Last week, and I released Diary of a Murder, a brand new murder mystery short, available exclusively as a gorgeous digital zine. Paid subscribers, you can find a discount code for 60% off at the bottom of this email (or message me).

Can two amateur detectives solve a cold case that everyone else has given up on? Drew and Jane are writers, but when they find the diary of a murdered woman, they’re suddenly inside the story.

Get Diary of A Murder

You don’t want to miss this one!

Now, on with today’s show.

Alfred’s face looked like it had been smashed with hammers, because it had.

The entire left side was lower than the right, the bridge of his nose a topography of hills and valleys. A wide scar flattened his cheekbone where it should have rounded.

“Jane sometimes has an aspirin to give. Usually expired,” he said. With two fingers, he touched his temple, as if remembering his own ordeal. “But most make do with willow tea. River water is ice cold this time of year. That helps.”

They sat on two stumps in a clearing. Corinne’s was a dead thing, perfect for sitting, smooth and worn shiny with use. Alfred’s was overgrown with lichen, piled with leaf litter and pine needles. She noticed he made no effort to brush it off before sitting, his wiry body settling with a soft crunch. As he spoke, his fingers stroked a fleshy shelf fungus growing off the stump, as if it were a dog between his legs.

“We’ll give you another day to decide,” he continued. “But you can only decide once. If you come back here with a known face they’ll kill you.”

He paused, staring at her until she lifted her brown eyes to meet his green ones. “I will kill you.”

Corinne pursed her lips, holding his gaze. If his tough guy threats were supposed to scare her, it wasn’t working.

“Ridiculous,” she said. “There can’t be cameras out here. It’s the middle of fucking nowhere and they don’t even know where we are. Who’s going to see my face?”

“There are cameras everywhere,” he said sharply. “If you think you’re safe— if you think you’re away from the drones and the biometrics you should leave now— you’re putting us all at risk.”

Corinne studied the stump, her bandaged fingers worrying the bark under her legs. An iridescent-shelled insect trundled across the earth between them. She wondered if one day she would know the name of that insect, some arcane use for its body. She wondered if she could ever be useful to Alfred and his people, chopping wood or hauling water someday, her face broken and remade.

“Your face doesn’t belong to you,” he continued. “It’s on a dozen ID cards, starting when you’re a child. It’s in a million pictures online, most of which you don’t control. It’s in yearbooks and photo albums and airport security files. It’s on the Jumbotron and it’s all over that phone you left behind. Right now, your face belongs to Them, and I’m giving you a chance to take it back. Remake it. Move through the world as a newborn.”

She opened her mouth and then shut it.

“Go ahead. Whatever it is. Better to say it now.”

She pulled in a breath, her hand finding her lips as if she could hold in the words. They tumbled out.

“Why does it have to be so savage? You people are fucking sick about this, you know that? I mean, did you ever hear of plastic surgery? I’ll get plastic surgery, that’s fine. I’ll change everything about myself! Sign me up.” Corinne began to realize she was begging but she couldn’t stop. There had to be another way.

“I want to be here. But I don’t want willow tea! I want a doctor, a scalpel, stitches and medicine. We can do this in a normal way. Let one thing be easy.”

Alfred suddenly straightened, looking past her at something in the distance. Corinne turned around but saw nothing.

“The point is to go through something tough,” he said, his eyes locked on the trees. “And to get through it. To come out the other side stronger. Surgery doesn’t make you tough.”

A breath of wood smoke pushed through the clearing, and then there was a man, not ten feet away, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in dark camouflage. He wore the scent of a bonfire on his clothes. In his hands he carried small animal bodies, fur and feathers dripping blood on the forest floor.

Corinne startled. The man had moved through the trees as silent as a ghost. She hadn’t noticed him until he was almost on top of her.

“Walt,” Alfred said, nodding.

He moved past the stumps, walking with purpose, his bloodshot eyes watching Corinne like a snake in the grass. A long, crooked scar cut a pink stripe from his eyebrow to the corner of his lip, where it pulled his face into a permanent sneer.

