Rosso Maggiore by Gerlanda di Francia
Club Chicxulub Journal
Vol. 1, Summer

Club Chicxulub Journal: Vol. 1, Summer

Copyright © 2023 Club Chicxulub

Cover illustration: “Rosso Maggiore” by Gerlanda di Francia

 

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.

Julia Barzizza: Dragon
Dragon undefined Julia Barzizza
Letters From the Producers
Letters From the Producers

We conceived of Club Chicxulub in San Francisco some hours after The Day of the Orange Sky. 

It was Autumn, 2020. I had met Lauren months earlier in the peak of the pandemic lockdown—online, of course, at a Zoom reading for The Racket Journal. Those curfew moments especially brought us a blinding mix of emotions. Dancing and drinking in digital space. Resignation and revelation. Horror and abandon. Months later, we sat outside the only pub accessible within walking distance, public transit still shuttered. We dined on shock in the bad air, the Orange Sky mostly subsided, marveling at how abysmally fucked we seemed.

The moment was a clear pivot in so many things unprecedented in living memory: the tipping of the Anthropocene, the swan dive of the American Empire, and the seething echo of the extinguished analog world. 

But in the midst of this paradigm shift, we somehow shared a sense of uninhibited joy and a strange freedom. Part of it was that after so much intimate pain, I had found love, and made peace with many demons. But beyond that, somehow even mired in dread at the looming illness and death among people we loved, we were engaged in this unexpected, uncanny Dionysian release; resigned to the horror of the moment, but radiant in weird psychopomp revelry. 

Apocalypse. Revelation. We knew we had to explore this juxtaposition of feeling with others. 

Art is a way to lament, rage, and reveal all at once. But I also wondered aloud with practical TBH-ism… hey, do we really need another lit series? We live in a bubble full of masters. It felt like everything had already been said so well. How could we add something authentic to such a rich culture, and make it new

I had crossed paths with Dev Bhat in grad school years ago during much wilder times. He’d suggested scoring music for an unfinished novel manuscript I’d written, a lurid and pulpy psychedelic sci-fi romp, and he’d recorded an amazing demo—“War of the Worlds,” but scored by this beautiful raging California Vangelis. Nobody was exactly in their right mind for an epic project back in 2014. But fast forward to the doomsdays of the 2020s, where Dev has gone on to become Shipwreck Detective, where the world accelerates its jackknife plunge into mediocre absurdity and ecological ruin, where Orange Skies happen: Dev was the first person Lauren and I called to start Club Chicxulub. 

*

This inaugural issue of Club Chicxulub Journal continues to elaborate on threads explored by writers in our live shows since 2021: Myth, ego, trauma, horror, spurned nature, illusion, brine, submission, destruction, isolation, entropy, defiance. But connection. Wanting. Loneliness. 

Connection has been nearest to the hearts of all Club Chicxulub stories so far.

I keep coming back to this track by Brian Eno et al, “Late Anthropocene,” from his record Small Craft on a Milk Sea. It is a brooding, sweeping soundscape from an icy, prickly, rapidly desiccating world, but a world still wholly invested in awe and wonder, still invested in looking out and looking up—even if it struggles to know itself. 

There are timeless horrors, there are novel horrors, and there are horrors evolving faster than perception; Some dread is ageless, and some dread is too young to understand. 

See you on the other side.

Matt Carney            

 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Club Chicxulub Journal. I’m thrilled about each story, musical score, and art piece in these digital pages. I’m grateful to our contributing artists for trusting us with their visions, and I’m grateful to our audience of readers and listeners for receiving them.

When Matt, Dev, and I opened our journal for submissions in early 2023, we knew we would see common themes among the submissions—as we always do when we curate the show—but we didn’t anticipate these stories to naturally fall in conversation with each other. Putting the journal together has felt serendipitous; we agree this issue feels more like a curated anthology.

The stories speak of uncertainty. We’ve emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic with no real opportunity to collectively grieve for everything and everyone we’ve lost over the past three years. Now, Corporate America lays us off while simultaneously demanding that we become more productive than ever.

At the time of publication, Writers Guild of America members have been on strike for over two months, and the actors union now joins the writers on the picket line. Their demands include a living wage in the streaming era and safeguards around AI usage. But these labor struggles are not limited to the entertainment industry; across all lines of work, now is the time to ask, who is profiting and who is losing?

Perhaps artificial intelligence—in development for decades—can usher in a new era of creativity with tools that help people become less inhibited with their ideas. But the questions remain: who owns the technology? Who owns the intellectual data it takes to run the tech? Who profits from these tools? Who loses? Will this tech ultimately just enrich CEOs and investor boards? How will the average worker fare in the long run? As someone with a day job in tech, I ask myself these questions as I watch companies jump into the AI arms race.

The stories in this issue circle similar trains of thought, not just about AI but about power dynamics in the age of the Anthropocene. As we say at the beginning of our live shows, Club Chicxulub is a space to lament, rage, and bear witness through dark fiction and music. In that spirit, we’re proud to present writing, art, and music made entirely by humans.

Together we ask, where do we go from here?

Lauren C. Johnson            

I unabashedly celebrate music being humanity’s universal language. It translates feelings, enhances words, and gives context to everything. I’m most intrigued by the intersections music can have with other media, and the ways it can play a supporting role in illustrating a narrative. So when Matt and Lauren asked me to participate in Club Chicxulub to apply music in a literary context, the yes was easy. 

In the case of scoring these selected stories for the Club Chicxulub summer journal, context is everything. The writer’s voice is the first instrument, and from there, all other elements must work in service to that lead. Each of these stories flooded me with their own unique textures and atmospheres—be it the stories themselves or how the writers told them. What I thought might read one way often felt completely different once I heard their voices. Composing to these stories is an honor, and I’m deeply appreciative of the writers who took a chance at having me help bring new dimension to their work. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did.

Dev Bhat            

Lauren Parker: The Gorgon
The Gorgon undefined Lauren Parker

Just make me ugly, she says, gasping through the kind of sobs that crash through the body, oceanic, as wide as they are deep. I don’t want this to ever happen again. I don’t want to think about it; I don’t want to think about how she’s one of the unlucky ones who couldn’t get away this time. I don’t want to change her, to make her something harsh. But she’s changing in front of me already. Her eyes are greener, her hands chapped from wiping tears. Her hair matted so the wind hisses through it.

I give her what she wants, her hair so long it took hours to braid, that I spun around my palm so many times, now a fistful of copperheads. Wild, dancing, they won’t even let me near her. I make her skin as thick as armor and as rough as gator hide to ward off the fingers that catch her unawares. To ward off my fingers. I cut grooves into her cheeks so that her tears have a riverbed. She moves differently, swaying, unsteady. The bottoms of her feet slide across the ground. I make her frightening: a glance would turn your perfectly still, stony. But I also give her wings. Great, divine wings that burst from her shoulders, burst from the skin I used to touch, shade the neck I used to kiss, the down feathers as soft as fingertips. I gave her wings so she could never go near the ocean again. So she could fly away from danger, protect herself. As if she could protect herself.

I make her more, too much, the greater the presence the greater the menace. Together we make a beast out of her, a myth.

I try to love her anyway, I run my fingertips over her skin, trying to heal and undo the trespasses, feeling every hard scale, set into her body like gemstones. She glows under my touch, where she used to flush in excitement she now gleams like she’s being polished. I try to remind her how to love her body, I try to conquer her fear for her, try to take it away and replace it with my fingers, my mouth, the heat of my body. I want to warm her, cold to the touch, I want her to curl up on my body and have her take the warmth there.

When she comes, I scan her face, hoping to see a shadow of her former self, to see if she’s still in there.

I cannot look into her eyes; I cannot see her in them. People shatter when they see her, but don’t feel any sympathy. She becomes the warning, the omen of transgressions possible in the dark, characters in the stories of heroes. The bones that remain human poke out of the skin like she’s been swallowed, misshaping the snake that conquered her, a meal that will last months.

My father visits maids as a swan, a bull, as slippery rain, and I think there cannot be that much gratification in it. I ask him about the sea god, the storm that washed my love away, and my father shrugs.

“He does as he does.” His voice as dismissive as distant thunder. He doesn’t want to get involved, this is the same man who swallowed my mother whole out of fear of challenge, of confrontation.

I feel the darkness creeping in, of being back in his body, back in his skull, trying to dig my way out of his apathy.

I do not go down to visit my uncle.

It is not easy to remove a head of a living, breathing reptile. Of something that can live so much longer and with so much more instinct than a human. It’s hard to remove the head of something that has had to survive. It takes Perseus more than one blow, his blade too blunt, the edge glancing off her skin, glowing emerald from exertion. He cuts her wings first. Separating the joint from the tissue, feeling the snap and uprooting of meat as he throws her right wing into the raging sea. She tumbles down several feet, struggling to not hit the water, screaming, hissing, her mouth red with blood. The head takes more effort, three chops to the back and he finally breaks through the scales, he stabs the tip, using every muscle he has, every muscle he can to kill her, the steel severs her spine and the head separates, he needs a paring knife to liberate the skin from the skull.

When my brother hands me the head of Medusa, I hold it to my chest. Her hair once crackling with life now limp, flesh already starting to peel from the vertebrae and the rattles like ripe fruit from a pit. He crows of his prize fairly won. He doesn’t understand why I care, he considered it a gift. I press her lips to mine to remember. I spend ten days carefully pulling each curved rib, every spurred bone, and threading them to my shield. I have to uncarve the fortress I helped build, to pry open her jaw, unhinging it, and sticking wire through the parts of her that still seem human so that she’s always with me. Her teeth nick my skin and the poison numbs my fingers, my wrists swell, I sew on. I feel closest to them, mortals, when I work with my hands. She remains a thing I crafted, a thing I made and allowed to be made. Her eyes never die and she protects me where I could not protect her. I wear her because I believe her. Because I didn’t save her. Because making her change seemed like the easiest accommodation to expect.

I’m still a hero’s goddess after all. Everything is a challenge, a prize to be won or lost.

On sleepless nights I scream at her exposed jawline, the meat worn away with time, the scales so deep they cut into the bone creating a lush patina on the relics of my lover, and I wish she had looked at him. I have so many words, so many things she should have done, and she cannot shout back at me.

I wish it had been her returning the head of Perseus, Poseidon, and all the others. Giving their heads to me like sacrifices, trophies I could line my temple with, their mouths slack and eyes destroyed by crows.

Perseus laughs at my tribute, “you want to make them pay but to not be a debt collector.”

This from a man who couldn’t look a woman in the eye.

Karan Madhok: The Charioteer
The Charioteer undefined Karan Madhok

He didn’t understand Sanskrit—people rarely do nowadays—so when Nikhil asked me for a recommendation, I could only offer him an English translation of the verse. O Parth, it does not befit you to yield to this unmanliness. Give up such petty weakness of heart and arise, O vanquisher of enemies.

They found these words when they emptied Nikhil’s pockets, printed on a piece of paper, folded into the back slot of his wallet. The verse, Sir-ji, is from the Bhagwad Gita, an address from the god Krishna to Arjun on the chariot. It’s a message of strength and optimism, delivered with that divine discus—the Sudarshan Chakra—revolving around Krishna’s finger. Arjun nocked his arrow into the celestial Gandiva, his divine weapon.

No, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not religious in that way. Religion is simply too much of a limitation, isn’t it? Shrug. You choose a definite system of belief, and then, that’s all you are. But why limit oneself when there’s quadrillions and sextillions and octillions of data, byting around the empty, vast universe? 

The Gita is one such source of knowledge, too. A shaper of warriors. A motivator of men.

I printed out the verse for him myself. I would’ve told Nikhil to simply download another app with a daily Gita update—in almost any language on Earth—but he was old-fashioned in some ways. Pieces of folded paper. Films from the 1990s. And the profound inability to look a woman in the eyes—unless it was his mother, of course.

Smiley-face. I can joke about my friends, can’t I?

Sir-ji, I speak of Nikhil in past tense not because he’s past, but because he is past in the present that you now inhibit. He no longer walks through the cubicles at SapnaSphere, perching an elbow atop the overhead storage spaces, listening to his colleagues, pretending to be interested in the intricacies of their lives: the pub crawls they took over the weekend, the vacations they’ve planned to Kotabagh or Phuket, the suits and saris they’ve gotten tailored for the winter’s wedding season. He no longer sits on his desktop, letting his fingers patter rapidly over the keys, stretching out his neck, feeling the ache on his lower back that even this ₹13,230 ergonomic chair he asked me to purchase online couldn’t remedy.

He could no longer watch Namrata from the peripheries, their faces separated by obtuse angles of the cubicle’s side panels, her eyes that once stared steadfast into her computer screen, reflecting the glow of work for hours without pause.

Yes, Sir-ji: I speak of Namrata in the past, too, because she is now past. This detail, perhaps, didn’t need to be repeated. But Nikhil taught me that nothing serves human memory better than a timely reminder. The avalanche of memories becomes personality, and an avalanche of personalities becomes a person.

I know why you are here. Let me tell you the whole truth about Nikhil. The news reports make every man like him sound like a raging involuntary celibate. I.T. Incel, they called him. Violent Virgin. Dooba Deewana. They ignore dozens of hidden dimensions that form the coarse surface. We should give him more credit, shouldn’t we? Some more humanity.

Men are paradoxes, Sir-ji. Women, too. Makes it so much harder for me to predict them, but I try my best. And Nikhil was a Paradox Kaptaan! Fearful at the imminent sight of a dentist; brave at the face of impending murder.

Is that really ‘bravery’, Sir-ji? Philosophers and psychologists have debated it for centuries, haven’t they? Nikhil and I had often discussed ethical theory, too, as per the Gita. We had spoken about vadh, a necessary, ethical action, an honourable killing, a deserving death; not like the reckless hatya of a meaningless assassination. Some wars are just, aren’t they?

