The poem "Five Cantos from the Prayerbook of Aphrodite" by Sandra Kasturi, which got an honourable mention in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.

Excerpt from "The Robber Maiden's Story"
by Eileen Kernaghan
Honourable mention from terry Windling in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Volume IX

My father was a bandit-chief. Not many people remember that. He died a long time ago, with a knife between his ribs. Not my knife, either -- though I thought of doing it often enough.

I was an ugly child, they tell me, dark-skinned and scrawny. But neither was my mother any beauty. She had a long beard, stiff as a brush, that I used to pull to hear her squeal; and eyes like two burning coals half-hidden under shaggy brows. But the power was in her, as it was in me.

When I was sixteen my breasts were still as small and hard as pine nuts, but my shoulders were as broad as a man's. One day I buried my skirts under a bush, and put on a man's boots and leggings, a cap the colour of ripe strawberries, and a deerskin shirt. From one of my cousins I stole a fur-lined cloak, so heavy that it made my shoulders ache. And when I went away from my father's hall, no one guessed that under my rough bandit's garb were a woman's parts.

But that was later. I'm getting ahead of myself. You asked how I came to know the Swedish woman Gerda, the one they call the Angel of the Snows. You tell me she is famous now, for her travels and her good works. You say she writes books that are published in a dozen languages, and people come from miles around to hear her speak. Yes, I can see how that could happen. It doesn't surprise me very much.

Excerpt from "The Changeling Variations" by Steve Carper:

The dinner was going badly as usual. Carl snarled at Betty each time he condescended to notice her arguments. Green-eyed, bitter Kerry tore her shattered voice in Betty's defense. Roy and Martin sat pressed together, picking at their food and saying little. Propped crookedly in her wheelchair, Olivia cringed each time the hiss and crackle of a sizzling rice dish filled Ng's restaurant. Lona cringed with her, horrified at the twisted woman's reaction. Olivia had been stretched on a rack for hours of unendurable agony. Not being loosened when her rape began, her arms and legs ripped from their sockets. Lona shivered, her joints aching sympathetically. Was that the connection, the sizzle being the sound of her tendons snapping and tearing deep inside her body where her mind had taken refuge? Not one of them understood the other, their pain, their violation. Conceiving of the minds behind their tormenters was as much beyond Lona as it was an obsession to Carl.

"Torture is a constant," Betty was saying, in futile response to a pronouncement of Carl's.

"Of course it is," Carl said, barely glancing at her. "Always has been. Look at the World War II atrocities, and not just the Nazis. Look around us in the world--Iran, Chile, Uganda, China, Libya, Turkey, a parade of nations. Judicial torture was such a constant 500 years ago that you can't even think of the Inquisition as an aberration. But that was known, there was always a reason, even if only terrorization. It was carried out by men . . ."

"Always men," Kerry broke in.

"So now we're equal, thank you very much. At least they were men whose names sometimes became known, who could be tried for their crimes or quietly tortured and killed themselves. What do we have? Five thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand Victims and not a clue, just impossible crimes from a locked room mystery."

"I used to like those," Roy said in a small voice, while Martin nodded vigorously. "Now I can't read them." The two men had discovered one another at a dental clinic for repair of their chipped and cracked teeth, an odd side effect of their electrical torture. Constant companions ever since, they spent every day lengthening an incredibly long list of similar tastes and habits.

"You two," Carl said. "So alike, tortured so similarly. Coincidence? Bullshit. Somebody's experimenting."

Kerry slammed the metal lid back onto a dish of Orange-Flavour Chicken so hard that Olivia dropped her fork in surprise. "Great. You mean there's another green-eyed, lapsed-vegetarian, half-Bulgarian, Greek Orthodox Kerry out there, except that somebody dug in a thumb and popped out her left eye instead of her right just to see if there was a difference? So all I have to do is find her and together we have depth perception again? Who would bother. Who could bother? Tell me it's aliens, Carl, aliens with the galaxy's most humongous database."

"Why not? Why the hell not? Does anything else explain it? Can you tell me how humans could have known the moment I was alone inside a locked house with four other people casually roaming around in it? Or put me back into one again? Ten days, TEN DAYS, later without a bite of food the whole time?"

