Bards and Sages Quarterly (January 2018)

By A.J. Flowers, Russell Hemmell, Steve Rodgers and 3 more

First launched in January 2009, The Bards and Sages Quarterly is a celebration of short speculative fiction. Each issue brings readers a vibrant collection of speculative works from both new and established writers. Our goal remains the same today as when we began: to create a showcase in which to introduce readers to amazing voices they might have otherwise missed.

In this issue: Stories by Russell Hemmell, James Victor Jordan, Steve Rodgers, J.G. Follansbee, George Nikolopoulos, Peter Medeiros, Robin Reed, Scarlett R. Algee, Judith Field, James Fitzsimmons, Jude-Marie Green, and A.J. Flowers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386663065

A.J. Flowers

A.J. Flowers is a fantasy author, book blogger, and automotive engineer in Detroit. She loves her writing, her work, and above all, her faith and family. When not writing or designing, you can find her saving the world from annihilation on her favorite video games side-by-side with her Dutch husband and princess Blue Russian kitty named Mina. To follow AJ's blog for new writing tips, head on over to https://ajflowers.wordpress.com

Book preview

1348 by Russell Hemmell

A Friend of the Devil by James Victor Jordan

Blood Soap by Steve Rodgers

Zillah Harmonia by J.G. Follansbee

Book Announcements

High in the Sky by George Nikolopoulos

The Eternal Life of the First Emperor by Peter Medeiros

People of the Dragon by Robin Reed

And Drown Melancholy by Scarlett R. Algee

Somewhere, Somewhen by Judith Field

The Dead They Come by James Fitzsimmons

The Lay of the Land by Jude-Marie Green

Wiersbiel by A.J. Flowers

About the Authors

1348

by Russell Hemmell

HE ARRIVED ON SUNDAY, after a winter of sleep and snow. A jester with clear blue eyes, pale lithe hands and white flowers in them. He smiled and said, I come in peace. I ply my trade with buffooneries and riddles, and the joking tambourine accompanies my laughter. Enjoy my gifts, you beautiful city, and the good time I bring. He bowed in reverence, with the beauty of an angel. And it was Sunday.

On Monday, Florence woke up at the song of hundred birds, colorful plumes of fast-winged spirits. Sun bathed the city roofs and its rays made the Cathedral’s spires shine and glow. Here it comes an unforgettable season, people rejoiced. For the jester had promised.

On Tuesday boys chased girls in the streets, calling them funny names like the jester had told them. Naked shoulders in the sunshine heat, naked feet on the humid lawn, great expectations and longing hearts. They laughed and laughed, they played and played again. And they were happy.

On Wednesday the artist began his most amazing painting, of a pale young man with white flowers in his hands. He gave him the beauty of an angel, blue starlight in his eyes. Which flowers are they? he asked, the jester - but the model stood up and walked. Wait, the artist said, I haven’t finished yet. You won’t, replied the jester.

On Thursday the lords in their high palaces wanted to declare the war to end all wars, for a never-ending peace. Money to buy armies to buy weapons to buy yet more power. To earn yet more money for the richest city of Christianity. But the smiling jester told them to wait, for a war was no longer needed. And so they waited.

On Friday he invited the people of Florence to celebrate and party. He went down to the streets, taking their hands and dancing around, drinking red wine and eating warm bread. They made rhymes and ballads together, singing the praise of loving souls, of kindred spirits, believing in eternity, sizing the fleeting day. Like yesterday never was, like tomorrow would never come.

In peace, I came, he said and kissed people of all ages, sex, and races, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, filthy and elegant, nobles and peasants. He caressed Lady Beatrice’s soft cheek and brushed children’s head with his delicate fingers.

It was late at night when his Lady came to him. So scared she had been, the week spent burning in secret, yet hesitant on her steps. Are you wise enough to befriend a fool? Are you foolish enough to believe what he says? But not that night – that night she believed, and her feet followed him under an immaculate moonlight. His skin was whiter than the moon itself, and his touch as gentle as butterfly’s wings, bestowing pleasure and divine wisdom. What’s your name, my Lord, she whispered in awe. One you don't want to hear.

When Florence rose from slumber on Saturday afternoon there were no songs, no flowers, and all birds were gone. A hot sticky rain was dripping on their faces and insects crawled on their wet skin. Sunlight had disappeared under a blanket of fog and clouds masked the Cathedral’s spires. In thousands, they were dying, without mourning of the living, abandoned in fear, desperate beyond despair.

As a ghost in the darkness, a cart with its sinister bell sound came over, slowly parading in the streets. The jester strolled along, clear blue eyes shining with compassion, and face covered by a beak-like mask, white as his hands. Soothing sick people, whispering words to their moribund ears, caressing their gaping buboes.

He visited taverns, churches and houses, a silent shadow of doom. And on the red linens of their beds, he threw the asphodels of the Black Death, his voice crystalline and sweet, the touch suave of an Angel of Plague.

