Welcome to spooky season! October has finally arrived, and we're ready for the spooks that lurk around the corner. Nights creep in faster, the air carries that misty chill, and pumpkins start popping up on all the doorsteps. It’s the season of costumes and candlelight, of tricks and treats, of embracing the strange and the spooky.

Welcome to the eighty-second edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.

This month’s theme is Witchlight Market! Come with us and visit the crooked stalls lit by lanterns, meet the merchants selling charms with hidden costs, and find some bargains that might just follow you home. Thank you to everyone who sent in their tales this month. Your stories have filled our shelves with potions, curses, and unexpected magic. Here’s to an October full of masks, mischief, and the thrill of wandering into the market after dark. Dare to join?

Congratulations to both winners of the October theme: Anne Wilkins and Keyan Bowes!

The Coin's Lullaby by Anne Wilkins – A starving boy accepts a witch’s offer to cry for gold, only to discover too late that her magic traps him and his lost sister in a fate far darker than poverty...

The Night I Proposed to Reema by Keyan Bowes – At a mysterious floating night market, two friends wander through stalls of strange and wondrous wares until an unexpected choice changes their relationship forever...

This month's newsletter features:

• NEW Flame Tree Press, Gothic Fantasy, Collector's Editions AND Beyond & Within Titles
• LIVE & SPOOKY 2025!
• Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #1: The Coin's Lullaby by Anne Wilkins
• Original Fantasy Flash Fiction #2: The Night I Proposed to Reema by Keyan Bowes
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

The Night I Proposed to Reema

Keyan Bowes

The canary-yellow leaflet on my windshield advertised a Floating Night Market. Maybe Reema would be interested?  In Thailand, floating markets have boats full of vegetables and flowers, assembling on canals to sell their wares. I expected something similar, but at night.

It wasn’t similar.

#

The trail from the crude map on the back of the flyer went through the meadows and over the hill. The track was barely visible in the fog on the new moon night. Had we been alone, we might have turned back, but others seemed to hurry by. We couldn’t quite see them in the dark.

Then we burst through a fogbank -- into another world. The place glowed. Light-spheres hung in the air, garlands of them draped the trees, and they lay on the ground like bright puffballs. The market stalls actually floated, like small airborne boats riding on the breeze. Banners with pictures of their wares advertised their goods to would-be customers.

“Magical,” breathed Reema. Boats swooped by us, checking us for signs of interest.

“You can get anything here,” said a chatty vendor who paused nearby. “See, I have a cape of invisibility woven with lookaway spells.”

“I’m tempted,” Reema said, “but how do you explain suddenly disappearing?”

“Maybe lookaway spells just make people not notice you?” I said. But I agreed with her trepidation about invisibility. What if you accidentally walked into traffic?

“Do you like cats?” asked someone floating slowly by. “These are magical, in that they’re really dragons.” Five kittens scampered precariously on the prow of her boat: two marmalade cats, a black, a white, and a tuxedo. A shimmer of light, and we were looking instead at five young dragons. One hissed at another in play and emitted a jet of fire.

“Adorable,” said Reema. “But I’m not sure about the care and feeding of dragons. And would insurance cover it if they set something aflame?”

We browsed stalls selling seven-league boots, and girdles of power, and undefeatable swords which might be useful if one went in for tournaments. I thought it would be unfair.
“It’s not unfair if they’re trying to kill you,” said the owner.

“Duels aren’t to the death these days.”

“Really? Sounds utopian.”

Reema and I looked at each other. “More distance weapons now,” I said, thinking of drones and bombs and rifles.

“Ah. Well, Jenen sells bows with arrows that never miss.”

#

The stall was selling bracelets of light. When the vendor saw us looking interested, she floated down to our level. Taking off the chunky bracelet she wore, she rolled the beads around in her hands. They flashed like small fireworks.

“Cool,” I said. “Piezoelectric?”

“No,” she said. “These are witchlights. They’re linked to my soul.”

“Your … what?”

“Life essence, anima, whatever. Me.”

She dropped them in my hand, and they went inert. I rolled them as she’d done, but they refused to light up. She took them back, and they promptly launched their light display. Not just flashing, but dancing and changing color and looking, well, magical. She arranged them around her wrist, and they became a simple bracelet again. She shook her hand, and it came lit up and sparkled.

Reema looked entranced, watching the dancing fire of the live bracelet on the vendor’s wrist. The vendor handed Reema one. It stayed dark. “It’s not connected yet,” she explained. “I would do that for you if you buy it.”

“Let me get you that,” I said. I turned to the vendor. “How do you pay for these things? Do you take credit cards or cash?”

“No, of course not. You use bits of your, your soul.”

Oh.

She looked hard at me. It felt almost like she was looking through me.  “A week,” she said. “Life force. One week’s worth. A bargain at the price!”

“No,” Reema said firmly. “There’s no way he’s giving up a week of life to buy me a bracelet. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

The vendor made a face. “I suppose it could be that.”

“It would be worth it,” I told Reema. “You know what the diamond corporation De Beers used to say about diamonds for an engagement ring? That it should cost one month’s salary?”

“De Beers? What?” said Reema, “How ancient is that advertising? And how stupid? Anyway, why are you bringing it up?”

I blushed. “I mean, Reema, what I wanted to say…Will you ummm, marry me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to say the same thing. Before we went off on a tangent.”

I didn’t think it was a tangent, but kissed Reema instead of saying so.

“If it’s for an engagement, then it’s different,” said the eavesdropping vendor. She offered the beads to Reema, and found a different one for me, with flat links like a metal watch strap. “I’ll give you both these for three days of life-force each, and you can exchange bracelets.”

I took Reema’s hand. “It would be unique and special,” I said. “We’re young. We can afford it.”

“Okay,” she said, smiling. “Three days *each*. As in, each of us.”

#

The process was complicated, involving breathing on smoldering herbs of some sort, and giving a drop of blood each, and I don’t know what we were doing and whether I should have gotten Reema into it, and would we even know if the vendor took more of our life force than she said, and honestly, I hope the vendor was trustworthy.

But at the end of it, when I put Reema’s beads on her, it exploded in glorious fireworks. When she put mine on my wrist, mine did too.

“Congratulations!” the vendor said as she lifted off.

As we watched her boat rise, Reema grabbed my hand. “Do you think she… mingled our blood? I can, sort of ‘feel’ you?”
Now that she mentioned it, I felt something too. As though I was under her skin in some way.

“Maybe? I don’t object if you don’t.”

“Nope,” she said, and kissed me.

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 -five 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 in print in over twenty anthologies and publications. She's a Clarion graduate and a SFWA member.  Website: www.keyanbowes.org