Web Exclusive

Welcome to our Web Exclusive section. Each month we will be bringing to you poetry, flash fiction, columns and more! With that, we welcome you to our June exclusives!

Smells Like Uncharted Boyhood
Israel Okonji

After Nirvana

What will murk you is time. You’re twenty-four. You had new clothes, a new hairstyle—
the whole caboodle.
Plus, you’re cack-handed now, your mum wouldn’t buy you an iPhone. You must
have love for cadaverous
things, don’t you? Lipsticks on your terraces, grunge, carpet-bombing from pedestrians
on weekends.
Yes, you like the chalet in the backstreets, don’t you? They have the spicy chubs on the
plate for you— they’d
make you wish you had more hours for a grin. You’re a hoof on the delta, aren’t you?
You’re not in a complete
dwaal. We have dyspepsia— we smirk verbatim behind your head. The hedgerows were
planted with elms
looking like boys of your kind— lanky & oars for an Ethan Hawke character. Dusk
carries an oud to your
ears: you’re an exit wound to your past. You’re southside, go back home & try nuzzling
up against your mother.
O mind your chin, you clumsy oaf! In your head, being a boy means you can’t go back.
When you woke up, was
there an octet of Daniel Pembertons flailing flaccid notes? With fire flaring in your
cheeks? A Rothko hangs
at the back of your throat, something else has nominated you for redundancy— for the
little drops of the red
lodged in your chest. You developed filiform antennas, they tweak your dog years to you.
The nodes of Èkó’s
nightlife that you refused visiting grows greater in girth: the apparels of Èkó are berouged.
In your despondency,
you look for Marlon Craft. Did you get a thick ear after quizzing how you appeared in
close-cropped otherlings of living?
In swartness, you illustrate mirth on paper. Your liturgy burns: peat-reek. A matchstick
perishes on the brown
floors of your anoia. & does your epiphany of sunset smell like teen spirit?

Bio - Israel Okonji (He/Him) is a Nigerian creative.
‎Mistaken to be from Gen Z, he is a ‘24 finalist for the Dan Veach Prize for
‎Younger Poets; & a Pushcart nominee. He has works published at Brittle Paper,
‎Hominum, The Milton Review, Bruiser Magazine, Outside the Box, Maudlin House,
‎Isele Magazine, plus others. He hopes to be a greater record collector than Craig
‎Kallman. He also hopes to own a bungalow housing his family & his pets. He is openly
‎obsessed with American Neo-soul singer Jill Scott. Find him on X, @Izrltrcz.

The Hamadryad
E. W. Farnsworth

Myron Banks, the trusty lab assistant and janitor for Nano Robotics LLC, walked behind the bioengineering facility into the swampy woods to dispose of the latest failed experiment in creating synthetic life capable of reproduction. He had no idea what might happen when the five liters of organic substances melded with the specimens he had dumped in the forest over the last fifteen years. His job was to distance the residue from the latest lab work ‘somewhere the sun did not shine.’ End of story.

But tonight, it was not the end but only the beginning. Banks wore hip boots that crunched through the decaying debris of rotting wood in the process of advanced decomposition. The putrid stench of the swamp made his head reel though he was enchanted, as always, by the phosphorescent glow of the rotting vegetation brewing in the black water. He chuckled as he thought about the company’s youthful technicians’ excitement about their xenobots. As he poured the contents of his container into the vivid soup, he could not witness the change the liquid made in the dark. Anyway, it was, like any organic chemical process, exceedingly slow, but in the forest, it no longer required human Ph.D. scientists to do its languid work.

Banks was not a superstitious man, but tonight he thought he heard the cry of a young woman in distress in the swamp. He called back asking whether the female in question required his assistance. He was affronted when his offer was met with a derisive laugh. Angered by the rebuff, he turned and walked back to the lab where he washed his container before making his usual notation in the log book. He checked the temperatures of the continuing experiments in progress. He thought no more about the disposal of the waste. Like all the other such janitorial tasks, the dumping was merely a checkmark item on a schedule, nothing more.

The forest that surrounded the Nano Robotics xenobio lab was thick with wood and wet with decaying detritus. Some thought it was in the beginning stages of becoming a petrified forest. The Ph.D. scientists joked they might be on the wrong end of their experiment. Perhaps, they joked, they should be studying the process of decay in preference to alternative modes of regeneration and reproduction. Dr. Charles Lamont, the Chief Science Officer, never joked about his work in this way. The others thought he was so narrow he might just win the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough experiments. He had no sense of humor that any of his colleagues understood. He was exceedingly brilliant, a confirmed bachelor and a workaholic.

Today he was taking Myron Banks to task for taking the wrong batch of liquid into the forest for disposal the previous night.