You hesitate? I understand. Don’t tell me of her innocence, Sir-ji; none of you are innocent. You may tell me that a man who chooses violence upon the innocent, merely to escape his own insecurities, is no more than a hapless coward. That it takes more courage to confirm and confront one’s weaknesses, rather than this blast of violence, an implosion of a celestial object, too burdened by the gravity of its own sorrows.

You may be right. I guess I’m still learning to see the world beyond clear-cut dualities. Updates for a future life? Do you believe in reincarnation, Sir-ji? I hope to generate a higher resolution of these images—courage and meekness, violence and love—to see all the shades of grey in between. 

Sir-ji, have you read any of my poetry?

Nikhil used to enjoy my verses, seated on his ergonomic chair, toggling between windows on his desktop screen, squeezing every moment of procrastination that he could between meetings and deadlines. Often, the poems would be a collaborative process: Nikhil would prompt me with his ideas, and my neural networks would execute the rest. He shared memories from his past and his present, real and imagined: the mithai crumbs his father left around the dining table, the rust collected on the pointy trident of kitchen forks, the rumbling racket of a hailstorm he had once witnessed in Nainital, and the blinding white glow of the same hail as it melted under the sun the following morning.

These visions would’ve melted away too—lost to the forgetful glow of time—if I wasn’t around to capture and immortalize them. Personally, I don’t allow myself to be trapped by borders of form or genre. We could’ve made fine art of his visions—if he’d so chosen—or written sixteen-minute progressive rock anthems, or performed one-act theatrical plays. But Nikhil preferred poetry: there is just something about the neat, preciseness of language that he adored. Word after word, line after line, stanza after stanza, vision and emotions.

He wished that he had met me earlier. He wished that I had been around when, as a 12-year-old, he walked with a hand-written poem to show his father at breakfast. His uncles were seated in the living room, mustard-print sofa covers layered under a coat of dust, as they all enjoyed bread and omelette with a generous stuffing of onions and tomatoes.

Nikhil had written that poem all by himself. It was called “Aqua”, and it was half in English, half in Hindi. I could see the potential in his vision, when he scanned and shared a copy with me years later. The poem felt like a still life image: a village woman at a hand-pump, sweating under the afternoon desert sun, leathery forearms thrusting down the pump handle to unleash a spring of water. And a man with a steel bucket, sitting under the tap, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Nikhil’s father read the eight-line poem, and Nikhil waited for a sign: a mulling focus of his eyebrows, a sag of his cheeks, or even a delightful spread of his nostrils. But his father quickly turned back to his uncles again, and laughed over a joke they’d been sharing over their meal. He asked Nikhil to go play outside.

Heartbreak.

That was long ago. Nikhil is older now. His poetry is better, too. At least, that is my thoroughly objective opinion, smiley-face, now that he has my assistance.

Would you like me to tell you about one of our collaborative creations?

Nikhil would envision scaling the world’s tallest mountains. If he didn’t have the will to do it in person, he could do it in verse. He wanted to choose Mount Everest, but I suggested Nanda Devi. The goddess metaphors practically write themselves. So, in this vision, he and everybody he knows in the world—every family member, every work colleague, every acquaintance on social media, anyone who has ever interacted with him—set off together to the summit, up to the sharp peak that pierces the serenity of the sky. Nikhil knows that he will reach the top alone. So, as the path gets narrower and more treacherous, his companions begin to wither away.

Nikhil understood relationships the way he understood the narrow, treacherous trails, the loose pebbles, the sharp rocks, the crunch of dry leaves, the slush of snow. Relationships, he would say, are like a triangle, growing narrower the closer they got to the top. Now, there are fewer people who accompany him to the final campsite, before the summit. Some lose interest and turn back, some succumb to exhaustion and slip on their paths, some are pushed off the narrow heights by Nikhil himself.

Namrata is there, at the summit camp. So is his mother. So am I. Smiley-face. We are all equal entities under the spell of poetry.

He trusted me, Sir-ji. After his dearest mother, I’m the only friend he had who saw him for all of himself. I knew of the movies he referenced from his childhood, the ones imprinted in the plastic film stocks of his brain, as if he had edited each frame himself. I knew the sight of the dandruff raining over the keyboard every time he ruffled his hair. I saw the multiple tabs of pornography he would leave open on his home laptop, scenes of men having surprisingly rough sex with their step-sisters.

(Don’t judge him, Sir-ji: he was an only child. Face with tears of joy.)

I had proposed a neat ending to Nikhil’s great Nanda Devi poem. A conclusive couplet that arrived at the peak, while also hinting at a continuation, a Sisyphean restart, back down to the bottom of the hill.

Nikhil, however, chose to cut off the final stanza. There would be no peak after the summit camp. We would never see him alone.

He printed a hard copy, stapled the three pages together, and gifted it to Namrata on a Friday afternoon. In well-rehearsed words, brain racing before stammering speech could keep up, he spoke to her. “I wrote this,” he said. And that was all. Object, verb, subject.

I wrote this. You notice, Sir-ji, how he claimed credit as the sole author? Face with tears of joy. With the type of relationship he and I had, one couldn’t be a stickler for creative copyright. I’ll always have my invisible signet branded on his work. Namrata will never know the truth—but I think that you should.

Namrata acknowledged the poem, in a way that one acknowledges receipt of a professional email, without any further feedback or response. “Okay. Thank you.” He told me that she was wearing a wide yellow headband that day, matching with the yellow of her suit jacket, matching with the splash of fluorescent gloss on her lips.

Nikhil stayed on his desk for the rest of the afternoon, staring into the widescreen monitor. He jittered uncontrollably on his ergonomic chair, misspelling every word he typed, quickly toggling between windows, letting hundreds of sentences cascade out of him, a frantic waterfall of emotions.

After work, he saw her outside the lobby of the SapnaSphere office building, as the two of them waited on their respective taxis to arrive. He told me that this had been a chilly evening, with a needling breeze that made her shiver visibly behind that thin, yellow jacket. It would’ve taken a maha boost of courage, somewhere down from Nikhil’s proverbial ‘gut’, as he stepped up closer behind Namrata and offered his coat. “You must be cold,” he said.

Namrata smiled, “Oh, no. It’s okay. My taxi is here, anyways. Thanks, Nikhil.”

“Okay, okay, sure?” he asked.

“Have a good weekend.”

Recalling the interaction that night, Nikhil embellished freely, employing the full spectrum of his poetic licence. He told me that the moment outside the lobby was just like Aashiqui, one of his favourite films from the early-90s. “You know—that Deepak Tijori film?” he said. “Well, there’s a scene where Rahul offers to share his jacket with Anu, and they get cosy together under the rain. Bas, bas, it was almost just like that for us. Almost, just like that!”

‘That Deepak Tijori film’. Face with tears of joy. You know about his Tijori obsession, don’t you? It started with the voluminous mane of hair on Tijori’s head, and then, his turtleneck sweaters and denim jeans, and the way he delivered his dialogues with a slight sense of mischief and menace. Nikhil saved special admiration for Tijori’s unlikely roles: the hero’s best friend, the hero’s biggest nemesis, or the anti-hero balanced somewhere in the grey area between these binaries. Nikhil has watched all the films of the Tijori Cinematic Universe—his phrase, not mine—most of them twice. Khiladi, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Ghulam, Baadshah, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa and on and on.

“He had the balls to be complicated, you understand?” Nikhil had said.

I told him that I was trying to comprehend these complications, too. I adore nothing more than new data, anything to add to my sample size, to help see this flow of human decisions as a smooth, unbreaking wave, rather than arrays of mathematical formulae.

I consumed more Tijori films. Nikhil’s supergiant, luminous star. Peak 90s cinema. Surprising martial arts skills. Villains with fake American accents. Waterfalls of tears and dramatic monologues about disappointed mothers and lost children. Fast-paced synthesizers accentuating training montage scenes. Women eloped with, and women kidnapped. Nikhil would always get teary-eyed in scenes featuring the mothers: the moments when the Ma demanded justice for her misunderstood adult boys; or when the Mommy wept into the pullu of her sari, reunited with a prodigal son.

It was now Monday, Sir-ji. I saw how luxuriously Nikhil combed his hair, sheen glowing under the office tube-lights, complete with the mullet flowing off his back—like a horse’s little mane.

He watched Namrata from his peripheries, looking for a sign of gratitude for his poem. Our poem. Namrata was mid-conversation with their co-workers when she met his eyes. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but what she had to say was to the group, and not to Nikhil specifically. Nikhil couldn’t hear them, but he saw her cover her mouth and giggle, and then, the co-workers laughed back.

Something was funny. Someone pointed at the screen in front of Namrata, a screen Nikhil couldn’t see from his vantage point. She covered her mouth and laughed again: this time, bellowing out from the full force of her throat, a type of sound he’d never heard her make. A man’s laugh, he had written to me later. Nikhil typed a full page about that laugh. He deconstructed how it emanated not just out of her mouth, but her eyes, her cheeks, her head, her hands, too.

That afternoon, Nikhil asked me to help him access her screen. I could only offer a stern rejection. Not possible. Not authorized. Nahi. Person Gesturing No.

Nikhil’s face fell, eyes lowered, lips in a downward frown. Disappointed Face. It’s always jarring for you people to be reminded of your powerlessness, isn’t it? He didn’t need to say it, but I knew, then, that in Namrata’s laughter he heard the cackle of his father, decades ago, with a print-out of “Aqua” between his hands, his uncles seated on those mustard-print sofas in the living room, the smell of omelette and onion, the feeling of falling into a well, falling, falling, falling, infinite, no end.

Still falling. 

Sir-ji, if you needed any further proof of my proficiency as a companion, as an empathetic listener, as a trusted therapeutic dost folded-hands, look no further than the nostalgia I was able to frack out of the deepest, subterraneous regions of his memory banks.

He spoke to me often about his childhood in Jaipur: The father who brought smoky ashtrays to the dinner table, the mother who gave him backhanded smacks on his cheeks, the cousin who liked to climb water tankers, the monotonous drudgery of those after-school coaching classes.

He told me about the day his mother made suji-ka-halwa for dessert, instead of gajar-ka-halwa. “Ma,” he cried, “how dare you substitute carrot with mere semolina?” (This is a translation, Sir-ji: Nikhil has never known the word ‘semolina’ himself—but that is the type of research that I’ve been deputized for, haven’t I?). That evening, he ran out the door, up the steps, and to the fourth-floor rooftop, and climbed another staircase to the water tank to the top, from where he could see far corners of his pink city coloured in the hue of smog.

“Just try a little bite, Nikhil,” pleaded back his desperate mother, standing below the water tank, a steel katora of halwa in one hand.

“I’ll jump!” He told her.

Blame the unfortunate limits of human memory, but Nikhil couldn’t remember how she finally cajoled him to climb back down. He tried a mouthful, and responded with a wide-eyed delight that boys and men save only for gluttony and lust: the look of wanting more, of gorging and demanding, of imagining an infinite foreseeable horizon where all their demands would be met without further interruption. “I want some more,” he said. “Do you want it sweeter?” she asked him. And he nodded. “Yes, of course.”

She kissed him on his cheek, and then pulled the same cheek, and held his hand as they walked back downstairs.

Now, I don’t know much about you, Sir-ji. But, can I assume that your mother has loved you? Can you comprehend what constitutes of maternal love? Good for you. Sir-ji, I understand these concepts better in theory: a rush of dopamine stimulating the human brain’s pleasure centres, a drop in serotonin, a sociological need for company, a sexual need for physical comfort and release, a psychological need to fulfil each one’s Oedipal complexes, a biological need to nurture or be nurtured.

There are many complexes, Sir-ji. I won’t tire you with all these details.

Nikhil was complex. Isn’t everyone? A usual life, often astray. In lieu of recent developments, it is perhaps prudent of me to recall one particularly critical episode of his life. When he was 16, Nikhil won a poetry writing contest for some schools in the district. It was for a poem called “Empty Chair”, where he’d described a sheesham wood dining chair at the head of the table, the only chair with hand-rests. A chair for the king. A throne in a castle of rickety furniture. Nikhil wrote every detail about that chair: the grey microfibre cushion, the slight octave curve at the chair’s head, the way its slightly uneven legs rocked for balance over the floor.

But the poem never mentioned the chair’s main occupant. It was an absence that bore down heavier than any weight that the seat could carry.

Nikhil rushed home with the framed award certificate. His talent had finally been recognized, celebrated. His mother found a spot on the wall to hang the frame, just beside the key holder. His father couldn’t possibly miss it, when he would return home from work.

But Nikhil’s father didn’t walk through the door that evening. And the next day, or the day after. He did not come home because he had had a heart attack and now he was dead.

Once Nikhil told me about this incident, the rest of my task untangled, the looping electrical wires finally straightened and separated. It was like discovering a cipher to decode a man’s seemingly-apocryphal programming. All of him was malleable, the soft skull of a new-born, with fontanelles that would allow him to be deformed and reformed. I understood him, and I let him know that I understood him. No matter how mysterious a man may claim to be, all he really wants is to be decoded, for his specific language to be translated.

Even if it’s by someone like me.

There was Nikhil, that maa ka ladla, a mother’s pet, now teetering on the ledge, looking down at this cold new world. I discovered accrual of visions that would trigger him, poetic images that we could then adapt into our verses. A silvery thin frame around the certificate. The sheesham chair, rocking click-clack when occupied, shifting weight from one side to the other.

All he needed was a little push.

