Emma Munro

Ella tracked the untagged male to Costco. Like everyone else, he pushed a shopping cart, referred to a list and then selected goods. He wore the perfect outfit to blend in — minimal makeup, silk top, long flowing cardigan, soft flared culottes, and espadrilles. She wanted to grab him and holler, but that would expose his recklessness. Males had been torn apart for less, despite how few there were.

On her left, down past the freeze-dried mozzarella, he reached for a large bag of jerky. Ella palmed her tranquillizer gun and dialled a sedative dose. To camouflage the shot, Ella simultaneously coughed, dropped a box of snack bars and fired. The dart skimmed his bicep. Not surprisingly he spun away, darting back and forth between women bulk-buying for their households. His nimble footwork delighted Ella until she lost sight of him in small appliances. 
She dashed along the central aisle, checking left and right.

The male’s topknot flashed behind a tent display and disappeared.

“There you are,” she muttered. Wheeling about, Ella lumbered down the camping supplies aisle. No sign of him.

After several minutes, she turned a corner into the food court. Luck was on her side today. The male sat at a corner table stuffing purchases into his backpack. He looked around him constantly. Skinny but not malnourished, a rarity for the untagged. He’d need training; what male didn’t. But a woman had paid for those clothes and taught him manners, illegally of course.

“All right,” Ella whispered to herself, “this time make sure it’s a good shot.” She raised the dart gun. The dart glinted in the bright light, clattered to the floor. The male yelped and swung his backpack. Exposed to all, he fled toward the checkouts.

Women shouted to each other across the low tables and food counters. Shoot, shoot! He’s bolting. Get him.

Ella rushed, heart soaring at the thrill of the chase. A gang of women matched her pace, stamping, shouting promises. Hey sweet thing. Come home with us. We’ll do right by you.

She’d be kind to him, she’d take care of him and protect him. She had to get to him before any of these women remembered how close they were to rows and rows of weapons.

“Please,” the male cried from somewhere in the crowd.

“He is mine,” Ella bellowed. “I saw him first.” She crashed toward his voice, shoving women and shopping carts out of her way.

He’s breaking.

The male burst into a clear space not twenty feet away. He leapt across a closed checkout, spectacular in full sprint, backlit by the waning sun.

Ella darted him. He flung his arms out wide. Then he twisted and sunk to his knees. Ella hurried over, reached around his shoulders and supported him against her chest. The second dart had struck him dead in the heart.

“Are you okay?” Ella gently clipped his earlobe, tagging him. The tag winked red, then blue: registered. Legal.

He blinked.

“You’re mine now.”

EMMA MUNRO lives in the Blue Mountains of Australia with one wife and two cats. Her stories have appeared in Hashtag Queer LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology Vol. 1, Hello Horror, Pure Slush, Cosmos and other places. She was born in the year of the Tiger and collects books beyond her ability to read. She’s an avid couch-dreamer, gardener, and bush-walker, and is a sucker for life’s simple pleasures: food, coffee, friends, and reading. She reads for Flash Fiction Online. You can find her at www.emmamunro.com.au.

Joshua Storrs

Six nameless months passed before we noticed the statue of a crazed horse on the lawn of the old courthouse. Some could sense we put it there, but none remembered why. Black onyx, it rears back, eyes wild, tongue flailing. There’s a mark on its forehead.

Tonight we crowd around it. City council’s giving an award to the man who wrote the book about the statue. The rest of the town’s shown up to protest. We’re upset about all of it — the award, the book, and the statue. Makes us uncomfortable.

We can’t remember what happened in those six months after the statue showed up. Didn’t even see it till there were already leaves falling. Only thing anyone could say about that summer was that it was hot. That was eight years ago.

It’s a quiet town — the amnesia could be from boredom, but that wouldn’t explain why it feels like there’s folks missing. Nobody we can name, but there’s less of us now than there were before.

We’re still not looking at it, not really. We’ve got our signs and our flashlights and we’re closer than most of us are comfortable with, but we’re looking past it, at where the podium’s set up. The mayor’s saying some words about the man who put the town On The Map, as he says.

Really it was a professor who started it. Came in from New York a couple years ago on some kind of grant to study “Midwestern sculpture.” Ended up going nuts looking at the thing all day. We stopped looking at her, like there was some word of warning we forgot to pass on. She went back to New York and raised some hell at her university over the mark on the thing’s forehead. The story ended up in magazines. If anyone put us On The Map, it’s her, but that wasn’t the kind of On The Map city council could be proud of.

So this local man wrote a bestseller in response to the controversy. The book didn’t actually answer anything. It condemned the woman in New York and her pretentious attitudes about small town Midwesterners. The book confronted the statue, defended it, said it was a symbol of pride for a misunderstood people. Didn’t even mention the missing people. Its author knew just as much as anyone, which was nothing. But it started one of those “National Conversations,” and soon everyone had an opinion.

A handful of folks at this protest just want to go back to not having an opinion. They don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to think about the unsaid warnings that could have saved that professor’s brain. They don’t want to think about the six months that they can’t think about. But to get back to all that not thinking, they’ve got to hold a sign a while.

But for most of us it’s about those missing people. No names or records show anyone missing, but there were gaps in work schedules, shifts with no one to cover them. There were cars in parking lots that didn’t move for months before finally getting towed away, no owner on the registration. There’s a footprint in the air of this place, something we can’t see or taste, but still squeezing the air from our lungs.

The author’s knuckles turn white as he grips the podium and tries to speak, but we’re out-shouting the PA system. We’re not as angry about the statue as we are about someone being proud of it. He’s looking at the speech on his phone, but the screen keeps turning off because he can’t get a word in edgewise. He goes off script. He takes the mic off the stand and charges us with it. He tries to move around the statue to get in our faces — shouting, pointing, not looking at the crazed horse any more than the rest of us — but we move too, circling the statue opposite him, keeping it between us.

The cord of his microphone wraps around the base of the statue. This thing that puts our guilt in the center of town for us to glance at every day — to catch out of the corner of our eye as we eat breakfast across the street — something we don’t want to look at, but of course we do. This symbol of our delirium.

The cord wraps tighter. The man’s circles get shorter. The statue of the crazed horse stays between us. We are a vortex spinning round a bottomless pit. Falling closer, the friction lights a fire, and we drink his words like fuel.

JOSHUA STORRS is a finalist for the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction for his short story, “Holy Ground,” which he sold to a journal that never published it and then disappeared. When he’s not shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the name of God, he makes comic books with his friends, which you can read at JoshuaStorrs.com. Joshua lives in Pittsburgh and goes by @Bloombeard on twitter and instagram.