests. Starve to death, for all she cared. But then she remembered her own child inside of her, and her hate turned to fear. The goblins demanded a treat tonight, and they wouldn’t leave unsated.

Fearful that she’d missed her chance to make the offering, Rose jumped up and rushed to the foyer, throwing the door open in a mad panic. The porch was empty. For a second, she thought they’d grown tired of waiting, and her heart sank. They’d be back, she knew, and when they returned, candy wouldn’t suffice. She was about to call out when she saw the first of the creatures emerge from the tangle of dead bushes along her walkway.

It was a freakish-looking thing, no bigger than a pumpkin and covered with warts and pus-filled boils, ready to pop. It walked with the uncertain gait of a toddler, but its teeth were sharp and its eyes were cruel. Behind it, five others followed, identical in structure but each boasting their own distinct deformities.

In her haste, she’d knocked over the candy bowl, sending a few excess chocolate bars scattering across the floor. Her whole body trembling, she picked up the bowl and dangled it over the threshold, her arm extended to put as much distance as possible between herself and the creatures. The head goblin – the tallest of the group, although that was a dubious distinction – looked past the bowl and over her shoulder, but the leering visage of the turnip warned it not to violate the house.

Shifting its gaze to the candy bowl, the goblin snatched it from her hands and began to dig greedily through the chocolates, shoving the KitKats and full-sized Coffee Crisps into its soiled overalls. Two of the lesser beasts, enraged at their leader’s greed but secure in their own, pounced on him and began to pull his clothes apart to get at the pilfered chocolate. The three others waited on the sidelines to catch any stray sweets that flew out of the bowl, swallowing handfuls of hard candy, plastic and all.

Rose barely registered any of this, though, because her eyes had fallen on a seventh visitor. This one was smaller than the others, and lingered shyly a few paces behind them, staring at her from the brush. The sight of it made her want to weep.

The creature wasn’t remotely human anymore, if it had ever been – in fact, it was perhaps even uglier than the others, the delicacy of its features throwing its grotesqueries into even sharper relief. Its face was also scarred and marred by angry protuberances, but its eyes were a lovely robin’s egg blue, bright and wide and strangely guileless. She would have recognized them anywhere.

Do you remember me? Rose wanted to ask, but the words curdled on her tongue. Instead, she knelt and groped for one of the fallen candy bars. Never abandoning eye contact with the little goblin, she wrapped her hand around a bar – Hershey, cookies and cream, her husband’s favourite – and silently offered it up.

The young goblin approached tentatively at first, before darting up the porch in a sudden burst of speed and snatching the bar from her hand. It paused to regard her suspiciously before tearing the wrapping and taking a bite; but it barely had a chance to sink its teeth into the chocolate before one of the larger goblins knocked it out of his hand.

Those incongruously beautiful blue eyes welled up with tears, but the other goblin subdued them with a snarl. The monsters had finished their bickering and were ready to move on.

As the goblins hobbled down the walkway, the blue-eyed one once again hesitated.

He knows me, Rose thought. He still knows me.

Looking nervously over its shoulder, the pitiful creature slunk back towards the open door, its hand extended, the tiny fist clutched around something small but precious. He wanted to give something to her, Rose realized, and reached to receive it.

The child-goblin was now in front of her, its hand close enough to hold hers. She waited patiently, palm open, although she wanted nothing more than to pull him into the house and lock the door behind them. The little hand opened, and the bloody remains of an aborted fetal bird fell into hers.

Rose gagged, stifling a scream. The creature looked into her eyes one final time, giggled, and ran off to join its companions.

Later in the evening, Nancy received her first trick-or-treaters in years.

She was surprised to see them – and even more surprised to find them unaccompanied by adults of any kind. Then again, perhaps their parents were parked somewhere behind the trees at the edge of the driveway. Even so, she thought, it couldn’t be wise to let children so young wander across a vast and darkened farmhouse yard by themselves. At least they looked young – it was hard to tell under the masks.

