*cover art subject to being less blurry

After a couple of weeks of dicking around behind the scenes, it’s our pleasure to formally announce the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology!

The 2010 Anthology showcases the best of what we’ve published so far, as well as six — count ‘em, six! — new stories, all of which epitomize what we here at Jersey Devil Press are about. Stories rife with Jersey attitude, dark humor, and zombies, and werebears, and unicorns, oh my! It’s a veritable bacchanal of genre-straddling, clown-fearing, taco-hunting, world-ending prose!

The 2010 Anthology is set for release on Tuesday, July 27th, and will be available in paperback and a variety of digital editions.

Featuring work by:

Andrew Frankel
Ansley Moon
Bruce J. Berger
Christina Murphy
Danger_Slater
Daniel McDermott
Gavin Broom
Jenny Ortiz
Jonathan Plombon
Jonathan H. Roberts
Kate Delany
Kevin Brown
Louis Wittig
M. R. Lang
Mike Sweeney
Ryan Werner
Stephen Schwegler
yt sumner
Z. Z. Boone

Pre-orders begin next week!

Featuring seven stellar short stories — some significantly shorter than others — by six sensational authors — some of them probably shorter than others, as well — from five different locales in this fourth month of a year who’s digits add up to three — two of the authors are from Jersey, did I mention that? — it’s one hell of an issue.

This issue includes work by Josh Goller, Craig Wallwork, Joseph A. W. Quintela, Carly Anne West, a man called Danger_Slater, and the returning Mr. Mike Sweeney. Read up, people.

You can download the .pdf here or read it online here.

P.S. Don’t forget about our reading at the end of the month!

The church sat astride Broad Street, the main avenue of that great cultural oasis of Central Jersey known as Red Bank. Dotted with bistros and boutiques – all favorites of the wealthy locals from Rumson and Fair Haven and the visiting weekenders from New York – Broad Street never failed to provide us with any shortage of appetizing choices for the evening.

Becca would stand at the tip of the steeple while I crouched next her, ready to pounce on whomever she instructed. I loved that moment before she gave the word: the light tapping of hearts beneath us, the crisp stillness of the night air, the rich leather scent of her Belstaff jacket, her hand on my shoulder.

Some nights I was her attack dog. Other nights, her wingman.

I miss her already.

I miss the sound of her biker boots clomping on the pavement beside me. I miss the way she used to wrap her arm around my neck and squeal after we’d killed together. Mostly I just miss talking to her.

Occasionally, we’d skip St. James and stroll down to Front Street to watch the Navesink roll by in the starlight. Becca liked watching the river even if she wouldn’t admit it. Sometimes she even let me hold her hand as we passed through the crowds, mentally marking kills for later.

In winter, there’d be time enough for us to browse at Jack’s Music Shoppe before it closed for the night. Jack’s was one of the last great independent record stores on the East Coast. They’d always open at midnight for a new Springsteen release and sometimes he’d stop by on his motorcycle to meet his fans and sign CDs.

Across the street from Jack’s is Kevin Smith’s comic book shop. We saw him one night, playing cards in the back with his friends.

It’s a whole lot of Jersey in one block.

Or at least it was before the sky fell.

The world ended on a Monday, but we didn’t see them till Tuesday.

We were back atop St. James, but instead of night it was ten o’clock in the morning. I was still too giddy from the thought of perpetual darkness to take the Newcomers seriously. They jerked and lumbered along, eating whatever had the misfortune to stumble into their path. I actually laughed at them. As always, Becca was thinking much further ahead.

“These things are going to taste like shit,” she said.

Five months later they ripped her to pieces in a shopping mall. Becca was smart and my best friend and a piece of ass to boot. She deserved a lot better than to be eviscerated in a burned out Anthropologie.

And in the end, she was only half right. The Newcomers didn’t just taste bad, they were bad – the human equivalent of spoiled milk. You could drain five of the things in one night and still be no closer to meeting your thirst.

It didn’t take long to realize that the Newcomers weren’t food; they were competition, a pestilence that consumed everything and anyone we could feed off.

We probably should have done something right away, while they were still in small packs.

Maybe if we had, things would be different now.

Maybe that emaciated beagle I ate earlier today wouldn’t have seemed as succulent and tasty as if I was biting into Eliza Dushku’s left butt cheek.

Maybe going three weeks without blood would’ve seemed like a bad dream, something you do on an insane bet, rather than the standard existence.

But blood drinkers aren’t generally known for their strategic planning – or their collective action.

Instead, we just went after the deer. Close to humans in weight, more readily available than one might think for a place like New Jersey, and not all that difficult to catch. And if you closed your eyes, they actually tasted just like people.

They didn’t last long though. No one will ever confuse a hungry population of blood drinkers with forest rangers when it comes to responsible culling practices. After about three months, it was no more Bambi.

