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Club Chicxulub Journal
Vol. 2, Thaw

Club Chicxulub Journal: Vol. 2, Thaw

Copyright © 2024 Club Chicxulub

Cover illustration: “Divine Feminine” by Creamy Skeletons

 

Club Chicxulub:

Created by Matt Carney & Lauren C. Johnson

Produced by Matt Carney, Lauren C. Johnson, and Dev Bhat

Website: clubchicxulub.com

IG & Twitter: @clubchicxulub

 

Promotional rights only.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the producers and individual contributors.

• Dedicated to Stuart Lynn Johnson •

Forewords
Forewords

Maybe ‘The Thaw’ is about apocalypses of scale.

Lamentation. Transformation. Loss. Disease. Self-harm. Malice. Vengeance. Like our previous issue and our shows, the Thaw explores some of the darkest elements of our experience, probably more viscerally than any of our previous productions. None of this art shies from presenting sacrilege, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, cancer, or transphobia anywhere on the spectrum between ‘frank honesty’ and ‘pulpy mayhem.’ 

The tone and power in this issue is a reflection, I feel, of two distinct forces currently acting on art in general and especially on the art in Club Chicxulub.

The first force is novel: the writhe of the world in the 2020s. The ‘novum,’ as the kids say. This new world is burning on entry into uncertain new paradigms. Political and cultural orders strain beside ecological and energy systems. The strain incites new and renewed conflicts—wars of imperial domination, militant barbarism, genocide, the erosion of rights. And so much of this violence has occurred more rapidly in a world exponentially more digitized and more populous than in any previous generation. I had this initial idea to list some of the specific injustices since we started Club Chicxulub three years ago, or since the first issue of the journal, or since this year. But even within any of those stretches of time, where would I begin? Where would I end? And what would I miss or diminish by enumeration? How can you bullet point human suffering? And how much suffering remains completely invisible?  

The second force is familiar: interpersonal mortal pain. In talking with these artists—and through ongoing experiences with my own family—I understood how much this work is informed by pain at the time of its production. We all are sharing ongoing battles with grief, trauma, terror, domestic violence, displacement, illness, dying. Most of this happens far from the perception of news or social media, totally hidden from the views of the people around us. Malice can develop inside a human body far beyond the technological ability of detection or control; A human body can also be imprisoned and destroyed by others far beyond the detection or control of the society around. This is a force that is timeless, familiar, mortal, and in the shape of the pain within ourselves and our chosen families.

What I think Club Chicxulub contributors share, and why our work seems so synergistic, is that our work is a catharsis to process and center both forces novel and familiar. It is anchored to the intimacy of past motifs just as often as it is flung forward toward dark futures.

At once personal and regional in scale, spanning non-linear time, The Thaw is a body of apocalyptic art.

Matt Carney

 

I’ve always welcomed the Vernal Equinox. Lengthening days, cherry and magnolia buds, the birds—always the birds, especially the ravens performing aerial acrobatics over Ocean Beach and the peregrines raising chicks in Berkeley’s Campanile. 

Everyone I know hungers to embrace the softness and beauty of this season, yet in so many ways, the world feels just as dark as it did four years ago when COVID-19 forced us to shelter in place. We have witnessed nearly six months of genocide in Palestine, and yet again, we are in the throes of another maddening and dangerous election cycle. 

At the personal level, this past half year has heralded a time of loss and grieving. Since September 2023, I’ve said goodbye to my beloved pet and grandmother. Now, my father faces the end of his life after an unexpected diagnosis of leptomeningeal disease (LMD) in late February.    

Club Chicxulub exists to provide a space to express difficult emotions through dark speculative fiction. This journal is catharsis, dirge, and celebration, submission, and defiance. The pieces in the spring issue of the Club Chicxulub Journal reflect collective and personal pain, fear, and anger—from Jasmine Sawers’ radio play about trans revenge to Victoria Greenaway’s short story about the futility of inspirational platitudes in the face of oppressive, exploitative systems. 

As spring unfurls around us, we let our stoicism melt away. This journal issue is our invitation to feel all emotions. Enough suppression. Welcome to The Thaw.

Lauren C. Johnson

 

Trauma is the creature that stalks me on my hikes through the redwoods, just out of sight. Its presence is felt at every moment, but the moat of trees between us shifts daily. When it inevitably pounces on a seemingly innocuous day, it can look like listlessness. Or anger. Usually exhaustion. A too-long nap. Breathless heaving. Pins in my chest. Or, worst of all, numbness. Once in a while it takes the shape of a person. Sometimes, to my dismay, that person looks like me. 

With softness, I invite it to walk the trail with me. With time, it becomes just another vertebrae in my back that needs cracking.

The collection of stories in Thaw are all touched by an element of this feeling in both personal and collective senses. I wanted to translate the nuance of trauma and grief into sounds that similarly pulse and shift. There is a wavering between harmony and discordance when processing these things. Some days are fine. Some days are not. It’s unfortunately nonlinear. We’re both alone and together through this. Spring comes back around anyway.

Dev Bhat

Amy K. Bell: A Night Out
A Night Out undefined Amy K. Bell

Everyone was feeling major inertia but decided no, it was important to prioritize time with old friends outside of work and away from significant others. Everybody got to the restaurant on time and ordered noodle soup. So cold outside, everybody said. Perfect day for soup. 

Everyone talked about how busy they’d been feeling lately. How tired and constricted by schedules. With that out in the open, everybody took a breath. The food arrived quickly but everyone was too engaged in the conversation to begin eating immediately.

You see, everyone had hired a matchmaker. And apparently the first thing the matchmaker requested were photos of every person everybody had ever dated. 

Photos of your exes, what for? Everyone wondered. 

To establish a suitable physical ideal! Everyone laughed in reply. 

Admittedly, everyone had a very specific type. A certain kind of person attracted them, and they seemed to attract the same. In fact, it was astonishing how consistently true this was. Time and again, everyone had fallen for that one specific profile. Same loves, just on repeat. 

Huh. Everybody mulled that over.

The noodle soup was delicious and satisfying. Unwilling to leave this convivial table, everybody ordered dessert. It had been so long. Conversation turned to weirder notions: intuitions, unconfirmable suppositions, everyone’s break from reality. So sad, what’s happening to everyone right now. Everybody had a bit of dessert on their face and everybody dipped a napkin in water and wiped it clean. (Everyone is that kind of friend.) 

Everybody kept shaking their head at the shape of life now. Kept starting their sentences with, ‘As you get older, you realize…’ After all the food was eaten everybody got the check and stepped out onto the cold sidewalk to part ways. Everybody crossed their arms tightly and drew in close, like old times back when they’d all lived in New York. But instead of smoking, everybody vaped. 

Did you notice how our conversation kept circling back to a longing for the release once permitted by youth? everyone asked outside. Everybody grimaced and nodded. 

Let’s do something about that, dammit, everybody said with conviction. 

Yes, indeed, everybody nodded behind their plumes. 

A pact was made. It was the kind of promise that everyone hopes will initiate a shift in life’s trajectory. Dance in the moonlight! everybody shouted out, laughing. Rituals and ecstasy, everybody whispered. No inner child left behind, everyone agreed heartily. The moon shone down on their small circle, dusted their clenched shoulders with its faint light. Everyone left feeling grateful for an intimate dinner with friends, for hot soup on a cold night, for some synchrony of purpose. If anybody could make this happen, it was everyone.

B.F. Vega: Riffing With Liminality
Riffing With Liminality undefined B.F. Vega

A Northern California Taco Bell sometime in the 90’s

It’s almost midnight. My parents don’t know where I am, but they think they do. I snuck out again with Annie. We don’t actually like each other but she has a car and parents who notice her absence even less than mine do.

Under eighteen, there is little to do in this city. So here we are, at a bright orange and yellow table with a fake mission bell somewhere over our heads and a booth of four young guys two tables over, drunkenly doing impressions of a Chihuahua in a sombrero or Speedy Gonzales between catcalls.

They don’t bother to lower their voices as they leer at my pitch-black hair, skin like wet sand, or eyes that have turned almost obsidian with anger.

We are only here because Taco Bell is affordable. From under car seats and the loose change in our mother’s purses, Annie and I are always able to pull together the $10 necessary to order a party pack. Six soft tacos, six hard tacos. No burritos. I hate refried beans. 

When there are more of us—young, bored, and without the means to buy illicit alcohol—we sometimes go to Denny’s and order coffee until they kick us out for drinking all the cream in the little containers and slipping the condiment bottles into our bags. Our friend Ty has over a dozen ketchup and mustard bottles from such adventures.

Sometimes, when one of us manages to get ahold of some cash, we go to the all-night Carrows and split a plate of fries and an ice cream sundae between the six of us. The waitresses there know us and always puts us in the back room to avoid annoying the patrons who are actually spending money. 

But most nights are like this. Annie and I and sometimes Star, if she isn’t babysitting her three younger brothers, end up in a Taco Bell at midnight eating soft tacos and refilling our single ‘water’ cup with soda.

We always sit at this same table. Close to the back door and right beside the window where we can see everyone waiting in the drive-through line. We are here enough to have started recognizing some of the regulars waiting in their cars. We make up stories about them, giving them names like ‘Mikhail the Musical Truck Guy’ for the man who plays Tchaikovsky loudly from the cab of his twenty-year-old beat-up Ford or ‘Steve From Accounting’ for the man who always shows up at ten to midnight dressed in a full suit in a shiny Lexus the color of Grey Poupon. 

Like most nights, the line gets longer and slower as closing time approaches and I have started playing my game.

I don’t know the first time that the glare of fluorescent lights bouncing off of the faux fiesta colors started to make my head spin. But now if we stay for longer than an hour I start to feel the light penetrating my brain. The iridescent colors of the liminal restaurants start to bond to the food. They get swallowed one soft taco at a time until the world around me is grey and the people are glowing.

I’ve never told Annie or Star about it. I have started giving them more and more of the party pack. Soft tacos turn their skin a soft tangerine. Hard tacos make their hair glisten the sickly yellow of old vegetable oil. I have started asking the cashiers for more and hotter sauces. I have come up with new ways to slip the sauce onto the food before one of my friends eats it.

I’ve started to make little notes to myself on the brown paper napkins about what different colors the different food creates and where. Definitely more orange tonight or Fire Sauce did not turn her eyebrows red. Repeat with two sauces next time

I started to look for this at other places as well but it only happens at overly-bright night spots filled with exhausted people too sad to go home. During the day I can’t tell if there is a slight glow the color of cooked yams to identify who had ‘Moons Over My Hammy’ for breakfast.

But at night, in the hours between the last ray of sunset and the first hint of dawn where there is just darkness and it could be anytime, anywhere, I can see the wilted seaweed aura of Jack in the Box taco eaters and the tawny glow of Double-Double lovers. If they have a slight peachy-grey shimmer I can practically taste the animal-fries. 

Steve From Accounting has a mottled glow of brass and pistachio with the occasional splotches of full-fat milk. I’ve never seen him get his order, but I know he gets the Mexican Pizza every night. 

Usually, aside from trying to figure out their liminal restaurant aura, I ignore other people in the dining room. But tonight, the ignorant drunk idiots are getting to me. I don’t know if it’s the blatant racism or the gross sexism, or a combination of the two, but I can feel the mild sauce in my blood being taken over by hot, then fire. 

I look over at Annie. I don’t think she can see my thoughts shimmering like El Scorcho sauce from Del Taco, but she’s known me a long time and she can tell that I’m about to do something ridiculously stupid.

“No.” She says.

But it’s too late. “Those Jäger swilling morons need to be a taught a lesson.”

“How do you know they’ve been drinking Jäger?” She asks momentarily distracted.

“Um, I can smell it.” I lie because I know saying ‘the entire world around them is pulsing emerald with black licorice veins’ will require a longer explanation.

“I can’t smell… sit down!” She hisses at me.

But I’m already standing. I straighten my pink camo crop top that says Hottie in Charge and put on my sweetest smile before walking over to the idiots’ booth. 

The confirming stench of Jäger and vomit makes my vision swim. For a minute I lose my ability to see the auras. I blink in the sudden brightness of the Technicolor world and wonder if this is a sign to not go through with my plan. 

But I’m committed now to making a stand.

“Excuse me,” I say, batting my eyelashes as I lean onto the yellow table, pushing my elbows toward each other to accentuate my chest.

Four pairs of red eyes with overly enlarged pupils try to focus on the elevation difference between the words Hottie and Charge. I let them look a moment and then realize that the table around my hands is going back to its customary grey.

Deciding to take the return of my ability as a positive sign I say, “I was going to grab another drink and wondered if you wanted a refill.”

Too focused on my chest to think clearly and too drunk to remember where they are anyway, they all quickly agree.

I pick up all four cups and repeat back to them what they said was in them. Then I head to the soda fountain. 

Before putting the first cup on the grate I look over and am relieved to see that Annie already has her car keys in her hand, and both of our purses over her shoulder.

I nod to her, noticing that her aura has turned a pinkish purple that I haven’t seen before. I know she hasn’t eaten anything different. That mystery will have to wait though.

Quickly I set each cup under a random stream and press all the buttons, then I shuffle the cups and repeat four more times. I add in a bag of Sweet ‘n’ Low and a lemon to each. Then to top off my master, sewer-side creation, I turn to the cashier.

It’s the closing manager. His nametag says Max, but we’ve dubbed him ‘Emperor Maximillian of Tacovania.’ The Emperor has been watching, obviously amused. His aura is pulsing shades of buttercup and magnolia. I almost ask what he’s been eating, but am able to stay focused.

“Can I have four packets of fire sauce?” I ask.

He gives me eight and a salt shaker.

After adding the Emperor’s contributions, I take the full cups back to the table.

The idiots nod and thank me by doing their ‘hilarious’ “Yo Quero Taco Bell” and “¡Ándale, ándale!” routines again. One tries to hug my hips.

I squirm away and pat him on the head before heading straight out the door.

Annie has moved the car into the handicap spot. The engine is running, but even after I slip into the passenger seat she doesn’t drive off. Instead we both stare through the large windows at the four idiots whose Jäger aura has started to fade.

When the first one takes a sip his face turns the pungent grey of wet cement. The others follow suit. The whole table starts to glow in a combination of pea-soup green and salmon.

“Time to go,” I say. “That’s sobered them up.”

“How can you tell?” Annie asks.

“Let’s just say I have a sixth sense about these things.” I smile at her as she peels out before the idiots can make it to the door.

Jacqueline Lesik: Me, Myself, and Eye
Me, Myself & Eye undefined Jacqueline Lesik

Chelsea Davis: The Fruits of
The Fruits of undefined Chelsea Davis

They’d long since passed the point where road gave way to trail gave way to forest. Bright green ferns now rose to their knees. Around them, old-growth redwoods loomed forth. It had been like this for miles: only trees, ferns, the sweet scent of pine, and the two walkers, lost and silent. 

At least, Amber was fairly sure they were lost. Anton’s navigational methods didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The gruff, stout man in a camo sweatshirt and buzzcut—both style choices that were, she now suspected, aspirational rather than markers of actual military service—barely ever paused to check his compass or beat-up map. Amber didn’t dare question him, though. He had a fragile ego and a short temper, a powder keg of a personality that had both scared and intrigued her when they’d first met behind Danny’s Pub last month. He’d told her, then, with a smug calm that made her breathe harder, that she had literally nothing to go on without him and his knowledge of the nightfruit. “Zilch. Zip,” he’d slurred in the bar alleyway, slashing his Miller from left to right in the universal gesture for ‘nothing.’ His small eyes had shone watery in the red light of the bar sign above the back door. “Also, first hint of funny business and I’ll leave you out there. Don’t care how far we are from the road.”

