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found my single dead body, evidence of a struggle, but a room sealed from the inside, with no possibility of escape.
    Every locked-room mystery that ever really happened, happened like that.
    The stories had to make up some convoluted tale of icicle daggers and false compartments or hidden rooms and odorless poisons. They also had to provide characterization. Sorry I wasn’t able to give you a sense of mine. But goddamn it, if I twist my ankle stepping off a curb, I’ll have to limp into the office the next morning, because I’ve run out of sick days taking care of these creatures. For you. And if you don’t have enough of a sense of me as a heroic, sympathetic character, then fuck y’all. Will you volunteer to kill Wendy?
    Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 5
Copyright © 2013 by Eric Cline. All rights reserved.

Neep

by K. C. Norton
    E ver since Mads carved me, he has spoken of the day when he will make me his. Today is no exception.
    “Your skin will part like apple-flesh,” he tells me, “and the meat beneath is white. Did you know that, Pluto? That inside, you are as white as I?” His fingers trace the slope of my cheek up to my scalp and into the stalks of my hair. He tugs—I am sure he thinks he is being gentle, but Mads is never gentle—and it takes everything I have not to react.
    Like most humans, Mads does not believe we can feel pain, and I have never set him straight. If he does not know that he can hurt me, he will not bother to try. So I keep my face blank as I polish his second-best pair of shoes and say only, “So you have told me, Gartner Poulson.” When he caresses me, I dare not use his given name.
    “You’re a good neep,” he tells me.
    But that is the problem—I am no longer a neep. I am nearly full-grown, and when I begin to flower I will be diced and shaved and julienned in the name of Mads Poulson’s hunger.
    His hand, where it rests against my skin, is smooth and soft. Beneath a stranger’s touch, I would seem to be the rough one. But skin deceives.
    * * *
    It pleases Mads to think of me as a woman—though of course I am no such thing—because his hunger for me has the same shape as all other human hungers.
    When the light finally begins to fade from the sky, I am permitted to sit behind the old house, on the weathered steps half worn-through with rot, and speak with Sissel Peals, so long as it does not disrupt her work. Sissel considers herself a her , most likely because she has seeded several neeps of her own.
    “You’re not well,” says Sissel, laundering Mads’ shirts. Her hands are leathery and polyped from so much time spent in the water.
    “Well enough,” I say. From the folds of my tunic, I withdraw my secret stash of cigarettes. I must be very careful where and when I smoke, in case Mads should smell it and catch me out, but he never intrudes on the laundry washing. It disgusts him to think that he needs washing-after. When Sissel sees the carton, her lips become pruney, but she does not scold.
    “There is news in town today,” she says instead. “We have a visitor.”
    “A visitor.” I light a match, one of only four I have left, just as dangerous and just as secret as the cigarettes themselves. “That does not pass for news.”
    “Ah, but she is special.” Sissel wrings a shirt dry and hangs it on the line. “Her performances are spectacular. And she is very pretty; they all say so.”
    Who cares about pretty women? I hope she starves to death. I hope they all starve to death, and then sink rot-deep within the soil, that we may feed on them.
    I take a deep drag on the cigarette and hold the smoke within my fibers for as long as I can, so that the tar and nicotine have every opportunity to render me carcinogenic. So that when he cuts me open, Mads’ stomach will roil at what his knife reveals: my flesh, not opaline, but yellow-black.
    “Tell Gartner Poulson,” Sissel insists. “Maybe he’ll bring you to town, to meet her, before she leaves.” She