“So there I am, homeless, shaking with the cold, right, squatting in this shop doorway, a mound of blankets and all that.”

“Right.”

“I’m starving, but what I really need is a smoke. I’ve found a few fag-ends but I’ve no paper. Then I see this scrap blowing down the road towards me. Like, just skipping along. Beautiful. I grab it. And then, as I’m rolling it up, I see it’s a lottery ticket.”

He’s told the story a hundred times, of course. The young blonde woman sitting at the bar next to him sips her cocktail. Death in the Afternoon. Her long red fingernails are wrapped delicately around the bowl of her glass.

“Just like that.”

She smiles a beautiful smile, her earrings sparkling. Her legs are crossed and he finds it hard not to look at the silky stretch of her thigh. He thinks about running his hand along it. He knows what she wants, of course; he knows how it is. If it wasn’t for the money she wouldn’t look twice at him. His ruined teeth may have been fixed but his sun-ravaged face is still a mess. Still, he doesn’t mind.

“Well, yeah, you can guess the rest. I check the date and it’s today. I turn to look at the screens next to me — I said it was a branch of TV World, right? — and there are my numbers coming up on the screen, one after the other, bam, bam, bam. Suddenly I’m a millionaire. Ten times over.”

“It’s incredible.”

“Enough to make you think there is a God after all.”

She smiles a little smile to herself.

“Of course, there’s the little matter of the price,” she says, as if it’s something that has only just occurred to her.

“The price? Don’t worry about that, love. The drinks are on me.”

“I didn’t mean the drinks.”

She glances sideways at him. There’s something different in her face then, something he catches a glimpse of beneath that immaculate exterior. A hint of red in her eyes, a red that has nothing to do with her make-up. A look of ferocious hunger. For a moment, the elegant fingernails wrapped around the glass are more like claws. She smiles and the beautiful woman is back there next to him.

He sips his drink, ice clutching his stomach. He sees how things are. The piano continues to tinkle away in the background. The hum of conversation around them doesn’t pause.

“But that’s not how it works,” he says. “I’ve seen the movies. You’re supposed to tempt me first, offer me a deal.”

She stares into the depths of her cocktail, as if fascinated by the streams of bubbles in the milky liquid.

“That’s how we used to operate. These days we’ve polished up our marketing skills, raised our game. Now we give you what you want up front, then take it away if you don’t agree terms. It’s still technically within the rules. We find it gives us a better strike rate.”

“So it’s, what, my eternal soul or back to the old life on the streets? Starving, freezing, being beaten up?”

She smiles sweetly as if it’s the simplest thing in the world.

He doesn’t really have to think. He waves at the barman and orders them both another cocktail.

“Seems like a bargain to me,” he says.

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Simon Kewin writes fiction, poetry and computer software, although usually not at the same time. His fiction and poetry has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. He lives in the UK with Alison and their two daughters Eleanor and Rose.

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Terence Waldrip, like most sentient beings except snakes themselves, was born with an instinctual fear of those narrow reptiles, but it was by no means his only fear.  He was afraid of being late for work.  He was afraid of heart disease and open elevator shafts.  He was afraid of diabetes and Ebola.  He was afraid of love and he was afraid of not being loved.  His life was as narrow as a snake’s path, walled on either side and defined by fear.  He maneuvered surprisingly well within the limited space allowed by his timidity; he was comfortable there.  He had learned early on not to let his ambitions grow too large for their constraints.

Then Evan moved in next door and Terence was no longer comfortable.  He began harboring “what-ifs”:  What if he invited Evan over for dinner?  What if he accepted Evan’s invitation to join him at the pool?  What if, instead of letting his gaze slither away when he passed Evan in the hall, Terence returned the younger man’s smile and engaged him in conversation?

From the safety of his second-floor apartment, Terence sometimes watched Evan at the pool.  He envied the sinewy confidence of the young man’s muscles, the total lack of hesitation when diving from the undulating surface of the spring board.  Evan would leap into the air and hang there in defiance of gravity (Terence felt his heart stop during those endless seconds/minutes/hours), his long form parallel to the water.  Then, at an angle so oblique that it was barely discernable, Evan’s hands would slice the water and he’d submarine into the depths.

Terence went online and ordered a pair of swimming trunks.  When they arrived, he breathlessly stashed them in the bureau under his neatly folded tee shirts.  For the first time in his life he owned swimming trunks and they weren’t black or dark blue, but a vivid look-at-me green.  He was in awe of his own daring.

