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The new kid Herman had this proud smile of rotting teeth. We were in the second grade and my teeth were crooked. I was embarrassed to smile. Herman’s teeth were falling out of his head, but he didn’t care what anyone thought. The teacher sat Herman next to me and he soon passed me a copy of Mad. I spent the next week reading it to pieces. We laughed at his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards. We became friends with few questions asked. We traded numbers and started calling each other at home. He called Grandma’s house and asked, “What’re you doing?” I rarely had an answer that interested him. “Do you have a TV?” he asked. The basement had a TV, Uncle Val’s old set. “Yeah,” I told Herman, “I got a TV.” “Okay,” he said, “now go turn it on.” I hopped up on the arm of the couch and hit the power button. “Okay,” I said, “it’s on.” He told me to go to channel 99. “Channel 99,” I said, “that’s gonna take forever.” The TV in the basement didn’t have a remote, so you had to smash buttons up or down. “Not if you go backwards,” Herman said. “Huh,” I said. “Yeah,” Herman said. “Hit the down button like you’re going to channel three, but keep going. My brother showed me this trick.” I smashed the down button as quickly as I could. The channels flitted by. When I got to channel two and hit the button again, there it was: channel 99. Like magic. But the channel was dead. Grandma didn’t pay for channel 99. It was all static, but there were figures moving in it like people dancing in a hard rain. “You get there yet?” Herman asked. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m there, but I can’t see anything.” “Turn up the volume, but not too loud,” he said, “and put your ear to the speaker.” I pressed the volume button, notching it up one bar at a time. I pressed my ear to the speaker and listened. A saxophone, women moaning. “You hear it?” Herman asked. “I hear it,” I said. He giggled. “What is it?” I asked. There was a pause and all was mysterious and forbidden. Herman said, “It’s sex.”

Short stories by Ed Komenda.

On Thursday we went down with some friends for a chicken burger and chips. At 8 o’clock, they pick a name at random from the membership list and if you’re in the club, you win a grand, so the place was chocka. We sat in the back room, where the old people gather to talk about Reform and I felt as I usually feel at the club, self-conscious and chippy. Then, waiting at the bar for a consolatory whisky, I saw it. At a table in the corner of the room, a white-haired woman sat on her own. In front of her, alongside a glass of bottled beer, there was a book face down on the table. Its cover was white and the name of the author clear: Zizek. I started. Stared, grinned, gormless. A reader? Reading Zizek? At the cricket club? What were the chances?

By Charlie Hill.

It’s a sky-blue day. Fern leaves spike as I wade in. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave. Nubs of rosehips bristle on hedges. From the thick nettles bunched around my knees, I could make soup. I could use dandelions even if the blackberries are frizzled after months of sunshine. Warm days slouch as we settle in, plant and sow. Next spring, Olly says, we’ll reap the bounty. Then we’ll eat like kings.

A short story by Deirdre Shanahan.

The mirror says he’ll do. More than do. He’s made an effort though whether it’s in the right way he can’t tell. Too formal or not? On stage, years fell away and he knew he looked pretty good for his age. In real life he’s revealed. He’ll show he still cares. She’ll see him as he really is. As he can be. It’s not too late.

He runs through the tangle of streets north of Oxford Circus but has to walk west for the church with the steeple. The place she mentioned. He’s early but doesn’t care. Once in his life he should be early. Which door? Smoky grey glass hides something, maybe people. Part of a hotel and at the main entrance a gathering of suited men and women in heels. He tries a door but it is locked, though a smaller one falls open at his pressure and he tips in.

A short story by Deirdre Shanahan.

Towards the end of August, I received the news that Deirdre Shanahan had passed away unexpectedly whilst abroad. Deirdre was a talented and dedicated writer of fiction—short fiction in particular—with an impressive track record as well as great promise. At the time of her death, Deirdre was confirming the edits on not one but two new stories intended for publication here at 3:AM Magazine. With the blessing of Deirdre’s family, I’m grateful to be able to share these stories, even as I am saddened by the knowledge that they mark her final forays into fiction.

An editorial note by Daniel Davis Wood.

Ian and Véro are gonna get married one day. And then divorced later on, but they don’t know that now. Maybe Ian knows about them getting married, or maybe he doesn’t.

