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Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology
Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology
Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology
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Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology

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Untied Shoelaces of the Mind is the culmination of two years of intense editing by Geoffrey C Porter, Eva Wheelbarger, and Jeffrey Breault.

We bring you humorous tales, horror pieces, romance stories, science fiction eye-openers, and literary greats.

We process close to one hundred stories for every story we publish. We've been the first publication credit for budding authors, and we've been the umteenth credit for many established authors.

Untied Shoelaces of the Mind has something for every reader.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 20, 2011
ISBN9781465886262
Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology
Author

Geoffrey Porter

I've been writing fiction for eight years. I started writing novels, but the good instructors at the local college convinced me short stories were where it's at. I've had twelve short stories published. I have written seven novels. My fiction magazine is Untied Shoelaces of the Mind. I build multiplayer online wargames, namely Legions of Tercia and Alien Battlegrounds.

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    Untied Shoelaces of the Mind 2011 Anthology - Geoffrey Porter

    Issue #1

    Fantasy Humor

    Dragon Snot and Chosen Ones By Therese Arkenberg

    http://mumbling-sage.livejournal.com/

    Bio: Therese Arkenberg is a student from Wisconsin, though she studies only in the most extreme circumstances, and many of her works are penned in the classroom. Her fiction has previously been published in Kaleidotrope, The Lorelei Signal, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology, Things We Are Not, an anthology of queer science fiction, and the Norilana anthologies Sword and Sorceress XXIV and Warrior Wisewoman 3. Several of her short stories are also available at AnthologyBuilder.com.

    I'm not like all the other dragons, it sniffs.

    I sigh and lower the point of my spear. Seems like this one wants to talk. Over the years I've realized that dragons, like humans, will gladly unburden themselves on anyone they think is listening. Unlike humans, they include among this number people coming to kill them.

    I know hu-humans call me a mindless brute, but really I'm not. The dragon sniffs again and checks with one red-rimmed eye to see if I'm listening. I'm the Chosen One of dragons.

    Oh really? I say. This year, humans alone have had twelve different Chosen Ones, thirteen if you count each of that pair of twins, and rumor tells of an Elvish one in the north. But a draconic Chosen One?

    And what exactly are you chosen to do? I ask. As I speak, I begin to raise my spear again, ever so slightly. In my career as a dragon slayer, I've learned to take advantage of their penchant for talking. It distracts them.

    I'm supposed to be the one wh-who kills all the humans, the dragon says. To end the dragon-slayers, once and for all. It sniffs again, and I barely resist the urge to retreat at the thought of the dragony mucus moving up dragony nasal passages. That stuff is flammable, you know. It's the whole reason dragons breathe fire. Some say dragons are like snakes, and have venom, and that venom catches fire on contact with the air, but don't let them fool you. It's really just dragon snot.

    But it does catch fire on contact with the air.

    The dragon is still watching me with eyes raw with the beginning of crocodile tears. Or draconic tears, which are the same thing.

    You've done a pretty good job of killing humans, I say. That's why I've come here. And I take a small step closer, spear raised a little high, to do what I've come here to do.

    But you don't understand! It sniffs again, the greatest sniff yet. Trying to hold back slimy dragon tears, if I know my thing. Which I do. I defy my destiny! I don't want to be the Chosen One! I want to be friends with humans! I try, and sometimes I come down and talk to humans in their little villages and, well, it's just sometimes, I, I, I— Its voice breaks. The miserable thing is about to start bawling like a baby. Its eyes close, and I step forward, spear raised...

    The world around me bursts into flame.

    I think I have allergies, the dragon confesses to the pile of cinders before it. I always sneeze.

    Issue #1 Horror

    Koko's Rabbit By James S. Dorr

    http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

    Bio: James Dorr's current collections, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET and STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE, are available from Dark Regions Press, while other work has appeared in ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, NEW MYSTERY, ABORIGINAL SF, FANTASTIC STORIES, DARK WISDOM, GOTHIC.NET, CHI-ZINE, ENIGMATIC TALES (UK), FAERIES (France), and numerous anthologies. Dorr is an active member of SFWA and HWA, an Anthony (mystery) and Darrell (fiction set in the US Mid-South) finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a multi-time listee in THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR. More up-to-date information can be found at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

    Sometimes Koko's rabbit would tell her stories.

