New Release: Cry Baby Bridge Anthology

Speculation Publications has a new queer friendly horror/urban legends anthology out (ace, bi, some authors are also LGBTQ): Cry Baby Bridge.

Welcome to Cry Baby Bridge.

If you venture here at the right time of year, on the right kind of night, you might hear a baby crying in the wind. You might see some things you didn’t believe were real. You might return with some stories to tell too, if you are lucky enough to leave.

Warnings: This book contains stories with suicide, murder, infanticide, miscarriage and still birth, sexual and physical assault, mental health issues, spousal abuse, graphic descriptions of injury and death, loss and grief, and extreme gore. For a story specific guide, visit our website. www.speculationpub.com

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Excerpt

From “Carolyn and the Girl Under the Bridge” by Dori Lumpkin

Carolyn has a big imagination. That’s what they’d said since she was big enough to have an imagination at all. She’s good at making up stories, telling people exactly what she wanted them to hear—whatever her version of the truth was. This came in a variety of different forms, beginning with telling her kindergarten grade teacher that her daddy was actually an assassin, and he liked to show her pictures of his victims, and landing somewhere around her and her mom playing spies in the second grade, hiding in the pantry, hoping desperately that the False German Diplomat (Carolyn’s daddy) didn’t find them and rip their eyeballs out.

The eyeball part was Carolyn’s addition.

The False German Diplomat was her mother’s.

Carolyn loved her stories. She loved them so much that she pulled them over her eyes like a comfortable blanket, preferring the warmth of the adjacent reality as it compared to the splintered, wooden floors of her own home. They were a pool she could sink into, drowning out the rest of the world by drowning herself in lies.

So when the police finally came, when Carolyn was eleven, asking what had happened and why her mother had been gone for so long, if she was still alive, if she made any reference to leaving at all ever in the whole entire world, Carolyn did what she did best.

She told them her mother was a princess, long-lost and time-forgotten, who left to seek her fortune in Europe. She told them her mother was a pirate, and she went out to sea to find her treasure and would be back, of course she’d be back, to take Carolyn sailing with her in no time at all. She told them her mother was a ghost, had been a ghost all along, and Carolyn herself was half-ghost, didn’t you know?

She did not tell them that the man who loomed over her shoulder as she told her stories scared her most of all. She did not tell them that the last time she had seen her mother, the woman was sobbing and telling Carolyn to run, run away and hide.

No, she did not tell them any of that.

About the Publisher

Speculation Publications is a women owned indie press, founded by LCW Allingham with River Eno and Susan Tulio. They publish The Collections of Utter Speculation and other speculative fiction anthologies of horror, folklore, and fantasy.