A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous by ed. Shane McKenzie Page B

and rough, a mosaic of grays and browns and reds. Leaf-clad branches the size of fingers jutted from its cheeks, its chin, its brows. Speaking through a distorted fissure in its bark the width of a snake hole, it said, “Do you remember your embers, Mr. Lawrence?”
    And he did. He tasted the last drag off his cigarette, recalled his pride as he watched the muscles in Brooke’s legs when she stooped to roll up the tent. He felt his fingers flick the cigarette into the dry brush lining their campsite, watched its glowing orange tip somersault and fall. Banished details returned, the gathering smoke where the cigarette still burned, the scent of flaming kindling, the thickness in the air as it prepared to sear. He saw Brooke’s forgotten look of horror as a shadow grew behind him, heard a now familiar crack, then pain and the dark.
    “Seventy-three trees burned before the heavens doused them with tears. Seventy-three, Mr. Lawrence. And so I replenish, as I’ve replenished since my bride first took me to her side, and I remind the sinners of their sins.”
    His stomach lurched, spasmed, seemed to rip apart with a stab of pain. Lawrence tried to look down, wanted to watch his viscera uncoil, but the tree man still clutched him by the hair and held his gaze. The pain lessened, and his mouth filled with the taste of soil. His tongue rolled around the flavor and rejoiced.
    “You were preparing us,” he said. His voice was a rustle of leaves. “For planting.”
    “You prepared yourself when you scorched my bride.”
    “Brooke … Brooke never hurt you. Never hurt your…” He spit out a raspy laugh. “Your bride. ”
    “Are those who love sinners not sinners themselves? And she does look quite beautiful, does she not?” The tree man turned Lawrence’s head.
    Brooke stood mere feet from him. Her arms shot skyward, as dark and rough as old leather, branches and thorns lining her hide like warts, ending in fingerless hands that resembled the pine cones that would gather in their yard each fall. Her eyes, as lovely a shade of brown as they had been at their wedding, stared at the sun in reverence. Her mouth was a yawning O and ringed with a bundle of tiny pink flowers the shade of her lips in the morning. She was buried in the forest floor up to her remaining knee.
    It pruned her , he realized, and his mind slammed shut like a coffin lid. He dimly noticed the tree man had set him down, but any thoughts of running vanished into Brooke’s pleading wooden eyes.
    “It took her fingers and it took her toes and it will not be done ‘til it buries my soul.” He laughed the words like a poorly delivered punchline.
    “And your soul will replenish all that you have taken,” the tree man said, stepped between husband and wife, and drew its saw from its cloak.
    “Mother Nature is a forgiving bride,” it said. “Nature’s Father, however, is not.” Its crack of a mouth fractured into a crooked grin. “Today is Arbor Day, Mr. Lawrence. Let us celebrate.” It raised its arms. The saw gleamed in the moon’s pale glow, and the trees welcomed a brother.

THE GREENHOUSE GARDEN OF SUICIDES
    by Kirk Jones
    D octor Bryukhonenko’s Experiments in the Revival of Organisms , and the accompanying footage of a small canine head severed from its body, its life sustained with the help of machinery, now flashed in Dick’s mind as he watched the severed head of a middle-aged woman in the same condition. Like the dog in Bryukhonenko’s tests, the woman reacted to various stimuli. Her eyes lazily followed his hand when he waved them before her. She squinted under heavy lighting. She was, in a scientific capacity, alive.
    As he scrawled the results down in his journal, the woman’s eyes spun like a roulette wheel, darting from one corner of the room to the next. Then the scattershot movements slowed, and she settled on him.
    He dismissed it as chance and continued in his journal until a rhythmic clicking drew him back to the head. Her jaw