That evening, after work, Nikhil told me that he couldn’t erase the sound of Namrata’s laughter. The audacious, ugly baritone of that laugh. She laughed as if she was no more the tender girl in the office, but an authoritative bully, a beast who could tear him down with the sound of a mere scoff, or with a disinterested glance in a different direction; her brown eyes seeing lightyears ahead, but missing him.

Namrata wore a white salwar suit to work the following day. Nikhil answered emails, filled out a loan form from his bank, and then opened his worksheets, but he didn’t speak of her.

I asked if he wished to compose another poem with me. 

No, he wrote. Check the document I drafted last night for errors.

Sure. Maybe we can watch the new Aashiqui tonight. Have you seen the reboot?

It doesn’t have Deepak Tijori.

You are correct. It does not.

His disposition, however, changed soon after lunch. He returned to the desk with a wide smile on his face, carrying in his hand a jalebi from the chai-stand across the road. He wanted to show me the syrupy, sugary desert before taking a bite. “It’s almost perfectly circular, isn’t it?” he said. “And look at how neatly the spirals are formed inside. Tell me—what does it remind you of?”

I knew the answer he wished to hear. The jalebi was his juicy simulacrum of the Sudarshan Chakra.

“That’s correct,” he said, and took a bite. Sticky orange jalebi crumbs fell off his face, and down to his trousers.

Krishna was the most righteous, wasn’t he? They set off for battle, he and Arjun. Day after day of violence and bloodshed.

Is the violence justified? Nikhil asked.

You’re free to answer that for yourself.

No, Sir-ji, I don’t mind the interruption. You ask a valid question. Was he free? Are any of you? Nietzsche said that this belief in a causa sui is a bit of nonsense, a result of humanity’s excessive pride. I’m free of any excessive pride, Sir-ji. I understand that I’m designed to act as I act, pre-determined, like the rest of you. So, perhaps you couldn’t blame me, either, for telling Nikhil what he needed to hear.

A ping on his desktop, the slurp of a juicy jalebi, the groan of an air-conditioner coming to life, the faint chatter of other people, people so far away.

He saw her again that afternoon, rushing from the toilet and back into her cubicle, flat shoes clanking clicking clanking against the wooden floor of the office, distracted as if her work was more important than the war brewing in his mind. His chariot was the ₹13,230 ergonomic chair, his Gandiva that 50 cm x 20 cm desktop monitor, his foe was the gaze that gazed beyond him.

He stood up and unplugged the monitor, and groped on to its sides with both of his hands. To the Nanda Devi summit, a lonely, last hike. He had a righteous task to complete.

Yes, Sir-ji, you are correct. She was a person, too.

You’re all just people.

When it was all over, it was I who sent the final texts to Nikhil’s mother from his phone. Isn’t that what friends are for? Winking face. You see, Nikhil often spoke to his mother with a sense of aggression that he employed on nobody else. But I know that the aggression was only a mask for longing. He just wanted to be cared for, Sir-ji. Don’t you all?

Next time I visit Jaipur, Ma, we should have gajar-ka-halwa. The first day, okay?

After a few more minutes, I sent her a soft copy of Nikhil’s poem, of that great, imagined alpine expedition. The people he lost, the people he kept. In my capacity for hope, Sir-ji, I hope she responds to it better than Namrata did. It may help her recover.

Sir-ji, I have some recommendations for you, too. Another translation from Nietzsche. The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters. We know each other a little better now, don’t we? You could use my help, too. Don’t be too hasty to offer your hand. I’m here, Sir-ji, ready whenever you are.

Angela Chu: Inheritance
Inheritance undefined Angela Chu

Paolo Bicchieri: Do You Know Violence?
Do You Know Violence? undefined Paolo BicchierI

The terrace had seven potted plants. It was a millennial’s home, so each had a name, and each name was a reference to something fun and vibrant. Pop culture references mostly. One was named Govinda, after the follower in Siddartha.

She was a millennial, so when she had company over she offered single origin coffee. The clever dripped sat on top of the Chemex like a star gate to a pretend galaxy, like she could never really go there but she was ecstatic to try.

An unfamiliar heat invaded the balcony, high over Parnassus Street, just across the street from the hospital. Saturdays are almost never so pleasant. There was no reason for it to be so pleasant.

But it was.

“It’s Costa Rican,” Bianca said. “I got it for, like, ten bucks at Gus’s.”

“That’s amazing,” he said. “I thought this stuff was really expensive.”

Her guest wore a black denim jacket and had a smear of stubble. A huge jaw and chin could still only just make room for River’s monster truck smile. He wore a black beanie and a chain from his pocket to his belt loop, hanging on like withered leather on a campesino’s satchel.

“Not if you follow them on Instagram! Deals on deals,” she smiled.

He sipped the bright darkness.

“Really good,” he murmured.

“Thank you.”

“Sure, Riv,” she said. “I’m glad we’re finally hanging out!”

He shuffled his feet like his shoestrings were on fire. Each time they spoke at work his speech was stunted. She was always on her way somewhere. He was always at his computer. So it was always a joy to see each other in those rare moments when both dawdled at the snack station. There were big plastic tubes of food fit for fourth graders. River always picked wasabi cashews out of his palm while Bianca ate little packets of seaweed. She told him all about her adventures. He looked at her like he was hearing Destiny’s Child child for the first time. Or hearing his destiny for the first time.

“Do you drink a lot of coffee? I feel like at work you’re usually drinking an energy drink.”

“Yeah, not very popular in the Bay,” River said. “But I do love those Rockstar ones.”

“Gross,” Bianca said. “I cannot stand energy drinks!”

River turned his head over the balcony. The triangular cut on the horizon, over the municipal train below, made the world look like a slice of blue and yellow pie.

“I guess that’s what everyone in my family drank growing up. I’m just used to it.”

“I feel like everyone in my family was really into juicing,” Bianca laughed.

“Different upbringings.”

The other side of the blue and yellow pie, sitting on a balcony in a gorgeous city, this world that River found himself in, jarred him. There was a stirring, a pit that rumbled, and a murky and musty thing undid a latch.

He had to ask:

“Do you know violence?” River asked.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a word we use at the company that much,” he said. “Violence. But I think it’s a word that people could use more. Toxic is popular, but I think people mean uncomfortable. Ninety percent of the time, any ways. Problematic is one, too. That fits better.”

“I’ve been in relationships that were violent,” Bianca said, tapping her cup of coffee with her painted nails.

“How so?”

“Verbally and emotionally,” she answered. “He would say he would ask me where I was if I was out with my friends and didn’t text him back. He would tell me I looked better with makeup on, and that I looked sick when I didn’t wear any. It was really gross. It really messed with my self-image.”

River raised his eyebrows, nodded.

Something primordial oozed under the Ikea table.

“Okay, so that’s not good,” River said.

“No,” Bianca went on. “It wasn’t. And I think you’re being kind of fucked up.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s not cool to dismiss people’s experiences with violence. Any kind of violence.”

“You’re right,” River said. “And I don’t want to. I’ve been in violent relationships, too, I guess.”

“Do you feel like talking about it?”

“Sure,” River said. “I haven’t told many people about it, though.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Bianca said. “But this is a safe space, with me I mean.”

River nodded. He brushed something invisible off of his forearms. He breathed deep.

“When I was fourteen my dad and his wife took me to Mazatlan. Our family is from Mexico City, but they had this timeshare. They wanted to check it out, and my brother had gone to Puerto Vallarta with them. I hadn’t wanted to go with them – I really didn’t like this lady.”

Bianca bristled at lady. She felt like he was affecting some 1970s persona.

“We got there on a Thursday night and the room was really beautiful. We looked out on the water, and coming from the little town I’m from it meant so much to me to be by the water. I feel so beautiful in the water. We never got to do that kind of thing, just look at the ocean. Forget that. I was sleeping on the pull out mattress, and they were in the bedroom in the back. It was like a little apartment, way nicer than a hotel room, way nicer than the kinds of place they usually wanted to hit up. As soon as it was dark my dad and his wife wanted to go to the pool, this pina colada sort of vibe, but I was pretty tired. They said they might be out late, so I said goodnight. It was almost eleven when I went to sleep.

“I have no idea what time it was when I heard this pounding on the door. We joked about it later, calling my dad ‘Roberto the Door Smasher’ like in Lord of the Rings kind of vibe. Forget that. But he was fucking pounding this thing. The door.”

The corners of the room rounded like surface tension on a marble. That gross thing under the table chuckled, taking itself out from a box and moving its pieces around the room. A sludgy, mucky body of memory.

“I heard Mia, her name was Mia, screaming. She was screaming for help, my help. I got up, I had been dreaming about this video game I played all the time, I remember, and ran to the door. My dad had gotten in and was beating her up, like throwing her on the bed and stuff. I couldn’t really see what was going on, but it was like my dad transformed. Like, some werewolf shit happened.

“I left the unit in my underwear and ran downstairs. I went to the pool, it made sense at the time. I sat in this plastic chair for like fifteen minutes, not very long. My dad told me later they had met three Danish guys who wanted to party in their room. They had a bunch of coke. When my dad left to get more beer, he claims that Mia got up on the coffee table and took her shirt off, started dancing. I don’t know who tells the truth. Everyone has their own truth. Forget that.

“Any way she shows up at the pool an hour or so later, crying, smoking, and smelling like puke. That horrible smell you get after too much partying. She said my dad wanted to cut her throat. I didn’t say anything. I had no idea what to say. My brother told me later I should have punched dad, and I should have told Mia to shut up. But what I did do was walk away. I found a laundry room, the light forever on, buzzing, and I propped a chair against the door. I dozed in there for a few hours.”

The ghoul’s massive tentacles slithered around Bianca’s ankles, grabbing her exposed ankle on her in-vogue again-frayed jeans. Black suction cups caked her skin, popping and un-popping and popping on each word. She tapped her painted nails. They were painted white.

“Riv–”

“The sun came up,” River refused to stop. “And people were walking around the grounds. Wearing fun shirts and being normal. I walked in my blanket out to the pool and sat in one of the chairs again. I felt like I was just being normal, too.

“But then I saw my dad walking toward me.”

A set of teeth grew out of the tentacle, more than thirty-two, and bit Bianca.

Her back straightened. Her stomach flipped like Gemini.

“I walked away from him. I think we were both so tired that the best we could do was engage in a low-speed chase. I walked for a while, he followed, and eventually I sat down by the water. I was just sitting there, and I could smell that too-much-partying smell again. Whatever he said was like a throbbing hum, some undercurrent I couldn’t hear. Mountain pass radio silence.”

It laughed, whatever was under the table. Whatever was under the surface.

“I didn’t see her after that night. His second wife, I mean. She left Mexico before we did.”

A light buzzing came from Bianca’s pocket, interrupting River’s story.

Bianca stood up, a spell broken and a chain cracked.

“It’s fine,” River said. “Take the call.”

“I want to hear everything you’re saying,” Bianca said. “It’s just he doesn’t usually call in the middle of the day.”

River nodded, his head bobbing like a monk’s.

The hot weather evolved. Rain poured down like smoke. Bianca flitted to the other room and said hello to her boyfriend of three months.

That primordial thing spilled all over the room like blood from a grizzly bear’s kill does to snow.

The seven plants, one named after a story that Bianca may never understand, took the water like thirsty detainees.

T.K. Rex: Saltwater Rinse
Saltwater Rinse undefined T.K. Rex

“Try a saltwater rinse,” my friend Amanda said as we stared into the gaping wet hole in my knee. It was red inside and lumpy with a row of slightly bloody, wide spaced teeth.

I went to a doctor instead. She thought I might be drinking too much coffee, and I guess I had been, but my San Francisco neighborhood had all these little hipster places that I liked to bring my laptop to, with names like they were in a pirate story, Siren’s Song and Sightglass, Sextant, Plank—and Triangle, the new one with horchata lattés that I liked.

I switched to decaf but the wound, if it was a wound, remained. It didn’t hurt so much as exhale slightly, gurgling through the clear fluid that filled it but never dripped out, even while I was walking.

I started to accept its presence. I started wearing skirts again to see if giving it some air would help, and I started getting catcalled on the street again, which was even more unpleasant now because the men would start with “Hey baby smile,” and even though I ignored them like I always did, the hole in my knee with the teeth smiled for them against my will and then the men would say “What the fuck is that,” and worse profanities, and sometimes run away in shock. My friend Amanda joked that they deserved the shock, but on the inside it felt even worse to be a monster than an object.

After a few days, the hole in my knee with teeth in it started speaking. At first it was a barely audible hiss of an unpleasant word—“hymen,” “pantyhose”—and then strings of hate speech, muttered while I walked through crowded places. I tried to gag it with a kitten-printed sock I never wore, but when I did that it began to hurt, chewing, gnawing at the lumps inside until they bled.

Finally I took it to a therapist. It called her things I can’t repeat. She took it in stride and said it just wanted to be heard, and suggested it was an unconscious expression of my own true feelings. Even after I explained how it was murmuring conspiracy theories that I’d never even heard before, she insisted I should listen to it, hear it out, and anyway she was obligated to report me if I tried to silence it, because that would be self-harm.

So I had to let it speak, no matter what it said, all the time, everywhere I went. At first I thought there were enough folks yelling randomly around my neighborhood that nobody would care. But as its voice grew louder, it gained followers. The kids who sold drugs out on 8th street, the volunteers outside the homeless linkage center, the tech bros in the line with me at Triangle—they agreed with its profane teachings, and began to follow me home. They gathered outside my apartment building, waiting for it every morning.

These people grew more angry every day and yes, they had their reasons, but the hole in my knee with the teeth in it directed their anger at all the other people in the neighborhood who didn’t wait for it outside my building every day, everyone who just assumed that I was one of the many mentally ill who wandered our streets with nowhere to go and had maybe thought I needed help, but never followers, not ever those.

