Little Five: A Terminalia Story

By Kari Kilgore

Barry Evans: An oddball in the oddest land of all.

A gray-suited accountant navigating colorful hair, crazy clothing, and questionable businesses.

After three months in Little Five, nothing surprises Barry anymore.

Until the day he meets a true stranger in town.

What happens when numbers meet magic?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386860402

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

Little Five

For my brother, James Walker Steffey II

---

An expert at walking the line

between standard and strange

Little Five

A Terminalia Story

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Little Five

On a good day, the passersby in Little Five Points were what Barry Evans considered odd. Far from the general Atlanta strange, one he’d been keenly aware of in the three months since work had brought him down here.

Hair dyed orange, green, or blue, on the men half the time. Women, or at least he assumed they were women, with no hair at all. People he couldn’t even guess at age or gender, slouching around in next to nothing or what he was sure were old Halloween costumes.

Even the shop owners, the ones he’d managed to get comfortable talking to, had shockingly visible tattoos or painfully visible piercings.

He wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, cursing the sludgy Southern afternoon air. More water than air, if you asked him, and all at an intolerable ninety-two degrees in early March.

Ninety-two degrees and a hundred and seven percent humidity, at least. Chicago got plenty hot, sure. But not when spring had barely rolled in.

He’d given up trying to keep his dress shoes presentable after the first couple of weeks of warm weather. The sidewalks and cobblestones stayed coated in spilled food, bird droppings, and worst of all for sensible black business shoes, endless and changing varieties of graffiti.

Was it painted or spray painted, like respectable so-called street art back in Chicago? Oh no, not down here. Most of the swoops and swirls and dubious masterpieces were in sidewalk chalk or some kind of gummy paint that never set. Probably too humid for any kind of paint to set, really.

The most elaborate displays moved into three dimensions with