As September begins, marking the shift from summer's glow to autumn's allure, we're excited to introduce the sixty-ninth edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter! This month, dive into the cosmic wonders of our Galactic Bazaar theme, featuring two captivating tales that will transport you to the far reaches of the universe. We extend our gratitude to all who submitted their work this month – your creativity and vision have truly inspired us. Here's to a month of starlit skies and interstellar adventures!

Congratulations to both winners of the September theme: Zach Shephard and Anneke Schwob!

The Love of the Hunt by Zach Shephard – On their anniversary, two former lovers and bounty-hunters meet at an underground bazaar, reviving old memories.

The Invisible Hand of the Market by Anneke Schwob – At an intergalactic market, the protagonist attempts to earn enough money to move her family off-planet by selling the only valuable things she owns – her memories.

• This month's newsletter features:
  • FLAME TREE PRESS: New titles coming this month!
  • Ramsey Campbell: Serving Horror for 60 Years
  • THREE Calls for Submissions
  • NEW Beyond & Within titles
  • Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #1: The Love of the Hunt by Zach Shephard
  • Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #2: The Invisible Hand of the Market by Anneke Schwob
  • EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
  • Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

The Love of the Hunt

Zach Shephard

If Kylan had had it his way, he’d have always entered the underground bazaar from the south end. That was where all the merchants from the biomod planets set up their stalls. Biomods were the products Kylan preferred the most because, in his many years of galactic bounty hunting, they’d always proven the most reliable.

After the last few months, Kylan could use more “reliable.”

He approached a midnight-blue tent, flanked by the artificial torches of the cavernous bazaar. It was attended by a purple, shimmering alien whose edges rippled whenever the crowd’s murmur got too loud.

“I need more ink,” Kylan said, rolling up a sleeve. A tapestry of tattoos covered his battle-scarred arm, from just above the metal hand he hated to the flesh-and-blood shoulder he refused to have replaced. The thin lines of artistry produced their own light, glowing orange and blue and diamond-white.

Without a voice, the alien communicated its question: What effect?

“Camouflage, if you’ve got it.”

What design?

Kylan looked at the heart tattooed on his deltoid – the one that had enhanced his strength when he’d first received it, but whose glow had since faded.

“A dagger,” he said. “Piercing.”

The alien shuffled into the tent. Kylan followed, casting one last glance northward before passing through the flap.

* * *

Tarissa approached the bazaar from the north, where all the best weapons and cybernetics could be purchased. So little of her form was still human, but she didn’t mind adding even more metal to the flesh; she’d always preferred machines to biomods anyway.

The olfactory sensors of her silver nose detected garlic, cumin, and a nameless spice from a planet she’d once visited while tracking a slippery fugitive. The smells didn’t mean as much to her without her original sensory organs, but she could identify them at a greater distance, and with greater precision. The cybernetic nose had made her a better bounty hunter.

Tarissa found a rustic wooden stand, manned by a long-bearded figure with cobblestone skin. The wall behind his hulking body displayed shiny weapons of every sort: laser rifles, tarium axes, shock-nets.

“Tarissa,” the stone man said, grinning a gravelly grin. “Shopping alone today?”

She nodded her chin at the weapons-wall. “Got time to install a pair of tendrils?”

“Certainly. Doesn’t seem like your usual style, though. They’re more for ensnaring things – pulling them in close. I thought you liked to keep your distance.”

Tarissa looked to her inner wrists, where the tendrils would shoot out from her forearms to grab her target.

“I could use a little less distance,” she said and laid her arms on the counter. She gazed southward through the crowd as the stone man got to work.

* * *

Kylan continued north through the bazaar, new tattoo glowing red-pink on his shoulder like a neon light. He passed the stand where, two years earlier, he’d bought a star-shaped glass pendant, filled with an iridescent cloud that flowed lazily through its container. The vendor had pitched it as an actual nebula, miniaturized and captured – the perfect anniversary gift.

Kylan recalled the moment he’d delivered the present, standing on the white sands of an alien beach, under a tangerine sunset. “Perfect” was right.

Someone in the bazaar’s crowd dropped a glass jar, snapping Kylan from his memory. The sound was the same as when the nebula-pendant had been angrily hurled into a brick wall three months earlier, after a disagreement about who’d been responsible for losing a bounty.

