by Janina
In an effort to promote some awesome things we see happening out there, Logos is starting a new column called “New Fiction” where we share stories from various journals and online magazines around the internet. For our first post we are featuring some new fiction from the Annalemma Magazine, a biannual literary journal going on it’s third year.
Eternal City by Matthew Baker
In the same way that a lamb, fed a fat diet of seeds and stems, can grow larger, and thicker, and eventually become another thing entirely—a sheep—power is simply the adult version of something smaller that each of us are born with: cruelty. What cruelty feeds on, then, is the Other.
Everything I ever needed to know I learned as a child, in the groves of plum and cedar beyond our village, inventing games of chance for the other children in which chance played no part, in which winning or losing depended on my whims alone. For me, the pleasure in these games was in exposing the Other in each of the children, finding a way to divide them from the rest of the pack, herding them away from the fields and into the caverns, a dark place for my cruelty to feed. For the mechanic’s son, it was his lips—thick and pale, chapped almost to whiteness from a nervous habit, licking them with the tip of his tongue, a habit which I had pretended to have until he had acquired it as his own… (read more at Annalemma Magazine)