Regardless, she had no candy for them, and told them so regretfully. Perhaps Rose had been wise to stock up. She’d make sure to buy some next year.

The kids left without making too much of a fuss (then again, had they said anything at all? Other than trick or treat?), and Nancy returned to her sofa where a grainy television and lukewarm bowl of popcorn awaited. Harvey was working late at the police station – there was always lots of trouble on Halloween night – and the baby was asleep, so for all intents and purposes, she had the house to herself.

She tried to keep her eyes open until the end of the late movie, but started fading fast. She flicked the TV off and dumped the remnants of the popcorn into the kitchen garbage before heading straight up the stairs and towards her bedroom, pausing only to peek into the baby’s room, where she found the crib empty.

Madison McSweeney is a Canadian author and poet with an interest in all things weird and macabre. She has published horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories in outlets such as American Gothic, Under the Full Moon's Light, Rhythm & Bones Lit, and Zombie Punks F*ck Off. She also blogs about music and genre fiction at www.madisonmcsweeney.com and tweets (mostly about heavy metal and horror movies) from @MMcSw13. She lives in Ottawa with her family and her cat, and celebrates Halloween year-round. 

Cover: Amanda Bergloff @AmandaBergloff

DEATHLESS by Karina Steffens

I have no use for Death,
not anymore;
there is a better way to mend a broken heart...

I hold the bone needle between finger and thumb. A slender, fragile thing. It looks so delicate, unlike the bone from which I carved it. Unlike my trembling, clumsy hands. How easy it would be to place another finger on the tip, right there, and press –

You are a fool, Koschei!

I snatch my hand away in time. What devil filled me with the urge to break it, destroy the needle and my only chance? When have these second thoughts crept in, this sentimental death-wish? It is absurd and dangerous and far too late.

Some men build fortresses around their hearts; others drown them in strong spirits or Rusalka lakes. Such maudlin, humdrum ways to drive away the pain. No, in my quest for death, I served a year as herdsman to the witch's steeds. Each night, I took Baba Yaga’s horses out to pasture beyond Smorodina, the fire river. Each time we crossed Kalinov Bridge, I waited for my Death – and yet she spurned me too.

Knowledge came instead.

I have no use for Death, not anymore; there is a better way to mend a broken heart.

My breath slows down until I hear each drop of water trickle down the cavern's roof. A mass of bedrock hides me from the surface, but not for long. Above me, in a Thrice-ninth Tsardom, a hut on chicken legs lumbers through the forest, sniffing at my trail.

Between its crooked walls, on top of a Russian brick oven, Baba Yaga whets iron teeth and spits the shavings to the floor. Her nostrils quiver at the lingering stench of mortal spirit: that thieving sorcerer, Koschei.

But I have left a deeper mark behind than just my smell.

Right there, under the sarafan, on the old witch's leg; her left leg, the skeletal one. Her finger dips into an ointment and traces the gash where a sliver of shinbone has been chiselled away.

This she will not forgive before the sun has blackened in the sky.

Soon, when the bony-leg has healed, Baba Yaga will mount her mortar, steered with a pestle and a broom, and find the culprit. Ooh, but she will crunch the villain's bones until he begs for death!

For now, the hut on chicken legs hunts in the forest. And while I stand here in this grotto, listening to echoes of self-doubt, my scent uncoils ahead of it like a ball of twine.

I hold the bone needle between finger and thumb. My hand is steady as I aim it at my ribs.

A flash of darkness on the edge, an icy bite against my chest. The needle plunges through layers of skin, muscle, and bone, until it finds my heart and eats it raw.

Pain is first to come and will be last to leave. The rest of them come rushing out. Compassion, passion, rage: everything must go. Love. All the tiny particles of life blaze briefly as they pass. Hope. They flee into the needle like a frightened school of herring.

