Story Excerpts

Courtyard of Villains
by H.K. Slade

Board a streetcar at Decatur and Canal. Ride it north past Bourbon Street, leaving behind the sights and sounds and smells of the French Quarter. Do this at four a.m. on November first, and you are apt to have an interesting ride. For several blocks, you may share a seat with a zombified Elvis or the vampire Lestat. You may brush elbows with Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, and survive the experience with only a bit of body-paint transfer. You might share an aisle with an exhausted dishwasher or waitress, their workaday clothes stained with sweat and the spilt remnants of someone else’s sticky-sweet cocktail. Or you may have the car to yourself and bask in the eerie quiet.

Whichever ride you get, you will eventually arrive at the Lopez Street stop, and there you will find a strange house completely out of keeping with the surrounding neighborhood. A pair of palm trees like Greek columns frame the yellow stucco two-story residence. A flight of crumbling, painted brick steps lead up to an open door beneath a swinging wood placard that reads simply India House.

Rumor has it the original property was a house of negotiable affection, but when the proprietress fell behind on her taxes, the abandoned house was occupied and then bought outright by a young adventurer who turned it into a backpacker’s hostel. READ MORE

Tiger Tiger
by Savio Pham

Sitting up, he peered over at the woman next to him. She looked disheveled (as did he) in the clothes she’d been wearing for the past two days, rumpled and dirt-stained, her once-pretty hair in need of a wash, even those once perfectly manicured nails of hers were rimed with crusty mud. Though she was sound asleep in their big bed for what he imagined would be for a few hours more under the influence of powerful sleeping agents, he whispered, “I’m gonna step outside for some air. Sherry? I’ll be right back, okay?” He waited, hoped she might stir awake to hear his message, but she gurgled and whimpered and then began to snore.

He climbed down the stairs, drifting like smoke into the quiet of the bottom floor. It was a large house that once prompted his own mother to harass them, claiming so much space with no children in sight was wasteful. “And I’m positive your brother would love to be an uncle some day,” she added. “I’m sure it would make him very happy. We both know he could use a little joy in his life,” she said.

But thankfully, no such day came when they could call themselves parents. How could they think of kids when their work—their dreams—occupied so much of their time? READ MORE