Then it was whatever we could get our hands on. Wild Turkey. Opossum. Dogs. (Labs were surprisingly good.) It took us less than a month to run through them. And that was pretty much the end of regular food for us.

Eventually, the only thing that sustained me was the shared blood with Becca.

Before the sky fell, there was a place in Brooklyn called “Angel’s Sister.” It was run by this pair of blood drinkers who’d had a club going somewhere in New York since the late eighties. They named the first one, “Vlad’s Mom.” It was a play on “Dracula’s Daughter” from the Anne Rice books. The name was a send-up but the purpose was the same: a space for blood drinkers to gather peacefully with their own kind. It moved around the city every few years, changing names but keeping with the same in-joke. There was “Yorga’s Aunt” and “Lestat’s Niece” and my personal favorite, “Orloc’s Granny.”

By 2003, it was Angel’s Sister, and it was housed in an old diner in Wilmington. We met Nomar in the brick-lined back room. He claimed he was eighteen hundred and sixteen and had been the Emperor Nero’s personal secretary before being turned. I don’t think the math worked on that one, but I let it go. No one likes a smart ass. Besides, he was definitely older – and stronger – than me, so Becca and I sat and listened to him tell tales of the persecution that followed the great fire of 64 A.D.

“We went underground, to the catacombs,” he said, leaning in close to me and closer still to Becca.

“It was there the great nosferatu imperator Maximus Sanguineas showed us the blood circle.”

Yeah, “Maximus Sanguineas” set off my bullshit alarm too. But it was the way Nomar described the blood circle itself that made you believe in it, even if you didn’t buy the rest of his story.

In hushed, reverent tones, he described a cannibalistic feeding deep in the catacombs where blood drinkers would pair off with their most intimate comrade and one would drain the other within ounces of death. The point was to make half the coven strong enough to go out and find food which they would bring back to the others. Over time, the cycle would repeat, with the other partner taking his turn and becoming the hunter.

“You have to trust the fellow drinker, greatly, though,” he said and smiled at Becca.

“Trust,” he purred in his Eurotrash accent,“is what you need. Trust and knowing where to bite.”

He poked Becca gently in the thigh and every muscle in my body tensed.

He turned to me and smiled. “The neck, you see, is no good.”

Becca didn’t let me stay much beyond that.

She disappeared for a fortnight, twice as long as we’d ever been separated. When she showed up that night at Donovan’s, the first thing I noticed was that she was still wearing the same clothes. Becca stole from all the best boutiques and never wore the same outfit twice.

I knew she’d let him drink from her, had allowed herself to be kept by him. I wanted to hate her for it. But as she stumbled through the bar and grew close, rage was replaced by alarm. Her skin was ashen slate and her eyes were charcoal dots instead of their usual ice blue.

She didn’t say anything, maybe couldn’t. But I knew what she wanted. Within the hour we were both home, sipping on the sweet Goth girl from the end of the bar, the one who had insisted on ordering Pilsner Urquel while all her friends drank Coors Light’s. She was just Becca’s type.

When I rose the next night, the color had returned to Becca’s eyes and her skin was smooth ivory again. She sat primped and dressed for another evening out, a small smile playing on her lips as she watched me shake off the last of my sleep.

A dozen years as bloodmates and I’d never seen her naked. She always woke and dressed before me: a new expensive pair of jeans over the perfect curve of her hip, a just-in fashion top covering her small tomboy breasts.

She’d seen me constantly, of course, starting with the night she found me nude and feral down on Sandy Hook. She soothed me, took me in, fed me. Clothing me seemed to come last.

And each dusk she’d sit back and watch as I cleaned the dried blood off my chest and arms and dressed for the night. I don’t know what she got out of it. She just liked the power, I think, of her eyes on me. It served as further reminder to me that I was hers.

A few nights after she found me, I finally summoned the courage to ask her if I could still have sex, now that I was a blood drinker.

“Of course,” she said laughing.

“With you?” I added, almost without meaning to say the words out loud.

She went silent and looked at me for a long while. Then she took my arm in hers and said, “Let’s go out.”

That was the last we ever spoke of it.

It was before what would have been dawn if there still was a sunrise. We talked about nothing all night, maybe about how things were before the Newcomers. We spoke about that a lot towards the end.

After a while, Becca brought up the blood circle and that night at Angel’s Sister. There was no asking, just a decision for both of us, one she knew I’d agree to.

Calmly, precisely, she started telling me what to do. She lay back, wriggled out of her jeans, arched her back, and showed me where to bite. It was dark but her skin was nearly luminescent and my eyes lingered.

I moved my head forward and she grabbed a handful of my hair. Becca wasn’t angry, just firm.

“You’re just here to drink,” she said and let go of my head.