My mouth waters at the idea of salted fish, washed down with a fiery shot of vodka. The thought escapes into the needle, leaving a taste of ashes in its wake. And I know in my bones that I will never savour food again. What use are the flavours of life to one who has no Death?

I hide the needle in an egg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, the hare in an iron chest. I bind the chest in chains and bury deep among the roots of an oak tree on the lost Island of Buyan.

Baba Yaga may sharpen every single tooth, but I no longer fear her. The witch will never find my Death.

My hair has bleached to ivory, my skin has withered to the bone, but immortality is a small price to pay. Or was it the other way around?

And my heart? It is no longer broken. You simply cannot break a thing that isn't there.

Now, what can one do to fill eternity? Perhaps take up collecting: gold, young maidens, power? Oh, I will think of something, given time.

 

Karina Steffens began her love affair with fairy tales as a young girl in Soviet Ukraine, quoting Pushkin at anyone who'd listen. It followed her to Jerusalem, where she picked up a degree in Journalism, and to Dublin, where she consults as a web designer and writes SFF. Her work has appeared in Gathering Storm and Empyreome.

Find her on Twitter @KarinaSteffens.

Cover: Amanda Bergloff @AmandaBergloff

BEDTIME STORY by Wendy Lynn Newton

"Remember what I told you about the teddies?"
"They only ever speak one word,
and that's their secret name..."

“This is the story of four little bears and the four little girls who owned them.”

Four pairs of beady eyes locked onto Momma’s beneath sleepy lids and long, curled eyelashes that twitched and fluttered like the down of a baby bird’s feathers as it settles into sleep. Outside the wind was beating like dragon wings against the flimsy walls of their small, wooden hut, and the open fire spluttered and crackled and smoked in the draft, as if it was answering the dragon’s moaning call to come inside and claim it.

“Is it a scary story?” Twig asked, gripping Prickle’s chubby hand with her own, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice and her cup of frothy hot milk from spilling. 

Momma nodded her head. “Very,” she said and gave them a wink.

“So scary we won't be able to get to sleep?” asked Splinter, sliding her hand over the rough wooden floorboards to Thorn’s and locking pinky fingers together.

“I expect you won’t want to,” Momma replied, and she pulled the scratchy grey woolen blanket a little higher over Prickle’s knee.

“And if we do we’ll wake up screaming?” asked Twig, her brown eyes as dark as the blackest corner in the room.

“I’m afraid so,” Momma answered, “so it’s probably best to stay awake,” and she dropped a chocolate morsel into each of the girl’s cups.

“The four girls were four sisters and the youngest was born but four years after the eldest took her first heaving breath in the world, not more than eight years ago.”

“Just like us,” whispered Splinter as she licked a smear of chocolate from the corner of her mouth.

“What were they called?” asked Prickle, and as Momma said each of their names, “Violet, Daphne, Rose and Petunia,” she pointed to each one of the girls with a crooked finger, and they giggled and squirmed as it pushed and wriggled and tickled into each of their chests. 

“Each one owned a bear that they were given on their first birthday, and the bears owned each of the girls right back, which is quite rightly the way it’s supposed to be with teddy bears.”

“Did they have names?” Twig asked, yawning so wide her pink tongue lolled right out of her mouth.

“I expect so, but they're secret names. Only the teddy can tell you what it is, and it’s the only word it can ever speak. It whispers it in your ear, if it likes the look of you, and then you know you can tell it every secret you ever knew in your heart to be true. Even the ones you daren’t tell me.” Momma leaned in towards the fire and her round face took on a rosy glow like a ripe apple about to be plucked from an autumn branch. “But once its name is known, it never speaks again. Unless the little girl gives it up to some other little girl, but that’s not very likely, if I know anything about teddy bears and little girls.”

A single “Oooo-ooooooh!” floated up towards the rafters with the smoke, as the girls settled deeper into the feather eiderdowns strewn across the dusty floor.