They’ve hitched to this town from Paris, where things hadn’t gone well. Nowhere to stay after Véro’s cousin ran out of patience with them crashing at her tiny flat, and the beer so expensive you wouldn’t believe it. More than in London, and Ian hadn’t thought that was even possible. Véro did warn him, though.

Alright, fine, but this place is gonna be better. They can stretch their cash for longer, have a bit of a rest; maybe calm down on the drinking for a bit. Véro laughs. You know they’re famous for their vineyards here?

A short story by Katy Derbyshire.

“You know,” he said, “there’s a second world in which the Bartleby novella doesn’t exist.”
A narrow beam of sunlight had found its way to Paul’s pint and it reflected back up on the ceiling, a small golden spot quivering like a jellyfish.
Now, I knew Paul well enough to accept that, after a few beers, he’d sometimes say things meant to provoke, things he himself only half-believed.
“You mean a second world as in a fictional world, right?” I asked him.
He leaned in, conspiratorially. “That’s just the thing. I’m very close to believing that second world’s not a fictional world, but a real one that bleeds over into this world, sometimes.”

By Nicholas Rombes.

It was hard, living on a hillside in Los Feliz, in a rented house with walls of glass, not to imagine the mountains surrounding the city burning. As if in a nightmare of perpetual fire. Lurking within the benign appearance, the appearance even of beauty, the beauty itself was the fire to come. Or something like that.

If she still wrote fiction, this would have been the start of the story.

A short story by Catherine Gammon.

It’s by far the most shocking thing to happen on a London campus in decades. A lecturer shot dead – in apparent imitation of the Reeva Steenkamp case a few years before – through the door of a toilet stall in the Humanities building. The questions are myriad. Too many to answer in the short window the press affords the story before the customary slide into seasonal oblivion. The victim is Laura Cameron, Professor of Philosophy, and Esther’s dear friend and colleague. A mother of two, and almost as renowned for her eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on metaethics and moral responsibility. With her heron’s-nest hair, held high in an improbable construction, Laura was unmistakeable walking into a conference hall, or on TV. A public academic, and the youngest woman to be made professor at the University of London, Laura was brilliant, risky, unconventional. A force of nature, the newspapers predictably say. All the qualities, Esther reflects in the dark, time-arrested days of January that follow, that she lacks.

Read the opening pages of Time Being, the new novel by Jude Cook.

Paul, with his good Christian name, wanted to mark his white damask caparisons and liturgical sandals and his cloaks, particularly the one depicting the Tree of Jesse, with a bold and original monogram, one that would immediately and resoundingly promulgate his high and uncontaminated standing in the world to everyone with seeing eyes, and so the boy, whose name he could not be bothered to learn, was brought to him. It was the boy, the baker’s son, who’d designed Manuel’s monogram. Where the boy might have learned this skill never crossed Paul’s patrician mind. He was too enraged to hear others, especially Mechthild—Mechthild with her circlet of verbena and those wildly wide-set, goat-blue eyes that drove him near mad—praise Manuel’s monogram. Manuel’s nobility was not a hereditary condition. He had no longstanding coat of arms. He was merely a knight—a knight!—and Paul loathed him. He ordered that a peacock be skinned without plucking, roasted, and brought to table in its natural envelope. In its beak, a sponge soaked in spirits of wine was kindled, and Paul made his vow: Lo, though it be in defiance of the Peace and Truce of God, he would have Manuel beheaded. Yet before the sword smote the worm’s head, Paul would see to it that Manuel looked upon his monogram and knew it to be the superior of the two.

A short story by Young Rader.

The Valley of Kings, 1922. Obstinate and impatient, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon descended with their excavation crew into darkness.

“If they go down in that spirit, I give them six weeks to live,” joked reporter Arthur Weigall.

Carter—the self-made man, the scrappy adventurer—broke into the outer chamber, which released a plaintive gust. He clambered inside, the first soul in three thousand years to breathe that air. He paused before the sealed door which bore a foreboding inscription: You people who enter this tomb make evil against me, may snakes be against you in water and on land.

An awed hush fell over the scene. By candlelight, Carter hacked a hole into the pitch-black tomb. As he reached his torch into the darkness, his eyes adjusting to the light, what he saw shook him to his core—

A short story (in variations) by Jonny Aldridge.