His jaw and hands are shaking. His wrists, feeble.
There are bruises but no blood—his mother does not need blood to know. As she leads him to bed he is crying, or rather he tries to, with sobs chopped into fine exhales, mostly empty.
When the blood does not clot the hours do. He waits and waits, warming at the neck. His knees throb as if they are filling up.
These are the final days of the tsars
and young Alexei Shafirov, an infirm skeptic, is bedridden after a fall. Throughout a long recovery his mother and girlfriend speak to him of fables, uprisings and a magic royal family under house detention. At the heart of their stories is Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, the abdicated heir apparent. Like him, Alexei Romanov is a hemophiliac, near the center of a decades-old political cabal. Both boys are prone to mischief, self-indulgence and illness. But some insist their connection runs deeper than that.
Alexei and the Second Empress is an alternate-history account of the end of the Imperial Russia. In equal measures fairy tale and cruel realism, it is a story of opulence, superstition, vengeful Bolsheviks and substance abuse. Yet the most profound secret of all-that of the boy’s true nature-may not come to light until his parents’ deaths, or his own.
He’s here. He’s whiny, impulsive, a failed con artist and could really use a cheeseburger, but forget all that.
[Fiction] I have good reason to doubt. There is no power source and the case is bolted shut. If it has moving parts I cannot see any. It has the dimensions of a gramophone player.
[Fiction] I loved them, even if I raised money by killing them. One nearly killed me, too—not the quiet kind of love.
Fred Nolan has published short fiction in The Molotov Cocktail, Empty Oaks Magazine and Dali’s Lovechild. This is his debut novel. Despite what he claims on social media, he lives on three unkempt acres near Dallas, with his wife, two young children and worn-out Coetzee novels. He is a technical writer at a commercial subcontractor, but much prefers Twitter.
![[POETRY] [SORT OF] an odd colored bear](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5acb62e59d5abbb71e495923/1533126253872-XY8Y4SUQBBE00GGKMS9N/scott-webb-101503-unsplash.jpg)
