points, and in the hilarity that resulted from that and from everyone overhearing Maggie tell Harriet-called-Harry and Mia about losing her virginity, lo these many years ago, at Disneyland, Sandy claimed six fives when she only rightly had four, winning the round for Gwynne and herself when the bell rang. Dionne tallied her points without demur but Sandy didn’t see Gwynne and Lydia glance at the table and then at each other.
Sandy buncoed at the head table, getting the bear and three buncos for the price of one, then Cass buncoed and sent Sandy back to the pit, her second loss of the night. She moved quickly from pit to center table to head for the final game. She wouldn’t win for having most buncos—Tessa had that pretty much in hand, but she might score most wins if she was careful. She took the score pad automatically as she sat, letting the game draw out as it would: another long one. The chatter quieted as the last match, sixes the goal, drew out.
One more win was all she needed. The game was close: nobody would notice—Dionne rolled one six, then nothing. Sandy moved the pencil as if to give Dionne her point, but left no mark. Opposite her Miranda rolled and crapped out, and Dionne’s partner Cass got one six, bringing their score to twenty. Sandy held her breath and Cass rolled again: two, five, five. They were tied, at least on paper if not in truth. Sandy rolled, saw two sixes, and whooped. That ended the round and the game and gave her nine wins; she’d won the lion’s share of the pool. She grabbed the dice to roll again—might as well try for last bunco and win that pot too.
The silence struck her like a fall of bricks. The three women at her table stared at her stone faced, when they should have been shrieking and cursing at her win. She felt the grin solidify on her face and clacked the dice nervously in her hand as she stared back.
The other eight, four at one table and four in the pit, were staring at her as well. Sandy’s smile faded as she looked around: there was a strange, sharp tang in the air that, more than the somber gaze of eleven other women, made her hackles rise. The scattered pencils on each table, a spill of honey-glazed peanuts from a bowl across the stained cloth of the pit, the bright green bear crumpled on the floor, a cluster of half-filled water bottles and a lone, lipstick-stained martini glass gave the impression of a room abandoned in haste, and the group of women that once belonged so intrinsically to this milieu, with their good-natured vulgarity and dull jobs and side businesses and recipes and husbands and boyfriends was gone, this predatory, alien coven in their place.
Sandy grasped the dice hard until the pointed edges bit painfully into her palm, then laid them carefully on the table. She tried a final placating smile, directed at Miranda’s grim expression opposite her, then let it fade.
“I think we won. Did I make a mistake on the scoring?”
Miranda regarded her under lowering brows for a few seconds, then smiled, hugely, showing all her teeth. With a dull shock Sandy saw they were very white, and very pointed. More like a dog’s teeth than a person’s, she thought.
“No,” said Miranda. “No, I don’t think you made a mistake.”
The sharp smell—a kerosene kind of smell, Sandy thought in her back brain—got stronger suddenly and she shifted backwards in her chair. The path to the front door was blocked by the two tables to her left, but the arch to the kitchen was directly behind her and on the other side, the front hallway.
But that was silly. No one was going to hurt her. Not over bunco. It wasn’t that important. Not like they had skin in the game. Not like her.
Then Miranda and Cass rose; Cass’s chair fell with a clatter—she ignored it, poised in a semi-crouch, just like Miranda. The way they stood, knees bent not quite right, the planes of their faces not quite right—they had changed, shifted in some indefinable way, and as she watched Sandy
“I told you,” growled a voice from the pit. Shel. Her partner four rounds back. They had lost, Sandy making sure it was her last loss. “I told you she cheated. Second time she subbed.”
Dumb bitch, thought Sandy with useless clarity through her pooling fear. I fooled you the first game too, and you though it was sub’s luck.
Miranda growled, her lips lifting, her snout—it was a snout, her face shifting, malleable as Play-Doh— extending out of her formerly placid face. Sandy scrambled backwards, tipping her chair over in front of Cass to give her a few more seconds, retreating into the kitchen and, abandoning purse and coat, making for the hallway. The blinds over the sink were up and a small part of her, seeing the moon rise over the neighbor’s rooftop, understood.
It wasn’t even a full moon, a blobby something somewhere between full and half, not even photogenic. Seemed like cheating to her.
Of course, that was only fair, considering.
The arch to the hallway was blocked by three looming forms—small plump Gwynne, her back humped up under a pink silk blouse, her fangs protruding over her lower lip, her petite fingers now claws. Lydia and Shel loomed behind her, their faces molded flat and feral like Miranda’s.
Sandy whirled around, her heels slipping on the linoleum. Cass’s shoulders, enormous and hairy, were bursting out of her dusky purple jacket, part of the suit she wore every Monday, or when clients were in the office. Sweet, kind-of-frumpy Cass, eating yogurt every morning and heating up her Lean Cuisine at lunch. Harriet-called- Harry, who had a meeting with her fifth-grader’s teacher that afternoon and was bemoaning the fact that she only came up with fantastic retorts three hours later at dinner, drooled down her T-shirt, her eyes huge and yellow.
Sandy backed into a table loaded with the dirty dishes from dinner; one tipped to the floor and spun around with a clatter of silverware. More crowded into the kitchen: Tessa, Maggie, Mia—whose ears had grown up pointed, still pierced with Cookie Lee earrings. Lexie, impossibly broad and squat. Dionne, her body still human, her face a beast’s.
“Keep her in here,” snarled Cass. “I just got the carpets cleaned.”
Sandy backed into the cold expanse of a sliding glass door and fumbled at the latch; it was closed and locked tight. She slammed the glass, trying to break it, but glass is tougher than it looks and that only works in movies, and this wasn’t a movie.
If this were a movie, you would have seen a reverse angle of the sliding glass door and a scarlet spray across it.
The kitchen was very clean by the time they were done. Everyone was always careful to help clean up.
“Did you win?” Cass’s husband shifted over to make room for her. He’d taken their daughter to the movies, knowing neither of them belonged here on bunco night—not a scary movie, with blood across a window, but something with princesses, and spells, and little bit of death, suitable for a seven-year old.
“The hostess never wins,” she said, pausing to listen for her child stirring again before she laid her head on his chest, looking out the bedroom window at the blobby moon, small and insignificant, risen high above the trees.
He stroked her hair. “Your friend from work—Sammy?”
“Sandy.”
“Did she work out?”
Cass didn’t answer at first, and his fingers, twinned in her hair, stopped.
“No,” she said, finally. “She didn’t fit in.”
“Oh.”
“Some of the others think she cheats.”
“Oh.” His fingers were still.
“Cheated.”
He didn’t say anything and after a while he began stroking her hair again, and she blinked at the moon, her eyes green, then yellow, then green.
BLENDED
C.E. MURPHY
The pack had been born savages and had, almost to a man, died that way.
Almost: almost. She had been a whelp the day the hunters came, dozens of them on their thundering black horses with the pack fleeing before them. Her mother had thrown her beneath a long-dead tree, and she’d watched
