All Existing Literary Magazine
Foreword
When All Existing started in 2023, the goal was always to put together an issue that commemorated gothic themes in literatures and visual arts, and we’re so excited that we finally get to show you some of the incredible talent of today’s gothic writers! Within this issue we have pieces that represent gothic themes and imagery of both the newer and classic variety. We’ve got it all: from graveyard hauntings to Russian folklore to musings of dread and anxiety. The team here at All Existing are so grateful that our little magazine gets to house the work of these incredible artists, and we sincerely hope that you love this issue as much as we do.
— Claire Westbrook and Sonika Jaiganesh (The All Existing Team)
Cover Art by Mathew Gostelow
Short Fiction
Jasmine De La Paz, The Cemetery's Keeper
Reyzl Grace, The Sunday Tree
Teresa Chen, White Flower Elegy
Drew Broussard, Almost Everything He Dreamed
Katie McCall, Grandfather's Pocket Watch
Sam Villa, The Sinkling's Unrest
Alex Conley, Cliff
Poetry
Ayden Massey, After
H.V. Patterson, Detritivores
Allison Phillips, Make Me Into What I Am Not
Harrison Fisher, Flesh's Whine of Fabric
Marley McKenzie, The Red Goblin
Jennifer Jantzen, SALOME
Michael Betancourt, Aphasic (2023-035)
John A. deSouza, My Life of Words
Erin Petti, Samhain
Brandon Shane, The Flood
Ophelia Knight, Vampirism is a Metaphor for Hypersexuality
Zack Carson, Days With Salome
Flash Fiction
Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Flight Risk
Zander Lyvers, Antebellum Leaves
Merlin June Mack, Mary Shelley
Anthony Incollingo Harwan, A Widow's Watch
Rebekka Gondosch, The Sin Eater
Allison Wall, After She Makes A Pact With The Dark Goddess
Visual Art
Mathew Gostelow, The Boy
Graphic Fiction
Patrick McEvoy & James Killian, Meandering
Vampirism is a Metaphor for Hypersexuality
by Ophelia Knight
we have never been pure
from the womb we came into the world weepy creatures covered in dew
shrouds of red covered sterile blankets
yearning to be wrapped in something other than ourselves
all of the crying
has gotten us nowhere
instead has left unwashable stains
on expensive carpets
you have not learned how to self soothe
became pliable in willing hands on your knees
there is no shame there
just exasperated coddling whilst you discovered the comfort of sucking thumbs
on your tongue is a sensation that has failed to please you
you've always been told that you are young
& virile
in order to relive your past
we could all sell our souls
offer up our necks
and know that we are feasts
with enough sacrifice you, too, could be reborn
be expelled from the body again and this time — come quietly
Ophelia Knight is an aspiring poet with a deep passion for exploring the intersections of nature, human emotion, and societal issues through her evocative and thought-provoking poetry. Her two most recent works were featured in Orpheus Magazine (2023) and Sigma Tau Delta Annual Round Table (2019). As Ophelia continues to write and share her work, drawing inspiration from both the natural world and the cultural landscapes around her. As she embarks on her hopeful, literary career, she aims to inspire and connect with readers through her lyrical and introspective poetry.
Mary Shelley
by Merlin June Mack
Mary Shelley and I matched on one of those astrology-based dating apps. She’s a Virgo sun and a Sag moon. Somehow none of this surprises me, and somehow I worry that I’m already in love. She’s another beautiful woman with too much time on her hands, which is my exact type and always has been. She doesn’t have a location but she claims she lives in New York. Her profile warns me that she has a husband, but I don’t have it in me to care.
Mary Shelley and I have our first date at a union-friendly coffee shop where Bushnick artists with rich parents go after class. Somehow she already knows my coffee order. Mary Shelley takes her coffee the same way all of the poets do, with more sugar than caffeine. I see her drink it like it's just her and the free love sodomites against the world. Mary Shelley does not trim her nails. That’s how I know she’s serious about her husband.
I’ve never had as easy of a conversation as I do with her. There is morbid humor in everything she says. Shelley Says I tell her that would be a good name for a podcast. She tells me she’d rather die. I tell her she’s already dead and she tells me she doesn’t feel dead when she’s with me.
Mary Shelley has not texted me since we got back from our coffee date, I imagine her in a gothic mansion with her husband. She probably feels like she’s normal when she’s with him. I picture her like a beloved photo in his wallet. That’s because women are known for how they die and men are known for how they live. I could see her husband’s heart in her tote bag earlier, beating like a shaking house. I doubt that she would ever carry a woman’s heart like that. She might fuck me in a graveyard though.
We see each other again in Central Park, and she tells me the thing that bothers her the most about the adaptations of Frankenstein is how they always make him green. She thinks that it makes him seem less human and he’s supposed to be human-ish. She tells me that Byron always thought that the doctor was the hero of the story, but even Elizabeth is more of a hero than Victor Frankenstein. No woman can truly make a man the hero of their story, that would mean that they would have to live a life without ever meeting a man which is impossible. We go to a bookstore and she signs copies of Frankenstein, but when she looks back at the ink there’s nothing there.
The devil doesn’t work hard at all because the devil isn’t the one making decisions. Mary Shelley is looking around my studio apartment like it's better than a mausoleum, she does not believe that my Kindle has so many books in it. She assumes that I must be keeping rabbits and deer in my refrigerator. I ask her if she wants to watch a movie before I forget that she’s never seen a movie before.
When I turn on the TV she grips the handles of her armchair like she’s in a car crash so we move on to a charcuterie board instead. Mary Shelley told me she always thought that she was cursed. We eat cheese and talk about the apocalypse and sailboats, yachts, and pirate ships named after poetry. She’s got such a way with words. I joke with her asking if she’s ever considered being a writer, and she laughs louder than I thought she would.
Mary Shelley is in a fight with her husband because he’s starting to fall down the alt-right rabbit hole. She’s been staying over at Claire Claremont’s house and Claire is probably telling Mary Shelley’s husband everything that she’s saying behind his back. That two-faced bitch.
Sometimes Mary Shelley thinks everything would be different if she ever got the chance to know her mother. The only thing that they share is their name. Mary Shelley tells me that she learned how to write her own name tracing her mother’s grave. It feels even more unfair when she says it out loud.
The first time that Mary Shelley kisses me she begins to fade away. If a woman invented science fiction then it’s never really belonged to women. Women only own the things that they create before they give it to the rest of the world because men will always believe that they are the first in line at every intergalactic and ordinary grocery store. Women are remembered for how they die, but men are remembered for how they live. That’s the last thing she says to me before she’s gone. When she’s gone she’s really gone because the room is a little bit warmer than it was before.
I don’t see Mary Shelley again for two years, two years that feel like ten because all rooms feel too warm now. I’m on a first date with another woman and Mary Shelley is holding hands with her husband. We are in the MET on no day in particular. She’s wearing her wedding ring which she never did when I knew her. She doesn’t notice me until she does. She looks at me like that painting of her everyone knows.
Merlin June Mack is a writer, hemiplegic poet, and activist from Southern California. If they aren't writing they can be found reading a book with at least one good literary motif in it. Merlin is currently working towards a BFA in Creative Writing at Southern Oregon University. To see more of their writing and publications visit @merlin_june_is_a_lover on Instagram
The Sinkling's Unrest
by Sam Villa
Sand . . . there was still sand! I couldn’t lay in bed any longer. I knew it had to be somewhere. The granule. The crumb. The itch! I threw off the silk sheet and heaved myself off my bed. The night had encased my vision in a screen of violet so dark it was the brother of black, so I lit the lantern posted by my bedside, and the shadows scattered. As I searched where I had laid on the mattress, I found nothing. Still, the itch poked my skin. I tore off the silk sheet completely, along with the lynx blanket and pillows. The sand had nowhere to hide. I swiped my hand across every inch of the bed, top to bottom. Then, I felt it. The thing flew off the bottom corner, onto the floor. I dropped to my knees and chased after it. Soon enough, I held the singular grain between my fingers. The granule. The nuisance. The itch.
I walked over to my tower window where I cracked open the latch just enough to drop the sand outside, then quickly shut the window once more. The granule fell into the wind where it was carried back to the trillions more of its troublesome kind. How many times had I stared out my window, wishing the ocean of sand that surrounded my castle could be turned into hills of grass or pillars of rock. I would take anything else over it, even ice. For at least ice would melt and evaporate, leaving no trace of itself in one’s shoes, between fingernails, or worse, inside the mouth! Oh how I hated it. But no price was too much to pay, including the ceaseless sand, for I now owned the sole castle to be uncovered in all the dried seas.
Dong! The foyer clock struck midnight. I couldn’t go back to sleep. There was still more!
I dressed myself in a more suitable outfit before exiting my bedroom. As I locked my chamber door, a wriggling thing, the tail of a shadow, passed overhead. I now realize that this was the first instance I had encountered them. My ears caught the push of air—like the sound of drapes in the death of an afternoon breeze—but when I turned around, there was nothing except the empty corridor, coal black and silent. Figuring my mind was still taking its last steps out of my slumber dreams, I carried on.
I began at the spiral staircase down to the main hall. Working under the flickering auras of hanging lanterns, I used the towel from my pocket to wipe down each step. Although not one particle of the nuisance appeared on my rag after twice-wiping the first twenty stairs, I wasn’t willing to overlook any of the two-hundred more. As I continued to wipe, I thought back to when I had first visited the property at the castle’s auction. Immediately, my sight, hearing, smell, touch, and thought were all taken hold by the mansion’s stone. The hosts informed me that everything from the floors to the ceiling had been constructed by a variety of rock that could not be found anywhere else outside the sand basin or “on land” as they jested. The color of the rock was that of a deep indigo, as if by some magic the night sky itself had been transformed into stone. Amongst the color, thin veins of jade, scarlet, silver, and more glistened all along the rock, no matter if there was light to shine upon it or not.
However, the most distinguishing factor of the castle was not the mineral of its construction nor the soaring cluster walls that stacked and stretched like ancient coral, but its lack of staircases, including the one I descended now. At the auction, I overheard theories that a great tremor had likely torn them down many years ago. Other voices contested these ideas, citing that no such occurrence was possible without also damaging the rest of the structure which was visibly sound and in remarkable condition. I didn’t care about what happened or didn’t happen either way—erecting new staircases posed no issue. In fact, once the deed was in my hand, I ordered their construction immediately, making sure the most exquisite of blue marble was chosen in order to compliment the rest of the manor beautifully. No, my worries were not in staircases or any other trivial fixture, but that such a magnificent edifice had gone so long concealed in the bowels of the ocean, left to waste away without one to own and refine it.
At last, I reached the final step, but still there was no sand.
The sound of distant humming entered my ears. I recognized the ancient, earthy voice. It was my chief maid, Elma-Grenne. I located the old hag in the center of the foyer, at the top of a ladder which undoubtedly had taken her an entire five minutes to climb. She was dusting the chandelier and all of its five hundred crystals, humming a tune devoid of all rhythm and melody as she did so. What I didn’t expect to find as I looked down from the second-floor balcony was a miniature version of herself dusting the rails and desks. The girl must have been around ten years old. She was quiet and completely focused on her task.
“Good evening, master. This is my granddaughter, Yoli,” Elma said, noticing my confusion at the girl’s presence. “Say hello to the master, Yoli.”
Yoli waved at me briefly, then returned to her dusting. Ah yes. I had nearly forgotten that Elma had asked to bring her granddaughter for the duration of the night shift. I agreed simply because Elma had promised to pay the girl out of her own wages, and more working hands would help ensure a perfectly clean manor.
“Does she know of all of the house rules?” I asked Elma. “I will not have her bring in any—”
“Yes, master. I have ensured that the girl never opens a door or window without permission,” the maid interrupted.
“Good. How is tomorrow’s roast coming?”
“Fine, fine. I have Sanka monitoring it now. Yoli and I were just about to begin adorning the dining hall. All preparations will be completed before the luncheon.”
I nodded in approval, then descended the stairs to the ground floor. Elma simultaneously descended her ladder.
“Come Yoli,” Elma commanded before departing the room.
Yoli dusted over the end of the railing just as my hand was about to pass over it. I stopped next to her, watching her eyes turn to the ornate carvings in the domed ceiling. There were etchings of aquatic life of all kinds: fishes with strong fins and sharp noses, ones with tails like peacocks, sea turtles, jellyfish, anemone, and more. They all danced in a circle around the head of a large trident at the dome’s peak.
“Grandmother says they used to make the world so beautiful,” Yoli said in a tone much colder than I expected from a child. “Did you ever see them?”
I stared up at the ceiling a moment before saying, “Once or twice. But you ought to smile that they’re gone. They were disgusting creatures, and only a few of them were tolerable enough to eat.”
“Yoli!” Elma shouted, having reappeared from the hallway. Our conversation ended there, and the child quickly followed her grandmother to the dining hall.
I turned back to the ceiling, perusing the stone sea life. Their mouths and eyes were filled with shadows that carved an emptiness in my stomach. I noticed the face of a creature I couldn’t recall seeing before. The eyes were just as dark as the others, but the skin looked warm. Alive. It appeared human, with features like that of a young girl.
Suddenly, the eyes turned toward me, causing me to recoil. The being fled from the ceiling, twisting and sliding like a serpent. The creature moved so swiftly, and the shadows upon it were so strong, I could only see that beneath its head of long hair that the lower half of its body possessed a slender, curving shape. As terrified as I was, I attempted to follow the creature as it slithered along the top of another corridor, but was slipped by a puddle of water. When I recovered myself, the creature was gone.
I clutched at my wild hair in disbelief. What was that monster? Had I really seen the creature at all? No. Of course I hadn’t. It was just the night. Disrupted sleep. My restless mind resorting to hallucinogenic tactics due to the dreams it had yet to release. Ugh! If it wasn’t for the sand, the nuisance, the itch, I would still be resting in bed.
Retaking my towel, I cleaned myself off and wiped the water from off the floor. Ridiculous. What use was hiring maids if they couldn’t keep even the floors clean? How had the water appeared at all? After wiping the marble dry, I turned the towel in my hand.
There was no water in the rag. It was covered in sand.
I nearly dropped the towel in disgust. Instead, I ran into the tea lounge across the hall and threw the rag into the fireplace. The flames engulfed it, chewed and licked the fabric black. I wiped my hands over the fire to make sure there was none left on my skin. In front of the mirror above the fireplace, I checked my hair and face for any sand that might have jumped onto me. My scan was cut short by the muffled sound of running water.
The noise seemed to be coming from behind the adjacent wall. I listened a few seconds longer, then walked over to the wall and pressed my ear against the surface. I heard a new sound entwined within the gushing water. It gargled the words: They used to make the world so beautiful.
As if triggered by the voice, the wall receded backwards, revealing itself as a secret door. Where it led, I had not the faintest idea. Neither the auction hosts nor the purveyors of the property had ever disclosed this passage to me. I was sure they didn’t know of its existence either. The sound of the water became clearer, easing my worry and fear. I couldn’t help but want to find the current; the sound alone swaddled me in a motherly embrace. I grabbed a candle, fit a stack of books against the wall-turned-door to keep it from closing again, and ventured into the darkness.
I don’t know how long I walked; the memory sometimes feels as short as a spark or as long as a river. I saw nothing the entire time, left to listen to my shoes clack against the floor as the sound of the water grew louder. Eventually, I reached a wall with a fountain sculpted into the surface. I brought the candle closer, discovering that the fountain was in the shape of a bearded man’s face who wore a tall crown. A stream of water flowed from his open mouth down into a half-circle reservoir. The smell of milk and magnolia filled the air. It was the water.
The scent, sweeter than anything to ever exist on the earth, overtook me completely. I knelt next to the basin and after resting my candle on the floor, scooped handfuls of the water onto my face. It felt so clear, so soft. I couldn’t stop smiling. I knew that whatever sand I had caught was being washed away by the water’s sweetness. My smiling turned to laughter, but then my laughter was echoed.
The water stopped flowing, and I looked up. The stone face was no longer a statue, but a true man. He laughed at me, his amusement raging into an ear-splitting roar, water dripping from his lips. There was something he saw on me that filled his eyes with devilish joy. I looked down into my reflection in the basin, but before I saw it, I felt it. My skin stung hot, as though two branding irons were pressed against either half of my face. In the basin’s reflection, I saw that my cheeks, forehead, and chin were covered in sand. Sand that seared my face in ten thousand tiny thorns.
I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. All I could think to do was to stop the burning, so I violently wiped the sand off. As I did, the bearded man rose, revealing his naked torso, while the lower half of his body remained cloaked in shadow. Tendril bodies emerged from the darkness. They snaked across his body, shining in a gleaming sable. A new face emerged from the shadows next to his. I had seen this face before—the one from the ceiling. And yet, there was a second memory of it even still. This was the face of Elma’s granddaughter, Yoli!
She grinned at me wickedly. Two more faces just like hers soon appeared.
As I knelt frozen in fear, the crowned-man turned his arm backwards and retrieved something from out of the darkness. He held inside his gray hand a hook-toothed harpoon as tall and deathly sharp as himself. Then, in an instant so fast I thought myself thrust forward in time, he impaled his own chest with the weapon. He howled in great pain, but continued on, pulling the blade down his sternum until an eight-inch long gash opened itself to me. The man’s body had trapped a pressure it could hold no longer, and water gushed out of the gash like a broken dam. But there was something wrong with the water. It was muddy, riddled with filth that stank of rotten flesh. I remained on the floor as the liquid pooled around me.
The last of the putrid water carried three objects onto the floor: a conch shell, a large glass bottle, and the skull of some sort of fish. Just like with the fountain, I found myself drawn to the conch shell. It beckoned to me, wanted me to grab it and keep it as my own. From its opening, I heard it whisper my name. I had to have it.
I reached for the shell, but as soon as I touched it, I was met with a searing pain ten times hotter than before. At the same time, all four of the beings cried out. Their voices roared with a hellish mixture of glee, sorrow, and agony.
