Lately, my old buddy Boz has been feeding me some pretty stellar videos dredged up from ancient internet archives. And by stellar, I mean awful (in a weird, confounding, delightful sort of way). There’s one with this lady belting out KFC lyrics inside a thrift shop next to a guy tinkering on a synthesized piano, another with a choir of old shirtless dudes blowing bubbles (musically!) in a scummy pond, or this one, which I can’t even describe – you just need to watch it.

     So my kids, naturally, come skittering over when I’m cackling in front of my phone amidst this nonsense. Ten minutes later, my five-year-old is phantom kicking his sister and shouting, “Thank you Paul!”

     Are kids not the best? And at times, also the worst? Kinda like stale videos from the past. And with both, you just never know what they’re going to blossom into - what adventures will be had.

 

     For our fifth annual short story contest, we're giving away $5,000! There's never been a better time to enter - and if the trend continues, there never will be again. What do we mean by that? Let's break it down.

     On the front end, our annual contest is about finding and publishing great stories. Check. But on the back end (you know, the whole financial solvency thing), it's about garnering more submissions, more subscribers, and most importantly, more paying Members. Last year, we doubled our prize package, and yet saw a significant decline in all three of those metrics from the previous year - what's up with that? And this year, we've nearly doubled the payout again, and once more all three of those areas are lagging behind. What that means is (unless we see a big turnout at the end), the juice ain't worth the squeeze. And if it doesn't improve, we're going to reduce the prize package for future contests. This is where you come in: 

     Submit a story. 

     Become a paying Member. 

     Help spread the word!

     Think long term. Do you want a high-paying contest laser focused on top tier writing (because those are almost non-existent anymore) to enter annually? Then help us out. We can't do it alone. The contest closes January 14th for free entries, and January 31st for Members, so act quick!

By Wulf Moon

 

No man entered the shrouded boundaries of the Schwarzgrund Forest. Banshee winds howled through blighted trees; pools of mire and steaming mud pots belched up sulfurous odors and the unwary’s stripped bones. But Lillith Thimberdoo was not a man. She was a girl, she was six years old, and she knew no fear.

     One cold autumn afternoon, while skipping through those woods in her favorite purple cloak, Lillith passed under a particularly loathsome tree, its skeletal limbs hanging over the trail, draping ghostly fingers of pallid moss. To her surprise, a hairy thronguk thrashed down from the upper limbs, landing with a thud on a twisted branch just above her head. As everyone knows, thronguks would sooner eat a stringy woodsman than a fat ram just to savor the man’s screams. To the thronguk, Lillith supposed she looked like succulent veal cutlets.

     “Ho there! Who be thisss?” said the thronguk as he swayed from side to side on his gangly limbs. His matted fur was the color of rust, and a festering scent of decay spilled like poisonous brume from his twisted mouth.

     “I’m Lillith, Lillith Thimberdoo,” said the girl, twirling a blonde ponytail through her fingers. “I hope I didn't startle you.”

     The thronguk’s eyes were pond-scum green. Spittle sprayed from its lips. “Lillith. Sssuch a pretty name.” He rattled and clacked ebony claws along the limb. “More careful mussst you be, Lillith. One wrong ssstep in the Schwarzgrund could prove to be your lassst.”

     Lillith shrugged and flipped her ponytail over her shoulder. “Okay. Thanks.”

     As Lillith stepped to the side and was about to skip away, the thronguk hissed and scuttled along the limb, swinging upside down in front of her. His warty black lips curled in a snarl, revealing jagged, razor-sharp teeth. Bits of flesh stuck between them, no doubt the last timber feller gone missing from the town. Her heart clenched a moment. She had liked that old woodsman and the clever woodland stories he told at market while hawking his carvings.

     Now, she would never hear those tales again.

     “Made wrong ssstep already, Lillith. Your bones-es I shall crunch like—what iss it you little girls suh-suh-sssavor? Ahhh! I crunch you like sssweet rock candy and suh-suh-suck marrow from your bones-es like dripping honey.”

     Lillith didn't like this game much at all. She waggled a finger at the creature.