Activating the camouflage-implant from his new tattoo, Kylan disappeared from the world. He didn’t come back into view until he’d reached a biomod vendor who sold the scientific equivalent of magic potions. The new purchases went onto his belt: three globes full of sorrow, regret, and rage.

* * *

The tendrils snaked out of Tarissa’s metal wrists to taste the air. Their control was intuitive, as the stone man had promised. She used them to handle tools displayed at a vendor’s stall. The grumpy, eel-faced creature behind the counter told her not to touch if she wasn’t going to buy. Without thinking, Tarissa activated the dragon scale tattoo running along the curve of her ear – one of the last few bits of un-mechanized flesh on her body. It released a pheromone that calmed the vendor enough to avoid a scene. She’d forgotten how useful that tool could be.

And yet, it wasn’t her style. She’d have preferred another cybernetic modification. But she’d gotten the tattoo in the name of love.

Her olfactory sensors picked apart and analyzed her own pheromone, turning what should have been a pleasant sensation into a strictly mechanical experience. It was upsetting, how quickly a good thing could change.

Tarissa went to the next stall, where she bought fuel for the jets in her metal feet. She continued southward, seeking a familiar scent.

* * *

The center of the bazaar was a wide-open hub in the cavern, with passages leading to the north and south. Aliens of all species milled about, looking over their latest acquisitions or chatting. Tarissa arrived from the north tunnel.

“Kylan!” she yelled, her amplified voice so loud that the startled crowd cowered against the walls. The clearing in the living mass revealed a lone man across the cavern, covered in tattoos. His metal hand brought a potion-globe to his mouth. He took the thin gray liquid down in one long drink. The veins of his arms bulged, his muscles swelling.

Tarissa’s tendrils snaked from her inner wrists, whip-cracking the air.

“I had a feeling you’d be here today,” she said. She shook her head. “We never should have worked together.”

“Biggest regret of my life,” Kylan said.

Tarissa’s metal lips bent into the best smile she could muster. “I love you, Ky.”

“Love you too, Riss. Happy anniversary.”

Kylan rushed forth, fading from view. Tarissa rocketed across the cavern on jet-propelled feet, tendrils snapping as she sought his scent. The crowd went into a panic, scrambling.

Through the chaos of the bazaar, two lovers found each other one last time.

Zach Shephard lives in Enumclaw, Washington, where he writes stories that are sometimes dark and sometimes humorous, and sometimes so maddeningly vague not even he understands them. His fiction has appeared in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology series, and several of Flame Tree Publishing’s Gothic Fantasy anthologies. He’s a huge fan of Roger Zelazny, and would probably never have started writing if not for the battered copy of Nine Princes in Amber on his bookshelf. For more of Zach’s stories, check out www.zachshephard.com.

The Invisible Hand of the Market

Anneke Schwob

Market day. The vendors lay out their wares. Though day isn’t quite right, not this deep into the black void. Decoupled from a star’s diurnal rhythms, even the brightest lights don’t do a damned thing against the darkness.

Market isn’t quite right, either. Still, galactically agreed-upon timespan for conducting assorted acts of commerce, politics, dirty deeds done dirt-cheap, back-alley bargains, legal and illegal vices, distractions, desultory pleasures, diatribes, flimflam artists, tryhards, sellouts, resale girlies, and everywhere you look, dear gods, the freelancers…doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

So, market day. The vendors lay out their wares. Booth babes preen, skin and scales and silicone-based lifeforms. (Look but don’t touch, or, if you’re going to touch, remember to discuss rates in advance.) It’s an attention economy, and sex sells.

Well, anything sells. Everything sells.

It’s the market’s only law – everything must go. Nothing for nothing. But who’s to say what constitutes fair exchange? Who, for that matter, makes laws?

The market does. But it’s not a law like that. It’s more like gravity. Conservation of momentum. Without it, the whole thing falls apart. That’s what they say.

* * *

The central part of the market has a convention-floor sterility. Bright lights obliterate shadowy deals. The vendors move around each other with tight-lipped – metaphorically; less than half of them have lips to speak of – courtesy, scrupulously allergic to anything that might look too much like a favor. The market’s gyroscopic machinery account favors debt; if payment isn’t offered, it will be taken. You won’t like it if the market sets the rate of exchange.