I turned and ran. Although I left the candle, I spotted the light from the tea lounge and kept on straight. Only once did I glimpse backwards. The three slithering outlines of the she-creatures rushed after me through the air. They were flying. No, swimming! And behind them, the thundering bellow of the crowned man’s laughter.
Just before the she-creatures could clench their nails into my back, I made it out through the secret door, kicked the books, and shut the wall. Panic threw me onto the ground. I expected to hear the creatures pounding at the wall from the other side, but there was only the quiet crackling of the fireplace.
Sweat drenched every inch of my body. These weren’t hallucinations. They couldn’t be. I saw them—their faces standing before me like any other person. Something was amiss in my mansion. An evil had been allowed to enter. An evil that had turned its focus onto tormenting me, but for what possible reason?
Not knowing what else to do, I rushed to the kitchen located in the rear of the castle. The burning still lingered.
The roast simmered gently in its copper pot, smelling of herbs and wine, but Sanka was nowhere to be found. I turned on the faucet, activating the twenty-thousand-gallon reserve tank in the basement below. As I wiped my face clean with the cool water, the tank bubbled under my feet. Then I grabbed a glass, filled it with more of the water, and drank it dry. It was only once I set the glass down that I caught sight of my reflection in the window in front of me. My face was completely clear without the smallest hint that my skin had been burning only a minute ago.
Again, thoughts emerged telling me I had dreamt the entire scenario, but I knew I hadn’t. This wasn’t a trick of the mind. It was a humiliation.
All night I had toiled to ensure the castle was free of sand, but instead I had spent my hours—all of which should have been filled with peaceful sleep—constantly cleaning sand off my own person. I had become the fool in an elaborate scheme to paint me as nothing but a manic, deranged, lonesome man. When I realized this, I burst into laughter and shoved the roast onto the floor. The pork, vegetables, diced potatoes, and rosemary flung across the marble, spilling away from the red juice like seashells abandoned by the tide.
My laughter died, and I filled another glass of water. I drank, becoming the fool again.
I couldn’t swallow. My throat choked on a mouthful of sand. It was in my cup, dripping out of the sink, and shifting inside the reservoir tank. Heave after heave, I gagged out the hot sand. It felt like my stomach was about to push my liver out of my mouth.
With my bile on the floor alongside the roast, I had saved myself from choking to death. I turned my tear-pooled eyes and saw Yoli standing next to the rear exit at the other end of the kitchen. The door was open, and a mound of sand had crept onto the floor.
Of course. It had been her all along!
I darted toward the girl and growled between gritted teeth, “You little wretch.”
She stood there as I grabbed onto her neck. I could feel the tiny cylinder about to burst in my hand. She didn’t push back against my weight, so she fell backwards with myself on top. On the floor, I continued to choke her, spitting and grunting.
“It was you! It was you!!” I shouted. The girl knew of my disdain for the sand and had been mocking me for it, but no longer. I would end her witchery.
The maids ran into the room with Elma at the front. The old hag shouted at me, cursed my name and begged me to stop.
“Let her go! Oh! Let her go!”
No matter how hard they pulled at my arms, I would not cease my strangle on the girl. Could they not see that she wasn’t fighting back? Wasn’t it obvious?
Look! The corner of her lips. She’s smiling!
Suddenly, a quake in the earth shook the entire castle. Pans fell from off their hooks and clanged onto the floor. Dust burst from the walls. We all paused, but even with my hands no longer squeezing the girl’s neck, she remained silent. Why hadn’t she taken a breath?
The lights extinguished. Eyes darted every which way, then the lights came back to life. They flickered on and off until the trembling stopped a moment later, and we were left in the darkness.
. . . rrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhh . . .
A low, terrible moan rose from beneath the earth. When it stopped, black tentacles with suckers big enough to swallow one’s head crept in from every passage. One from the east entrance, two from the west, and another from the exit behind me. They moved in complete silence like smoke, curling all along the floor, walls, and ceiling. I stood up and ran through the northern hall, it being the only passage not yet invaded by the giant limbs. Elma and Sanka huddled around Yoli and safely wrapped her in their arms. The tentacles looked as if they were about to engulf them, but instead, slithered past. I hurried for the foyer.
Beneath the domed ceiling, I turned back. More tentacles emerged from every direction. There were dozens of them, worming their slimy bodies over my castle and directing their crawl towards me. The only place left to flee was through the castle’s entrance—two grand doors made from the night-shade stone—and out into the wasteland of sand. I pulled the doors open with all my strength. As soon as I exited, I was taken hold by the she-creatures.
They dragged me along the sand, hissing and shrieking. I fought their grasp, but to no avail. They towed me far away from the castle, then held me in place. A grueling pain ripped beneath my ribs. One of the creatures had clawed three slashes into my left side. Blood poured from the gashes, reminding me of the red veins in the castle stone. A second she-creature tore three more slashes in my right side. I screamed and flailed.
The third she-creature, the one that looked most like Yoli, slithered herself up my body until we were face-to-face. I watched her pupils take the shape of a snake’s eye, sharp and thin. Sand coated her long hair, down onto her scale-covered torso, but the scales were not smooth. They were jagged and corroded, similar to the castle rock, but without life. Past her waist, she had no legs. The stone-rugged scales collected into a long, black fish tail.
She hissed, spewing saliva onto my face, then clutched her hands around my neck. But she did not choke. No. Instead, the she-creature clawed my neck, slicing open three more gashes on either side of my throat. She did it slowly, tearing through my flesh like a butter knife through rare meat. I coughed up blood, unable to scream.
Strangely, I didn’t lose consciousness. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of suffocation. The air. I couldn’t breathe the air! The sand beneath me began to open, and the she-creatures departed. My body sank into the ground as three of the black tentacles emerged. They wrapped around my entire frame, leaving only my eyes uncovered. I watched as they pulled me below, down into the utter blackness of the endless sand.
****
Since my sinking into the depths of the earth, I have lost all sense of time. I am surrounded by darkness no matter where I go. My lungs are filled with sand, and I am forced to breathe through the gashes in my sides and in my neck. Sand enters through them every second, running its prickling teeth not only on my outer surface, but inside my flesh and through every orifice. It is still as hot as it was from the fountain, leaving my skin encrusted in blisters and scabs that I cannot see, but always feel. Every now and then, I am startled by the distant moan of the black tentacles. I feel the sand shift and know it has caught my scent once again. I push my arms and legs in a bastardly swim, fleeing from the drum of the crowned man’s laughter. I am always swimming, always burning—never to escape the granules, the nuisance, the hell.
Sam Villa (he/him) is a Mexican-American Chicago native who recently completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Utah studying film and writing. He is also a member of the upcoming chapbook, Kraken Weather Micro Press based out of the University of Utah. His creative focus revolves around poetry, short-stories, and fiction.
Detritivores
by H.V. Patterson
Content Warning: Implied Child Murder
First appeared in Diet Milk Magazine
No one ever asks the termites,
but they know.
Workers feast on cellulose, devouring walls and foundations,
digesting flaking pieces of ghosts.
They could tell you:
How the baby wouldn’t stop screaming,
How the cat stared at the dark mouth of the basement
waiting for what lurked there to show its claws,
How the mother sat alone, subsumed in the ache of her bones,
her reflection in the cloudy mirror
a warbling watercolor of pain and dread.
The termites undermine the past with lacerating jaws,
striving towards a future which will never come,
locked in the hungry room of the present.
They were there:
When the baby stopped screaming
fear a physical weight on tiny lungs,
When the cat fled the basement’s shuddering yawn,
When the mother rose, marionetted by grief,
the slender bones of her radius and ulna gliding over each other,
pas de deux reminder of her abandoned pointe shoes,
her dusty dreams
When she realized
there was only the house enclosing her,
the present’s terrible teeth
biting each delicate rung of her spine.
The mother calls the cat: it will not come
she calls her sister, her ex-husband, her dead mother
no one answers.
She calls out to God,
but he has cast his eyes from her mewling soul
and given his favor to the humble termites.
She walks upstairs
steady and tall like grandmother taught.
She wails
a sound of crickets and cicada wings, the screaming death of summer
her long, slender fingers collapse past and present, strangle off the future.
Later:
the abandoned house sags and collapses
neighborhood children see ghosts reflected in the feral cat’s eyes
termites feast on wood pungent with old blood
H.V. Patterson (she/her) is a speculative poet, fiction writer, and playwright living in Oklahoma. Poetry credits include ETTT, Star*Line, Haven Speculative, Small Wonders and anthologies from Sliced Up Press, Angry Gable Press, and Black Spot Books. Her poem "Mother; Microbes" was selected for the inaugural Brave New Weird anthology from Tenebrous Press. She’s a cofounder of Horns and Rattles Press, and you can find her on X: @ScaryShelley and Instagram: @hvpattersonwriter or at hvpatterson.com
Antebellum Leaves
by Zander Lyvers
I would be the first to admit that Ed was a genius, though most who knew him reckoned that he had snakes in his head. One could almost mistake him for a renaissance man based on his CV, an exhaustive resume that spanned from a truncated military career to his current vocation as a man of letters. Miserable and misunderstood, profound and prolific, he drained his madness through the black tip of his quill, the prose splashing onto the page like humors pouring out of the gravest of wounds.
Whether north or south of the Mason-Dixon, Ed always found himself pacing parallel to the shoreline, as if deeply entrenched in a long conversation with an equally matched colleague. On one December evening I joined him. The tide was so low you would have thought we were in the middle of Arabia, with the distant undulating surf resembling a mirage. The detritus of sea creatures were strewn across the beach, decaying and baking in the warm southern sun. Vulturous seagulls dove down to peck at the wounded soldiers on the beachhead, cracking open shells and snapping joints to steal away a few morsels of sustenance.
Ever the naturalist, Ed was eager to dissect this cabinet of curiosities that had been laid bare by the laws of nature. Flipping over jellyfish and scrutinizing disembodied crab claws with a stick of driftwood, he would pause and look up at me with a child-like smirk as he probed and prodded the demons under the sea. I’d continue to walk closer to the water, eventually coming to the realization that I was alone. Turning my back to find my suitor on bended knee, jotting a few strokes in his notebook. Always scribbling.
“Am I really the subject from which you draw inspiration? Or is it the grotesque that ignites your passions?”
“What is the sublime without the grotesque?” He responded, not looking up from the spurts of his shorthand.
“Spare me the cliché, it’s beneath you.” (I was much better suited to be his editor than his muse.)
“You are my lighthouse in the fog, a beacon—”
“More clichés! And don’t tell me I am your lighthouse. Everyone knows it’s darkness you gravitate towards.”
Ed wielded his pen like a shovel, breaking new ground as he excavated dirt and filth, while all I ever got were saccharine platitudes. Deliciously entertaining tales were served to an adoring public; however, I was expected to settle for crumbs.
But it was by no means unwelcome. Receiving his blandishments was pleasant for a time, letting his doting words crash against me like waves in the shallows. What joy it was to have the saltiness of his syllables linger on my lips. Yet, the undertow of his melancholy persisted, biding its time below the surface, a maelstrom ready to swallow me up as the clouds rolled in.
He longed for companionship but was unable to engage in the tête-à-tête that his characters pursued. He contained multitudes, as evidenced by his ability to carry on a dialogue with himself while I waited in the wings, covetous of the conversation from which I was all but excluded. Ed attempted to compensate for his lack of ability to confer—he would call me his muse and I would call bullshit. My Calliope. I love you. These words brought diminishing returns once squeezed of all of their meaning, meanwhile a whole swath of his lexicon collected dust.
Money and inspiration are kindred currencies to writers—they either had it or they didn’t. Lack of money caused short-term panic, whereas lack of inspiration led him to sink like a cinder block into existential dread. The marketplace of ideas was always vacillating between bull and bear for Ed. When he wrote, he wrote. When he didn’t, he drank. When he drank, I took to the shore—walking on seashells being infinitely more tolerable than walking on eggshells. Blast it I can’t read my writing, he’d bark. I’d light a candle. Damn it, now it’s too bright in here! If I’d wanted it to be summer solstice I would have asked you to—
Oh but in truth he smothered me then and he smothers me now. His mood swings were insufferable, attributable to his chronic neurasthenia, perhaps, if not just garden-variety lunacy. In the end, it wasn’t so much that I was taken by the chill of the wind; rather, it was the fact that he sucked all of the oxygen out of the room, and in order to stay within the eye of the storm I temporarily succeeded at feigning an agreeable nature—a smile plastered across my face like wallpaper, all the while forgetting to breathe in the process.
And now I am gone, and he cannot string a single sentence together. It kills me to admit that maybe he was right about my station the whole time.
Ever since I was laid to rest, Ed has made his home past cemetery gates, lying in repose above my tomb, adorned in layers of late-autumn leaves. Was he mourning the extinguishing of his flame, or the loss of his spark?
I am unburdened by the worldly, while Ed stays bound to the land like a serf, a Promethean curse of his own design. If I could, I would whisper through the rock and dirt, my voice carrying the keys to his manumission. Go on, Edgar. Write. Let me be your lighthouse, your divine afflatus, your cliché, in our kingdom by the sea.
His body twitches, wet and shivering alongside the frozen dew atop the grass. Eyelids opening to see the spindly branches of crape myrtles approaching winter, hanging above his head like a crown of thorns, defilading him from the angels in Heaven above.
He shoots up, body angled forward like a sundial—no longer afraid, no longer trembling, at the doorstep of infinite resignation.
He reaches into the breast pocket of his undersized peacoat, arming and readying himself for the kill. A murmur escapes, soars and crash lands on the page—in this kingdom by the sea.
Zander Lyvers is originally from Columbia, South Carolina, but he currently lives in Madrid, where he teaches Social Studies. His primary inspirations are George Saunders, Eleanor Catton, and Paul Beatty. He has recently published stories in Deal Jam Magazine and Dionysian Public Library. Zander published his debut novel, Last Great American Whale, in 2021.
SALOME
After Salome by Henry Ossawa Tanner
by Jennifer Jantzen
Content Warning: Allusions to Sexual Abuse/Assault
I am your God.
Be not a prude
and follow me.
Remember these paths?
Trace the walls with your hand
so you’ll know them in the dark.
There’s a step here
to watch out for. Once
your uncle lifted you high
and promised
to gobble you up.
The hallway expands
into light and shouts— Salome,
come out here! Come, and stretch
that beautiful stomach.
There’s dark blue stains
in your underwear, but
you know that can’t be right.
Find wonder in these sinewed walls.
Tease the shaft through which
children crawl. Lean forward
so that tunic slips from your breast:
it’s important to deny
your first instinct.
Your stepfather has come to watch.
Beside your mother, he watches
the fabric drip down like it did
that night and this night and that night before.
He smiles and pats his bouncing knee
as if to beckon a dog.
An uncle opens a darkened door.
Remember his scent? For now,
shift and shimmer in candlelight.
Bounced up and down,
your body turns bauble.
Remember that I am not lost.
Now spin. Find wonder.
Tease. And crawl. And beg—
ignore that scent again.
He’s always close, but
so am I, so you’re never alone,
I promise. Salome—
it’s your God. Salome—
stick the landing. Salome—
beg mercy, and tell me how much
you love it.
You are spinning
and it’s harder than ever
to know where your body ends
and the world begins. Salome—
they know, they know you’ve grown older,
but don’t give up—reel, race, unspool
until you are only
skin and suffering—
the crowd screams. Yes, Salome.
Father’s so proud.
Jennifer Jantzen (she/her) is a writer and educational professional based in Washington, DC. Her poetry has appeared in The Disappointed Housewife, Sublunary Review, and Alexandria Quarterly. When not working, she dreams of dogs and performs with her punk band, Girls on Toast. You can find her work @stone.fruuit on Instagram.
Meandering
by Patrick McEvoy & James Killian
Patrick McEvoy has had illustrated stories appear in Apricity Press, Glint, Old Pal, Best of Penumbric Vol. 6, Murder Park After Dark Vol. 3 and on Slippery Elm's website, among others. "Um" has been published by Metastellar. In addition, short plays he wrote were chosen to be performed at various festivals in NYC, including Chain Theatre's 2023 Winter Festival and self-produced Eclectica. In 2024, "The Dream People" appeared online and in public for Equity Library. The short play "Retrieval" was also performed by Bunbury Players. Photography has also been exhibited with Exhibizone: Scenic, Artistonish, HMVC, and literary journals
James Killian is an artist from Co. Westmeath, Ireland. He graduated
from IADT with a First Class Honours in Art in 2019. His illustrations are
created using the traditional medium of woodcut printing, pen and
ink. His professional work can be seen in Folktales of Fermanagh: Dark
Stories From Across The County, Turning Roads: Irish Folklore Stories,
Bump: A Horror Anthology and I Like Robots; A Chidrawgo Magazine
Graphic Anthology. He currently resides in Boher, Co. Westmeath.
Grandfather's Pocket Watch
by Katie McCall
The name “Hollygreen” called forth thoughts of yuletide and merriment, yet Cousin Elizabeth’s ancestral home had been bestowed with an entirely inappropriate name, due it’s sombre, uninviting appearance; perhaps, if Joseph shared this astute observation with her on a brighter and altogether more bearable afternoon, he might have succeeded in eliciting a smile from his walking companion. However, on the October day in question, her pinched, drawn features prevented him from making such a remark; an untimely complaint about the building’s façade ran the risk of pushing her into an even fouler temper.
“At least it only rained for the last half of the walk,” he ventured, politely averting his eyes from the sopping curls plastered across the pale dome of her forehead. “Only another mile or two to go, and then we’ll be back!” Elizabeth responded with a look that matched their gloomy surroundings in measures of misery.
Known as a man of eccentric habits and a keen historian, it should have come as no surprise to Elizabeth Dunn to discover that her reluctant bi-annual visit to Scrawbury had presented itself as something of an academic opportunity for her older cousin, Joseph. He had accepted the invitation to accompany her on the arduous journey to Hollygreen House with surprising zeal—a delayed omnibus, two trains and a lift in the back of a kindly trader’s wagon, no less! Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, Scrawbury Abbey (which stood but a few miles away) had in fact been selected as the subject of Joseph’s impending history dissertation.