Looking at him, Corinne realized some people were good looking despite their broken faces. Maybe some were good looking because of them, fortunate enough to wear a scar well. Alfred was not one of those, and she doubted she would be either.

“I’m Mary,” she said, using her code name. He looked away when she spoke, as if it confirmed something, then kept on his path until he disappeared into the woods.

“They’ll be suspicious of you ’til you’ve gone through it,” Alfred said. “Sometimes even after. We’ve been burned.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve all been burned!” Corinne heard her voice rise on a crest of fury. She hoped Walt could hear it too. “The whole world is burning! Jesus, I made it all the way here for a Goddamn purity test? What is this, high school?”

Alfred gave her a stony look. She lowered her voice.

“I went through so much to get here. I crawled through Hell. I left everything behind. I’ve done enough.”

The night she left, protestors had blocked the main bridge into the city, causing a standoff with police and border guards. The smuggler Corinne hired— using every penny she could wring from three maxed out credit cards— had told her to wait for this exact circumstance. Demonstrations were frequent, but only a few were big enough to distract the guards.

The police fired tear gas canisters into the crowd, and protestors threw them back. Corinne had tied a bandana across her face, but there wasn’t time to get goggles, and the sticky cloud seared her eyes and lungs. She struggled to take pictures and videos of the action, filling her albums with records of her being there, as instructed. The bridge was a battlefield, dark and smoky, and Corinne watched silhouetted soldiers toss limp bodies into waiting trucks.

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail and it burst on the street. There was a roar as protestors surged forward and something hit Corinne hard in the temple, knocking her to the ground. Black spots crowded her sight but she knew she couldn’t stop.

Glass shards pressed into her palms, and she focused on the pain to keep herself awake. Through acid tears she crawled to the back of the frothing crowd, her hands becoming sticky with blood and debris. Her head felt heavy and the asphalt rolled under her like a wave.

She managed to dump her phone into the dark water, so far below she didn’t even hear it splash, then dragged herself to the back of the bridge, where the smuggler shoved her in the trunk of his car. The trunk’s thin liner was damp with someone else’s blood. There, in a cloud of exhaust, gasoline and sweat, she gave in to the pressure in her skull, wondering if she would ever wake up again.

When They tracked her phone later, after she missed enough work, her trail would end at the protest. She hoped that would be enough— They could assume she was arrested or killed. And if her phone was found in the river, with any luck They would think she drowned.

When her brother tried to find her, he would too. He would call the jail, the detention centers and emergency rooms, searching for his only living family member. He would worry and panic and eventually he would grieve her, alone.

There was no way to say goodbye.

“My brother—” she said, her voice cracking.

Alfred raised a hand to stop her, a halfhearted gesture that made him look so tired. She understood right away. Everyone had the same story— he had his own, of course— of shredding their past and torching their present for a chance at a future.

“Getting out shows a certain kind of courage, Mary. It’s a courage born of desperation. Making your way here,” he paused and looked up at the sky, thinking of his words. “Finding us is another kind of courage. Instinct. Tenacity. But giving up your face for us—with us— shows me something else. You seal off the exits, you give us everything. And we make you whole again. ”

“You make it sound like poetry, but it’s smashing my face with hammers. Let’s just say it, ok? You and that creep Walt and whoever else is out here are going to attack me with fucking hammers, Alfred.”

Something about the way she said this cracked him open. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and they both began to laugh. The sound was outrageous in the quiet woods, free, unburdened and deeply human, surprising both of them with its sweet ferocity. It bubbled up from a place she had forgotten, pushing against her ribs and collarbones, demanding to be heard. This was a laughter that refused to be caged, and it brought tears streaming down her face.

When Alfred smiled, he revealed gorgeous teeth, perfectly white and straight. The teeth of a game show host, not the leader of a survivalist cult.

For a moment, Corinne wished her teeth were white and straight like his, then she shook the thought out of her head. Come tomorrow, she might not even have all her teeth. She wiped the tears from her cheeks as their laughter evaporated into the air. Her smile turned soft.