She’d nodded, handed him the cash, watched him count it. 

At least it wasn’t dark out yet in the woods, she told herself, her boots sinking into damp soil again and again. Judging by the sun’s place in the sky, they still had two more hours of decent light. Two hours from now they would hopefully have found what they were looking for. And then it wouldn’t matter whether she could see well. 

She exhaled and rubbed her temples in a gentle circle, trying to will away the headache that had settled between her eyes like fog. Her hands paused when she realized what she was doing. This had been Mom’s signature move, the world-weary forehead massage. Her mother had deployed it at the beginning of a long, pointless fight with Amber over politics (how a daughter of the twenty-first century could turn out more conservative than her mother, Mom had never been able to understand), or at the end of a long day of teaching surly eleventh-graders in Willits the names of various presidents whose policies had permanently fucked them over. Was the gesture one that she played for sympathy, or an unconscious tic that brought her real comfort? Amber never could decide. Mom’s life had been dismal, to be sure—hardscrabble, and riddled with self-proclaimed failures, none bigger than Amber herself—but she had also savored her own pitifulness, the way a child tongues a loose tooth. 

The footsteps ahead of Amber had stopped. A few paces in front of her, Anton was resting one hand on an enormous redwood trunk, staring intently at its bark. As she approached, Amber glimpsed a design in the wood that he was studying. Against the background of mahogany bark, black smudges—burn marks?—outlined a human face, slightly larger than her own. The face was absent of expression and of gender, its eyes closed, as if in sleep.

“Here we go,” Anton muttered, more to himself than to her. 

He started walking again without waiting for Amber to respond, his pace brisker now. She took a last look at the face, its mysterious peace, then hustled so as not to lose sight of Anton. His navy-blue frame backpack was nearly swallowed by the trees already.

undefined

It had been a gently cold evening in early November when Amber had realized something was well and truly wrong with Mom. Memory had long been the woman’s gift and vocation. As a child, Amber would sit transfixed as her mother recited for her, in response to some cruel scrap of national news, whole paragraphs from Beard and Du Bois and Zinn. We must not accept the memory of states as our own, Amber. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest…

In recent months, though, her mom had begun to forget things. She’d miss her weekend phone banking shift, or write the wrong date—off by a decade—on checks. More than once, she’d become confused while driving to school along the same route she’d taken since the ‘80s, insisting, through frustrated tears, that someone had changed the street signs. Amber had barely had time to notice, at first, overwhelmed by her own two jobs and by the bills and housework that her mother increasingly neglected. But one night at the dinner table, Mom had looked up suddenly, eyes blinking quickly, then narrowing as they took in Amber’s hunched-over presence: “Wh—who the hell are you?” 

From then on, the memory slips became a plummet. Dressing was an ordeal. Mom rarely made it to the toilet. But there was no money for an in-home nurse, let alone a facility. So Amber quit her job at the flower shop, then her job at the restaurant. Her mother was her job now. Even if Mom didn’t realize she was her Mom. Even if Mom looked at her only without recognition. Or with loathing. 

undefined

An hour further into the woods, the trees had grown smaller and denser, blocking out much of what little sunlight remained. The warbler trills that had broken the stillness every few seconds on the first three days of the trek had grown less and less frequent, then ceased altogether. Replacing the birdsong was a lower, darker sound: the steady hum of some insect, pressing in around them in hidden, unthinkable quantities. There was a new smell, too, growing stronger the further they walked. Something putrid-sweet, an earthy tang that reminded Amber of opening her mom’s backyard compost bin to dump fruit and eggshell scraps there. Amber didn’t want to think about the hot scent the heap must give off, now, after being left untended for eight months, how it must twitch constantly with crawling things that ate death.

Anton had slowed his near run to the pace of a heartbeat. As he walked, he scanned the trees around them with uncharacteristic attention, turning his head slowly from side to side. In the end, though, it was Amber who spotted it: another trunk with a face sketched onto it, about five feet to the right of the mostly straight line they’d been walking. This face’s eyes were closed, again, though the expression was less ambiguous this time. Its lips were drawn lightly upwards at their corners in a small, toothless smile. 

Anton whooped and grinned back over his shoulder at Amber, his look of little-boy glee jarring after days of sullen machismo. “That’s the last one!” he shouted, veering slightly right towards the tree, then passing it. “C’mon, now!” Amber followed. As she passed the tree with the face markings, she felt a squelch under her right foot and paused to look down. Lifting her hiking boot, she saw a small gash of dark purple pulp on the dirt beneath it. There was slime on her shoe, in the same color. Nightfruit. Pressure rose in her throat. This was it. She was finally excited, herself. And also, she discovered, afraid. Deep down, she’d been assuming they wouldn’t actually find anything. That Anton was full of shit, like most of the barflies in her town, just a hustler finding an easy mark in a grieving daughter. But maybe there was some truth mixed in with the shit, this time.

undefined

The last time she’d taken Mom to the town’s run-down ER, they’d had to strap her down with restraints on each wrist and ankle. Even this had taken three nurses to achieve. Mom had thrashed her frail, dry limbs against the men in a frantic dance, shrieking first be freed—late, she was late for work! And Amber was trying to kill her!—and then with nonsense words, and then without words at all. Sundowning, the on-call doctor had called it a few hours later, as Mom slept a chemical sleep nearby. He was clearly a transplant to Willits, clean-cut and youngish. Amber wondered idly how long he’d last here. “Happens all the time,” he’d told Amber, jerking his brows upwards and patting her shoulder in a gesture of comfort and dismissal. 

Happens all the time, meaning, ‘happens to many people,’ Amber thought the next day and she slowly walked Mom to their car in the hospital parking lot. But also meaning, ‘happens often, to your mother, now and for the rest of her life.’ She kept one hand under Mom’s elbow and the other tightly gripped around the bottle of antipsychotics she’d picked up at the in-house pharmacy. As they reached the passenger’s side door of their car, Mom turned to look at the face of the person holding her arm and smiled faintly, politely.

undefined

More and more of the black fruits littered the ground in front of Amber, forming their own kind of path in the absence of a manmade trail. The rank, sweet scent forced more of its fingers into her nostrils and mouth. She suppressed a gag and began to jog, her backpack straps jostling heavily on her shoulders. Fifty feet ahead, Anton had stopped again. He sank slowly to his knees. This time, he said nothing as she caught up with him. And as she joined him in kneeling, she understood why. Before them was the bush. Though only three feet wide, it was thick, thick with the nightfruit, clusters of berries peppering the emerald leaves. They were something like blackberries in shape, but unshining—and darker, so dark they seemed more to mark the absence of light than the presence of color. Like little black holes that sucked at the green around them. 

undefined

The day after their return from the ER, Amber slept deep and woke late to the sun in her eyes, smiling briefly at the rare luxury. Mom usually interrupted her sleep several times throughout the night, fears of her own bedroom’s dark corners driving her to seek the vague comfort of her daughter’s presence, or whoever she thought Amber happened to be that particular night. Last night, the new pills must have been working their magic. 

Amber stretched, sat up, and yanked sweats and a ratty t-shirt onto her ever-paler body. After walking to her mom’s room down the hall, she yelled, “Morning, Mom!” and rapped on the door. When no reply came, she repeated the greeting. Opening the door, she first saw the sideways bottle on the bedspread, its bright orange jarring against the muted grays and purples of the rest of the room. And then she saw her mother on her back in bed, unmoving, her mouth fixed open as if in speech, and her eyes fixed open, too. 

undefined

“Are you sure,” Anton said softly, his eyes still trained on the plant ahead. There was no question in his voice. Amber took a breath in through her mouth, trying to block her nasal passages as she did. Mom’s compost bin, Mom’s vomit, Mom’s shit-smeared bedsheets. “Yeah,” she exhaled. Anton carefully extended a hand to the bush and grasped a berry. With a small tug, it was free from its cluster, then in Amber’s hand. 

Amber looked at the nightfruit, small and silent against her palm. “So you’re the little woman who made this Great War?” she chided it with a small grin. It was Mom’s favorite quote to share with her students when they learned about the Civil War. Although, as Mom never failed to point out to the rows of bored young faces, it wasn’t clear that Lincoln had actually spoken those words to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Likelier, some advisor who’d witnessed the meeting had mostly or completely invented the line, then conveyed it to some historian to be recorded as a permanent fiction.

She raised the berry to her nose, gave it a sniff. This was the source of the smell, alright. Then, before she could stop herself, she popped the thing in her mouth and began to chew. “Gah!” she blurted, wincing as the taste hit her tongue. She was eating roadkill; she was eating dung. A juicy wad of dung. She kept chewing. She swallowed. She panted. It was done. 

Anton turned and looked at her, then, for a few beats, the longest gaze they’d shared for days. There was a new look in his eyes, almost gentle. He gave a short nod, pushed his hands down on his knees to stand, and walked quickly away, retracing the path they’d taken. 

Wait. 

He wasn’t going to stay?

How would she…?

“Wait,” she murmured, too surprised to move. His steps became softer, then vanished altogether. 

The sun was setting. What little light had made its way through the tight foliage before was leaving, now. She wondered what it would feel like. A moment passed. What what would feel like? That what had been important to her, crucial to her, just moments ago. But now she found it hard to recall why, exactly, she was here. The fruit-laden bush in front of her seemed related, somehow. But she couldn’t be sure. She stood up from the ground and turned around. A trail of dark splotches led away from the bush. There was no real path, though. Just the wall of trees all around. And a smell—what the hell was that smell? Fear rose in her chest. Was she really all alone, in this strange place? 

She tried to focus, to remember anything that could get her out of here. Her back and underarms were damp; there had been exertion of some kind. And a nasty but exciting presence—the image of a man, buzzed head and scowling face, swam upwards in her memory. Had he hurt her? Or could he help her? He might still be close. “Hello!” she shouted into the forest. “Is there anybody there?” She rubbed her temples, willing her mind further into the past, but the past slid back as quickly as she ran to meet it, a line of surf retreating from the shore. 

Suddenly, another face was there, rising in her mind. Ratty gray hair, falling to the shoulders. The jade eyes slitted, the mouth screwed up in suspicion. ‘Mom,’ Amber thought, slowly. This she was almost sure of. ‘That’s my Mom.’ The person’s mouth began to speak. Of disappointment; of disapproval. ‘Never did I think,’ it hissed. ‘Everything I fought for.’ Amber felt tears on her cheeks. But now Mom’s face was changing. Wrinkles and sag were pulled upwards, into smooth skin. The hair grew thick, and brightened to the colors of a fire. The eyes creased now not with hate, but with affection. “Amber,” Mom whispered, the words a caress. “My baby.” Amber’s chest cramped with sudden joy. Why this dampness on her cheeks? Her mother loved her. Had always loved her. 

Soon, Amber would forget the words for everything. Soon her heart would forget to beat. She would lie down in the darkness. And on her face would be the smile of the silence of the trees.

Creamy Skeletons: Pact
Pact  undefined Creamy Skeletons

Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito: Goats With Benefits
Goats With Benefits undefined Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

Nothing makes you re-evaluate your life priorities like a well-intentioned offer to fuck a farm goat. More precisely, a domesticated Nubian buck with large pendulous ears, a convex profile, and soft golden eyes that flash blue in the dark. 

“Moe is a nice boy. He takes care of us on the farm. He’ll take care of you,” Marie, the lady farmer, says to me with a wink and mothering sincerity that is comforting like a blanket of pancakes and lightly sweetened steamed bread that Granny (also a lady farmer when she was alive) used to cook on bamboo racks in the outdoor kitchen at midnight.  

Marie offers goat love like life’s essentials, like milk and cookies, like stir-fry and rice, like pineapple and ham, like penicillin. “Moe don’t care. When he ruts, he ruts everything.” 

“What if I care?” I ask the second most obvious question that shouldn’t be allowed to clog the air like musky pheromones and bad cologne. The first obvious question is unspoken but has me scrutinizing the seventy-six-year-old woman from nose to toes. The slope of her stoop is pronounced, bending her like river reeds in high wind. Her hunch is anchored to the earth by thin legs, clad in grey tights, that make her stork-like with the mop of white hair and a sharp nose. 

I look at Moe. 

I look at her. 

It’s a wonder she hasn’t broken her bones.  

Marie shrugs and scratches an itch on her cheek, forgetting it seems that her hands are covered in mud. At least I hope it’s mud. It’s hard to know for sure with this many ducks and chickens free-ranging and free-shitting at every step. 

Now, if I were a doe, Moe the billy in question might have been a tempting contender. Strong back, mottled coffee fur, stout legs with clean-ish hooves, bunny ears that flop like bouncing breasts during a good jog, ten-inch horns curling backwards, and a keen, persistent stare from bright eyes that follow me everywhere. As goat boys go, I could do worse.

“No thank you,” I tell Marie and she doesn’t push it. She’s known me my whole life. Related by marriage in distant fashion to Granny. Marie knows that I’m stubborn. Knows that I’d eat cardboard over cake if it meant getting my way, which has never been the easy way.

Speaking of uneasy, things have been hard for months between Scott and me. That’s why we’re here on Marie’s farm. I’ve run out of things to give him, except the one thing Granny left me.

“So… about that wish,” I say to Marie as she looks beyond the open barn door at Scott who’s standing by the red truck, smoking a blunt. It’s the fourth one today. He promised to ease up, and he has actually, at least today.

A broad-chested turkey the color of bourbon struts by the Toyota, curious at whether Scott is willing to share the stuffed cigar smoking in his mouth. The bird moves too close for Scott’s liking and he kicks at the fan of white tail feathers. He lands solid contact against the turkey’s ass. It screeches and limps off in feathered confetti. 

Scott slaps at the toe of his boot, swearing a soliloquy before climbing back into the pick-up. 

“Yang! Hurry the fuck up!” He yells out the driver side window at my direction. 

Marie doesn’t say a word, but reaches to scratch Moe’s forehead. Moe enjoys her touch and launches himself on his hind legs to dangle his front hooves over the pen’s wooden door. 

“Come on out you silly boy.” The door clicks open and Marie leads Moe out of his pen. She continues scratching his head and he leans into her dirty nails but continues to stare at me as his eyelids droop and lusty lashes sweep the brown markings on his face. 

I feel the need to explain Scott to Marie and so I do. 

“We met over pie and sandwich.” 

That part is mostly true, but what I didn’t say is that I served him my first week at the Milky Way Deli where I got a job after Granny died and the money ran out. I still remember his order: a chicken club, marbled rye, no onions, and a slice of warmed strawberry rhubarb à la mode. I got him the wheat, not rye, and peach not strawberry rhubarb. He complained and the boss fired me.

“Pie and sandwich,” Marie echoes as if the pairing doesn’t make sense.

“He felt sorry seeing that I was in a bad spot after Granny died. Offered me a ride and gave me a place to stay.”

Marie snorts and Moe chatters his teeth. 

Some of that part is true, but what I didn’t tell Marie is that Milky Way Deli was my fifth job attempt. And it ended like the others. Fired at the close of the day. The only difference is that Scott was in the parking lot after my shift. Hanging out by the same truck, smoking and drinking, waiting for me. 