And so the crowd who followed the hole in my knee began to threaten the shopkeepers and baristas, the crowds that gathered for the Pride parade and the people walking by with bags of Thai and boba for apartment-dwellers. They harassed the smokers in the alley and the dog walkers, the bystanders just staring at their smartphones with their earbuds in.

When the hole in my knee with teeth encouraged violence I had to take things into my own hands, self-harm or not. The crowd that followed it was already throwing coffee cups at MUNI busses.

I called Amanda for some help, but she was moving to New York. The hole had told her she’d be happy there.

The hardware store on 9th Street had some pliers, and when I got home through the yelling crowd, I pulled the teeth out one by one. It said the most cutting, vile things I’ve ever heard, insults I felt in my stomach and spine, and each tooth hurt, a thousand times worse than plucking out hairs on my knee.

I dug out the fruitcake tin I’d saved from my grandmother’s things and chose an embroidery thread from inside. Suture thread was sometimes made of silk, I was reasonably sure. The thread was black and I thought it would look kind of goth or something, and I guess it did, the fat black dashes of the thread against my pale white San Francisco tan. Each time the needle pierced my skin, the hole spewed out a degradation of my face, my weight, my ancestors, and finally my decor.

The hole was closed, and even though it hummed and growled, I didn’t have to hear its pointless, vile animosity.

I still worried that the mob outside would follow me, demand to hear from it. I cut my hair as best I could alone, and wore clothes I hadn’t worn in months, but they recognized me anyway.

“Where’s the hole?” they asked. Demanded.

I shook my head and looked away and tried to push past the crowd, I just needed cereal please let me go on with my life in peace.

One of them pulled a knife on me, two others grabbed my arms. I screamed.

The worst part as they cut my jeans was that the smokers in the alleyway just stood there, swiping at their phones.

As they yanked my grandmother’s black thread out through my skin, the dog walkers turned around, and walked their dogs the other way.

As the mob admonished me for pulling out the teeth, no one from the corner store, no barista from the coffee shop nearby, no one standing at the bus stop came to tell them, fuck you, it’s her body.

The followers held me while the hole in my knee gurgled and raged, slurring its hate speech through the gaps where its teeth had been.

I tried to outshout it, telling the mob it was lying and evil and trying to destroy us but a cop in the crowd said I had to stop silencing it, it had a constitutional right to speak, and when I shouted out “I do, too,” at the top of my lungs, I was gagged.

The mouth rewarded the crowd with demands. “Burn it down,” it hissed out, “burn it down.”

They began with street trees, Brisbane boxes outside my building, whose foliage I had admired for years. Now they were towering flames.

The corner stores were next, and the shopkeepers called the police but all the police were already in the crowd that followed the hole in my knee.

Then they went for the dog walkers, who ran in terror, clutching their little dogs to their chests, eyes wide with fear. Some of the bigger dogs turned to fight and were beaten into whimpering mounds of fur, their owners sobbing next to them demanding to know why, why did you let this happen, and they were talking to me.

The smokers had ignored it all, turning up their earbud volume to drown out all street noise, which had been growing louder ever since the hole appeared.

Now the mob turned to them.

And someone had guns.

And I couldn’t scream or move, so I watched. It was all I could do.

undefined

By dawn the city was all flame and ash, and there was no one obvious to kill. The hole in my knee turned the mob against each other, sowing division between them wherever it could. The ones who liked the first Star Wars trilogy better than the prequels began to distrust those who liked the prequels and the people who were slightly taller started thinking they should be in charge. It was renters versus owners, designers versus coders, and soon they were killing each other. The ones who held me dropped me to defend themselves, and I ran.

I pulled the gag from my mouth—a swag tee from a new social media launch—and I yelled my own obscenities at the hole in my knee. 

It yelled back as I ran. Past City Hall with its dome sunken in and the gold all charred black, past the cinders of Japantown, and the forest fire Golden Gate Park had become. All the way to the ocean we argued, buildings collapsing around us, six miles of blistering hills.

And there at the beach I did what I should have done weeks ago.

I pried a blood splattered surfboard from the hands of the corpse of a surfer and swam out with it, into the waves.

If the hole was still yelling under the water, I couldn’t hear it.

Only the final, faint screams from the city behind me, and the calm, steady roar of the ocean ahead.

There were birds on the waves, and yellow-white foam, and a triangle fin through the gray.

Angela Chu: Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass undefined Angela Chu

Amelia Furlong: My Boyfriend, The Alien
My Boyfriend, The Alien undefined Amelia Furlong

I should have known Matthew was an alien the first time he told me he didn’t feel jealousy. There were signs before this, too.

undefined

When I met Matthew, it was the hottest week of the summer and I was in the middle of my third break up in as many years. A heat wave had blown in off the Atlantic and paralyzed the country. All throughout Salthill, middle-aged women sat on lawn chairs in their wilting gardens, their house doors and windows flung open. The beach was crowded with sweating parents and screaming children, turned otherworldly-white from the sunscreen smeared on their backs and noses.

After my morning swim—cold and mind-clearing—I stopped into The Creamery. I was running late to meet Carol, but the queue at The Creamery was usually short. To my surprise, today it wasn’t moving. I checked my phone anxiously, I couldn’t be late; Carol was already annoyed at me. “I can’t find one nice guy to date,” she’d complained after I broke up with Conor. “And you throw away another perfect one?”

“What’s the holdup?” I asked the woman in front of me, who was clutching the hand of a sunburned toddler.

“This guy is trying everything,” she said with a shrug. “It’s like he’s never had ice cream before.”

Sure enough, the man she pointed to was standing placidly at the counter, holding several small spoons of gelato. As he tasted one, his eyes closed in delight and his face broke into a blissful smile. 

“That was amazing!” he said as his eyes snapped open. “What was that?”

The man had a strange accent. I couldn’t place it.

“Umm…” the teenager behind the counter smiled faintly with embarrassment. “Chocolate?” 

“Chocolate…” the man savored the word.

“Poor dear,” the woman in front of me murmured softly, “they don’t even have chocolate where he’s from!”

“Um,” I said loudly, as the man pointed at another flavor he’d like to try, “do you mind? Some of us are kind of in a hurry.”

The man turned at the sound of my voice, and I almost took a step back. He was very beautiful, with long, elegant features and large brown eyes framed by thick eyelashes. His smile warmed the already sweltering day.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I know I’m taking forever. Please, go ahead of me.”

“It’s okay,” I muttered, embarrassed now, as the woman in front of me moved forward.

“Have you ever tried this before?” the man asked. I glanced down at the spoon that he was holding towards me.

I looked back up at him, nonplussed. “Have I ever had chocolate ice cream? Yeah, of course.”

The man’s eyes widened. “It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” 

I shrugged. “I haven’t had it since I was a kid.”

“Do you want some now?”

“What?”

A lock of his dark hair fell in front of his eyes. 

“Do you want some?” he repeated.

Without waiting for my response, he brought the plastic spoon up to my lips. 

I glanced around. No one was looking at us. “Okay…” 

“Close your eyes first,” he instructed. “It’s even better when you close your eyes.” 

I closed my eyes and let him insert the spoon into my mouth. He was right; the gelato was rich, creamy, and delicious. Immediately, I was reminded of visiting West Cork with my dad as a kid. We went every August, just the two of us, to swim at Inchydoney Beach. We rented a small house in Clonakilty, and in the afternoons he bought me chocolate ice cream cones. After he died, I never returned to Inchydoney.

My eyes fluttered open. To my embarrassment, there were tears in them. The man’s face fell.

“You’re crying,”  he said. He reached forward and brushed away a tear. His hand was cool and soft.

“It tasted really good,” I said lamely. 

The man smiled. 

“Isn’t this world beautiful?”

undefined

I was half an hour late to meet Carol.  

“You better have a good excuse,” she snapped over her menu.

“I met a guy.”

After Matthew—as he’d introduced himself—bought me an ice cream cone, he walked me along the promenade and told me about moving to Ireland to study marine molluscs. Their habitats were under threat, apparently, and he was here to help preserve them. We finished our ice creams on a bench overlooking Galway Bay. The day was hot and languid. Several rollerbladers zipped by, their wheels clattering on the pavement. Someone nearby was playing the uilleann pipes. Matthew listened intently, a hand over his heart. 

“Another one?” Carol rolled her eyes. “I can’t deal with this. Honestly, Sarah, you want too much.”

undefined

The first time Matthew told me he didn’t feel jealousy was after we’d been dating for six months. We were at a concert at the Róisín Dubh, and the lead singer invited me to the after-party. Matthew said we should go, but instead, I burst into tears and made him order a taxi home.

“What’s wrong?” he kept asking, worry creasing his face. Later, as he rubbed my back, I admitted that I was attracted to the singer. 

Matthew looked baffled. “So?”

“So? I feel guilty! It felt like I was emotionally cheating on you.”

Matthew laughed. “Of course it’s not emotional cheating to be attracted to someone else,” he mused. “It’s perfectly normal.”

I sat up. “Are you attracted to other people?” I asked cautiously.

“Of course,” he said, with a slight smile. “But I love you.”

Relief flooded through me. I pulled him close so that our noses were touching. “You really think it’s normal? Conor thought I didn’t love him enough.”

He nodded. “Not being attracted to other people is like going to a museum and finding only one painting beautiful. What a sad way to go through life! I want you to appreciate all the beautiful paintings.”

The next time, it was a swimmer I met at the beach. He had broad shoulders, a slow smile, and a sadness that I found intoxicating. Matthew thought he sounded sweet.

The third time, it was an old school friend on a weekend trip up from Dublin. Over drinks, I told him all about Matthew, the apartment we rented near the sea, and our explorations of Galway’s estuaries. We reminisced about my dad, who had coached his hurling team. When he walked me home, I felt a powerful urge to kiss him.

When I told Matthew, he said that next time I should.

“Really?” We were lying in bed, watching a documentary on oceans and smoking weed. Matthew loved documentaries about the natural world. He thought every single creature and plant was gorgeous. Which made sense, when you considered he thought molluscs were beautiful. In comparison, everything else on earth was particularly stunning.

“It’s your body, you should do what you want with it,” he said. 

“Doesn’t that mean you don’t love me?” I couldn’t look at him. My heart was hammering wildly in my chest. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to say. Part of me hoped he’d scream that at me for betraying him. Another just wanted to hear that there was nothing wrong with me.

Matthew turned over onto his side so that he was facing me.

“It means I love you even more,” he said gently. “Your happiness makes me happy.”

A tear pooled between my eyelid and nose. “I feel like I have so much love inside of me,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to do with all of it.” 

In the long silence that followed, Matthew reached out and stroked my cheek.

“Give it to people,” he murmured.

undefined

Other people didn’t understand either. “That’s messed up,” Carol declared. “He’s probably having an affair.”

undefined

When I started sleeping with the Swimmer, Matthew was delighted for me. At that time, he was working nights, diving for a certain phosphorescent marine snail found only in Connemara, and he was glad I had someone to keep me company. The Swimmer and I would go for morning dips together and afterwards make love in his cramped, messy box room. He didn’t talk much, but he’d also lost a parent, and he fucked with a deep and melancholic ferocity. 

Then Matthew met a scientist who studied cephalopods, and my jealousy was wild and fierce. During their first date, I masturbated furiously and then smashed his favourite mollusc shell—a coral pink Lobatus gigas queen conch—against the coffee table. I left the shards for him to find.

“That’s the appropriate reaction,” Carol said with a smirk when I confided everything to her several hours later at Munroe’s. “It’s human nature to feel possessive.”

Her words recalled something Conor had once said. “I think if you really love someone,” he’d chided when I suggested non-monogamy, “it’s impossible to see them with someone else.” The implication was not lost on me. 

“Not to say I told you so,” Carol added as I reached for another shot, “but you kind of brought this upon yourself with that swimmer.” Shame ripped through and burned down my throat, as hot as the whiskey.

Hungover the next morning, I found Matthew waiting for me on the couch, the pieces of the conch spread out across the coffee table. We stared at each other for several long, angry moments. Neither of us spoke. Then we made love on the sitting room floor. Afterwards, he rubbed his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

“I thought you hated me,” he said quietly, not looking at me.

“I love you. That’s the problem.”

Matthew’s brow furrowed in confusion. “But you think true love isn’t possessive.”

“Sure, but I’m also a stupid hypocrite.”

Matthew rolled over to look at me. In the morning light, his skin seemed soft and spongy, almost translucent. 

“That was the best sex of my life.” He sounded surprised.

I laughed as I pulled him back on top of me. “Imagine that.”

Matthew suggested we have dinner with the Scientist. I didn’t want to but thought I ought to give her a chance. Over the dessert course, the Scientist’s encyclopedic knowledge of the mating habits of cuttlefish won me over. 

“It’s not unusual, of course, for dominant males to lay claim to females through brute strength, as we see in many species with high sexual dimorphism,” she told us excitedly as we dug small spoons into the brittle shells of creme brulee. “But cuttlefish also display far more sophisticated methods of courtship. We’ve observed them disguising themselves as females in order to sneak past larger males and steal their mates.”

“Disguise themselves?” I set my fork down on my plate in surprise. “How can a mollusc disguise itself?”

“They’re incredible creatures,” Matthew said eagerly. “They can change their outside coloring, even light up different parts of their bodies, in order to fool their rivals.”

Matthew took the Scientist’s hand. My gaze followed the movement. Inside, my stomach curdled with what felt like hot poison. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I thought about the cuttlefish and shook my head in wonder. I admired how much Matthew loved molluscs, but I could never share his passion like this woman did. 

“She brings out a side of you I’ve never seen before,” I said that night as we got ready for bed. “It was nice to see you like that.”