     “You are naughty.”

     “No, Lillith. I am ba-a-ad. Run now. I enjoy the chase.”

     But Lillith didn’t run. She calmly opened her other hand, revealing a glistening pearl that pulsed with power from within. Perhaps she had borrowed it from her mum. Mum’s jewelry box had such fun things to play with—so sparkly!—and it had all kinds of surprises. Mum really shouldn’t have left such a pretty box unlocked.

     “From foul to fair,” Lillith whispered.

     A sphere of radiance rose within her palm, sweeping reflections through the hunched trees and lattice of branches. Viridescent leaves sprouted from dead limbs; clusters of cherry blossoms burst into life. Rosy petals fell, dusting the ground in a carpet of pink snow, lacing the air in a shower of sweet fragrance.

     Peppermints! thought Lillith, and it was so.

     “Arrrgh!” wailed the thronguk, “What you do with my home, you nasssty little girl? Stink, sstinks, SSSTINKS it does!” He leaped from his branch, dropping to the soft petals.

     They rested atop a hungry pool of quagmire.

     The maw of murk engulfed the thronguk, covering him to his boil-encrusted chest. He screamed in fury; Lillith was most impressed. No wonder woodsmen feared thronguks. They really could be quite loud. And hairy. And they were awfully rude.

     It howled again, spittle spraying the air. “I sssuck out your eyes like sssoft eggs; I bite off your fingersss like little suh-suh-sssaussagesss; I run my clawsss through your tender—”

     The more the thronguk threatened and thrashed, the faster the thronguk sank. Lillith silently watched as she remembered her timber feller friend. He had always smelled of pine and woodsmoke, and his sunny smile had warmed her heart every time she saw him.

     Soon, the thronguk was up to his scaly neck, then his horned chin, and finally just those lips spraying spittle in foul curses, mostly words Lillith didn’t know at all, but she gathered they were bad ones. The pool bubbled up one last belch. Pink petals flowed back in.

     The thronguk was no more.

     Thrusting out her lower lip, Lillith blew away an annoying wisp of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. She bent over, shook a tiny finger at the place where the thronguk had been.

     “You really must be more careful, Mister Thronguk. One wrong step”—she rolled the tip of her boot through the petals—“could prove to be your last.”

     As Lillith skipped her way home, the pool of quagmire belched behind her. She thought about her mum’s wardrobe closet. Maybe one day she’d forget to lock that one as well. Just once Lillith would love to slip her tiny feet into some of Mum’s shoes and go clomp-clomp-clomping around the manor in them.

