One Last Stitch

Given that his operating theater was an open casket, Alvin Marks thought he was actually doing a damn good job. If Oretty Whiting hadn't been so determined to find fault with his technique that she ripped her late husband's arm off, no one would even have noticed the way the flesh gave beneath your fingers like squid sushi. And that could hardly be blamed on him.

Besides, Alvin wanted him whole.

"Is this the best you can do?" Paul S. Whiting, Esquire, asked from the casket. "I can pay more, if that's the concern here."

The concern wasn't Paul Whiting's payment schedule, though. It was the smell. Paul Whiting smelled like . . . well, he smelled like a dead man too long in the coffin, was what he smelled like. Alvin only hoped the body would hold together long enough to sew.

Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Amusement Park

On the ninth day west of Des Moines, the little company came across a crumbling Ferris wheel tilting drunkenly above a starveling cornfield. Here and there, crows picked among the scant remnants. They showed no alarm at the squeaking wagon's approach.

 Angler flapped the reins and Missus Hammeril's pair of horses came to a halt.

 "Oh," Missus Hammeril said, a little sadly. "Orry and I rode one of those, when he was first courting me."

Angler, facing forward with his mistress behind him, rolled his eyes. Exactly who he was rolling them for, he could not say. The crows, maybe.

Crawling Back (NSFW)

When Chrysta's eyes rolled back, when she warned us about the storm, she'd said nothing about dildos rising on the floodwaters.