Author Jay Sturner

 Inspired by the dream logic of Norse mythology. The lumberjack returned to his cabin atop the mountain and sat by the fire to smoke his pipe.      “How was your day, Balder?” asked the man’s companion while cutting carrots for stew.      “Well, Nanna, I chopped down another ten trees for the Company. Big ones, too. One had a bear in it.”      “I’m sorry, dear,” Nanna replied. “I know how much you hate to inconvenience the animals.”      Balder blew smoke from his pipe and stared into the fire. Guilt was heavy on his mind, layers deep, like river silt. If he didn’t need the money he’d quit the whole business.      A cool breeze blew in from under the door. Though spring was upon the mountain, the wind yet carried a chill. Balder scooted his rocker closer to the fire.      “I’ve just got to find another job,” he said to himself, smacking the armrest. Just then, a weasel peeked out from beneath...

To Shayne Keen (for introducing me to the band King Buffalo, from which an image in a song of theirs led to the creation of this story). Ynè-Kee froze at the sight of her own face peering down at her from the emerald flame of an aurora. This vision, the shaman said, was a sign that a journey must be taken, and that closure was its purpose.      Next day, after making preparations, Ynè-Kee spent extra time with her son. Part of her did not want to go, as the boy had just lost his father and sister in a recent battle. In her own grief she retreated to the hills every sunset. There she watched light dance across the boreal landscape to distant waters where it was lulled beneath the horizon. Often she wondered where all that light went, and if it was better there.      After saying her goodbyes, she climbed atop her mammoth and headed west through the snow.      Several days into her journey, under a setting sun, Ynè-Kee arrived at the sea. A pai...

As the airplane enters the towering clouds, Billy spies wispy ghosts and shifting white valleys. What is turbulence to everyone else, to Billy is an angry fog monster.   An old woman snores beside him. Others resign to airport novels, electronics, and the anticipation of the cart. Humming engines and whooshing air vents backdrop the cries of a baby, of two teenage girls absorbed in gossip.   Billy peers out the cold, turbid window and sees Harryhausen beasts run amok in the cloudscape: dinosaurs gnawing on cars and bridges, a distant Cyclops ripping a train off its tracks.   A break in the clouds reveals a stretch of suburbia, of baseball fields where an interest in sports fell short of home plate. All around, long thin roads blink with ant-cars: “Ants can lift fifty times their own weight, you know,” his mother once said, not long before getting sick.   The edge of an upcoming cirrus cloud swirls over the wings: Here comes Conan through the smoke of battle, sword dr...

I was facedown in swamp muck beneath a moss green moon, gasping for air and choking on aquatic slime, when a female hunchback grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me ashore. Red will-o’-the-wisps twirled through the fog about us, while dark pines creaked ominously overhead. What had led me to sleepwalk to such a place? Had I been dreaming of what might lay beyond the edge of the city, far from its apathetic citizenry, tangible greed, all that privilege and expectation? Away from the howls and squeals of cars, trains, and other oiled machines? Had my soul looked to escape the leech-suck of it all? And who was this savior of mine, this decrepit hag wearing nothing but a potato sack for a garment? I inquired, but she would not speak. Instead she hummed, though not in any musical sense. Rather, that soft buzzing deep within her dewlapped neck sounded more like an electric power line. How strange, I thought, this woman’s presence near such a terrible, noxious swamp, for she was frail, ...

Faritook stood on a rotten old log in the woods, cleaning one of his antennae. Shanamook was about to come along at any moment, and he knew he had to look his absolute best if she were to stop and talk with him. When she finally emerged from the decaying bark, Faritook released his antenna and edged closer to where she would pass. But Shanamook shuddered when she saw him. She was creeped out by Faritook, uncomfortable with how he always stared at her, his mandibles moving as if eating something invisible. And though they had seen each other a few times in passing, nothing more had ever transpired between them. They were just two earwigs that passed on the log. Faritook became increasingly nervous as she got closer, his prepared compliment ready to be spoken. But Shanamook was desperate to make him understand that she just wasn’t interested. An idea suddenly came to her, one that was certain to scare him off completely: she plopped her abdomen against the bark and excreted explosive...

Inspired by “The Kith of the Elf Folk” by Lord Dunsany These I have drawn: a hillside of moonlit clover; creeks cradled by heather; a forest beyond the stone walls of a pasture. And all just to get home; I’ve been gone so very long. Today you’ll find me in the green layers beyond the city, sidestepping the coiled corpses of men’s dreams, bypassing industrial towns where mechanical beasts gnaw on adolescent hearts. For out here dwell the kith of my childhood: the salamander, fox, rook, and deer. Old friends too are the mosses and ferns, the spirits of pollen, the ghosts of tree rings. All under the watchful eye of Pan. You see, my troubles began as a child. I had become obsessed with humans, would sketch their tall bodies and lively faces on everything from peeled birch bark to rain puddles to hardened flows of sap. I read and reread all the stories about them—romantic tales of knights and beautiful maidens, of epic battles and hidden treasures. To me, the human soul mirrored endles...

He who is outside the realm of man suffers a deep, unrelenting misery. Left, for reasons known only to the gods, to ponder his existence within the cosmic fog outside space and time. To know only his purpose, his destiny, a task performed mindlessly and without pause. As a consequence, many questions relative to his plight arise but are never answered. He bears no recollection of birth, no sense of an earlier time or even of time itself, save for hints gleaned from the collective awareness of mankind as it fumbles through its existence. He is unable to interact with humans. Yet now and again come flashes of once having been human: a spear thrust into a mammoth, the eyes of a woman and child, his hand painting horses on a cave wall . . . and then, the sudden visitation of the gods. Adding to his misery is the probability that these flashes are nothing more than residual energies from the endless stream of souls passing through his bony fingers. Fingers that once painted, or so it...

A skinny old man stands on the shore of the river Styx. He removes his tie and suit jacket. Next his dress shoes, slacks, and pressed shirt. He always hated being dressed like that, even as a funeral director. Why didn’t his wife bury him in his Hawaiian shirt like he’d asked? She never did listen, that woman. Charon emerges from the fog in his creaky wooden boat. Seeing the old man in nothing but black socks and tighty-whities causes him to snicker. This leads to heavy laughter, which in turn leads to a hoarse guffaw. In fact, he laughs so hard he loses his balance and tumbles forward off the boat and into the river. Seeing this, the old man scowls. That is not very professional, he thinks. I could do a much better job than that fool! Charon clambers back into the boat and reaches for his pole, still laughing. He squeezes the water from his shroud and pulls the hood up over his pale dome. As the boat nears the shore he motions for the nearly-naked man to step aboard. The old-time...