     Those ruby red ones were amazing.

~~~

About the author:

     Wulf Moon wrote his first science fiction story when he was fifteen. It won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and became his first professional sale in Science World (circulation 1,000,000 per issue). He has won over sixty awards in fiction and nonfiction.

     Moon's stories have appeared in numerous publications and best of year anthologies including Writers of the Future, Best of Deep Magic 2, Galaxy’s Edge, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2--a borg love story, what could be sweeter?

     Moon writes his series The Super Secrets of Writing for two professional magazines. He is the founder of the Wulf Pack Writers group and teaches the award-winning Super Secrets of Writing Workshops. Moon is the author of the runaway bestseller, How To Write a Howling Good Story. He invites you to join his free Wulf Pack Club at wulfmoon.com, or join Wulf Pack Writers at patreon.com/wulfmoon

 

By Sarah Cannavo

Most places, if you care to listen, have stories all their own, the sort people pass around like a jar of applejack at a Friday-night dance, during their own generation, and then hand down to the next, who do the same, and so on and so on until they become legends, embedded so deep in the place you can’t mention one without the other springin’ to mind. ’Round these parts the folks still talk of the time Jack Redding took on the Devil in a drinkin’ contest, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a soul here who didn’t grow up hearin’ about it at their ma or pa’s knee. Me, I’ve heard it so many times I could tell it backward and forward, or in my sleep; I’m regarded as somethin’ of an authority on the subject, and plenty of people who’re curious about it have found themselves sent my way to hear what went on deep in the pines that day.

     Now, sometimes the Devil gets restless, bored with struttin’ around orderin’ demons about and torturin’ the souls of sinners, and when that happens, he leaves Hell for a bit and goes wanderin’ in the world, either to see what mischief he can stir up or just for a change of scenery.

     As it happens, that day he found himself in New Jersey (a place many have thought of as bein’ only slightly better than the brimstone-soaked depths of Hell)—South Jersey, to be specific, wanderin’ through a stretch of it known as the Pine Barrens, which runs from Freehold down almost to Cape May and all the way out to the Atlantic. There are some who say the Devil’s got kin out in that area, though to the best of my knowledge he’s never rightly claimed that Leeds woman’s boy as his own, nor done much over the years to provide for him if he is. But some folks are just like that.

     Anyway, it was one of them beautiful days that have a bit of summer and autumn both to it, and the Devil was feelin’ mighty fine as he walked along, whistlin’ like a bluebird and soakin’ up that fresh Pinelands air. He had no particular destination in mind, walkin’ just to walk, and God only knows how long he’d been makin’ his way down those sugar-sand roads before he happened across the Redding family homestead, set way out in the woods headin’ toward Chatsworth. It wasn’t much of a homestead, all things told, just a rundown tarpaper hovel just about good enough to keep the rain off, and a little shed out back, and the only Redding left to tend it was Jack, his ma and pa havin’ taken a fever and passed on a few years before and his younger sister Kate run off to marry a man who made his livin’ haulin’ clams in from the bay in Barnegat six months ago. Jack was twenty-five years old then and managed to keep things together pretty well, and kept up the family business on top of it all.

     Some Piney families crawled on their hands and knees through the bogs to harvest cranberries come September and October; some worked makin’ charcoal and smeltin’ bog ore, at least before the Pennsylvania mines and furnaces put most of the ones ’round here out of business in the back half of the nineteenth century. Others made bricks, built ships, blew glass, or raked sphagnum moss out in the swamps, and still others fished or worked in the bays, like Kate Redding’s young man. But the Redding family was and always had been in the business of brewin’ and sellin’ applejack—Jersey Lightnin’ if you’re bein’ familiar, and moonshine if you ain’t from around here—and since this was a time when the gov’ment thought they had a right to tell folks what they could and couldn’t drink, business was pretty brisk for young Jack Redding. He housed the still in the shed on his family’s property and ran the product down the back roads of the Barrens to various folks and restaurants who disagreed with the liquor laws, haulin’ it in a beat-up Model T held together with his mechanical skills, a few well-placed nuts and bolts, and the occasional prayer.

     As it happened, he was out in his front yard workin’ on that Model T when the Devil ambled by. The night before he’d been out cartin’ a few barrels of applejack, and while he’d done it without hassle, on the way back he’d noticed a new rattlin’ under the hood. Say what you will about him, but Jack was a prudent young man and wasn’t about to keep breakin’ the law in that truck ’til he could be sure it wouldn’t quit on him at an inopportune moment.

