In “What Does It Profit a Man” by Rebecca Day, Pastor Zeke Brown has a way with words, the wrong ones.

“It was bad enough that his sermons never went as planned: notes got out of order, jokes fell flat, and serious points returned Hollywood sized laugh tracks.”

Zeke worries about disappointing his wife, Dana, and makes the predictable deal with the Devil, but for a very noble reason, not for power or money. And his punishment is, of course, eternal damnation. But it’s not what you expect. 

Clichés abound in the story, a device to keep the reader grounded in the message: the futility of expectations and of blind faith in anything. They didn’t bother me, and neither did the irreverence, the innuendo, and a foul word or two. But, oh ye politically correct, remember, it’s a joke.  What did pull me out of the story on the first read was the juxtaposition of colloquialisms and regional slang with more uppity language. Malapropping and trucking with the devil didn’t seem to mesh. But I got past that on the second pass, and enjoyed this quick read that will give you a few laughs with the clever word play, as long as you don’t take religion, and your soul, too seriously.

In “Dinner Made Willing” by Vylar Kaftan, the Sessumian Consensual Chef entices readers via all the senses, particularly the smell of beetles glazed in Yark butter and the crunchy shells of fresh lyth’an beetles. I would have liked to have seen what a Sessumian looks like; the chef’s fixation on grubs, beetles, and worms first conjured an image of an insect that feasts on such fodder, but then the reference to spawn made me think amphibian. But I decided not to worry and just enjoyed Kaftan’s tale of an androgynous alien that relies on smell and believes chemical subjugation ruins the taste. Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but I detected some double entendre in the chef’s pleasure.