“You’re right,” he said, a crooked, devilish grin on his crooked, devilish face. His bristle of red hair caught a beam of sunlight, and it made him look like a man on fire.

“We’re going to smash your face with hammers. And you’ll be the most free you’ve ever been.”

One spring day in the forest, when everything was soft green and baby pink, and a lacy border of frost still lined the edges of the little creek, there on a frayed loop of twine dangling down from a branch into the rushing water, I found a piece of paper with my name on it.

I had never been to those woods before.

I moved to Barnswell in the single most spontaneous moment of my life, throwing my inheritance at a stone cottage like a big sack with a dollar sign on it, having seen the cottage only once, and only online, and knowing it was probably a place of spiders. But I had ninety-three thousand dollars burning a vicious, bitter hole in my pocket.

I had to spend every buck immediately, had to take that leap into the forest right then, without breathing or thinking, because if I breathed or thought about it at all, even for a second, I would never do it. I would never spend one dollar of that lousy inheritance, that horrible blood money from smelly Uncle Ted of the ashen fingers and wandering eyes, because the whole thing made me feel so filthy I was desperate to pretend it didn’t exist.

So it was: die with ninety-three thousand dirty dollars stacked up in a bank vault like Scrooge McDuck, or spend it all while holding my breath and buy a stone cottage in Barnswell that I saw only once, and only online.

If I bought the stone cottage I could get out of Queens, which was picking apart my nerves like pulling a hole in your jeans thread by thread. In Queens I had come to understand I would never become an artist, never grow food in a garden, never learn to make soup on a fussy antique stove, or how to stop slugs from eating my tomatoes, or what the moon looks like on the night of the Equinox. I would be dragging my laundry to the corner place every Saturday, never hanging it on a line. I would fall asleep forever to the sound of sirens and the rumbling N train.

I would die, like Uncle Ted, alone and diminished with the scratchy lungs of a lifelong New Yorker. And my ninety-three thousand dollars, which were his dollars to begin with, would go to the City, and pay for my plot in the pauper’s field, because there are no Umbras left for me to leave it to.

The bank accepted my offer in four hours.

When I found the paper with my name on it, it was my second day in Barnswell. I was in the woods behind my stone cabin, the mud on my boots less aesthetic and more elemental than I expected it would be. The muddiness didn’t appeal to my eyes, not my Pinterest-oversaturated brain or my romantic sensibilities or my dream of cottage life. But the squishy sound it made put me in mind of old things, of footsteps in the foggy mystery of dusk, of ancient flowers pressed into soft river banks and hand prints on dark cave walls. The cold, sweet, iron smell of it grounded me.

The creek was there, picture perfect, its run hinting at snow melt further up in the Adirondacks, spring finally having reached the higher elevations. The loop of twine caught my eye, dry and unraveling, the circle of it so desperately, embarrassingly man made in this forest of unstraight lines and asymmetric, earthen shapes.

It hung on a branch that had been cut, sliced where it met trunk, but not all the way through, just enough so it could bend towards the creek. The yellow wood inside was bright against the bark and the sap that bled out and hardened into stony globs was the color of wine.

The loop of twine hung down perfectly so it just grazed the running creek, and on the loop was fastened a piece of white paper that drifted at the surface of the current. I thought it was trash, and I reached for it, so disappointed in this world, and as my hand met the twine I froze for a moment, one electric moment when nothing felt exactly right. The sounds of the forest fell away— the birds, the creek, the rustle of wind— and the light dimmed just a little, the sky going muddy instead of blue, and the edges of my vision blurred like a watercolor.

The moment passed so quickly I didn’t think of it at all, not until later. Merely the blink of an eye and then the loop was in my hand and the wet paper unfurled on my palm. The paper was rough and pulpy like it had been handmade, and it came apart as I held it, but not before I read the words. My name and my birthday in big swoops of black ink. The ink ran like a trickle of blood, tracing the creases of my hand, seeping into me.