A Friend of the Devil

By James V Jordan

My psychiatrist says that my memory was impaired by a brainstem stroke suffered by my husband, Al. But my memories are vivid, distinct, reliable.

My psychiatrist insists, however, that what I describe isn’t memory but paramnesia. What she fails to understand is that surreal doesn’t mean unreal.

Al’s doctors say that his ability to think, to remember, is intact. He’d been athletic, handsome, but now he’s a man trapped in a body in atrophy with a face frozen in a visage of horror, a Dorian Gray transformation, a Kafkaesque portrayal of mind-body duality.

What must he be feeling? Heartbreak? Fear? Panic?

What must he be thinking? Of loss or loneliness? Of the past or what’s happening in the present? Of what his life might have, could have been?

For twenty years we were lovers, best friends, my husband and I. We were so close I believed I knew his thoughts and feelings. But now I can only imagine; I can wish; I can guess.

I must have been with him when it happened. Probably because the trauma of shock and fright the only thing I don’t remember is the last few hours of that night. My last memory of that day is seeing my father, dead just six months, standing next to Al on the cantilevered landing above our foyer.

When our sixteen-year-old son, Jacob, and his best friend, Pierre, one of my honors English students, came home late that night, they found Al on the landing, paralyzed. I was asleep and don’t remember waking up, the paramedics, the hospital.

Since the stroke, I’ve felt guilty. What if the paramedics had arrived earlier? Maybe after Al collapsed I blithely stepped over him, drew a bath, and took a sleeping pill. Maybe, as Rose Kennedy is rumored to have done, I watched my husband suffer a stroke and then went out to play nine holes of golf.

There are so many possibilities, but no one blames me: not the doctors, not Jacob, not Al.

Nothing – not mood elevators or stabilizers, soporifics or stimulants, booze or pot, or even selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – has helped.

Tomorrow, I’m going back to work, back to my students, back to my classroom, stepping back into the world where it all began, a world where I don’t know what I’ll do next time or to whom I’ll do it.

THE DAY OF AL’S STROKE, my students were discussing The Great Gatsby while I was thinking about redecorating the classroom, replacing the posters of Hemingway and Fitzgerald with posters of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.

My attention returned to the classroom discussion when Pierre said, "Except for Wilson, every character in Gatsby was a liar."

What about Nick Carraway? I said.

I didn’t hear his answer because the next moment I was twenty-eight again, with my best friends, Phoebe and Aurora, in Miami Beach, window shopping for a wedding ring for Al, deciding which one to purchase before I proposed to him.

Aurora, black curls clipped behind her ear, said, If you marry Al it will ruin your life.

I looked to Phoebe, expecting her to rebuke Aurora, but she just played with her innocent blonde pigtails.

One of my students said, Nick Carraway didn’t lie.

Although I’d never before experienced the present momentarily becoming the past, I didn’t feel caught between alternate realities. Reliving one of Aurora’s fierce admonitions of twenty years ago was disturbing but understandable. After all, what is consciousness if not a dialog between the past, the present, and the future? What are memories and dreams if not an expression of the speed of life?

Across the quad, beyond the four-tier Mediterranean fountain, birds of paradise, roses, and bottlebrush bordering the science building bloomed in a palette of colors. Below the beveled cornice of its art deco façade was the classroom where my father had taught for thirty-eight years.

He was lecturing – Using light emitted from solids and gases will help you understand the consequences of quantizing the energy in atoms; coaching baseball – Step forward with your front foot when you swing the bat; tutoring Hebrew – The vowels are a crutch; we’re throwing them away.

Then I was on a Key Largo beach watching children building a sand castle. Swimming in the ocean, a powerful undercurrent drew me underwater toward the ocean floor. I struggled, inhaled seawater, felt certain I would drown. My father lifted me to the surface. From far away, as if in a dream, I heard an echo: Nick Carraway was in love with Jordan Baker.

Victor, one of my students, diligent but unattuned to the nuances of truth, was arguing with Pierre. "Carraway was not in love with Jordan Baker, Victor said, flipping through the book. Here, right here on page 57: ‘I wasn’t actually in love with her.’"

Pierre said, "Actually?"

Victor said, Why would he lie?

Gesturing with power and precision, like the athlete he was, like the surgeon he hoped to become, Pierre, said, He can admit he was attracted to Jordan Baker’s hard, jaunty body, but he can’t admit he was in love with a liar and a cheat in a story he’s telling about the consequences of adultery.

You’re delusional, Victor said. The veins of his neck bulged. That’s why you cut your wrists. He jabbed a page with his forefinger. Carraway says, ‘I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known!’

There you have it, Pierre said, his hands in his lap. According to Gertrude—

Who is Gertrude? I said.

Hamlet’s mother, Pierre said. Nick Carraway protests too much.

IN THE PARKING LOT, where I thought I’d left the Buick, I was astonished to see my Triumph— a 1962 British racing-green TR3b, a gift from my father, who’d bought it new. I rarely drove it before he