PLATE 1. A simple bonfire takes on otherworldly tones, hinting of a darker past. Ozark Magic & Hoodoo by Joshua Heston Our rational, scientific world filled with textbook knowledge and an overabundance of electronic equipment has little room for the unknown or inexplicable. “Faith” is carefully relegated to quiet, predictable corners of our lives…
Original artwork by Seth Daughtry. Plague Child’s Doctor by Joshua Heston There was a flicker of afternoon sun through sighing leaves. Movement came back into the world. The ratchet-like scrape of butcher knife against sharpening stone. The rustle of old newspapers being spread out on the floor. Dirty yellow curtains billowed in the wind. The…
Dead Ringer by Lisa Livingston Martin The giggling announced that the Women’s bathroom door had opened. I glanced at the clock. 11:48 p.m. I returned to my notes, turning the pen in my hand as my mind worked over the scrawled handwriting. The phone started ringing. Not the phone on the desk behind me. The pay…
Memories of Bloody Hill by R’vyn Grega-Szabo “Quiet!” whispered a Union soldier as one of his brothers stepped on a stick. The cracking sound had echoed through the woods. The Union soldiers moved quietly through the dense forests of the Ozarks. The surprise attack was almost perfect until they had a run-in with opposing troops,…
Cold Dark: Eureka Springs’ Art by Joshua Heston Into the cold dark. Rainwater glistened black streets. Rising clouds of mist obscured tops of ancient buildings. Normally unnoticed trees became ghost sentinels, undulating in a haunted night. Above the narrow alleys and close crowded windows and beyond the now-silent streets, the rainbow lights of Eureka Springs’…
House of a Hundred Rooms: stories the ghost tour guides do not tell by Keith Scales If anything in these legends should shock the faith of the over-scrupulous reader, he must remember the nature of the place, and make due allowance; he must remember that he treads the halls of an enchanted palace, and that…
The Skeletal Princess by T’iana Sage & Art by Kaitlynn Robinson There is a myth, told by the ancients, that within a grove, in a cursed forest, lay a skeletal princess. Her skull, wet with salty tears, be filled with the memories of the life she’d previously lived, and the thoughts of the life she…
by Clint Lacy and Joshua Heston. Original art by Curtis Copeland. “There are no black panthers in Missouri. It is a myth like Bigfoot.” — Michael Flaten Years ago at my grandmother’s house, I discovered an old high school yearbook. Thumbing through the pages, I found my uncle’s senior photo with the usual details of…
Plague Child’s Doctor by Joshua Heston “Fourteen-year-old Cyrus Thatcher already knows he’s a freak and his father hates him. But when his beloved baby sister disappears and the townspeople won’t help, Cyrus must choose to take matters into his own self-doubting hands. Set in rural Missouri of 1924, The Plague Child’s Doctor is a…