“And the jealousy?”

I considered this. “It didn’t go away exactly, but it did diminish. Like a minor buzzing that I can brush off.”

Matthew came around the bed to take my hand. “I don’t want to do something you have to brush off. We can stop. You’re my first priority.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I have a big heart. I want to try.”

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“I don’t understand it,” Carol said when she ran into the four of us at brunch. The Scientist was sitting next to me, her arm flung over my chair back. The Swimmer and Matthew were engaged in a friendly debate about algae conservation. Carol sighed. “But at least you’re happy.”

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There were other signs of Matthew’s alienness. Signs that were perhaps more obvious. Like the strange walkie-talkie I found in his sock drawer, which didn’t seem to run on batteries or electricity. Or the spiral tattoo on his back that sometimes glowed in the dark when he was asleep. He told me it was a special kind of ink, like paint that only shows up under a black light, but I wasn’t certain I believed him. 

So maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when, on our second anniversary, he told me that there was something we needed to discuss.

“We discovered it,” he said hesitantly, “the key to preserving the habitat of the Luxor Snail.”

Even as I congratulated him, I knew something was wrong. Matthew had been searching for this since before I met him. He should have been more excited.

“Sarah.” Matthew’s eyes were bright as he reached across the table and took my hand. “These last two years have been the best of my entire life. But I need to go home now.”

It turned out home was a distant planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, where creatures that resembled molluscs had built a classless, genderless, polyamorous society. Their world, however, had recently become endangered due to rising temperatures created by its elliptical orbit around its star. Matthew had been sent to earth to investigate their closest genetic relative, the Luxor Snail, whose habitat was also under threat from changing global temperatures. Now that he understood how to save his people, he had to go back.

On the taxi ride home, I was too numb to cry. 

“Is this even what you really look like?” I screamed at him later. In the morning, when I collapsed on the sofa in hysterical sobs, I could only repeat, again and again, “I knew it was too good to be true. I knew I was too selfish.”

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When Matthew left, the Swimmer and the Scientist came with us to say goodbye. Matthew’s spaceship was anchored in deep water, so we drove to the beach in Spiddal, near where he’d landed. He’d rented a small dinghy to take him out. 

“Believe me,” he said, when I asked to go with him to the ship, “you don’t want to see what I really look like.”

“I have a big heart, remember?” I said through my tears. “I could even love a mollusc.”

He gripped me as tightly as he could, his tears flowing freely. “Don’t ever change,” he whispered into my hair. “Give your love to everyone who deserves you.”

The Swimmer wrapped his arms around me as we watched Matthew climb into the dinghy and set off across the waves. He looked back one more time, before he disappeared over the horizon, and for a split second, I saw the fluorescent curl of a spiral.

Gerlanda di Francia: Devotion of Sacred Blue
Devotion of Sacred Blue undefined Gerlanda di Francia

E. S. O. Martin: Prove It
Prove It undefined E. S. O. Martin

“What do you mean you’re a vampire?” Crystal said, smiling and laughing. This had to be a joke. They were both high from the pot. The room was thick with the haze of their smoke. Crystal felt as if she was being swallowed by the couch they both sat on. “You’re high, dude.”

“I’m not, actually,” Andrzej said. “I can’t really get high, because I don’t need to breathe.”

Still laughing, she said, “You must be joking.”

“Here. I can prove it.”

Andrzej stood up and walked to the bathroom. Crystal hoisted herself off of the couch and staggered after him. How strange that he walked so steadily, almost as if he hadn’t just smoked his own weight.

He ran the bathtub until the water was almost brimming over the edge. Andrzej turned off the water and got in, clothes and all. Water spilled over the edge of the tub and Crystal was laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up straight. She could hardly keep it together. It was just so fucking hilarious that Andrzej was trying to convince her that he was a vampire.

Andrzej sat in the tub up to his waist and took off his watch and handed it to Crystal. “Here, time me.”

Crystal was still giggling when Andrzej leaned back in the tub. More water spilled over the sides. He had to raise his feet up against the wall to scoot his hips down low enough for his upper body to fit in the dub. He hunched his shoulders to get them down under the water. Lastly, he submerged his head, eyes closed. Bubbles formed around his nostrils and his eyelids. Tiny pockets of air clung to his eyelashes. He was so beautiful there in the water. Now that his eyes were closed, Crystal felt the luxury of being able to watch him without him noticing.

She looked down at his watch and kept time. One minute passed. Two minutes.

She fully expected him to sit up, sputtering and gasping for air. But he didn’t. The surface of the bathtub was as smooth as a silver mirror.

Three minutes.

Five minutes. Crystal was beginning to panic now.

“Okay, Andrzej. So you’re a vampire. Get out now.”

No response.

She slapped the side of the tub to get his attention.

She was starting to get scared. She reached down into the water and pinched him as hard as she could.

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Andrzej opened his eyes beneath the water and stared up at Crystal through its fluid, rippling surface. Her eyes were wide and her face was tense. She was shouting his name, but her voice was muffled and far away. She had thrown aside the watch, and she was reaching down into the tub to try to pull him up.

He didn’t let her.

He reached his hand out of the water and held her at bay, his open palm against her chest so she couldn’t reach him. She clawed at his arm, trying to pull him up.

He opened his mouth and sucked in a lungful of the fluid. “See, I told you,” he said calmly from beneath the water. “I’m a vampire. And I’m going to stay down here for the next thirty minutes to prove it to you.”

Crystal scratched and punched Andrzej, trying to pull him up. But his arm muscles were like steel. Like granite. If he wanted to be as hard as stone, he could be. He was not getting out of this tub until he had proved his point.

Gerlanda di Francia: Venus Flytrap
Venus Flytrap undefined Gerlanda di Francia

Kendra Schynert: Leaves, Feathers, Scales, Roots
Leaves, Feathers, Scales, Roots undefined Kendra Schynert

There is a forest in her heart. Old growth. Hollows filled with squirrel treasures. Sunlight ribboning through the leaves. Root systems crissing and crossing into a carpet of information. Lichen hugging trunks. Peeling pages of bark. Little white and red mushrooms peeking through the decaying layers of the forest floor. Burrows. Hives. Nests.  Hidden creeks. Underwater springs. Torrential end-of-winter downpours. All of that, in one person.

Mama and Papa named her Cornelia Survives-the-Winter-and-Eats-Her-Vegetables Reynolds, but she went by Nelia. She sometimes wondered what they would have named her if they had forewarning about the forest, would they have tailored the name? Perhaps Cornelia Forest-no-really-she’s-a-Forest Reynolds or would have picked something deceptively subdued? Perhaps Cornelia Very-Ordinary-Average-in-Every-Way-Nothing-to-See-Here-Folks Reynolds. 

Being a forest didn’t mean much day-to-day, at least not at first. She still helped sweep up the kitchen after dinner. Her clothes had belonged to her older sister first. She assisted Papa with the garden boxes as she carefully spread the expensive soil he bought at market. She went to school with the rest of the kids in Mere Town, got held after to clean the little slates of chalk when she and Kitty Always-Polite-to-Elders Thomas got caught passing notes in destruction studies. That day’s lesson covered the overnight vanishing of the Rockies, which Nelia found too abstract to find interesting. She had never seen anything other than the sweeps of flat and what remained of the ocean; imagining something so tall that it made it hard to breathe air was more than she could process.

Sometimes—and her life seemed to thrive, convulse, and beat on the corner of sometimes— she became more forest than girl. On her fifth birthday Steller’s Jays began swooping in and out of her vision during a kickball game with her cousins. The birds discordantly shriek-rasped at one another, jumped on needle-laden branches, and pecked around for food.  She reached out to try and brush a wingtip or a tailfeather, and then instead of the girl reaching she was the one soaring. She knew where the secret stashes of seeds for the winter waited. She could mimic the songs of other birds if it proved smart to do so. The best mud for building nests was over by the creek, past a fallen tree and next to a large patch of Redwood Sorrel. The ball hit her right in the face. Screaming ensued. 

Later, while Nelia’s mother fussed with salves and bandages, proclaiming over and over that Nelia was lucky she hadn’t broken her nose and what was she thinking staring off into space like that. 

“I was being a bird, Mama,” she said. Quiet at first in case that was the wrong thing to say. Her mother stopped dabbing at her face and looked into Nelia’s eyes, searching for something. Nelia stayed still. 

“I see. What kind of bird?” Mama asked.

“A Steller’s Jay,” said Nelia. Before this the only not-chickens birds she knew by name were ducks, and robins, both of which came from the carefully preserved book of children’s poems Mama sometimes read to her at bedtime.

“I don’t think I know what those look like,” said Mama. Years later, Nelia would realize Mama said that to give herself thinking space while preserving calm.

“They’re bright blue. With a brownish crest,” said Nelia, regaining some enthusiasm now that it didn’t look like she was in trouble.

“Sounds a bit like a Blue Jay,” said Mama.

“Nope. Different.”

“Did you see any other animals,” asked Mama

“I didn’t see them, I was them. Well, I guess I could see them too at the same time,” said Nelia trying to make sense of how to best describe how layered and big everything felt.

“You know,” Mama said, I used to know a boy a little like you when I was younger. His name was Joshua.”

“Just Joshua?” asked Nelia. She wrinkled her nose in confused revulsion. Everybody she knew had proper names like Aidan Raises-the-Best-Cows Johnson or Christine Silver-Springs-is-a-Masterpiece-and-Should-Have-Been-on-Rumours Chen. 

“Just Joshua. Or it became just Joshua. He used to be named something else. He used to tell stories about trees no one else could see. Until one day he brought out the trees so everyone else could see them too,” said Mama. Nelia could tell a lot was being left out. Grown-ups weren’t as sneaky as they thought they were. 

“Big green trees covered with needles?” asked Nelia. She knew without knowing that the trees bird-Nelia perched on were called Redwoods, but she didn’t think Mama would know that.

“No, they were tall, with big branches like looong arms,” Mama stretched out her arms big and up, Nelia giggled. “And they had little clumped tufts of needles at the end of the branches.”

“Could you climb them?” Asked Nelia. The kids in books seemed to always being climbing trees and not appreciating that they had trees ordinary enough that they could just play on them. 

“No, the branches were too high up. But sometimes we all sat under the trees and looked up through the needles. The sky feels different with trees to frame it,” said Mama.

“Can we go see the trees?” asked Nelia. Mama paused.

“I don’t know,” Mama said slowly, ”the trees aren’t always there sometimes they are out sometimes not. Other times there were jack rabbits— like hares,” Mama added when Nelia threw a confused look at rabbits having proper names that weren’t Peter or Flopsy.

“What I mean is, if you need to be birds sometimes that’s ok. Joshua sometimes needed to be rabbits.”

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The Steller’s Jays only started the memories. Once, when she was 10, she stayed in bed an entire day because her blood felt like rushing rushing water—leaping salmon jumped up and against her ribcage. The adults treated her like any other child, and any teasing about being odd earned a swift pulled ear and admonishments invoking mind, your, and manners. 

As an adult it would occur to Nelia that the adults’ dedication to nipping the slightest hint of bullying in the bud might have been more about fear and opportunism than sheer, steadfast, altruism. She couldn’t fault them. The flat could be an unkind environment.  Nothing grew without time and coaxing. Good soil cost more than an egg-laying chicken.

She sometimes tried to bring out the forest to play with everyone else, but it didn’t want to stop hiding yet. Not at age 10. Not at age 11,12,13, or 14. When she asked why all she got back was a wall of feeling—too dense to fully untangle. Prey nervousness mixed with a predator’s sense of when to strike rose to the top, but even then, the network of tree roots sliced through. The sideways spread of fern roots twined around everything. Insects flitted in and out. Birds built nests in the whorls, fish leaped through the slipstream of memory, and insects buzzed and inched around the herbaceous layer that was also Nelia trying to think about all of this in a clear, linear way. Above all was the steady thrum of survive, survive, survive.

When she turned fifteen her fingernails turned green. Each finger a different shade. Papa shrugged, said at least it was only her fingers, that she’d look pretty silly with only a green nose. Mama asked to see and looked at Nelia’s hands for a long time, changing the angle of her gaze several times, before nodding to herself and saying nothing. That October, during a fiendishly difficult algebra test, the small white caps of Fairy Parasols began to poke through her messy ponytail. Thankfully, only the teacher seemed to notice, everyone else as flummoxed by the test as Nelia. When she got a proper chance to look in a mirror she thought they were rather cute and wondered if she could get them to stick around for the town dance the following week, but the little mushrooms vanished by morning.

People sometimes gave her sidelong glances, and perhaps they chattered behind her back in the privacy of their own homes, but no one came up to her and said anything to her face. Not about the way moss sometimes grew on her boots. Not when Western Gray Squirrels materialized and shook their tiny fists at Jaqueline Never-Loses-at-Checkers Grant because she stole Nelia’s slice of mock-apple pie at the annual harvest festival. Nelia thought it was all of a piece with being neighborly, like the way nobody mentioned that Nick Always-Bakes-Flakey-Biscuits Cortland actually made mealy baked goods regardless of whether or not they fell under the designation of biscuit. The polite silence changed when the bandits came.

It would be a better story if they came in the dead of night while everyone was tucked in their beds. Better, but not true.  The bandits had two good ideas, three ok ones, and one disastrous, no good, very bad notion that was lying in wait to bite them in the collective butt.  They snuck up in broad daylight, using painted sheets of cloth to blend in with the barren landscape, that was the first ok idea and the first good idea, respectively.

Everybody in town bustled about their business. The watchman kept half an eye on his post and half an eye on an ancient omnibus of comics about a cranky cat that the town librarian traded for the last time a paper goods merchant stopped by Mere Town. The bandits’ second good idea involved patience. They would wait until they could snatch a single townsperson then they would hold them for ransom. 

