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I Crave My Meat a Little Rare
by Rajiv Moté
Jada wants to take dinner down to her father, so I slap some raw meat from the cutting board onto a tray. It means she’s not afraid anymore, and she’s still a forgiving child. I want to nurture both. But my heart beats faster. My throat and lungs are still raw.
I don’t tell her to be careful. His temper isn’t hers to manage. It was never mine, either, though I’ve formed instincts over the years. The door groans, the stair creaks, and I hear his breathing, the low rumble of an approaching storm. My muscles coil and an answering growl builds painfully in my chest. I listen for the telltales of agitation I’ve learned during our marriage. I’ll always protect you baby, I told my daughter four days ago, holding her head against my belly, her tears soaking through my shirt.
I relax my grip on the knife I’m using to cut onions, green peppers, and chunks of tomato. That’s not the protection that’s needed. That’s not the situation.
He’s a literal ogre, my friends say, as if they know what that means. As if it matters. As if fur and rage are all that define him. He’s big enough that I’m lost in his arms. Strong enough to stand against anything that would hurt our family. He has never once touched me or Jada in anger. He would never. He loves us, and even if ogres won’t apologize, the fact that he’s stayed in the basement shows he has remorse.
But he also has a temper.
Have you ever heard a lion roar? It’s louder than you’d expect, even from such a massive beast. You feel it as much as hear it. It fills space. It brooks no argument. An ogre roars like that, but hurling words with such force and fury, they hit you at your core. If a voice like that calls you useless, coddling, or lazy, maybe you are. When I was young my mother used a voice almost like that to call me selfish, and ever since I’ve tried to put the needs of others first. And she was no ogre.
I listen from the top of the stairs. Her father asks Jada about school, and she gives him the same one-word answers she gives me. Questions about friends get longer answers. She even whispers something that makes him chuckle, rattling the light fixtures. He’s Good Dad now. The growl rises to my sore throat. Four days ago, she was crying, saying she didn’t feel safe in this house. Four days ago I shouted him down into the cellar where he’s stayed ever since. I shouted down an ogre.
There’s an offensive theory that pop psychologists advocate on talk shows, to the jeers of the ogres, trolls, goblins, and harpies in the audience. They say the locust, famous for swarming and devastating crops, is not a distinct species from the grasshopper, but a stress-induced behavior. So too, they say, the inhumans among us are merely humans with “externalized pathologies.” They’re just people transformed by their worst traits. It’s a demeaning and racist idea that I never want my daughter to hear.
But it’s true that when ogres start to rage, they can’t stop. They keep working themselves up until the explosion, and only then can they eventually calm down. I know the drill. I’ve gone through the repair bills. But he’d never exploded at Jada before. Not like four days ago. She’s growing up, starting to assert herself. She’s showing signs of a temper herself. And her father has his triggers.
My first, awful thought? Thank God it’s not at me.
Selfish. I was putting my fears before my own daughter. Shame can overcome fear. Shame can curdle into anger in your chest and rip from your throat, louder than you’d expect from a human. And when you know—without a doubt—that you’re right, when it’s for your child, what you unleash brooks no argument. There’s power in rage. Enough to drive an ogre down into the cellar.
But I can rein it in. I have to. Someone has to set an example, to show another way. Jada’s only half ogre.
I make fajitas using the rest of the meat. I pan-roast it with the vegetables together, removing a portion from the heat a little early. Only a bit of char that doesn’t go deep. Lately I’ve craved my meat a little rare.
When we sit at the table to eat, occupying only two of the three chairs, Jada asks when Daddy can come upstairs. As if I’m the one keeping him down. I fold a piece of steak into a tortilla, without bothering with fixings. Its juices drip red onto my plate.
When he’s ready, I say, and then I take a bite.
I’ll be ready too.
About the author:
Rajiv Moté is a writer and software professional living in Chicago with his wife, daughter, and a tiny dog. His stories appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Diabolical Plots, Reckoning Magazine, and other publications. He likes his meat medium rare with a peppercorn-cream sauce.
Driving On
by J. Y. Zhang
When the Wayback machine finishes its boot, a velvet voice bleeds in from the bottom of the cooling box: “Connecting you to your default destination.”
You know all the steps to the process. It’s an old routine by now—you brace yourself for the discomfort of limbo.
Soon enough, sub-zero air hisses in from overhead. Mid-breath, your chest seizes still. Your fly-aways flash-freeze, and toes clench death-stiff. As your former reality blinks away, the box finishes its recitation. “June 2, 2031,” it murmurs, as though you will ever forget the day.
Gravity shifts, pushing you into the projection once more.
It is easy how the years collapse. A single instant, like tipping back too far in a chair, and you are there again: twenty-three, in the shotgun seat of her sedan, driving on toward a candle-wax dawn. Twenty-three, and still wadding tobacco between your molars, still strutting the hours in a pair of converse sneakers with a splitting sole.
