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Where’s Mummy?
by Harris Coverley
He was about sixty, and a
rough sixty at that. He just started rambling it out when I was packing up my
spade and whatnot.
“Yeh, ‘bout five years back.
Was our cat and mutt from next door. Both dead now. But the priest came ‘round
one day, uninvited, parish church y’know, came in ‘ere, and the dog and the cat
were sat there, ‘bout five feet apart, and, I swear, he said: Let these two
be in union! And he left, just like that.”
“Mmm.” I wrapped a spanner
with its mates.
“Then, ‘bout ten weeks after,
cat gave birth. Just the one. And it was the oddest thing: it was like a
cat, but a dog.”
“Oh yeah, really?”
“Like, a halfway. This
and that. Like that priest had set somethin’ in motion, somethin’ weird.”
“Hmmm.”
“Wanna see it?”
He nodded to the shed.
“Lives in there. Never comes
out, much.”
He creaked the door and I
leant in. It smelled grim. I could see it at the back, a short crippled shadow
in the gloom, crowned by two eyes, one green, one brown. I heard a hissing breath.
I said I had to get going,
and I grabbed the last of my stuff and walked.
He called after me, but I
didn’t hear it.
Along with previously in Yellow Mama, Harris
Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published
in Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E,
and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books),
amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in
journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England."
J. Elliott is an author and artist living in a small
patch of old, rural Florida. Think Spanish moss, live oak trees, snakes,
armadillos, mosquitoes. She has published (and illustrated) three
collections of ghost stories and three books in a funny, cozy
series. She also penned a ghost story novel, Jiko Bukken, set in Kyoto, Japan in the winter
of '92-'93. Available in Paperback and eBook on Amazon.
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