Bards and Sages Quarterly (January 2021)

By S.E. Greco, Nell Ravenna, Jasmine Arch and 3 more

Celebrating our 13th year in publication!

 

Welcome to The Bards and Sages Quarterly, a journal of speculative fiction. With each issue, we strive to bring readers a wide range of character-driven fiction from established and emerging authors in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction fields. The Bards and Sages Quarterly is the perfect sampler to explore the incredible range of storytelling found in the speculative genres.

 

Here is a sample of what you will find in this issue:

 

The dead victim of a serial killer goes to extreme lengths to prevent him from killing again in Forever Fourteen.

 

A contract lawyer for magical creatures gets caught up in the investigation of the source of a mysterious wailing coming from a hotel room in Force Majeure.

 

The death of a young girl in a poor village changes her community in drastic ways when her hair continues to grow long after her death in The Corpse's Crown of Glory. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Jan 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393718123

Book preview

As Good as My Brother

by S.E. Greco

JAKE SAYS WE’LL REACH the big field soon and then we’ll walk down to where the orange trees are. He says the walk will be long but easy. But when we get there, maybe there will be other people to play the game with, and we have to be ready to hide. Always be ready, says Jake. Or else we’ll lose the game.

I’m Natalie. I’m seven now because we passed two of my birthdays while we’ve been walking. I had no cake or presents for those birthdays and that was sad, but we have peanut butter to eat. I wish we had more peanut butter, but Jake says the oranges we find will taste good.

Jake and me walked a long way today already, and we’re still walking with the sun low in the sky. He picks up his arm now and points. He’s my brother and he’s big, thirteen years old. He points the way we have to walk and I walk next to him.

He carries what we have on his back, in a sack. It’s not very much stuff, so it must be easy to carry. Our peanut butter jar is almost empty. We finished the crackers two days ago, so now we just put our fingers in the peanut butter jar to get some out, and then we lick them. Mommy would never let us do that, but she’s not here, so Jake is in charge, and he says it’s okay. Mommy and Daddy are not here because of the game. They must be the most best players of the game. 

Because they’ve been hiding such a long time.

Most of the game is hiding. We do the hiding part a lot because Jake says it’s more fun than the other part. I guess that’s the seeking part. Like from when we used to play hide and seek in the backyard, a long time ago.

But another part of the game is making and showing toy guns. Showing them off, I guess, is to see who has the best one. Jake made his out of wood. He works on it a little bit every day when we stop to rest, or before we go to sleep in the woods if it’s not too dark. He’s always scraping and carving his toy gun. He has a knife that he uses for the carving, and once we even found a can of shiny black paint in an old barn and Jake painted the gun with it. I asked him when his toy gun will be finished, and he said never. Jake said you can always make it look better.

The knife he uses to carve the gun is the kind where you can make the pointy part go back into the part you hold. I asked him once if I could use it, but he said no because it’s the most best thing we have. And he said that if I hurt myself with it, we can’t get help because all the doctors are hiding, too. So I guess the doctors are very good at the game, like Mommy and Daddy.

Sometimes we see someone else, and that’s when we start to play the game. We either show them the toy gun or we hide. I had a toy gun once. It had a red part at the end, and Mommy said that was so people know it’s a toy. That was way before everything turned grey and me, Jake, Mommy, and Daddy started walking all day long. Now nobody has that red thing on the end.

We’re walking in a field now. We stay off the roads because Jake says there are too many people on the roads and we don’t want to play the game with too many of them. A long time ago I remember when we walked close enough to a big city to see the tall buildings through the dusty air. And we saw fires burning in some of them, and black smoke going up in the sky. I wanted to get closer to look at the fires, but Jake said it wasn’t safe. He said we have to stay far away from the cities, and not even on the roads.

We walk and walk and I want to stop and I tell Jake I’m so tired and I need to rest but he says we shouldn’t stop here because there aren’t enough trees around. Jake says we need the trees because they’re good for the hiding part of the game, even though most of them are colored brown and grey because they’re dead. Everything is brown and gray and covered with dust, and that’s why we have rags over our faces when we walk. It’s to keep the dust out of our mouths. I remember when there were lots of colors outside. I remember the colored flowers Mommy used to plant. But there are no colors now except for the two, brown and grey. And dust everywhere.

Jake says to think about the oranges and that will keep me going and I do, but I’m still tired. He says if we find oranges, they may look brown and grey like everything else, and maybe they will be on the ground, but if they dried out in the sun they will still taste good.

I remember oranges are good. Apples, too. When I was five Mommy and Daddy and Jake took four big boxes of apples from a man and told me to go with him. Mommy and Daddy and Jake all walked away with the apples and I waved and cried. I couldn’t help it. But the next day, Jake came back for me and stole me away from the man. Only Jake, though. He said Mommy and Daddy were hiding. They’re still hiding, Jake says.

And now...someone stands up, right in front of us! He was maybe laying down in a hole because he just popped up and there he was. It’s a boy, taller than Jake and maybe older, but I can’t tell because he has a rag over his mouth too. The boy is alone, and he is dressed in clothes more ripped and dirty than the clothes Jake and I wear. And the boy raises his toy gun. And now I guess the game begins because Jake raises his toy gun, too.

I look at Jake to see if we will run and hide this time. But he just looks at the boy and the boy’s gun.

Drop it! the boy screams. Drop it right now or I’ll shoot!

I don’t like the screaming. This boy is playing the game too noisy and mean. But Jake is calm. He is used to this.

That’s not a real gun, Jake says to the boy.

Jake’s gun is long and black. It has a part you put next to your shoulder and then a long part looking like two long circle tubes you point at the other player. And not just one but two wood triggers. Jake’s finger is on both of them. The other boy has a different kind of gun, a small one you hold in one hand. It’s black and shiny, like Jake’s.

Yours is fake! screams the boy.

"Oh, it’s not fake," says Jake. 

Prove it, says the boy. Fire a shot in the air.

"Yours looks fake to me, says Jake. Let’s see you fire a shot in the air."

The boy makes a mad face and then shouts at Jake: You know I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna waste a bullet.

Got only one bullet then, huh? One bullet in your fake gun?

I got more than one bullet, but I’m not gonna waste even one.

Then Jake says, That’s a revolver you got there, right? So just spin the chamber. Spin it so I can see it’s real.

The boy gives Jake another mean look and says, I’m not gonna spin it. You could fire when it’s spinning.

"Oh, so you know mine is real," says Jake.