‘Scrawbury Abbey is one of the few historic landmarks in the region that has so far been overlooked as the subject for published research,’ Joseph’s lecturer had explained to him. ‘Quite simply, no other academics have ever stayed there long enough to write about the place.’
With that in mind, Joseph ascertained that, if he was to be the first to complete such a project, his dissertation would attain high marks for originality.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth retained the notion that her cousin was a man of infinite patience, with a willingness to escort her on tiresome excursions to visit their ageing relatives. Her mother regularly wrote, encouraging her daughter to stick fast to this ritual of cross-country visits to her ailing uncle’s residence, no matter how inconvenient the excursions may seem at the time. On the surface of it, Mrs Dunn’s letters emphasised her daughter’s responsibility as a dutiful niece yet, in fact, the notable current of urgency running through their correspondence had more to do with her fear that Colonel Dunn might choke on a lamb chop at any given moment, leaving his fortune and silverware to fall into the hands of his untrustworthy house staff. And so, the two cousins had returned to Hollygreen House to visit once again.
Cheerless torrents of autumn rain began to fall the moment that the pair reached the crest of Scrawbury Tor, and the return to Hollygreen House had been, at best, a dreary trudge across darkening moorland. Finally, they reached the front porch and gave a sigh of relief as Mrs Riding, Head of Service, flung open the door.
‘You are both drenched! To think of Miss Elizabeth tramping around out there in the rain! We were wondering where you were; we were so worried. It’ll be getting dark before long. There are blankets and dry clothing ready for you inside the house.’
Without a moment’s delay, Elizabeth was gratefully received into the warm folds of the house. It was only then that, after checking his pockets to ensure that his maps and research notes remained in their rightful place, Joseph became quite still.
‘My grandfather’s pocket watch is not here. Where is it? Elizabeth, please check your bag. I cannot seem to find it,’ he said.
An inordinate deal of scrabbling and worrisome muttering ensued, after which it was decided that the pocket watch was nowhere to be seen.
‘But you took your watch out of your pocket at the top of Scrawbury Tor, didn’t you? When you last had it, we were up at the abbey. I thought that you put it back into your coat pocket. I despair, Joseph. You would lose your head if it weren’t attached,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Curses! You’re right; that’s where it remains. I placed it down onto the scrag when I was note-making and must have forgotten to pick it up again.’ Joseph permitted Elizabeth a moment of satisfaction before saying: ‘Well, that is settled then. Back to the abbey I go.’
‘No, we can’t be having that!’ Mrs Riding burst. ‘Colonel Dunn would have me strung up if he discovered that I’d allowed you near the abbey after nightfall.’ The very mention of nocturnal wanderings caused a tendon beneath her jaw to spring into prominence, where it remained as taut as a rope.
‘I’m afraid that my grandfather’s watch is a family heirloom, Mrs Riding. I must go back to retrieve it. Be so kind as to fetch me a lamp,’ Joseph delivered this utterance with unexpected authority, considering his habitually quiet disposition. Besides, the hour drew close to six o’clock and it absolutely was certain that Colonel Dunn would have made good work of the bottle cabinet by this point in the evening, as was his daily custom. The opportunity to postpone yet another tiresome encounter with the cantankerous old fellow held considerable appeal, even if it did mean trudging across dark moorland in torrential rain.
‘Sir, I insist that you come into the house. It is dangerous to wander any fell at night, let alone Scrawbury. You mustn’t set off into the darkness to go looking for it, especially if you left it up at the abbey,’ Mrs Riding veered towards an argumentative tone, but Joseph remained stoic.
‘And relinquish it to any passing crook? I think not. Leaving my grandfather’s possession out there overnight is out of the question.’
‘There won’t be a single living soul out there, sir. You’ll be quite alright if you go back in the morning to collect your timepiece once the sun has risen. It’ll still be there; I promise you that.’ By now, Mrs Riding’s voice had risen an octave. Her pale eyes shifted to the moorland beyond the garden wall, roving to and fro across the fells stretching out into the distance.
‘Now see here, Mrs Riding. The longer we stand here quarrelling about it, the closer we draw to nightfall,’ he said, setting his mouth in a terse line. ‘I understand that a certain degree of risk presents itself when walking in the evening. I shouldn’t like to tumble over onto my ankle in the darkness or take a wrong turn and slip into a marsh, but that can be avoided if I am provided with a lamp. I have a map, and I have accompanied my father on a great many hiking expeditions to the Alps and the Scottish Highlands. Scrawbury Tor is by no means the most challenging excursion upon which I have embarked. And anyhow, the rain is now beginning to subside.’
It was at this moment that the housekeeper proceeded sniff away tears; a diversion from her usual dour-faced countenance that succeeded in rendering Joseph speechless.
‘That’s quite enough of this nonsense! Should you fail to retrieve the watch, I shall never hear the end of it from your father, Joseph, so I shall fetch the lamp for you myself!’ Elizabeth snapped, taking everyone by surprise, before she turned on her heel and disappeared into the house.
Within a matter of moments, the lamp in question had been deposited into Joseph’s hand. He thought it sensible to gain as much ground as possible away from the front door of the house whilst Mrs Riding was still gathering her wits. It wasn’t until he reached the far side of the garden gate that he heard a shout.
‘Mr Crabtree, if you should hear anything out there, do not look behind you! Turn around and come straight back to the house,’ Mrs Riding called after him.
With that, Elizabeth bundled the fretful woman back into the house and firmly closed the door. If Joseph was set upon retrieving the watch with such determination, she could at least see to it that a roaring fire and hot mug of tea awaited him once he returned.
‘No wonder Mrs Riding’s nerves are frayed when she runs here and there all day long, waiting hand and foot on the insufferable Colonel Dunn,’ Joseph mumbled to nobody in particular, as he strode back towards the sheep track with a purposeful look about him. After her many decades of service at Hollygreen House with only the Colonel for company, it’s no wonder Mrs Riding’s mind has taken leave of reason, polluted by an illogical fear of will-o’-the-wisps, and other such nonsense, he thought, with a tug of sympathy for the poor woman.
The route up to Scrawbury Abbey was nothing but an old trail used by livestock and occasional wanderers, passing through sparse heathland, before the potholed path climbed up past the ragged cliff faces of Scrawbury Tor. Without Cousin Elizabeth to slow him down, Joseph now made swift progress across the expanse of open land, with only a scattering of sheep for company who veered away from him, bleating in distress as if it were their first encounter with a man of any description.
A bank of slate coloured cloud descended once again and a steady patter of rain began to drum against Joseph’s overcoat, like fingers tapping against a windowpane. Before long the ground began to rise and his ascent began, stepping over gorse bushes and pausing every now and then to prise tangled thorns and burrs from his trouser leg. Soon his cumbersome overcoat was heavy and sodden with damp, hindering his progress. Mrs Riding might as well have sewn leaden weights into my hem, came the acrid thought. Aside from crude sproutings of hemlock and ragwort, the mountainside stood bare and empty; the distant shapes of ewes and lambs had long since faded into the fog at the foot of the slope, for it was perilously steep and the rocks underfoot loose; even the livestock knew better than to climb the north face of the crags. The abandoned abbey’s crumbling walls were hidden from view, shrouded by the dark sluices of rain and cloud that billowed to and fro in every direction.
For a moment, Joseph started to worry that he had lost his way, and somehow taken a wrong turn. Taking care not to let the rain soak it, he pulled the map from his pocket and held the lamp up so that he might squint at it. It was then that the desolate silhouette of the ruined abbey emerged from the mist above, like the vast hull of a stranded vessel. Joseph gave a sigh of relief. Perhaps it wasn’t quite so far after all. If his estimations carried any degree of accuracy, then he was set to reach the top in half an hour or so. His pocket watch would be waiting for him exactly where he left it, on top of the one of the fallen pieces of masonry where the entrance to the abbey once stood. It was the very same spot where he and Elizabeth had paused earlier on in the afternoon so that he could take out his jotter to scribble notes and impressions of the place.
‘It’s a small wonder that a single stone should remain standing after centuries of winter storms,’ Elizabeth had said. “If it wasn’t such a desolate and inhospitable place then I would have suggested that we bring a hamper, but it hardly strikes me as the most agreeable spot to take our luncheon. What’s more, there’s a funny smell about this place, as if something has gone off. It’s rotten and it makes me feel rather sick. I don’t like it.”
She had clamped her handkerchief over her nose in a theatrical show of disdain as they explored the abbey that afternoon. However, Joseph paid her little attention, for his cousin was always prone to exaggeration; he had other things to focus on, such as his research notes. Her sullen observations were only stemmed once the pair set off back towards Hollygreen House; a journey in the daylight which now seemed to belong to a different age.
On the evening in question, a flurry of shingle slipped from beneath Joseph’s feet, and he pitched to one side. With a resounding crash, the lamp fell from his hands and lay shattered on the surrounding rocks, extinguished in an instant by the deluge from above. So swift was the descent of panic that Joseph found himself lurching to his feet and turning back without a second thought. Sending pebbles and soil scattering, he plunged and slipped several paces down the mountainside before jarring to a halt. The embarrassment of it— he had bolted like a frightened colt! Returning to Hollygreen House without his pocket watch was a shameful thought. How on earth would he explain it to Elizabeth? And all because of a broken lamp! The notion of another arduous evening in the company of the chinless, impudent Colonel was enough to repel him from the house. I shall just have to muddle through and retrieve the blasted pocket watch before the light fades any further, he thought wanly, before setting off uphill for the second time.
Once or twice, he cast a glance over his shoulder. The relentless torrents of rain distorted the outlines of faraway gorse bushes scattered here and there across the heath, their aberrant shadows shifting out of view as the downpour continued. As they disappeared once again in a swell of darkened mist, an unpleasant impression rose in Joseph’s mind. Suppose that the crooked shapes had moved further uphill? The shuddersome thought of things crawling forth over the moor towards the rain-soaked mosses of the abbey was almost too much to bear. A twist of fear took root in the pit of his stomach.
‘My eyes simply require time to adjust to the fading light, that’s all it is,’ he said with crackle of defiance. For several long moments he stood and surveyed the fell below, but it remained still and watchful like an impassive face. Nought else moved through the gloom until a cascade of loose scree tumbled past him, dislodged by some unseen passing creature up ahead. It crashed and scattered on the cliff side. Joseph stood for a moment, stared in bafflement at the cliff tops above and waited; no further stirrings occurred. Concluding that the livestock guilty of eliciting the disturbance must have passed out of sight into the murk beyond, he continued to pick his way along the narrow pathway. He hurried onwards, leaning against the battering rain and pulling his collar up high, for he had no good reason to continue gazing out onto the surrounding wilderness. This relentless uphill march presented an opportunity to retrieve some rational thought, for an unyielding impression had begun to take root in his mind, that whispering voices could be heard from above.
‘It’s nothing but the wretched sound of rain rushing down onto the rocks,’ he said aloud, in a tone as cheerful as he was able to muster. ‘And whilst it may be cold and damp out here, it’s a welcome relief to being confined to the Colonel’s stuffy parlour, inhaling his infernal clouds of pipe smoke.’
The patter of the rain abated, leaving an oppressive soundlessness that closed in around his solitary form. Except for the abbey atop the cliffs, he was entirely alone. The plaintive calls of curlews and moorhens had long since faded away to silence and an expectant hush had fallen on the surrounding fell, broken only by the sound of the mud sucking at the heels of his boots. He averted his eyes from the crooked shapes of weather-beaten gravestones surrounding the abbey; now was not the time to be thinking of dead things, rotting beneath the soil.
As if the unseen inhabitants of the moor were conspiring to attenuate his nerves, a boggle-eyed pheasant suddenly burst out from beneath a nearby thicket, then fluttered away into the roiling masses of mist, squawking a warning to its unseen fellows dwelling in the undergrowth. This unexpected flurry of movement drew an exclamation of surprise from Joseph, who leapt backwards in a startled tangle of limbs to avoid the flapping of the assailant’s tawny wings. If only he had brought one of Colonel Dunn’s gun dogs along for company. It would have done very nicely to have one of the old hounds snuffling about, to keep me company on this lonely journey, he thought, very nicely indeed. Elizabeth had been quite right in saying that the place emitted a smell of mildew and decay; it caused Joseph to pull his shirt over his nose. As he approached the entrance to the abandoned abbey, the sickening stench of rot grew stronger.
He was within twenty paces when the discordant pealing of bells interrupted the silence on the moor. The bell tower’s cacophonous clamour called out across empty the mountainside, echoing over the darkening clifftops like the bellow of a banshee. Cold dread seized Joseph’s limbs as he looked up towards the abbey, aghast. Who would think to wander out to the bell tower on such a night? Was that a movement up there in the gloom? Perhaps a wiser man would have taken heed of Mrs Riding’s warning, for she was, in truth, a rational woman who had no reason to indulge in folly and unnecessary talk of foul, ungodly things.
There was something up ahead. It was waiting, there in the shadows. It came lurching through the darkness with such swiftness that Joseph scarcely had time to cry aloud before it was nearly upon him. He tried to rush away from it, all consideration for the retrieval of the pocket watch forgotten, but with the loose scree underfoot and his rain-sodden overcoat weighing him down, he lost his footing. As the ground rushed up to meet him, an overpowering stench of something foul filled his nose. Mouldering meat.
Out in the rain, his grandfather’s pocket watch remained atop the fallen masonry, until the hunt for Joseph led Elizabeth and the search party up to the ruined abbey, when her eyes fell upon its burnished surface at daybreak; the earliest hour at which any living creature would be advised to venture out to the blackened, wind-swept cliffs of Scrawbury Abbey.
THE END
Katie McCall grew up in the North of England, where the haunted, cobbled streets inspired a fascination with the supernatural. She writes uncanny, gothic fiction and her short stories have been published in Short Beasts, Flash Fiction North, Supernatural Tales, DarkWinter Lit, Black Lily, The Cackling Kettle and Ghostlight. Her first full-length ghost story is out on submission, and she has just finished writing her second, a folk horror tale. Follow her on Instagram or Threads for further spooky musings @katiemccall_author
Flesh's Whine of Fabric
by Harrison Fisher
stapled to
the edges
of revelation.
Lugosi as
Dr. Richard Vollin
in The Raven (1935):
“I tear torture
out of myself
by torturing you.”
Open Plague City
by Harrison Fisher
Elephantine,
eglantine-embroidered
drapes (“I wound to heal”)
erupt in high billingsgate.
The skirts-up lady is foiled,
suddenly bereaved
by her lover’s skewering,
run through rear-wise on the spot
by the home’s virtuous
uprooter of perfidy,
the stealth-hubby flushed
from the flowered weave.
He yawps in triumph
for meat and wine.
In the large open kitchen,
a scullery maid tweaks
the mechanical quirk
of an unspeaned piglet
that huffs while being
stuffed with dates.
The Dialectic
by Harrison Fisher
Imagine a violent death so unexpectedly flamboyant the earth
and the heavens open right away, blaring their opposed intents to claim
the deceased as their own in booming and screeching fusillades of
calumnies and rebuttals.
Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems since 1977, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. In 2024, he had new work in BlazeVOX, Book XI, Clade Song, dadakuku, MIDLVLMAG, Misfitmagazine, Rundelania, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Transom. Fisher is retired from public service and living in upstate New York.
After She Makes A Pact With The Dark Goddess
by Allison Wall
That night, she gets into the shower. She stands in the porcelain tub, hot water pouring down like rain, and within her, the forecasted warm descent. Oncoming bloodfall. Crimson splash of her body’s blood, shocking, against the white. She hasn’t done this before, but she has a deep knowing. He will die tonight.
Whichever “he” you thought of first. Whichever “he” the world needs the least. Whichever “he” hurts the most people at once. Whichever “he” hurt you the most. That guy. You know who I mean.
She watches each blood clot drop from her body. They land on their feet, nimble as cats, and run down the drain into the pipes. From there, they know where to go. These Un-Children, these splinters of the home she denies the human children she might have borne, which she will not, and now cannot, bear. It is no hardship at all, to give up something she does not want for the Dark Goddess’s blessing. The sunless side of the moon, always facing the black infinity of space, radiating dimly in her mind. These Un-Children, running, leaving bloody footprints behind them. That is how you trick Her into blessing you: make Her think it is a burden (to be free), a loss (to never sacrifice).
Her Un-Children reach their destination. She feels them crawling up through another drain, swimming through a bathtub sea, wavelets breaking against the mountains of his body. They scale him, swarming, packing themselves dense and thick into his mouth, his throat, his nostrils. It takes a lot of them, a lot of clots, but her period has always been like that. He thrashes. Claws at his face. If he dislodges any, they leap right back in. Her Un-Children coagulate.
To the men who are alarmed watching him choke and gag on menstrual blood, I offer some advice. Make no enemies among women. Right the wrongs of your fathers. If you are this kind of man, you have no need to fear.
He thought he was above everyone, the people he deceived, assaulted, used, mocked, belittled, robbed, murdered, but he needs clear airways, needs air, just like them. Now those two things, those crucial two things, he does not have. And when he stops needing them, stops needing anything ever again, she calls her Un-Children home. They take all traces, all DNA, pack it up neat like a paper bag school lunch—sandwich, chips, apple, cookie—and come running back. She crouches to greet them, gathers them in her hands. She is so proud. They are so happy. She eats them, one by one, and they are so glad to be home.
She turns off the water. Gets out of the tub. Until tomorrow. Of course there will be a tomorrow. Eliminating one man isn’t enough. It took a lot more to break everything that’s broken, to keep it that way. She has a list.
It’s the same list you have, dear. Don’t worry. All will be well.
The Dark Goddess is hungry, and so is she. She will take them, one by one, night by night, cycle by cycle, until she is satisfied, or the world is healed. Whichever comes first.
END
Allison Wall (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent writer whose work explores deconstruction, self-discovery, and belonging. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Her short fiction has appeared in Electric Spec, Metaphorosis Magazine, and NonBinary Review, among others. Connect with Allison on her website, allison-wall.com, or social media @awritingwall.
