Bards and Sages Quarterly (July 2014)

By Bards and Sages Publishing

Since 2009, the Bards and Sages Quarterly has brought fans of speculative fiction an amazing variety of short stories from both new and established authors. Each issue sets out to introduce readers to the wealth of talent found in the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres. Our authors have included Nebula, Hugo, and Pushcart winners and nominees.

In this Issue:

An Interview with Sci-Fi Author Mary Fan

After refusing to sell his grandmother’s old phonograph to a peculiar man, Evan learns what it means to defy the desires of ancient forces in “A Song from the Old Country.”

An almost indestructible princess discovers the truth of her strength, and her heritage, in “Rebirth.”

A young man concocts a scheme to get his parents to stop pressuring him to find someone to sue in “Victims.”

Plus more original stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Jun 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311181039

Bards and Sages Publishing

Established in 2002, Bards and Sages Publishing is a micro-press that publishes speculative fiction and roleplaying games. To find our line of RPG products in digital format, please visit Drivethrurpg.

Book preview

Bards and Sages Quarterly

Volume VI, Issue III

July 2014

Editor-in-Chief

Julie Ann Dawson

Editorial Assistant

Jaime Kaiser

Cover Art by

William Fischer

Print ISSN 1944-4699

©2014 Bards and Sages Publishing

Stories are © their original authors and republished here with permission

Smashwords Edition

License Agreement

This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser and should not be copied, transferred, distributed, traded, or sold to third parties without the expressed written permission of the authors. Please respect the copyright of the authors by not sharing unauthorized copies

In This Issue

A Song from the Old Country, by James Zahardis

In the Deep of a Wild Blue, by Erin Cole

Old Man's Cave, by Jamie Lackey

Rebirth, by M.E.L.I.

The Great Mystery, by Tanya X. Short

The River Fox, by Danielle N. Gales

Victims, by Tim McDaniel

An Interview With Mary Fan

A Song from the Old Country

By James Zahardis

Evan turned six in the spring of ’72. His birthday came a few days after the Easter Offensive in Kontum, a few days after three soldiers in class-A uniforms showed up at the door. Evan’s mother, in the throes of an emotional collapse catalyzed by widowhood and exacerbated by the synergism of lithium carbonate, vodka, and pot, sent him to stay with his paternal grandmother, Grandma Connie, on eastern Long Island for the summer. Her home was a post-Great Depression bungalow; its décor was inspired by Coco Chanel in confluence with bargain-basement sensibilities, which had manifested into a menagerie of mismatched Monet-colored furniture sealed in plastic slipcovers; and china cabinets lined chockablock with miniature tea sets, figurines of geishas and Spanish dancing ladies, and faux-gold statuettes of stallions. And behind the bone-white, blue-trimmed bungalow was the Pine Barrens, a sandy, scrubby greenbelt marshalling the East End suburban hinterlands with multitudinous sentinels cast in stunted pine.

One afternoon, Grandma Connie called Evan into the dining room. She was sitting at the table with an old photo album in front of her. She flipped its threadbare cover open and pointed at a fading black-and-white photograph.

Evan looked at the photograph, at the gray-space image of two austere adults and four children with benign, barely perceptible smiles and asked, Who are these people, Grandma?

Well, that’s me sitting on my father’s lap and beside him is my mother. That’s your great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Demetrius and Helen.

But who’re the other kids?

The little boy to my left, that’s your Uncle Peter. The boy and girl to my right are Christos and Penelope. They were my brother and sister.

Did they stay back in Greece after the rest of the family came to America?

No. They died. Died from fevers a few years after the picture was taken.

Evan reached out and touched the photograph; he imagined himself colorless, in that gray-space flatland of the distant past. Why’s everybody standing around that funny-looking horn?

Oh, that’s not a horn. That’s a phonograph! It’s like a record player that all the kids have these days, except it didn’t play a disk. It played a cylinder.

A cylinder?

That’s right. And this was a special phonograph. My father brought it back home after the war and gave it to my mother. It was the first phonograph in our village in Arcadia.

The first? Cool!

It was such an attraction! Everybody wanted to hear it play some tunes! I remember one cylinder. A good old Blue Amberol! It had a clarinet solo. All the children loved it! They would gather outside our living room window on summer nights and dance by the light of citronella lamps until they were called home.

That night, Evan dreamed of children dancing beneath the Cosmos of Twelve Bright Stars in the cool summer night to the phonograph’s melody. The children; spinning, spellbound whirligigs; and the sheeny metallic horn of the phonograph transmuted into the grainy, knobby spiral horn of a goat. Its melody now strangely discordant. The children continued to dance into the oblivion. And in the darkness something looked-on.

* * *

Evan had recently graduated from college and landed a job as a slush reader for a book publisher in Manhattan. He was eating a lukewarm TV dinner in his Washington Heights apartment, vacillating between soppy cardboard turkey breast and fluorescent-green spring peas, when he got a call from Uncle Peter. It wasn’t Christmas so Evan expected that something was wrong, and before his uncle could finish saying I have some bad news he knew Grandma Connie had died.

The wake was two days later, and afterwards Evan, Uncle Peter, and the family’s priest, Father George, sat in the rented hall