“With all due respect, Doctor, the container I emptied was the same I always empty on Friday nights. I had no instructions to empty another. If I have erred, it will have been the first time in the last fifteen years.”

“It seems we will have to chalk up your error to a ‘spilled milk’ state of affairs. We cannot recover from it, so we shall have to leave it ‘as done.’ In future, though, please consult me before you release our compounds into the forest. If you don’t, we are likely to face the wrath of the EPA and other agencies. The lab will be shut down then, and you will no longer have a workplace. More importantly, the compounds in your
dumping place might interact with each other with no predictable consequences.”

The janitor grimaced and went back to his duties. Dr. Lamont might have called the EPA to report the matter of the dumping, but he had another important xenobot experiment to conduct, and he did not want to waste his time to comply with trivial government regulations.

The forest surrounding the xeno lab was perpetually inundated by the Chickahominy River, which also fed the fresh water reservoirs of numerous adjacent cities, villages and towns. It was also a hunters’ and trappers’ paradise harboring prize animals like black bears, whitetail deer, beavers and muskrats. Nick Bounder, a sixteen-year-old woodsman helped his mother make a living by selling the wild game and furs he harvested on the black market. Like his now-deceased father had been, he was successful
precisely because he did not follow the rules.

Bounder kept clear of the small businesses that pock-marked the borders of the swamp though he detested the dumping those businesses did in his swamp. The pollution spoiled his own business. It also caused changes in the swamp itself. The boy felt closely bonded to the wilderness, and he hated anyone who encroached on its ancient natural rights. He knew places in the swamp where no other men had yet penetrated—limpid pools rich with fish and ancient stands of bamboo and papyrus. He would cut bamboo shoots with his knife and use beeswax to fashion them into the pipes of Pan. He had also experimented making paper with papyrus as the ancient Egyptians did.

Nick was an autodidact and an original in all senses of the word. He was a fool who did not consider anything but the surface meanings of things. He was also a trailblazer who ventured where no man had dared go before. Two weeks after Myron Banks had dumped his waste into the forest, Nick Bounder sat on a rotting tree stump to play his pipes after checking his traps. He played his rustic music and watched the insects swarm in the starlight and admired the iridescent glow on the wet fallen trees and the
fetid water. He heard, as often before, a hidden maiden singing harmoniously to his melody.

Nick concluded his piping, but today the female voice continued to sing. He had nowhere in particular to go, so he listened carefully to the woman’s words. Hers was a sad song of a woman whose life depended on a tree that had fallen. She had thought all was lost until one day her tree was given a drink of healthy liquid that reversed its natural process of decay. Now she felt young again and looked forward to the growth of green shoots stemming from crannies in the fallen tree. As a woodsman, Nick’s heart beat in sympathy with her song. He found the green shoots she had sung about, and he rejoiced in her theme of life springing from death. This reversed his expectations and gave him hope for other things.

In making his nocturnal rounds from that time forward, Nick stopped to pipe by the fallen tree where he had heard the young woman’s voice. Like a Druid, she sang interminably though never once repeating the stanzas of her lyrics. He could not see her, but her voice projected into his mind her image as if she were standing before him naked with her long, golden hair covering her breasts and spilling down to her knees. He often
held out his hand so she might take it, but she was shy and reluctant to make contact.

The more frequently they met, the more real she became though her reality was a kind of mesmerizing fluorescence instead of flesh. Visiting her dwelling place each day, he saw her transform from a faint shadow into a multicolored neon buxom lass. He thought her transformation might have been occasioned by the green shoots from her tree. So, he composed a tune about that, and, from the way she smiled when he played it, the ditty seemed to please her well. The third time she heard him pipe his tune, she sang a song she had composed to suit it. The song captured his unspoken thoughts with uncanny exactitude. Seeing it pleased him, she came close and touched his pipes with her fingers.

From that first contact forward, his piping improved as did his facility to compose. She sang increasingly joyous spells, and the frogs’ mating cries became her chorus. The tree’s shoots sprang higher and higher between his visits. The sheen of iridescence now extended in all directions as if he were witnessing the swamp’s general resurrection.

Meanwhile, the experimentation at the xeno lab continued. Dr. Lamont redoubled his efforts to perfect his recipe for xenobots, but each new failure led to new waste, which was disposed of by the janitor in the same way as before.

Inevitably, Myron Banks returned to the place where Nick Bounder and his forest creature made their music. Not believing what he was hearing, Banks crept up close enough to listen to the singing and piping. By starlight, he saw how lush and green the new shoots were growing. With a wild surmise, he intuited what must be happening as connected to his company’s xenobot experiments.

