Liz Zimmers
Bio
Liz Zimmers is a writer of dark and speculative fiction. Her stories have been published in numerous anthologies and in two collections, Wilderness: A Collection of Dark Tales (under her former name, Elizabeth Yon) and Blackfern Girls.
Stories (7/0)
Blackbird
She dreamed again of houses. Old and in need of repair, they welcomed her even as she despaired of ever making a home of any of them. She was often alone in these dreams but sometimes she was aware of a comforting presence. It was then she would hear the clear, exuberant song of the blackbird in spring, and she would rise toward waking with that wild music in her ears and a fierce ache in her heart.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Humans
A Box of Night
I never left Cairo with the division. Over the following three days, fourteen soldiers died of a mysterious ailment, two of them army photographers. The men were billeted in the desert at the edge of the city in a small village of tents. Many of them were conscripts, the “odds and sods” who had been called into service because of the great need for men. Out there, in the heat and the sand, they began to die without apparent illness or injury, in gruesome fashion. A man might climb into his bunk whole and hale and never wake again. The bodies of the dead were shriveled and papery, like husks. The eyes stared, bulging from their sockets, pupils blown to wide, dark windows. The jaws hung open in silent screams. They looked like nothing so much as mummies, except for their horrifying expressions. They were men staring into an unspeakable abyss.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Horror
A Box of Night
London, 1992 “Wilding had a cottage on the highland moors. He was Scottish, you know, by pedigree, although he grew up mostly near London.” Sir Peregrine waved his cigar to indicate the city outside his comfortable West London club. “That’s where I last saw him, that cottage he called Mousefoot Farm. Wasn’t a farm, mind you. Just a patch of rather tangled garden snatched up against a stone house with a massive red deer rack over the door, and that wild, rugged land all about. Bit isolated and rough for a man with a dicky leg, I always thought. Never understood how the man’s wife could bear it out there, and I suppose she’d had enough of it, at that. When our gang were last assembled there, she’d come down to London to live in civilized style. Wilding, though, he was another story. He’d seen enough of the world of men.”
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Horror
The Kitchen of Good Fortune
When customers to the café ask for love spells, Lila tells them, “It’s my sister you want.” She sends them around the corner to Alia’s bookstore in Serpent Moon Street. La cocina de la buena fortuna, Lila maintains, is for finding one’s luck--and while that might include love, it encompasses much more. Finding luck, in the truest sense, takes patience and persistence. It takes work, too. The seeker must be committed to the search. If it’s luck you want--and that boils down to a blessed and abundant life, which reduces further to the essence of personal happiness--you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and plunge your hands into the ingredients. You’ve got to create something.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Horror
Cards on the Table
Dark, Scorpionic energy roils and sizzles around us as we take our seats at the little Victorian table with its stylized harp pedestal. The room is dim and warm. A choir of candles kneels in crystal dishes scattered about us, their song the whisper of flame against blue shadows. I smile at you across the ebony polish of the table and tap the deck of cards that lies between us. I am knocking at a door.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Futurism
The Night Therapist
Her name was Ana, and she lived as a prisoner within the cage of her bones. That sense of trapped and stunted identity was what brought her to the clinic on Bat Moon Street. It walked her along the cracked sidewalk under the cloudy night, her eyes on the concrete beneath her shoes. Sensible shoes with low heels and closed toes. Librarian shoes, clasping tender feet that rarely came out after dark. Watching her from the window above the striped awning, I could imagine the trembling thrill that gripped her. How daring she was, to leave her safe, lamplit apartment and its familiar solitude to wander along this dim street. How brave, to enter this neighborhood of after-sunset trade, alone and small amidst the old buildings with their aggressive griminess and narrow stairwells like tunnels of night. Yes, I could feel her heart quaking from three stories up. That is how it begins here, evening upon evening, the supplicants arriving, begging to be freed.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Horror
Socks
In the cold February twilight, the wreck of the robbery had taken on an artistic effect, the starkness of pen and ink, or perhaps the transparent-to-opaque interface of gouache. That was a word Ted had learned from Aunt Theo, whose secret savings now lay scattered about him like the dead butterflies he had once found in the old summer kitchen. Dreams die if they can’t get out into the world, Theo had told him, lifting one bright, weightless corpse and studying it. She had carried it away to her studio, a teenaged Ted trailing behind in sullen boredom, and made it live again on cold-pressed watercolor paper. She had taught him the meaning of gouache but the deeper message she had tried to impart went unheeded. Ted had no dreams.
By Liz Zimmers3 years ago in Horror