Not everyone at the market scruples.

Winding out from the center, the spokes of a wheel, intended for different gravities than these, snake the alleys and dead ends, home to hangers-on and hawkers. Their senseless geography will be familiar to anyone who frequents a fleatique in Western PA, the souk in Marrakesh, and the Scrap Exchange that orbits ceaselessly around Betelgeuse.

In these narrow lanes, anyone will sell anything. Sometimes, those who buy don’t know what they’re buying, or why. They’ll deny up and down their prurient interests, their desires. But the market knows.

* * *

She has a number in mind. She’s heard that’s important. Greed is a trap. Greed is how the market takes you, and keeps you till you’ve made good…that’s what she’s heard. Better to have a number. Earn that much and get out. That number is the cost of five shuttle tickets: the amount it will take to get her family off their planet-tomb. (But already doubts creep in. What happens, after the shuttle?)

It’s her first time; she doesn’t know where to go. The first vendor she asks only shivers his tentacles at her, squidbeak clicking with disappointment. He doesn’t understand. Mutual incomprehension is worthless.

Eventually, she gets directions, paid for with the only thing that she has. She walks deeper into the warren. Her helper watches her leave, the taste of her earliest memory on its lips.

She takes her place, an uncomfortable seat on the hard floor. The amplifier sits in her ear, sending her pain, her fear, and her very worst memories out into the market, irresistibly aching.

…The day they bombed her fifth grandmother’s village, levelling the intricate whorls of porous stone houses while she watched, clutched tight in the arms of second, third and fifth grandmother, while her first mother held her brother’s nose tight to stop his screaming. Afterwards, the place that had been a village became a mine. The ones who own the mine use its ore to make weapons, which they use to kill her cousins.

(In the central market, a demonstration of new technology commences. The booth babe gleams as she holds the rocket aloft. The sales executive adjusts several dials, and locks lens protection down over his single eyestalk, gleaming red. He fires. The target is obliterated. Exchange is made: a fine, pink mist, the color of rare steak.

Watchers panic, scrambling to pay for a frisson they had not expected to feel. Representatives of galactic governments mob the booth. The vendors are sold out in moments. They can pack up and go home early.)

Her recitation gains potency. It’s painful, exquisitely so. Hard to hold. Wounds open, sliver-thin, welling with blood to let the pain out. To make it easier to consume. One shopper unfurls its great double proboscis, and laps up the blood and the terror.

Coins and strings of cash and pieces of familiar precious ores gather at her feet.

…She and her brother, picking in the slag heap outside the mine, feeling the ground shake. Feeling the cave-in start, knowing third father is down there. A cloud of toxic ore dust rises. Clapping her hands over her brothers’ eyes and mouth but knowing, even as she does so, that she is too late, too late, too late.

The cuff on her wrist pings and buzzes as her credits rise.

Her number, once unimaginably high, feels almost close now. Her arms are blood-slicked with memory’s wounds. The crowd drinks it up, eager to feel.

Revulsion rises: This is her pain, earned by nights turned sulfur-yellow from rockets, by babies born dead and by hunger and thirst. How can these dilettantes, these fetish flaneurs, these trauma tourists, think themselves entitled to it? Theirs for the asking, theirs for a song?

Scrabbling in the slag, corralled like an animal – isn’t she the one who’s owed?

Anger’s salt seasons her sensations. The audience loves it. They go crazy for it. They love to be castigated. It makes them feel terrible, which makes them feel great. They crowd around her, showering her with gold, demanding more. Her cuff pings and pings. Credits climb. The sharp edge of a coin slices her cheek, a thin cut that drinks her tears like a mouth.

Stop it, she wants to cry, stop, stop, I want to stop. But the crowd wants what they’ve paid for. They close in. They take, and they take, and they take.

Anneke Schwob is a one-time robot impersonator, lapsed academic, and lifetime lover of the weird and fantastic in all its forms. A graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop, they have published fiction in Strange Horizons and Baffling Magazine, with more forthcoming from Kaleidotrope and Nocturne. Their nonfiction and reviews have appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room, Foundation, and GrimDark Magazine. Anneke can most often be found haunting a rocky shoreline, traipsing through a cursed bog, or online at annekeschwob.info. Technically, though, they live in Montreal.