    These weren't pleasant stories, by and large. Mostly they tended to be stories about things with fangs and claws, the sorts of things rabbits feared.

    Koko feared these things too. No, no, Bunny, she often exclaimed. Your stories scare me too much. Yet she still listened.

    She listened to stories the rabbit told about werewolves in forests, and girls who wore red hoods. Koko was twenty-three years old herself, yet she still liked to think of herself as a girl. She also heard stories about giants and vampires, zombies and ghouls and cats that wore boots. Bluebeards and redbeards and men with bristling, purple mustaches -- one story that the rabbit told her was about another girl, this one a beauty, and how one day she married a beast.

    Koko liked that story most of all, not so much the beast part, but how the girl, a woman really, ended up being married. Koko imagined she'd like to be married -- especially the happily ever after part. All of her friends were doing it all the time. But whenever she told them about the rabbit, her friends had a way of looking at her oddly and tapping their heads. And, afterward, they tended not to invite her to go with them quite as much.

    That last, no doubt, was because they had, after all, gotten married, Koko thought. Or at least had plans to. She remembered how her mother had told her once, a long time ago, that being married was a full time job. No doubt it was, too, but she still thought she'd like to give it a try.

    After all, if it didn't work out -- well what was the point of having divorce courts?

    She asked her rabbit about that once, that is, divorce courts, but the rabbit told her a story instead about a vampire who, irked by companions who asked stupid questions, sucked out all their blood. Then he married three women in a row, and sucked their blood too when they asked silly questions, but, because they were nice, he still kept them around. Then he went to England to find new women who he might marry who wouldn't ask questions, but then a mean man named Van Helsing showed up and stuck a stake in his heart.

    Koko didn't care for that story. She didn't like stories with unhappy endings.

    Her mother had died when she was little. Of some kind of blood disease, Koko recalled. That made her unhappy too.

    Koko didn't like to be unhappy.

    One day in December she got a new boyfriend. She took him home with her. Within three days they were sleeping together. She liked him that much.

    She didn't tell him about the rabbit. She didn't want him to look at her oddly, or tap the side of his head with his finger. When her friends did that, she often didn't see them for months afterward, and she didn't want this to happen with her new boyfriend. Rather, she hoped that maybe they might get married instead.

    She did miss the stories, though.

    Then one night her new boyfriend raised his voice to her. They had begun to have arguments sometimes, which she remembered from when her mother had been alive was what married people did. Mothers and daughters too. She had hoped that this might lead to their getting married, since, if that was what married people did, wouldn't that mean that they were halfway married already?

    But, instead, he frightened her.

    He had a mean temper. But then, she recalled, all men seemed to her to have tempers, especially when she started to ask them questions about when they were getting married. They'd put it off sometimes. Or joke about it. Or even say perhaps they ought to set a date, but not quite yet. And then, like so many of her other friends, somehow they wouldn't see each other nearly as much anymore. Just like the friends who looked oddly and tapped their heads.

    She started to cry.

    Then suddenly the rabbit appeared from the closet where it had a tiny cot, and a hot plate and a refrigerator, and stayed when it wasn't telling her stories. But it growled and had fangs and claws, just like the beast that had married the beauty. Except that it didn't turn into a prince, like she recalled the beast did in the story. Instead it bit the boyfriend.

    Koko fainted.

    Women always were fainting in the stories the rabbit sometimes told Koko, the nicer stories where huntsmen and princes and men who made livings chopping down trees, and sometimes even very little men who lived together and were in the mining trade, came to their rescue at the story's end. Who didn't have mean men stick wood in their hearts, or other men shoot them with silver bullets. Or be forced to go out in the sun when everyone knew they had skin conditions and could die in an instant from melanoma. The nastier stories.

    When she woke, she was all alone. Her room was messed up and there was sticky red stuff on the floor which she had to use a mop to clean up. When she tried to call her boyfriend later he wasn't home. She thought she might leave a message for him, for him to call back. But she thought better of it -- they rarely did. She decided she'd probably do better trying to get a new boyfriend.

    Later that night Koko's rabbit told her a new story, this one about a woman in part of what was now eastern Europe, who liked another woman very much. These were young women, really almost girls. But it was a sad story too because at the end the first woman got a stake stuck in her heart.

    Sometimes the rabbit disapproved of Koko's new friends. Her last boyfriend, for instance. She got the idea it told her sad stories as a kind of warning. The rabbit also disapproved of Koko eating Italian food, especially with garlic.