It was the best thing I ever tasted.

I said Becca was smart and I meant it. She knew others like us would start going after the humans’ stored blood supply. Riverview and Centra State would’ve been licked clean months ago, like most hospitals. But Becca had a gift for seeing the unobvious. New Jersey might be the Garden State but its most lucrative industry was pharmaceuticals. Drug testing and development meant the pharmaceutical companies needed their own large supplies of blood. Their labs usually had better back-ups and fail-safes for storage than the average hospital. Even five months after the end of civilization, their stocks might still be fresh and safe if we could just get to them.

The Johnson and Johnson facility by Rutgers was my first target.

I started out at the Home Depot on Route 9. We learned early that decapitation was the quickest, maybe only, way to put down the Newcomers. An axe and a small hatchet as back up and I was all set.

I headed north to New Brunswick.

New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape.

I think that was a Springsteen line.

What I saw as I hacked and sprinted along dead highways resembled less outer space and more mythology. Tartarus. Shoal. Hell. Everything seemed to burn. Dead trees lined the landscapes and empty cars – wrecked or just abandoned – jammed the thoroughfares like the getaway vehicles of a legion of ghosts.

The ground was a patchwork of blacks, grays, and browns, all of it dried and barren. The only things that moved other than me were the omnipresent, wandering, weaving bands of Newcomers.

I killed at least three dozen that first night. It was worth it for what I found in that one lab: forty-eight perfectly preserved whole units of O positive, over five people’s worth.

Becca hit a goldmine of AB negative during her first foray.

We knew eventually we’d exhaust the drug companies’ supplies too, but for a while things were better. We were drinking human blood again and I was closer to Becca than I ever could have hoped before the sky fell.

That was before either of us heard of Shotgun Annie or Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy.

Humans always seemed like a spark in the dark to my kind. They didn’t know it, but people actually lit up our world. After a fashion, maybe the blood drinkers didn’t really know it either. With over six billion of them around, the sparks became ambient lighting, the preternatural equivalent of background noise.

At least that’s how it was before the sky fell. As the Newcomers consumed or converted what was left of humanity, the sparks returned. The last pockets of living people stood out like bonfires.

Shotgun Annie and Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy.

They were the consistent sparks, the ones that were there each time we went out. Soon their names started floating to us on the wind. We never spoke them aloud, but we both knew who they were and, more importantly, that they were there – living, breathing people.

Annie was an assistant manager of a Gap at an open-air mall in Shrewsbury. She came home from work the day the sky fell to find that her seventy-year-old mother and two-year-old son were among the Newcomers’ first meals. And that was pretty much it for Annie’s sanity.

She looted a pair of shotguns from a local sporting goods store and duck-taped them together like the guy in that Phantasm movie. Then she filled her Kia with all the shotguns shells it and she could carry and went back to work. She opened the Gap like the world wasn’t dying and just waited. She even started a sale on outerwear.

While the big human safe havens were being sacked, Annie was stockpiling ammunition and gasoline and digging an escape tunnel. Occasionally, she took a break to try to sell reasonably priced denim goods to the survivors of the apocalypse. Since most humans who stumbled upon her store were seeking shelter not cargo jackets, Annie did what only seemed natural when they wouldn’t buy anything: she shot them and used them for food.

When the Newcomers finally came knocking, she was ready with barricades and long lines of sight set up over the mall’s wide-open parking lots. She shot as many as she could until the defenses were breached. Then she torched the Gap with the Newcomers inside before scurrying out her tunnel.

Afterwards she made herself manager of the Banana Republic a few doors down, started tunneling again, and waited for the next wave. By the time we picked up her scent, she was president and operating owner of an Anthropologie, having immolated over a hundred Newcomers in the Banana Republic, the Eddie Bauer, and the Brooks Brothers combined.

I still have no idea exactly what the fuck Anthropologie sold. The place was burned to a cinder when I went to recover Becca’s body.

As smart as Becca was, she could also be remarkably stupid – especially when there was something she wanted badly.

She didn’t tell me she was going for Annie, of course. But I could feel something wasn’t right as she drank from me. And she kissed me when she left. That in itself told me something was wrong.

About an hour later, I dimly saw her slip back into our lair, her arms cradling a scrawny and scared little thing. She set the skeletal beagle down beside me and left again. I knew she wasn’t coming back.

I wish I could say that I saw everything, that the blood circle put me there in her body, let me see through her eyes. But it doesn’t work that way. I just got flashes of feelings: exhilaration, disappointment, rage, and finally what I can only call surrender.

Annie didn’t make it out through her tunnel the last time the Newcomers came for her.

Becca must have known Annie was dead from a mile away, had to know the spark had been snuffed out, yet she went anyway. She didn’t run, didn’t come back to me. That’s what hurts most. Becca and the blood circle were all I needed, but it wasn’t the same for her.