Offered to take me home to my husband. When I told him that I was between homes without a husband, he touched me in two places. One hand on the curve of my hip and the other at the small of my back. Firm and possessive, he placed me into his car and took me to his house. Gave me a drink that tired me after a single sip and laid me across a damp mattress on the floor.

In the morning, he asked if I believed in destiny. Asked if I believed in love at first sight. Asked if I had any money for breakfast. 

“I haven’t had a chance to go to the store,” he explained. 

The wet mattress had no sheets or blankets and we laid in a rumpled-ness of Milky Way uniform, corduroy pants, and t-shirts.   

Scott was naked, hairy, and sated next to me.

I was bewildered and achy. 

I’d never been with a man. 

“I believe in destiny if it’s like magic,” I answered. 

Magic was something I was familiar with. Granny had baked it into bread, sprinkled it into porridge, poured it into candles, and sealed it in vials for customers who ventured through the old rotting forest surrounding our farm. 

“Show me,” he said.

I had very little magic, only what Granny wished into me when she wished for a child. But I liked the way this man was impressed by my wide hips, thick middle, and cropped black curls that became seaweed nests when grown out. He didn’t notice that I wasn’t pretty in the way I saw the other waitresses were. He didn’t seem to mind the hanging rolls and the resilient roundness of my belly. 

I dug into the skirt pocket that was bunched under my neck for my last twenty and showed Scott the magic by turning a lock of his grey hair into gold.

“For breakfast,” I offered. He took the cash.

“I’m in love with you,” he said later in his bathroom when he snipped the gold hair with scissors and placed the strands into an envelope. “Can you do it here and here?” He pointed to the peppered hair at his temples and the wisps combed across a bald spot.

“Ok, but only a little more.”

I didn’t see the harm in sharing. Granny always said, “A tiny bit for everyone.”

Except. 

Magic runs out like coal.

“You’re empty.” Marie says to me in the barn where I’ve spaced out staring at Scott in the truck. He’s napping now with the baseball cap covering his face. His scalp looks cold. The hair shorn.  

“I used what I had.”

“Was supposed to last you a lifetime.” Marie’s tone is matter of fact.

“I need more.”

“I see,” she says, her hands on her hips now as she watches Scott sleep. 

Moe is watching too. Watching me. A loud watching because he bleats and shakes his head while chickens cluck in rafters shawled by cobwebs.

“You kept Granny’s last wish for me. Can I have it please?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all that’s left, you know. All the magic she had, she put it into a last wish for you to make.”

“I know. I need it now.” 

“For you. Or for him.” 

“For us.” 

That part is half true, but what I didn’t say is that Scott has started to hate me. It began around the time my magic burned out. No more big, bright smiles, and twisting in soiled clothes on the mattress that’s wet because of the leaky roof above our heads. Or growls of pleasure synchronized with writhing shadows made by the flashlight on our coiled bodies. 

Sometimes he’s not even there at night and when he is, he asks me if the magic has come back. If I can make him golden again. When I say no, he’s angry. Punches walls, splits his skin. Yells that I would do it if I loved him.

“You’ll have to stay for dinner. We can catch up,” Marie says, interrupting my thoughts.

“Dinner? I was hoping to pick up and—” 

“Yang-Yang, wishmaking isn’t fast food. When your Granny died, she didn’t have much to leave you. Used too much to wish for you in the first place. That’s why I kept whatever was left. I’m the best at scraps and leftovers.” 

“Um. I have to talk to Scott.”

“Come on Moe, want some raisins while I cook?” Marie leads Moe directly into a cottage that looks like a gingerbread house with boxy walls, isomalt windows, and white trim piped on slanted eaves. 

I head back to the truck and gently nudge Scott by placing a hand on his shoulder through the rolled down window.

“Hey hon, Marie invited us to dinner.”

Scott jerks awake and shoves my hand out of the car. “Don’t touch me! You smell like piss!”

I sniff my wrist where he grabbed, where it throbs, but don’t smell anything but earth. 

“I was petting the goat.” 

“Did you get it? Let’s go.” Scott starts the car as if I’ve already said yes.

“Uh, not yet. Marie says it’ll take a while and we should stay for dinner and catch up.”

Scott stares ahead at the windshield. A vein on his neck bulges and pulses. His grip on the steering wheel turns white as bone.

“You promised me that your grandmother left you more. I didn’t drive fifteen hours for a family reunion on a trashy farm.” 

He’s mad. He’s always mad.

“I know, babe. And I’ll get more. I promise. It’s just dinner and I think Marie is a little lonely for real company.” I pause before continuing, “I think she’s spending too much time with the goat.”

“She’s looney! And all your fuck-ups are starting to make sense.”

I know what’s coming. The List.

“Milky Way. Mean Bean. Singing Cats. Star Market. Dal’s Café. Can’t keep a job. Can’t clean a house. Can’t cook. Every fucking thing has to be taught to you fifty times and you still get it wrong!” 

“I love you Scott.” I’m shaking and the ‘ssss’ stutter and slide through my front teeth like the pulled scarf of a fake magic trick.   

“Your love is a mess,” he says and climbs out of the truck, grabs my arm and slams me against his chest. His face is close enough to bite. 

“Please, one more chance?” I’m ashamed that I beg. But after Granny died, a void cracked open inside me. An empty lost, untethering that happens when a wish no longer has a maker. 

But Scott is full of wants and wishes. He’s a wishtaker, which I tell myself is almost as good as a maker.

“This is your last chance,” he says slow and steady as his grip tightens. I know better than to complain even when it hurts.

“Yes, Scott. Thank you Scott.” I coax the pain into a coo. 

“Last. Chance.” His grip tightens more and twists, winding up the tension like a toy.

“Ow!” Scott lets go suddenly and rubs his ass. 

“You fucker,” he says as he kicks out at Moe who has wandered behind him and poked him with his horns.

“Beeehhhhh,” Moe bleats, dodging away with a snort as he trots back to the cottage.

I massage my arm where red welts lengthen their claws on tan skin.

“Yang-Yang, come into the house! Dinner will be ready in an hour,” Marie calls out from a screen door of the house. And I wonder, how long she’s been standing there.

“Coming!” I answer and look back at Scott whose hand has slipped past his waistband to knead his left butt cheek with abandon. For some reason, I want to laugh. Laugh at him. Laugh at me. Laugh loud and wild, and caw as murmurating blackbirds do. 

Instead, I walk away without checking if Scott follows me into the house.

undefined

Inside, I realize quick that I’d forgotten the strangeness of Marie’s home. Mini cauldrons crowd the shelves built into the walls of the single room house. Cast iron bellies and three-pronged feet stand ready for work like udders of raven cows at attention. Worn hardbound books break up the monotony of relentless black along with taxidermied animals. Deer and goat heads, and the occasional full-bodied chickadee peer from perches high up and low to the floor. Glasses, bottles, and caps cover the kitchen countertops.

I’d forgotten the smells too. Spices that tingle and make nostrils weep and tongues salivate. Smoky, cinnamon carrying heat. Bitter, tangy, burnt. Blurry, singing flavors that confuse the mind and blur the eyes.

“Sit down,” Marie instructs without turning away from the stove. I do as she asks.

The screen door opens and slams shut. 

Scott. 

But I don’t feel like saying anything or looking at him. So I don’t. 

I focus on Marie in her blue apron, crouched low, feeding splintered wood into the hungry maw of an ancient stove. She stokes the fire until it shifts from tangerine flames to a white blue blaze. I haven’t felt anything this warm since Granny died. Moe stands close to Marie, staring at me.

“How long this gonna take?” Scott says gruff and impatient.

“Soon,” Marie answers and stirs a pot. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“How soon is soon?” Scott straightens, crosses his arms, and takes a step closer to Marie. He’s huge compared her tiny five-foot frame.

“Leave her alone, Scott,” I say.

“What? I just want to know how long we have to wait for the old bag to hand over what belongs to me.”

 “You mean to Yang-Yang,” Marie corrects him, while adding chopped vegetables to the pot.

“To me. This woman has been living rent free in my house for months. Anything she has is mine.”

“Leave her alone,” I say again.

“Shut the fuck up and let me handle this!” He says and takes another step toward Marie, who continues to stir. 

“The cake is baking,” she says calmly.

“Don’t give a flying fuck.” He takes another step. “Look, this is how it’s going to work. You’re going to give me what I want and we’ll leave.” Something gleams in his hand. A jackknife from the glove compartment. 

I leap up, grasp at his sleeve. “Scott! What are you doing?!” 

He pushes me from him. “For once, do what I tell you do! And do it right!” 

Moe stomps and nods his head, brandishing his horns.

“Scott, this isn’t why we came!”

“It is now.”

“Stop it!” I lunge at him to take the knife. I miss and he knocks me to the floor.

Moe charges.

Scott’s ready this time and slices the blade across the goat’s face, hitting his left eye. 

Moe bleats and whimpers, but charges again.

Scott dodges and swipes the goat’s shoulder. Blood soaks the fur. 

Marie tries to scoot away from the tussle, but the space is too confined. Scott grabs at her, she trips, falls, and hits her head hard on the corner of the stove. Blood gushes out from her forehead.

I jump onto his back, scratching at his neck. 

“You’re all crazy!” he shouts.

Moe rams him again, this time in the groin. 

Scott bends in pain and Moe rams him in the same place. The knife falls to the floor close to my hand.

 I grab the knife.

“Stop it Scott!” I yell at him. The knife in my hand shakes.

“Give it back,” he commands.

“No!”

He stalks as I back away. When he rushes, I close my eyes and thrust the knife out. And the blade sinks without complaint deep between the ribs. Deep into Scott’s heart. 

Stunned, he stares at me before collapsing onto his knees. I leave him kneeling, his eyes wide open, and his head and shoulders slumped against the shelf. 

I run to Marie and gather her into my arms.

I cradle her head in my elbow.

Her eyes blink, unfocused. 

“Take the cake.” She turns her head weakly toward the stove.

“I’m sorry Marie. I don’t want it! You can have the wish. Wish yourself better. Please!”

“It’s too late child. Your Granny didn’t have enough left. I promised to give you what I had when you came. It’s all there, not much, but enough.” Marie patted my hand. “Choose more wisely this time.” She sighs and stills.  

I cry. Because that is what you do when you wake up from a nightmare and find out it’s all true.

A burning smell rouses me from the puddle I’ve become next to Marie’s stiffening body. I pull down the oven door to a pan of browned sheet cake. It smells delicious, but turns my stomach.

I take out the pan and set it on the floor where Moe stands by Marie. His eye is swollen closed but the wound on his shoulder has stopped bleeding and started to crust.

“Go ahead, Moe. Whatever you want.” I slide the pan under his nose and he sniffs.

He hesitates though I know he’s interested. He’s a goat after all. 

“I’ll be fine. I’m good.”

None of that is true. But I don’t need to tell him that it’s a lie. 

He licks and begins to eat the cake. Timid and slow to start. And then faster. The magic works immediately. His eye heals and opens up. His shoulder stitches back together. Then he changes shape. The fur shortening to hair. Hooves flexing into fingers and toes. A goat’s conical face shortening into a man’s. 

Moe the human stands up, fully clothed in black pants, a brown shirt, and bare feet. Tufts of thick brown hair cover his head. He’s lanky, middle-aged, and annoyed.

“Well, that sucked.” He looks at Marie and paces. “She was like a mother to me.”

“Mother?” I can’t help but repeat.

He scowls. “For the record, I don’t and didn’t rut with everything.”

“Ok.”

“She was joking with you.”

“Ok.”

“So what now?” he asks as if I have the answers.

I say the first thing that I think. “I’m taking a break from men.”

He nods and covers Marie with a blanket; not over face, but to her chin as if she’s sleeping.

I study his deliberateness and the careful way he moves around her body in his new body. 

“Why’d you wish for this?” I ask.

“Because you need a friend.”

I consider for a moment the morbid state of the room and the kindly goat-man with soft golden eyes. 

I hold out my hand. 

“Sure, I think we can be good friends.”

And, for once, I believe what I’ve said is completely true.

Suri Parmar: Hound of Hell
Hound of Hell undefined Suri Parmar

Sarah found the dog on a chilly February day. Or, rather, it found her.

After an appointment at the local hospital, she went for a walk on the nearby beach, as she usually did. She spotted the dog as she headed back to her car, a brownish beagle-size lump huddled on the boardwalk, though it didn’t look like a beagle. She’d never seen an animal with eyes that color before. Like molten lava, or fresh orange peels. They reflected the sky, which had turned a lurid lavender shade that made the lake look sickly. 

“Hey, you, where’d you come from?” Sarah cooed. She looked around. Nobody on the beach but her. She bent and scratched the fat, curly creature behind its ears, recoiling as an icy breeze crinkled the water and blew sand and brush and powdered snow into her face. The dog closed its queer orange peel eyes a little and thumped the splintery walkway with its tail.

She laughed. “Who do you belong to? I don’t see a collar.” The dog shivered and rubbed against her legs like a cat. Sarah sighed. “I can’t take you home with me. My daughter hates dogs.” She picked it up, even though her oncologist had warned her to stay away from animals that might bite or scratch. This dog seemed tame enough, stolidly nestled in her arms. She let it rest its head in the concave space where her left breast was missing.

She walked to the hospital parking lot. Tame or not, she couldn’t keep it. Her ex-husband had custody of Ashlynn that week and she’d be home in two days. Hopefully the town Animal Control shelter could take the dog before then. Hopefully.

On her way home, she made a quick stop at a mall to buy a few things. Tins of wet and dry dog food, a leash, squeaky toys, and, after consulting Reddit on her iPhone, a flea collar. The creature looked and smelled like it had just been shampooed but she would take no chances. She left it snoring on the heated passenger seat of her Land Rover, chubby body slumped on the creased leather, butt perched in the air. She smiled. Its tail looked rather long, ending in a snake-like point. She made sure to lock the car door.

When Sarah returned from shopping, the dog had disappeared. But how? Her car, still locked and streaked with slush, windows shut and whole and sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight. Maybe someone stole it, or it slipped out when she opened the car door? Filled with unease, she looked under the seats and hunted the mall’s asphalt parking lot. Nothing. Well, she couldn’t do anything about it, though she fretted that the dog would freeze. She stashed her bags in the car trunk and eased into the driver’s seat, briefly resting her forehead against the steering wheel. The beginnings of a headache cramped her temples, a usual side effect from the MRI scan she’d had done at the hospital. She quickly called Animal Control to let them know she’d seen a stray dog in the neighborhood. She’d return her purchases the next day. Now, though, she needed a hot, filling dinner and a nap. 

By the time she arrived home, the dog had slipped her mind. She’d begun preparing a salad and reheating leftover Chicken Tetrazzini when Ashlynn called. With no preamble, her daughter bluntly asked if she could come home on Monday instead of Saturday. 

“Again?” Sarah winced as she wiped up spilled cream sauce on the counter. “Last time you wanted to stay longer so you could play Stardew Valley, and the time before you needed your father’s tablet to finish your art assignment—”

“—but it’s the Superbowl this weekend and Dad has the big screen TV. It’s more fun at his place. There won’t be another Superbowl for a whole-ass year. I know Dad and Natasha will let me if you say so.”

“I’m sure they will,” Sarah muttered sarcastically, though Doug and his new wife had been nothing but supportive since they married, anxious to co-parent as smoothly as possible. “All right,” she said, too weary to argue. “And please don’t use that language.”

