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Where to buy: Amazon; Kindle; ePub and other formats available upon request.

Odd Goings-on at Ferndell Farm and Other Stories

by Kathryn L. Ramage

Sample pages

Finding the late Mrs. Taggart’s missing jewels had made Freddie Babington famous. People with problems began to come to him, hoping to engage his services as a private detective. Freddie expected his new career to involve thrilling cases such as restoring diamond necklaces to Duchesses and secret plans to government ministers, perhaps rescuing a kidnapped heiress or two. Most of his cases were more mundane–but every once in a while, a client with a truly strange and interesting problem came to his door.

Where to buy: Amazon; Kindle; ePub and other formats available upon request.

Excerpt:

The Family Jewels

1

It was a beautiful, crisp, and colorful autumn afternoon. Frederick Babington, who was visiting his aunt in the Suffolk village of Abbotshill, decided to take a walk. Though the injuries he’d received during the Great War had taken a long time to heal, he was beginning to feel truly well again. His leg no longer pained him and he’d discarded his cane.
Billy Watkins, Freddie’s manservant who had saved his life during the war and looked after him diligently since, insisted that he take a coat in case the evening grew chilly and not tire himself by going too far. Freddie promised to be back in time for dinner and grabbed his tweed coat down from the rack by the front door on his way out.
He had a delightful time wandering the country lanes around Abbotshill, climbing the green hills and kicking up piles of golden and russet leaves that had fallen under the trees. At dusk, he headed back toward his aunt’s house by way of the Rose and Crown pub; a pint of the local beer seemed just the thing to complete his outing.
The taproom was crowded, but the girl at the bar smiled when she saw him. “We’ve been hearing some talk about you tonight, Mr. Freddie,” she told him as she filled a mug from the tap. Freddie didn’t understand this remark, until she lifted her chin to indicate a table in the corner behind him. “Bill’s been here near an hour, telling everybody what a fine detective you are. Our constable was interested in particular.”
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Gah!

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Where to buy: Where to buy: Amazon ; Kindle ; Other formats available upon request to contactATwapshottpressDOTorg.

Sample pages

Where to buy: Where to buy: Amazon ; Kindle ; Other formats available upon request to contactATwapshottpressDOTorg.

The Distance Between Here
and Elsewhere: Three Stories

by David Meischen

Crossing at the Light

Albert Decker and Grady Smith, July 14–15, 1965

Albert woke at 6:30, aware in the instant that it was Claude’s birthday. He made up the Murphy bed he’d slept in since 1934 and folded it back into the wall, bands of summer sun along the seams of the closed window blinds suspending the room in a glow that brightened perceptibly as he stood watching. He shared the little apartment—and the package store below—with his mother, his days dispensed behind the counter, selling liquor to the locals, inhaling the dust they trailed behind them as they browsed these narrow aisles, five thousand miles from the one place he could imagine inhabiting. Still, each morning until Mrs. Decker woke—each morning was his.

After a quick breakfast of toast and jam, Albert fetched his cosmetics case from the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink and flipped the switch for the makeup lights he’d had installed around the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw. He’d always enjoyed being slim, but the skin at his throat had begun to let go, a sag at his Adam’s apple the brightness exaggerated. Before attending to his face, he unfastened the top shirt button and laid his collar open to the burn scar—like the negative of a shadow across the left collarbone—a private reminder of his mother’s skillet, the frying grease splashed from it so many years ago that without the scar he might not credit memory.
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Where to buy: Amazon (eligible for free shipping!) and Kindle.

Storylandia 28: Make Me Disappear

Sample pages

Mabel Banner, age fifteen, is a girl on the run. Escaping a dark and tumultuous life in the foster care system in Oklahoma, she runs to Key West, where she becomes first mate on board the sailboat Stella Luna, with the amiable Jake Ennis as captain. In Florida she forges a new life with a new name and tries to forget the circumstances that brought her there. But can Mabel keep her past a secret from Jake? Will the authorities looking for her eventually catch up? And mostly, will she ever have a chance at a normal life? Mabel finds that no matter how hard she tries, she can’t outrun the ghosts that haunt her dreams and the feeling that, eventually, everything she has fought so hard to gain will slip out from between her fingers like the sugar white sand of a Gulf Coast beach.

About the author:
Jennifer Wilson lives in Oklahoma with her husband and seven of her thirteen children. When she is not negotiating peace treaties between the warring factions residing beneath her roof, she enjoys writing and playing the banjo. Occasionally she hides in the closet and drinks whiskey while contemplating the meaning of the universe. She has published four books of poetry and two novels, blogs at crazyreal.net.

Where to buy: Amazon (eligible for free shipping!) and Kindle.

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Where to buy: 10% discount code: HDCYF4CR at this online store; eligible for Free Shipping at Amazon; and Kindle.