But, then, it never was.

The blood from the beagle allowed me to walk, if barely. I stumbled out into the permanent night not really sure what I was doing. I couldn’t even carry my axe and just limped along with the small hatchet drooping from my hand.

It’s been a very bad year and I suppose I was entitled to a little luck.

It was black and lumpy and lying on the tattered asphalt.

A bear. A cub maybe? Not that big.

Winnie-the-fucking-Pooh.

I was on my knees drinking from him before I even knew what I was doing. Only after did I realize that he was wounded, near dead. There were Newcomer bite marks cratered across the thing’s stomach. There was a foul aftertaste in my throat. Another hour and his blood would be useless to me. He would’ve turned completely.

Into precisely what I didn’t want to think about.

Then I saw the cub’s mother.

Twisted and lumbering, she fell at me, crimson foam spewing from her snout.

I think she was still trying to figure out post-mortem movement. If the herky-jerky gait was awkward in a human, it was positively spasmodic in something that once was a bear. She couldn’t quite walk – on two legs or four – and so just bounded, picking herself up and falling in lunges at me. I dodged her three times and, on the fourth lunge, leapt onto the bear’s back and followed her to the ground. One hatchet cut into the head made sure she wouldn’t get up soon; two more cuts across the neck and she was down for good.

As I stood back, I saw her left paw reaching out in the direction of her cub. Or maybe that’s just how I imagined it. Something about it made me angry.

I didn’t know if the drained cub could still turn but I made sure he wouldn’t. That was the world I was in now: where you thanked someone for saving your existence by making sure to lop off their head.

I knew the strength from the cub would fade quickly. I only had so much time to get to Becca. I wanted to be with her at the end. But I needed something more. I had to make a stop.

In truth, Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy was unfairly named. He was actually quite level-headed and positively stable compared to the likes of Shotgun Annie.

Eddie had been the proprietor of an Army-Navy surplus store he inherited from his father. But Eddie was a people person. His secret ambition was to own a convenience store, the type of place where he would make coffee every morning for his regulars and run two-for-one specials on chili cheese dogs for dinner. He’d become a fixture of the neighborhood, the place everyone stopped by on Sunday morning for donuts and a paper. It was a nice dream. So Eddie saved his pennies and was six months away from getting his own WaWa franchise when the sky fell.

That first day, Eddie took the things from his surplus store he though he would most need – a couple of generators, lanterns, sleeping bags, dry food-stuffs – and packed up his Blazer. He also took his dad’s Vietnam-era M-16, a good deal of homemade ammunition, and the 128 back issues of Hustler he’d collected since his seventeenth birthday.

Somehow he wound up in the abandoned Seven-Eleven on Maple Avenue. Like Annie, he opened the place for business. But whereas she was insanely cannibalistic, Eddie actually wanted to help. He was, remember, a people person. Had the first survivor he let in not turned into a biting, twitching fiend in front of the Big Gulps, he might not have grown so paranoid.

After he dispatched the thing with his father’s rifle, Eddie started parking cars. Dozens of them. He hotwired every car in immediate walking distance and began crashing them in concentric circles around his store. After two days he had three rings of crushed steel to barricade his own personal paradise, complete with a Blu-Ray DVD player, the entire contents of the local Border’s video, and what was likely the last operating Slurpee machine in the world. There was also, of course, his porn collection, which he finally had time to index properly.

The Newcomers would mass and threaten outside his barricades but ultimately lacked the mobility to scramble over three rows of busted-up automobiles, at least not before Eddie could get a head shot in. Like a suburban Robert Neville, Eddie manned his fortress, going out for provisions when the Newcomers drifted off to another target.

I actually expected to find him behind his check-out counter watching I am Legend that night. I was impressed to find that he had on Omega Man instead.

“They sure don’t make pictures like that anymore,” Charlton Heston was just saying as I rapped on the window from atop the pushed in hood of a Chevy Malibu.

I think Eddie knew there was something not quite right with me, even as he let me in, carefully undoing the locks on the glass door. He didn’t seem to mind too much though.

“Buy something,” he said.

“What?”

Eddie fingered the barrel of his M-16, resting near the cash register. But he didn’t pick up the gun. He positioned himself squarely behind the register. Behind him, Heston was screaming that there were no telephones ringing.

“Just buy something,” Eddie said. “Please. I never got to sell anything to anyone.”

I nodded and began walking up and down the short aisles as Eddie switched off the DVD.

I stopped at the small section of cleaning supplies and picked up a canister of Comet scouring powder. It seemed like the type of thing that would still be good months after the end of the world. I read the back of the can for a few seconds then nodded and moved on to the refrigerated drink locker. All the sodas were gone. There was just questionable looking juice and some green tea drinks. I took a bottle of the latter and walked up to the register.

