I’m pleased to make another small contribution to the number of stories in the world: my alien invasion tale “The Dead Thing at the Bottom of the Pool” is now available in MYTHIC #13. You can buy your own copy of the issue for the cost of a cappuccino.
Below is the full table of contents, and beneath the beautiful cover are the opening paragraphs of my story.
The Unkillable Man by Topher Froehlich
Borderland by Barry Charman
The Dead Thing at the Bottom of the Pool by Karl El-Koura
A Different Sort of Death by Tom Jolly
The Frost Mother by Caitlin E. Jones
Parley by Sean Patrick Hazlett
Blood in the River, Tears on the Sand by Timothy Mudie
The Belly by Katie Gray
Goodbye, Blue 42 by John Waterfall
Wall of Thorns by Shaun Kilgore
The Dead Thing at the Bottom of the Pool
by Karl El-Koura
The storm came all of a sudden and lasted for hours. We were in the pool — me, Bobbie, Daddy and Mommy, Daddy sitting at the edge and tossing in pennies for Bobbie and me to see who could dive fastest to grab them and bring them to Mommy, who was keeping count with mine in her left hand and Bobbie’s in her right. Daddy had just grabbed another handful from the glass jar on the grass beside him and tossed it in when the sun went out and hard rain started falling. The sky had gone from day to night in an instant, and Mommy, laughing but also a little nervous, yelled at us to get out. She shooed us into the house through the back door, all of us dripping wet onto the kitchen tiles when normally we had to dry off completely first, while outside in the dark I saw Daddy’s shadow race around the backyard, gathering our towels and throwing them on the patio table under the large black umbrella.
“Daddy!” Bobbie, who was ten years old, two years younger than me, yelled, raising his voice over the thundering snap and clap of the falling rain. Bobbie was always concerned about Daddy, like he had a feeling that something bad was going to happen to him one day and that Bobbie was the one to stand guard over Daddy and stop the badness. “Daddy, come in with us!”
Read “The Dead Thing at the Bottom of the Pool” and other stories in MYTHIC #13.