“You’re sure, Mom?” Ashlynn sounded surprised. “I mean, if you don’t want me to…”

Sarah lost it. “Kiddo, I don’t have the energy for this. If you want to stay, stay. If not, come home.” 

Ashlynn fell silent and then a plump, buzzy dial tone filled Sarah’s ear, making her headache ten times worse. Ever since Sarah became ill last year, Ashlynn never seemed happy with anything Sarah said or did, a line already forming between the girl’s eyes. She was a good kid, for the most part. She brought home decent report cards and rarely acted out. So why then did Sarah feel like she failed as a mother?

Once Sarah finished dinner, she quickly showered. She emerged from her bathroom in threadbare flannel pajamas and slippers, toweling her damp hair.

The dog waited for her in her room.

It sat on her bed, sphinxlike, staring her down with four flaming eyes. It had grown another head. 

Sarah screamed and covered her face. One of the dog’s mouths emitted a guttural whine; the other began to yip. She didn’t dare move lest she startle it. 

An excruciating moment passed. She felt the dog nosing her bare unpolished toes poking out of her slippers. She looked through her fingers. It sat on its hind legs and cocked both heads, yellow teeth and nails curved and twinkling. Who could she call? The police didn’t seem like a good idea. Animal Control wouldn’t believe her, that she’d somehow found a mutant dog that could scamper through walls and metal car doors. And even if they did…

It looked at her again. Hungry, maybe. What could a demon dog eat and drink? Fire? Brimstone? River Styx water?

“No such luck,” she said shakily. She went to the garage and retrieved the pet paraphernalia she’d bought that afternoon. The animal patiently waited for her in the kitchen, front paws raised. She opened the tins and spooned dry and wet dog food onto a large plate, mixed in a few spoonfuls of water, and microwaved it to room temperature. The creature looked young; its tummy maybe couldn’t handle chilled food. She contemplated its new head and molded the mixture into two tidy hills, which she set on the floor with a plastic bowl of water. The dog wolfed it down, each head obediently munching its own portion. At least someone liked her cooking. 

“You’re not so big and bad,” she said to the dog, and meant it. If this was a hell-creature, then she’d endured far worse in her lifetime. Like Doug divorcing her the year before because of her health issues. To say nothing of her medical bills.

When the animal finished eating, she tried to lead it to her backyard to do its business. But when she opened her patio door, it balked and quivered in the cold. “Just a huge softy, aren’t you?” she mused, relaxing. Thinking hard for a moment, she rummaged through drawers and crumpled boxes until she found an old sweater and a few pairs of booties she’d knitted for Ashlynn when she was a baby. She dressed the creature, adjusting the sweater neckline with sewing scissors to fit its two heads and tightening the booties on its paws with hair elastics. Bundled up, the dog seemed happy to romp in the snow outside. It plowed through hills and drifts and chased its tail, which looked more and more serpentine with each passing minute. Hopefully the neighbors wouldn’t see it.

Soon the dog tired out. She let it back in the house and it followed her to her room, daintily shaking tufts of snow from its tail and paws. She washed her face and brushed her teeth and climbed into her bed to watch Netflix on her laptop. The dog settled on a braided rag rug nearby, turning three times before drifting to the floor in a velvety chestnut-hued heap.

Doug texted her in the middle of her favorite true crime show. He’d spoken to Ashlynn. She worried Sarah was mad at her and would come home on Saturday, after all. Which Doug encouraged—he didn’t want to take advantage of their custody agreement. 

Right, Sarah thought sourly. She texted back that she’d just had a check-up with her cancer team at the hospital. She was likely fine but couldn’t relax until her oncologist gave her a clean bill of health. It might be best for Ashlynn to stay with Doug until Monday in case something showed up on her test results, to give her time to process things. Doug agreed without hesitating. Sarah felt a trifle guilty. She couldn’t help wanting to punish Ashlynn, a little. If the girl preferred her father and stepmother’s company, she could stay with them. And maybe Sarah wanted Doug to sit in the hot seat, too. She’d had enough of his detached pity, his polite accommodating. He’d never been this civil during their marriage.

“I’m allowed to be demonic,” she said aloud. Just like the dog. On cue, it hopped onto the bed and curled up next to her. “You better not fart,” she warned, knowing that it wouldn’t. It wanted to please, of that much she was sure. One of its heads—the first one, she suspected—pushed against her hand, the other snapping at the frayed edge of her plaid duvet. She scrunched and smoothed the thick varicoloured fur at the creature’s neck. It licked her fingers. 

A few minutes later, Ashlynn called her back. “Why didn’t you tell me you were at the hospital today?” she asked in an accusing voice.

“Kiddo, you’re supposed to be in bed. Don’t you have a math quiz tomorrow?”

“Mom, tell me what happened. Are you okay?”

“It was a routine appointment. I have to do one every six months to make sure my cancer treatment last year mopped up all the bad cells. Like I told your father, as soon as I get the test results I’ll let you know. I should hear from the hospital tomorrow, or the day after. It’ll be okay.” She shifted.

The creature, drowsing in a tangle of blankets and sheets, abruptly woke. It began to bark.

“Is that a dog? Mom, did you get a dog? You know how much they scare me.”

Wouldn’t she love this one. “Of course not. It’s a show I’m watching,” Sarah lied. She frantically stroked both of the dog’s heads, hoping to soothe it.

“Please turn it off. That sounds like a whole pack. It’s creeping me out.” Sarah patted the animal’s back until it quieted. “You don’t even care, do you?” Ashlynn said. To Sarah’s surprise, she sounded close to tears.

“What do you mean? Of course I do.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t care about anything. That I didn’t want to come home on Saturday or that you were at the hospital. You don’t even turn off the TV when I call.”

Sarah grew exasperated again. “Ashlynn, I’ve got a lot going on right now. I’m doing my best. You just turned thirteen. You’re not supposed to like me. Otherwise I’m not doing motherhood right.”

“Then you’re doing a good job,” the girl retorted. She hung up once more.

Sarah groaned. Even when she tried, she said the wrong thing. No wonder her daughter didn’t want to be around her. She turned to the dog for comfort. Again, it was gone. 

The next morning, she dressed and ate breakfast early. She went to her study and remotely logged into her job from her laptop. She worked from home as a bookkeeper and office manager for a lighting manufacturer. Thank God her boss hadn’t joined the backlash against ‘Quiet Quitters’ that had been all over the media lately. So long as Sarah finished her work and did it right, she could do what she pleased until she clocked out each day. Today though, she ignored her co-workers as they messaged her funny pictures of cats and viral TikTok posts—the kind of humor Ashlynn sneeringly dismissed as “Boomer stuff”—and shared their weekend plans. Sarah devoted herself to her daily tasks with more concentration than usual, replying to emails and filling out invoices and reports with efficient precision.

The text message she didn’t want to receive arrived late in the afternoon during her coffee break. It signaled its landing with a cheery ping. The results from her MRI scan. She swallowed her bite of cream cheese Danish and called the number on her phone screen, a queasiness settling around her heart. With affected indifference, she spoke with a nurse. Her oncologist had spotted something on her scan. A “non-mass enhancement” near her right nipple. Likely nothing serious. Fibrocystic tissue changes or a random flow of blood, they guessed. MRIs tended to be oversensitive. Sarah dispassionately made arrangements to visit the hospital again for a biopsy and more scans. Bile gathered in her mouth, as bitter and watery and stinging as the residual coffee drips in her mug. 

She washed and dried her dishes without thinking and wandered to her study, one hand protectively hovering over her remaining breast. Deep down she knew what the hospital tests would reveal. For all her oncologist’s dismissive attitude. She knew. 

She knew. 

She had cancer again. When she’d finally grown back her hair and felt reasonably healthy and fit. She’d been told she could only have radiation therapy once and had used up her shot. What would her doctors advise this time? More blood draws and tests, hushed consultations and procedures with impatient technicians and nurses with rough hands, humiliating and invasive surgeries, feeling tired and nauseous all the time from chemicals pumped into her bloodstream, swollen arms and blown-out veins…

Sheer torture. She couldn’t describe it any other way.

In between the appointments and hospital trips, she’d pretend to be normal. She’d drive Ashlynn to and from school and her gymnastics and swimming lessons. She’d push through her fatigue, the growing dread that her body no longer belonged to her. She’d prepare Ashlynn’s lunches and dinners and remind her to set the table and empty the dishwasher and finish her homework. And, again, as Sarah grew weaker from cancer treatment, she would ignore the panic and frustration in her daughter’s eyes. Her pain.   

Ashlynn, Sarah thought with a silent moan. She was far too young to endure a sick mother all over again. How would she cope?

She checked Ashlynn’s printed class schedule pinned to her corkboard. She should be finishing school by now. Natasha would pick her up shortly. Sarah resolved to call her and have her come home that night for company. Doug would let her. They’d cry together as they’d done when she was first diagnosed with cancer and order Ashlynn’s favorite Korean takeout and Greek honey cake. They’d watch the silly anime shows her daughter loved and fall asleep on the living room couch.

Try as she might, Sarah couldn’t make the call. She set her iPhone on her desk.

A hissing noise. She looked up as the dog padded into her study, claws clicking on the dustless parquet flooring. It had grown another head—now it had three. The latest, smaller than the others but with the same eager golden retriever expression. Its tail had lengthened and sharpened into a long scaly snake with a forked tongue and a spaded head. It grinned at her with needle teeth and exhaled puffs of dissipating white vapor. 

One head carried a bundle in its mouth, which it dropped at her feet. The lead she bought yesterday and Ashlynn’s baby sweater and booties.

Resigned, Sarah kneeled and dressed the creature in her daughter’s clothes. Its serpent-tail playfully coiled around her fingers and nipped at her jeans. She left the study and headed to her backyard, the dog at her heels.

Jacqueline Lesik: Witching Hour III
Witching Hour III undefined Jacqueline Lesik

Jasmine Sawers: The Rivening
The Rivening undefined Jasmine Sawers

Albion County Police Department

Interview Transcript 4/17/2028 06:14am

Participants: Detective Elias Millburn and Christine Lindell, wife of deceased, Derek Lindell

Note: ACPD responded to a 911 call at 11:39pm at the Lindell Residence at 6157 E. State Route 43 in the unincorporated territory between the towns of Richler and Slope Creek. Caller Christine Lindell was unable to give a coherent statement. Dispatch determined that Mrs. Lindell’s husband, Derek Lindell, had been attacked, but Mrs. Lindell was unable to say if the attack was by an unidentified wild animal or a human intruder and seemed to indicate both. Dispatch sent an ambulance and two squad cars to the address. Mr. Lindell was found in the basement of the home, in a state of undress, eviscerated, penis amputated and found 8.32 feet from the body. He was declared deceased at the scene. Transcript of call and photos of crime scene attached.

undefined

EM: All right, Mrs. Lindell. Sorry about that wait. How’s that coffee treatin’ ya?

CL: Well, it’s cold.

EM: We’ll get you a little warm up in a second here, but let’s go ahead and get started. Can you state your name for the record?

CL: Christine.

EM: Your full name, please.

CL: Christine Lindell.

EM: And for the record, please state that you have waived your right to counsel for this interview.

CL: I didn’t do anything wrong, why would I need a lawyer? My husband is dead.

EM: We’re just covering our bases, ma’am. You were the only witness and we have to follow protocols. You have waived your right to counsel and you have to state that clearly. For the record.

CL [close to the mic, breathing harshly on purpose]: I, Christine Marie Lindell, do not need a lawyer because I didn’t do anything wrong!

 EM:  Thank you, Mrs. Lindell. Your 911 call was fairly chaotic. Can you state for the record— 

CL: Oh was my 911 call chaotic? Was the call I made after I watched that thing tear my husband apart chaotic?

EM: Mrs. Lindell, I’m trying to figure out what happened tonight but you have to calm down. Can you do that for me and then we can figure this out together?

CL: [trying not to cry] I don’t know what happened. Nothing makes sense. How could this happen?

[door open, sound of a glass being set on the table]

EM: Thanks, Lieutenant. Here, Mrs. Lindell. Why don’t we take a few deep breaths?

[Breathing and drinking sounds]

EM: All right now? Okay. Now I know this is upsetting, but I need to ask if there’s anyone who might have wanted to hurt you or your husband.

CL: No! No, we’re Christian. We’re good Christians, we go to church. Derek helps out with the girl’s softball team down Slope Creek.

EM: Now you know as well as I do that not everyone supports the church. Some people, Mrs. Lindell, see a godly person and seek to destroy him.

CL: Yes. Yes! I just never thought—we never done anything to anybody.

EM: But can you think of anyone, for any reason, who had a grudge against your husband? Even something minor. You can take a minute to think about it.

CL: Derek could be hot tempered at a game. But he never hit anybody!

EM: He get in anyone’s face?

CL: No, no. Do you think it could be Satan?

EM: Mrs. Lindell, I’m only using this information to help you. Your husband ever scream at the ref? Threaten some opposing player’s dad?

CL: It wasn’t like that!

EM: [papers rustling] The most recent game was last week, and we were playing East Wharf Senior High, is that correct?

CL: I don’t know. I guess.

EM: [leaning in closer, lowering voice] Look, we all know the people from East Wharf aren’t like you and me. Everyone’s too polite to say it out loud, but that’s the truth, isn’t it?

CL: [breathing heavily] They just get so jumped up. Why don’t they understand that we’d leave them alone if they’d leave us alone?

EM: So it would be understandable, wouldn’t it, if Mr. Lindell got into an altercation with one of them. Who could blame him?

CL: It was never anything serious.

EM: Could you describe anyone he might have disagreed with? Height, complexion, distinguishing features?

CL: There was that Roy St. Clair—Derek had to practically drag him off the pitch—but it doesn’t make sense. No one, no person could control that thing. No, Roy St. Clair’s a pill and a half, but no way he has that thing ready to sic on people he don’t like and no one ever noticed.

EM: Thing.

CL: It wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. You didn’t see it.

EM: You’re gonna have to help me understand, Mrs. Lindell.

CL: [audibly agitated] I keep telling you! It just came out of nowhere! You’re not listening to me!

EM: [deep breath] Okay, so in your 911 call, you indicate your husband has been attacked. Look [rustling papers], here you say, ‘it got him, oh my god, she got him.’ The coroner will be able to determine what weapons were used, but it would be a lot easier and quicker for everyone if you would just tell us what you saw.

CL: It was—I don’t know what it was! It was crazy, it wasn’t—You don’t understand!

EM: So make me understand, Mrs. Lindell. I can’t help you if you won’t help me.

CL: Is that was this is? You’re helping me? You’re treating me like a stupid little woman who never saw an episode of Law & Order and you call this help?

EM: Look, it’s been a long night. You want a muffin or something?

[recording cut/recording on]

EM: You indicated in your 911 call that your husband Derek was attacked by a wild animal, is that correct?

CL: Yes.

EM: You also imply here that it was a person. [rustling papers] Here, see, in the body cam footage from when you returned to the scene of the crime with Officer Fitzhugh, you say, “How could she do this to you, Daddy?”

CL: Okay, so?

EM: So do you think it was a person or an animal?

CL: I don’t know. It was crazy. It must’ve—It must have been an animal. What else could do those things? No person could do those things.

EM: And you don’t know what kind of animal.

CL: It wasn’t—it was something I’ve never seen before. It wasn’t… right. But there’s all sorts of coyotes and things out there. You know those big hawks? They eat people’s chihuahuas.

EM: You think it was a coyote or a hawk?

CL: No, no, nothing so small. But Satan takes many forms, doesn’t he?