“It’s a nice day for a drive,” she says, a cold hand settled on your thigh.
Feet kicked up upon the faux-leather dash, you—your projection self—think nothing of the way your dirty soles stamp dirt. You lean back against the headrest, breathe in that stale Little Tree air. She was always bad on the aux, always trying to get you to listen to Elliot Smith as a snap-cure for clinical depression.
Each time the minutes replay, it happens the same way. History is absolute. You once expected some revelation from knowing the past in perfect clarity, but now you know better. It’s like a song—learn the lyrics, dissect the chords. Still, it is that same old song when you hit replay.
But rewind a moment. Hold still. Experience it fully as it happens.
The road sign, 401 West Windsor—close, closer, gone. The McDonald’s arc striking through the distant morning mist. The cold air of the broken heater assaulting your throat. Her bitten nails painted Midnight Cherry, tapping away at the steering wheel. Her eyes searching the dawn. You see it now: she always watches the sky like it is a door. She waits at night for her life to change and wilts each morning when it remains the same.
So you are twenty-three. So she is here with you. You know what happens next.
Reverse the gears, unwind the night—everything the Wayback machine might do for you. Still, it happens how it happens. Still, there is no changing her searching eyes, her cold hands.
There’s no sharp turns to the road ahead, nothing but distance. Driving on, then: tires biting bitumen, cruise control.
At some point, she asks if you like the song she’s chosen. She asks if you love her. She asks you if you can point out each of the moles on her shoulders, then falls quiet when you prove you can.
She says, “Doll, look at me.” Her icy fingers tip your chin. She splits her gaze between you and the empty road ahead. “If there was any other way—”
But she doesn’t finish the sentence. Her hand settles upon your thigh. Her voice falls silent. She never talks to you about these things. Never knows how to say what’s on her mind. So she turns her gaze to the road, where the silhouette of an incoming truck breaks the horizon
How the story ends is no mystery. How she does it is easy for anyone to see. Mid twenty-first century, the steering wheel still doing the steering; the driver’s absolute control.
The truck remains on course as it nears. Its headlights are brighter than the dawn. That’s when it happens—her hand leaves your thigh as she wrenches the wheel left.
Here it is: the big bang in reverse. Everything turns to nothing. Crash, fizzle, gone. Before the impact reverberates the old pains of your bones, the projection cuts to black.
Why did she do it? Why? Will you ever understand?
Reverse the gears.
Unwind the night.
There’s a quarter hour still blinking on your clock. You know you should get your money’s worth with the Wayback machine. So the lightshow spins before your eyes as gravity shifts back in place. The scene reassembles, the panes of light interlock.
Then it begins again: you are twenty-three, you are whole, and she is next to you, driving on. You try to note the signs again—any sign which gives away what she is going to do.
Ten minutes before the crash, she makes a strained sound of the throat when she tries to laugh. Five minutes before the crash, she smooths the skin of your thighs like a prayer. Moments before the crash, you are still mapping out her constellation of moles to prove you love her.
The past is no mystery. You know exactly how it happens. Fact after fact after fact. A successive bludgeoning.
“Here,” you say, touching a pink speck in the underside of her chin. “And here, and here.” Your fingers slip to her shoulder, then her wrist.
Each time you relive this moment, you imagine your touch anchoring her to the world. Each time your fingers graze her body, you still feel a clench in your chest, as though she can still choose to stay.
But for all the times you’ve reversed the gears and unwound the night, it still happens how it happens.
Driving on with her is all you can do.
About the author:
J. Y. Zhang codes by day, writes by night, and doomscrolls Reddit in the hours between. Their fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Heartlines Spec and Inner Worlds. They are a fan of microwave baked potatoes.
Find J. Y. Zhang:
Website
Bluesky
Grandfather’s Pond
by Aeryn Rudel
I was sitting at Zeke’s, nursing my fifth scotch and soda and contemplating my life choices when Oleg Kardov pulled up a stool next to me. The Russian was a contract killer celebrity and rumored to have a hundred hits under his belt without a sniff from the feds. No one knew how he did it.
“They find your body, yes?” Oleg said without preamble.
“Jesus, Oleg,” I said. “Say it louder in case the whole fucking bar didn’t hear.”
The Russian looked around and shrugged. “No one cares. So, is true?”
I sighed. “Yeah, is true. Now can you let me drink in peace?”
I’m what they call a sinker in the biz. A local flooded quarry and a couple of twenty-pound dumbbells reliably made my hits disappear. But I got lazy and caught a floater. The cops weren’t able to tie the body to me or my employer, but it was fair to say it rattled me.