"I heard about a new case," Olivia said softly, her black face creased white with wrinkles from the pain, "at the hospital, when I went today." She spent much of her time there, as doctors studied her case, plotting ways to put her back together. She called them the King's Men.

"A young man, a boy really. Just brought in from downstate because the burn ward's so good here. A team of astronomers were with him. Somebody identified the pattern on his body as the stars visible from the 44th parallel on the night of the Summer Solstice."

Silence at the table. Roy gripped Martin's hand and gently squeezed it. Then Kerry's permanently hoarse blare shook the room. "Livvie, that's dumb. I mean, really stupid. That's the stupidest thing I've heard out of this group. A star map, in burns yet. Down to the sixteenth magnitude, I suppose. With quasars and galactic clusters. Damn you all, can't you see? We've stopped being people. We're nothing but headlines for the Weekly World News. And you, Carl, you encourage it with your speculations and theories and conspiracies. You want evil? Don't look to the stars, just stare in the mirror."

"No," roared Carl in response, and to her utter surprise Lona found herself saying it in chorus. "I refuse to admit it. I refuse to become like it," Carl shouted. "There may be evil, and it may come from other men, but I'll fight it just like I fought them. With the scars to prove it."

And Lona said, "It doesn't matter who did this, WHAT did this. It was Them, a Them with nothing to do with me, with Us. I don't like myself as Victim. But it's better to be part of our group than part of Them."

The dinner crawled to a halt shortly after. The fortune cookies and plum wine went untouched, except by Carl, who drained his glass in a gulp. When Betty tried to raise the subject of their next weekly get-together, the lack of response overwhelmed even her hostess soul.

Lona watched as they grouped in the parking lot. Kerry and Betty helped Olivia into Betty's car, folding her wheelchair so that it would fit into the back seat. Roy and Martin walked over to a gleaming Volvo. Lona couldn't tell whose it was; their cars were identical. The crisp night air, almost warm after the cold winds of the snowstorm earlier that week, reanimated the men. Their good-byes sounded joyous, and Lona envied the way they happily jammed their bodies together like teenagers out for a moonlit spin.

Carl joined her, waved with her as the cars left the lot. His open grey coat flapped companionably against her tightly buttoned beige one. For several minutes they stood silently, enjoying the promise of spring in the breeze. Lona had barely been touched by a man in weeks, but when Carl took her hand and offered to walk her home, she never hesitated.

Excerpt from "In a Revision Once I See"
by Charles M. Saplak

There are over two hundred of us in my Cluster. We call our shared world Amareteus.

Amareteus is a desert world, yet contains a fabulous eco-design. It's a stark world, and we Amareteuns often joke that to enjoy this Cluster you have to have a taste for pain.

I trek from the LavaBubble city of Norr to the Lattice Mountain of Irom. As I walk through the desert I feel the hot wind dry my skin. I smell the decomposition and dessication of unlucky animals, windborne testaments of death. Death is a necessary background detail in Amareteus. I hear the glassy tinkling of predator snakes slithering and see the sparkle of distant mirror plants.

A man gallops up from behind a rock. He has redesigned himself to have thickly muscled legs like those of a small dinosaur. He wears crested plates on his spine. His skin consists of purple and red scales, ornately patterned like that of an ancient snake.

"Join you?" he asks.

I nod.

"Ride me?" he asks, patting his broad, leathery shoulders.

I shake my head. "I want to walk."

For miles we walk together. Occasionally he scurries away to capture small jeweled birds. Occasionally he rubs his crest against my arm, begging for petting.

Not one mile from the Lattice Mountain of Irom banditti attack and fight us with swords and morningstars. I'm carrying a dagger and a bag of explosive crystals. The battle lights up the desert but is short. When it's over all the banditti lie dead, but my companion has also been hacked to pieces. His head is stuck on a spiketree.

I walk around considering how to free his head without getting stuck by a spike. The slightest spike wound, according to the rules, can cause spontaneous mutation.

"Leave me alone," the head says.

