M Issue 1

By Big Pulp

The debut issue of M, the new horror and mystery magazine from Big Pulp! Published twice annually, each issue contains a mix of horror, macabre, crime & mystery fiction and poetry.
This issue features:
"Shotgun Suicide" by Steve Passey
"Cover My Grave" by Helen Wurthman
"Last Evening" by Shannon Schuren
"​Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well" by Don Norum
"Willy" by Jake Walters
"Wildcraft" by Ellen Larson,
"Concealed" by Katrina Ray-Saulis
"Right Behind" by Philip Roberts
"The Middle Bleed" by Steven Wolf
And poetry from Robert Laughlin, Simon Perchik, Ron Larson, and Stephen Rogers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Big Pulp
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310010934

Big Pulp

Since 2008, Big Pulp has published the best in fantastic fiction from around the globe. We publish periodicals - including Big Pulp, Child of Words, M, and Thirst - and themed anthologies.

Book preview

M

Horror and Mystery

May 2014

Big Pulp Publications

Bill Olver, editor and publisher

Bill Boslego, associate editor (editorial)

contact: [e-mail]

Cover illustration by Luke Spooner

M Vol. 1, No. 1

May 2014

ISSN 2372-1049 (print)

ISSN 2372-1065 (electronic)

M is published twice yearly in May and November by Big Pulp Publications. 
All credited material is copyright by the author(s). All other material © 2014 Big Pulp Publications.

The stories and poems in this magazine are fictitious and any resemblance between the characters in them and any persons living or dead—without satirical intent—is purely coincidental.

Reproduction or use of any written or pictorial content without the permission of the editors or authors is strictly forbidden, with the exception of fair use for review purposes.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of our writers.

From the Editor

Welcome and thank you for purchasing the debut issue of M, the magazine of murder, mystery, and the macabre!

M is an offshoot of Big Pulp, an all-genre magazine that premiered online in March 2008, and then in print in December 2010. That first print edition featured Jarrid Deaton’s Ted Bundy’s Beetle, a psychological mystery about a used car salesman who comes into possession of the serial killer’s death car, and a tale that set the tone for the type of horror and mystery we publish.

One of three new publications in 2014, M is a next step towards fulfilling our long-term dream of creating a wide variety of publications presenting fantastic fiction from new and established authors.

Like mixing peanut butter and chocolate, we like a bit of horror in our mystery tales, and a taste of real life in our horror. In M, a mystery is generally less focused on whodunnit and instead examines the questions of why and how, the human mysteries at the heart of crime, as well as what happens next.

Similarly, our horror fiction may include a boogey man, but it eschews gore in favor of exploring the horror in the choices we make, the terrible actions we are all capable of, and the fear that creeps up our necks as we realize the inevitable outcome of our decisions.

In this issue, you’ll meet characters as they reach those crossroads, and make their fateful choices.

M is a pair of cousins with a corpse in the trunk. It’s the child with the gift of prophecy and the little girl whose best friend is a spider. It’s a man being slowly devoured alive at the bottom of a pit.

M is hunting out of season. It’s a family who makes a bad deal and a woman giving birth in total darkness. It’s date rape and revenge.

It starts with a man with a shotgun.

Bill Olver

Editor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FICTION

Shotgun Suicide by Steve Passey

Cover My Grave by Helen W

Last Evening by Shannon Schuren

Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well by Don Norum

Willy by Jake Walters

Wildcraft by Ellen Larson

Concealed by Katrina Ray-Saulis

The Middle Bleed by Steven Wolf

Right Behind by Philip Roberts

POETRY

Untitled by Simon Perchik

Untitled by Simon Perchik

The Amityville Realtor by Robert Laughlin

Solitaire by Stephen D. Rogers

Lifelike by Stephen D. Rogers

One Summer Night by Ron Larson

Steve Passey lives and writes in Southern Alberta. His fiction has appeared most recently in Existere (Journal of Art and Literature) and he blogs at Half Wit Lit.