When Nick departed after his performance, Myron stepped forward to dump his organic residue. The female creature smiled at him in gratitude for replenishing her tree’s nutrient liquids. Rather than pressing forward, the janitor fled back to the lab to inform Dr. Lamont what he had seen.

The doctor did not wait a moment, but importuned the janitor to take him immediately to the location where he had witnessed the seeming miracle. The glow had not diminished, and the female was still luxuriating where she had stood before. After he recovered from this stunning vision, the doctor tried to communicate with the young woman, but she either did not hear him or distrusted him. She remained silent. The doctor took notes on what he saw, and he resolved to return to the place the next night to talk
with the piping woodsman whom Banks had described.

Back in the lab, Dr. Charles Lamont meticulously reviewed his records to discover what among his developments might have caused the lush growth deep in the forest where light seldom shone on the universal vegetable decay. His interest in the young woman was a secondary matter for him as he saw no apparent connection of her to his work. The janitor, however, had fallen in love with the image of the beautiful girl. As the doctor was preoccupied with his experiments, the menial conspired how he
might woo the young forest woman as his wife.

The next night, four figures met deep in the forest: the doctor, his janitor, the woodsman and the forest maiden. The woodsman was vexed to have others intrude on his “personal” preserve. The maiden refused to sing while the janitor was entirely fixated on her naked form. The scientist was firing a hundred questions in quick succession at each of the others without getting any answers.

The three men were about to come to blows when the young woman raised her hands and asked them to remain quiet while she sang a song. The exception she made was for the woodsman to use his pipes.

The pipes made music as if by their own accord, and the young woman’s singing was different from anything the woodsman had yet heard. The song told of the birth of a young woman in a tree to which she was bound until the day it died.

The tree did die. It fell and began its slow decay. She remained next to the tree expecting to perish as well. Magical substances were spilled into the surrounding waters, and new green shoots formed betokening a subsequent cycle of life—both for the tree and for herself. She sang she was grateful for the renewal she felt in her body. She had never expected a reversal of the process of decay.

The scientist asked the maiden how the fragmenting process of decay had been reversed, but the maiden had no notion. She did know everything changed when the janitor brought his liquids to her tree. This angered the woodsman, who might have vented spleen about the desecration of nature with pollutants, if the maiden had not counseled calm.

“As my tree revived from the nutrients out of the materials dumped in
the water, I felt those same active particles coursing through my veins to give me energy and hope.”

The scientist pulled two petri dishes from his lab coat and collected samples from the standing water. He raced back to his lab with the janitor in his wake. After the commotion, the maiden asked the woodsman whether he was game to make music. Of course, he was game! The two piped and sang until dawn. Then the woodsman went home leaving the woman to her thoughts.

Dr. Charles Lamont found in his two samples what he had been looking for. By an “accident of nature,” his experiments had been successfully completed. He awarded the janitor an enormous bonus and stock options in his company after apologizing profusely for having berated him earlier. Once they learned the details, Lamont’s colleagues thought their lead scientist was now a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize.

The scientist was subsequently so busy at the lab, he neglected returning to the dark center of the forest where the maiden dwelled. In the mean time, she had prevailed upon the woodsman to transplant her tree’s green shoots to another place deeper in the forest where they would not be disturbed by meddlesome outsiders. The woodsman was happy to oblige her.

The janitor continued to dump residue from his company’s experiments in the same place as he always had done, but now the maiden was gone and the woodsman had apparently changed his routine. Though Myron Banks was now a man of means on account of his bonus and his stock options, he had not won the love of his life.

The woodsman, in contrast, remained relatively poor, but he loved hunting and trapping, and he looked forward to making music with his maiden even though she must remain with her tree deep in the swampy forest forever.

E.W. Farnsworth is a prolific author whose work spans more than seventy titles across genres from high-stakes thrillers and espionage fiction to romance, science fiction, poetry, and young adult literature. Known for imaginative world-building and elegant prose, Farnsworth has built a loyal readership drawn to the breadth of his storytelling and the depth of his characters.

His fiction has been recognized with multiple national and international awards, and his short stories appear in numerous anthologies. Whether writing espionage adventures, near-future science fiction, western dramas, or supernatural tales, Farnsworth brings a signature blend of intelligence, pace, and emotional resonance to every page.

Over the past decade he has published several major series — including the John Fulghum Mysteries, Al Katana Chronicles, Wiglaff Tales, and multiple science-fiction universes — along with dozens of standalone novels and acclaimed short-story collections.

Born in Long Beach, California, Farnsworth draws inspiration from a varied career that spans defense, intelligence, academia, and the arts. His work reflects a lifelong fascination with technological frontiers, human resilience, and the subtle mechanics of moral choice.