Magic for Unlucky Girls is that rarest of things: a book that doesn't remind me of anything else I've read ... A wonderful, truly original work. -- Emily St. John Mandel, author of  Station Eleven The fourteen fantastical stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls take the familiar tropes of fairytales and twist them into new and surprising shapes. These unlucky girls, struggling against a society that all too often oppresses them, are forced to navigate strange worlds as they try to survive. From carnivorous husbands to a bath of lemons to whirling basements that drive people mad, these stories are about the demons that lurk in the corners and the women who refuse to submit to them, instead fighting back--sometimes with their wit, sometimes with their beauty, and sometimes with shotguns in the dead of night. “[ Magic for Unlucky Girls ] is that rarest of things: A book that doesn’t remind me of anything else I’ve read . . . A wonderful, truly original work.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author,  Station Eleven " Magic For Unlucky Girls is a bold debut from a bold author, and make no mistake—these are stories that matter, and that will stick with you long after you’ve read them." —William Jablonsky, author, The Indestructible Man: Stories and The Clockwork Man "You'll find familiar fairytale tropes here, but Balaskovits shatters these familiar mirrors and finds fresh, original stories in the sinister shards." —Tara Laskowski, author, Bystanders and Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons "Readers looking for something askew from any fantasy they’ve read before will want to get to know the unlucky but determined girls of Balaskovits’s stories." — Publishers Weekly "The stories in Magic for Unlucky Girls combine the magical with contemporary realism, rendering an aesthetic I’ve not quite seen but couldn’t get enough of. Balaskovits has an in-depth eye for detail, creates her own folklores, and possesses a dry wit that adds a welcome attitude to her fables." —Michael Czyzniejewski, story366blog.wordpress.com "Balaskovits’s anthology breathes fresh life into classic fairy tales. Readers who enjoy short fiction with a fantastical bent should pick up this award-winning book." — Library Journal "Balaskovits’ stories are spectacularly entertaining and artfully executed." —Ashley Miller, Atticus Review "Balaskovits creates her own mythology that transcends time and upends traditional ideas about helpless damsels and men-as-beasts." —Jen Michalski, washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com A. A. Balaskovits won the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards grand prize in 2015. Her work appears in Indiana Review , The Madison Review , The Southeast Review , Booth , Wigleaf,  and many others. She is the Editor-In Chief for Cartridge Lit.  Magic for Unlucky Girls Stories By A.A. Balaskovits Santa Fe Writers Project Copyright © 2017 A.A. Balaskovits All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-939650-66-5 Contents Put Back Together Again, Postpartum, Eden, Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me, Three Times Red, Let Down Your Long Hair and Then Yourself, Suburban Alchemy, The Ibex Girl of Qumran, Beasts, The Romantic Agony of Lemon Head, Mermaid, Bloody Mary, Juniper, All Who Tremble, CHAPTER 1 Put Back Together Again It was July when I first saw him, a hot July, the kind of July that you remember because you spent the whole month drenched, and you were amazed that your body could stand to lose all its water. We all looked to the sky. The devout clasped their hands. That month I kept a tally of gunshot wounds blaring into the ER. During the winter, when it's too cold to set a pinky out the door, people keep their guns in shoeboxes and use kitchen knives. Then they roll bloody out of ambulances. The bodies come in on their backs or their sides, porcelain and metal handles sticking out from their skin like deformed arms. The whole city was at the mercy of the weather, blandly dictating how we would mutilate one another that season. Lizzy told me that, before med school, she used to spend her weekends chasing ambulances. There was something wrong with her blood, I suppose, because she said the noise made everything inside of her bounce and sing. Lizzy, I told her, blood always moves. It doesn't know how to stop until it stops. She was mesmerized by the red and white blinding lights, the sirens that left a trail of yelping dogs in their wake. Someone, a teacher I think, told me that sirens were made a particular pitch, one that made dogs, no matter how many times they heard it, into frightened little pups, barking mad for their mothers. With the heat came the earthquakes — low, rumbling earth beneath the concrete. The ambulances were going off all the time now, and even a minor shake would send people into the ER, holding their heads or arms or legs from where they had hit themselves against their coffee tables, or each other. Even in the mad noise, it is easy t