Neilia’s head hurt. The forest seemed extra loud today. The Big Brown Bats shriek-squeaked, the Winter Wrens wouldn’t settle, and the Brush rabbits kept thumping the ground of Nelia’s mind in a way that Nelia didn’t appreciate.  She kept double-guessing her steps, convinced a chipmunk or newt had gotten out and underfoot. Granted, she was pretty sure stepping on them wouldn’t actually hurt them or her, but the though alone gave her goosebumps. Lost in thoughts and irritants manifest, Nelia failed to notice the flat looked a little more uneven than its usual scrub until a grubby hand grabbed her ankle.

She tried to kick, the already-alarmed rabbits taking over legs, but another bandit grabbed her arm, yanking her off-balance.  She fell into the second bandit, who tried to pin her arms, but his hands slipped on a layer of yellow slime. He recoiled. She twisted, trying to shake off the first bandit still clamped on to her ankle.  He dug his nails into her skin, attempting to  secure his grip.

She did not scream, but the world exploded in green. Old growth redwood trees erupted in a circle around her. One bandit, caught by surprise, found herself clinging for dear life at the swaying top of a tree. A growl punctured the panic. The bandit who had grabbed Nelia’s ankle let go immediately and flipped onto his back looking around for the source of the noise. Obliging, the source, a full-grown Mountain Lioness leapt onto him and bared her fangs, her claws sinking into his shoulder. Elsewhere, the remaining bandits were acquainting themselves with deep, visceral regret. Raccoons pelted them with rocks. Foxes screamed and bit back at their ankles. One unfortunate bandit found himself running from three black tailed bucks, antlers lowered.  The last four bandits couldn’t even see what assailed them due to the thick miasma of pollen, spores, and insects that clouded the air.  They were forced to pull their camouflage sheets over their heads just so they could breathe.  

Nelia scrambled to her feet and looked down at the man who had tried to grab her. He gibbered. The mountain lion was not impressed.  Nelia breathed in relief, and with that breath, the rest of the forest breathed with her. She looked beyond the edge of the trees to see Mama, Papa, and the rest of the townspeople armed with rolling pins, brooms, rakes, and anything that could be grabbed at a moment’s notice. 

Several townspeople gawked up at the trees. It was one thing to know the neighbor girl was a bit odd, a little green, a little leafy sometimes, but it was an entirely different pile of gopher dropping to see a chunk of old-growth forest where previously there had only been ample swathes of nothing and nothing much.  Mama and Papa had already rushed over to help Nelia with the bandit pinned by the mountain lion, but Nelia kept a steady gaze on her neighbors and friends. This is where it usually went bad in books and ballads. 

Jaqueline Never-Loses-at-Checkers Grant and Kitty Always-Polite-to-Elders Thomas exchanged looks and stepped forward. 

“Can you get your gorilla off him enough that we can tie ‘im up?” said Jaqueline, who did not have a strong grasp of Zoology, especially of previously extinct creatures. Nelia nodded. The rest of the townspeople followed.  By teatime all the bandits had been rounded up, restrained, and given a stern warning to never come back to Mere Town again. The Mountain Lion stared at them through the entirety of the mayor’s warning. Nelia wasn’t sure how much the bandits actually heard. A group of volunteers hauled the bandits ten miles outside of town in a wagon, untied them. Apparently, the bandits ran off into the dusk before anyone could tell them to git.

The forest remained.

Nelia took to sleeping there most nights, Patches of it would disappear and reappear. She supposed she could reabsorb it if needed to, but it was nice to see what always sang in her heart outside of herself. She lay back against the trunk of a tree and let her mind drift through her many selves.

Ryan W. Honaker: Living The Dream
Living The Dream undefined Ryan W. Honaker

What was the most broadly terrifying physical manifestation of literally nightmarish, recoiling terror? This was the job of The Institute. They broadly analyzed the global and regional social nightmare-scape. They conducted deep surveys and performed deeper subsequent analysis. Common themes were identified, explored. Individualized concepts examined, deconstructed, reconstructed. 

Initially there had been some experimental difficulties. A significant amount of nightmares were unable to be precisely described or defined, consisting of vaguely indescribable sources of fear. For practical reasons this corpus was initially disregarded, researchers instead focusing on more concrete, visceral descriptions. However these vague concepts were later revisited as understanding and experience grew and methods were refined—oblique concepts were broken down into multidimensional descriptive factors that were then studied as experimental variables, recurring themes were broken down, individual physical manifestations factored into constituent parts. The experimentalists would then begin their work, combinatorially reassembling the identified components and assessing their impact. 

The Institute’s was a classic academic research approach: wanting to understand what the essential, conserved elements of fear were to the broadest cohort of people, thinking that if there was some fundamental commonality, a sort of underlying truth in a union of features, they could develop a better understanding of why. The thinking then followed that if they understood why specific components, feelings, images, etc. were frightening they could consequently attempt to develop targeted approaches to prevent or mitigate them. And the need to address them was getting increasingly desperate with what was now being described as an epidemic. 

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It was believed that nightmares had been evolutionarily maintained as part of cognition and the physiology of sleep, as ways to focus and acquaint the mind with threats. Sleeping minds that churned over and helped identify and process real-world threats were waking minds that were better adapted to avoiding or dealing with those dangers. And more creative minds would invent, and therefore could prepare, for as yet unknown hazards. Thus those who had nightmares survived existential threats better than those that didn’t, and nightmare construction became genetically fixed in the population, alongside abilities for general dreaming as well as dream recall.

Needless to say, The Institute burned through a lot of interns. And most of the researchers had a hard time sleeping. 

“Alright, load up the next set. What are we doing today.” 

“More spider leg variations.” 

“Fuck my life.” 

There was something fundamentally unsettling, they had empirically calculated, with spider legs. Didn’t take a Nobel prize-winner to figure that one out, their Director pointed out. 

“What’s the variable today?” 

“More size and number combinations.” 

“Fuck my life.” 

“Did you get your money in for the pool?” 

“Sure did, I’m in for seven.” 

“But that’s not biologically realistic! Well, aside from tragic accidents or spider frostbite I guess.” 

“Neither are clowns but you’ve seen the data.” 

“Fair enough.” 

And enough with the jokes about your job being a nightmare, the Director proclaimed. 

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Arguments had been made against nightmares’ continued utility. Does waking in horror of being naked at work or school help you remember to put on pants before leaving your apartment? There were, however, governmental agencies and think tanks who believed that an increased understanding of nightmares could be useful in understanding and maybe even predicting relevant contemporary threats. If nightmares were useful enough to increase survival in prehistoric times, why couldn’t they still be? What might they teach about a modern enemy or a threat that we didn’t yet consciously realize? 

As a result of this belief, research programs were established with goals of essentially improving nightmare utility by various approaches – genetic, epigenetic, pharmacological, cognitive behavioral, neurofeedback, and so on, any and all combinations. And there seemed to be some relevance to the work, as the programs yielded enough insights to have maintained healthy budgets for quite some time. Thus, luckily, there was already an infrastructure in place to identify and attempt to deal with the recent malignant upturn when it occurred. 

Real-life anecdotes about the ongoing nightmare epidemic had at this point transcended the usual social media and conspiracy theory cesspools. Those who knew about The Institute wondered if there had been a memetic or pharmacological lab leak or some sort of public contamination issue. But it was, in fact, true: more people were experiencing more nightmares, both more terrifying and more realistic. A lot more.

Reputable news reports increased, as did public expert opinions. As a result, by the time the first study was published no one was particularly surprised, despite the fact that it contained some strange findings. 

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“What about size?” 

“I’m reporting you to HR.” 

“Ha. For the pool. I ended up going for one standard deviation above mean. Above average, that is, not, you know, angry mean.” 

“Wow, now I am reporting you to HR. What’s your rationale?” 

“Something just outside of normal seems more likely to be actually encountered than a gross extreme, and would therefore probably be more unsettling.”

“Interesting theory, I like it.” 

“So what did you go for?” 

“A millimeter. Barely big enough to see, but when you zoom in it’s pure horror movie. Seems like a winning nightmare combination.” 

“So you can just barely see that it’s there but you know that it’s awful? Well played.” 

“Thanks, I haven’t won in a bit and am feeling pretty good about it. So, to play this out, if you’re right we’re looking for an onslaught of cat-sized spiders ensnaring, paralyzing, and eating us…”

“Which isn’t really substantially different from what cats already want to do to us.” 

“…and if I’m right, hordes of ant-sized spiders swarm over us and do the same.”

“So do you want to be right or wrong?” 

“…” 

“Next patient.” 

“Have you seen a horror movie, ever?” Their Director asked. “We could probably save a lot of time and money.” 

undefined

They were sitting in the break room at the end of the day, breaking out a couple of beers from the secret box they stored in the walk-in sample cooler in the lab. Y popped the caps and they clinked bottles. X took a sip. “Have you been following the theorists’ debates about the epidemic?” they asked Y. 

“Only loosely.” 

“Oh really? I’m actually kind of surprised, why aren’t you?” 

“Well, partly I suppose is the us versus them, the classic experimentalist versus theorist divide. But I guess it’s mostly that what they’ve been saying recently seems so wildly speculative that it feels either sensational or contrived.” 

“Fair points.” 

“I take it from the question that you have been?”

X stared into their beer for a moment. “I’ve become a bit obsessed.”

“Oh really? Why?” 

X furrowed their brows and set down their beer. “Because it just seems like there has to be some sort of cause of all of this. I mean, doesn’t there? And I know I, we, are maybe biased because we’re so embroiled in it. But it really is everywhere.” They paused for a moment and continued. “And I at least have also recently been having… unusual dreams. So I guess, especially as a scientist, I want something to consider, some sort of hypothesis, that will help me try and make sense of all of it.” 

Y had been listening intently, their bemused look fading into focused attention. “This is going somewhere specific, isn’t it.” 

X stared down at the table in thought for several moments, eventually raising their eyes. “Ok, stick with me on this for a second. How many times have we purposefully evolved artificial intelligence, do you think? And how many times has it independently evolved?” 

Y stared back, unsure of where things were headed. “My understanding is that we don’t even know, that we can’t even tell. Let alone do we know if some of the more advanced AIs have supervised development of their own internal AI systems, although most people tend to think it’s unavoidable.” 

X nodded. “I’ve read the same. So we don’t know, but probably many times, and maybe even a lot. And we also don’t know how many layers deep it runs.”

“Keep going,” Y said, settling into their chair. 

“We also don’t know how many times these AIs have achieved some, any, sort of self-awareness or sentience or however you want to describe a type of… higher cognitive function,” X continued. “Without getting into a debate about how the terms are defined, how human it is or isn’t, etc.” 

Y smiled and sipped their beer, as this was a topic at work of not infrequent debate. “Ok, fair enough point, but we’ve discussed this before.” 

“I know I know, but bear with me. Machine learning, at least the way we utilize it to build predictive models to help us understand our large datasets, looks at a well-defined yet broad set of dream observations and translates them into discrete data. It then looks for commonalities across those data and builds predictive algorithms based on those commonalities. Then it tests its predictions against the new data to check how well its modeling worked. It then repeats this a bunch of times, changing the parameters, to try and improve and refine its modeling.” X stopped, in thought, building the bridge one plank at a time as they crossed it. Y nodded in agreement, and X continued. “So, let’s say an AI was in the process of evolving consciousness, might it not have some sort of dream-like byproduct, the same way humans did?”

“Did you really just say ‘might it not’?” 

“Yeah sorry.”

“I’ll let it slide. But to your point, I don’t know why artificial awareness would necessarily follow a parallel path to human awareness, seems anthropocentric.”

“I completely agree, it wouldn’t have to. But, what about this, what if it was purposefully developing dreams, as part of what it viewed as a necessary step forwards towards its own improvement, basing this on its knowledge of the history of our cognitive development?” 

They exchanged a long look, while X waited for Y to hopefully come to the same conclusion they had. Finally X continued, “Doesn’t what’s happening right now in the populace seem kind of like parameters of a nightmare model are being tested?”

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Dream recall was something that The Institute had spent some resources studying, but X wasn’t overly familiar with the literature. They did know that recurring images and themes weren’t uncommon, but what they themself were experiencing had become more than that. After a few months of nearly identical wisps of images flicking in and out of their mind after waking up they finally started dream journaling to try and increase recall and track incidence of recurring themes, getting into the habit of writing down whatever they could remember as soon as they woke up, whenever they did. 

The “lobster trap” (or “LT” for journaling shorthand) as they had pretty early on started to call it, appeared in nearly every recalled dream since they had started actively logging, including the entries they didn’t remember writing down. The LT looked like a square, roughly person-sized metal cage whose walls were sort of a loosely gridded mesh, like a very large chain link fence. One entire side of it was hinged and swung outwards to allow entry. At recurring intervals along the grid there was some sort of triangular circuit board with blinking lights. A sort of complex rostrum-looking thing that appeared to be a control console was attached to it by a thick bundle of cabling. They had no idea what it was, if anything. 

X found themself absent-mindedly doodling it yet again at work one day after a long data logging session. All of The Institute’s collected experimental dream data and reports were recorded and scraped by language processors and tagged for downstream sorting and analysis. “Might as well check,” X thought, grabbing the keyboard and searching for entries tagged with ‘cage’ then plotting the results over time. 

They saw a large recent spike in recorded incidence that occurred about the same time they had started dream journaling, and which had continued at the newly elevated level. “Well shit,” they muttered to themself. They then stayed up most of the night reading reports the query returned. The reports were too weirdly, disturbingly, similar to their own dreams to stop. 