     The Devil saw him workin’ on the truck, and he smiled. Ol’ Nick’s got quite an eye for such things, and he liked the look of the Redding boy, somethin’ in him sayin’: Here’s an easy mark if there ever was one. So he walked up to the Redding yard and cheerfully hailed the bootlegger, thinkin’ he might have some fine sport after all that day. “Hello there, son. Fine day, isn’t it?”

      Jack looked up from his work and took in the stranger: his neat dark hair, his fine features, his dark and stylish suit of clothes (for all his faults, the Devil can be one dapper gentleman when he wants to, part of the reason it can be so damn hard to spot him sometimes), and immediately Jack’s guard went up. The area which he called home, like so many of its kind out in the Pines, was isolated, fresh faces comin’ through infrequently—travelers on their way to somewhere else: an itinerant preacher or two, the occasional wanderin’ salesman, and of course there was always the threat of revenuers comin’ around to put a stop to a man’s honest work. This man didn’t have his world on his back or in his arms like a traveler, and somethin’ in Jack (who wasn’t the world’s most religious man, but who managed to find his way to the local Baptist church from time to time nonetheless) rejected without hesitation the notion that he was a preacher. A salesman, then, with slick clothes and suave manners to help him hock his leather-bound Bibles or tonics for health, wealth, and sleep? Maybe, but then where were his case and his goods? Wary, in case he was a Fed who’d heard some rumors about how Jack earned a livin’ and was takin’ a kindly approach to get close, Jack set down the wrench he was holdin’ and said guardedly, “Yeah, it is,” thinkin’ all the while about the shotgun he kept tucked under the Model T’s front seat.

     “It’s been a while since I’ve found myself in these parts,” the Devil continued, keenly aware of Jack’s caution but not lettin’ it dim his charm a whit, just takin’ care not to overdo it and scare his new mark off. “My usual haunts are a little further south than this.”

     “Delaware?” Jack asked, and the Devil laughed.

     “Sometimes,” he said agreeably. “Sometimes further down than that.”

     “What brings you up here, then?” Jack asked, mind and hand never far from that shotgun.

     “Well, to tell the truth,” the Devil said (because even he can do that, when it suits his purpose), “I didn’t really have a reason in mind when I came up, but I’m the sort that can’t bear to pass up a business opportunity when I happen across one, and you, my boy, have the look of a man who wants something. Badly.”

     A salesman after all, then. Jack snorted. “What was your first clue?” he asked, lookin’ around at what passed as his worldly estate: a dirt-floored tumbledown shack, a sagging shed shelterin’ his hand-rigged still, a bare patch of earth for a dooryard, and the battered truck that ran on grit as much as gasoline. But he shook his head, wipin’ his grease-stained hands on a red rag already bearin’ a wealth of similar stains. “Ain’t too bad, though. Got food, got a roof, got my health. I don’t need much more’n that.”

     It was the stranger’s turn to snort, and he waved his hand at the Redding place, dismissin’ it all. “Oh, I don’t mean anything like that, Jack, none of that surface stuff. I mean wanting something way down deep in your soul, something you can’t buy, find, or make for yourself, but that you’d give anything to possess. Something you need so badly the ache settles in your heart and won’t leave no matter what you do, won’t let you sleep or think or breathe without reminding you of it. That’s the sort of want I mean; that’s the business I’m in. And you strike me as someone with such a want, Jack. Or might I be misreading you here?” His amiable tone allowed for the possibility, but the curve of his smile and the sudden glitter in his dark eyes said differently.

     He wasn’t wrong; Jack was in fact sufferin’ a powerful want, had been for some time. See, Jack was a fairly good-lookin’ young buck, a bit rough around the edges in both appearance and manners but well-built, slim and strong, with the dark brown hair and blue eyes of the Reddings, and a smile from him or a look from those blue eyes was enough to win him the heart of many a local girl. There was only one girl for him, though: Lenora Dunnett, a golden-haired beauty all of twenty-three years old and from good Pine stock, with a warm heart, friendly nature, and a laugh more melodious to Jack than church bells on Sunday are to a true believer. As it happened, Miss Dunnett returned Jack’s affections just as ardently as he gave them. That wasn’t the problem.

     Lenora didn’t care one bit how her beau made his livin’. He could run Jersey Lightnin’ up and down the state, or dig up buried pirate gold or rake moss in the swamps and come home soaked in cedar water, and it wouldn’t bother her none as long as they were together, she loved him so.

