Murder and the taste of limes

With leather gloves, I seize these bugs, as they breed, as they eat tender leaves and buds. The air stinks and my skin sometimes burns with the acrid juice they spray in fear.

‘I’m amazed how quickly the desire for limes made me a murderer.’

‘No, you were already a murderer. What’s interesting is how quickly you became a mass murderer,’ remarks my husband, casting an analytical eye over the crushed bodies beneath my feet.

I do this so we can squeeze limes into our tea, our beer, our curry, and so we can eat death marmalade.

But enough about what I get up to in the weekends. There is much more intriguing  (and free) weekend reading online. SQ Mag, an ‘International Speculative Fiction eZine’, includes SF, bizarro, horror, fantasy and the supernatural. In the March 2013 issue, I lingered over ‘The Stills’ by Jeremy C. Shipp. The story makes my weekend activities look quite benign. I like that in a story.

And the blog begins …

with the weekend.

Editorial assistant Rakki-chan hails from Japan and is completely bilingual. She can say ‘meow’ and ‘nyan’ with equal ease. You just have to listen for it. Honestly.

This weekend’s recreational reading comes from free online fiction magazine Strange Horizons. Strange Horizons’ chosen genre is speculative fiction, which they view as a ‘vibrant and radical tradition of stories that can make us think, can critique society, can offer alternatives to reality’. They believe that this tradition should be global, inclusive and diverse. Writers of short sci-fi, fantasy, slipstream and the like should definitely take a look at their submission guidelines.

In keeping with the idea of global diversity, Rakki-chan, the Japanese-Australian feline, has selected her favourite story from the Strange Horizons archives. Naturally, narcissism dictated the final choice; one of the characters is a cat – named Baby Boo. I’d be a spoiler if I said anything more, except to say that ‘Red Matty’ by Nisi Shaw is very readable, and we read it twice.