EM: Describe the nature of the animal for the record.

CL: They say Satan looks like a goat. But I know goats.

EM: Let’s assume it wasn’t Satan. What did it look like, Mrs. Lindell?

CL: You should never count Satan out. That’s how he gets you.

EM: [sighs heavily and takes a second] You’re right. So what form did Satan take this time?

CL: I don’t know. There were legs.

EM: The animal had legs.

CL: Like big spindly legs all of a sudden. Hairy and black.

EM: How does something have legs ‘all of a sudden?’

CL: I don’t know!

EM: Okay, so the legs are hairy and black. What else? Height? Size? What about its face?

CL: No, it’s—you don’t understand. It wasn’t there and then it was.

EM: Mrs. Lindell, please try to start from the beginning. Go slow if you have to.

CL: It was late. I wanted to watch my cooking shows but Derek was downstairs making a racket.

EM: Describe the nature of the racket.

CL: He was hollerin’ and banging around.

EM: Did he do this often?

CL: Sometimes.

EM: What was he hollering about? What was the banging?

CL: If you ask me a million questions we’re never gonna get through this.

EM: I’m trying to get a full picture here, Mrs. Lindell.

CL: Derek always had work to do in the basement. Sometimes work doesn’t cooperate and you have to yell. You never yell when things don’t cooperate, Detective Millburn? 

EM: I’m not accusing your husband of anything. I’m just trying to get a sense of what was going on before the incident.

CL: So he was working on our project in the basement and I couldn’t hear the TV over the racket. There were still dishes from dinner so I decide to wash those and if he wasn’t done after I’d tell him to keep it down. So I’m—

EM: Hold on, back up. You say ‘our project,’ as in yours and Derek’s?

CL: [breathing]

EM: Mrs. Lindell?

CL: Yes. We agreed on what had to be done.

EM: What kind of project? Home improvement?

CL: Yes.

EM: Okay, so he’s yelling, you’re washing the dishes. What happens next?

CL: There’s a real loud scream, I’m talking bust your eardrums loud. Like a shriek, and it’s not stopping. I’m trying to unlock all the deadbolts on the basement door, but my damn hands aren’t working, you know, I’m shaking, the screaming’s so loud it’s crowding everything else out of my brain, you know what I mean?

EM: Wait, deadbolts? Plural?

CL: We take security seriously.

EM: Your husband’s working in the basement and he locks himself in there?

CL: We always keep everything locked. Except the locks on the kids’ doors, back when they still lived at home. We took those out for their own safety.

EM: [papers rustling] Your children, Mason, male, 21, and Hadley, female, 18?

CL: Yes.

EM: They’re out of the house?

CL: They’re grown. 

EM: Have they been informed of their father’s passing?

CL: I’ve been with y’all this entire time, what do you think?

EM: Do you know where they were last night?

CL: You’re trying to get something out of me but you’re the one off on tangents. Do you want to hear this or not?

EM: [scribbling sounds] We’ll circle back.

CL: I finally get the door open and there’s a mess. The chair’s been broken and the TV tray and the stand and even the little TV we left down there for her, the ungrateful little—[swallows word]. He’s thrashing and flailing and she’s under him but the ropes are gone and she’s got his ear, she’s got his ear by the teeth and she won’t let go, even though there’s blood everywhere, all over her face and in her mouth, she’s probably drinking it, he’s the one screaming but I never heard him make a sound like that in my life, you wouldn’t believe the fucking sound

EM: Hold on, wait. There’s someone in the basement with him? Who is this? He had her tied up? [pages flipping frantically]

CL: We had no choice. No one does, when it comes to Satan.

EM: Mrs. Lindell, you’re gonna have to back up again. You’re saying you and your husband had someone imprisoned down in your basement.

CL: You would have done the same, I’m sure. Do you fear God, Detective Millburn?

EM: Mrs. Lindell, you have to tell me who you had down there and what happened to her during all this. [rustling papers, beeps and static of walkie talkie, indistinct talking through it] There’s no record of—this says you and Mr. Lindell were the only ones in the house.

CL: And so we were. The only people.

EM: So this, this ‘she’ in the basement—that’s not a person?

CL: I’m sure you’d agree.

EM: Mrs. Lindell, I’m gonna need you to be real clear with me. Who or what was in the basement with your husband at the time of the incident?

CL: Do you have kids, Detective Millburn?

EM: That’s not—we’re not discussing my personal life.

CL: That’s a yes, I think. Divorced? No wedding ring. Did she decide she couldn’t play second fiddle to your job for the rest of her life? Do you even see your kids anymore?

EM: Mrs. Lindell, I can’t help you if you won’t be honest with me.

CL: Do you help people? You can’t bring back my Derek. What good are you?

EM: Mrs. Lindell—

CL: So you have kids. What are you, forty? Forty-five? Maybe you have a teenage daughter or two. What would you do if one of them came to you and told you she was a man? That she’d never been your daughter at all? That you were mistaken all this time, like you’re some idiot, like you didn’t grow her inside you, like you didn’t spend your days and nights keeping her little kitty cat clean til she could do it herself. Of course, you’d realize Satan was speaking through her. Of course, you’d want to help her, wouldn’t you Detective Millburn?

[long pause]

EM: How long? How long did you keep your—how long did you keep Hadley down there?

CL: I’m not a monster. I make her good homemade food every day. I clean her bucket and spray her down and everything. And does she thank me?

EM: [indistinct static on walkie talkie] No one found her at the crime scene. Where is she now? Make it easier on yourself and tell me where she is. Right now, Mrs. Lindell.

CL: Derek and I agreed it was important that we teach her what a privilege and honor it is to be female. To submit. To be connected to God and heaven as the site of new life. There was a lot to cover.

EM: [under breath] Jesus fuck. [phone dings, footsteps pacing] This indicates you submitted paperwork to withdraw Hadley Lindell from Slope Creek school district for homeschooling on August 28thth of last year, is this correct?

CL: We should have been homeschooling from the start. You never know what kind of influences your kids can end up with in public schools. Dens of sin. We see now.

EM: You’re telling me you imprisoned your child with restraints and deadbolts for eight months, and it was for her own good?

CL: Don’t come over all high and mighty with me, detective. We did the only righteous thing, and you can’t tell me you’d do anything different. Unless you’re just a coward behind that shiny badge.

EM: Okay, Mrs. Lindell. All right. Let’s get back to it. What happened when you came downstairs and saw Hadley biting Derek’s ear?

CL: I screamed.

EM: What next.

CL: I grabbed one of the loose chair legs. I hit her on the head until she let go of the ear. Derek scrambled off her. He tried to hold her legs up but she was kicking. She got him in the face so his nose broke. He was choking on the blood, so he lost his. You know.

EM: I don’t know, Mrs. Lindell. And no, stop making that gesture. Anything you want to state for the record has to be done so in words.

CL: [harsh sigh] His hard on. Are you happy? He lost his hard on. He tripped and fell onto the floor. That’s when it happened. [pause]

EM: Go on, Mrs. Lindell. What happened?

CL: I went to go help him up, but I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I should never have turned my back to her. I should have hit harder when she was biting. I should have ended it before it ever got here.

EM: What happened, Mrs. Lindell?

CL: The legs, the legs happened! They were everywhere, big skinny black legs, taller than me, tall as the ceiling and covered in moss and blood and hair. One of them swiped me and I slammed against the wall, knocked the wind out of me so there was nothing I could do but sit there and watch.

EM: Where was Hadley?

CL: Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? I told you already. Satan was speaking through her. She wasn’t strong enough to resist him. Those were Satan’s disgusting legs. Those were Satan’s razor-sharp mouth-pincers. That was Satan, come straight out of our Hadley like she was nothing but smoke.

EM: Don’t lie to me, Mrs. Lindell. It won’t go well for you.

CL: [fists slam on the table] Don’t you call me a fuckin’ liar! You asked and I’m tellin’. That thing—it pinned him to the floor. Pierced him in place like it had needles for feet. He screamed and screamed. It clacked its awful mouth. It—it bit it off. It threw it at me and hit me with it.

EM: Derek’s penis.

CL: [scoffs in disgust] Yes, that. It hit me and I screamed too, but Derek wasn’t screaming anymore. He was gasping and gasping. Choking. He couldn’t breathe. That thing turned back around and chomped again. Jesus lord, it cut him almost in half. Oh, Jesus, everything was spilling out. I ran. I ran and ran. I called 911.

EM: [papers rustling] And when you went back inside when ACPD arrived, there was no creature and no Hadley, is that correct? You were the only one there with his blood on your skin and clothes.

CL: Maybe she was that thing all along, I don’t know. A cuckoo in our nest all these years. A test from God. We must have failed.

EM: So by your own account, your child, Hadley Lindell, killed your husband in self-defense?

CL: We were helping her, why don’t you get that?

EM: You understand you’re under arrest now, right Mrs. Lindell?

CL: What? No, that’s not right—you should be finding her. That thing. She’s the one who killed him!

EM: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can—

[muffled screams, a rumble like the foundation shaking, the crash and shatter of things falling down, a great rip like metal rending, a door slams open, CL screams]

[Some special voice effect so it sounds deep but like many voices at once]: There you are, Mother.

[A crash. Recording cuts off abruptly]

Creamy Skeletons: Dawn
Dawn  undefined Creamy Skeletons

Tara Campbell: The Annunciation(s)
The Annunciation(s) undefined Tara Campbell

I.

The angel first appeared unto me wearing a topaz jumpsuit, gliding down from a cloudbank in silver roller skates and coming to a T-stop before me. 

He said “Greetings favored one!” and I said “Hey” and he said “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God” and I said “I’m not Mary” and he said “And now you will con— wait, what?” and I said “Yeah, no, you got the wrong person. My name isn’t Mary.”

He reached into his jumpsuit, extracted a piece of paper, and peered at it. “Are you sure your name isn’t Mary?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Sorry, man.”

He shook his head, befuddled, then stuffed the paper back into his jumpsuit and plastered on a smile. “Well, then. Apologies,” he said, and skated back into the heavens.

I waited a good five minutes to make sure he was gone before I ran to my husband. 

“Joseph,” I said. “We’re moving. Pronto.”

 

II.

Joseph and I moved, but we’d barely unloaded the camel when Joseph wandered off for smokes.

And, of course, that’s when the angel found me again. He darted down in a gold lamé caftan, magenta roller skates shooting sparks.

“Mary,” he said. “You lied to me.”

“Mary who?” 

He must have been tired of my mess, because he gave me a glimpse of his true form: a sphere of roiling clouds topped by a rotating head with four faces (lion, ox, eagle, man); brass hooves and talons flailing on the ends of innumerable limbs; everything surrounded by a flurry of disembodied eyes and wings wheeling in manic orbits.

I held up a hand up to protect my eyes. Despite his intense seraphic glow and the powerful wind of his wings, I couldn’t resist peeking between my fingers to watch all those gleaming hooves and faces. “Holy cow,” I murmured.

“Not a cow,” he said in four simultaneous voices. “But yeah.” 

I couldn’t believe he’d heard me over the wind and the cacophany of metallic chimes. “Okay,” I said. “You got me.”

He heaved a sigh and slipped back into his human form.  “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him—” 

“Hang on there,” I said, stalling for time. “Shouldn’t I get to name him?”

The angel blinked and I shuddered, imagining the multitudinous eyes of his real form blinking in unison.

“I mean…” I looked around. Why was Joseph never around when I needed him? “If I’m going to get knocked up, shouldn’t I at least get to name the kid?”

The angel shook his head. “That’s not how this works. Listen, a holy spirit will come—”

“And I have to say yes, right? It’s like vampires, you have to invite them in.”

The angel pursed his lips. “I mean…” 

He pulled a piece of paper out from the folds of his caftan and read, shifting his weight from one skate to the other. I watched his radiant face as he contemplated. A breeze blew in, pressing his shimmering caftan against him. I let my gaze roam up and down his gold-sheathed physique, trying not to compare it to Joseph’s.

After a while, he sat down with his piece of paper, still deep in thought.

I crept silently away.

 

III.

The third time the angel came, he was wearing a charcoal grey suit with an ebony tie. The suit was so well-tailored, I briefly considered leaving Joseph behind in the desert.

“Hey, I want to apologize,” he said. “I got things mixed up.”

I felt like my head was about to implode. An angel apologizing? To me? 

“Wrong Mary?” I asked.

“Wrong Mary, wrong century, wrong multiverse.” The angel smiled, revealing fetching dimples. “I really screwed this one up, actually. Sorry for the scare.”

I laughed, gigglier than intended. “No worries, but whew!” I said, wiping my brow in an exaggerated gesture of relief.

He chuckled. “Yeah, I wondered why you already seemed to know what was up.”

“And I was kind of surprised you were going with that plan again, to be honest.”

He looked down sheepishly. “Look, I want to make it up to you. What is your heart’s desire?”

“You mean, I get a wish?”

“I hate that term, but yes. I’ll grant you a ‘wish’ and never bother you again.”

Joseph never apologized to me, much less granted me a wish. “It’s not like you’re bothering me, per se. You were just the messenger.”

“Well, that’s kind of you, considering I almost—”

His blush was adorable.

“Anyway, that’s how it works,” he continued. “You make your desire known, and poof, whatever you wish for replaces me.”

“So, one or the other? I have to choose?”

He nodded, his smile dimming.

Minutes went by, and still he stood before me.

His brow furrowed. “Did you ask for something yet?”

“Yup.” 

“Then I don’t understand,” he said. “It should have happened by now.”

He let me take his hand. Joseph would find his happiness elsewhere.

“It’s about to,” I murmured, kissing his palm.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “So it shall be.” 

He smiled at me, and I saw a million eyes closing in pleasure.

Kelechi Ubozoh: Relationship Status
Relationship Status undefined Kelechi Ubozoh

See Death and me we’ve got this thing.
I’ve flirted with her once, twice, okay thrice
and she hooked right in

Visited her in the underworld
and she showed me some things
psychedelic curved moons
a world without end

(Her most enticing)
Grandma’s warm embrace
whispers come home
curls up in my lap
and purrs like a hungry fat cat

We could leave this all behind
I’ll admit I’ve been tempted
almost succumbed

She croons to me sweetly
Your time here is done

Join me and Persephone
Pomegranate in hand
but back on Earth
see, I’ve got my man

Sweet brown eyes
a wide grin
only person who knocked
and I have let in

He’s cunning and kind
makes it easy to be
made a home in his bones
and gave me the key

This year he’s been to
funerals 3
I’ll be damned if the next one is me

So Death, a seductress
an escape from the pain
must ungrip her claws
cuz I hear my man

You think your exes suck?
Let’s go for a ride
Have you ever gone to the shadow world?
Behind the veil?
The other side?

There was no Grandma
with her rose gardens and balm for my pain
it faded to black, it was just the end

Awake and shook on the bathroom floor
misquote the Raven
‘Dammit No More’
I decided to stay
Death said, oh what a bore

Look, she means well
despite dragging me
to literal Hell

Last year, I made vows
under redwoods bent
‘Till death do us start’
was not in fine print

So even though I feel so alone
I know it’s time to put temptress Death
back in the friend zone

Jacqueline Lesik: Garden of Leavin
Garden of Leavin undefined Jacqueline Lesik

Aquamarine Schutter: Titanborn - Prologue
Titanborn: Prologue undefined Aquamarine Schutter

MatyoM; South Ching-tu, Titan

Matyom and Case trudged across Titan’s frozen dunes. Headlamps framed their vision, pushing back the total darkness of almost eight Earth days’ worth of night. Golden fog hung lazily, tinting everything they saw. Matyom had been told once, by his cosmonaut guardian Robert, that Titan smelled like a popsicle of fish, asphalt, and oil. To Matyom, it had always smelled of the warm plastic on the inside of his howlsuit helmet. He liked that smell: it meant he was exploring.

