“Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western” now at Fantasy Magazine

My latest short story (fourth this month!), Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western is now up at Fantasy Magazine. You can also listen to it (by clicking on Listen, at the top, or click here to download the MP3 file).

It combines my love of Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away with my love of westerns and kung fu movies. Fantasy also have an Author Spotlight where I am interviewed about the story.

I. Massacre at Three Blind Sisters

The strangers came under a red half-moon to Three Blind Sisters. They wore strange clothes—stiff-looking black and tan suits of foreign design, with black hats and carefully-manicured beards. On their belts they carried guns. All but their leader, who dressed casually and carried no weapons, and who had an easy smile.

The boy and his sister watched the approaching men.

“He is so handsome,” the boy’s sister said. They were watching the men ride past the three Blind Sisters who gave the village its name. The stone statues, ancient guardians of this small, distant place, stared at the men without seeing. Their power had weakened over generations: Now they were little more than mute stone, and no one in the village could remember ever hearing them speak.

The boy felt a tingling at the tip of his fingers. He saw with his inner eye: The leader rode unarmed because his power was great. The aura of Qi around him was unmistakable. Unease made him close his fingers into a fist. The man, passing close to them, glanced casually their way: His eyes locked on the boy’s for one long, uncomfortable moment. Then his gaze shifted to the boy’s sister, and his smile flared up like a small sun. – continue reading!

New Story, “Monsters”, now in Fantasy Magazine

My latest short story, Monsters, is now up at Fantasy Magazine. Yes, another busy month!

I first ate a man when I was eight years old. In the history of humanity, cannibalism is more common than you might think. Rather than the mark of a savage, as several rising civilizations on the continent of Europe tried to make it, eating another person’s flesh is a mark of the outmost respect. On the islands, people ate people for centuries. Later, we learned to talk of the devel I kakai man, the cannibal spirit—the word devel comes to us from the English devil, brought over by the missionaries along with bibles and guns. But one does not eat another human being out of anger, or greed. One, rather, eats from respect. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is a lie, brought to us but never truly believed. We believe in renewal, and a man’s remains, once digested, will then in turn feed the trees in a man’s garden. The mango you bite into has been fertilised with the bodies of those who tended and ate from it before. – read the full story.

 

New interview

Alongside my story in this week’s Fantasy Magazine (The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String) is a just-published interview, where I talk about the story, language, Pepsi vs. Coke and tuk-tuks. Not necessarily in that order.

“The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String” is the second of your South East Asia stories that Fantasy has run. The inspiration for last year’s “The Integrity of the Chain” arose from a tuk-tuk ride. Could you tell us about the process of writing “The Spontaneous Knotting”? Was it also inspired by a specific event?

Maybe less obvious than the tuk-tuk thing—it was me walking around and seeing this woman walking from shop to shop, selling trinkets—and it sort of clicked. I wanted to write about this woman, or someone like her. And it tied in, strangely, with this scientific theory of agitated strings that I’d read about around that time. I thought, that’s pretty cool research! Someone needs to do something useful with it!

Going back to tuk-tuks though, one of the stranger evenings I spent in Laos had to do with meeting a midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver. The next day I had a terrible hangover so naturally I wrote a story about it. . . and “Aphrodisia” is going to appear in Futurismic in a couple of months. Life really is weirder than fiction.

Read the rest of the interview.

New story: “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String” at Fantasy Magazine

My latest short story, “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String”, has just been published at Fantasy Magazine.

Mrs. Pongboon, that great woman and mother, that seller of mysterious artefacts, walks down the street in her red-patterned sihn the colour of a naga’s crest, and people stare because to dress this way is to invite the wrath of the Ngeuk Laeng, the dreaded drought nagas—but it is all a nothing to Mrs. Pongboon, who had taken all her fear and her secret anxieties and put them in a talisman which hangs around her neck, a tasteful little locket of gold and quartz and state-of-the-art mass-produced Chinese technology. “Buy my lockets, my darlings!” she calls, and the women stop and stare, and the children giggle and are shushed, and the men look anxious and thoughtful. “Put away your loves and fears, and keep them for a rainy day!”

But every day is rainy in the rainy season, and the Mekong snakes, as large as a naga, between the banks of Laos and Thailand, this snake-river, divider of countries, carrier of goods, all swelled up with its own importance and the water that falls from the sky and the water of the snows in the far away Himalayas, which have travelled a long way to come here, will travel a long way yet before they see the ocean. “Buy my lockets, for a fair and good price, transfer precious memories, store tender hearts! The deal is today, a one-of-a-kind, hurry, my friends, hurry, I say! Or you’ll miss out forever, when Mrs. Pongboon has passed, and was gone on her way.”

Read the rest of the story.