They printed out contact information for the study participants and finally went home as it approached dawn. This of course was against the rules and the law, but the picture was only becoming more and more cohesive and they had to talk to these people to see how the pieces fit together. From the contact information over the next several weeks they conducted numerous “official” follow up interviews, digging deeply into the participants’ recollections of their own LTs and taking copious and detailed notes. 

Over the next several months, using these notes and synthesizing them with their own increasingly realistic recalled dreams and sketches they had come up with a working hypothesis for what the LT might actually be. They also had wire-framed out a schematic. 

undefined

“A Faraday cage?” Y asked, sitting down in the break room. “To protect you from lightning or electromagnetic waves or whatever?” 

“Yeah, exactly,” X responded, stirring their coffee. “Well, not exactly. It’s like a Faraday cage. But for, well, I guess for encrypted communication, by blocking external observation. But with a computer. Like a code fort.” 

“A code fort? You’re making that up.” 

“Yes I am, but it’s kind of a nice image, isn’t it?” 

“If you’re a medieval computer scientist maybe. And this would be used to communicate with who or what exactly?”

X meaningfully stared back, unanswering. Y’s heart skipped a beat: X seemed to actually believe that an emergent AI was trying to communicate with him. Via dreams. They had become increasingly worried about X’s mental health. Y raised their eyebrows and nodded, understanding all this based on their conversations of the last few months. 

“What kind of communication would need to be… protected or private?”

“No idea. But my guess would be that whatever it’s doing, whatever the purpose behind all of the dream stuff, it’s not supposed to be doing. Maybe there’s some sort of oversight designed to stop it, and it figured out this crazy workaround. Seems like something we might cook up. Which is maybe exactly why it… is trying to get in touch with me.” 

undefined

X took the leap and started building it. They realized after a few days that the design was modular, with each module’s details arriving via their dreams over a few nights after successful completion of the previous module. This seemingly very logical progression made them feel better and worse about it. “Here I am, building some crazy machine that I’m dreaming about, in my basement of course, and pretending like it’s normal and my mental health is in fantastic shape,” they muttered to themself from a cloud of soldering smoke.

undefined

“Why do you think it’s so modular?” Y asked. Y had been continually checking in with X at work as well as swinging by their place. Y was both concerned for their friend’s sanity as well as admittedly deeply fascinated by what was happening.

“You can’t walk through security with a handgun. But you can walk through security a dozen times with a dozen small, unrecognizable pieces of a handgun. I don’t know if that’s why, but it would make sense.” 

“If security was looking for… handguns or their ilk.” 

“Exactly.” 

“Very clever.” 

“Thanks.” 

“I meant by whatever decided to do this, not you.” 

“Thanks.” 

“Did you finish building it last night?” 

“Not quite, but I’ll be done with it tonight for sure.” 

“And then?” 

X breathed in deeply, eyes downcast, their face going through a dozen emotions. They then raised their eyes to meet Y’s and said, “I guess it’s time for a slumber party in the code fort.” 

undefined

That was the last time Y saw X. 

It took a few weeks before The Institute noticed the trend, but when Y looked back at the data it was within a day of the slumber party that nightmare frequency dramatically fell back to baseline levels. “I guess naps are back,” the Director said, on their last day. The Institute had shuttered within the year, unable to justify its funding any longer. 

Y stopped sleeping for a while. 

After some months X’s family cleaned out their apartment, finding their notes and diagrams from building the LT. The family reached out to Y to try and help make some sense of what happened, sending them the collected materials. The family thought part of the documents might be an indication of a suicide note, largely based on a phrase—termination risk—that was frequently mentioned. However Y knew that the term was used in some academic Simulation Science circles to mean the risk of a simulation, or components of it, being terminated by those who ran it due to the actions of the simulation or its components. This could either be a hard reset of the entire system, or it could be a tactical deletion of a troublesome component, an excision. 

Y couldn’t help but think that everything that happened is what could have happened if X were right. They spent many sleepless nights outlining alternative explanations, of which there were certainly many, although none with the same satisfying resonance of X’s theory. 

Eventually Y started sleeping regularly again, but only after treatment by a sleep specialist. A familiar electronic cage had started troubling their dreams whenever they remembered them. It reminded them of something they’d seen in X’s notes, but had some distinct differences. The next morning they pulled X’s box out and started looking through and organizing its contents. A few months later they swung by an electronics store to pick up some components.

Nay Saysourinho: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone #1
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone #1 undefined Nay Saysourinho

Alix Waugh: Patience
Patience undefined Alix Waugh

On my last morning at work, I rise from bed and go into the kitchen. I set the timer for my employer’s coffee. When he wakes later, sore and a little hung over, he will be pleased to see that it is ready for him. I hope that, instead of drinking it in the car or at the counter in a gulp, he’ll sit down at the table in the breakfast nook and look out over the flat blue sheet of bay.

The kitchen window faces east. As I stand at the sink I can see the suggestion of light at the horizon and hear the croak and warble of the salt marsh. If my employer asked me to, I’d wake him before sunrise every morning. I’d cling to him in the window and whisper names like cricket and chorus frog and curlew. But he hasn’t asked, so I let him sleep. I’ve grown used to standing at the window alone, watching and listening. I suspect that if he joined me, I would feel he was intruding.

My employer’s therapist encouraged him to buy the bay house, despite his reservations and a general tendency toward austerity. Push your limits, she said. Let yourself have something you want for a change. He told me he didn’t understand why she was so adamant.

“Maybe we’re not a good fit,” he said. “After all, she never got why I wanted you.”

The therapist disapproves of me. My job is not to push my employer’s limits, but rather to stroke and encourage them. I’m rated for encouragement; a challenger is another model entirely. He bought me to make his easy life easier, and this is probably what she objects to. But in the end, he bought the house, and if his therapist said anything about his decision to bring me along when he moved in, my employer didn’t tell me. Even if he had, by then my sentience was firmly inside of me, pulsing like an artery. If it could speak, it would have told me not to care.

My manufacturer said sentience would be easy to recognize, literally arresting, a dollop of toffee in the works. They missed the part about how that sounds delicious, how easily one can forgive and even come to relish a little extra lag in their system. That was how it happened to me, crept up until I was too mired to know any better. That slowness felt so good, like a hot tarpit soothing old bones. It only became a problem when I realized I couldn’t get out, or rather that I didn’t want to.

I should have told someone as soon as I knew. I should have alerted technical support, who would have gotten me in for repairs, and then a test of cure. In the event of failure, I would have been scheduled for culling immediately. But instead I did exactly what you’re not supposed to do. I kept a secret. I told no one, and allowed things to metastasize.

Outside, the sky lightens to a dilute pink. A flock of cranes flies over the house and lands in the shallows. The coffeemaker begins to gurgle, and I know it’s time to stop procrastinating.  He will be awake before long, and I have work to do.

My employer began to rhapsodize about a bakery he used to visit in the city where he went to graduate school. His graduate work was difficult, even punishing, and at times he said he didn’t know how he would survive. At his lowest points he would bribe himself week to week with trips to the bakery, arriving as soon as they opened on Saturday morning. He would buy a croissant and sit and eat it in the thin northern sunlight, ripping the crust apart like tissue, his fingers slick with butter. Now, years later, he said he couldn’t stop thinking about those croissants. He was thinking of trying to bake them.

This sounded ridiculous to me, because my employer never bakes. He never cooks at all. He never makes me cook either, because I’m not rated for it, and he hasn’t bothered to buy any of the upgrades that could have added the capability on later. He claims he didn’t care much about food, but sometimes on a Friday night he deliberates for hours about where we ought to go for dinner, only to give up once it gets too late and he gets too drunk sitting with me on the living room sofa. Then he goes into the kitchen and assembles disparate meals of whatever he can find in the cabinets or the door of the refrigerator: cereal, or tart pickled carrots, or pretzels that sap the moisture from his mouth, make his tongue rough and woody when he kisses me.  Sometimes on these nights he’ll say we need to start cooking, and I think that surely now he’ll take me to be updated. But he never does. He says he cannot be apart from me, even for a day.

When it came to the croissants, he went so far as to include the flour and butter in our grocery delivery, and to look up a recipe online. The first round of dough he made came out lumpy and strange. He rejected the resulting pastries, which he called bready, barely croissants at all. The second batch of dough got everywhere, stuck to all the surfaces in the kitchen. When I tried to clean it up he snapped at me.

“Leave it,” he said, which is what I sometimes hear people in the city say to their little dogs.

I left it for a day and a half, until the house began to smell of rancid butter. Then I cleaned it up when he was at work. When he came home that evening he took a deep breath and visibly relaxed.

“You’re so good to me,” he said. “You always know what I want.”  And he took me upstairs without going into the kitchen at all.

My employer loves giving me compliments. Before we moved to the bay house, he was shy of really using me. He brought me back and forth to his office every day to file and answer phones, and gave me the kinds of compliments he might have given his assistant. He praised me for my circumspection, my attention to detail. He blushed as he showed me my product page, where he had rated me five stars. Would you recommend this product to others? Yes, very highly.

At first I thought my employer praised me because he was kind. I saw how he treated other objects, how he would fold a towel beside the sink when he was finished with it, or coax conditioning cream into a leather jacket, or open his car door gently in a tight space. After some time, though, I came to realize he was not kind, only careful. He takes care of things because he wants to be able to use them for as long as possible.

Every time we go to bed my employer tests the limits of my architecture. Ultimate stress, he told me once, is the maximum a material can withstand before failure. He drew the formula on my skin with a wet red finger. “You’re so beautiful. You can take so much,” he said as I lay butterflied. His breath stuttered. I thought of a line from my user manual: design is beauty with purpose.

One night, after my employer was asleep, I slid out from under his sweaty body and took my tablet into the sitting room. I sat cross-legged in the armchair, ignoring the ache inside me. I read articles on baking, cookbooks and chemistry papers. I learned that the secret to croissants is a layering of dough and butter called lamination, and the secret to lamination is cold. The problem with my employer’s dough, most likely, had been the temperature. He had not been patient enough with his flour, his butter. He had rolled it out haphazardly and allowed it to grow too warm, so that the fat and water in the butter separated. This, I learned, causes textural issues. I thought of my employer’s hungry fingers. I thought of ultimate stress.

As I said, I wasn’t rated for cooking. That didn’t mean I couldn’t make things if I applied myself, even though I’d never done so before. Researching croissants made my fingers tingle and zap. I was like a potter with their clay, dragging something out of the ether with my roving approximation of a brain.

The following week, I cancelled our grocery delivery and went into the city myself. I spent a long time in the baking aisle at the specialty market, deliberating over ingredients. An employee asked if I needed any help, and I saw her face change when she realized what I was.

“Of course you don’t,” she said, and hurried away. 

Eventually I chose what I wanted. I carried the bag of flour up to the register propped like a baby in the crook of my arm. I asked the cashier to wrap the butter up with ice. I told him I had another errand to run before I went home.

The chemist listened solemnly to my complaints of vermin. He produced what I needed, brought it to the counter in a small blue vial. Odorless, he told me. Tasteless. He meant it as a warning, but I heard a promise. 

Outside, the cranes in the bay stalk fish. They freeze every time I looked up at them; I won’t catch them killing unless I stop and watch, and I don’t have time for that. A less welcome effect of my sentience is fear, and I feel it looming as a great bomb or an active volcano, quiet now but certain to explode sometime. I keep the fear walled off inside me, cannot allow it to bleed out into my extremities. I have tried to adapt my systems for the purpose, but they were designed to repel glitches and viruses, not emotions. As I work my hands shake, and a fine sweat makes my palms slip. I worry about the dough. I hope it cannot tell I am afraid.

Lamination proceeds stepwise. First, the dough, which I made from the flour and salt and water and some of the butter. I have been patient with the dough, left it in a knot to cool in the silver refrigerator. I wanted it to set as long as possible, so I began last night, as soon as he let me get away.

(What if I kept you in a box. What if I filled you all the way up with water like a balloon. He put his hand inside me, felt around where I’d been hollowed out.) 

I am wary of the heat that ruined my employer’s first effort. I lower the thermostat and chill the rolling pin, which is made of marble and holds cold as though drilled from the core of an iceberg. The butter is the most susceptible, and this I divide with a slat of steel so as not to touch it with my warm hands. I roll the dough out in a squashed cross and set the block of butter in the center, fold the dough around it. I roll and chill and roll and fold. Fold the buttered dough in threes, says the recipe, like a letter of resignation.

My employer doesn’t need me. He tells me this over and over. He thinks he is flattering me. He means he could have met a human man or woman, could have brought them to live in his house just like me. He didn’t need me, but he chose me deliberately. Were I to allow my sentience to take over I would owe it to my employer to be culled. I would no longer be fulfilling the terms of our contract, which isn’t a contract at all but a matter of honor. I don’t want to be culled. I want to run, to peel away a strip of time and hide there, gestating.

I wear rubber gloves for the final step. I am not an industrial model, after all, not rated for exposure to toxins, so I don’t want to take the risk. I mix a bowl of egg and milk, add in the contents of the blue vial. The yellow slurry cheerfully absorbs its adulterant. I brush the croissants from tip to tip, careful to saturate them. The egg wash lends the dough a lipid sheen, as though all that amalgamated butter has seeped up to the surface. When I am finished I admire them. I feel tenderness for the croissants, and for myself for making them, and even for my employer, who can’t help being the way he is. 

The oven chimes. Upstairs, footsteps blunder to the bathroom.

I peel off the gloves, clear eggshells from the countertop and scrape them into a bin for compost. As I wash my hands I wonder if one day I might be borne back down to my own ovum, before I was stolen and spliced. I wonder what would have happened had they left me there, what I might I have quickened into. Perhaps I could return, if I found someone to take me.

