Welcome to Theory Train Magazine.
We are pleased to present to you a collection of speculative fiction poetry and fiction. Visit us at theorytrain.com or email us at theorytrain@gmail.com.
Editor in Chief Eileen Young
Selection Board Adam Schreckenberger and Michelle Ristuccia
Editorial Assistant Lynn Underwood
Cover by mapleakuma
ISSN 1925-2439
All contributions are copyright © 2011 by the individual contributors.
A Conversation With Odin by Valentina Cano
A World Without Pi by Joe Jones
Vocabulary by Valentina Cano
A Higher State of Mind by George Piper
The Calculation by Terence Kuch
2020 by Jim Eigo
A Conversation With Odin
By Valentina Cano
Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Magnolia's Press, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals and will appear in the upcoming editions A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. You can find her here: http://coldbloodedlives.blogspot.com
Crumpled, he lays.
His skin is dry and puckered
with a fear that has sucked
out his entrails.
He makes no sound,
no wet hiss slithers out of his mouth.
He stares with eyes
that have filled with ice,
with a view of the room
beyond the glass.
He raises dead coils,
marble-stiff and knotted with sleep,
and he looks at me
with a face fluttering like a feather.
I nod and he takes off,
a puff of scales
brushing me like sandpaper.
The Nursery
By Nick Kimbro
In the past my work has appeared many places, most recently: decomP magazinE, Fogged Clarity, Spring Gun Press, Eclectic Flash, and I have work forthcoming from Naked Snake Press, and Electrik Milk Bath Press.
By that time she’d already stopped going in to check on the child. She sat on the couch in the living room and imagined it there beyond the door. The bedroom where she’d used to receive ‘guests’ had been converted into a nursery, and every now and then the monitor at her elbow would groan.
She spent her time trying to remember the baby’s father. Whoever spawned a thing like that ought to have been more memorable, she thought, but no matter how hard she tried their faces all blurred together. She felt as though she had missed something extremely important—missed it while being present—which is of course the most affecting form of loss.
She’d born the child herself in a pool of water that boiled as her contractions collapsed together. When the thing came she screamed, tumbled from the tub and groped on the table for the scissors, desperate to cut it away from her. Once she was free she was able to consider the child. It lay on its back and didn’t cry, had not uttered a sound the entire time. Its skin was a deep shade of red with so many humps and bulges it looked more like a stone than a person, and its face—that was how she knew it was wrong. Its face was not an infant’s, but mature. It had teeth for Christ’s sake! And pupils that swallowed its eyes in black. She should have held it underwater, she knew, but considered that it might be the Antichrist. It occurred to her who the father must be and she held off. He would return for the child, and she began to wonder why he’d chosen her. She gave up working, burned the sheets and bought a crib, a blanket; no toys or pacifiers—the baby didn’t need them. From the moment it was born her apartment was as quiet as a tomb. She did buy one of those hanging constellations to dangle above its crib, although she couldn’t tell whether or not he enjoyed it. His eyes were so big and black, she could never tell in which direction they were pointed.
At first she would check on him, waiting for him to cry out for nourishment, but he never did. This was fortunate because her breasts were dry and empty, like the sensation of motherhood, which, in her case, was not so much a feeling but a dark knowledge she kept locked inside her and didn’t bother to express. The child laid in its crib without moving or making a sound—waiting, she thought, for his father to return.
She sat in the living room and waited for the heavy knock of a visitor: the only one she’d ever hoped would return.
The radio she kept beside her was mostly silent, but every now and then it would hum and stutter, groan like a record player stuffed with cotton until those sounds formed words, although ‘mother’ was never one of them.
“Tell me when your father is coming,” she whispered into the receiver. “Tell me what he looks like.”
The voice did not respond to her questions, but spiked and moaned, morphing in pitch as though it were a radio signal trying to resolve itself. When it did form words, it did not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. The words were familiar, but their movement confounding. It was like it was reading a book, although with the sentences backwards, turned inside out, refusing to make any sense.
She tiptoed to the door and placed her ear against it, listening for the voice inside although the only sound came from the baby monitor where she’d been sitting. She cracked the door to the nursery and the sound behind her dissolved. She followed the sliver of light to the crib, but could not see inside it; shadows spilled out between the bars like a fountain of ink, and there was only silence.