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Dray is slumped at the edge of his desk, doodling. It’s Saturday again. Another business studies class. 4 low level Japanese students talking about their companies in broken English. No matter what he does, it’s always boring. You’d think, you’re the teacher of a class, it’s going to be interesting. You’d think, you’re the teacher, you shouldn’t be the one falling asleep. But it happens. He spends longer every time, planning, brings in CDs, newspapers, games, but somehow it always comes down to this. Just, dull. Dray’s eyes creep shut. His classroom has always been too warm. The fan just …

Tycho lay on top of his grassy hillock and waited for the disgusting crow to come for his eyes, feeling downright blue. His friends the tired old turtle and one-eared rabbit tried to pep him up, but it wasn’t taking. Banter was banter, but the disgusting crow was something else entirely. Every time he closed his jewelly eyes he saw its claws of brambly bone and its diamante beak. He remembered how it stank, and how much he hated it. “I really hate that disgusting crow,” he said sadly. “Maybe I should just let it take my eyes.” “It won’t …

His name was Sir Clowdishley. He was once a royalty man, an astronomer to the king. He surveyed great kingdoms of heaven and charted the progress of the stars. He named whole galaxies after his two children and wife, but his family were now all dead, outlived by their celestial counterparts, lost to the sea. He stalked the ocean, walking the shores of England’s beaches, from Land’s End in the north to John O’Groats in the south. He lived off tubers and seaweed, jellyfish he found rotting on the sand, husks of old cod half-desiccated in the salty winds. He …

The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky.  He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds.  At night he painted it black, with white for all the stars.  When the sun rose he dashed its arcing yellow lines across the heavens, and as it sank he brushed it orange and gold over the horizon. He knew he had to paint the sky.  If he didn’t paint the sky, who would? Nobody would.  He knew that.  So he stayed, and he painted the sky. He lived on the mountaintop alone.  Sometimes it was …

The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him. “She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and …

It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves. “What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers. “Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?” Mandragora walked over and studied the bodies. One was a man and he had his skin intact, though one of his legs was gone, and the other was a woman but it wasn’t easy to tell because …

(Advisory- this is a graphic story, X-rated really.) Mad Noah can’t give me what I want. No. Mad Noah stands in his tent and shouts at me in the doorway- “Incubus of Satan! If you had SEEN the holy holy holy as I have, if you had SEEN!” And I leave. Mad Noah comes to me at night and between his whisperings of a world gone mad he slips his fingers between my thighs, and while he tells the story of the one eyed fox that learnt to fly above the second flood, he strokes me, and I do what? …

Emhoola peddled magic. He sold it by the cartload, and everywhere he went it was bought with self-deceiving gusto. He sold it in cheap brass compasses that no longer worked, in the shriveled corpses of pack donkeys whose heads lolled flea-bitten against the sales-rack strappings of his wagon, in straw dolls and dried frogs and mosquito paste and all variety of herbs and medicinal fungi. He was a collector of all things collectible, and he purveyed these wares with a rag and bone man’s pitch few could resist. ?Freedom,” he’d call out, as he strode the dusty main streets of …