Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter | June 2026 | Bone Orchard -Flame Tree Press

June always feels slightly overripe. The heat settles in, gardens thicken and bloom, and the world turns lush enough to hide things in. Beneath the green and growing, something begins to rot. Roots tangle, branches claw skyward, and the earth keeps far more than it gives back.

Welcome to the ninetieth edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.

This month’s theme is Bone Orchard. These are stories of bodies buried and unearthed, of hunger creeping through tangled fields and forgotten graves. Expect restless soil, brittle remains, and places where death does not stay dormant for long.

Thank you to everyone who submitted this month. Your stories dug deep and brought something back with them. Step carefully... the orchard is still growing.

Congratulations to both winners of the June theme: Emily Y. Teng and Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.

The Apples of Ylis by Emily Y. Teng – In a kingdom built on sacred orchards and inherited rituals, a young woman begins to uncover the terrible hunger rooted beneath her people’s prosperity...

Dinner with the Gutless Lady by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska – An invitation to an unsettling dinner party draws a lonely guest into a grotesque world of appetite, beauty, and quiet desperation...

This month's newsletter features:

NEW Flame Tree Press titles!
Myth & Fiction Podcast Returns
Original Horror Flash Fiction #1: The Apples of Ylis by Emily Y. Teng
Original Horror Flash Fiction #2: Dinner with the Gutless Lady by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

FLAME TREE PRESS | June Titles

We have new Flame Tree Press titles coming out in hardback and ebook.

Fresh Start by Johnny Worthen

Against the backdrop of failing empire, a former soldier sworn to non-violence after his involvement in a global massacre seeks answers from the captain who ordered it, now exiled on a lawless prison planet overrun by psychotic killers.

OUT 9th JUNE!

Steelbound by W.A. Simpson

In the epic conclusion of the Tales from the Riven Isles series, Ursa, a bitter exiled princess, and Lucea, a determined chronomancer, must unite to stop the Rot threatening their world. Facing internal demons and external threats, they embark on a quest to recover the Steel Driver’s Hammer, the key to saving the Riven Isles.

OUT 9th JUNE!

Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris

In 2004, six university friends are haunted by a terrifying supernatural force linked to Room 55 in their student halls, ending in tragedy and tearing the group apart. Twenty years later, their lives are unraveling as the horrors of the past begin to seep back into the present, threatening not only them, but their families. Reunited by fear, the five remaining friends must confront whatever still waits inside Room 55.

OUT 30th JUNE!

The Siren of Groves Peak by Glenn Rolfe

When a murder at sea shakes the lobster town of Groves Peak, Maine, buried secrets and supernatural horrors begin to surface. As fear spreads and bodies pile up, friendships fracture and no one is safe from the darkness lurking beneath the town’s waters.

OUT 30th JUNE!

Of Love & Dragons

Dragons may be fierce but they are symbols of great power, and the bond between human and dragon, once forged, can never be broken. Or can it? Can romance deal a deathly trail of vows abandoned, or forgotten, and can realms beyond our time conjure tales of Dragon Lords, warrior princesses and great rivalries? Modern writers have sought to explore these questions and more, in a new anthology of enchanting romantic fantasy fiction. Strong-willed, independent leads navigate epic fantasy worlds and emotionally charged quests, featuring lyrical romance, and of course, majestic dragons.

A Breath of Time

Time – at once fleeting and eternal – is a tricksy, intangible dimension. A Breath of Time, part of Flame Tree's exciting new series of Romantic Fantasy titles, is a collection filled with stories of lost loves, love discovered, love unreachable unless Time itself is conquered; stories of time-bending, time traveling, time distorting; of alternate history and parallel timelines, of ancient forests returning to haunt the present and great adventures through dreams and timeless mountain tops, all with hearts beating to the rhythm of romance.

OUT NOW!

The Apples of Ylis

Emily Y. Teng

The fruit grown in Ylis’s orchards were called apples, but only because there was no other name for what they could be. Round and smooth-skinned, they were small, the size of a young girl’s clenched fist, and glossless and pale in a way that made one think of cathedral arches, or funeral steles, or well-polished piano keys. The look of them was of something carved rather than grown and would have been unnerving enough that people avoided them, if not for their taste: light and sweet and incomparable to anything grown anywhere else. Intoxicating, people said, and you could see the truth when birds fell out of the sky during harvest season, staggered by their heady scent. Orchard growers worked with cloths tied over their noses and mouths, lest they grow drunk on proximity.

Ylis’s apples were grown from bones.

Honored ancestors, treasured mounts, prized game—all that died and were revered were given to the orchards. Apprentice growers were tasked with boiling the meat off carcasses and cleaning off surface impurities. Then the master growers, guided by their own esoteric criteria, sifted through the pile of clattering white. They would ponder their choices, then pluck a jawbone here, a cathedral arch of a rib there. Only a handful of fresh bones every year were deemed worthy of planting. It was a mark of honor for a person’s bones to be chosen for Ylis’s orchards.