After
by Ayden Massey
Content Warning: Violence
After: I disarmed my memory.
Left the violent ritual of language in the basin
to rust. My moth brain bashes itself
into the buzzing white specter
looming over my father's garage. Called this Ra.
Branded my grief into our small four-legged animal and beat it
too weak to return. I waited
for a more able creature
to sally its injuries over hot spit.
I know I am strong because I tell myself
I do not blame the mouths of hungry things —
the hand that whipped across my cheek
like a deity, quick as a burn. My father taught me
to wield a knife even after the beast has died.
Caulk the space between
my ribs and keep my name closer than air.
I know this renders my holiness improbable,
but every monster is only cursed
by the absence of space.
A too-close room is ironic at best,
so with my blade I slice and slice.
Freeing my lungs of the smoke from his still-running car,
I spread my slain chest to the sun
like a diary.
Climb to the warm spot on the garage roof and
Let the hungriest parts of my belly
bleach as I soar.
Ayden (they/them) is a queer poet and filmmaker. A summa cum laude graduate of Chapel Hill, Ayden received a dual BA in English and Gender Studies. They have also accrued varying academic accolades, visual awards, and publications, including features in Hawai'i Pacific Review, Idiosyncrazy Magazine and a mention in the NYT. Their debut chapbook, American Nesting Doll, is forthcoming with Main Street Rag in 2025.
White Flower Elegy
by Teresa Chen
Fifteen minutes after school ends, I stay behind to mop the floors. I straighten the lines of desks and stretch to erase the blackboard, reduce formulas and English vocabulary to chalk dust floating through afternoon light. The exam is coming up, so I’m careful not to topple the towers of books at everyone’s spots. And I notice that your flowers are beginning to wilt, so I take the bouquet I bought this morning and refill your vase. Your desk is the only empty post, save for that glass vase, and light glances off its laminated surface when we’re studying sometimes. But look, look at the flowers I got you—white chrysanthemums, because I think I love you, and white carnations, because I can never feel true remorse.
The concrete courtyard downstairs doesn’t get much sun now that it’s late afternoon. When I lose focus during class, I look out over the yard and wonder if the school was intentionally designed this way. Our high school is a single building in U-shape, like a cupped palm with the courtyard in its hold. It’s more a broken panopticon; our cramped classrooms thrum with an anxious rhythm, a routine rhythm of frantic pens and mumbled recitations, barreling forward so recklessly and awfully. We’re on a speeding train that's ripped past all its stops, stealing away to a destination that grows more distant by the minute. But none of that was news to you.
Truth be told, our lives are offensively unchanged. Every once in a while, a teacher will pull me into a stairwell and ask how I’m doing. They’re either asking about my wrist or, the ones who don’t know any better, about you. I think I’ve designed the perfect response: something soft-spoken and grateful but nonchalant enough to suggest that I’ve moved on, something transactional that receives their concern and recompenses with reassurance before I drift away. Because it’s true, I’m doing alright. My wrist is healing nicely, surgery fixed the compound fracture. And I hardly even knew you.
Most teachers I know seem to have forgotten that we’ve always left flowers at your desk, the same clinically white flowers. People started noticing you last September, so we must have been doing it for at least six months—it feels ironic to realize that you were just about to scrape past school unobserved, ironic in a terrible, Greek tragedy sort of way. Because of course, right? A room full of restless third-years who didn’t know how to relieve their perennial frustration. No way you were leaving unscathed.
All those years ago, when you first transferred, you took the window seat right next to me. Maybe you looked for comfort in me, I can’t say. But I saw you wore a red string bracelet around your knobby wrist, and it matched my own. And I know it’s some Chinese superstition, that red invites luck and wards off evil, but when I was especially bored and delusional, the thread bracelets were instead strings of our fate, binding our pulses and blood.
Did it surprise you, that I let everything happen? The flowers were the most bearable part, the white funeral bouquets with the mocking manila paper condolences. The first time they left them for you, I was just waking up from a nap at my desk and saw your reaction. You picked up the card, took too long to read a few scrawled words. Your eyes dreaded for a moment, then became horribly passive, hollowed and glassy when you thumbed the white flowers. The same carnations, before and after. I don’t think the adults ever realized, or maybe they didn’t want to—who leaves death flowers for someone who hadn’t died?
The flowers are almost a rite of passage, a formality to prelude the gauntlet they prepared. And I don’t think they care to be inventive. They’re only capable of raw, unsophisticated violence that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. (Now that I think of it, the flowers were the only artistic part.) Every few months on the dot, a new target shows up to class late, blank eyes that echo like stony voids. Band-aids under uniform sleeves, skin scrubbed red and blistering when permanent marker will always stain. Uneven hair, rips in clothes. Exhausted, brittle voices, slowly replaced by silence. Bright red dulling into rust, into rotten black. I’ve seen it all, I hope. A lot can happen in a concrete courtyard that gets no sun.
I never explained myself to you, but I’ll try now. Twice in my life, I’ve felt pain that I can’t remember because I refuse to recreate the feeling, even in memory. The first was on the eve of Lunar New Year’s, eleven years ago. Loud noises and sudden movements give me headaches, so I always stay inside during the fireworks. I really can’t say where it came from. Fifteen to midnight, slumped over at the dining table and completely still. The migraine was parasitic, it sapped any energy I had. A slow, serpentine intrusion: a nebulous pressure in the dead center of my head, and then a routine throb, and then a violent burning biting writhing awful agony with its own heartbeat that reverberated everywhere under my skin, that made me fight to stay awake but wrenched away any hint of sleep. I wished more than anything that I didn’t have to contain it, I wished I could throw up, I wished I could bleed, bleed gallons from my core, anything to let some of it out. Oh, I can’t describe to you how scared I was. It was all deafening and simultaneously static, blinding and bottomless pitch-black.
I don’t think my family knew. Through a thick fog, I saw Dad in the kitchen, Mom following behind him, the anxiety of seeing them together an unwilling reflex. For the first time, I closed my eyes. I think everything has its saturation point, a breaking point, where water boils and boils and marinates in its own red-hot rage before it releases into formless vapor, drifts toward an uncertain sky. I let the pain drink me in and sink me into silence at last, wait for release. I let it bite into, through me and overwhelm the gentler ache of old sores, the phantom of breaking glasses and long cries in the bathroom lingering behind my ear. And all night long, I clenched my fists until glittery red crescents branded my palms, waited for the venom pooling in my stomach to boil bright red and turn to poison instead. And all I could want was quiet.
When I woke up later, I was dizzy and strangely light, hollow—like a defect, like an exhausted abyss, like life disqualified from body—and I noticed the red thread bracelet Mom hastily knotted around my wrist, before she left for good. As far as I can remember, it all started then, and this is not an excuse but at least one of us owed you an explanation.
The second time, you were there. It was that night in the classroom. Was it January? The girls in my dorm sent me down for hot water, and I was on my way back up when I saw our homeroom with its lights still on. Our desks were stacked atop one another against the back wall for the weekend, the teacher’s things gone from her desk. You were there, so small and pale that you almost blended right into the linoleum. When I walked over to you at the center of the waxed floor, your eyes were defiantly shut. Your fever-pink skin gleamed with sweat, angry and red where your arms were burnt. Small round craters outlined in ash, large slant ovals where the flesh scarred and rusted—contraband cigarettes and curling irons, I could tell. A smattering of diluted red next to your hairline and the corners of your lips, which I wiped away with my thumb. With your formal uniform and long hair splayed out around you, you looked like an angel, far too close to the ground.
After all this time, I think I’ve figured out why.
From the first day, I knew the two of us just live differently. I knew that you were attached to your body like embroidery through soft cotton; the fibers of your soul have been sewn through skin and sinew with a serrated needle, then double-knotted around bone. You’re whole and complete. You’re saturated and secured. In a sea of people who’ve reduced themselves to their synthetic skins, you can fall and break but stay the same person fundamentally, through and through. The way you’re attached to your body is different from the way I’m attached to mine, because I’m tired of clinging to this hollow skeleton, and I’m too weak now to keep going and watch the thread fiber by fiber. I wanted to reach into myself and catch the steaming red excess, feed myself back to life in shame and disgust, but I fear it’s too late now. For that, my resentment for you is a relentless beast of a thing.
You opened your eyes a crack to my ice-cold touch. From where I was squatting, I could see your glittering waterline trembling, shadowy faults where cosmic terror has carved itself into the lines on your face that used to smile. You were very beautiful from where I crouched over you. We stayed that way for a bit, your broken breaths echoing in my ears. I pinpointed the exact moment you realized I was too awful to save you, when your doelike fear flattened out into resignation, acceptance. And it hurt me where I thought I was forever desensitized, seeing the heart and emotion be swiftly stolen from your expression, your dark irises resounding in their emptiness. And in them, I saw myself, with the same relaxed face and brittle, glass eyes. And the two of us were mirrors reflecting each other’s hollowness.
I place a gentle kiss on your drowning hands and return to my dorm.
There’s something else I want to tell you, maybe it’ll give you peace.
There’s a street in Singapore, somewhere deep in the dimmest and most forgotten district of Chinatown, where funeral parlors used to line the sidewalks. I remember Grandma telling me this on one of the Saturdays she stole me from Mom and Dad’s house, when I was small enough to curl in and fit entirely in her lap, hold myself closer and tighter and longer than a mother would her newborn. She talked about Sago Lane, the single-file line of concrete and mahogany houses. They weren’t exactly funeral parlors either. Sick-receiving houses, relief shelters, Chinese death houses. A final resting place where lives came to end quietly.
Grandma’s voice was thin and level when she described the Samsui women. Migrant women from southern China, overseas to seek manual labor jobs. They wore red cloth scarves over their heads to shield from falling debris, dark linen blouses to hide stains. The red headscarves reminded younger me of gaitou, red chiffon veils Chinese brides wore on their wedding days. In the stories I read, the bride would dip her neck in a ginger, birdlike movement as her beloved lifted the veil, looked down with enough tenderness to make young hearts swell and bleed. I remember giggling at the thought and telling Grandma, and she smiled with half her face and told me to quiet down.
Grandma said the Samsui women worked all their days, ground through each breath their lungs could exhale like chalk on black, solid then thin and gravelly. They got halfway through their lives and, one unassuming morning, reached deep into their pockets for the business card, the one they kept safe all these years and hoped to never need. They’d call the number scrawled in black ballpoint on the bottom corner, and they’d feel an inexplicable stillness when the man on the other end answered. And the day they arrived, Sago Lane and its concrete houses waited dutifully.
Then, Grandma asked me what I thought a graceful death was. She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. The death houses were dark, smelled of mothballs and thick dust. A bed cost more than three months’ pay, but the women had finally reached the day they no longer needed to care about surviving and, at long last, no longer needed to fuss over their families. As they stepped foot inside, they were no longer mothers or wives or wageworkers who’d never deign to self-preserve, they were free from their lives, from themselves. The beds—really just wooden slats across wooden frames—would be hard against their swollen joints and tired spines, but soft and gentle against their old souls. The parlor assistant in the corner kept a watchful eye as the women sank into their long-deserved sleep.
And in my imagination, everything followed those women to their death. I imagined Sago Lane as a void in phenomenal reality, a glitch, where the air and ground around the houses warped ever so slightly. The lawns lining the street would be dark yellow and gray instead of green, the sky desaturated and the air hot. Grandma explained the houses were for the superstitious to die in grace and dignity, miles away from all they loved. Because at least the last moments of their lives were solely at their will, they could have back an illusion of control after an existence kept in the balance between futile living and near-dead. I stared up at her and wondered what she meant, I wondered until that night I went to find you.
That night at the station, I finally admitted I was wrong about you.
It was already mid-April, all of our waking thoughts had long surrendered to gaokao practice problems—I doubt that many people noticed you leaving. I’m not sure what compelled me to wander down to the tracks, but I’m glad I did, and I’m glad I saw you there. You spotted me immediately. You looked exactly the same as you did months ago, blank and near-transparent, graceful in your freeze-frame stillness, like a snow-white bird plucked from the sky and laid to rest between old concrete houses. You were flightless on a bed of dead grass, I stood over you and prodded at your crippled wings. I knew instantly that we were the same. Somewhere in that ghostly void, I saw your watery stare and numb face, lit by headlights, and I knew instantly that you would be there with me.
And as the train grew louder and faster, I reached towards you and towards a quiet end, the red thread around my wrist sailing through infinite light.
Teresa Chen (she/her) is a writer and student from Shanghai, China. Whether she wants it to or not, her writing obsesses over our coming-of-age and the way our childhoods are omnipresent throughout our lives. When she's not writing, she can be found bookstore-hopping and exploring downtown Shanghai. Find her on Instagram.
The Flood
by Brandon Shane
My father opened
an old letter with an ink quill pen,
and thought about the old guard
standing with a sword
ready to swing,
not believing in the death
but the lobbed head;
nothing is as true.
Outside the walls,
my daughter climbed a tree,
through light rain playing
instruments with ponds,
and the toads stood there
like men gray enough
to fade into cobwebs, dust.
I watched the young village
boys rattle the windows, like pigs
trying to get loose, and mud
began to overtake the frost,
hills rolled over themselves
as fog breached the veil
of high grass and midnight
forests with broomstick moons.
The rain is becoming heavy,
my daughter has reached the canopy;
I can hear giggling and laughter.
and God knows she does not need much.
It is such a joy to know the land
remains pure for some.
My father drinks beside
fire and chimney,
awaiting all those still in the hunt.
When the storm comes,
know there will not be much time;
the river swallows
and soon becomes a flood;
there are no innocents
in the path of vengeance;
we will be gone
long before.
Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka Japan. You can see his work in trampset, the Argyle Literary Magazine, Berlin Literary Review, Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Ink in Thirds, among others. He would graduate from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English. Find him on Twitter @Ruishanewrites
The Boy
by Mathew Gostelow
Mathew Gostelow (he/him) is the author of two books: a collection of speculative stories entitled See My Breath Dance Ghostly (Alien Buddha Press) and Dantalion is a Quiet Place, a novella-in-flash (forthcoming, DarkWinter Lit). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. He also creates nightmarish images, from time to time. @MatGost. Website.
Almost Everything He Dreamed
by Drew Broussard
Tim wasn’t planning to go to the party.
He’d expected to be busy: he was performing in the park that summer and the cast had developed a routine of shuffling over to a little hole-in-the-wall on Amsterdam after the final curtain, where they’d stay and carouse til close. Summer, summer in the city — almost everything he’d dreamed. He was almost 23.
But a line of storms had been lashing the city all day and despite valiant efforts from the cast and crew, the performance was called off at the end of the second act. Before the stage manager had even finished the announcement, a few of Tim's fellow actors were already on their way out of the theater. There was an uneasy vibe amongst the cast, a sense of incompletion. Tim suddenly understood their camaraderie was conditional, that it would have an ending, and he had been neglecting his other friends for too long.
So he texted Will, yes, he would come to the party after all. It wasn’t a very long ride on the B train to the Lower East Side, and if the party sucked, it was on his way home anyway.
The building was an unassuming old walk-up, down a one-way alley-street. The door was propped open with a brick, and he took the stairs two at a time.
On the fourth floor, the apartment door swung open to reveal the most beautiful woman Tim had ever seen — she was in her 50s, white with gray-black eyes and short blonde hair. She had on a short dress and an oversized smoking jacket and she smirked at Tim. “Another Lost Boy,” she called over her shoulder, without breaking eye contact. He had the thought that she could’ve eaten him whole, in that moment, and he would not have minded.
Will appeared. He was older than Tim by about a decade and he moved with such confidence, his hand pressing the small of the woman’s back with a kind of intimacy Tim could barely fathom. “Careful,” he said with a wink that said everything else. He murmured something into the woman’s ear and she laughed.
The apartment was palatial for old Manhattan. It belonged to a famous gallery owner, but was used primarily by the gallery owner’s son—“A friend from college,” Will said, as though that explained how easily he moved through the space, through this world Tim could barely have imagined.
The party swirled around him, a carousel of elegant perfumes and strong cocktails. There was a haze in the air, a mixture of incense and cigarettes and spliffs. He was introduced to several people, all of whose names he quickly forgot. He felt pleasantly unmoored in time and space.
At some point after midnight, he found himself sitting on the floor with his back against an armchair, in which was perched that beautiful woman who had answered the door. Her hands were toying gently with Tim's hair and he felt a thrill at the warmth of her bare leg so close to his cheek. He had a vision out of a fairytale, that she was a witch and he’d been transformed into her dog. Again, he wouldn’t have minded.
The party had dwindled and those who remained had begun to swap ghost stories. After a short lull, someone leaning by the fireplace said, “I’ve got one.” As the speaker leaned towards the dim light, Tim was briefly taken aback to realize that it was Will. He’d lost track of him in the crush of the party several drinks ago; it was almost funny, that he didn’t recognize him for a second.
“This was fifteen years ago now. I was in college, a freshman, home for Christmas break. Sitting in the suburbs, reading Less Than Zero, thinking how it spoke to me.”
Laughter. Tim hadn’t read the book, so he just offered a smile.
“I was still in my pajamas, home alone. Early January. I had another few days before I went back to school but my folks were back at work, my sister back in high school.
“I’d felt like a stranger in my own home, that break. It had somehow gotten smaller, the house — even though it was a big old Victorian, stately and tall. I understood, I think, that the change had been in me and not in the house, and I began to feel antsy, eager to return to school, to see my new friends, to be single.
“My high school girlfriend and I had finally broken up after a few awkward long-distance months and we hadn’t spoken since. She reached out over the holiday break, several times, but I ignored her.
“Finally, shortly after the new year, I went a few days without hearing from her. Combined with the return to life for the rest of my family, this peace propelled me into a sense of my own future. There were other things going on in the world, and I would be a part of them — and, crucially, they would take me elsewhere, beyond this small town with its parochial concerns.
“All of this to say: I was eighteen, alone at home, on a gray winter’s morning, possessed of a performative attempt at maturity and confidence. I was sitting in the glassed-in porch that sloped off the side of my parents’ house, facing the driveway and the back yard. There was a comfortable old chair, and at my feet were two old sheepdogs.