I visited Uncle Ted once when he was dying, me being the last of the cursed Umbra family after he went, and knowing no one else was visiting as he died an endless, watery death from emphysema. I didn’t stay long at his yellowing bedside but long enough to lean my elbow on the tube feeding oxygen into his lungs, long enough for him to feel some fear. Long enough that the fear oozed out of his old man pores and into the room, smelling grimy and flimsy and pathetic, and there was so much of it that came out when he realized he couldn’t breathe and I was in charge for once that I actually tasted the fear, acidic over the disinfectant cloud, brightly sour against the decomposing of my Uncle’s living body, and I thought: Now we are even.

But we were not even. Because now, standing in the forest alone, it was my turn to feel afraid, once again a little thing, transparently helpless against a greater force. It was my turn to fill up an entire place with my own rancid cloud of terror.

Think of the questions I chased around the maddening labyrinth in my head.

Why?

How?

What’s the logical solution? Could it be— ? Maybe—?

Am I—?

I wondered if it was Uncle Ted, if he followed me here, crossed some barrier in a boat made of evil intentions and ended up back in my life, undead and unkillable. What was this creek? What was this place?

The loop on that branch was not a circle but a snare that trapped me inside it, the clean creek water washing over and sealing me in place.

I couldn’t walk in the woods again. I sat in my stone cottage day after day, ice cold, without enough food, and I stared at milky sunlight through its thick, grimy windows. My grimy windows, which I had thought at one point I would clean, but going outside, standing there in the naked clearing, now I felt eyes on me.

And Uncle Ted’s cracked dry knuckles scraped across the stone of my cottage day in and day out. His yellow eyes smeared across the musty air, and eventually even the spiders that owned this cottage curled up into husks in the corners. Only the nights released me, and only because I slept for hours— nine, ten, twelve of them at a time— the starless dark closing in on me as wholly as being buried alive.

And every morning, as I became conscious of the glassy sunlight teasing dust motes out of cracked and drafty windowsills, I wished I had been. Buried, that is.

I called no one for help, but I did consider it. Imagine it though, the questions they would ask.

Why?

How?

What’s the logical solution? Could it be— ? Maybe—?

Are you—?

And I don’t know the answer to that last one.

Outside, my dream garden overruns itself, whipping weeds and wild vines bursting from the soil as this orgy of a season simmers to life. Insects buzz in and out of the high grass, hunting each other and knocking on my window panes.

In my mind’s eye, I watch black ink bleed across the lines of my palm. One of those is called the lifeline, and maybe it’s the short one.

The moon, I imagine, floats somewhere in the dark skies over the forest, but she never comes where I can see. I know less here than I ever have. All that exists is roof and walls, stone and sleep.

Loop and snare.

My grandmother comes back to me in spring. I see her in the tulips, especially the pink ones.

But, surely, tulips are where everyone sees their grandmother.

I see mine in the raging spring skies as well, those “in like a lion” storms when March is so badly behaved.

Spring has softness but it also has power. The power to …

Read more

Colonel Masterson thought to himself, one day this will all be so funny.

He had served nine seasons on the US Air Force base in Antarctica. If there was one thing he knew by now, it was that stories of people going woo-woo on The Ice were always a hit back home. He pictured his wife, her silver blonde hair done up in a twist, doing that big laugh with her mouth wide open, prodding him to share the latest antics from the bottom of the world.

This one would have her in stitches.

It would be so funny when he explained that it was only spilled paint that created so much fuss.

It was paint in a shade of red that made his heart beat faster than he liked.

Paint that outlined ghostly hand prints with blackening edges.

Paint with a strange, undeniably meaty tang.

The Colonel steadied himself in the door frame while a tingling nausea passed through his body, like bubbles rising in a bottle of pop. It was paint, it had to be.

His men, young and brave and armed, moved confidently around him and into the building, content to ignore an old man’s sudden weakness.

Still, his mind could not catch up to what his body knew. The next feeling he had was gratitude. A warm, overwhelming love for the tight team of the 13th Air Expeditionary Group and how well they worked together. It could almost bring a tear to his eye.

They were so kind to not make him go inside and face that awful red paint.

“I’m telling you! He stabbed his roommate for spoiling the end of a book.”