Oleg didn’t leave. Instead, he ordered a rum and coke—not exactly the drink I expected for a brutal Russian hitman, but who am I to judge?—and settled into his seat. When his drink arrived, he took a sip and said, “I will tell you secret.”
“I’m not sure I want to know any of your secrets.”
The Russian chuckled. “This is why I tell you.”
I considered telling Oleg to go fuck himself, but as nuts as the Russian seemed, his reputation was legit. He’d killed more men than heart attacks, and staying in the good graces of the most feared hitter in the city wasn’t a terrible idea. “Fine. I’m listening.”
“I know a place. Secret place. I take bodies there, and no one finds them. Ever.”
Every hitter had a favorite dumping ground, and you sure as shit didn’t share it with anyone. “Why would you tell me that?”
Oleg shrugged. “You remind me of me when I was young. I want to help.”
I threw back my scotch in a gulp. “You don’t exactly have a reputation for being helpful.”
“But I have reputation of bodies never found, yes?”
He had me there.
I was drunk enough to get in a car with Oleg, but not drunk enough to take my hand off the butt of the Glock 19 I carried in an appendix holster for the entire trip. If Oleg noticed, he didn’t care.
When he pulled up onto the shore of a small pond surrounded by towering trees, I had a basic idea of where we were. I could probably even find it again after I sobered up.
My Russian “friend” got out and went to the back of his SUV. “Come. Help.”
I joined Oleg at the rear of the vehicle. He opened the hatch, and I saw what was definitely a body wrapped in a yellow sheet. “Jesus, how long has that been in there?”
“Not long. Job last night. Help me bring to pond.”
Well, if Oleg was carrying a corpse, his hands would be occupied, so I obliged, and we manhandled the body down to the rocky shore.
“This is it?” I said as we set the body down. “You just dump them here? Is it deep?”
Oleg smiled, his teeth bone white in the dark. “Deep and inhabited.”
The last word sent a chill down my spine. “Inhabited by what?”
“Vodyanoy.”
I don’t speak Russian, but the way Oleg said that word—half whispering it—made me keenly aware of how badly I needed to piss.
“Grandfather!” Oleg called out. “Come. I bring you good meat.”
“What in the fuck are . . .” my voice trailed off as the water in the middle of the pond began to bubble and writhe. Something appeared beneath the disturbance, then a ghastly green shape rose up out of the water, and all the spit dried up in my mouth. It was easily ten feet tall, with dark olive skin and a vaguely man-shaped body. Vaguely being the operative word. Its head was a terrible cross between frog and fish, with a huge maw lined with finger-long daggers. Its arms were spindly, double jointed, and ended in webbed hands tipped with ripping talons.
The thing waded toward the shore, its huge yellow eyes, as big as a car’s headlights, fixed on Oleg. I watched, half-dazed with horror, as the thing reached out, grabbed the sheet-shrouded corpse and opened its mouth wide. It shoved in the body headfirst, made a horrid gulping noise, and the corpse—sheet and all—slithered down its gullet and disappeared.
“Grandfather is always hungry,” Oleg said.
“Dva?” the thing in the pond said, its voice a dreadful croaking whisper, and held up two spindly knife-tipped digits.
I was terrified, and it’s fair to say not in possession of all my faculties, but I’m a seasoned killer, and though I didn’t know what dva meant, I could fucking count. I went for my Glock.
“Wait!” Oleg shouted, holding up one hand. The other hand was, of course, reaching for his own pistol.
I shot Oleg in the head, filling the quiet shore with thunder. He collapsed to the ground, leaking blood and brains.
Grandfather didn’t move. It simply stared at me with those dinner-plate-sized eyes.
I pointed at the corpse I’d just made. “Uh, dva?”
A smile split Grandfather’s frog-like face, and it hooked Oleg’s body with a talon and dragged him into the water. Then it looked up at me and pointed at its gaping, fang-filled maw. “Boleye?”
You can pick up a lot through tone and context. “You betcha, pal. More to come.”
Grandfather disappeared beneath the water with Oleg’s corpse, and once again I was left contemplating my life choices. One choice was clear. I’d need to learn some Russian.
About the author:
Aeryn Rudel is a writer from Tacoma, Washington. He is the author of the baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, the Iron Kingdoms Acts of War novels, and the flash fiction collection Night Walk & Other Dark Paths. His short stories have appeared in Factor Four Magazine, On Spec, and Pseudopod, among others. Learn more about Aeryn’s work at www.rejectomancy.com or on Bluesky @aerynrudel.bsky.social.
Raja
by Moh Afdhaal
Raja the mahout shared a name with his elephant.
It was temple tradition to assign elephants to namesake handlers. Or handlers to namesake elephants. The mahout wasn’t sure which way it had begun and had never bothered to find out why. He assumed it was to make it clear that the handler was fully accountable for the elephant.