Matyom braced himself against the shallow slip face of their dune, planting a hand into the granular, golden dust beneath him. It stained his glove with yellow and gray and stuck tenaciously to his fingers. The ground shifted beneath his weight, but he held purchase.

“‘Nother footstep.” He grunted, training his lights onto the boot imprint in the sand, perfectly preserved in the linear dune’s side. The low winds that had formed these dune fields would take another eon to erase the footprint.

That wouldn’t last though.

The seasons were changing. A storm was coming.

Matyom wasn’t worried. He was born to walk these dunes. If he had to find a missing woman before the first rains started, he would.

Case tugged on the long rope that connected the two men. Even with the global positioning signals from their suits, it was easy to get lost out here, hence the rope. Case’s gray face looked sickly, almost gangrenous, behind the veil of golden smog. He coughed as he wondered aloud, “What is this chip-head doing away from her skimmer and her partner?”

Matyom mapped the depth of the footprint with his prosthetic eyes. His mind pulled down calculations from a network that spanned almost half of Titan’s surface. In an instant, he knew exactly how much force this woman had planted in her heel.

He traced the trajectory of the missing woman’s, Deepa’s, next steps up the dune. Matyom found two more boot prints, significantly higher. She’d leapt up and to their left, using Titan’s low gravity to assist. This was a dangerous way to climb dunes. Their missing person had been too hasty, ignoring protocol. Had she been running from something? “I don’t know,” Matyom responded. “Her lifeline and suit’s signal are off, and I can’t think of why Deepa would do that.” “And her partner ran in a separate direction, north until the Trailblazer caught up to him…” Case added, “Were they—”

“—running from something?” Matyom completed his companion’s sentence. “Maybe.”

“There’s nothing out here.” Case snorted. “Nothing to run from but us, hah.”

Matyom planted his feet into the organonitrile soil and leapt upward, sending a spray of gray-yellow particles unique to the southwestern Ching-Tu region behind him.

His rope slackened as Case followed suit; the two men in golden-stained alabaster howlsuits leapt up the dune, tracking their missing target. Frigid, still air whistled about Matyom’s helmet. His quick movements disturbed more sand than an entire day’s weather in this region. Some theorized that a Titanborn could cause storms in such static climates simply by jumping.

“Oooh, look out,” Case joked, making exaggerated claws with his gloved hands. He looked decidedly unthreatening, even as he bared his incisors.

They reached the top of the dune. Matyom’s eyes shifted, going blind to the light from his own suit. He toggled his vision into the infrared. The golden haze appeared to vanish; Titan’s darkness fled from his sight. The landscape stretched out before him. The dune they stood atop spread below for dozens of kilometers, falling gradually. Smaller linear dunes cut across its surface, their striations carved by gentle winds. Fatter, wider dunes and sharp plateaus of gray and yellow organics shattered the otherwise perfect symmetry of parallel lines drawn by the moon itself.

Matyom tracked Deepa’s footsteps as Case reached his side. The shorter man was panting and bent over, bracing his knees.

“I don’t see her in IR,” Matyom said.

Case shrugged as he braced himself against Matyom’s arm. “I can’t see in IR so not sure how I can help.”

Matyom gestured toward a distant naturally-smoothed cylinder jutting from the moon. “Deepa’s footsteps, at least, are closer together now. I see the last of them disappear behind a plateau.”

“Another one of Chetan’s favorites acting up…” Case’s voice trailed off.

“Case, come on. Focus.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go find her. Your eyes creep me out when they’re gray, by the way.”

Matyom shifted back into the visible spectrum. As golden smog and overwhelming darkness crept back into his vision, his irises returned to their previous crimson glow.

They started down the dune. Sometimes a rescue mission was just walking and talking, keeping each other awake and alert until they reached their goal and delivered life-saving help and equipment to the Titanborn in need. They’d already found their first missing person and sent him home to Shangri-La on the automated Trailblazer. They’d be returning to the colony soon and, with luck, so would Deepa.

<maTy?> A telepathic message oscillating with panicked anxiety hit Matyom’s brain as he and Case half-leapt down the long, sloping dune.

Matyom hesitated. He could tell immediately that his boyfriend needed help, but he wasn’t sure if he could handle the distraction right now.

Then he felt guilty. Truthfully, Matyom wasn’t sure if he could handle his boyfriend right now, period.

<maTy?> Torvram repeated. <i need help.>

Matyom grimaced as his boots landed in the gray-yellow sand once again. Robert had always said, “When a man asks for help, you help him.” And this man was Matyom’s boyfriend.

<What’s Going On, Honeysuckle?> Matyom replied telepathically, trying to inject an emotional tone that was wholly warm, comforting confidence.

<i dunno…im just…im Thinking abouT cuTTing myself again.> Torvram’s reply was so faint Matyom had to focus to hear his boyfriend’s thoughts.

<Honey, No, Please. I’m Here. It’s Going To Be Ok. Just Talk To Me, Yeah? I’ll Listen For As Long As I Can.>

Matyom’s exchange with Torvram had lasted only a second and the stocky explorer’s plucky mood was already beginning to plummet. He felt tired, bordering on miserable, as he thought about his boyfriend suffering back home. Matyom’s face drooped, and his long mustache brushed against the frown growing on his lower lip.

Despite all of his talents, Matyom wasn’t sure how to deal with this feeling.

Case touched down lightly beside him. They’d reached the base of the dune. Their suit lights crawled up the face of a smoothed plateau illuminating thick bands of rust and gold. Deepa’s footsteps curved around the plateau’s southern edge, where its top jutted out into thin air like a precariously suspended platter.

“You ok, big guy?” Case asked. He looked up at Matyom through hazel eyes, his concern evident.

It would be another long second before Matyom answered his unaugmented companion.

<i jusT can’T do anyThing right…i had a meeTing Today where lakshmi…ugh i jusT remembered my lasT breakdown and maybe i should jusT sTop because i know i’m already a burden on you and—>

Matyom cut Torvram off before he could spiral further.

<Hey. Hey. It’s Going To Be Ok, Torvy. You’re Not A Burden And I Love You! Just Take A Deep Breath. Breathe, Like Anyu Said. Breathe For A Second. Can You Do That For Me?>

<…>

<ok.>

Matyom couldn’t hear Torvram breathe. Instead, he felt the full enervating brunt of Torvram’s mood. He closed thebatch of mental channels that served as a conduit for his partner’s emotions. He couldn’t bear feeling Torvram’s anguish on so intimate a connection any longer.

<Does That Help?> Matyom asked.

<a little,> Torvram replied.

<I’m So Sorry To Go Like This But I Have To Focus Out Here. Thank You So Much For Telling Me Though.>

Matyom dumped every idea he had into his broadcast.

<Please Talk To Someone: Meera Or Yumi Or Anyone That’s Available. Have AVA Track Your Health. I Know You Don’t Like It But It Could Save Your Life If Your Mood Really Plum- mets.> He couldn’t bring himself to say the word “suicide.”

<I Promise I’ll Come See You The Moment We’re Back. I Love You, Honeysuckle.>

Torvram didn’t reply immediately. For a long millisecond, Matyom worried about what he might hear or, worse, that Torvram would say nothing at all. He felt guilty he hadn’t replied immediately, fearful that his boyfriend might spiral into suicidal thoughts and confused about how he dreaded speaking to a man he loved so much.

They’d have to talk when Matyom returned. He didn’t want to break up, but he wasn’t sure how to deal with this. They had help, though. The Titanborn stuck together. There was always someone to help.

But right now Matyom needed to focus. Deepa was relying on him and Case for help. She might die if they didn’t find her soon.

<ok… yeah… ill Talk To meera as soon as she’s free. Thanks, MaTy. i love you, Too.>

The telepathic line went dead. That long second ended. Matyom took a long, calming breath and finally replied to Case with a simple lie: “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

He leapt forward again, not noticing the frown that crossed Case’s face. The short man was quite astute, especially consid- ering he lacked any empathic circuitry—any circuitry at all, in fact. Matyom was a cyborg while Case was simply human. They reached the plateau promptly. Matyom switched to IR again, ready for anything. Rather than a missing human, he found more footsteps off to the east and the jagged corpse of a Dragonfly drone. The quadcopter lay in three pieces, its battery rapidly cooling in a molten pool of yellow tar.

Case hissed as he approached the drone. “What the fuck happened here?”

Matyom leaned down, calling for the model number and recorded flight path of the drone from the AI named AVA back home. Curiously, the drone’s own visual records ended hours ago, just before Deepa and her research partner, Dr. Alburn, had gone missing.

“This bot has a hole in its records,” Matyom said aloud, for Case’s benefit. “Last thing I can see is the two of them working in their mobile lab, like normal.”

“Maybe Deepa turned it off?” Case posited as he circled the drone, taking pictures with an old smartphone. Case did what he could, lacking prosthetic eyes.

“Doesn’t look like it.” Matyom beamed what he was looking at back to AVA and his Titanborn dispatcher, Arienne. “The record just… stops.”

Matyom and Case inspected the three pieces of the quadcopter. They found a plastic handle buried within one of Deepa’s footsteps, a meter away. Matyom tugged it free and found a small hammer. Its head was covered in yellow-gray organics from Titan and black plastic from the downed quadcopter.

Matyom realized that she must’ve struck the drone with this hammer; that raised more questions. What would have driven Deepa to attack the drone? It was a research tool designed to take video and collect gas samples. It was harmless.

Case waved Matyom over to his side. “Fuck… Matyom, there’s a big piece of her suit and some frozen blood here.” He jabbed a finger at a yellowed mass of howlsuit insulation on one of the quadcopter’s rotors. Sure enough, ice crystals with hearts of crimson and black were smeared on its surface.

“Her suit could be breached.”

Matyom rose abruptly. “Ok. I’ll have Shangri-La follow up with this drone. Location’s marked.” That the drone had torn her suit was an even greater mystery, but now was no longer the time to ask questions.

We have to find Deepa.” Matyom scanned the surface for more footprints. No more Titanborn would die out here, not while he still lived.

Case nodded affirmatively, turning his back on the broken drone and its mysteries. “Yeah.”

“No more death.” Matyom leapt north, toward the next set of boot prints that disturbed the frozen, yellow-gray linear dunes.

Kristin Eade: Leech
Leech undefined Kristin Eade

Not even a blaster held to his temple would crack open Senator Nuula’s lips. Secrets swelled behind that thin, dry dam, and I was going to bottle them up.

“I hope you can understand,” I said, tilting my head to the side and giving the wizened man a smile. He must’ve been at least eighty, wispy hair evaporating from his shiny egghead. He’d tried JuvenaDerm patches at least four times to no avail. Time had robbed him of the suppleness he clearly wished for, and the failed patches of lab-grown skin had peeled off and left a grid of scars across his cheeks. He smelled of old cabbage and, strangely, mayonnaise, explained purely by the fact that he was an elder bureaucrat, so engrained in politics that he could pay for smuggled condiments and his peers would look the other way. Maybe he had little packets of the stuff in his pockets right now, those slim, single serve pouches they used to slather on sandwiches a hundred years ago. His robes surely had enough hiding places for covert sauces.

But, back to the point of the raid.

I cocked my blaster.

“If you kill me, you won’t get whatever secrets you think I have,” Senator Nuula said.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. My breath had turned the inside of my mask swampy. Nuula’s small office roasted under hateful lights that cast shadows so intense it made everything look melted. His collection of antique clocks drooped and all the holoscreens sagged and even his overstuffed furniture had slumped over. This lava-puke of a room made me want to tear my mask off. But masking is an absolute requirement when you’re out collecting specimens.

“What do you want, if it’s not my blood?” the old man asked.

I primed the blaster’s syringe with a flick of my thumb and the needle kissed the man’s mottled white skin.

Nuula swallowed. “You’re one of those leeches,” he said.

“Someone likes his state-sponsored news,” I said as I slid the needle into Nuula’s temple. He grunted as it bore deeper and deeper, piercing his skull, slipping into brain tissue that had all the fight of soft serve ice cream. Convulsions ricocheted through his limbs. I held the blaster steady against his protesting body as I drew out memories and misdeeds and sins and slime, anything I could use against him, anything to make him cough up credits to protect his sweet little secrets.

After a few seconds, I drew the blaster back to my side. The gauge was nearly full, its insides undulating with clouds of shimmering organic data. I holstered my blaster and clapped the man on the shoulder.

“I’ll find you,” he said through gritted teeth as I stepped away from him.

“I very much doubt that,” I said before I typed the coordinates for Home into my wristcom. The small screen accepted my jump route with a green flash. I hit the button and my body pixelated, breaking itself into billions of tiny squares before scattering into nothing.

undefined

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be carbonation, try pixelating. When you fizz back into being, you’ll question whether you aren’t actually a can of soda. For some, that’s fun. For me? Fucking nuisance.

I popped back into being, swallowing down the nausea and shivering until feeling started to crawl back to my nerves. I shook my head, clearing away the dancing stars, waiting for the dark walls of Home to materialize in front of me. Traveling across space and time as packets of data can wreak certain havoc on an organic body. There are some things meat can do that metal can’t, and vice versa, but as I fought down the bile and tried to tap away the swelling pain in my temples, I wished I were made of something sturdier than flesh.

I blinked and blinked until sense came flooding back.

Home. The subterranean space shimmered and sputtered as other leeches pixelated in and out, blinking off to wherever their next hit was, be it politician or starlet. The only way into the cramped space was via pixelation—the doors were sealed shut. All the tech and computers and whatsits lying around were draped in plastic sheets, meant to keep all the above-world drippings off the memories stored inside. Mirrors took up almost all the wall space so that no matter where you stood, you’d always be able to see yourself.

Because there was nothing remotely homey about Home, I spent little time there. Above, the city of MoonJoy clawed its way toward the glass-domed ceiling, trying to drag itself off this rocky moon stuffed with clubs and casinos and brothels. The streets coiled and meandered with the express purpose of getting visitors to spend more money. Neon bounced around alongside blaring music, turning the streets into a never-ending party. The undertubes were obviously horrid by comparison. But the shadows here could hold their tongues in ways the shadows above couldn’t.

“Is that my sweet, beautiful Kazik?” a voice said.

Mom stood near the navport at the center of the room. She looked sere as usual, body struggling to recover from her latest reconstruction. Her skin was a patchwork of colors, a jerry-rigged nightmare grafted together from whatever remnants of JuvenaDerm she could buy or scavenge off bodies. One arm was an older model than the other, her bolts and caps were wildly mismatched, and she was missing an eye. The other, glowing with a loud out-of-order red, was still calibrating after a software update.

“Hey Mom,” I said. Of course she wasn’t my mother and Mom wasn’t her real name. No one knew that precious information. The only thing I knew about her I’d found out purely by accident, when a patch of skin fell off her neck one day and revealed a scratched out serial number, the hallmark of a security droid.