    It isn't healthy, the rabbit maintained.

    Issue #1 Horror

    Trading Up By Tracie McBride

    http://traciemcbridewriter.wordpress.com/

    Bio: Tracie McBride is a New Zealander who lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 50 print and electronic publications, including Pulp.Net, Coyote Wild, Abyss and Apex, Space & Time, Sniplits and Electric Velocipede. She won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent for 2007. Her first collection of short stories and poems, Ghosts Can Bleed, was released in April 2011. Find out more about her at http://traciemcbridewriter.wordpress.com.

    Mamma has always had a love for other people's possessions. Her house is like a giant magpie's nest. Everything in it is second-hand, some items legitimately purchased but most stolen. A collection of knick-knacks clutters her mantelpiece, thrown together with no regard for colour, form or value. A trio of pink plaster kittens, bought from a teenage boy for fifty cents after he had won them at a sideshow shooting gallery, is equally valued with the emerald encrusted Faberge egg she lifted from the drawing room of an exiled Russian heiress. Even her husbands all started out as someone else's.

    There is one thing, however, that stands out from her purloined belongings, one thing that she coveted above all others, one thing that has proved more costly to possess than she ever could have imagined.

    Me.

    When Mamma first saw me, I was little more than mist in a dusty bottle. We glimpsed each other through an open doorway as I peered from my glass prison on a shelf in the back room of a curio shop. It was mutual, familial love at first sight. Something in her unfettered spirit called to me, and I to her. The avaricious old man who owned the shop guarded his stock like a vulture over a scavenged carcass, so, even for a practiced thief like Mamma, it took several return visits before she saw her opportunity. With a swirl of misdirection from her saffron silk scarf, she slipped me into a concealed pocket in her jacket and took me home.

    Once home, she uncorked the bottle, but she did not know that, without a suitable receptacle for me to enter, I could not leave. She pressed her face to the glass and murmured to me, sometimes pleading with me to come out and play, sometimes singing lullabies, and sometimes uttering nonsensical terms of endearment. Never did she become angry or disheartened. Day by day she sat with me, while her other less cherished belongings gathered dust, her face grew lined and haggard, and her fourth husband left her. She barely noticed, so intense was her infatuation with me.

    Two years to the day after she found me, fortune struck. Mamma was carrying her bags into the house after one of her infrequent shopping trips when a sparrow flew in through the open door. It careened in panic about the living room before flying at full speed into a window, dashing its little brains out and falling to the floor. I felt the old familiar pull of the void left by its departing life force. Almost without my volition I slipped out of the neck of my bottle and flowed into the bird's body.

    Ah, the freedom! The delirious, intoxicating freedom! For a moment I forgot about Mamma as I flexed my tiny muscles and took to the air. She frowned up at me, not yet aware of what had happened. I landed next to my bottle and pecked at it. She shooed me away angrily. Snatching up the bottle and peering into it, she turned white as she realized it was empty. I fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. She raised her hand as if to dash me off, when she recognized something in my chirruping. Tears of joy filled her eyes as we touched for the first time, her forefinger stroking my head, as delicate as a butterfly kiss.

    She called me Jeannie. It was a private joke. Unlike the mythical spirits I was named after, I have no power. I could not smite her enemies. I could not provide her with material wealth. I could not grant her any wishes, save for one, the single wish her starved soul desired -- unconditional love.

    My new form allowed me scarcely more ability to communicate than my old one, but I was grateful to have the use of all five senses. In time, however, I was no longer able to maintain the sparrow's body. It began to disintegrate around me. I shed feathers at an alarming rate, and soon was unable to fly. Mamma was concerned, then frantic when my skin began to bleed and peel. Pressing her hand to her mouth to stem her sobs, she fled the house. I thought she had abandoned me to my fate, which would be dire indeed. Without a corporeal form, or the correct incantation to send me back into my bottle, I would be cursed to an eternal half-life in the void between heaven and earth. But Mamma soon returned, clutching a plastic bag that sagged with the weight of a freshly gassed cat.

