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    Spillways: Three Surreal Short Stories
    Spillways: Three Surreal Short Stories
    Spillways: Three Surreal Short Stories
    Ebook70 pages55 minutes

    Spillways: Three Surreal Short Stories

    By Aniko Carmean

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    About this ebook

    SPILLWAYS explores the surreal, often chilling, consequences of idée fixe. The horror is not relegated to isolated locales; unsettling revelations occur at a fish counter, a seaside cemetery, and an aquarium. In MOON SICK, the moon is falling, and while some pray for the celestial coitus of Luna’s impact with Earth, all Fisk wants is Charlotte. FLOOR SEVEN is the story of a woman’s discovery she is the object of a “betrayal methodology” intended to inspire an artist – and feed an unnatural hunger. In MAUSOLEUM WHISPERS, Rollins has been dead three months, but dead isn’t the same as gone.

    Obsession has tides, too.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAniko Carmean
    Release dateJun 13, 2015
    ISBN9780984968923
    Spillways: Three Surreal Short Stories
    Author

    Aniko Carmean

    Aniko Carmean is a Virginia girl living in Austin, Texas. She writes stories and novels in a variety of genres including horror, science fiction, and literary-artsy. Aniko is the sole proprietor of Odd Sky Books, a publication imprint dedicated to serving discerning readers of surreal fiction. Aniko's major literary influences are Italo Calvino, Shirley Jackson, Amelie Nothomb, Iris Murdoch, and Sylvia Plath. After graduating with a degree in Physics from a small liberal arts school, Aniko married her college sweetheart, and took a day job in software to support her writing habit. Aniko's favorite shoes are Doc Martens. Her favorite way to think is while is walking, favorite number is twenty-two, favorite month is October, and her favorite pastime is lingering over a hearty meal and talking with friends. Aniko has lived in more than one haunted house, which goes a long way towards explaining her fascination with the surreal.

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      Book preview

      Spillways - Aniko Carmean

      SPILLWAYS

      Published by Odd Sky Books

      First Smashwords Edition: June 2015

      First Edition: November 2014

      Copyright © 2014 Erzsebet Aniko Carmean

      Cover Art by Aniko Carmean, using DIY Book Covers

      Editing by Jacinda Little

      License

      This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

      Disclaimer

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      SPILLWAYS

      Three Stories of Obsession

      Aniko Carmean

      Table of Contents

      Moon Sick

      I Was Floor 7

      Mausoleum Whispers

      About Aniko

      Moon Sick

      It’s Sunday, and I’m a few cars behind Charlotte and Lawton. We’re going to the Asian Grocery in Aqueduct, the part of town women shouldn’t visit after dark. I never liked the place, not even before the moon started falling and the whole world went to shit, but Charlotte thinks the Asian Grocery is an attainable adventure because she can speak Japanese and say hello in Korean.

      Charlotte pulls into the lot for the strip mall, dodging potholes that are the first scourge of the moon’s descent. I go the opposite way and back into a space. My rear tire hits one of the larger holes, and I hope it isn’t damaged because I’ve already replaced three flats this month. While I wait for Charlotte and Lawton to go inside the store, I scroll through the pictures on my phone. Most of them were taken when the reports of the moon falling were relegated to those crackpot conspiracy shows on the AM radio. In my favorite photo, Charlotte sits with me in the writing workshop where the three of us met. She read my work and found symbolism. That was a shock. I didn’t write it on purpose. As for Charlotte’s stories, I could never see anything but her in them. We analyzed The Soft Moon by Calvino, joking about how topical it was (how little we knew!). Charlotte identified with the character who was looking through a telescope with awe at the magnificent approach of the moon, but Lawton shared the narrator’s disgust. I just felt excited. I still do. Yes, the moon is a ghastly colossus, a pocked and looming mass, but her crude, elemental pull is unadulterated arousal. The Lunatic Cult prays for the moon to fuse herself to the Earth in cosmic coitus. I just want Charlotte.

      The automatic timer still hasn’t shut off the headlights on Charlotte’s car. I keep waiting.

      Half a year ago, and much to the embarrassment of physics, eons of the moon’s infinitesimal and steady movement away from Earth suddenly reversed. The scientists still use their equations to explain that it will take another miracle to increase the moon’s orbital speed and prevent a collision, but equations are no better than bibliomancy or reading tea leaves. The moon will put herself in a new equilibrium, or she won’t. Only she knows for sure if she’s planning a crash-bam extinction event.

      Charlotte’s headlights finally die.

      I double-check that my doors are locked before I cross the lot. Looting is more common now, even when it’s not full moon. The Vietnamese Pho restaurant is out of business, and the place that cashes checks has ply board covering windows broken by high-tide quakes. Though it is January, a string of Christmas lights hangs above the doors of the Asian Grocery. Fish – Almost Gone, Hurry, is hand-printed on fluorescent yellow poster board.

      Inside, I dodge behind a stack of empty crates, adjusting to air that is filthy with the scent of rot. Lawton and Charlotte peruse the meagre selection of battered vegetables. The transportation of goods is unreliable, and winter brought the first food riots to the bigger cities, where there was more competition for increasingly scarce commodities. It is nothing like last summer, when Charlotte convinced me to do my grocery shopping here by promising she’d go to dinner with me. The produce section was brimming with stacked stripes of multi-colored vegetables, many I didn’t even recognize. I got a bunch of grapes in a bag that was stapled shut. As I ate them the next day, I found one had been bitten. I imagined lips other than mine on the fruit, a strange tongue and fingers on what was supposed to be mine. I haven’t eaten a grape since then – and wouldn’t even if they were available.

      Charlotte and Lawton leave the produce section with one destitute looking leafy green

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