As August arrives, bringing the last full month of summer's embrace, we're excited to unveil the sixty-eighth edition of the Flame Tree Fiction NEWSLETTER! This month, immerse yourself in two chilling tales that explore the theme of Living Dolls within the horror genre. Thank you to all who submitted their work this month. We were captivated by your eerie and imaginative stories. Here's to a month of long, warm days and spine-tingling reads!

Congratulations to both winners of the August theme: Keyan Bowes and Rukman Ragas!

Matryoshka by Keyan Bowes – During a fraught visit to her sister's studio, a woman discovers a disturbing artistic exploration of family dynamics…

10 Steps of Resurrecting Your Grief by Rukman Ragas – In a surreal and poignant journey, a person engages in a ritual that blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead to confront their deepest sorrow.

• This month's newsletter features:
  • Ramsey Campbell: Serving Horror for 60 Years
  • Flame Tree at WorldCon24!
  • THREE Calls for Submissions
  • Original Horror Flash Fiction #1: Matryoshka by Keyan Bowes
  • Original Horror Flash Fiction #2: 10 Steps of Resurrecting Your Grief by Rukman Ragas
  • EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
  • Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Matryoshka

Keyan Bowes

I cautiously open the door to Ana's studio below our parents' home. Often it stinks of paints and wood resin, and would probably nauseate me. Today, it's just a trace of lacquer.

Ana stretches and stands up. No surprise, she's not pleased to see me. “Lita. You should have warned me you were coming."

"You're my effing sister! Do I need an appointment? I was visiting Mom."

"You know I hate being disturbed!"

“I'm here now. Are you going to show me what you're working on?" I demand, looking around and seeing nothing. So it's not one of her obscenely large pieces that the galleries seem to love. "Mom said you're in here all the time."

She just looks at me.

"Why so secretive?" I insist. "You're exhibiting giant suggestive sculptures downtown for everyone to see, but not your own family?"

"You hate my work, Lita, and never minded saying so."

"So? I'm honest. It’s ugly. That doesn't mean I shouldn't see it!"

She shrugs. "Okay."

Her Big! Secret! Project! is a matryoshka nesting doll. You know the kind. You open the first doll along the seam in the middle, there's another inside – which also has a seam that opens to reveal another similar doll until the last doll is carved of solid wood.

The one on Ana's table looks like just a normal matryoshka doll. What’s so special about this doll set? It’s not like the overscale things she’s usually making. This is just about a foot tall. The painting is careful and more realistic than commercial matryoshka. But it's still just another painted doll, not “art.”

Of course, I don’t say that, she’d just stop talking. "So tell me," I say instead, carefully minimizing the snark in my tone. "What's this all about?"

"This represents a mother," Ana says. "Serene, fulfilled in her role. The maternal archetype."

It has rosy cheeks, a rosebud mouth, and a pleasantly blank expression. In its hand is painted a baby’s toy, a small stuffed dog.

"Look inside," she says.

I open it, expecting a smaller version of the same doll. Instead, the second one is a cheerful, slightly weather-beaten man in work clothes, carrying a work bag. He also looks pleasantly blank.

"The proud father," says Ana. "On his way to the family life he wants."

Inside the second doll is a female doll again, the same woman. But the painted expression is – sad? The rosebud mouth droops, and the eyes have lost their sparkle. She looks exhausted. She’s carrying a pail of dirty diapers. I can almost smell them.

"Not all mothers are joyous below that serene surface," Ana says. "Sometimes that's just the face they present to the world."

This doll opens to the man, hollow-eyed, stubbled chin from a clumsy shave. He doesn’t have a work bag, he’s carrying a large coffee. He glares at us.

"It's difficult, adjusting to a new baby. Having to share his wife's attention, extra expenses, so much extra work."

I open the man doll. The next doll, the woman, looks grim and tearful. She holds her empty hands in a way that suggests she’s been wringing them. I can almost see tears trickle from her eyes, but of course, I’m imagining it.

"Becoming a parent is hard," Ana says. "Perhaps the birth was difficult, perhaps there's financial stress."

The next doll is the man, barely recognizable as the cheerful man of the second doll. His expression exudes fury. There’s something nasty about him. He’s carrying a half-empty bottle of whiskey. His mouth twists in anger.

"He's pissed off at their life. He's pissed his wife has no time for him. He hates that 'family life' is all about the baby, their center of gravity, pooping and crying and demanding their time."

The seventh doll is the woman. She's angry. Wrinkled brow, narrowed eyes, thin lips. But she’s also fearful. Her hands move up in a defensive gesture. There’s a gash on her forehead. When I touch it, my finger comes away red.

“Oh. The paint hasn’t dried.”

“It’s not meant to,” Ana says. What? But again I don’t ask, because Ana will just make me leave. And for some reason, I really want to see it, though I don’t like it. I don’t know why Ana never makes anything pretty or appealing.

“She looks mad. And scared.”

"Perhaps the baby cries all night. She's not getting any sleep. Her misery’s turning to anger. But so is his, and he’s blaming her. Sometimes he’s violent.”