“How’d your collection go?” she asked, her voice warbling as it struggled through her modulator. She fumbled around for the hairbrush she always kept at the navport. I handed it to her and she began to run it through her hair. Any time she hit a tangle and pulled at the knot, her hair parted, revealing little sprouts poking out of her scalp, not unlike a doll’s head. Only Mom’s hair, like her skin, was not just one color or texture. She had black kinks next to auburn curls, gray waves alongside blonde locks. The longer I worked for her, the more I was sure she settled for aesthetic discord if it brought her closer to humanity.

“Only the most beautiful parts,” she often muttered to herself while gazing into one of her many mirrors.

I took out my blaster and removed the syringe full of Nuula’s memories. Right as I moved to put the syringe in Mom’s hand, her iris blinked green, cycling through different colors before settling on amber, like my own.

“Ahh, there you are,” Mom said, cupping my cheek in her cold hand. She studied my eyes for a moment before tutting. “I really need to install a better color scale for my eye. I want gold flecks like yours.”

Mom took the syringe. Without another word she loaded it into the navport, gently nestling the needle into the receptor before pressing the plunger down. Symbols and words flashed across the screen, and then images shrieked by, moving so fast you couldn’t make sense of them. Once they slowed down, the usual suspects appeared: affairs with busty or well-endowed adolescents, bribes to get out of traffic violations, credits accepted from lobbyists keen on making spores illegal.

“Nothing exciting, but enough to blackmail for a few million,” Mom said. She leaned against the navport and continued to brush her hair. “Would you be a dear and fetch my lipstick?”

Mom’s vanity stood next to the navport. She’d covered it in potions and bottles to hide the chipped white paint, and the oval mirror was draped in a silk scarf to hide the crack at the top. It looked like something made for a child, especially when she sat on the accompanying pink pouf, her knees taller than the vanity’s surface.

“Which color?” I asked as I slid open the drawer.

“I’m feeling saucy today. Let’s do Fuck Off Fuchsia.”

As Mom slicked color across her lips, I studied the credit estimate ticking up and up on the navport’s holoscreen. My cut was twenty percent, which wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent in my debts. Sharks came sniffing around my door every few days, eager to snap up the credits I’d lost to MoonJoy’s sin-reliant economy. I made myself scarce as much as possible, but there were days I had to pixelate to avoid an oncoming fist or knife.

A few more hazy memories presented themselves, but the very last one started out unlike the others: in a painfully bright room. A white box sat on a table. Everything was blurred at the edges, as if Nuula had been drinking.

Where are they from, Nuula said in a distant, sluggish voice.

Kexus, a voice answered. They were all desperate to get off that icy rock. Nothing there except ice mines and certain hypothermia.

My heart froze at the mention of my home planet. Immediately I thought of nights spent on icy doorsteps, stiff joints in the morning, begging for food and then digging it out of the trash as a last resort. Kexus was not a particularly kind planet, nor was it very well-known. Perched far in the Outer Rim beyond the Crab Nebula, the only way on or off was by cargo ship. Why was Nuula, a high-profile politician, working with a nobody from Kexus?

Nuula crept closer to the table and peered into the white box. It almost looked like they were holding hands, the way the arms were arranged inside, palm to palm. Nuula poked the skin of one and met frozen resistance.

Truly macabre, Roon. I can’t believe I’m doing this, said Nuula.

It’s lucrative—trust me, said Roon. The Android Uprising opened the door for some… innovative new business ventures.

The memory evaporated and the holoscreen went blank.

I glanced at Mom, who stood motionless.

“Looks like we found our next hit,” she said after a while, voice purring, her single eye gleaming with hunger.

I shook my head. “I can’t go to Kexus.”

“Because of that bounty? Oh, please. It’s only ten million. Or it was the last time I checked. That’s chump change, especially for grand theft.”

The thought of Mom checking my bounty made me squirm. “It’s too risky,” I said.

“I’ll raise your cut to thirty percent for all contracts going forward,” Mom said.

My heart leapt. An extra ten percent would be helpful. But was it worth risking my life and returning to a planet that would see me jailed, or worse, dead? Kexus hadn’t conformed to the Federation’s ideas of justice. Punishment for crimes was decided on the whims of the Ice Lords, and they loved a good spear through the heart.

“Fifty percent,” I said.

Mom studied me, circuits and synapses considering my worth. She had no sympathy for my debts. She gave zero shits about the reasons why I leeched. If I had a baby to feed or a cardboard house, she’d laugh in my face if I asked for more money. All she needed was someone desperate enough to do the job so that she could get money to build her body. And MoonJoy offered no shortage of people drowning in debt.

“You know what? I’m feeling generous today,” she said. “Forty and nothing more. Take it or leave it, my dear.”

Forty percent. Even after paying my debts I’d be able to hit the casinos with my pockets swinging. The risk remained: Kexus would see me killed. But the reward?

I took a deep breath and said, “Deal.”

undefined

The first thing I felt was the blizzard slapping me hard across the face.

I swam back up through the fizz and found myself in an alley. Even beneath a heavily insulated jacket and a wool cap and mask, my skin screamed. ‘How did I do this when I was a kid?’ I thought, and then I lamented how, in the span of the five years I’d been away from Kexus, I’d turned into a milksop who couldn’t handle extreme temperatures. Only MoonJoy’s balmy recycled atmosphere.

As the cold started a grudge with my bones, I tried to quell my pounding heart as I peered around the alley. Frozen garbage and yellow snow and rank rime brought me right back to the days when I prowled the streets and picked pockets. I relished the smooth wallets less than the hit of warmth I got slipping my hand into a stranger’s pocket. The slums had been frozen in time, but over the A-frame roofs and cheap shanty walls, new skyscrapers peeked up from the downtown hub in the distance. The overcast sky was laced with ships, little ants marching through the gray, carrying ice and ore to be sold at far-off markets. A cargo freighter rumbled by overhead and caused the entire stretch of slums to violently shake.

Because it all looked so familiar, I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to be here. At least not here, in this alley. That was never part of the plan. I was supposed to pixelate right into Roon’s lair. Mom and I did all that recon for a reason, triangulating his location so I could avoid setting foot outside. This was supposed to be a nice clean hit. Now it wouldn’t be.

I checked my wristcom’s data logs. My jump route was solid up until I entered Kexus’s atmosphere, when it wobbled and shook and patched in and out. A note in the log attributed the failure to weather interference. I was lucky my body hadn’t been snowed all across Kexus.

Botched pixelation aside, I downloaded Roon’s coordinates into me. My wristcom vibrated as the data entered my body, snaking its way up to my brain until I suddenly knew where I needed to go.

I left the alley. Soon I remembered, this is how you walk on Kexus, head down but eyes up, always on the lookout, but not looking like you have something to hide. And this is where you find the good scraps, thrown out the back of sick houses. The chance of illness is worth the soft, unfrozen heels of bread. Roofs are the only safe place to collect snow for melting down into water. If you need gloves, socks, caps, goggles, sometimes you can find bodies behind bars. And never, under any circumstance, set foot on an Ice Lord’s turf.

Take my word for it.

I wound through icy streets with snowdrifts piled up to the roofs. Children played on the haphazard slopes while their parents haggled for fur hats and fuel. A restaurant served hot dumpling soup, the smell still as intoxicating as it was when I was a kid, but then the succulence was replaced with the dirty tang of snow seal dung. A beat-up snow hopper slid by, engine hacking up acrid fumes.

Memories thawed. Dead dreams resurrected themselves. Moments I hadn’t lived for years suddenly seemed like they’d happened yesterday. It wasn’t homesickness, this feeling rooting around inside me. It was more like relief that I wasn’t missing anything.

I came to small square buzzing with merchants and mercenaries. Just as I was about to slip into a nearby alley to avoid the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a holoscreen projected onto a building at the far end of the square. Faces flashed over windows and doors, listing names and bounties and last known whereabouts. Then I recognized a familiar face.

Kazik Alzman, age 20, bounty: 15,000,000 credits. Last seen in the Tuliq Quarter.

Part of me warmed with pride knowing my bones were worth more than when I’d left. The photo was from five years ago, so I still looked like a gangly, good-for-nothing teen with a patchy beard and hollow cheeks. Hopefully the muscle I’d put on helped me look different enough from the boy Kexus remembered for stealing Ice Lord Tuliq’s snow hopper—with his daughter riding shotgun. That joyride ended with my first bounty and my first kiss.

When my face made way for another, I moved on.

I walked until my feet went numb and my eyelashes were white with ice. A few times I had to duck into doorways to avoid roving mercenaries. When they finally passed, I hunched forward through the blizzard and pressed on until I arrived at Roon’s ramshackle shop. A sign over the door flashed in holographic blue: Books! Books! Books! As if it were a strip club instead.

There would be no surprising Roon. My pixelation debacle had ensured that. I could go in blaster blazing, hoping to catch him off guard. Sneaking was out of the question in this blizzard. Negotiation was a possibility—Roon was a businessman after all. But proximity mattered most. I needed to get close.

I pulled down my mask, ignoring Mom’s cardinal rule of anonymity. Then I took a deep breath, pushed open the door, and went inside.

Roon’s shop was rather extraordinary, packed with colorful books. The mildewed scent of ages-old paper had a quaint charm to it, and for a moment I got lost imagining what it would be like to read from a book instead of a holoscreen. Some of the books had gold gilded edges and others were bound in soft leather. Still more were paper, corners rounded from being shoved into pockets and bags. And best of all were the tiny books you could fit in the palm of your hand. I hate admitting how enchanted I was by it all.

Before I could get swept further away, the sound of steps, hollow and thumping, pulled me back to the present. 

Roon appeared from a door at the back of the room. He looked more tired than he had in Nuula’s memory, but his appearance was mostly the same: white skin, gray hair floating above his head in cirrus wisps, a forehead cut with wrinkles, and broad shoulders that, despite the slant that age brought, had retained much of their strength. Under a plain white shirt his corded muscles had no trouble with the massive tome he held.

“How can I help you?” Roon said.

I smiled. “I’m looking for a rare Earth book, from pre-calamity. It’s called Bridget Jones’s Diary. Do you have it?” 

It was the only book title I could think of. Mom had been raving about it lately, spending late nights poring over its contents, sifting through the downloaded story and mimicking the characters’ speech patterns.

“Earth literature is hard to come by these days,” Roon said, studying me from behind dirty spectacles before slapping his giant book down on the counter. “What does a young man want with a book like that?”

“You’ve heard of it then?” I said, trying to cover up the fact that I had no idea what Bridget Jones’s Diary was about.

“Son, look around. I’m a man who deals in books.”

‘And bodies,’ I wanted to say.

“I’m surprised you didn’t try The Arched Spine first,” Roon said as he meandered through the shop, browsing the shelves. “They specialize in that kind of genre. It’s difficult to get out to Lophala though. All those asteroid fields, you know. But die-hards will do anything for pre-calamity romance. Guess there’s not much love to be had these days.”

Romance? I ground my teeth. Roon pulled a slim book from a shelf and brought it back to the counter.

“Bridget Jones’s Diary,” he said as he set it down.

We were only a foot away from each other. Would a quick jab to the throat do the trick? Could I grab his arm and swing him over the counter? He was old. It might work. But he had to be strong, all that muscle gained from hefting and hacking up bodies.

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” I said. It was so quiet I thought I heard a speck of dust settle on the counter.

“Five hundred credits,” Roon said. “You could get it for cheaper at The Arched Spine. But you’re not at The Arched Spine, are you.”

Roon studied me, his eyes flicking back and forth between mine, bouncing from right to left, right to left. The hair on my neck stood up. I couldn’t waste any more time. 

I pulled out my blaster.

“You gonna rob me for it?” Roon said with a chuckle. He came around the counter, steps slow.

“Do as I say or this could get bad,” I warned.

“Lucky for you I prefer doing things the easy way,” he said, holding up his hands.

“Kneel and put your hands on the floor,” I said, leveling the blaster at Roon’s face. He knelt, grunting as his knees creaked against the wood. 

He gazed up at me with pond-green eyes, eyes that had seen into countless bodies. He was a man who’d seen what an arm looks like cut crosswise. He knew the hills and heaths of the brain and had perhaps memorized the market price for each organ. I wondered if he’d ever felt things like guilt or embarrassment or shame. He would call himself a businessman. Shrewd. Talented. I would call him despicable. His memories would go for millions.

I stepped closer to Roon right as a ruckus erupted outside.

“Found you!” said a voice.

A flurry of ragged armor and weary metal whirled beyond the window. Gauntlets reaching, scrabbling for something, the doorknob, surely, because they had found me, had come for my bounty at last. I thought I had escaped my fate all those years ago when I left Kexus. And maybe I still could if I drew out Roon’s memories and pixelated before they got to me.

But before my fate could burst through the door, the scuffle stopped. Mercenaries had merely caught the ear of some small street urchin, a stolen something in his hands. As I watched the mercs drag the boy off, relieved it wasn’t me instead, I felt a sharp twinge in my thigh.

“You know, for someone from Kexus, I’d expect thicker pants,” Roon said.

It took me a moment to spot the tiny needle in his hand.

“But like I said, I prefer things the easy way.”

I blinked, trying to understand what had just happened. But when Roon started to swim before me, body turning into waves and swirls, I knew.

I had been so careful. Had built a reputation for being competent. I was Mom’s favorite, a mantle I’d proudly taken up and flaunted in front of her other leeches. And I deserved it: I’d never missed a hit, never failed to deliver memories to Mom’s pocket. But now that crown slid from my head as the room began to spin.

I stumbled backward, dropping my blaster as I hit the ground.

“You look different from your wanted picture,” Roon said. “More grown, I suppose. Fifteen million credits is quite the bounty. That’s enough for some to retire on.”

I fumbled with my wristcom, hoping to punch in the coordinates for Home, but my hands slapped the device like slabs of granite. I tried to pixelate anyway, but the carbonation fizzled out, the route incomplete.

“But that’s chump change compared to what I can make from you. I’m sure you understand—you’re a leech, after all.” 

I couldn’t speak. Words were too heavy and my tongue had turned to jelly. I fought to stay conscious as Roon leaned over me and pulled me up by the collar. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and took out a spoon.

“Huh,” he said. “She was right. You do have nice eyes.”

Victoria Greenaway: Inspirational Gym Towel
Inspirational Gym Towelundefined Victoria Greenaway

I wasn’t paying attention when someone, science guys probably, let atmospheric CO2 drop below 175 parts per million. Shit would’ve happened anyway, clearly, whether I was paying attention or not. Whether I was discussing it on message boards or not. Plenty were. I’ve seen people literally die of rain. So you need a towel. Towel’s an important bit of post-apocalypse kit. Turns out it’s not crossbows. Cassie is signalling that we’re stopping for a rest, so I’ll sit on my towel, something else it’s useful for. Used to be I had this awesome couch and a gaming chair. 

Hard work and sweat You’ll be hard to forget

That’s an inspirational gym-towel quote. I’ve got a gym towel with a quote. Mine’s black writing on red. When I got it in the post, I didn’t think it looked as cool as I thought when I saw the picture of it online. Red writing on black would have been better. Of course, it doesn’t matter now what colour it is, just the fact it’s a towel is important. Back when they told me to pack for the compound, I grabbed my gym bag and my towel was still in the bottom. I wasn’t thinking ahead or anything. I didn’t plan for the towel. Bring one bag, they said. When you hear someone in charge say, “bring one bag,” you feel okay. How bad can it be, if you’re going somewhere where all you need is one bag? I keep thinking of that old story, from a couple of hundred years ago, when Europeans were doing genocide and they told people to bring a suitcase with them. Must be okay if they’re letting you take a suitcase, right? It’s so easy to trick people with stuff like that. Must have been a shock, though, when they arrived and saw Alsatians. Like when I saw the razor wire. Who was it meant for? Us getting out? Someone getting in? Neither was good. 

