Mushrooms and Monsters

Manus Gloriae

In graveyards we live, so you can thrive.

But you flee — to your Tarshish perhaps, quailing round Joppa’s piers.

Why?

Because we’re pallid? Because of cousins like ‘dead man’s fingers’? Or because we thrive in fields that refuse to give up their dead?

Wild candles five, within each a wick unlocks the night, to set you off with the rush of unfolding swans.

Where wild candles grow: open locks, whoever knocks.

Just pick, and light us.

Fred

Auntie had Lloyd in her lap; singing to comfort the petrified child, ‘…wheel, and keep your snoopy eyes on the road…’

Lloyd was transfixed by the interior mirror’s reflection; can’t uncle see it?

A wretched, sweaty slough of grey slouched on the back seat. Its three glossy, bovine eyes espied him solicitously, and sparse downy hairs quivered at the corners of its tittering mouth.

‘…sitting in the back, huggin’ and kissin’ with…’

Lloyd passed out.

Christopher Bean

My first published work is the story ‘Jumbled-up Jack’ in The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel (Woodbridge Press, 2016) anthology (See Cemetery Dance review here). Since then I’ve had several flash fiction pieces published by Haringey Unchained, some of which are included here. My first long-form, Victorian horror novel The Pegge and the Pendrel is finished and looking for a home. I’m working on companion books set in the same universe, designed to be read in any order. I started writing in 2009 focusing on shorts and awkward, wretched little things that were too long to be short and too short to be novellas. On Bluesky, not Twitter.