     Her pa, however, was a different story. Harold Dunnett owned the local general store, which did double duty as the post office and the gas station, and was one of them “pillars of the community” people are always yakkin’ about. And he was dead set against Lenora marryin’ Jack Redding on account of his profession. Harold was no teetotaler, wasn’t above takin’ a sip of applejack here and there, and even had to admit of all the vintages he’d sampled in his life Jack’s was the strongest and sharpest, but his first daughter had married a hotshot lawyer up in Philadelphia and his second a well-to-do hotel owner down Cape May way, and he’d be damned if his youngest was gonna hitch herself to a (literally) dirt-poor moonshiner. He’d threatened to disown Lenora if they married, and the lovebirds knew he meant it.   

     Jack didn’t want to sunder his sweetheart so completely from her family if he could help it, but Harold’s apt sum-up of his state rankled him. Jack was a steady worker and not a profligate spender, but he didn’t pull in as much for a haul as some of the bigger outfits in the Barrens did, and certainly not as much as those folks who ran booze down across the Canadian border or into New York ports. He wanted to give Lenora a good life like he felt she deserved, and if he could provide her with it maybe Harold Dunnett would ease off and not cut her out of the family after all. Of course, that all hinged on Jack makin’ his fortune, and soon, before his love for Lenora drove him right out of his mind.

     Jack was so caught up in thoughts of this that he forgot to wonder how the stranger’d known his name when he’d never said it. And, givin’ him a wry smile instead, Jack said, “Well, you better be the Devil himself, then, mister, if you’re fixin’ to get me what I want, since prayin’ to God and workin’ for it myself ain’t been doin’ a damn thing for me.”

     The stranger’s smile grew then. “Pretty serendipitous that I came along, then, Jack, if that’s the case,” he said, and though Jack couldn’t’ve spelled “serendipitous” with a huntin’ rifle pressed to his temple (his family never havin’ had much money for schoolin’), he gathered the meanin’ well enough. A moment later he also gathered that this stranger had called him by name twice now without bein’ given it once, and that was when a few things started clickin’ into place for young Jack Redding, who looked on the eloquent, well-dressed man with different eyes, a chill skitterin’ down his spine even as his body stiffened.

     “You’re from south of here, huh?” he asked, and the Devil’s handsome face well and truly shone with amusement and delight now.

     “Much farther north originally, but down south now.”

     “Uh-huh.” Jack felt like a man walkin’ through a cedar swamp: well aware that the green carpet beneath his feet wasn’t as solid as it appeared and one wrong step would plunge him deep into dark treacherous waters. “And you’re sayin’ you can get me what I want—for a price, I’m guessin’. I pay it and you make it, let’s say, so I have enough money to take care of Lenora and her pa can’t quibble about my job anymore. That about right?”

     The Devil’s eyes were still glitterin’; he looked now like a cat watchin’ a bird flit to lower and lower branches of a tree, just waitin’ for the perfect moment to unsheathe his claws and sink ’em in. “You’ve got it, son,” he said. “Although you can pay for your fortune … or you can play for it. Your pick.”

     Jack’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, ‘play’?”

     The Devil smoothed out a nonexistent wrinkle from his black coat. “I’m a businessman, Jack, but I’m also a sporting man; I like to have some fun now and then when I’m out conducting my business, make a few wagers, that sort of thing. And there might be a way for you to get what you want without even having to pay. Is that something you might be interested in?”

     Is a bear interested in honey? Jack knew he should’ve been runnin’ away just as fast as he could go, but he found himself listenin’ to those honeyed words instead—lettin’ the Devil make his pitch, if you will. The Devil was well aware he had our hero by the ear, and fluid as silk that pitch went on. “A contest, Jack, you and I. If you win, I provide you with enough gold that your sweetheart’s father will be throwing himself at your feet to beg forgiveness, and probably a loan or two. And if I win ...” Oh, then the Devil smiled like a cat with that bird’s blood already on his tongue, and his eyes glowed like the hottest coals in the heart of a fire. “I get your soul.”

     Now, I already told you that Jack didn’t have much schoolin’, but that doesn’t mean he was a fool. He knew right well the risks of acceptin’ such a challenge from such an opponent, and facin’ the scorn of Lenora’s father every day for the rest of his life was a far more tolerable scenario than havin’ his soul sent straight to Hell marked Special Delivery, all postage paid. He’d heard plenty of tales about people with too much confidence in their abilities who’d taken on the Devil and lost.... But then again, he’d also heard tales of people who’d taken on the Devil and won, like that fiddler, Sammy Buck, right there in the Pinelands. It could be done. So wasn’t it possible he could do it, too? Jack asked himself, his mind goin’ again and again to Lenora: her cornflower-blue eyes, that sweet little laugh of hers, her warm tender kiss. Might as well hear what he has in mind, he reasoned, and asked, “What kinda contest?”