Growing a tree was long work. It took years for a bone to grow into a sapling and years more for those saplings to bear fruit, but Ylis’s growers were patient. They loved their trees the way they loved their children, for the promise of their future blossomings. The best of each crop was sent out across the world, and the renown of Ylis’s apples grew.

The orchards flourished. Ylis flourished.

The war was a blood feud of empires that swallowed the entire world. The city of Ylis wasn’t the only bystander caught up in the violence. The invaders might have come from the Ashen Empire, or the Third Archanate States, or from any number of smaller players looking to take advantage of the chaos. In the end, what mattered was simply that they came.

They tore down Ylis’s walls. They dragged Ylis’s people to the streets. They set fire to Ylis’s groves. It was harvest season, the branches heavy with fruit, and the trees went up in flames, bitter and black as char. And when the growers fought back, trying to save their city and their orchards, the army slaughtered the people and threw their bodies into the cairn of their own trees to burn.

War ebbed. Armies folded themselves back within their borders.

Ylis dragged itself out of its own ashes.

Those who were alive were few and broken. Those who were dead were broken as well and outnumbered the living by far. The people of Ylis gathered in the orchards around the funeral pyres of the massacred. They wept, wailed, and cursed.

Then they went to work.

It’s one thing to strip clean the bodies of strangers. Another thing altogether to do so for the mangled corpses of family and friends. The bones that emerged from Ylis’s ministrations were blackened and shattered, the marrow roasted out of their hearts. The few growers who remained sifted through and pulled out the most charred, the most damaged.

They planted the bones.

It took years for the bones to grow into saplings. Years more for them to bear fruit. Ylis was patient. When the first crop finally ripened, they packed their merchants’ baskets with care and sent them out to all the sovereigns who’d made war in the first place.

As soon as the sovereigns laid eyes on those baskets, they were gripped by a hunger like they’d never felt before. The apples were pearly-skinned and fragrant, a thing of beauty they’d forgotten they’d once treasured. Eagerly, they reached for the fruit.

But when they bit in, the fragrance erupted into putrescence. The flesh their teeth sank into was black and spongy with rot. These were not the unearthly fruits that Ylis had grown before, but something tainted and rotten.

Yet they ate. They couldn’t stop themselves.

They ate the skin, the flesh, the pips. They sucked the cores dry, then swallowed the remnants as well, choking on the stringy, fibrous pulp. Juice ran down from their mouths, thick and dark as blood. Rot filled their bodies, sickening them.

They ate.

And when the last apple was gone, that pang of hunger wasn’t sated but was sharper than ever. A hollowing need that howled for more.

They sent merchants. They sent ambassadors with caravans of all the jewels in their vaults. They would have sent armies if their empires hadn’t been crumbling apart by that point, driven towards ruin by the irrational obsession of their rulers. Anything for one more taste. One more apple. One more. More. More.

Ylis sent no more.

The orchards flourished.

The apples Ylis grew now were of a different sort. No longer did they plant the bones of the honored dead. Instead it was the cursed, the broken, the wronged who now found themselves given purpose past their lives. Growers worked with cloths tied over their noses and mouths, lest they fall ill from the putrid scent of rot. Birds sickened out of the sky.

The best of each crop, Ylis, is no longer sent out. Instead, they shared the fruit out amongst themselves. As the rotting black flesh slid down their throats, they grew heavy with bitterness and remembered grief. Felt it seep indelibly into their blood.

The juices stained them all the way to the bone.

Emily Y. Teng is a speculative writer based in Seattle, Washington, where she works full-time as a narrative game designer. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, The Book of Witches anthology, and in the anthology Death in the Mouth 2: Original Horror from the Margins. She has published poetry at Apparition Lit magazine and may or may not have a habit of reading horror stories so late at night that she terrifies herself out of being able to sleep.

Dinner with the Gutless Lady

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska

CW: Body horror

The first time I ate for the Gutless Lady, I was deloused, deodorized, and stuffed into a ritzy suit and bow tie. “You may be a hobo out there,” the scowl-faced servant grunted as she snipped off my prodigious beard bush, “but in here, you’re a surrogate stomach. Gotta be presentable.”

I felt exposed without my bush. My scabby skin chafed beneath designer labels and expensive wool. But I didn’t dare pipe a word, afraid to jinx my crazy luck. You drop out of society, you better forget about kindness and such. About being a person and such. You become a belly that dreams of food, and that is all. Except today. Today I wasn’t dreaming. Today I was being paid to eat.