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Eddie answered. He pressed some buttons on the register and handed me a ten dollar bill.

I shoved it into the front pocket of my grimy, tattered jeans.

“Will there be anything else?” he asked.

I thought for a moment and tapped the glass counter above the scratch-off lottery cards.

“One of those,” I said, pointing to the one with penguins and polar bears on it. For some reason, I thought Eddie would like that.

Eddie’s hands shook as he ripped off the card and placed it next to the Comet and green tea. He waved his hands over all three items and muttered to himself, adding in his head.

“Seven-seventy-five,” he said.

“Pretty reasonable,” I lied and handed him back the ten dollar bill.

“Look like rain out there?” Eddie asked as he counted out my change.

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“Are you going to kill me or make me like you?” he asked.

“You don’t want to be like me,” I said.

I didn’t kill him there, of course. I only took a third of his blood. I needed him alive as bait.

Eddie stirs a little as he dozes on the counter of the gutted Starbuck’s I’m sitting in now. We’re a few doors down from the Anthropologie and I’ve lit some new fires to make sure they know we’re here. What’s left of Becca is sitting next to me. I’ve only kissed her twice. I know I shouldn’t do anymore.

I can hear the distant shuffle of dead legs and I start to catch their smell, fetid and pungent, even amidst the charred cloud of death that hangs over this place.

When they get close I’ll finish draining Eddie. I want all the strength I can muster. I want to kill as many of them as I can.

When it’s over, I wonder if Becca and I will be able to talk again.






MIKE SWEENEY lives in Central New Jersey where he writes constantly but never quite enough.

Welcome to April, everyone. Sorry about throwing snow on the cover right when it feels safe to start thinking about spring, but we’ve got a lot of stories dealing with the end of the world this month. And — as Robert Frost was kind enough to point out — when the shit does go down, it’s gonna end in either fire or in ice. Once you read Danger_Slater’s “Snowpocalypse” you’ll see why I sided with ice.

Of course, if you prefer your worlds to end in ways that don’t involve your socks getting soaked, we’ve got you covered there, too. Unless you’re the titular fisherman of Joseph A. W. Quintela’s “The Fisherman Takes a Wife,” that is. Joseph’s second super-short, “Intelligent Life,” is the warmer fate, to be sure.

If you’d prefer something a little more sprawling, “The Newcomers,” by repeat offender Mike Sweeney, spins you a tale of vampire lovin,’ set in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Or if you’re looking for something with an international feel, look no further than Craig Wallwork’s “Sigourney Weaver Stole My Shadow” and its shadow-thief-plagued England. “Enclosure,” by Carly Anne West, spends its time in the ladies’ room and shows you a much more personal kind of calamity, while Josh Goller’s “Nothing Up His Sleeve” gives you a glimpse at the end of one very unlucky rabbit’s world.

Anything else, though, you’re on your own. There’re only so many apocalypses we can fit into a single issue. Believe me. It’s what I do.

You can curl up with the .pdf version here or make your way through the individual stories below.

– Eirik Gumeny

The Newcomers, Mike Sweeney
“The world ended on a Monday, but we didn’t see them till Tuesday.”

Nothing Up His Sleeve, Josh Goller
“Hanging by its scruff from the magician’s fat fingers,
the dead rabbit almost looked asleep.”

Sigourney Weaver Stole My Shadow, Craig Wallwork
“I closed all the curtains and had my wife shine a torch behind my hands. That’s when I realised something was wrong.”

Two Stories, Joseph A. W. Quintela
“A wayward military computer? Sure. But a Ford?”

Enclosure, Carly Anne West
“Her foot was undeniably and firmly lodged in the toilet’s drain.”

Snowpocalypse, Danger_Slater
“MOTHERFUCKER, I NEED MY MOTHERFUCKING MOTT’S APPLESAUCE!!!”

For our part, Jersey Devil Press nominated “The Werebear Who Wished to Come in from the Rain,” by Mike Sweeney, and “You and Me and the End of the World,” by M.R. Lang. Good luck, guys.

Reader nominations are open until February 28, 2010. You can find out more here and then nominate a story you think deserves some much needed accolades.

Were we successful in our Abouting?  If e-mails from complete strangers in California are any indication, then hell yes.

[Editor's Note: As per Mr. Holt's request, editor's commentary is in red.  Links are also in red.  There is going to be a lot of red.]

Dear Jersey Devil Press People,

As is the want of every as-yet-undiscovered-whatever (which with my being in California instantly makes me an aspiring actor [In Pennyslvania, they're apparently puppeteers.], which is inaccurate as I do not nor have ever waited tables wearing a white button up shirt and black slacks), I was perusing the lists of online magazines and journals who will publish nearly everything that is incomprehensible and poetic and yet will turn down my incomprehensible and poetic because it does not meet their “current needs at this time.” [I promise to never use the phrase "current needs" when we reject you.]