California summers are long and the summer of the hidden swimming trunks seemed particularly so.  Terence graduated from watching Evan through the blinds to sometimes sitting on his balcony in prescription sunglasses.  He couldn’t see distances well through the corrective lenses, but he didn’t mind.  The important thing was that no one could see his eyes.  To the smooth gold bodies at the pool it might appear that Terence was staring at the palm trees across the street, or reading the pool rules sign on the fence, or perhaps dozing in the summer warmth.  Sometimes Terence held an open magazine.  No one need know or even suspect the real object of his watchfulness.

One day he sat on his balcony long enough to sunburn the top of his feet.  Perched on the edge of his bed that night, Terence stared down at the bright red half-moons, studying them for signs of melanoma.  He could already feel the disease metastasizing a savage path up his legs and he visualized the oozing lumps that would invariably form on his vital organs.  This was his punishment, Terence realized glumly.  This was the dark reward for a fascination he had no business indulging.

He went to the medicine cabinet and took a Xanax.  After a moment’s consideration, he swallowed a second one.  Detouring to the dresser on his way back to bed, he found the swimming trunks and tossed them into the trash.

The drugs callously and abruptly pushed Terence over the edge of wakefulness.  From lying in the dark with his feet on fire, Terence transitioned directly into dreams.  He sat on his balcony and stared down at the pool that pulsated unfamiliarly under pinkish light.  It was deserted except for a long shadow beneath its lavender surface.  Terence stared as the shadow wove its dark path across the pool and emerged from the other side.  It was a monstrous snake.  Its brilliant green scales gleamed under the pastel light as it slithered onto the cantilevered deck, coiling its impossibly long body behind it.

Terence watched helplessly as the snake slid over the pool fence and disappeared into the hedges directly below.  He could hear its approach.  The huge reptile made surprisingly little sound as it wound its way through the hedges and up one of the palm trees that the complex management always insisted on decorating with lights for Christmas, but he could hear it just the same.  It whispered his name.

“Terence…” the snake lisped, “Terence…”

It came into view, twisting its way up and around the palm.  When it was even with the balcony, the snake stopped and regarded him silently.  Its eyes were the color of pool water.

Terence tried to scream himself awake as the snake’s head came to rest on the railing.  It kept coming, pulling its wet coils over the railing with mesmerizing grace.  He felt the first touch of its hot body on his feet, then around his legs and eventually wrapping around his shoulders.  He realized with shock that it wasn’t slimy at all.  The snake’s embrace was warm and firm and somehow comforting.

Its head was inches from his face.  “I have something for you,” the snake hissed.  Its slender tip of its tail was coiled around an apple.  “I have something for you,” the reptile repeated.  “I have something for you, Terence…”

In his dream, Terence gasped.

He was making a green salad with fat free ranch the next day when he was surprised by a knock on the door.  Evan was outside on the landing.  “I’m grilling burgers down by the pool,” the young man said.  “Are you hungry?”

“Absolutely ravenous,” Terence replied.  “Just give me one second.”

He returned to the kitchen and snatched the swimming trunks out of the trash can.  After a short consideration, he dumped the salad, bowl and all, into the garbage.

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Deborah Winter-Blood is a writer, dog mom and displaced California Valley Girl. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications over the past 30 years. She has recently completed her second novel.

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From the Editors

Today is Every Day Fiction’s third birthday.

Back in 2007, when we first launched EDF, our grand long-term goal was to make it to our third birthday. Given that the longevity of fledgling magazines is measured for the most part in months rather than years, that seemed impossibly far off — a good moon to shoot for, but it hardly seemed real at the time. Today we are standing on that moon and taking aim at the stars.

So please, wherever you are in the world, if you’ve been along for the ride from the beginning or if you’re only just joining us now, eat some cake for us today and raise your glass to celebrate all that we’ve achieved so far — together, because we would be nowhere without our readers, writers, commenters and friends — with this toast: “Three years is only the beginning.”