"I can help you. If you die in Amareteus you have to wait twenty-one days before you're allowed back, and you may not get your incarnation of choice. I can get medical attention for your head."

"Leave me," he says. "Dying is...."

I wait, but he doesn't complete his sentence. I leave.

Excerpt from "Steelsong"
by Steve Schlich

He listened with his body for the vibrations of appliances being moved by a search party, but the pounding pain of the drum against his shoulder was too strong. Finally the ground stopped moving and the pressure of the drum against him filled Kenny's world.

His pain came in waves, and in the spaces between those waves, Kenny began to hear music again. He realized that it had resumed some time ago; his panic and his pain had deafened him to it. That was funny. A deaf boy losing his hearing. But the music was back and he let it lull him. The deeper he let the music penetrate, the less he hurt. Or minded that he hurt.

Because he had never heard such things, Kenny could not compare the sound he heard to opera, or rock, or any other kind of ear music. Instead, he thought of colors that could be felt as well as seen. Greens and blues and dead-of-night blacks sent chills through him; whites and yellows and warm sunset oranges bathed him in comfort.

It seemed that his clothes dryer prison had become a big ear, and the junkyard around him an orchestra of color and feeling, cacophonously warming up for a performance. He let the colors swell over him like surf, washing his pain away in waves of comfort that withdrew and then built and broke over him again.

Kenny could judge the passage of time well enough. The earthquake had struck somewhere around five o'clock. It was Fall and would be dark in another hour or so. He watched the available light begin to fade and with it the comfort and distraction of his music. He managed to shift so the dryer didn't press against his shoulder as savagely. But he couldn't escape it. Instead of absorbing and reflecting his body's heat, the metal transferred its cold to him. Instead of numbing his pain, the chill exacerbated it.

I'm in real trouble, Kenny thought. His T-shirt didn't provide much warmth. I could die here from -- he reached for the word -- exposure. But what was he supposed to do? He tried to remember anything he'd read about earthquakes that might help now. In times of trouble, he'd gotten used to leaning on others for help.

People assumed that because Kenny couldn't hear and made blurry sounds instead of words, he was slow. He wasn't, but he'd discovered early on that people made allowances for his handicap. They sent him to a special school, treated him like fragile glassware, and generally expected less of him.

However, it was a life of extremes: when people weren't fawning over Kenny like some oversized baby, they ignored him completely. At those times, he was on his own. No one expected anything of him.

He was definitely on his own now. Salvation was up to him. Calm, he remembered. He was supposed to stay calm. Fear was the enemy. Don't panic. He tried to let the music in again, to calm himself and to ease the pain.

But there was pain in the music, too. And the whisper of other feelings. Indistinct images and emotions came to him, fading in and out of focus like the portable TV did when his father fiddled with its antenna in the junkyard office. The images were foggy black-and-white movies, fuzzy memories of things he had never experienced.

Gradually they became as clear as his own senses. He felt within him the stiffness of sheet metal and beneath him the solidity of a concrete floor. He did not see his surroundings, he sensed them. Every thing in existence broadcasts its own aura, and it was by these infinitely varying wavelengths that he now viewed and listened to -- listened to! -- the world around him.

He sat immobile in the basement of some house. The musty dust of old cinder blocks filled the air. He felt a chill and heard the furnace flame burst to life. The world shook, but not like the earthquake. He shook. His belly rotated, turning wet clothes round and round, bathing them with heat. And there was a foreign pressure on him.

Flesh and cloth pressed against him. A woman. She twisted a dial on his face plate and leaned on him as his drum turned the clothes over and over and over.

She liked the vibration and the warmth; it felt good to her. The sensation transferred to her body and helped her forget the pain that she lived with. The pain wasn't physical, but it hurt just the same. There was something she wanted desperately but could not have -- love. Her husband did not love her.

Kenny understood her pain. His father loved him, and knowing that was an important part of Kenny's life. The woman's pain was a deep blue solo of loneliness that rose above the background and filled his consciousness for long, poignant moments. It penetrated Kenny as ruthlessly as the cold, and dragged him closer to panic.

There were other songs. He tried to listen to them instead.

On to Issue #3