“I was fifteen, twenty pages from the end of the book when the dogs started to bark.
“They were both famously even-keeled dogs. I’d heard them bark maybe a half-dozen times growing up. But here they were, teeth bared, growling. They were up at the windows, tails down, barking barking barking.
“I shushed them both, looking out through the wisteria vines draping the porch. I thought perhaps it was the UPS man or a neighbor or even just a squirrel, but there was nothing there. I shook my head at them and went to sit back down but I didn’t even get another page into the book before they started up again.
“This time, they ran up out of the porch and towards the side door of the house.
“I followed them, clapping my hands for quiet. Once again, I saw nothing outside. But now, my adrenaline was up — I had to admit, I was on edge.
“I went to put away my breakfast dishes, and was standing at the kitchen sink when I saw the flash of movement in the yard.
“I thought at first it was just an animal, and I went to the back door, opened it to offer the dogs a chance to chase away whatever it was that was working them into such a lather.
“It was warm, warm for January anyway, and a mist had settled into the treetops. And it was so quiet—the suburbs in the daytime; weirder and quieter than anything natural.
“The dogs wouldn’t go outside. The minute I opened the door, they both… well, it’s hindsight to say that they got spooked, but that’s what it felt like. Both of them circling away from the door, as though calling me to come back inside.
“I chided them for their neuroses and closed the door, then went upstairs to shower.
“My room was on the third floor, and it was a crowded old house. Plenty of times, my parents would holler for me or my sister and we wouldn’t hear them for the distance. But now, I felt I could hear every creak and groan, the clack of the dogs’ nails on the kitchen tile three floors away.
“I had just turned the shower on when I heard the dogs start up again.
“If you’re a dog person, you’ll know what I mean when I say you develop an understanding of the implicit language of your dog. You know when they’re barking because they’re annoyed, or being an asshole, or — like these two were — when they are ready to genuinely fuck something up.
“I threw on a robe and ran downstairs. I confess, my heart was pumping and I felt my youth very presently. I’d never been much for sport—“
Some light ribbing from the crowd, the easy teases of old friends; Tim marveled that it didn’t faze the telling.
“—but I considered what I might do, if…
“I did a full circuit of the house, checking every door and window. I saw nothing: the world was still, quiet. Which didn’t make me feel any more at ease.
“I checked every lock on every entry, asked the dogs to please give it a rest, and went back upstairs. I forced my way through my shower, hearing the dogs barking all the while. I thought perhaps I could just power through when I heard a thump. Or I felt it, maybe; felt and heard.
“I turned the water off and stood there, listening.
“The thump came again and I could hear barking, barking, barking.
“I managed to towel off, throw on some clothes. I was looking out upper-storey windows on my way down, my pulse spiking at every flickering intimation of movement. Every tree branch shifting in the wind was a team of thieves or an axe murderer convention.
“I hit the first floor just as the dogs got quiet. One of them whimpered softly and I heard another thud except I realized it wasn’t a thud, exactly. It was the side door, somebody trying the screen door, giving it a little shoulder thump.
“The dogs were backing up: I could see them through the living room, backing away from the door, ducked low, growling softly. I got this feeling of absolute menace radiating from the unseen side door.
“I picked up the fireplace poker and took a deep breath, steeling myself for whatever would come next. Another thump at the door, another chorus of growls from the dogs, and I threw myself around the corner with a yell, the poker up like I was ready to swing for the fences—and at the door is my high school girlfriend.
“The dogs are barking, I’m holding this fireplace poker, she’s like,” and he waved, awkwardly, making everyone giggle. Tim wondered if he was the only one who remembered that this was supposed to be a ghost story.
“I gestured at the poker, like ‘let me put this back ha ha,’ and then I came around to see her. The dogs were still on a rip, and they knew this person. She had slept in this house.
“I was trying to come up with an excuse for why things were so obviously chaotic as I opened the inside door. She grabbed at the screen door but it remained locked.
“‘Hey babe,’ she said. I can remember it, her voice — like she was just coming over, like it was a normal day.
“I carefully opened the screen door and stepped out. She was forced to take a step back, and she looked confused for a second, and then briefly angry, and then mostly sad.
“I said something vague, apologizing for the dogs and the poker. I made up something about starting a fire in the fireplace, how fun, don’t have that in the dorm rooms.
“I was talking a lot; I was nervous, we hadn’t seen each other in several weeks now. She just looked at me, without speaking, visibly annoyed.
“It was then I noticed: there was no car in the driveway.
“She lived on the other side of town, a good five or six miles away.
“I asked her again what was up, and she said something about wanting to see me and asked if she could come in.
“I told her my dad would be home soon, and we had plans to go out for an early lunch.
“She tilted her head with an uncanny grin. ‘No you don’t, no he isn’t.’ She said it so calmly; how did she know I was lying? ‘Not if you just lit a fire,’ she added, but only after a long and uncomfortable silence.
“Now, let me get something out of the way: I was eighteen years old and a sneeze could turn me on. This girl was attractive, the sex had been terrific, I was home alone for the rest of the day—many parts of me were saying, ‘yes, let her inside, who cares that you broke up, you’re going back to school in two days so why not enjoy yourself now?’
“It still baffles me, to be honest, that I said no. Something about the lack of car bothered me, I think.
“Like she could read my mind, or she noticed that I kept looking over her shoulder, she nodded to the side, explaining she had left her car in the park parking lot a few houses down from mine. ‘I didn’t want you to worry when I pulled in.’
“Behind me, the dogs were still freaking out and I said something about going to quiet them up, would she mind waiting here?
“I was sure to lock the screen door, as surreptitiously as I could. I had taken only a few steps towards the dogs when I heard her try the door, and the dogs came lunging forward.
“I turned around and for a moment I saw her try to play it off, but her face was thoroughly unconvincing. She was scowling, truly angry.
“I ushered the dogs back to the kitchen, where I could pen them up, when I saw her coming around the side of the house, towards the back door. It was then I realized she had been the flash of movement I’d seen earlier, that she had been lurking around the outside of the house for some time.
“Even then, I was still thinking, ‘we’re going to laugh about this, someday.’
“As I watched her coming up the steps towards the back door, I heard my cellphone ding. It was on the kitchen counter and I flipped it open, just in case it was my parents or something — and I saw it was a message from her.
Hey, hoping 2 see u before we leave. U around 2day or tmrw?
“I was reading the text message as she started trying the back door, which was also locked, thank god. She was starting to hammer at it and I looked at her, looked at the phone, back at her. Understand, this was a flip phone, this was a time when text messages could take a while to be delivered.
“So I called her.
“It is still the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced, that moment when she picked up the phone and said hello. Whatever was at the door was still scrabbling at the knob, shouting for me to let it in.
“‘Hello?’ She asked again, because I’d been silent. ‘Hey, you there?’
“‘Where — ah, god, this is gonna sound like a crazy question but where are you right now?’ I asked.
“‘I’m at home, why? I’m — ugh, look, I’m sorry, was that text weird? I totally understand if—‘
“‘You’re at home,’ I repeated.
“‘Yeah, what’s—‘
“‘Let me call you back.’
“I hung up. I was having a hard time comprehending what was going on—I still don’t fully understand it. I could see that the thing on the porch didn’t have a phone out, that it hadn’t been talking to me. Instead, it was swearing and slamming against the door.
“When I looked at it, it had fully dropped the ruse. It still looked like her, but also it looked nothing like her. How I hadn’t noticed…
“But for a second, after all that, I still didn’t care. I was still a horny eighteen year old, home alone. I made eye contact with the thing that looked like my ex and I took a step towards the door. I must have, because I saw it smile so wide.
“And then I heard the crunch of tires and looked over to see my dad’s car pulling into the driveway. When I looked back, there was nothing at the back door. I ran around the house quickly to check but by the time he came inside, things were quiet. The dogs had calmed down, although I certainly hadn’t.
“He said something about me looking like I’d seen a ghost, something half-mocking, and didn’t let me respond before announcing he’d just come home to grab some lunch before heading back out to his afternoon meetings, that I shouldn’t let him disturb whatever it was that I was up to.
“He yelled at me later about the wet footprints, from when I’d run downstairs from the shower, but I didn’t bother to explain. Never called my ex back, either. Come to think of it, I haven’t spoken to her since.”
The room held its collective breath and then with a little anti-gasp, there was applause. “Who knew you were a little Nathaniel Hawthorne,” someone told Will and everybody laughed. Tim leaned back and realized the chair behind him had emptied at some point during the story.
The conversation shifted into gossip about people they all knew but Tim did not. He excused himself and made for the bathroom. As he stepped into the hallway, he passed the beautiful woman, who grabbed his wrist and squeezed. “Don’t leave,” she said, and he blushed as he agreed that he wouldn’t.
In the bathroom, as he peed, he looked in the mirror and felt an unstoppable intoxicated happiness spread across his body. As he was washing his hands, his phone buzzed — a text, he saw, from Will.
Hope the party treated you well, man
Are you leaving? he texted back, putting the phone down in order to dry his hands.
It buzzed three times, nearly rattling off the edge of the sink.
lol what
didn’t you get my text?
I ended up staying home
His euphoria vanished and the room pivoted around him. His mouth got dry as he texted back.
I thought you were in the other room
Three dots popped up, went away, popped up, went away, and then:
what?
Tim shoved his phone back into his pocket. He opened the bathroom door carefully, hoping not to make a sound. At the far end of the hall, he saw the shadow he thought was Will talking to the beautiful woman.
He went in the other direction, practically running for the stairs.
He could almost see the front door to the apartment building when he heard someone right behind him say his name.
In his pocket, his phone rang — Will, he was certain — but he never got the chance to answer it.
Drew Broussard (he/him) is a writer, producer, and bookseller in the Hudson Valley. He is a contributing editor at Literary Hub, where he also hosts The Lit Hub Podcast and Tor Presents Voyage Into Genre. His writing has appeared or will soon in The Southwest Review, Literary Hub, midsummer magazine, Club Chicxulub, 13Tracks, Oh Reader, Unbound Worlds, and friends's mailboxes. He is the bookstore manager at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, NY. You can find him at www.drewbroussard.com or @drewsof on IG and Bluesky.
Samhain
by Erin Petti
Woman among women
a sheep in wolf’s skin
I touch the earth
with moth wing fingernails
folded into hospital corners.
And the sisters sweetly feast.
Deeper, though
thickets dim
and arms grow longer than roots,
longer than anything that could ever be bitten.
Erin Petti (she/her) is a New England based writer and author of the Thelma Bee series. Her poetry was most recently featured in
GREENING THE EARTH, a global eco-poetry anthology from Penguin Random House.
Cliff
by Alex Conley
Each step crunches against the dead leaves and dirt. A sound like falling; like the dreams that wake you up with legs kicking, and arms flailing. You follow behind your brothers, your sister, your mother who leads the way. They’re laughing, going on and on about something you did as a kid, something you don’t remember anymore.
“You were so cute!” Your sister chuckles. “We’re not teasing you,” she promises, noticing your refusal to smile, to even smirk. “We’re just reminiscing. Come on, I’m sure you have some silly stories about us we don’t remember.”
“I do,” you tell her, smiling for the first time that day, and mom turns around, curious. You see she’s out of breath in a way she didn’t used to be, having done this walk a thousand times over. It feels different now, maybe because you’re accustomed to coming out here in the fall, not to swim, but just to look around, to notice time going by. The leaves are all green and ripe, the blue sky promises only sun indefinitely. It’s just you and them, and a few hundred yards of dirt until you reach the best swimming spots, the cliff diving. “I recall you had an obsession with tinker bell. You were reverent about it, almost. Dying your hair blonde, wearing little green tutus and going on and on about how we had to believe in you–”
“Or I’d disappear, of course,” she finishes your sentence for you, laughing. She hears the familiar bells in her head, the ones she had woven into the tutu, the one that hasn’t fit in ages. “God, that must have been so cringe for everyone. I think I suppressed that one.”
“We sure didn’t,” your brother chimes in, and he looks at you, prodding you along with a nodding head. “I’ll never forget that tinker bell phase.”
“I’ll never forget your Hulk Hogan phase,” your sister fires right back at him, and you see the way his skin crawls. “I swear to God, if I had heard one more ‘hell yeah brother,’ I would have smacked you with a folding chair like you were begging for.”
“And I probably would have stayed in character for it too.” Your brother replies, the clear image of himself with his hair grown out, going far enough to use a straightener on Halloween that year to make it extra authentic. He sees his tanned skin in the mirror, and his ten year old body flexing its drawn-on muscles; the black outline of sharpie-biceps already smudging against his skin. A vivid memory that might not ever die, and isn’t quite alive.
“I didn’t really go through a phase like that,” the other brother says. “I was never really enthralled with anything that way,” and he says it lighthearted enough, but there’s a sigh after the words, and the way he looks down makes you sad, it makes you wish you could go back and remove the parts of his childhood he wants to forget.
“You’ve got lots of stuff you love,” mom says. She’s limping. Her body looks tired, and seems to wilt like the dying trees scattered around the otherwise fecund forest. “You’ve always had passion.”
“No I haven’t, mom–”
“Nonsense. I don’t wanna hear it,” and mom pauses her walking to look him in the eye. “You have always felt tremendous feelings in your heart, and you have always had a runaway brain that meant to eat you up. But you never got so hungry as to let it, and that’s worth being proud of.”
Your first brother puts his hand on the other brother’s shoulder. “Mom is right, man,” he says, “you sweat the details too much. You’ve made a good life for yourself.”
“That might be true someday,” your other brother says. “For now, I don’t think that’s the case.”
“You’re twenty-two years old,” you remind him, and he looks a hollow thanks in your direction, like a missed connection seeing itself as it severs. “You have a whole life to figure this stuff out.”
“I know you guys are trying to be nice,” he says, “but can we just go swimming without making it a whole emotional thing?”
Images of every other trip here flash through your head. The way the sun beat down and eventually burned your skin red. The way the water splashed as your brothers landed in it, spraying each other with droplets, striking palm to the river’s surface and back again. The sound of it, heavy hands meeting fluid, and a childish glee you’ve since discovered to be impossible to emulate. The way dad had thrown a disc across the surface of it and watched as all of you swam to grab it first. When was the last time you saw his face? Was it the contorted, pale version of his hospice bed you can recall? Did it always look that way?
“Of course,” mom says. “I just worry about you, that's all.”
“I know you do, mom,” your other brother says, “but worrying doesn’t absolve anyone of their sins.”
“Do you guys remember coming here with Brian?”
Of course, you knew she would bring that up. It is a funny story, but you hate thinking about it. Brian, your first boyfriend, the one that dumped you with no warning and started shacking up with your ex best friend (maybe not in that order). Though it had been a massively funny moment in the family’s long line of stories to tell, and what’s more, today was such a special day that you felt like telling it yourself. You guess that it’s finally been long enough to dull the ache of it, however long it’s been. “How could anyone forget a grown ass man yelling ‘mommy’ as he jumps into the water?”
You all laugh at that, even mom. The visceral image of his chubby body, his boyish face and long hair meeting the river as terror flashed across his eyes, and a high-pitched whine escaped his bad-at-kissing lips. “And he tried to play it off like he was just kidding, like he did it to be funny,” your sister recollects, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes, building up like epiphora.
“So then he started yelling ‘mommy’ after every single jump to try and act like it was just his joke or something,” even your other brother chimes in, dispelling his malaise for a moment. “What a weirdo.”
“He didn’t call you mommy, did he?” Your sister brazenly asks before mom slaps her arm playfully.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” mom says, but she’s still smiling at the thought of it too.
She starts forward again, the crunching sound resuming as the whiff of pine needles gently caresses your nostrils, fills you to the brim with a warm, liquid-solid feeling, like syrup spilling from your pores, and you feel sticky from the weight of a place so laden with memory. You all follow behind her, ducklings in tow.
Through the gaps in the trees to the left you can see it, a wide ravine filled with blue. A deep reflection of the sky above, but darker, and you can almost taste the warmth of it; July sun beating down for weeks. The trail bobs up and down, and you all look like buoys in the ocean as you crest the hills.
“Dad always loved this place,” your brother says out of nowhere, and he wipes an aging hand across his forehead, or perhaps that’s how he wanted it to look while a finger secretly wiped away at his eyes. “It made him so happy to be here.”
“And it makes us happy to be here today,” mom says, not skipping a beat. “Don’t forget that. It’s still here, we’re still here; nothing has dried up yet.”
“He cheered so loudly at all my plays,” your sister says, hearing the audience clap in her head. An ocean of silhouettes buried beneath the spotlight blinding her, and she could still always tell which had belonged to him from the vibrancy of its clapping. Hands hitting each other fast enough to create a blur of movement. “Even when I was just in the chorus, or the few of them I just did stage tech in the back.” Dad had clapped when the techs, dressed all in black, could be seen in a flurry of movement, adjusting everything to its needed position. He specifically clapped at the part of the play which is meant to be unacknowledged, and he had been the only one doing it, but that never stopped him. Anyone listening after the show would hear an earful about how the tech is what keeps the plays running; how doomed it all is without them.
“I can remember three things in life, kiddo,” your other brother starts, and all of you smile as you see the way he puffs his chest out like dad’s, the way he alters his pitch to match his father. You all say the rest in unison. “How to rotate your own tires, how to change your own oil, and to say I love you every day, even when you don’t feel like it.” They smile after the recitation, which feels a world apart from all the other memorized things they had to recite in their lives. Their own little pledge of allegiance.
“What do you do when you miss someone like this?” You find yourself asking out loud, even though no answer would ever be enough of one.
They all stop again, the cliff resting just in the background behind mom, and you see her white hair frizzing up, her wrinkled face seemingly melting, and you realize that this is the youngest she will ever be. Your other brother looks at you behind a shroud of his unibrow, which seems to thicken as the years tick on, as his paunchy stomach sags out further like pregnancy, and his porous skin loosens. He opens his middle aged jaw, filled with recessing gums, but he says nothing.
