The last time Christine-Ann Corbin wore a dress was two months ago when she turned twelve. Her parents had a small birthday party and celebrated with a few friends and neighbors. The conversation quickly turned to the unrest in Europe.
Little Falls, Vermont, was exactly as its name revealed in the early summer of 1914, a small town of a few thousand inhabitants dependent on the many waterfalls to drive old flour mills and Hadley’s Metal Fabrications, the biggest employer, where her father worked. Hadley’s built fenders for the automobile market, and earlier in the year won a contract to fabricate them for the Army.
On this particular day, Christine prepared herself for another “conversation” with her mother about her refusal to wear a dress, something her teachers were increasingly unsettled over.…
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I used to climb these steps in a few bounding leaps. Not now. And not in so many years.
The space, the full city block which was converted from an old railroad terminal in the middle of what was known as Hell’s Kitchen, is a post office now, surrounded mostly by near-empty condos and hotels that once reached into the sky with restaurants you needed to make reservations for, months in advance.
And I no longer count the steps, even out of tradition or curiosity. I am too afraid my attention will slip away and I will lose count, or not make it to sixty-six at all. This time, finally, relieved and rewarded, I stood at the top, between a dozen massive Doric columns that faced 8th Avenue.…
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Arthur Davis is a management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and Crain’s New York Business, plus interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He has advised The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, Senator John McCain’s investigating committee on boxing reform, and testified as an expert witness before the New York State Commission on Corruption in Boxing. Over eighty original tales of horror, dark fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, speculative fiction, mystery/crime, and epic adventure, as well as literary fiction, have been published, with another two dozen as reprints. He was featured in a quarterly, single author anthology, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery Stories 2017. …
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“We need more guns,” Teddy Koala said, standing back from the array before them.
Teddy was the more aggressive of the pair while Rudolph, a year older, was the planner and dreamer. He was the one who insisted he’d once read an article that had identified the brothers as the most feared killing machine in Australia’s notorious Northwest Territory in the last hundred years.
Teddy liked the idea that they were men to be feared. His only concern was that, if the newspapers were so determined to help run them down that they might use an old photo that cast the damaged right side of his face in a poor light, making him look less like a predator and more like a victim.
Rudolph knew Teddy was right.…
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The crowd hovering around the entrance to the Hospital for the Incurable seemed slight at first. The hospital was the cornerstone of the city of Le Frères du Plume. Many of its citizens derived their livelihood from being directly employed by, or providing needed services to, the one hundred-twenty year-old institution.
Placards posted along the street proclaimed the hanging of Old Grimes. I thought that impossible. Old Grimes had been hung a month ago. Wasn’t he dead and forgotten? But there it was, a rare rehanging, and I hadn’t noticed the announcements at all.…
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