The air has a snap to it on a blue-skied April day in Virginia; a beautiful day for a funeral. As the thin crowd of mourners—friends and a scattering of the family—ebb away to go on with their lives, four men remain at the graveside. Two sons who’ll never see 30 lying in their coffins, two fathers struggling to speak. What do you say when you’re burying your boy and his husband, a loving couple whose marriage ceremony you missed, whom you struggled to understand or accept?
Buddy Lee Jenkins, a wiry and weathered white man, introduces himself to Ike Randolph, then spies the lion and twin swords tattooed on the Black man’s hand. Prison ink. Buddy recognizes it from his own experience; he did a nickel Upstate himself. Two ex-con fathers, two murdered sons. Ike has spent 15 years staying away from “Riot” Randolph, the man he used to be. Now he has a landscaping business to run, an orphaned granddaughter to raise, and no time left to mend fences or find forgiveness from Isiah, a son he loved and let down. Again and again.
Tears glisten in Buddy Lee’s eyes as he recalls whipping his son Derek with a belt when his boy was 14 years old and had been kissing a boy by the creek behind their trailer.
“You think they gonna catch who did it?” Buddy Lee shouts to Ike’s back as he stomps away.
It won’t be the only funeral in this story.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Fall #169, 2021 من Mystery Scene.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Fall #169, 2021 من Mystery Scene.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
6 New Writers to Watch
Wiley Cash’s debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, about the bond between two brothers landed on the New York Times Best Sellers List and received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut of the Year.
CARLENE O'CONNOR
“Anyone can play Snow White. It takes real talent to play the Wicked Witch.”
HILARY DAVIDSON
Call it The Case of Life Imitating Art.
S.A. COSBY
In Razorblade Tears, two aging men—one Black, one white, both with criminal pasts—join forces to seek revenge for the murders of their gay sons. The themes of fathers and sons and toxic masculinity will be familar to fans of Cosby’s 2020 breakout Blacktop Wasteland.
THE MANY FACES OF MORIARTY
By 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was a worldwide literary sensation. But he was also a man dogged by an unlikely enemy, and that enemy’s name was Sherlock Holmes. Frankenstein-like, the fictional detective haunted his creator, tormenting him, and would not leave him alone. For it must be said that Conan Doyle was a man of high literary aspirations, with a yearning to write books of both “serious” literature and psychical research. But the demand for new Holmes stories prevented him from realising this ambition. Speaking of this period in his career, Conan Doyle observed in an interview for Tit-Bits in December 1900 that “My low work was obscuring my higher.”
WILL DEAN
From an isolated cabin in a boggy Swedish forest, Will Dean conjures a fascinating series and now an intense standalone full of claustrophobia and creepiness.
STEPHEN MACK JONES
If the meaning of life is a puzzle awaiting assembly, then writers are purveyors of its pieces.
Madness on Campus
Helen Eustis’ The Horizontal Man
TIME TRAVEL, CATS, AND AN OLD MANUSCRIPT
Have you ever wished that you could go back in time and change something in your past or visit the future and find out what it has in store for you? Have you questioned what would happen if time travel was available to everyone? Could 9/11 have been prevented? Could the spread of COVID-19 have been eradicated before it ended so many lives?
GRIPPING RESEARCH
I said my first words in a bar—“orange sody.” I eventually outgrew my love of Whistle orange soda, but I have a lifelong interest in bars.