Somehow I accidentally stumbled onto your website [Destiny?] and accidentally discovered that there existed within Jersey Devil Press a commodity significantly lacking in nearly every other magazine/journal/press in the current publishing landscape [Latina editors?], that being an actual sense-of-humor and an acute sense of mortality [Oh.].

I regretted that I failed to read up on what a Jersey Devil was.  [That's a shame.]  I assume it’s some kind of “thing” that exists in Jersey [We also have Werebears.] (Or do you prefer non-Jersians to call it New Jersey?  I’m not sure of the local custom.  I don’t want to offend.  I mean I know Anthony Bourdain is from New Jersey but you may hate both him and his show on the Travel Channel… which I can respect.  [Kind of.  From the little I've seen he comes across as an arrogant tool.]  Forget I mentioned it.  [OK.]).  But whatever it is, I’m sure it’s good/bad and easy/difficult to deal with.  [Yes.]  For that matter I really didn’t read much more after that but I swear to God I’m looking at the pdf of the October issue right after this email.  [Man, you better have.  You too, current reader.  And read the November issue while you're at it.]

Anyway, good job and stuff.  [Thanks!]  Hope you guys don’t succumb to being serious artists and writing poems about red wheelbarrows… beside white chickens.  [We don't have any stories about chickens, but this one is about cows.]

Abstractly,

Caleb Holt

[Incidentally, as Caleb was so kind to point out, Kate Delany's Jersey Fresh was about the interaction between a Jerseyan and a Californian.  Much like this.  Crazy.]

[Side note:  To the authors of stories not linked to, we apologize.  We tried, but there're only so many ridiculous tangents we can string into a cohesive post.]

Jersey Devil Press, Issue One, is jam-packed with words and punctuation. It includes work from Kate Delany, Corey Mesler, Stephen Schwegler, Noel Sloboda, Christopher Woods, Robert Levin, and Mike Sweeney. Each and every story is eight kinds of wonderful and suitable for framing, refrigerator-hanging, or reading aloud at a wedding, funeral, or bar.

So, please, read and enjoy. Then tell everyone you know to do the same. Threaten them if you have to. It’s OK. We won’t judge.

There are innumerable jokes to be made about the Garden State in some quarters, but if you’ve ever seen Central Jersey in late July, just after the azaleas have bloomed and just before the cicadas come out to sing in August, you’d have no problem believing why the nation’s third state was nicknamed so.  Read the letters of the Revolutionary War soldiers – Colonial, British, and Hessian alike – for their description of what New Jersey once was before industry and chemical.  An earthly paradise where anything would grow, it was said.

And, today, in Central Jersey – the part that identifies with neither Philadelphia nor New York – that’s still true.  The land is rich and green like in the days of old.

Well, it is in spots, anyway.

There is no better time to observe the lush greenery of Jersey vegetation than during a summer rainstorm, the kind that move in from the south and berate the coastal counties before sweeping off into the Atlantic just as quickly as they appeared.  The water soaks the carpet of green grass that covers the rich horse farms and the small suburban homes alike.  The rain renews the ubiquitous red oaks, the stately yew trees, and the solemn weeping willows, replacing what the day’s heat has wilted away.

It’s a moment of reverence.

Time seems to slip away and the land is what it always has been.  Things that once were are again, things old and unseen.  They roam the earth they called their own long before there was a New Jersey or even an America.  They wander here and there and, occasionally, when the ashen sky cracks and opens, they ask to come in from the rain.

***

Little Ashley May Rue was by all accounts a well-mannered and polite little girl.  Quiet, but strong, it was said.  She was her mother’s rock in the days and weeks after her father’s death.  Her teachers all thought she would do well and the neighbors all thought she would keep her mom – and her little baby brother – anchored and sane in the difficult years that lay ahead.

It was a lot to ask of an eight-year-old, but Ashley May never complained or cried.  It was like she knew something the others didn’t.

But even if she hardly ever showed it, she missed playing whiffle ball with her Daddy and her cousins in the backyard, where the above ground pool was a home run and the swing set was a foul.  She missed her Daddy holding the back of her bike – the pink sparkly one with the Power Puff Girls seat – as she wobbled and wavered along the sidewalk before lunch.  Mostly, she missed the trips down the shore and the long walks with her Daddy in the sun, while Mommy sat feeding little Ben his bottle.

When she felt sad about not being able to do those things with her Daddy anymore, or when she just felt sad about all the things that had happened, the one thing that could always make her feel better was the rain.