     The Devil was feelin’ generous that day (and mighty cocksure of his own abilities, to boot), and spread his hands magnanimously. “I’ll let you pick, Jack, my boy.”

     Jack eyed him shrewdly, feelin’ for a trick. “Anything I want?”

     “Anything at all,” the Devil assured him.

     Jack grinned. “A drinkin’ contest…"

About the author:

     Sarah Cannavo is a writer haunting southern New Jersey. Her short story “The Drinkin’ Contest” first appeared in the Story Unlikely podcast, while her fantasy story “The Pack” was the third-place winner of their 2024 story contest. Her stories have also appeared in If I Die Before I Wake Vol. 8: Tales of Halloween Horror and JOURN-E, among others, and her adaptation of the short horror films OverKill and Croak were published in Pulp Modern: Die Laughing and Pulp Modern: Hand of Doom, respectively. Her story “Unreality” and novella “Wolf of the Pines” are available on Amazon. She’s been rumored to post on her site The Moody Muse at www.moodilymusing.blogspot.com, and occasionally been sighted Tweeting @moodilymusing. If you listen closely on moonless nights, you may be able to hear her screaming “DAENERYS DESERVED BETTER” into the darkness.

 

In my Illustrated Super Secrets of Writing, Volume 1 workbook, I have a chapter titled, "How Driving to the Story Creates Accidents." I teach a workshop at conventions covering this information as well. It's that important. Failure to launch is a critical issue I note in manuscripts I edit for clients. Emerging writers in particular get bogged down in the setup and forget that the reader desperately wants us to get to the story.

 

So do the editors. You know, those squinty-eyed prospectors just praying to find a golden story from start to finish in their gravel-filled pans.

 

Surprise! Almost every manuscript I see by writers in the early stage of their apprenticeship fails to launch. What do I mean by this? They spend too much time running around the launching pad making sure they show the reader everything related to their rocket has been correctly installed, and they've got all their engineering blueprints and diagrams and math equations on display in the text to prove it!

 

If they're a fantasy writer, they'll show us every merlon and crenel in the castle they’ve designed and take us on a tour from dungeon to donjon. Or worse, they'll spend days marching an entourage to their castle where we find out--surprise!--their waif is really a princess, and this is her long-lost home.

 

Two major violations in that last bit: (1) readers hate it when writers withhold vital information from them (writers think it creates mystery, but all it creates is aggravation), and (2) readers hate it when writers drive to the story. A little setup is necessary, readers know this, but they want you to get to the point--which is the plot of the story where all the action happens--as soon as is reasonably possible.

 

In short, readers want to go on an adventure. They don’t want to read a Chilton’s manual on your rocket engine. They don’t want your hero’s lineage all the way back to Adam. And, unless they’re hobbitses, readers don’t care what your hero had for breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper… 

 

Moon teaches the award-winning Super Secrets of Writing Workshops and is the author of The Illustrated Super Secrets of Writing and the runaway bestseller, How To Write a Howling Good Story. He invites you to join his free Wulf Pack Club at www.TheSuperSecrets.com

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Dear Editors,

     I landed on Story Unlikely because its front page is undoubtedly the most human I have read to date. Robots don't make me laugh. I read through the submission guidelines and the distinction between subscriber and member and laughed the whole way. Even the subscription email was a warm welcome, felt like making a new friend online.

 

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     I found you on Erica Verrillo's blog, so thanks to her, I've spent the last hour reading your website. I have to say that it's refreshing to discover a magazine that focuses on good stories rather than the identity of the writer. Great literature transcends time and place, and the identity of a writer, or how we perceive him or her, is often determined by those factors. Given enough time, they have little relevance. Anyway, I've subscribed and look forward to reading what you have to offer.

 

Sincerely,

Ken Reimer

P.S. I've submitted a short story to you, but please read this email as coming from a reader and not a writer. These are just the thoughts of a fan of the Short Story.

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