The journey starts with you

Fucking journeys, man. Everything’s a journey. Wanna get fit? Do a journey. Wanna get a career? Do a journey. Wanna stop being anxious and depressed? Journey. Before 175 parts-per, the corporation I worked for used to make us sit through its EOFY profit journey. What is a journey, is when they tell you to pack a bag and you go on a truck to a razor-wire compound because the food chain’s about to break, the biomass pyramid’s about to fall over. That’s a journey. And it ends up with me sitting on a red gym towel with black writing on a rock in the bush. Fuck, where even are we? Blue Mountains? Isn’t that west though? I don’t know. But life in the compound went to shit, that’s what I know. If it was possible for something so shit already to go to further shit. No more barracks, no more 8 a.m. chow line and communication meetings when they’d tell you that 150 ppm just isn’t going to happen. The plants are struggling, sure, but it’ll be okay. The science guys’ve got this. I don’t know if CO2 actually did drop to 150 ppm in the end, but it’s fucking cold and plants still don’t grow. Not well, not enough to stay in one place and grow a garden. Not that you can garden your way out of 175 parts-per because there’s no protein. Doesn’t matter what else there is to eat. If there’s no protein, hunger’s like madness. If you won’t eat insects, you die. I’ve seen it. 

You can throw in the towel or you can use it to wipe the sweat from your face

It’s pithy, your fitness motivation quote. When I started my wellness journey, gym shoes, gym subscription, gym bag, gym towel, 215 ppm, I wanted something pithy that said something about me. Something uncluttered and unencumbered so when someone walked passed my towel they’d know what I was about. 

Sweat Smile Repeat

Like that. That one’s pithy. Targeted at women, though.

You’re awesome No matter what

That one’s for women too.

The more you sweat The less you bleed in battle

That’s blokey. I scrolled past that one. It made me cringe. But we believed it. I believed it. Sitting in our gaming chairs trying to vibe with Vikings, online-shopping for bags and shoes and inspirational manchester so we could have the kind of body you need if you live in a fjord and have to wrestle your food, reassuring each other that an office job was perfect because if you rest after a weights sesh you build faster. I’m 5% body fat now. Something like that. I don’t need victory in battle. Just being warm would be nice. 

Pain is temporary Failure is permanent

Ha. You know what permanent failure looks like? It looks like drinking water that doesn’t look great but you risk it anyway. It looks like meeting another group of travellers and forgetting that they’re as paranoid of your motives as you are of theirs. Failure is getting rained on without a means to dry off. That’s permanent failure, and it comes with a fuck tonne of pain. Winter’s coming. I’ve done four since the compound emptied. Wait, is it four? Maybe it’s six, I don’t know. I don’t know. You can’t tell when a year has passed because it’s cold all the time. 

Remember why you started

Before 190 ppm, I was a quitter. So, that kind of towel quote would have appealed to me. Quit uni, start another course. Quit. Start a different course at a second uni. Quit. Get a shitty office job and realise you can’t quit because you’ve run out of options. It was Cassie who said back in the compound that we should walk north because it might be warmer. More insects if it’s warmer. Thing is, no one’s really got a clue of the scale of geography until you’re in it. We’re still walking north. Can’t quit walking. 

Trust the process

Don’t worry when it gets tough. Trust the process. Walk, forage, rest, start again. Like the science guys and the process they’d worked out to get the extra CO2 out of the air. And they had. They fixed climate change. In the end, it was only car nuts and poor people who had petrol cars. The logging had stopped and they’d made that filter, that carbon filter. But it went too far, it got out of hand, too much CO2 got taken out because no one was coordinating. We’d discuss it back in the compound when there was still food enough to bother with trying to work out whose fault it was. We all said it was the UN that fucked it up. Whatever. Don’t know if that’s right, but it sounds like it could be. When I thought the compound was the worst kind of hell possible, I’d say to people that someone should set fire to the oil fields and the coal, someone should bulldoze the forests. I must have sounded like I thought that would work because some woman told me that it took 300 years or something to get from 280 parts per to 440. I know those numbers. We all know them. I know shit’s not getting fixed. I know tomorrow’s going to be the same as today, just like today is the same as yesterday. Walk, forage, rest, start again.

Inhale the future Exhale the past

That one’s bullshit. Like, such bullshit. When it’s 175 ppm, the past is literally all that matters. I’m not being existential or anything. I’m not saying anything clever about time. It’s just that you don’t want to forget those details. You mull that shit over because, what you did last winter to keep living is how you’re going to get through this one. Before 190 ppm, when office jobs and gaming chairs still existed, mulling happened at 3 in the morning, cringing in bed about that trashy thing you said at drinks two years ago because it’s in you to say these things but you never would, so it comes out when you’re drunk. You cringe because you think people care about it the way you do. That shit never paid off. Mulling pays off now, though. You obsess about the bad shit, because now, the bad shit kills you. It’s in your best interests to mull.

Work out until you no longer have to introduce yourself

I remember laughing at that one, scrolling through the beginnings of my wellness journey. In other words, if you’re buff enough, everyone in the office’ll know your name. You know, the 5%-body-fat club. Exclusive membership, Viking shit. Turns out all you have to do is wander around the bush for years and live on insects. The last time I saw my brother, he was at 12% and getting lower. When we have a day without food, we sit in a circle and tell one story each about our past so we can remember who we are. I talk about Adam sometimes, but not in a sad way. We’re not allowed to say things like ‘I wonder where they are now.’ Or ‘There’s no way they made it.’ No one’s interested in your sadness, and absolutely not your anxiety, although we all run on it. It’s like, get over it. Walk.

Sunday is meal prep day

I remember reading that one twice. Why the hell was that on a towel? It’s about showing other gym people that you have the discipline to make little containers of nutrition to take to your sedentary job. Back before 190 parts-per, I used to set my goals according to the dietician’s-day-on-a-plate short reels and fill my vegetable bin with fresh produce. But then, lol of all lols, I’d spend the week eating focaccia from the sandwich place on the corner, Uber Thai for dinner. We were all the same, us 20%-body-fat clubbers, us wannabe-cut-as-fuckers, watching the vegetable bin rot as we ate pizza in our gaming chairs. It’s 2,225 calories a day a human has got to have. You can get that if you chase down a kangaroo, but you risk injury and sometimes you don’t even catch one. Kangaroos rarely pay off. Insects. Those pay off. It’s dead quiet here. Cassie is silently signalling us to get up.

You don’t have to make noise to be noticed

She’s made a mistake coming through here, I reckon. We’d be better off trying to find one of those government food hubs. They’re not great. You don’t get much and there’s a lot of guns, and they don’t let you stay around for too long, but I’m going to bring it up soon. I think maybe others will too. Cassie’s decisions are usually pretty solid and I know why she avoids food hubs because girls have to watch out, but I’m tired of walking for nothing, and it’s dead quiet here. No insects. I could go for a cicada. 

Two steps forward One step back Is still forward

I just made that one up. 

Cassie puts her fingers to her lips. There’s another group of travellers somewhere around here. We keep hearing them. We stay out of each other’s way because there’s nothing to eat. Except each other. 

Don’t forget your humanity

If temperatures ever go back up, I’m going to start an online business. ‘Inspirational Apocalypse Towels,’ I’ll call it.  

Cassie signals to me personally because I’m still on the ground. Is this what it’s like for the dead? You just can’t get up? 

Too fit to quit

That’s my towel. The one I bought. The one under me, red with the black writing. Too fit to quit. Such bullshit. Because maybe I’m gonna. Maybe it’s time to stay in my comfort zone and permanently fail to progress. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel because I don’t know which day is fucking Sunday. Maybe I don’t care why I started. 

“You okay?” Cassie says, crouching, keeping her voice low.

I say, sure. 

“Are you injured?”

I say, no. 

“We’re not changing the world today, okay?” She always says that. “We’re just walking.”

I smile at Cassie because no one wants to see my weak bullshit. 

No one wants to see your weak bullshit

Yeah. 

I get up. It hurts. 

Discipline takes over When motivation quits

There’s only one way to quit an apocalypse. I think I’ve got another day in me. That’s a quote.

Creamy Skeletons: Out For Blood
Out for Blood  undefined Creamy Skeletons

Creator Bios
Creator Bios

— Support creators everywhere! —

Pay your fellow workers for their art.

All funds received are distributed to the creators in this journal. 

Amy K. Bell often wonders, ‘will it go round in circles, or will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?’ She writes about time travel, doppelgängers, and mothering. Much of Bell’s work is invisible, but some of it has appeared in Hyphen Magazine, The Forge, and Heavy Feather Review. She lives in Oakland and loves the town.

Aquamarine Schutter is a trans non-binary merpunk living in the Potrero Hill Neighborhood of San Francisco. They write about centering queer joy, mutual aid, and liberation from systems of oppression. Aquamarine also loves to play and make video games, especially ones that center all of the above topics and then some. When they aren’t crafting the sweetest queer romance stories, you can find Aquamarine tinkering with new outfits at Noisebridge, hanging out with creatives at the Museum of Arts and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, and petting neighborhood dogs.

B.F. Vega is a horror writer, political poet, and overworked theater artist living in the North Bay Area of California. A member of the HWA, her short stories and poetry have appeared in: Dark Celebration, Infection, Dark Nature, Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging, Haunts & Hellions, Dragon Soul Press Haunt, Two volumes of Red Cape Books A-Z of Horror, and Good Southern Witches, among others. Most recently, her story “Grandchildren of God” was published in the Nephilim anthology through Iron Fairies Press. Her 90’s supernatural slasher “Allies” will be published in the upcoming Memento Mori anthology by Culture Cult Press. She is still shocked when people refer to her as an author—every time.

Chelsea Davis is a writer from San Francisco. Her essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, and elsewhere. She has published poetry in Vastarien, Pseudopod, and The Racket.

chelseamdavis.net @UnrealCitoyenne

Born in San Salvador, El Salvador, Jocelyn Sanchez is an interdisciplinary artist and illustrator who creates work under the moniker of “creamy skeletons.” Jocelyn graduated in 2015 with a BFA in Visual Art and has an M.A in Animation from the University of South Wales. In the past three years she has worked with communities in the Metro Vancouver area to create murals and paintings, including working with the Vancouver Mural Festival. She has also worked with the City of Burnaby though the Deer Lake Artist Residency program to create interactive stories through digital games.

Her work can be described as self-reflexive and impulsive through the techniques of automatic drawing. She is influenced by the styles of pop surrealism, the divinity of animals and Latine folk art. Jocelyn’s work contains themes of cultural identity, magic, and memory to explore feelings of diaspora, and escapism.

studiocreamy.com/about @creamyskeletons

Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito (she/her) is a Chinese American judge, mom, writer, and publisher in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Flame Tree’s Asian Ghost Stories, Chromophobia, Mother: Tales of Terror and Love, Death’s Garden Revisited, and Unquiet Spirits. She is the founder of game and book publisher Demagogue Press and the nonprofit, Qilin Press, which focuses on diverse, marginalized voices. She is the co-editor of The Cozy Cosmic, a cozy horror anthology through Underland Press, and Winding Paths: A Playable Reading Experience from Demagogue Press. Frances is also a co-chair for the Young Willamette Writers program that provides free writing classes for high school and middle school students. You can find her on IG @francespaippolito, FB Frances Pai, and at www.demagoguepress.com/about.

Jacqueline Lesik is a Polish-American artist from New Bedford, Massachusetts, currently residing in Miami, FL. She works primarily in acrylic and watercolor mediums—with a focus on female subjects and the use of neutral color palettes—under the pen name “evokedelement.” By mixing abstract elements into her portraits she attempts to evoke aspects of both beauty and sense of quiet chaos.

@evoked007 @evokedposters

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their work has appeared in many journals and anthologies and has won prizes from Ploughshares, NANO Fiction, Fractured Lit, and Press 53. Their book, The Anchored World, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. They serve as a senior editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.

Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer and mental health advocate who blends the reality of trauma, race, and mental health into her writing. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she was the first undergraduate published in The New York Times. Her book with LD Green, We’ve Been Too Patient, elevates marginalized voices of lived experience who have endured psychiatric mistreatment and is now featured in curriculum at Boston University, New York University, and Cal State East Bay. Her personal story of surviving a suicide attempt is also featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, CBS This Morning with Gayle King, Good Morning America, and the Mental Illness Happy Hour with Paul Gilmartin. Her work is featured in Argot Magazine, MultiplicityEndangered Species, Enduring Values, Essential Truths, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative, and the forthcoming anthology When We Exhale. She co-hosts the Bay Area reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett. In 2022, Kelechi received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Learn more at kelechiubozoh.com

Kristin Eade is a writer from Seattle, although she currently calls the Bay Area home. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts and has an ardent love for words, especially those that need a good edit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Defunct Magazine, Spectrum, and Rogue Agent. When she’s not writing she enjoys bookbinding, playing with cats, and being in nature. You can find her at www.kristineade.com.

 

Suri Parmar is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker with a background in design who graduated from the Stonecoast MFA Program and the Canadian Film Centre. Her fiction has been published in New Haven Review and The Spectacle and her short films have screened at film festivals around the world. You can usually find her at home playing point-and-click computer games and trawling online shops for vintage Max Mara and Miu Miu clothing.

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. She teaches flash fiction and speculative fiction, and is the author of a novel, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in fall 2024. Find out more at www.taracampbell.com

Victoria Greenaway is a New South Wales bush writer with a performing arts background. She has one anthology publication credit.

Matt Carney is a Latinx writer and musician residing in San Francisco. He holds an MA and MFA from SFSU. His fiction and poetry have appeared in A cappella Zoo, Inkwell, Red Light Lit, sPARKLE & bLINK, Entropy, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tilted House, The Racket Journal and in readings at seedy bars across California. His short story ‘On Becoming’ was a finalist in the 2017 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Contest; and ‘In Fresno, One Last Bath in Dust’ was included in the Baobab Press anthology This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West. He is a co-founder and producer of Club Chicxulub, a fabulist science fiction performance series.

Find his Art Rock/-wave project N! on Bandcamp, Spotify and everywhere else. 

mattcarney.space @ruddagerrustin

Lauren C. Johnson attributes her upbringing in Florida, America’s weirdest state, to her interest in the ecological and surreal. Her writing has appeared in Mason Jar Press, Maudlin House, the Swamp Ape Review, the Museum of Science Fiction, and others. She is the interviews editor for The Racket Journal and is a member of The Ruby, a Bay Area collective for women and non-binary artists and creatives. She earned her MFA in creative writing at American University and lives in San Francisco, where she is a co-host of Babylon Salon, a quarterly Bay Area reading series, and Club Chicxulub, a sci-fi and fantasy performance series.

Her debut novel, The West Façade, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in 2026.

laurencjohnson.com

Born in San Jose and living in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Dev Bhat is a musician, composer, sound designer, and copywriter. He grew up performing in bands that could be characterized as industrial rock, shoegaze, hardcore punk, drone, doom, and ambient. Dev’s solo work features synthetic and organic textures using analog synthesizers, old tape recorders, samplers, drum machines, loopers, and a dense combination of effects processors. He draws inspiration from nature, horror films, classic video games, 90s anime, and all forms of speculative fiction.

@shipwreckdetective