Back to the subjects of life, death, and the weirdness in between with Ef Deal’s short, sparkling gem “Czesko.” Like David Gerrold’s tour-de-force novelette “thirteen o’clock,” which appeared in last month’s F&SF, “Czesko” is driven by its urgent, casual, and utterly unique narrative voice. In this case, it’s a small-time drug dealer who must figure out how to kill his already-dead friend. The fantastical blurring of life and death seems entirely believable when told in the unintentionally deadpan (pun intended) tone of a blue-collar criminal. Hearkening back to all those folk tales about deals with the Devil, Deal puts a modern, intelligent, compulsively readable spin on the story with an exquisitely mordant punchline for an ending.