Sample pages

Where to buy: 10% discount code: HDCYF4CR at this online store; eligible for Free Shipping at Amazon; and Kindle.

Storylandia 17 features eight tales of dark fantasy, horror and the surreal by American writer Arthur Davis. “The Man From Lahr” is a tale of magical realism as a New York psychiatrist is visited after-hours in his office by a mysterious stranger who has traveled from Eastern Europe with an unlikely tale, and an even more improbable truth. “Dining With The Devil” holds us transfixed as the incarnation of evil reveals the ancient promise on which he has come to collect, and the extraordinary dish on which he has travel so far to feast. A foggy, chilly night on a dangerous road is the setting for “Cara’s Curve,” a narrative of regrets, doubts, confessions and the discovery of a dead man whose reach quickly claims an innocent soul. “A Sly And Knowing Grin,” interweaves the macabre with science fiction as strangers in a bookstore are presented with a horror that tests their fears and overwhelms their ability to cope. In a time-honored misadventure of the mind, “The Unwelcome Guest,” spins a fishing tale of horror that blurs the boundaries between reason and magical realism in a cross between Rieux’s rat-obsessed isolation in Camus’s “The Plague” and Samsa’s transformation in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Shrouded in sheets of black gossamer, “Dionaea Muscipula’s” dead bodies lie in the street of a deserted town in Maine in this surreal puzzle warning that death “be not the noble path of wise and aged men.” “I Have Become The Leopard” takes the reader on a haunting journey through the mind, heart and soul of a leopard, exposing instincts and consciousness that drives Africa’s most solitary big cat. In a direct-address monologue, “The Cracked Goblet’s” narrator leads his friend through the English countryside in search of an abandoned mansion in this intellectual thriller with the troubling neurosis of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the unfathomable paranoia of “The Twilight Zone.”

Where to buy: 10% discount code: HDCYF4CR at this online store; eligible for Free Shipping at Amazon; and Kindle.

Please get in touch with me about publishing your story in Storylandia 6. If I don’t hear from you by Monday, 3/26, I’ll have to pull your story out of the issue.

Your email is bouncing and I need to contact you. Please get in touch with me as soon as you can. Thanks.

10% off with this code: P5ZCS69C at this online store. Excerpts below.

“Poetry and Red Phosphorus” by Kellie R. England, “Assassin” by Adam Bourke, “Escaping the Apoidians Hivault” by Christopher Husmann, “Kiva” by Cinsearae S., and “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” by Mylochka. Cover: “Leaf” by Tom Good

Excerpts:

Poetry and Red Phosphorus
By Kellie R. England

It is perhaps the nature of the scientific mind to train itself to reject poetic and passionate thoughts as inconsequential frivolity while aspiring to think on things of logic and reason, teaching itself to dismiss the vulgar and commonplace in favor of chemistry and mathematics. However, as the mind grows rigid with certainties, the slightest disturbance can upset the fragile order, so that it becomes a great and terrible shock when a new variable enters into one’s life so as to inject one with strange and frightening ideas. Exactly such an event occurred to Professor Robert Pearson, a middle-aged, self-proclaimed man of science, in a way to wholly unbalance his very existence.

Assassin
By Adam Bourke

Time Passes. Winds blow and waves break. Change Happens. There is always change. The lands of Pyrrhus are constantly changing. The twelve gods keep the world in balance, but even they cannot stop the change. Mighty empires rise and fall in epic wars, Continents are drowned and raised in terrible conflicts between good and evil. And there are smaller changes. Somewhere a midwife delivers a child to proud parents, or else an old man passes away quietly. The magnitude various, but there is only one thing always constant. There is always change.

Escaping the Apoidians Hivault
By Christopher Husmann

“Do you think you can just take this? THIS?! You really think you can just walk in here, and simply pluck something up for your own benefit? Something that is clearly not yours in any way, shape or form?” An instectoid croaked with rage, as its stout, translucent wings vibrated furiously giving the human-sized creature, lift. The agitated bug twitched here and there, floating in circles around its target, which stood there in the middle of a dim-lit dome-shaped room.

Kiva
By Cinsearae S.

Her mind drifts back to a time when the women in her family were still alive. Although she did not always get along with them, she misses their faces, their voices, their smiles. She took for granted their short existence on earth, often regretting not having listened more closely to the stories of their own lives, repetitive and lackluster as they were. The males of her family were also long gone; if there were any alive she did not know.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
By Mylochka

“If I not charged wit’ nothin’,” the boy argued. “You got to be lettin’ me go….Else I done got to charge you wit’ kidnapping. You a kidnapper, man?”

Marcus Brown gave a tight smile to the young man on the other side of his desk. He’d only recently moved to New Orleans from the Midwest. He’d been warned that working here would be different than anything he’d experienced. Having been a caseworker in Kansas City, he thought he’d already seen it all. He had been wrong. “Would you like some coffee?”

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