“You don’t miss them forever,” mom says, and she turns around and stares at the cliff face. “I could sure go for a swim. It’s been hot for so long.”
“I don’t want you to,” your sister cries, and she covers her mouth with a wrinkled hand. Mom walks up to her and embraces her in a hug that doesn’t last long enough.
“You can only tread water for so much time,” mom says, and the hug tightens like a choke, and you can feel the dampness of the two women from here, like they cried into your air so you could breathe them from then on. They know it’s easier to breathe than to remember.
The embrace ends like they always do, and the five of you keep walking forward.
Mom stands at the edge of the cliff, looking down. Thirty feet below is deep water, deep enough to dive into. The blueish green color contrasts sharply with the smell, which reminds you of tea, a hot bag of brown particulates soaking at the bottom of you, and no one swims in it today. There’s a rope swing just to the left, tied to a thick tree branch twenty feet up, and as always, you wonder who got it there. What brave soul clambered up such a steep, sharp tree just to add a little fun into their life? You never used it, though dad and your brothers constantly were, and you even felt like your sister wanted to as well, but she stayed behind and jumped from the lower rocks only, to make you feel less alone. Mom hadn’t ever jumped off any of it, she had always preferred to walk down the rock face and enter the water from directly above it, and only at its warmest temperatures. Yet today she looks enticed, her eyes studying the water like a problem meant to be solved.
“I suppose it’s about time I saw what all the fuss was about,” mom says, and you feel that familiar jolt in your heart as she says it. Does she really mean that? Yet you know she does, that that’s why you came today at all.
“Who will worry about me?” Your other brother says, and he sniffles like a child, and you see the way mom pities him, the way she wishes he’d asked a different question, or even that one of you had asked the same question. You understand why, to her, that question feels tainted coming from him, but you also know that he is the only one who would ask something like that.
“A lot of people will, while they can,” she tells your other brother, and he straightens up a little, hearing the ghost of your dad tell him to hold his shoulders back. Always going on about proper posture.
Mom strips down to her bathing suit, leaving the rest of her clothes on the face of the rock and inhaling a deep whiff of blooming algae in the river. She can already feel its wetness on her skin. “Do you all remember when she was just a baby?” She gestures to you as she says this, “and I always had to fight to get her in the car seat, and she would struggle out of it? I would yell at her, and being a mother was so much more work than anyone could ever prepare me for.” A rock breaks off the cliff face and cascades into the water, and she doesn’t hear it plunk as she continues. “Anyway, I got through those first two years or so of her life with caffeine and Judge Judy reruns, and a lot of help from the neighbors, and when he wasn’t working, your dad’s loving arms. I don't know what I would have done without them. There weren’t even smart phones yet, I couldn’t even–”
“I think you mean me, mom,” your sister says. “Smartphones were definitely around when she was born.”
Your mom looks confused, and rocks keep sliding off. She never hears the plunking as she works to remember. “That’s right,” though her voice doesn’t believe it, and her eyes don’t have a glint of honesty in them. “When you were a baby…were you…that was just a moment ago…” She totters there, tired face seeming to slip together, like her chin and forehead were pressing into one another and she doesn’t speak for a while. A cool air whisks across the surface of the ground. The trees dance with it. You watch them slither and slide through the breeze. “When you were a baby…you were a baby…you were a…baby…” She steps off the cliff, her form splashing into the water below silently, and you hear birds gently cawing as they glide by.
Your sister isn’t sobbing like you expected her to. Her insides dried out on the walk over, and she sits her wrinkled bones down on a fallen log. She seems disappointed, the way a parent is when their kid doesn’t even try. Your brothers look out over the edge, as if expecting something to rise from the bottom of the river.
You rub your prune hands across your weary eyes and feel surprised at how dry they are, and you think that maybe it’s all too soon, but then you realize how true that will always be. You think about mom holding your hand at night when the monsters under the bed whispered a little louder than usual. You think about how quiet it’ll be without any other voices there to drown them out. A specific memory hits you from somewhere far below. Mom standing under an archway, the light behind her pulling in from the sun, caking her in effervescence and she looks holy, angelic.
She smiled at you then, and she said how lovely you looked, and you told her you had just been thinking the same about her, but she didn’t hear you. She watched the street below as a man that looked like dad walked by, and she sighed lovingly as she watched the random bald head go about its day.
“Am I next?” Your brother asks. He’s the oldest, so you understand what he means, but you hate the question.
“Not necessarily,” you tell him. You think about your own body hitting the water, and how it might be to return home to that black warmth, the liquid womb you once crawled your way out of. You’re too scared to offer to jump first, no matter how badly you wish he wouldn’t jump either.
Your brother stands, and he moves over to the rope swing. “I always preferred this to the jump,” he says, “it’s more fun to swing a little at the end there.”
Your other brother hugs your brother from behind, his frail elbows flexing as they pull inward. “Don’t jump, you don’t have to yet.” He says through sobs, and it’s only now that you feel some level of warmth creep out from your eyes.
Your brother lets go of the rope, and turns to your other brother. “You wanna go first?”
Your other brother cries, but after only a moment, he grabs the rope himself. “I just can’t watch you go in,” and you see your other brother’s legs lift off the ground. You watch the body swing forward, you see the hands release the rope, and you hear nothing as his form disappears underneath the still surface of the river.
“I still have to go eventually,” your brother says, grabbing the rope as it swings back towards him.
“Tell us your favorite memory,” your sister says, and she holds her hands together in a pleading way.
Your brother’s grip on the rope loosens, but it stays in his palm, held gently before him. “You were just a little kid,” he says, “you probably won’t remember. The five of us went to a river, one of our favorite, beautiful spots, and we walked for what felt like ages–”
“A different memory,” your sister begs.
“--and we saw all kinds of wildlife all over the place, and we watched the leaves sprouting, and we watched the world die to red, orange and yellow–”
“Please, a different one–”
“--and you reminded me so much of mom, the way you made sure to check everyone else before doing anything for yourself, and I love you for that, sister, but I also think you let it take over sometimes. We watched mom jump into the water–”
“Please–”
“--and we watched our brother jump in before me, and then you saw me go into the water, and you don’t have to wait much longer past that to go in yourself.”
They look at each other, your sister sobbing and your brother only smiling timidly. “I love you, little sis,” he says to you both, and you watch his legs pick up off the ground, and you see him give you one last thumbs up as he enters the river.
Your sister won’t look at you, doesn’t even seem to breathe beneath the heaving rolls of her shoulders. The only thing to confirm she is alive are the swells of water droplets accumulating underneath her. Two little circles of dampness like raindrops meeting the soil.
“Do you have a favorite story?” Your sister asks you, and she’s holding the rope absentmindedly, like she’s waiting to jump until you’ve had only enough time to answer the question. Not enough time to tell her what she meant to you for all these years.
“I think my favorite is the stories we haven’t made yet. The ones that come later, the ones we’re always planning and never quite get to.”
The grip on the rope loosens just a little. “Which ones?” And she won’t look at you as she says this.
“When we grow up and get married. When we finally age enough to see that age isn’t everything, that we do more than gradually die.” You see the grip strengthen again and so you hurry. “You’re hugging your husband at your wedding, you're pushing new life out of you and into the light of day, you’re watching the rest of us tag along with you. You’re teaching your kid how to tie their shoes, how to say I love you, how to count change. I’m watching my nieces and nephews get old and I’m thinking about how alike they are to you, and how I wish I could know what you’d be like a hundred years after you’ve died; would it change you? To come back from that and see me again, having been dead a long time too?”
She clings to the rope with an attachment like a tumor. “We did that all,” and she holds her gnarled, wrinkled hands up and you count the layers of cataract in her eye and know how ancient she is. “It never worked. I stayed lonely, and you stayed hungry, and I drowned myself in people that didn’t know me, and you ate everything in sight, and we both ended up just as alone, and just as empty.”
“Not every story is the last one,” you try to promise her.
She only smirks and says, “no. But this one is.” Her feet lift and her body swings with the rope, her hands letting go and her figure disappearing beneath the murk. A silent splash, and still water to replace her. The sun begins to wane.
You don’t consider much as you collect the rope. A proceeding step is always after, and no real step ever leads to any kind of completion. You did what you did here, and holding the rope doesn’t change that. You lied about what needed lying, convincing even yourself that it was true, and the swinging feet in the air can’t stomp that. You spent year after year telling yourself there would always be more time for other things, or to fix the problem, or to even identify it, but the feeling of gravity sucking you downward made that seem so far away. You didn’t feel much as the feet hit the water, and you thought of nothing else but the way the sun set, and how it lit up the sky like a cracked, crimson mirror.
Alex Conley is a new author from New York who is just beginning his publishing career this year. His work will be found in 'Analog Sci-Fi,' in their upcoming December 2024 issue, as well as 'The Dark' Magazine's November 2024 issue.
Days With Salome
by Zack Carson
Northern Daughter, you could spit on me
and I would wail
for forgiveness;
all birds get wounded
here on Earth.
I was no contender
for your love back then. The stabs
you endured - way before I knew your name -
frightened me, shadow slits in skin
that mended to pre-dawn blue. A phantom
spear vibrated through your midsection.
My knees gave out when I learned
the hard thing, that sigils and tattoos
and guardian prayers for shields
would never keep us safe. Heaven is not
golden if it’s built by thieves.
You were not saved from this raw animal
world; tragedy courted you like prey.
I always felt like the sun shut
its eye on you. Oblivion was the haven
you modeled the bedroom after, where
you slept unsoundly: empty airplane
bottles coughed from a purse’s zippered
mouth, to turn down the day’s static.
Blankets you draped across
yourself to go smoke in the snow.
A little flatscreen on a nightstand,
always powered on: depression nightlight.
I was an interloper
in your nerve-space. Between your shoulder
blades, I felt the exit
the lance slipped out of. Wounded tissue,
scarry and discolored. Burns
that healed over like anthills. Your skin
should not have been a house for such lightning,
for so much electricity, sober and pressing and sharp.
Sometimes it was too charged to touch; sometimes
I couldn’t even ignore. The growl of trauma
buzzed through my thoughts like microwave hum.
One morning in the frostbite,
I had to leave for work. Beyond your gate
out, two frozen fawn braced
against the freeze in a dead field.
One snorted and bolted away from the early
sun, number one with a bullet.
The other, he just stood
there, a sad little contusion waiting
around for nothing to sprout from the ice.
I wanted to gather him up in my
arms, place him warm and safe under
my musculature, but he was
too separate, too befuddled in his sudden
loneliness, and anyway how would I
coax this frightened thing to come
near me? There was already so much
frost expanding between us,
and he started out as far away as the wind.
Streetcleaner
by Zack Carson
The me that survives each lightning strike,
he’s tired. Welded together from blistered
weals, he’s covered in a tunic of scales
grown from the salt of common misfortunes.
Sewn into his defensiveness, a snarling;
a menace streaking through like charred scutes.
He welcomes impact like a mountainside,
just to keep me safe. Well-intentioned, sure,
but so thorned, rasping at touch. Everyone
handling him ungloved comes away more splintered
than they were; he smashes about, flailing
with nuked ferocity, at you and you.
The shield born from earth; his love language is
solitary. He keeps watch all lonely.
You can’t bring that to a party or wedding.
Dream for him: a lager-colored sun pulses
in delta waves. Resting under, he can burn
off his damage like radiation… slow.
His catshark armor might be shed at last,
fang retracted (for safe-keeping). Unhunted.
He’s always surviving. He deserves sleep.
Zack Carson is a poet and occasional musician from Asheville NC, currently working towards an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
The Sin Eater
by Rebekka Gondosch
Content Warning: Disordered Eating, Mentions of Violence
“I understand why sin eaters were made. Carrying such feelings is too much for one little heart, too much for one body. There must be some hope of shedding regret, grief, sorrow, sloughing them off like a skin and going into death free and light. Else we'd never be able to live.”
― Megan Campisi, Sin Eater
The monsters are sitting in the corners of the kitchen again. Crouching, with false smiles spread unnaturally wide across their faces. Hideous beasts with sharp pointed teeth. I give them a nod; one hisses loudly.
Thirty minutes left.
“Mina. Mina? Are you listening?”
Mina looks up from her plate and into the sad and sunken eyes of the six other girls sitting around the kitchen table. Seven sad souls. “Sorry?”
“We were just reviewing the rules of group meals.” The dietician smiles pleasantly. “We are waiting on your contribution before we begin The Meal.”
These girls could eat you up with those wide eyes. They hunger. Our bones always give us away.
Mina straightens up. “Yes. Yes, of course. Sorry.”
The dietician waits patiently, her bowl of soba noodles steaming. Mina picks up a glass of water to clear her throat and raises it mid-air like a toast.
One of the monsters swipes the water out of her hand; it clatters to the floor.
“Don’t talk about specific foods or weight?” Mina uses a cloth to wipe the spots around her.
“Yes. That’s a good one.”
The girls all nod.
“Well, let’s begin!” The dietician lifts her spoon with a flourish.
The plates and cutlery scrape together in eerie succession. Like poorly tuned violins in a ghostly orchestra. The girl on her left passes Mina the first dish; the type of triangle shaped sandwiches served at funerals. Mina places her left hand firmly on the plate as another monster tries to flip it over. She eats the slices quickly as the next plate rotation is passed to her. A third monster thumps violently against her back; she nearly chokes on the mac and cheese.
“Mina’s your nickname, right?” The soft squeak of a voice came from the girl at the head of the table opposite the dietician. The girl who always eats tomato soup and cuts rice cakes into tiny pieces.
“Yeah. It’s short for Philomena. Like the Saint.”
“That’s pretty,” the girl says, feebly.
Saint Philomena was also the patron saint of lost causes and had her feast day taken away in the 60s.
The room is getting hotter. Before the third plate is passed to her, Mina tries to knot her red hair into a bun. The monster with three arms bangs and drools on the table, knocking the stir-fry to the ground. The dietician looks up from her noodles. Cocks her head to the side. Mina gets down on her knees and takes fistfuls of rice and sauce from the floor.
Three plates to finish. Fifteen minutes.
Plate four proves most difficult. Mina’s stomach is churning, the heat oppressive. Stuffed sweet potatoes with cheese. It belongs to the girl across the table. Mina makes the mistake of looking at her face. It’s sallow. Her mouth pressed in a thin cobalt line. The monster behind her stretches out its wings and lets out a sickening shriek. The cutlery rattles against the wooden table. The girl who eats tomato soup tries to hand Mina a new glass of water. The dietician glares.
The hissing, the bruising. 10 minutes.
“We’re approaching the end of The Meal,” the dietician says, her voice loud above the growing chaos of the monsters’ contributions. “I think we should share what we are grateful for.”
The wooden chairs make a familiar scratching sound as the six girls inch closer to the table, placing their palms together and bowing their heads. The monsters bang their limbs against the walls, claws scratching across the floors, wings flapping, voices howling through the kitchen.
The dietician looks at Mina who is rapidly swallowing down a mix of vegetable stew and her own vomit.
“Mina, would you like to start us off?”
Two of the monsters are making gagging noises next to Mina’s ears. She can feel their spit on her cheekbones.
Five minutes.
“Good company,” Mina whispers.
The girls all share in order as the monsters play a game of tossing-the-sandwich with plate six. Strings of salami and lettuce stick to the walls. Mina runs to collect each morsel.
Oh, God. One minute.
Mina is licking the walls, licking the plates and spoons that are now scattered across the floor. Her breathing is fast, she clutches her stomach, holds a fist over her mouth to keep from retching. The girls’ eyes are now entirely on her. Fear is setting in. First a whimper. Then a wail. A chorus of wailing. The girls shake and moan and hammer their fists into the table. Some begin to tear at their clothes and hair. One takes a fork and drives it into her hand. The wailing is louder than the laughter as girls and monsters compete in a cacophony.
Mina slumps to the ground. Heart and breath slowing down. On the flat of her back, she stares at the ceiling. The creatures wail and scream above her. Mourning the mouthfuls of sins.
End.
Rebekka Gondosch (they/she) is a writer, theatre maker, and arts educator based in Hamilton, Ontario. They are a graduate of Trinity College Dublin’s M.Phil. in Theatre and Performance program and enjoy engaging in creative work rooted in the gothic, and queer and feminist theories. You can find Rebekka making/writing/thinking about art, teaching high school, or talking about vampires and sharing their Transylvanian heritage with anyone who will listen. “The Sin Eater” is dedicated to all those in recovery - you are worth fighting for. Learn more about Rebekka's artistic practice at www.rebekkagondosch.com and @theatre_is_wilde
My Life of Words
by John A. deSouza
Excerpted from Part 13 of My Life of Words, A Literary Biography, (pp. 67-68)
We had thought the tower of civilization was unbreakable, locked away
In a pretty room with pretty views across the square, considering you,
Another tiny existence enclosed in an artificial paradise of tree and stone,
At the little table beneath the efficient waiter in the white of service and
The black of the undertaker. Where is his tall hat! But the warmth
Against your cheek forgave everything, even now, as the black waters
Of the river call like the sirens of ancient epic. Un éclair... puis la nuit! —
Fugitive beauté. She passes you, her leg, anonymous porcelain,
The temptress is the song that entices you, that answers your longing.
This is what you craved, the end to causes and outcomes. To be free.
But your love is there, beneath the bridge, the song is too beautiful to
Be lost, you must continue. The waters pass like the days. Poets!
Baudelaire snickers and spits. Poe follows him, the shadow of a shadow.
Baudelaire twists his mouth, a demon’s sneer. The night is mine!
Dreams are for the slicing! Entrails splashed over cobblestones. You are
Banished. We live in between. There can be no purity! Purity is perversion!
The beauty of your lover glistens in the twisted bed, the rhythm and
Harmony that springs into words, that won’t be silenced. The siren
Was a curse and a stain, the stain of the pure. Des divans profonds
Comme des tombeaux…The lover is drowned in a river of words.
Their passion is the cold of the slab. What else can it be in a world
On the brink of a pit of corpses, bull-dozed, tumbling, putrid and gaping?
