Niteblade #31 - All The Better

Niteblade's dark fairy tale issue.

Fiction

The Men in the Walls by Rhonda Eikamp
“Put a stop to this,” I say out loud, but I don’t know who I’m saying it to, the imprisoned creature here or those in the castle, the wrong trapped in me or all of us.

Caught by Sandi Leibowitz
Grandmother’s stories all started with that magic word, “once.” In the stories, desperate girls got rescued. But no one will come for one so heartless, greedy.

The Flight of the Silk Moth by Zoe McAuley
The time of the great ball arrived and the three girls hurried into the grand hall of the castle, each in their enchanted gowns, among a crowd of dozens upon dozens of women.

Sefiria the Lesser – a tale from The Secret Egyptian History of Murtadi, Son of Gaphiphus by Darius M. Klein
“This love of yours is folly,” replied Sahaloc the Wise. “Forget her. To attempt to seek her love would be worse than to attempt to obtain caresses of loving tenderness from a basilisk of the desert wastes.”

Candy, Shoe, and Skull; Sallow Flowers Plucked Like Chains by Eileen Wiedbrauk
The entire town left their couches and looked for trails of shiny white pebbles, or breadcrumbs, or chains of sallow flowers picked and braided by small fingers: for the detritus a girlchild leaves when she wanders off from home.

Snip. Clip. Whip. by T. Fox Dunham
She dreams in vaulted night, buried beneath ocean fathoms, beneath eons of silt, the dead remains of millions of plankton and fish and birds flying above, buried low and buried again, a living world lost, buried, then lost to her.

A Curse and a Kiss by Eric J. Guignard
And he laughed again. The sound climbed and echoed, as if each snicker reverberated off the drops of turquoise rain that fell. The old woman’s face contorted, and I knew not if she was to cry or bellow at her tormentor.

Poetry
Hunger by Sandi Leibowitz
Et je ne pleurais jamais les larmes cicatrisantes magiques; c’est seulement un mensonge joli: Aarne-Thompson Index No. 310 by Elizabeth R. McClellan
Fruits by Sandi Leibowitz
All the Better by Lissa Sloan