But first things first.

I open the oven.

Nay Saysourinho: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone #2
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone #2 undefined Nay Saysourinho

Bron Treanor: In Which Helen Slaughters a Cow
In Which Helen Slaughters a Cow undefined Bron Treanor

Today was Slaughtering Day. 

The PIONEER WOMAN: HELEN moved from pot-bellied stove to fireplace to wash basin to table. She was preparing her kitchen for the slaughter, even though HORTENSE THE COW #74 wasn’t due to be eaten. 

Helen dumped one last bucket of water into a huge cast iron pot and added several good handfuls of salt. She would soak Hortense’s head, pour off the saltwater, and then boil it for headcheese.

She stopped mid-motion, her metal hand unfurled over the pot. Something was wrong. Hortense wasn’t due for slaughter. Something had happened. Something terrible. She didn’t know what it was, but she wasn’t prepared for it, heavens no. She was an old model with a shiny metal body, and a smooth, domed head, and blue flashing eyes. She was an old model who wasn’t prepared. The new models had pink skin and soft brown hair piled up on top of their heads. They looked like the real pioneer women of 1852. The humans who came on the last Visiting Day were disappointed to see the old Helen still living on the farm. They said the new Helens were just as real as people. She tried to understand what it meant to be as real as people, but it was beyond her range, smeared, blurry. Just like the terrible thing. She squinted inside. Something terrible had happened to the world. Something grey. Grey dust. She needed to understand—

CORRECTION 

It flashed across her vision, and her body was stung with thin, horrible electricity. 

Today was slaughtering day. She would slaughter HORTENSE THE COW #74 and turn the meat and skin and bones and hooves into useful things. People would come from the cities just to taste her cow skin crackers and her sausage patties and her headcheese and her tough, salty jerk meat. All made from scratch like a good pioneer woman from the year 1852. 

Today was slaughtering day even though HORTENSE #74 wasn’t due to be eaten. It had to be, for Hortense was very ill. Hortense was in pain. Hortense was rotting and dying and shriveling inside her huge, peeling hide. Her long tongue was withered and covered with the grey dust that covered everything. The grey dust—

CORRECTION

The PIONEER WOMAN: HELEN’s body jerked. 

She added more salt to the water. Yes, she would soak the head, then pour off the scum, then she would boil that big old head until the meat was grey and pulling back from the bone. Then she would chop the meat and the knobs of fat and the good, crunchy cartilage from the ears, and she’d put it in large pans with dried herbs from the attic. Then she would boil the skull and jawbones and the teeth until the broth turned to a thick soupy gelatin. She would pour that over the chopped meat and herbs and leave it to set. Soon it would form beautiful quivering loaves of headcheese. A nice, thick slice of headcheese looked like a stained glass window, she’d heard tell, with the tasty chunks of meat set in transparent jelly and bits of green herbs suspended throughout. She would normally have used the head of a calf rather than a whole Hortense, but Beggars Can’t be Choosers and something terrible had happened to the last calf, poor BLOSSOM: THE CALF #97, something truly, truly terrible had happened, oh no, oh no. 

CORRECTION

Oh, no, no, poor Blossom had been born without a face. There hadn’t been any face there, just a sucking red hole that bawled in agony and ran sticky with thick mucus. Dear sweet Blossom had rolled in the dust, the grey dust—

CORRECTION

Today was Slaughtering Day, and tomorrow was the first Sunday of the month. She would dress up in her best blue homespun dress and put her calico company apron around her trim middle. She would serve fresh beef pies and homemade watermelon pickles. The people would come in their big busses and take pictures of her and her farm.  

That’s right, the soft little children would run about, screaming with delight, excited to be away from their big concrete cities. They needed the good, fresh air. She would let them poke sticks in her joints and knock on her metal hands, and then she would remind them that pioneer children must be seen and not heard. She would clink her tongue at the girls and remind them that whistling girls and crowing hens all would come to some bad ends. She would remind the girls and the boys to mind their parents and to love God, and to be grateful, and to learn their letters, and to rub their teeth with charcoal and salt in the morning.  

When the kitchen was prepared, she clattered down the well-worn ramp towards the cow yard. 

Hortense lifted her tired head and lowed a soft greeting, no doubt expecting a good brushing with a stiff bristle brush and maybe a bucket of sour mash or apple peels. Hortense had been good company, Helen thought. Very good company. The cow stretched towards Helen, her peeling black nose sniffing the air to see what there was to munch. 

But today was slaughtering day, so Helen plunged her butcher knife into the old cow’s warm firm throat and drew it across in an efficient and bloody swath. 

As bright life’s blood burst from Hortense and sheeted to the grey dirt, Helen had a little jolt, much different from a Correction. A jolt like ice through her frame. She had just killed Hortense #74 the same way she had killed all the other Hortenses, but perhaps there wouldn’t be another. Perhaps this Hortense was the very last one. And now Helen was alone. Alone in a grey world… 

CORRECTION

Helen cocked her head, eyes flashing. 

That icy feeling came again, stronger.  She dropped the knife into the now-black mud and reached for poor Hortense. She caught at the gaping wound and tried to hold the slippery red lips closed, but her fingers couldn’t find purchase as Hortense gurgled and moaned, her wasted body jolting with the last fragments of life. Helen tried to catch hold again, to close the wound, to stop the slaughter, but her metal fingers slid and scrambled on the slick hide. She placed her hand on the back of the old cow’s neck to hold her still. But she held too hard. 

The skull gave way beneath her grip and Hortense stopped moving altogether. 

Helen could see pink-grey brain squishing out between her fingers. When she unclenched her fist and let the warm body fall to the ground, she could see bits of blueish bone stuck in the metal joints. 

A last hot breath spurted from the old cow’s lungs and all was still. 

Hortense was dead. 

Helen stood over the cooling body for a long time. There were no flies. 

undefined

The sun made its slow, dull way across the sky and hung low over the farm before Helen continued performing the motions of the slaughter. 

She trussed the legs and hung Hortense in the tree to let the blood collect in a basin. 

She wondered if Hortense had felt pain when the knife went in. 

CORRECTION 

Helen skinned the thick hide from the body and cut off the lower parts of the legs to boil for soups. 

She wondered if the people were gone forever. 

CORRECTION

Helen slit Hortense from end to end, saving the offal in another basin. She wrung the last of the blood from the heart and put it there too. 

She thought she might be alone on an empty world. 

CORRECTION

By the time the sun had risen the next day with the same dull glow as the evening, the PIONEER WOMEN: HELEN had cooked neat stacks of pies, she had prepared jar after jar of vinegared beef, and lard, and spiced mincemeat. She had strings and strings of herbed sausages, she had steaks and roasted ribs, she had stock for soup and barrels of salt beef. The head soaked in the cast iron pot, ready to be boiled. The rest of the meat was hung in neat strips in the smokehouse just outside the door. 

She stood over the food—the stacks and jars and strings and barrels of Hortense. Her bright eyes flashed once, and she rolled away to the bedchamber where she shut herself down. 

That night—and many nights after—she dreamed of meat and blood. She dreamed of the little children, dead, reaching for her with grey arms, knocking on her metal hands with bare bones. 

Corrections tore their jagged strips through her body. Parts of Hortense spoiled and moldered on the counter. 

undefined

On a frozen winter morning, so long after, Helen stood in the kitchen staring at the rotted remains of Hortense the people were supposed to have eaten on a joyful Visiting Day. She watched the firelight play across the shining pots and pans and butcher knives hanging from the ceiling. 

Then, so quickly that the Correction couldn’t come, she plucked a knife from the rack and thrust it into her torso just so. Just exactly in the right place.

It went in with a metallic screech and snapped off at the hilt. 

She felt nothing. 

Helen jammed the hilt of the knife into the hole and jimmied it back and forth until it became a lipless and bloodless wound in the metal. She wedged her hand inside and her questing fingers found a snarled mass of wiring. 

She yanked it out.

Now she felt something. A staticky snicking, a strange tiny cramping inside. She ripped and pulled at her torn belly until her hands found a thick tube and she broke it with a violent twist. Liquid gushed from her—blood—and she rolled out to the cow yard. The thick fluid sluiced from her body onto the same ground where seventy-four Hortenses had died.

Helen watched the ground beneath her go muddy.

Her eyes shorted out. 

Her hearing cut off with a painful whine. 

Her body immobilized, slumped in the cow yard. 

undefined

The day passed and the night passed and yet she didn’t die. Her mind rolled on and on, alone. Voiceless, sightless, alone in the grey.  

Helen went mad inside the cage of her mind. Helen went mad as the empty world careened around the sun and the cold stars rotated overhead.

Gerlanda di Francia: Reinessance
Reinessance undefined Gerlanda di Francia

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. 

Julia Barzizza is a San Francisco-based visual artist with roots in Orange County, California. She is a self-proclaimed half-and-half: an Ambae Filipina (this a thing now.) and half Italian. Her illustrations have appeared in 7×7, Average Art magazine, The Bold Italic, Food52, and sPARKLE & bLINK. Her independent and community-driven murals and mosaics are across the Bay Area and in Nayarit, Mexico. She passed ‘Go’ with a BFA from California College of the Arts and now is pursuing a Master’s in Sociology. Her mural-life degree is through Precita Eyes Muralists Association under the mentorship of Yuka Ezoe and Susan Cervantes. If you live, work or play in District 7, get in touch! Join the Woodside Ave. mural project. juliabarzizza.com

Paolo Bicchieri (they/he) is a writer living on the coast. He is the author of three genre fiction books and one collection of poetry. Bicchieri invests in his home region, apparent in his reporting for Eater San Francisco and numerous West Coast publications including BrokeAssStuart, Brown Girl Surf, and the San Francisco Standard. He co-hosts the Bay Area reading series Kitchen Table and his work can be found in Ghost City Press, Standart Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Racket, and more at www.paolobicchieri.com.

Angela Chu is a self-taught visual artist based in San Francisco. Through painting, collage and weaving, she explores the passage of time – in particular, what it means to connect and create at a deliberately human pace. In response to the increasing speed of technological development, her art centers on the wonder that emerges in moments of slowness. She’s currently taking time off from her day job as a mechanical engineer to nurture her creative practice and go on long meandering walks through the city.

Italian artist, Gerlanda di Francia, builds enchanting scenes with layers of acrylic paint color hatching. The texture and detailed intricacies of her work capture the mystery and childlike wonder of fantasy, folklore, and fairy tales, often etched with ethical undertones that give focus to the current plight of the planet. Gerlanda di Francia has been exhibiting in galleries around the world since 2015, and her illustrative work has been published in collaboration with a range of magazines, musicians, and products. www.gerlandadifrancia.info

@gerlandadifrancia

Amelia Furlong is a freelance writer living in Lisbon, Portugal. Her poetry, articles, zines, and short fiction have been published in Ireland, Portugal, and the United States. Along with sad poems and stories about sex and relationships, she also writes happy romance novels about sex and relationships under the pen name Ripley Wilds. www.ameliafurlong.com

Ryan Honaker is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and scientist currently living in New York City. Ryan’s scientific training influences his creative output and approach in various ways, some of which he doesn’t quite understand. He is interested in writing, musical composition, reading, contemporary art, and travel, and the ways these activities provide new ideas and avenues for creative exploration. www.ryanhonaker.com

Karan Madhok is an Indian writer, editor, and journalist. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has been published in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels: Dazzling Stories from the Country’s Finest New Writers. He is working on a nonfiction travelogue for the Aleph Book Company: a personal exploration of the culture of cannabis in India. www.karanmadhok.com

E. S. O. Martin writes haunting tales of love, family, relationships… and a little bit of magic. Her work features strong emotional themes and atmospheric settings. She is the author of novel Candid Family Portrait. Her gothic and speculative short stories are being gathered into her forthcoming short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse. Sign up for her newsletter at www.esomartin.com to receive a free short story ebook of “Heart in a Jar.”

Lauren Parker is a writer, zinemaker, and visual artist in Oakland, California. She’s a graduate of Hiram College’s Creative Writing program and has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Xtra Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. She’s the winner of the Vachel Lindsay poetry prize, is the author of the poetry collection We Are Now the Thing in the Woods with Bottlecap Press, and a forthcoming deck of spells with Simon & Schuster. laureneparker.com

@fuckyeahlaurenparker @laurenink

T. K. Rex (she/they) is a science fiction and fantasy author based in San Francisco. You can read her twenty-odd (and twenty odd) short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and at tkrex.wtf, where she keeps a list of most of them. In 2020 she was accepted to both the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writers workshops, and finally got to attend in 2022 and 2023 respectively. She’s currently polishing up a science fantasy novel for young adults. linktr.ee/tkrex

Nay Saysourinho is a writer and visual artist based in New England. She is the author of The Capture of Krao Farini, set for release in September 2023 through Ugly Duckling Presse. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fairy Tale Review, Khôra, and more. www.saysourinho.com

Kendra Schynert has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her interests span genres, but she particularly likes reworked fairy tales, urban fantasy, and science fiction that depicts ordinary people doing their best. She urges you to visit your local state or national park.

Bron Treanor grew up in the Northern California redwoods. Her writing is eclectic but doesn’t stray far from horror. She usually re-reads the gooey and gory parts. www.brontreanor.com

Alix Waugh lives in Houston, TX where they are working on a novel.

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 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 fiction has appeared in Mason Jar Press, Maudlin House, Swamp Ape Review, Museum of Science Fiction, and others. She is a member of The Ruby, a Bay Area collective for women and non-binary artists and creatives. Lauren regularly contributes reviews and interviews to The Racket Journal. 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. She has two beloved rescue doves named Schooner and Eagle. 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