Del Sol SFF Review

Kids up and Gone Scarce, King of Darkness, Killer Angel, Bent Personalities, Soul Sucking Love, Journey through Hades, Recombinant Revolt _______________ Wildflower—Steven Nutt Verified Sighting #33: Prague, 1979–V. Mier The Angel—Ken Foxe Leaving Limbo—A.A. Fuentes Incriminator—Matthew Wollin Cage the Soul—Dylan Nicole Hansen Ashes—Jon Adcock

When the police come round, askin, they looks me up sideways. Two men, barely out of kidskin. Says have you seen the boys an girls out by the humps? Goin out there night-time? I says I hear em, tells em that old oak and the lanky birches got no beef with children, keeps an eye out for them even. With their root talk ‘n spores. Wherever them kids has gone, they gone safe.   There is rules, see? Most people know that cats can’t abide no cucumbers. Common sense, that. But did you know the war between house spider an the house? That shale brick an clay, walling you all in, some two hundred years. The house spider scarries the floors, claims skirting board an plaster is his, all of em barriers between the hearth an home, the web, an that old enemy. Meanwhiles there’s that dancin cellar spider, in the damp corners an underneath toilets, in that space behind doors what don’t close no more. He works for shale rock since before it was ever dug out the ground. Old Papa Shale and daddy-long-legs,

For the first time in nearly eighteen years, someone had seen the King. The resulting report lacked concrete details, riddled instead with superlatives and italics and phrases like, “if you   felt   it, if you were   there ,” concluding abruptly with a useless sentence: “if only there were words to describe the way the night itself bent around him, how the shadows gave into his touch, how my tongue grew heavy and too big for my mouth, and I had the strangest feeling I was in the presence of a god.” Maelona snorted. The King was not a god, not exactly. Any Protectorate worth their salt should know gods were a different category entirely. But, if the stories were true, she’d rather come face to face with a god than the King.   If  the stories were true. She snapped the report folder shut, placing it back on the table, avoiding the condensation ring her pint had left behind. Maelona swept her gaze through the small pub she sat inside. It was her local haunt, an old place on an old road in

    They call us  angels  because we help fix broken people. It’s hard work to go inside someone’s head,  live  there for a month, try and pull them back from the dark side and put them on a better path. That first week is the most difficult, when their mind is still strong and you are trying to uproot everything. Synapses splintered by trauma and a life of crime, they are hard-wired for badness. We angels, we get in there and we put it back together. We unbreak the broken connections, awaken their buried consciences, and set them on a better path. It almost always works, but that first week or so is like playing with gelignite on a warm day. If you ask me why I became an angel, there are two versions of that story: the public one and the private one. The public one you probably already know. My name is Soren and my daughter’s name was Amelia. You remember now, don’t you? You remember how Amelia was on her way home from school when a car pulled up alongside her. You remember how she go