It was her Mommy’s own daddy who taught her to sit with the garage open on the late summer afternoons when the thunderstorms would roll in from the south and drench the world for one half hour or maybe two.  Grandpa showed Ashley May just the right distance – the length of an old picnic-table bench – to sit from the end of the garage so that you could feel the rain passing by without ever getting wet.  They’d sit side-by-side in the rusty old beach chairs, the webbing frayed and yellow, and hum a song as they watched the water fall in sheets.  Or sometimes, they would say nothing at all, and Grandpa and Ashley May would just hold hands and let their arms swing lightly as they stared off into the deluge.

It was where Ashley May learned to think of nothing when she wanted to think of everything.  It was where she learned to find the calm even when everything around her made her want to cry.

Of course, her Grandpa was dead now too.  From the cigarettes he smoked, they told her.

But Ashley May still loved looking at the rain.

It was three o’clock and almost as if on schedule, the slate sky began to crack and patter and another afternoon thunderstorm commenced.  Little Ben was upstairs sleeping and Ashley May would have at least an hour to herself before she needed to change and feed him.  She hoped the rain would last the whole hour.

She stopped using the beach chairs to watch the rain, as it didn’t seem right to sit in them without Grandpa.  So she stood – and occasionally twirled a little like a ballerina – exactly one picnic-table-bench-length from the edge of the garage and let her eyes and mind drift off into the sheets of rain and the occasional streak of lighting.

***

In truth, Ashley May wasn’t quite thinking of nothing as the Werebear approached.  She was concentrating on the poplar tree that dominated the front lawn of her family’s house.  She was earnestly trying to decide if it was called “poplar” because it was a popular type of tree.  At least two of their neighbors had one as well, so it didn’t seem that strange of an idea.  She was just deciding her theory might have merit when the Werebear’s nose poked around the corner of the open garage.

Ashley May had seen a great many animals – deer, wild turkeys, raccoon, and, of course, bunny rabbits – while watching the rain.  But this was her first bear.  The turkeys – loud and brazen – had given her quite a start.  The bear didn’t alarm her quite as much, as he was quiet.  But he also was quite big and uncomfortably close.  She took three steps back and looked to the door that led into the house at the back of the garage.

The Werebear cleared his throat and spoke.  “Please don’t be frightened, young miss.”

Most people would be more than scared not just by a bear, but by one that spoke.  But Ashley May had seen a great many things in her eight years and she wasn’t frightened.  Not quite, anyway.

“You can talk?” she said.   It seemed a good idea to her to get that out in the open straight away.

“Yes,” said the Werebear, in a deep, smoky baritone.  “I can also catch cold.”  He let his eyes drift up to the rain pouring down on his snout and shook himself a bit to show that his fur was getting quite inundated.

Little Ashley May Rue furrowed her brow.  This was a pickle.  Her mother had been quite clear on what she was supposed to say to any visitors while she was away at work.  Ashley May had repeated her mom’s words exactly – to the social worker, to the mailman, to the college student who tried to sell her cable TV.  But she didn’t know what she was supposed to say to a bear, let alone a talking bear.

The Werebear cleared his throat again.  “I don’t mean to be forward, young miss, but might I – just for a few moments – come in from the rain?”

“You won’t eat me?” said Ashley May, asking what seemed to her an honest, if slightly rude, question.

The Werebear’s snout twisted into a frown.  He exhaled disgustedly and turned to head down the driveway.

“Wait!” Little Ashley May Rue cried.  “You…you can come in.”

“Are you sure?” said the Werebear in his rich rumble of a voice.

“Yes,” said Ashley May.  “For a little while, anyway.”

The Werebear nodded and lumbered into the garage, blocking out Ashley’s May’s view of the rain – of everything – before sitting on her right.

Ashley May didn’t like this.  It was where her Grandpa used to sit.  She wasn’t sure she had done the right thing.

“Grizzly,” said the Werebear.

“What?”

“You were wondering what type of bear I am.”

Ashley hadn’t been but she didn’t say so.  Instead, she asked, “Do all grizzly bears talk?”

“No,” laughed the Werebear.  “I’m special.  And I’m not entirely a bear.”

“Not entirely?” asked Little Ashley May Rue.

“I used to be a person.  A long, long time ago.  Or at least I think I was.  That’s how I learned to talk.”

“But now you’re a bear?”

“A werebear is the precise term.  You see, something happened.  I used to be a human, then I was a bear and a human.  After a while, I just stayed a bear.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s all I know now,” said the Werebear.  “It’s been so long since I was a person.”

“What’s the best part?”

“Eating little girls,” said the Werebear.  Then he turned his head to look at Ashley May and laughed a loud and hearty laugh.  He sat back on his hind legs and rubbed his belly with his front paws as he guffawed to show the little girl what a good joke he’d made. Ashley May laughed with him though she didn’t quite know why.