A whir and a clank that needs no levers, is its own system of impenetrable
Logic, the mathematics of desire without countermeasure, gone amok.
Is this what we woke to out of the wordings of a new shade of pain?
The warnings that must be endured are a cataclysm of comfort.
We subjugate water, irrigate commerce, and squeeze the necessary
Outflow of energy into these machines that would nurture us.
What words are equal to such crimes? Symbolist orders of the
Artificial, arrangements that would embroider horror with inward
Departure. The fantasy of this profound anguish is also the prison
That waits for its end. It devours us, clinking and grinding, like the
Old evil with three mouths. In rat-run sewers, or a mob with torches
Coming to destroy you. Monster. A flaming windmill spins on a crazy
Mount. You are responsible, inhuman, trapped beneath a grate.
The silver fingers in black-and-white that wriggle their mastery,
Reach at the moon above, as cold and bright as truth. What other is
Reflected? The current twists your features in avoidance, grotesque
Ambition. The city is not yours, even your tiny pain as a perspective
That contains everything is void. There is no worship, no contract.
Abandoned. The limit of freedom is belonging. There can’t be one
Without the other. The simplicity of this appears at first like a lie.
But then what lives outside such limits but emptiness swallowed by
An implosion of uncaring energy? The discovery of an inhuman
Indifference that continues outside of our vocabularies of fear.
Mozart knew this, in the unrelenting rhythm we hear beating in
The Overture that also ends Don Giovanni, and in how the cold stone
Voice of logic must prevail. The Libertine in his hell-bound orgy. So what?
He despises your system of punishments. His final act is a brandishing
Of the freedom at the center of his own myth. That, and overbearing
Fathers who believe they know best. Leopold! At the bottom of chaos
Is only sediment, the muck of death. Even here, the structure of order
Tries to assert itself. It would seem it can’t be escaped. No matter
How we avoid or destroy it, a new myth replaces the old, grows
Another head, bifurcated from the old neck, shrieking and glaring
Or singing its hypnotic song of meaning and understanding. It is
The same river. It becomes and ends in us. We are its end, our skin
Flayed in image only, the double reed of two pipes tossed down
By a bored Goddess, and through the Aulos sounds our refusal to submit
The tool of her own vengeance against Apollo’s unyielding arrogance.
The skin and hide of the old world is peeled away from this new one,
Suffering and devoid of music. The new Gods are their own calculated
Absence, and still the silent sorrow of Marsyas, our better aspect,
Without argument, only a drunken song after the night’s ecstasies.
His pipes cannot be pure, pristine, ethereal, cannot be bright of perfection.
His music is in his wild eyes, his erection jutting between hairy legs.
We are of beasts and angels both, our minds are in the suffering world,
And outside of it looking in. Neither one nor the other, or this third,
Of words painted with the same river, named for the origin of our suffering
With a refusal to submit. The music that wells in us is like the river,
Channeled by discovered structures, wavelengths, pitch. Our nature
Is doubled, of a worser and a better part, and then this other that creates.
Not trees but rivers, one of blood and one of thought, sprung from
The same mind. The stuff of cruelty and mercy, of death and creation.
John A. deSouza is originally from Toronto, Canada where he attended the University of Toronto. Currently he resides in Jersey City, NJ. John has written five collections of poetry and has appeared twice in David Cope’s 'Big Scream Magazine', been translated in China by Prof. Zhang Ziqing in ‘New World Poetry’, and has an upcoming publication in the Winter edition of 'The Orchards Poetry Journal'.
Make Me Into What I Am Not
by Allison Phillips
I do not want to be lovely this
body a prison
stop looking at me,
cover my limbs in
guts and roots,
the blood of the earth
a part of my being.
Make me frightening a discomforting creature
two white bright eyes
in the long dark shadows of the
trees and water beneath my feet
Make me a kelpie no, an each-uisge,
vicious and violent
I am the sharp teeth
bones left in a rotting
corpse
I am the deep green
shadows shaped like
death
I am a threat a
lure
Make me horrid
a grotesque
creature
not a girl
take it
apart
Allison Phillips (she/her) is a dual MA/MFA candidate in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is currently working as an Editorial Fellow at the Texas Review Press. She lives in Huntsville, Texas with her two cats.
Flight Risk
by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
An eye stark blue, peering through night’s keyhole, kept watch, while a tongue chafed shadows, parched, desiring a dribble of blood.
“Not from me,” said Jan-Erik, alone on a path by the fjord. “Bound as I am for the Inns of Bleyking.”
Horse-Shrike laughed and lunged, slipped in his bill to sip a drop of blood, a drop that threatened to become a stream.
“Never,” said Jan-Erik, reeling back, sticking his hand to his side to stop the spillage, the leakage, the running of the blood.
Horse-Shrike rasp-chimed, watched Jan-Erik list left, list right, clutching at air in the darkness.
Jan-Erik donned then a feather-hame, a gift from the Witch of Old Hiddensee, hawk-wings like Freyja's, flew swift if ragged, aslant towards dawn touching the howes at Uppsala.
Horse-Shrike lazed through the sky.
“You can fly east to Ruegen,” he murmured, in tones that echoed off the rocks, amplified. “Where kobolds dwell under chalk cliffs…still I will catch you.”
Jan-Erik flew slower, hitching (blood…blood...).
“You can fly north to Bjarmland, where giants hunt bear for their supper…still I will catch you.”
Jan-Erik flew slower, labored (blood ... blood…).
Horse-Shrike laughed again and circled over breck-lands by sea.
“You can fly south to the Lunenberg, where the salt-dragons roam...still I shall catch you.”
Jan-Erik flew, arrhythmically (blood... blood-blood…blo/...od...).
Horse-Shrike cold-smiled, soared.
“You can fly west over Naze where the physeter spouts…still I shall catch you.”
Jan-Erik flew just barely (blood …)
Horse-Shrike stooped to the capture.
“Oh traveler, Jan-Erik, small pilgrim,” he cried. “Can you not see? Freyja you are not, your kite's feathers cannot withstand the axe-bill of the raven. Always you were bound for me.”
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) (www.danielarabuzzi.com) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Asimov's, Harvard Review, Abyss & Apex, Coffin Bell, Shimmer, Red Ogre Review, Goblin Fruit, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Pushcart nominee. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).
Aphasic (2023-035)
by Michael Betancourt
“Typoetry” emerges from an experience I once had: I saw a truck with a big logo on the back, and even though I could see the shapes of letters, I couldn’t make sense of them as actual text. My typoems try to recreate this experience by using parts of letters and text-like shapes to make asemic poems, which is a kind of visual poem where you can’t read what it says. Sometimes these shapes look like real letters or words, and sometimes they don’t. The goal is to play with how we recognize language, without always forming clear words or messages.
Michael Betancourt’s typographical asemic poetry has been published by Red Fox Press, Timglaset, Post–Asemic Press, and nOIR:Z, as well as in Die Lerre Mitte, To Call magazine, aurapoesiavisual, and Utsanga.it.
The Cemetery's Keeper
by Jasmine De La Paz
The cemetery's groundskeeper greeted the two boys at the gate; a lantern jittered in his quivering grip, sending wispy specters near his feet. The moon waned paper thin, and outside of the lantern's shifting light, heavy darkness cloaked the land.
“Hurry lads, in you go.” He held open one end of the rusted gate. The boys hesitated, unsure. Something didn’t feel right. The presence of the man alone unnerved them. But, after a moment, Peter braved forward—he needed the coin—and Charlie followed behind with the wheelbarrow squeaking an awful din. They both eyed the groundkeeper’s sallow, sagging face as they passed the threshold between the living and the dead. His eyes, the color of maggots, wiggled back and forth.
The gate clicked shut as soon as they entered. Keys tinkled. The groundskeeper had locked them in. He turned with a limp, holding the lantern high, and said in a phlegm-filled voice, “To ensure we are alone.”
Peter nodded. Getting caught stealing a corpse, especially this one, would send them straight to the gaol, the last place he wanted to be. A part of him felt guilty doing this work—it was sinful work, risky work. But as his father used to say: What must be done, must be done. And this had to be done—being the best-paying work he could muster. Besides, if it wasn’t him and Charlie taking the bodies, it would surely be some other lads. Might as well beat them to the coin.
“Before we go any further, I’ll need my share.” The groundkeeper held out a bony hand.
“Right,” Peter said. He pulled a pouch from his pocket. Doing his best not to touch the man’s leathery skin, he poured the coins into his palm like jewels. The groundkeeper held his hand up to the lantern, his bushy gray brows knitted together as he struggled to count. Charlie tapped his foot, impatient.
Pleased, the old man pocketed the coin and smiled, displaying a few decayed teeth clinging to stained, blotchy gums. Gums like the mildew smothering the gravestones. Peter smelled his rancid breath and winced. It smelt like death.
The man reeked of death.
“Alright,” the groundskeeper said, “follow me.” He moved with a wobbly gait. “The mausoleum's this way.”
The wheelbarrow creaked and squeaked, stark against the stillness of the night. Peter silently cursed Charlie for not oiling it before they left. “Have you been the groundskeeper here long?" he asked, attempting to make small talk.
The man turned his head. “Well-nigh forty years it’s been. My son sleeps here. Could never look for any other work, knowing I’m close to him here.”
Peter and Charlie looked at each other, the whites of their eyes popping in the gloom. Peter shrugged as if to say, Let’s just get this done. Even so, there was something strange with the groundskeeper. Peter wanted to get this job done and never see the old man again. It shan’t take long, he reassured himself. We don’t have to dig this one out.
The groundkeeper led them through a sinuous, narrow path. The further they went, the more worn and dilapidated the gravestones appeared, sagging sideways on the root-rippled earth. Crumbling statues stood solemn and staring as they passed. The ancient trees hunched and hollow, branches stretching. Charlie kept peering behind. He was always skittish, fearful of ghosts. But Peter didn’t believe in ghosts. The real monsters were the ones lurking above ground—living and breathing humans. Tangible and terrible.
The groundskeeper veered from the path, crisscrossing past grave after grave until a grand Gothic mausoleum appeared in view. Pinnacles pierced the obsidian sky from its slanted roof. Intricate spindles lined the stone archway—two angels perched on each end—wings folded in and heads bowed. The old man hobbled up the moss-stained steps, leaves cracking under his boots. He put a key into the lock of an ornate iron gate. It screamed on its hinges and opened with a scrape. “She lies in here, lads. Precious one, she is. Such a same . . . such a shame.” They were gathering a young woman’s body—a lady's body. Peter hoped her prized jewels adorned her decaying neck. Perhaps they could pry a gold crown or two from her mouth.
A cold and bloated dampness kissed their skin. A fetid, cloying scent hovered in the air. Much like the groundskeepers breathe, it smelled of death. Cobwebs clung to the corners; beetles scuttled near the walls. Their footsteps echoed like clicking jaws while the wheelbarrow whimpered like a scared child. They passed rows and rows of stacked vaults and plaques—each sealed space holding a skeleton at bay. Peter had heard stories of people being buried alive. Now, each time they popped open a casket, he was certain a body would jolt upright like a vampire and grab for his throat.
They stopped near a gaping hole in the wall, a wooden casket inside its mouth. “I haven’t sealed it yet. I’ll do so once you’ve rowed her out of here.”
“Thank you,” Peter said. “We’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”
The groundskeeper grunted and set his lantern on the floor. He shuffled away, and the lads went to work. Charlie reached for the casket. “I’ve got the other end," Peter said. They edged it fully out of its vault and placed it on the ground. “Bit light, ain’t it?” Charlie asked.
Peter thought so. But some bodies were smaller than others. “Let us get it open.” He grabbed the lantern, hovering it above the casket for Charlie to see better.
The casket appeared as old as the mausoleum. A layer of thick dust coated the cracked, thin lid, smeared along its edges. Peter’s stomach lurched. This was supposed to be a casket for a Lady. Not one fit for a beggar found dead on the street.
Charlie pulled out a special tool he always kept in his back pocket. His hand trembled as he pried the lid. “What in tarnation?” Charlie squeaked. “It’s already been opened.”
“Slide the lid off, Charlie,” Peter whispered, holding the lantern tight. Charlie opened the casket. They both jumped back.
“Ugh!” The boys covered their faces. The stench was unbearable—worse than meat gone bad. With their arms shielding their noses and mouths, they peered in.
A black spider scuttled out of it and onto the floor near Charlie’s feet. “What sort of game is this?” Charlie said, frantic and dancing away from the spider.
The coffin was empty.
A jarring clang suddenly sounded from the entrance. Their eyes jumped to the door, hearts in their throats. The groundskeeper’s shadow haunted the other side of the closed gate. His keys jangled before one slid into the lock.
“Come out, boy!” The groundskeeper yelled. “Come out, come out!”
“What is he going on about?” asked Charlie.
“Sir?” Peter yelled. “Sir, there is some mistake. There isn't a body here!”
Ignoring them, the groundkeeper yelled again. “Boy—my boy! Wake up!”
A low moan echoed deep within the mausoleum. The boys’ faces grew pale in the subtle light of the lantern, the shadows dragging their features like ghouls. “What is that?” Charlie grabbed onto Peter.
They both spun around.
The moan came again, and with it, a dark hunched blob appeared, staggering toward them.
“That’s right, my boy. Come and get 'em.”
“Run!” Peter screamed. They shot towards the door, slamming into the gate with a bang.
“Please, let us out!” they cried, twisting and turning the handle. “Unlock the gate!”
The groundkeeper stood his ground, looking past them as if they were invisible ghosts.
That same low moan sounded again, closer. The stench grew stronger, pungent, and nauseating. Peter turned; his back pressed against the cold iron. “Oh,” was all he managed to say.
Passing the light of the lantern was a boy. A dead boy, who walked with the same shuffle, the same limp as his father. The bottom half of his jaw hung open, slack-like. A dark liquid as thick as tar dripped from his mouth. It saw the two boys with its bleary, sunken eyes, and smacked its jaws like a puppet.
“That’s right, my boy,” the groundskeeper said.
Charlie closed his tearful eyes and cowered next to Peter, refusing to turn around, refusing to see what was coming for them. Peter held Charlie, doing his best to stay brave.
What must be done, must be done. His father’s words repeated in his head.
“Sorry, lads. I must take care of my boy.” The groundkeeper walked away, swinging his keys and whistling a merry tune. Behind him, the sounds of ripped and torn flesh, screams, and guttural moans echoed through the cemetery. He is fed . . . for now, he thought, and jiggled the coins in his pocket.
Jasmine De La Paz (she/her) is a Gothic horror author based in Bishop, CA. With lush landscapes, historical settings, and sinister characters, her stories explore the strange, the macabre, and the beauty within the darkness. Many anthologies and literary magazines feature her work, including Love Letters To Poe Vol. 3, Tenebrous Antiquities, Quill & Crow Publishing, Dracula Beyond Stoker, and more. You can find Jasmine online at: www.jasminedelapaz.com
A Widow's Watch
by Anthony Incollingo Harwan
Mary’s house was a squat little thing on Pearl Avenue in Cape May, a block from the beach, right at the southern tip of New Jersey where the Delaware River lets out into the Atlantic. It’s a quiet town, as far as shore towns go.
The house was one story, but in the back corner of the kitchen next to the gas stove with its resident tea kettle and cast iron pan there was a wrought-iron spiral staircase that led up to the flat roof. There were a couple chairs up there that sat around a glass table with a white canvas umbrella thrust through a metal hole in the center. A string of incandescent bulbs hung along the railing and a heavy ashtray sat on the table. A widow’s watch, she forced herself not to think.
And perhaps a widow had watched the sea up there before Mary and before they turned the lights on and put the sailing ships to port. Now the little house with the wrought-iron spiral staircase was surrounded by two story duplexes on an extra story of stilts that no one lived in from Labor Day to Memorial Day.
So she couldn’t even see the ocean from her widow’s watch. Which meant that to her it was just a roofwalk. But when she thought of it and the misty image of it appeared in her mind it was always accompanied by an incorporeal and esoteric pang in her chest that translated to widow’s walk, a thin whisper over still waters from somewhere down the other coast of her heart.
Because Mary wasn’t a widow. But her husband wasn’t here. He was… somewhere, Mary assumed, in the way that everyone is somewhere, but not here. He hadn’t been here for twenty-seven years, which she now realized was over half of her life. And that made the roofwalk for neither widows nor watching, since she was not a widow and could not watch the sea.
But Mary found the sea everywhere else. She saw Aphrodite birthed in the salt foam running over the side of her pasta pot. She saw leaves racing down the rainwater rushes; crumbling Myrmidons carried on Iphegenia’s winds. The seagulls croaked songs at her they’d learned from sirens, their ancestral tales falling on her uncomprehending ears. She heard the roar of the waves in tourists' lifted pickup trucks tearing away from last call and down her street as she tried to sleep. And she felt the receding and rising tides in the contentedness and aching that cycled within her.
In the summertime Cape May swelled with vacationers; the gift shops opened and the brick ovens fired. Ghost tours shuffled around old hanging squares and drydocked pirate ships, and the beaches teemed with life.
When the sudden afternoon rains came she would make a cup of green tea to sip on the roofwalk under her white umbrella while she watched people come in from the beach. You could suppose a lot about them by the way they moved, who they were with, what they carried. They could be anyone.
She would wonder at their histories and futures and presents, and the decisions they’d made that brought them to her street, but she’d refrain from outright guessing. It wasn’t really fair to them.
Her sister worried about her, she told her, and would gently suggest that maybe her husband wasn’t coming back. Mary knew that and never suggested that she believed he was. All Mary had ever said on the subject is that they can’t know, not that they don’t know. All they really knew was that one day twenty-seven years ago he had sailed away and Mary had never seen or heard from him again.
Her sister said things like why don’t you try dating? Why don’t you sell that house? Look at all the people that come here every year. You could make a whole mess of money. And that man who runs the restaurant down the road seems nice.
It was true, he did seem nice. Most people do. But he wasn’t what Mary wanted. Well what do you want then Mare? I’m not a mind reader. Most people aren’t.