So, when Raja the elephant went missing the day after the annual parade, Raja the mahout bore the sole responsibility of finding him.
Instructions from the temple management were clear:
“Find the elephant. Its tracker has stopped working. We have no idea where it is, but its geofence is set at three kilometres, so it’s still somewhere near town. You’ve got four hours. After that we shut you out of this work for good and put a bounty on the inorg.”
It was a valid threat. The mahout knew no other trade, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t think of anything else he could do.
So he set out in search of the elephant. They had unfinished business.
Sitting in the back of Karu aiya’s tuk-tuk, he began the search by circling out from the temple stables—where he had left the elephant to rest the previous night. He questioned the town’s permanent fixtures; a hulking mass like Raja couldn’t have gone unnoticed. But the lotus-cart aunty hadn’t seen the elephant. Nor had the lottery-ticket-selling droid, or Sumathi from Sumathi & Sons Hardware.
By hour two of the search, Karu aiya’s thoughts were let loose. “Raja was going to run away anyway, malli. You saw him at the parade. Restless, no? I saw it in his eyes. Battery drained.”
The mahout had no idea what the tuk-tuk driver was talking about. He’d always kept the elephant fully charged.
The search party covered the temple, the lake beside the temple, the roads that circled the lake, and the buildings that lined the roads. All that remained was the forest reserve that carpeted the surrounding hills. By then, the tuk-tuk meter had reached the mahout’s credit limit. Karu aiya offered a toothy, apologetic farewell and zoomed off, leaving Raja with an hour to the deadline and a long hike ahead.
Raja the mahout had never been inside a forest. Neither had Raja the elephant. They had spent many days back at the stables looking up at the rolling verdancy that walled the town. Up close, the sight was disorienting. The mahout felt the green was too green. Too alive.
Despite the unfamiliarity, it didn’t take long for the mahout to spot the elephant’s tracks in the forest. Trampled shrubs and half-fallen trees marked an unnatural, elephant-shaped gap in the dense everything else.
A few minutes down the path of destruction, the mahout came upon the elephant. A stationary leather-bound grey-brown giant. Like a large rock jutting out of the slope.
When Raja the elephant noticed the approaching mahout, he stepped away, only to be pushed back by something unseen. The geofence. He tried again, and again, with the same result.
The mahout tried to reason with the elephant.
“Raja. Let me access your core. I can fix whatever’s wrong with you.” It was more out of courtesy than a sincere request. All inorganics were programmed never to attack.
He picked his way through the thick forest floor to the elephant and gently placed his palm against his trunk. The elephant obliged without resistance, raising his left foreleg to expose a tiny port beneath a soil-stained toenail. The mahout plugged in the bootleg access dongle he had picked up at Sumathi & Sons Hardware, and Raja the elephant immediately went offline. His trunk slumped, and his beady eyes turned black.
The mahout accessed the intelligence core, swiping past directives until he reached the subdirectory for Limiting Protocols. He scrolled past the tracking system he had disabled the previous night, and eventually found the geofence software. It was no wonder he had missed it before. The geofence was buried beneath a thick layer of encryption.
A few lines of code and a neural key verification later, the fence was gone. Raja the mahout brought Raja the elephant back online.
“All done, buddy. You can go now. Sorry I missed it earlier. I didn’t even know they could put up a fence.”
The elephant swayed his massive head from side to side, then gingerly prodded his trunk at the invisible wall. It went through without resistance.
He shook his head with more vigour, flapped his ears, then sped off past the memory of the wall. More plants were trampled, sending shivers through the forest floor as critters dart away and a flock of babblers burst into noise in the canopy.
Raja the mahout watched it all in awe. He had never seen the elephant move with such speed or grace before. All the agitation of the previous weeks gone. Karu aiya had been right about the eyes; they did look different.
The elephant stopped abruptly a short distance away and turned to look at the mahout, his eyes now buzzing with colour. He raised his trunk and beckoned him forward.
The mahout flashed what he hoped was an appreciative smile at the elephant. He reached out his hand, stepping forward until he felt the inevitable pressure against his fingers. His invisible wall sat exactly where the elephant’s had been. He turned the prod into a wave goodbye.
As the mahout embarked on his long walk out of the forest, a flashing red light vignetted his vision, signalling the end of his four hours. He would go back to the temple now. Maybe the committee would commission another elephant with his name. Or change his. Maybe they would repurpose him—no namesake needed this time.
Raja the elephant trumpeted behind him. Louder and longer than ever before.
About the author:
Moh Afdhaal is a Sri Lankan writer published in MYRIAD, Tasavvur Nama, and the Simultaneous Times Podcast, among others. He works as a civil engineer and writes whenever the world allows. Find him on X at @mohwritesthings.
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