My hands shake as I open the doll and put the two halves on the table. The doll inside is the woman again – but she's changed. She looks pleasant and content and unmoving, like the first doll. Thank heavens!

This next doll is the man. He too looks calm, much as he did at the start. His workbag is also back.

"So it gets better.” I'm so relieved that I cannot believe how much I've been drawn into this story. Maybe that's what artists do, what Ana does.

"Yes," Ana says. "They all adjust. She settles into being a mother. The baby figures out how to eat, and sleeps through the night. The man pulls out of his depression and is more helpful as a spouse, parent and partner. They bond with the child."

Then Ana takes both the happy dolls from me and puts another doll into the empty base. It's solid, no seam. "But sometimes that doesn’t happen," she says.

I take out the newly inserted doll. Finally, the baby, swaddled. It feels soft, fabric or fine leather, not wood. Sleeping peacefully.

No, not sleeping. Its tiny face is bruised, its skull dented and bleeding minuscule drops of painted blood. Dead. It slips from my hand. Appalled, I watch the little toy baby roll under a cabinet. The red smears on my fingers are sticky.

When I find my voice, it's a whisper. "I was coming to tell you," I say hoarsely, "that I'm pregnant."

"Yes," Ana says. "I know."

A peripatetic writer of short fiction, Keyan Bowes grew up in India and currently calls the West Coast of the US home. She's had around forty stories published, some more than once. Her stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish and Polish. Keyan’s work can be found online in magazines such as Escape Pod and Fireside, and on paper in a dozen print anthologies. She's a Clarion graduate and a SFWA member. Website: www.keyanbowes.org

10 Steps of Resurrecting Your Grief

Rukman Ragas

[CW: body horror]

1. First, breathe. You can't do this if you are not breathing. Relax the diaphragm; you are holding it too tight. That feeling in your chest won't go away. Not even when you scramble upon her still-warm body, pleading her to come back. There are sounds locked away in your chest. You should let them out. She is not there to hold you any longer, but you can cry. We can't fix this, but a temporary reprieve, well that's possible. I can help you resurrect your grief. But you first must breathe. Let that sob out, push it through your chest like an unwanted child until it tumbles out. Cry. Scream. But breathe.
2. Are you breathing? Good boy. I won't lie to you, it doesn't get easy; there are a thousand metaphors of grief, like an ocean, but I always saw it as a sunny day that stopped midway. The cola is poured into the glasses, the tacos unwrapped, and her face permanently twisted into a scrounge as she tries the pita chips. Paper tastes like paper, she used to say, but she was always willing to try it out one more time. I’m asking the same of you. I’ve been through 100 failed resurrections but I succeeded once. We’ll try this out, one more time.
3. The first to go is always the skin. It is the hardest part for most and they give up here. Take your sharpest knife. Make the incisive cut at the shoulder muscle. Right where you used to kiss her. Don't move the blade away, no, you can wipe your tears later. For now, slowly trace the shape of the one you loved, around her skull (you'll part her hair like her mother had never parted before) down her arms, and all around her body. Get under her skin, flick the blade into the space between the muscle and dermis and lift it up. You’ve never had trouble with that before when she was alive.
4. It's time to unspool muscles. Muscles are cells that behave like threads, coiled together serpents. Grief hides in their crevices, so you’ll have to find the thread that unravels them all. It is easier, isn't it, to touch flesh when there’s no skin over it? It is all blood, all meat, and what made it your beloved is removed so carefully and placed in the corner. Can you feel where you bruised her when you touched what had once been her arm? A bruise is broken blood, a wound all the same, and just because you don't break skin doesn't mean the body doesn't remember. Unwind the strings now, let them fall all around you, red and bloody and beautiful. Let the tangle encircle your wrists, wear her like you wear your grief.
5. Now, all that remains is bone. Trace your fingers across the spine. Every ridge is a mountain. Try to remember how you traced down her back with your mouth. The grief is all in bones, all together as one.
6. Tie one end of the red strings of muscle to the bones, the other to yours. You need to call back like it's yours and only yours. She is dead but you are here. You can make her move.
7. Lift your hand. Watch the skeleton lift it in response. Move and it moves. How fast did she become it, do you wonder? How fast did she become string, her bones a controller? Now, take a step forward, gently, carefully. Lift your hand, wrap around your throat in ways that don't sever the threads that bind you to her. Let the hurt seep out of your bones and hers, of what is there and what is not.
8. Open wide your mouth and scream. Make your own music, and let the sobs wracking your body be all the rhythm you need.
9. Now, dance, my child, until the bones move with you, clattering. The chorus to your harmony. Move your back, throw it in. Dance until the bones are up in the air behind, never touching the ground.
10. Dance in hopes that you become a moved doll, in hopes her hand guides those bones. Dance until you are a living marionette moving to a dead woman's beat.

Rukman Ragas is a Tamil-Sri Lankan writer of anti-genocide speculative fiction, writing in hopes of throwing whatever sand they can against the wheels of genocide. Rukman's stories have previously appeared in khōréō, Tasavvur and The Baltimore and you can find them at rukmanragas.com. When not working on his stories or wrangling his novels into shape, he can be found consuming an unhealthy amount of historical media.