And now, here are the stories to begin our fourth year…

September’s Table of Contents

Sep 1	Deborah Winter-Blood	Ophidiophobia
Sep 2	Simon Kewin	Lucky Numbers
Sep 3	Nicholas Ozment	Time Ellipses
Sep 4	Ellen Peters	Father to Sons
Sep 5	Eric McKinley	Powerball
Sep 6	Dagmara J. Kurcz	First Date
Sep 7	Kriti Lilian Bajaj	The Dream Catcher
Sep 8	Kathee Jantzi	Butterfly Wings
Sep 9	Sally York	Deathbed Redemption
Sep 10	Amanda Capper	The Dad
Sep 11	Cat Rambo	Love Affair
Sep 12	Rich Matrunick	Full Circle
Sep 13	Jeanne Holtzman	There’s An App For That
Sep 14	Hunter Stern	Brothers
Sep 15	Kimberly C. Lundstrom	Jitters
Sep 16	Liz Penn	Virus
Sep 17	Howard Cincotta	Negative Space
Sep 18	Lilly Slaydon	It’s Not
Sep 19	Sarah Evans	A Good Hair Day
Sep 20	Kip	A New Life
Sep 21	Sam Pennington	Chip Fat
Sep 22	Stef Hall	Wishing Well
Sep 23	TFAhan	The Son of a Kite Maker
Sep 24	Nina Roselle	Diablo
Sep 25	Prospero E. Pulma Jr.	Mateo’s Notebook
Sep 26	David Macpherson	Shakespeare in My Pocket
Sep 27	Lyn Brown	A Paleolithic Day
Sep 28	Wayne Scheer	When in Rome
Sep 29	Erica Naone	Automatic Crash Response
Sep 30	Bosley Gravel	Less Silent is the Sea

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There was nothing to do.

“We could watch TV,” Mike suggested.

“There’s nothing on,” I said.

“We could play some more video games.”

“I’m tired of video games.” We’d been playing video games for the last hour. Mike was over at my house, because his house was boring.

We sighed.

The doorbell rang. “Jacob,” my mom called. “One of your friends is at the door.”

We went to the door. It was Kevin. “Hey,” Kevin said. “You want to do something?”

Kevin, Mike and I stood around in a huddle by the front door. You wait the entire school year for summer vacation to roll around, and at first it’s great, but by August… no one would ever admit it, but you kind of want school to start again.

“We could — ” said Kevin.

“Or maybe — ” I said.

Long pause. I could hear Mom in the kitchen doing something — sweeping, throwing stuff away.

“I have an idea,” she said, poking her head out of the kitchen. “You guys could help me clean the refrigerator.”

“Mom,” I said. “It’s summer vacation.”

“Okay, then why don’t you go down to the park and feed the birds?” she said. “You can take these bags of stale bread. I was going to throw them out.”

I groaned. “Mom, that is so lame. We’re too old for that. I mean we’re almost in seventh grade.”

“Suit yourself. But you guys either come inside or go out. Don’t stand there in the doorway; you’re air conditioning the whole neighborhood.”

In the end, we went to the park. No one could come up with a better plan. We sat on a bench and threw crumbs at maybe six or seven birds—some pigeons, a couple robins, a cardinal.

“This is stupid,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Kevin. “That one’s not even real anyway.”

Mike said, “Kevin!”

“It’s not,” he insisted, pointing at the cardinal.

“Kevin, I don’t want to know which ones are real and which ones aren’t,” Mike said. He sounded testy.

“But it’s so obvious,” Kevin said.

We all stared at the fake cardinal pecking away at the bread as though it was following a metronome. It bobbed its head exactly every two seconds. Up, Peck. Up, Peck. On every fourth peck, the bird paused and warbled a song. It sounded strangely canned, like a recording of a bird singing. Which of course it was.

“Roboto-bird,” Kevin said, then. I laughed, but Mike got really mad.

“What?”

“Kevin,” he said.  “Why can’t you just let me pretend, okay? I mean if you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have been perfectly happy to convince myself it was a nice wild bird out in the sun.”

“Sorry.” Kevin backed down. “I was just saying.”

“Well these robot birds creep me out,” Mike said. He looked at a robin — a real one — struggling to dismantle a huge crumb. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, it dropped the crumb and flew away. “I always just like to think of birds as free, you know? Not programmed.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Kevin said, without much enthusiasm.

“I don’t know why the government wants to make all these robots anyway,” Mike said.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I guess they figure it’s better to have robot birds than no more birds at all.”

That nearly killed the conversation. I hadn’t meant to say it; it just popped out of my mouth.

I was about to change the subject — to talk about the new phone I wanted, or something, anything else — but then Mike spoke up in a grave voice: “I saw this TV show the other day about the birds. This science show on public television. It had a theory about why they were all dying off.”

There it was. Dropped like a bomb. Out in the open.

We were quiet for a few minutes.

“These scientists on the show, they called it the ‘canary in a coalmine’ effect,” Mike resumed, at last. His eyes were huge. “They said back in the old days, coal miners used to take canaries into the mines with them, because the birds had more sensitive systems than people did.

“As long as the canary kept singing, they knew the mine was safe. But if there were any toxic fumes in the mine, the bird would stop singing, and even die. The miners would know they had to evacuate.

“And then, you know, the scientists went through all the statistics.”