    It was a beautiful creature, part Siamese with a glossy pure black coat, but in that body I was a poor substitute for what she really longed for, which was a child of her own. It wasn't long before she devised a solution. She developed a relationship with a local funeral director, and, using a combination of sexual favours and blackmail, she procured the cadaver of a young child. I could not leave the house for fear of being seen by former relatives, but that was no great hardship. I have lived for hundreds of years, so the outside world holds little mystery to me. Far more fascinating was the kindred spirit I had found in Mamma.

    But the day soon came when Mamma needed to arrange a new body for me. She went to visit her undertaker friend, only to find the funeral home locked up and vacant. It seemed that bartering bodies for sex was not his only vice, and he had been arrested. She offered to get me another animal body in the interim, but I told her that, having progressed to higher life forms, from bird to cat to human, it was impossible for me to go backwards. I must take another human form.

    This was a lie. Although the comparative strength and agility of animal bodies has its compensations, I much prefer humans. For me, there are no substitutes for a functioning voice box and opposable thumbs. Besides, I had Mamma's best interests in mind. I was sure that she would find taking a backward step to animal bodies to be unsatisfactory as well.

    For two days Mamma paced about the house chewing her nails and muttering, pausing only to glance nervously in my direction. When I began to slough off rashers of skin, she got desperate. She dressed us both in scarves and dark glasses, bundled me into the back of a Ford Fairlane that had taken her fancy in the supermarket parking lot (it was mainly the fluffy dice she was after) and took to the streets in search of a new body.

    What we found was a five-year-old girl, alone in a playground after dark. Beneath her snarled blonde hair, dirty scabbed knees and dull pain-filled eyes, I saw a beauty surpassing any of the forms I had ever occupied. It was obscenely easy to take her. She must have thought she had little to fear from a gentle-voiced woman and another (albeit strangely attired) small child, so she climbed into the car readily on the promise of a hot meal and a ride home.

    Her death was peaceful. After dinner Mamma drove around dimly lit streets until the girl fell asleep in the back seat. Using a similar technique to the one she used to dispatch the cat many months ago, she asphyxiated her with noxious gases fed into the car from its own exhaust. As my current body was already technically dead, I was able to sit safely next to the girl and take possession of her body at the precise moment of expiration. I caught a glimpse of her soul as it rushed toward the afterlife with a speed only seen in the very old and the very young. It was mostly coloured in the bright golden glow of joy, but with two distinct dark stripes of resignation and reproach. I did not tell Mamma of this. Even with her fluid notion of morality, taking a young child's life was causing her considerable discomfort. It was better for her to think that the girl went entirely willingly into the afterlife.

    I don't know how the police found Mamma. Now she is in jail, and I am in the care of strangers. From what I can ascertain from eavesdropping on my keepers' conversations, the initial charge against Mamma of child abduction could become more serious. They think that I was seriously mistreated in her care, because I have no memory of my life prior to her arrest. I hear terms like amnesia, ten year sentence, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Several doctors have seen me. They have stripped me naked and all but turned me upside down in search of scars, and sure enough, they found them. They are unaware that those scars were inflicted by someone else before Mamma found their daughter. The situation would be laughably ironic, were we not in agony over our separation. And if the doctors were horrified by what they found, just wait until the little girl's body starts to reject the foreign entity inside it.

    I calculate I have about two weeks before that process begins. How fortunate that I have a human body now, not an avian or feline one, or my plan would be nigh-on impossible to execute. I will have to obtain a new body for myself. This one may be small and weak, but it can still wield a knife in the dead of night. Then I will exchange a series of bodies, seeking forms of increasing strength and influence, until I find the one that is best equipped to release Mamma. I believe the modern term for this is trading up.

    Something about my intended course of action bothers me. Ah, yes. If I remember correctly, the last time I found myself temporarily without a master, I did something similar. The townsfolk were less than pleased, so they employed a sorcerer of immense knowledge and power to imprison me behind glass. But I need not fear. The old magic has been long since forgotten. There is no one in this world of shysters and charlatans who can stop me.

    Don't fret, Mamma. I am coming for you.

    Issue #1 Humor

    THE LIZARDS AND I By Conda V. Douglas

    http://condascreativecenter.blogspot.com/

    Bio: Conda started writing when she was 10, when she realized growing up to be an alien wasn't all that realistic. More about her writing life (and recipes!) can be found at her blog Condas Creative Center.

    Singapore was Asia light, a gentle introduction to the Pacific Rim, or so I believed. Perhaps my experience would have been like visiting a moist Disneyland, had it not been for

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