“One night when the girls were fast asleep in their beds - “

“With dragonflies in their hair?”

“And ladybugs in their eyelashes?”

“And beetles crawling through the straw in their mattresses?”

“And rooks watching in the rafters, waiting to pluck out their eyes and blind them if they started awake?”

Momma smiled and nodded as each of the girls added to the story, and the girls forgot to blink or take a breath or sip their milk. 

“ - in the biggest, grandest, fanciest house you could imagine - “

“Like the one at the top of the hill?”

“Just like that one, Petunia, with the sandstone front and the wide, sweeping driveway and turrets at the top, and the secret garden behind. I mean, Prickle,” Momma corrected herself and smiled, and the four girls giggled again, and each leaned against the other with their heads resting against another shoulder.

“One night, in the middle of the darkest part when even the moon at its fullest shudders to cast a shadow, when they were fast asleep and dreaming of bowls of curds, and candied eels, and plates of green walnuts stuffed with mouldy cheese, and rotten medlars for breakfast, someone came calling.” Momma leaned over and threw a faggot onto the fire, and the coals pulsed orange like dragon’s eyes, and the smoke curled to the rafters like its breath, and the flames licked the wood like its fiery tongue, while the girls warmed their tiny pink fingers over the top of it and blinked with sleep. 

“Who was it that came calling?” asked Splinter, breathless.

“Was it a friend?” asked Thorn, pulling the thumb from her mouth.

“Not a friend,” Momma shook her head as she poked the fire, and her eyes lit up as if she was the dragon that had found its way inside.

“A servant then,” suggested Twig, “the cook, with bags of sour corn, and mealy-wormed flour, and blighted steel-cut oats to bake into rock-hard breadsticks squirming with maggots, to break their teeth on over breakfast.”

“It’s night-time,” corrected Prickle, as she popped Thorn’s thumb back in her mouth, “the servants are fast asleep too. Aren’t they Momma?”

“Fast asleep, Twig, just like their parents in the other wing. The girls are on their own, all alone, far away from everyone else in the house who might save them, should they be able to get a cry out in time. Dreaming of dark things roaming the hallways, and scratchy sounds like fingernails scraping against the windows, and stinking breath flaring across their bare necks, as they roll in sweat-soaked cotton nighties that twist around their legs like a nooses’ rope, with only their teddies to warn them if something should come crawling into their room.”

Splinter’s eyes were as wide as Prickle’s mouth. 

“Do they warn them, Momma?” Twig whispered. “The teddies?”

“Remember what I told you about the teddies?" Momma whispered right back.

“They only ever speak one word, Twig," murmured Splinter, “and that’s their name. They never speak again.”

Momma shook her head. “They never speak again, unless someone else claims them, and that’s only to say their name,” and her eyes were suddenly as dark as the snuffed-out coals in the grate.

“So we can get inside the grand house without anyone waking up?” asked Thorn.

“And rip the little girls’ guts out while they’re sleeping?” suggested Prickle.

“And suck the blood from their entrails?” squeaked Twig.

“And cut their heads off, clean off their necks?” screamed Splinter, clapping her pudgy hands together.

Momma nodded slowly.  “So finish your milk and clean your fangs, and when midnight strikes, I’ll wake you up. And if you’re really good girls and drink all your blood, I’ll let you keep the teddies. And then we’ll finish their bedtime story.”

Wendy Lynn Newton is an Australian writer of fiction and creative non-fiction.  She is the author of two non-fiction books, and her short stories and feature articles have appeared in many key Australian and international literary and media publications. Wendy is a Full Member of the Australian Society of Authors and spent several years as a member of Write Response, a team of independent Tasmanian arts reviewers. She is currently working on a young-adult science fiction trilogy, and lives in northern Tasmania with two out-of-control chihuahuas and two indifferent cats. Instagram @wendynewtonlaunceston

Cover: Amanda Bergloff @AmandaBergloff