Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift by Fiction River Read Free Book Online

into one. I could help. I could make a difference. I could give people hope that didn’t stink of lies.
    I’d left most of my luggage, including some of my best clothes, in a hotel room in Cusco. I’d never see Amber again. At least not for a very long time. Unless, of course, they had WiFi in the jungle. I’d never gotten to hang out with Vince.
    I was only sixteen.
    I’d never been only sixteen.
    I looked at David. “Where were we supposed to go hiking today?”
    “To my village,” he said. “It’s a long way.”
    “My dad’s coming with us.” Not a question. A demand.
    David nodded. “We’ll go slow. As long as it takes. I’ll carry him if I have to.”
    I shook. All over. I didn’t think I’d ever stop.
    We set off from Aguas Caliente as the sun rose. The dawn lit the faces of the people we passed on the road. Buses honked at us as their tires kicked up plumes of dust. They headed up the mountain to the lost city.
    We took a different road.

 
     
     
     
    Introduction to “ The Red-Stained Wishing Tree”
     
     
    Eric Stocklassa lives in Germany in a “cramped apartment filled with tomes of forbidden knowledge whose bizarre secrets would drive any sensible person to madness.” I’m pleased to note that “The Red-Stained Wishing Tree” marks Eric’s first professional sale.
    About this strong story, he says, “Writing it felt like sitting in [this guy]’s passenger seat.” Reading it feels that way too.

 
     
     
     
    The Red-Stained Wishing Tree
    Eric Stocklassa
     
     
    Sam usually loved driving, but the storm was mean. The black sky was bleeding from several open wounds, gushing on the ash-gray hills, the pathetic excuse for a road and Sam’s windshield in opaque crimson. Lightning ripped up from the charged earth, to the suffering sky. Bright flashes of light, ear-splitting thunder and an echoing moan, as the shivering sky suffered another wound.
    A hollow bumping noise told Sam that the passenger in his trunk had finally woken up. It was time to find a dry spot.
    This was the Inbetween. People assumed that the notches on a ruler were evenly spaced, but they weren’t. There were wrinkles in reality. Hidden pockets where skeletons danced and swarms of intelligent rats gnawed the flesh of unwary wanderers. Between two yellow-green cornfields in Iowa, blood rained from the sky.
    The cave was alight from glowing veins of ore. Walking around his silver Mercedes the copper smell of blood grabbed his nostrils and held on tight. Had Sam been human, he would have had to fight a gag reflex by now. Good thing Sam was not. Not really anyway.
     
    ***
     
    The taste of cigarettes had almost faded from his mouth, so he lighted up again. It didn’t give him a buzz. Never had. It was one of his bastions of normalcy. A way he could fit into a society that had the ability and need to eat, sleep and drink once in a while.
    Sucking in the blue smoke, he opened the trunk.
    He expected a hand to shoot out and grab him. Instead he got complaints.
    “Your driving is shitty, you know that?”
    The boy was fourteen at the most. He already had tattoos on his arms and hands. The fingers on his hand proclaimed F-U-C-K and O-F-F-!.
    “And what the fuck is in this bag? That thing has been poking me for over an hour.”
    “Bones,” he said.
    Naturally the kid opened the ancient brown burlap sack. Even in the dim-light, the skull shone brightly. It was acid-cleaned and well-preserved. Sam had personally waxed every single bone. The kid picked it up and examined it from all sides.
    “Was that someone you killed?”
    “My father,” said Sam. He finished his cigarette and stumped it out. “And yes.”
    He took the skull from the boy’s hands and gently placed it back into the bag.
    “To business then?” said the boy.
    Sam nodded and gestured to a wall.
    “That’s where you are going to shoot me?”
    “I don’t need guns.”
    Sam took off his right glove revealing the black nothingness underneath. It was