The Werebear shifted back onto all fours and walked around the garage a bit.  He sniffed at the old rusty snow shovels, pawed a bit at the stacks of bound newspapers, and cast a disparaging eye at old the picnic-table bench Ashley May used to mark the correct distance for watching the rain.

“Where is your mommy?” he asked after a fashion.

“At work, but she’ll be home in a few minutes,” Little Ashley May Rue replied dutifully, saying exactly what here mother had told her to say.

“And your daddy?”

Ashley May was quiet for a full minute before answering.  She waited until the Werebear moved back to her side before speaking.

“My Daddy’s dead,” she finally said.

“I see,” said the Werebear.  “Well, I am sorry to hear that.  It must be hard on you being here all alone.”

Ashley May didn’t say anything more.  She stared off into the rain.  She remembered that the rain made things better, made her feel safe.  She wanted to be safe.  She wanted the Werebear to leave, didn’t want to hear his breathing through his thick fangs, didn’t want to listen to the way he subtly sniffed at her.  She liked the silence with her Grandpa, but with the Werebear it just made her more uneasy.  Ashley May desperately searched for something to say.  She blurted out the first thing that came into her mind.

“Do you know Winnie the Pooh?” she said somewhat sheepishly.

“You know, I could eat you all in maybe three gulps,” said the Werebear

“What?”

The Werebear stopped looking at the rain.  He moved his bulk full round Ashley May, blocking out her view again.  When he spoke, his voice was still deep, but had an edge to it.

“I said, ‘I could eat you all in maybe three gulps.’ Shall we find out?”

“You said you wouldn’t eat me!” cried Little Ashley May Rue.

The Werebear laughed and it was not a nice laugh.

“I said no such thing.  I never answered you.  I was walking away when you stopped me.  When you invited me in from the rain.”

Ashley May took two quick steps backwards and the Werebear lunged forward positioning his snout an inch away from her nose.  “Going somewhere, young miss?”

Ashley May tried not to cry.  She said the only thing she could think of to save herself.

“Do you like babies?”

“What?!” growled the Werebear.

“Do you like babies?” repeated Little Ashley May Rue.

The Werebear nodded slowly.  “Of course.  Babies taste best.  So soft and tender.  One big bite.”  He clamped down his jaws to show Ashley May just how he would eat one.

“My brother…my baby brother.  He’s upstairs.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” said the Werebear.  He turned his nose to the air and sniffed hard twice.  “Yes, yes he is.”

“You could take him – instead of me.”

“I could,” said the Werebear.

“He tastes better than me.”  Ashley May’s voice was small and cold.

“Why shouldn’t I take you both?” asked the Werebear.

“Because I have the key to the door to the house,” said Little Ashley May Rue.  “It’s metal and you can’t break it down.”

“Can’t I?” scoffed the Werebear.

“No, you can’t,” said Ashley May.  “At least not without making a lot of noise and attracting attention.”

The Werebear nodded.  “All right.  You open the door for me.  And I won’t eat you.  But I want to hear you say it again.”

“Say what?”

“Say, you want me to eat your little baby brother and not you.  Say it for me again.”

His snout was right next to her cheek and Ashley May could feel the Werebear’s breath, wet and foul.

“You promise you won’t eat me?  For real this time?” Ashley May said.

“I promise,” said the Werebear.  “For real, I promise.”

“My brother,” Ashley May whimpered.  “I choose my baby brother.  Eat him.”

The Werebear laughed his dark, edgy laugh again.  He didn’t rub his belly.  “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Little Ashley May Rue reached into the pocket of her shorts – the denim ones with the SpongeBob face on both back pockets – and pulled out a small key.  Her breathing was shallow and fast and she tried to slow it.  She stepped to the door, placed the key in the lock and turned it.  She felt an almost instant relief.

“There,” she said, stepping aside.

The Werebear brushed passed her and placed his paws on the door.  A smile, if you could call it that, played on his snout.  The Werebear didn’t normally go out of his way to be cruel, but he didn’t like this little girl very much.  He couldn’t quite help himself.

“You know,” he said in his thick, smoky voice, “it’s really too bad your Daddy’s gone and left you here all alone.”

Ashley May swallowed hard and said what she said to all the others – to the mailman, to the social worker, to the man selling cable TV.

“I said my Daddy was dead.  I didn’t say he was gone.”

She heard the door to the house open and covered her ears as the Werebear growled in agony, his roar echoing like thunder in the garage before trailing off into whimpers and the limp scratching of claws on concrete as he was pulled into the house.

Little Ashley May Rue still very much loved her Daddy, but she hated to watch him feed.

She turned her back and forced herself to focus on the downpour, the way her Grandpa taught her, and thought of nothing till everything just drifted away.

MIKE SWEENEY lives in Central New Jersey where he writes constantly but never quite enough.