______________

SHOTGUN SUICIDE

There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise: The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer; The rabbits are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks; The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.

- Proverbs 30:28

Her voice drifts on down to me from on high:

My daddy was a shotgun suicide. My momma tells me I don’t remember but I do. I had come home with my new dress on, blue on white, and I felt as pretty as pretty can be. Daddy never answered when I called, so I thought he might be outside. I went out the back door and down the path that led out to the fields and found him there. He was kneeling on a little patch of alkaline soil, the grass at the edge just tall enough to hide him from the house because he was kneeling. He was crying and I could smell the whiskey. DADDY I said, loud and scared so bad. DADDY I shouted and then he looked at me straight in the eye. DADDY I said a third time but he just said GO AWAY and then he looked away. I was even more scared and wanted to run back to the house but I could not move. I could just see momma standing on the deck; she had lit a cigarette and was looking for me to run. I looked back over at my daddy and he had put the gun in his mouth, both barrels, and he pulled both triggers and there was the terrible sound of both barrels going off and it knocked him back over and there was blood everywhere on the white soil. I ran to Momma and she held me close, my face pressed in against her. We stood there together and she smoked her cigarette until it was done. Carefully she stamped out the butt on the boards with her shoe. When she was done she took me into the house, my face still pressed against her and her arm around me and she phoned the ambulance with one hand. The ambulance came, but daddy was dead and daddy was a mess. Momma wouldn’t bury him, wouldn’t pay to have him buried so the county had to. Today he lies in a county cemetery in a plot marked only by a number.

I listen to her speak and it is an incantation. She stops telling the story and then fills her own mouth up with the smoke from the bong and then blows the toke to me through the two barrels of the shotgun her daddy used to kill himself. It is her family’s relic we share and her breath comes through it to me too slowly but when it comes it feels oh so good—like life itself. We have shared the story before and it is this incantation that summons high times and she is my priestess in this temple of smoke that we hold together. There is only silence between us now as she fills up again and then exhales and the smoke and her breath roll down through the twin chambers of death to be reincarnated temporarily inside of me as nirvana. A third time it comes…and I am made perfect. Free from gravity, I rest on the couch without weight and I hold the moment for myself and for her without words, without will.

My priestess is a dancer. Her name is Katherine Lee but when she dances she goes by Kaylee because that’s a little girl’s name and the tips are better. She sits across from me in a blue dress and her feet bare, the shotgun across her lap and the smoke still trailing from the barrels. I love her without attachment, my priestess, her bare feet and her blue dress, her hair so long and black and her lips so red. I can’t tell you the color of her eyes. This breath of life she blows into me is a gift, a charity, and like all who receive charity I can’t look the giver in the eye. Whatever she asks of me, I will do it, so when the breath of life is gone from my body and the weight returns and I rise up again I look across at this priestess and I tell her Whatever you ask—I’ll do it and I am humble and I am afraid and I laugh.

My priestess is a dancer but I have never seen her naked. I only take what is offered.

The sun comes too early the next afternoon and I come up out of the couch heavy. I’m like a vampire in an old movie made to rise up stiff as a board by invisible stage hands pushing on the floor of the coffin. Kaylee sits in the chair across from me again, wearing a red dress and putting on red heels. Her calves are strong from the hours dancing in heels; a line of hard muscle runs up parallel to the bone with a soft line to define it. She leans forward without speaking; her hands on her chin, and watches me try to sit.

Finally she speaks. David. Today is the day, tonight is the night. Rockstar and I are coming back here after closing. We’ll pick you up. Have my Daddy’s gun ready. And then, You be ready!

She has sunglasses on and I cannot see her eyes. Got any smoke? is all I can ask, all I can think.

No smoke today for Stoner Dave she says, sounding like the nurse she is on stage this week, I need you sharp. And if you are a little pissed, a little angry, that’s ok, too. You have a job to do.

There is something about nurses that leave them void of compassion. It’s sort of like… like…like…that quote