The Gutless Lady sat cocooned in blankets in a padded wheelchair, her small, desiccated head bobbing, as if suspended by strings, above the plush fabrics. Tiny button eyes peered from sunken sockets. Two rouged slashes etched out the hollow pits where cheeks had perked before. I pictured the puny pink grub of her sucked-out stomach, the thin tubes snaking down her veins to feed her. She plucked hobos from the streets to watch us gorge on haute cuisine, our rabid hungers stirring phantom pangs of pleasure, thrilling her starved flesh. I’d never thought I’d be among the chosen.

Before the Gutless Lady, a table strewn with dishes under gleaming silver domes. As per the instructions, I spread a starched white napkin on my lap and lifted off each lid, reading out the burnished metal tags. “Foie gras. Herb butter scampi. Beetroot with caviar cream.”

My innards trembled, glugging up the luscious smells. Smells to make love to. Sell your soul to. I reined in my hands’ ravenous urge to grab, to rip, and picked, instead, the dainty knife. The piece of smooth liver that I cut slid down my rusty gullet with a buttery, silky caress. My stomach squirmed with pure bliss. I longed to hop onto the Gutless Lady’s withered lap, curl up and cry.

She looked at me intently, nostrils flared, eyes moist. “Eat,” she croaked, tongue flicking over bloodless lips. Forgetting all manners, I cupped the liver in my hands and sank my teeth into the soft, spongy meat. The Lady moaned in pleasure-pain. Her face flushed, eyes upturned in ecstasy.

Next, I suckled on the pink coils of scampi, fingers dripping with their fragrant oil. The Lady wriggled, ogling me, panting with her little fish mouth opening and closing. I licked the plates clean, and she clapped and tittered. The servant cued me with her head, so I rose and took a bow. Then I rushed out the room, sloughed the suit, and staggered to the streets, shaking with rapture.

Each week, I went back and I ate. I ate braised lamb shanks with creamed potatoes in skins. Fettuccine with crispy pancetta and molten lava cakes. I sipped Pinot noir and Louis XIII cognac. I sucked on pipes and cigarillos and vapes with lemony flavors. The Gutless Lady writhed watching my wolfish appetite and my shameless abandon. My ripping mouth, my digesting stomach—her only connection to the gustatory sublime.

I liked to imagine her as a child and me being necessary for her happiness. To please her gave me a sense of purpose, and I no longer felt like society’s scrap. I was of use. I had value. Her adoration made me feel lovely. Perhaps even loveable.

One day the servant brought a dish without a name tag. “A special treat,” the Lady’s voice rasped from her nest of blankets. “Locally sourced.”

My plate glistened with what seemed like a glazed langoustine in a black-truffle sauce with a sprig of sage on top. The meat was so tender it parted easily from the spine, unfurling notes not of seafood but of veal onto my tongue. But the bones were so fine. Some rare bird perhaps? From her perch, the Gutless Lady studied me with hawk-like alertness. The overhead lights made glowing orbs in her lidless button eyes.

Sucking the last dregs of sauce off my fingers, I lifted the delicate braid of bones to pick them clean. A terrible realization took hold of me. I froze, sauce trickling slowly down my chin and pooling on the plate in rust-red drips like wonky commas. I dropped the skeleton. It clinked onto the fine china plate. There was no mistaking what it was: a human hand. I had just eaten someone’s hand.

“Come, come. I’ve got to show you something,” the Gutless Lady whispered with gleeful insistence, like a kid eager to show off her first crayon drawing. She turned and wheeled herself out of the room before I could say a thing.

In a daze, I followed her down a long, dim hallway and out a creaking screen door to the back yard. First I heard the sound, like hundreds of windchimes tinkling in the summer breeze. Except they were not windchimes. They were bones. An entire orchard of blooming apple trees, hung with bones that fluttered and spun, gleaming in the light like shiny baubles. Lone fingers curled into polished white buds; whole hands splayed star-like or twined together into delicate lattices draped over twisted branches.

“I’m going to ask for your hand now, darling,” the Gutless Lady said. “It’d be a great honor.” Then, seeing the baffled look on my face, she added, “You can say no.”

“I can?”

“Of course. No one’s keeping you here,” she replied, but her eyes dimmed and her face collapsed a little.

I looked at my hand, stamped with all the have-not years of my life, the hardship and the heartbreak hammered into it, and I wondered what it would taste like in someone’s mouth. If it would be as good as the hand I’d just had. If it would bring pleasure, or joy. If the bones beneath would twirl and spin, glinting ever so brightly, so beautifully, on the branches of the orchard trees.

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska is a Bulgarian writer based in Sofia. She’s the co-creator of a mental health game and a former science writer in psychology who has only recently begun to reclaim her imagination. Her work has been nominated for the BSFA awards, and her stories have been published in Flash Fiction Online and Small Wonders Magazine.

Ninetieth Issue! Bone Orchard