He didn’t have to explain “the statistics.” We knew what they were. You couldn’t log on to the Internet without confronting a new headline about toxic air pollution levels in Shanghai, or mutated flu in Sao Paulo, or yet another U.S. national park closing to make way for urban development. “We’re safe out here in the suburbs,” our parents would say, whenever the news came on. But then they’d give each other dire glances when they thought we didn’t see.

A robot sparrow landed near my foot. It pecked monotonously at an enormous crumb, unable to ingest it, yet still going through the motions of bird-like eating.

I thought about what Mike had said, and I wondered: What if the miners couldn’t evacuate when the canary gave its warning? What if they were trapped in that mine, with nowhere else to go? How long did they have before—

Kevin broke the silence. “God, Mike, you’re such a dork,” he said. “I can’t believe you watch public television.”

I took a deep breath. “I know,” I added, lightly. “I mean, we’re on vacation. What are you doing watching educational TV?”

“Yeah.” Mike shook himself, affecting a laugh. “I guess I was pretty desperate. There was nothing else on.”

Kevin said, “Let’s go play video games again.”

“Awesome,” Mike said.

“Great!”

We got up and headed back to my house, joking carefully about inconsequential things. Anyone who saw us would think we believed the summer was going to last forever.

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Erin Ryan is an editorial assistant and copy editor who lives in Vermont, where she writes lots of science fiction.

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Our highly evolved society has reached a point in which it is necessary to discard certain outdated traditions that many Americans cling to with the entirety of their being.  Meteorologists are the bane of our great nation and need to be dealt with in the only way that we as a society know how — violence. Now, you may be sitting there thinking to yourself ‘This guy is crazy’ or ‘But I’m a peaceful person.’ You may be formulating thoughts that sound like this but of course you are wrong. It takes an informed person, a man who has seen the inner workings of their cult, to tell you why it is of the utmost importance that we extinguish this threat before it spreads.

Friends, I must tell you, I have been there. I have seen their meetings, sat inside the production center and witnessed first hand the vileness of their treachery. An example: say, as it is common to do, you want to take your family for a well-deserved trip to the beach. You and your wife want to know what attire will be needed, and whether or not to bring an extra set of clothing in case of rain. You turn on the computer while your darling wife who no doubt just had breast enhancement surgery (this is hypothetical, so we should make it realistic) concentrates her attention on the television. Well, that is, after you turn it on for her of course. The internet and weather station both claim that the sunniest of skies is all that you will see, so you and the missus gussy up in your best clothing, swimming attire concealed beneath, and pile your 2.5 children into the stylish sport utility vehicle with leather trim and fold-down third-row seating. On the good advice of these “professionals,” you take the journey. The day is indeed beautiful, that is if you were a wind gust. A nasty storm takes you by surprise, blowing in over the lake, engulfing you in its turbulence and spitting your family up like dead fish littering the beach at sunrise. After the ferocious weather passes, you even notice that the .5 child is missing, a casualty directly attributed to the weatherman. No longer can we stand by and let more and more of our half children be swept away by an errant gust when all of this could have been prevented.

It is with great passion that I present to you the very reason for your loss: meteorologists. Think about it. They sit pretty, high in their ivory towers, and watch computer models and satellite data, they eat celery sticks and drink fancy fruit juices while tabulating numbers and checking figures dealt to them by their central command, the National Weather Service. It is too great a task, however, to start by attacking the home base. Instead, we will begin by holding our local weathermen accountable for their misgivings and false hopes. They will pay for continuing to provide us with temperatures that are “within five or six degrees.” No more can they get off saying “there is a fifty percent chance of clouds” when you and I can look outside and see them. See them? The clouds, right there out the window above the sofa. To think, they went to school for this. Or perhaps they didn’t. No matter, we the people will rise up and tell the network executives that hire these swindlers, “No more!” Protests will spring up throughout the nation and then, my friends, we will be strong enough to attack the center of it all, their proverbial eyes of the storms, and make it a final resting place for these foul beasts of burden. Down with the weathermen!

Wait, who is that? My God, she is beautiful! She is reading something, and pointing to… to us. She’s pointing at me, my house, I know it! Thank you, network executives, for hiring this wheat-haired vixen to dictate the changing nature of our atmosphere. She wears her AMS seal like a badge, courageously predicting the manner in which my day will unfold. Let the winds howl, the rain form torrents coming down off the roof. Let the sun burn holes in our skin and let it all happen when something else has been forecasted! Provided that this gorgeous woman is the vehicle in which we receive it. No one needs .5 of a kid anyway.

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Ed Buchanan writes fiction and drama defined by blending comedy and tragedy. He continues to build a body of work that actively twists the concepts of empathy and reality. Ed’s work has appeared in YACK, The Akros Review, and his play Graveyard Shift enjoyed a full production.

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