A Last Meal for the Holly King

By Stefon Mears

The cabin. Deep in the Oregon woods. Solidly built. Over fifty years old. Maybe a thousand feet from the Willamette river. A beautiful bargain, way underpriced.

Stupid purchase for Jess and Steve. Two crazy kids, just out of college and into marriage. Yet over the years, their love made that cabin paradise.

But Jess died.

Now Steve returns one last time. Not intending to leave it alive.

But magic happens in the Oregon backwoods.

"A Last Meal for the Holly King" – heart-wrenching short story, richly imagined and marvelously executed. Fans of fairy tales and stories of love lost, don't miss this one! From Stefon Mears, author of On the Edge of Faerie and the Spells for Hire series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thousand Faces Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393801689

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A Last Meal for the Holly King

A Last Meal for the Holly King

Stefon Mears

Thousand Faces Publishing

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The cabin. Jess and I bought it not long after we got married.

Stupid purchase, really. I mean, we were kids. Twenty-five years old, and barely making enough to get by. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment, for Pete’s sake. We were the last people who should have taken out a mortgage to buy a vacation cabin off in the Oregon woods.

But Jess’ dad was a realtor, and Jess grew up learning the business. Even if she hated it. Even if she never wanted to sell a damned house, no matter how much money she could make doing it.

She loved accounting, so that was what she did.

But she knew real estate. And she knew bargains.

The cabin was a bargain. Mispriced way under market value. Solidly built. Over fifty years old. Maybe a thousand feet from the Willamette River.

Jess was convinced it would be the place we took our kids every summer. The place we hid away every chance we got, once those kids were out of the house.

We never had those kids. We tried. Lord knows we tried. But the one time the pregnancy caught, well, it went wrong.

Badly wrong.

The doctor was gentle about telling us we’d never have kids.

Turned out the doctor told Jess more than that, but she’d kept it from me. Didn’t tell me about the internal damage she’d suffered when it all went wrong. That the hours it had taken us to get her to a real hospital – from that damned cabin – had left their mark deep inside her.

Don’t worry about it, Stevie, she’d told me, ruffling my hair the way she did whenever she wanted me to drop a subject. An old habit. One she’d started back when we were freshmen in college, and she didn’t want me worrying about the ex-boyfriend living on her dorm floor, only two doors down.

Truth was, that big lunk Lester hadn’t been anything to worry about. She was more than over him, and he was into some new girl every other week.

Set the precedent in my head. When my blond curls got ruffled, Jess was telling me the truth. That what she told me when she ruffled my hair and said those magic words, that was something I really didn’t have to worry about. It was something I could put out of my mind, and never think about again.

Didn’t matter if it was how we were going