But Mary could not even read her own mind, and she would certainly never ask her sister to do it for her.
There was a Kraken in there. An evil thing of unknown origin. It slumbered for weeks, months, years, laying its immensity in the trenches of her mind where Mary never dared venture.
And the Mary that lived there was different from the Mary that lived here. That Mary was a mariner, a dread pirate, mystical and radiant and terrible to behold but no one ever would. She was hardened by her own battles; her cutlass engorged on the blood of pirates and privateers, whales and sirens, Odysseus himself, and of course, the Kraken.
It always fell on her quickly.
The cerebral sea around it boiled and the monster blackened it with ink like tar that would sear her soul in its shell if she let it. She treaded in it, doing everything she could to keep her head above, and that was often enough. When it wasn’t, the kraken would take hold of her with eight, now sixteen, now sixty-four tentacles, clawing, hissing, writhing, dragging her to Charybdis.
Every swipe she took at it, every slash and every bite, every stray thought about how things should be, would be, or could be was rebuffed and answered, the beast’s tentacles each an unmade memory attacking in oblique.
And it spoke in a horrid and echoing screech.
It is too late Mary. Mary, it is too late, it cried.
And it’s getting later.
Then the sun rose over the Atlantic, as always. And when it rained, she would make her green tea and sit on the roofwalk, watching the people coming in from the beach. You could suppose a lot about them.
Moon Shine
by Anthony Incollingo Harwan
Moonshine prowled below deck, hunting by the light of a splintered firmament. Motes hung suspended in the air in illuminated strips, and when the tomcat crept through one the moonlight rippled across fur as dark as the North Atlantic.
He didn't need the light, but seeing the North Star reflected in a cat's eye unleashed an ancestral terror in a rat; something as ancient and primal as sorcery. It was sometimes enough to kill a rat outright.
There was a faint scratching, afore. He moved towards it, stalking under hammocks cradling apneic sailors, slinking between their stinking boots. The ship was rolling, but Moonshine had his sea legs; he had never set his paws upon the land.
This was his second favorite hunting ground, after the storeroom. Sailors hid away their rations and the little bits of exotic foods and sweets they were saving for when they needed a pick me up and had no privacy for a real one. For the rats, the bunks were a hinterlands of sorts. A place they could find great treasures and grave danger, between the relative safeties of the privy and the bilge.
Four years ago Moonshine was born to a surly street mother and an unknown father, something he had in common with many of his crewmates. The bosun, Maxwell Daniels, had taken in his mother off the streets of Tangier, unaware of her pregnancy. He named her Cinnamon, on account of her always smelling of it.
Cinnamon gave birth in the middle of the Atlantic, in the bowels of the Cienfuegos, to seven healthy kittens. She ran off when they made port in Boston. Each of the kittens, save Moonshine, was given away there to work as mousers on ships of varying nationalities. Danish, English, Spanish. The siblings probably don't share a language now.
But they all know about the North Star, the cat sorcery. It's in their blood.
Rat's blood holds secrets too. Secrets they don't even know they know. Ancestral knowledge. The rats aboard the Cienfuegos are dozens of generations removed from any who were terrorized by Cinnamon, but when they come upon a cinnamon pastry they're thrown into a frenzy. It's a survival tactic etched into their bones.
The scratching continued.
He lurked under Choopamayla's dangling cage. Another one of Daniel's pets; a parrot he captured in the Caribbean. He seemed to only learn swears. "Fuck you," he said, as quietly as he could.
Moonshine peered with copper eyes from behind a chamber pot. A piss bucket. Land cats hunt by looking for motion that stands out against the stillness. But ships are never truly still.
So Moonshine adapted. He sits and lets out his claws slow and strong, slipping them with great steady force into the softened wood of the hold. He is affixed to the ship, rolling and swaying as it rolls and sways. He unmoors his eyes from the aether, and anchors them to the ship. Nothing moves, relative to him.
The scratching continued.
Moonshine sailed again through the aether toward it and then anchored again. This time behind a pile of damp clothes. His eyes scanned all afore him. For minutes he sat, tense, ready to pounce.
Sailors slept restlessly above him.
Motion. Moonshine leapt, seemingly through a weft in reality. He was upon his prey, had it in his claws. But instead of soft rat flesh he felt scraping and etching.
An empty tin of chewing tobacco.
They were nearing port. Moonshine had already liquidated the bulk of the rats that had stowed away at the last.
He plodded back towards what the crew affectionately called his bunk, a small crate nailed to the floor with a makeshift doorway smashed into one of the boards. They had filled it with woolen blankets. It was where he was born.
The cook had left him a few strips of salt cod and Moonshine ate them without enjoying them.
Anthony Incollingo Harwan is from New Jersey and lives in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Rutgers University - Camden. He’s descended from sea and mountain folk and because of this he makes a mean stew.
The Red Goblin
by Marley McKenzie
Eyes of fire and brimstone
Cobalt hot silky tar drain from his eyes
I stare into his burning sunset
The closest sun in my sight
My eyes touched God's face
And I disappeared
Dancing jeers laughing peers
Roaring crowds breaking backs
Making shifts in time
Our slant eyes crunch together
Gathering all of our creases
Tenfold our skin
Split tongues for better tasting
Our world must taste the ashes it has created
It must taste the worlds perfume and eat its festering disease
Yes
A great world
My world
Your world
Our world
Be one with me
Your only temptation was the world
Let me give it to you
Sins aren't guaranteed
Akaname
Filth: Dust on the Window
by Marley McKenzie
Dust on the window,
mildew scent spreads in the air,
spouts drip in damp sinks.
Hair spikes on red flesh ensues
enthusiasm once more.
Castaway fall leaves
disintegrate in my mouth.
Silverfish glimmer.
Dust sparkles in the sunlight
as my tongue tracks roaches trail
Nature prospers here,
my filth ridden dross abode,
a palace of tiles.
I bathe in the drudgery-
deserted- yet I stick; glue.
Marley McKenzie is a Black gender-fluid person studying English at
Georgia Southern University. She has work published in Written Tales
Chapbook vol. XVI and The Nonbinary Review by Zoetic Press. She is
also looking for publication for his poetry collection titled Blocked
Messages. For more information please contact her at
marley.mckenzie36@gmail.com.
The Sunday Tree
by Reyzl Grace
—for E. R. Shaffer
Long, long ago, beyond the longest shadow cast by Mount Narodnaya, there lived a harried old woman in a run-down little cottage. All the week, she was about the business of the whole world—fetching and ferrying, chopping and charring, making and mending—though there was no one at home but her and the sharp whistle that came through a cracked plank in the door on winter nights.
It was after one of those nights, when the Lord’s day came in again as long and lonely as before—and offering as little respite as any other day—that the old woman, dragging her battered sledge, stamped her way through a little clearing in the forest, where a single fir tree stood, all glistening white from its crown down to its inmost bottom branches. As she passed this tree, the crust of the snow gave way beneath her step and stuck her boot, so that she cried aloud what she had grumbled to herself the long mile before, and the long mile before that:
“Had God any pity on an old woman, he would strike me down here with a bolt of lightning from a winter sky!” she cried. “It is not enough that I support so many without a single hand turned back to me in kindness—not enough that the tsar’s men and the merchants find no value in me but what they can task and tax—but I am left to it all with arms grown frail and heart grown weak and bags beneath my eyes to match the sacks across my back, so that I do not know myself for the pains in limbs that once were strong and the lines in a face that once was beautiful. I work for everyone but myself, because all that was me is gone.” So saying, she fell down in the snow beside her stuck boot and wept.
But when her weeping ended, she heard a voice—or at least, it seemed a voice for having spoken, though in truth the sound of it was little more than the strike of two snowflakes together in the breeze, or the ring of sunlight glinting off the smallest trickle of spring melt. “Baba,” it said, “I am blessed of the Morning and the Evening Star, and beauty is sacred to me. I cannot bear that you have lost yours; won’t you let me give it back to you?”
At this, the old woman wiped her eyes, but she saw no one—only the soft sway of branches in the breeze—so she tended to her boot.
“Baba,” came the voice again. “I would help you. Come to me!”
The old woman stopped tugging at her leg and peered harder into the wood, squinted higher into the canopy of the glistening tree, but there was no one—not even a bird upon the wind. Again, she pulled at the boot.
“Please, baba!” pleaded the voice, and whatever it was, it was not in the wind.
Now the old woman’s celadon eyes stood wide as saucers, her pupils darting like sloshed tea. “Who are you?” she demanded as the boot came free. “Where can I find you?”
“I am here, baba!” And for all that the declaration seemed to brim with joy, the voice was faint, as though the slightest turn of one’s head might blot it out forever. “I am the tree in the midst of the clearing. Will you not let me help you?”
So the woman trudged to the tree, unmittened her hand, placed it against the trunk. “Gladly would I take your help, but how?”
“Brush all the snow from my branches,” said the tree, “and your skin shall be white and smooth as though newfallen on you.”
The old woman had not climbed a tree in many years, but with aches and bumps and bruises she made her way to the top and then, branch by branch, swept every snowflake to the ground. When her feet again met earth, she fell a second time into the snow, a wild gasp escaping her, for there stood the tree, and its every needle shone of purest gold, so that it was blinding to look upon, and the woman could bear only to squint into a single sprig where—very small in the sharp curve of a cone—she could see her own face, fresh and gleaming as though forty years of toil had been given back to her unspent.
“I . . . You . . .” the now-young woman stammered, hardly able to speak for the smile that immobilized her lips as she sat, turning her face back and forth in the oriflamme reflection. “It’s . . . It’s a miracle! A wonder!” A long while she gushed like this, but then she sighed a great sigh, and her smile seemed to go out with the last of her breath. “Why have you done this for me?”
The tree laughed, or else the wind teased at the tips of branches—if, indeed, there were any difference between these things. “I told you, baba,” it said, “beauty is sacred to me. Go—take your load with a strong back, take the earth with a graceful stride—and have joy of it.”
And that is what she did. All her way home, every step seemed to take her twice as far, and the weight of the sledge felt like nothing at her regally broadened shoulders, and her thick, bark-brown hair kept her as warm as she could please, and she resolved to come again, in a week’s time, to thank the wonder-working tree.
But, oh! What a lifetime is a week—what worlds are made and unmade in it! For when Sunday came again, the young woman was not in a thankful mood, but a bitter one, and when she passed through the clearing by the great, gold tree, and it called out to her—“Baba! It is good to see you! How have you fared made fair again?”—she threw up her hands in frustration:
“There is more strength in my arms to sell,” she explained, “but still no food for my stomach except by selling it. My skin is unblemished, yet my roof is still full of holes. The wind still howls through the crack in my door, and it is only a matter of time before it cracks my lips as well. You have made me young again, but alas! I still am only a foolish old woman who had forgotten how cruel this world can be even to the young. Would that it were not winter, that the good Lord might take me, in his mercy, in a single flash of lightning!”
“Baba, baba!” cried the tree. “Do not speak so! The Morning and the Evening Star have blessed me, so let me bless you in kind. Brush all the gold from my branches, and your pockets shall never empty of it.”
So the woman climbed the tree once more, faster and more freely; from its crown she began to brush off gold like dust from a miner’s pan. When her feet reached the ground, the fallen snow sparkled, but the needles on the tree were all black, and she noticed for the first time how white and open the clearing was—how far the once-golden tree was set from all the others in the wood. So she asked, “Are you well?”
The tree’s voice was faint, but no fainter than it had been before. “I am well; do not worry for me. This black is not the black of death, but the black of rich, dark soil. Go, baba, and take your riches! When you do, you shall leave me to my own.”
So the woman bid the tree thanks and goodbye, and returned to her cottage.
Except that, where her cottage had been, there stood now a rich little house, beautifully painted and splendidly furnished, with glass in its windows and brass on its doors. Inside, where she used to keep an old tin with a couple coppers for bread, a solid oak chest lay open, filled with golden grivny in long, thin ingots that reminded her of nothing so much as pine needles. And that night, when she pulled her red silk sheets to her chin, warm and fed, they draped about her neck in a perfect reflection of her smile. Surely—she thought—surely, come Sunday, she would go back and give thanks to the tree.
But when the Lord’s Day dawned, after pouring all her money into the alms-box of the church until it overflowed, the woman went back to the tree in a sombre mood.
“Baba!” called the tree, and the yell was like the clattering of daisy petals in a calm field. “How are you? Have you rested?”
At this, the woman’s lip trembled, and she dropped herself in the snow. “I have rested, yes,” she explained. “My cottage is the dacha of a rich merchant—the mansion of a boyar! Yet I have no peace. Seven days the wind has not come through my door, nor the snow through my roof. Seven days I have not fetched or toiled, nor had to give to another what it did not please me to give, and seven days I have asked something of myself I cannot answer. When I was old, I wished for youth and you gave it, and I was not satisfied. When I was poor, I wished for wealth and you gave it, and my heart is restless. What good this temple of my nameless longing, that castle of my discontents? Truly, it were better for the Lord to end me in a bolt of lightning than to leave me to the storm clouds my heart must gather.”
“Do not say it, baba!” gasped the tree. “Only tell me what you wish, and I will grant it.”
And so the two were quiet together a long time, and the woman watched the black needles, which seemed to weigh upon the boughs on which they grew, as though tethering them against the wind. And she thought of what the tree had told her last time, for indeed, she had thought of little else since.
“Give me wisdom,” she said at last, “and I will trouble you no more.”
The heavy black branches sat, considering. “You have never troubled me, baba, but wisdom cannot be given; it must be won. I can give you a chance to become wise, but no more.”
The woman nodded. “No more will I ask.”
“Then climb,” said the tree, “and brush all my needles to the ground.”
A third time the woman mounted to the top of the tree. A third time she returned, branch by branch, to earth. And when her work was done, every branch was bare, and, though the breeze was light as a lover’s breath, the tree whipped violently from one side to another, as though caught in a terrible gale, and it screamed. What had hardly been audible before was now beyond all recognition, and the woman could not make out a single word of the tree’s agony, which sounded impossibly distant even as it felt incredibly close. She grasped at branches, threw herself at the trunk, tried everything she could to steady and still it before it splintered, and still the scream went on, like a flash of lightning thunder never caught.
So when the flash came, like a glinting coin tossed into an alms tin, the woman mustered whatever merit she had gained and cried, “In the name of St. Ilya, you will not harm this tree!” and the falling bolt became a woman clad in white who tumbled roughly to the ground, her long braid wrapped around her throat and her eyes flashing red.
“Stand aside,” said the seraph, rising. “I have come for this tree.”
But the young woman held the trunk close, twisting to follow it lest it lift her off her feet in its thrashing. “You cannot have it!” she bawled. “I won’t let it go; I have to know why it hurts!”
The seraph’s eyes softened, something in them like pity. “You cannot know. It cannot tell you.”
The woman caught a flailing branch by a knot, dug her feet into the snow. “It spoke to me before. Why can’t I understand now? It was going to teach me wisdom.”
At this, the seraph raised her eyebrows, fulsome and arch as wings. “Beneath your feet,” she began, with a sweep of lily-white sleeve behind her and a perfect stillness in her closed lips, “the trees of the forest talk to one another. Each makes its petitions and whispers its secrets, speaking by roots and mushrooms what is not meant for human ears. This one condescended to you, just as I do—” the seraph opened her mouth in an unnerving grin, revealing a tongue of fire that darted as it pleased, heedless of the words she formed “—but it is in too much pain for that now. You ask too much.”
With that, the seraph reached a long-fingered hand toward the branch closest to her, a red glow growing under her nails, but the woman grabbed the branch away. The bark of the twisting trunk seemed to bite into her thigh as even the most trivial gust caught it like a squall, but the woman just pressed her knee back into the wood, bent over and sank her teeth into the bark like a cat lifting an unruly kitten. Her voice came through her stiffened jaw sharp as steel and rough as wood chips. “Then make me a tree.”
At this, the wind stilled—though one would not have known it from the frenzied contortions of the tree—and for an instant, all that was was the small voice of the scream. And then there was a new motion in the air—a sweet-smelling, sticky, unnatural breeze that came in off the pines at the clearing’s edge—and in every waft came a low drone, like the sound of a swarm of locusts, growing higher . . . higher . . .
“For that,” the seraph stared as though she could hold the whole chaotic scene fixed with a single look, and yet it seemed to the woman also as though she watched the woods with eyes in the back of her head, aware of something beyond the edge of her command, “you would have to have roots.”
“Then give me roots!” A branch of the struggling tree caught the woman whip-quick in the face, and the seraph’s red eyes locked to a trickle of blood across her forehead.
“Here?” she asked.
“Anywhere,” insisted the woman, trying hard to hook her boots into the crust of the snow, “before we are torn apart. Behold the handmaid!”
But the seraph was gone, the trees that had stood behind her now rustling and swaying like abandoned wings. Faster and faster their needles shook in dark matte shimmer, until their branches burst with wings in truth, and the woman could hardly say if the tiny angels that poured from them bit at her flesh, or if her flesh opened to receive them, brimming with nectar in its blossoms. She knew only that the voice of the tree grew clearer as they fed, then calmer as they plaited the tree’s roots to hers in interlocking rings and tied its twisting trunk to the trellis of her own, until two trees stood in the midst of the clearing—a riot of new-burst green and earthy whispers no human being could hear.
Two green trees, all pressed in gold leaf, left like icons in the falling snow.
Reyzl Grace is an Ashkenazi Russian American writer, librarian, and translator working in English, Yiddish, and Russian. A past Pushcart nominee and contributor to Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals, she is also a current poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and an incorrigible lesbian. Originally from Alaska, she now lives in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.) Find more of her at reyzlgrace.com and on social media @reyzlgrace.
The Girl
by Mathew Gostelow
Mathew Gostelow (he/him) is the author of two books: a collection of speculative stories entitled See My Breath Dance Ghostly (Alien Buddha Press) and Dantalion is a Quiet Place, a novella-in-flash (forthcoming, DarkWinter Lit). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. He also creates nightmarish images, from time to time. @MatGost. Website.