Alfredo overheard two men making their way down the buffet line, their plastic plates piled high with carbs.

“People go nuts down here. Every year there’s at least one.”

He wrapped his apron around his hand and pulled a hot pizza out of the oven. The apron was thin— useless against the searing heat—but ever since he came to Antarctica, he found he didn’t mind a little burn.

“That guy was Russian. The stabber,” Alfredo said, sliding the pie under a heat lamp. The men startled; no one ever expected the cook to speak. “The roommate too.”

He had heard the story of the scientist who stabbed his roommate on The Ice dozens of times. Entertainment was limited in Antarctica and legends lived forever. Especially the bloody ones.

“Only a Rusky could lose their shit like that over a book,” one of the men said, shaking his head.

“You’d be surprised,” Alfredo said back, a tiny, crooked grin on his face. “Lotta stories of crackups down here.”

He leaned on his right leg and winced.

“You guys ever hear the one about the pizza chef from Newark? He spent eighteen months in this hellhole, then he turned himself into a compost heap.”

But the men were done listening to the Help. They descended on the pizza without a moment’s consideration for its maker. He fantasized about slicing them with his pizza cutter— how satisfying that would be— but it was a pedestrian dream, so common it bored him. Angry kitchen grunt kills scientists— everyone’s heard that one.

Instead, he turned back to his pizza oven, where a blast of hot air put him at ease.

He brushed fingertips across the tops of his thighs, feeling the ridges and grooves, the dampness soaking through his pants, and swallowed a groan. Pain brought him clarity. It was exquisite–-a sweet, living reminder of good things to come.

The Colonel’s men moved through the building with guns drawn, following the stripe of red blood smeared on the floor. The Colonel himself, looking a little woozy, had stumbled back to his truck.

“Sergeant Martinez, this is Base. Come in.” The sound of the radio jolted the soldiers, who were already on edge. One dropped into a crouch, swinging his gun wildly.

“Anders, chill! It’s just the radio,” said the Sergeant. “This is Martinez, come in, Base.”

“The two missing scientists have been located. Everyone is safe. Over.”

“What?” Martinez blurted without thinking. His men turned their heads to him in shock. The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees.

He cleared his throat. “Try again, Base. I do not copy.”

“Missing scientists located. Everyone safe. Over.”

Martinez was at a loss for words.

“What does that mean, Sarge? Whose blood is this?” Anders whined. He put his back against the wall, his eyes wide.

“Anders, man, you have got to chill,” Martinez barked, but he felt his own terror mounting. The men shifted and Martinez saw their eyes dart around the bloody mess.

He lifted the radio to his lips. His mouth was dry.

“Base, reconfirm objective.”

“Objective has not changed. Locate missing individual.”

“Copy that, Base.”

The men were quiet for a few seconds, then Martinez spoke into the radio again.

“That you, Quinn?”

“Yeah Sarge, it’s me.”

“Are you seriously telling me we’re looking for one guy?”

“Copy. One individual: Alfredo Aiello. Pizza chef. Last seen in the galley after dinner.”

“There’s a lot of blood down here, Quinn. Is Aiello a suspect or a victim?”

“Unknown. Proceed with caution.”

Chef Shelley emerged from the galley, a greasy apron wadded in her hand. Her blonde hair had sprung loose and her face flushed pinker than Easter grass.

“You going out for the sunset party?” She asked Alfredo.

“Sunset party?” He tried to sound normal, but he was in so much pain, his voice strained. He knew his shirt was spotted with blood, so he quickly turned his back to his boss, and busied himself wiping down the oven. He thanked God the uniform was black.

“Is that tonight?” He peeked over his shoulder at her, but she seemed relaxed.

“Yeah, doofus.” Shelley said, and tossed her apron into the laundry bin. “Our one sunset of the year— don’t you think that’s reason enough to party?”

“Of course, the great Antarctic equinox,” Alfredo said, through clenched teeth.

“Yep. Coupla hours then it’s back to the dark for us grunts.”

Alfredo’s stomach twisted. His memory of last year’s six-month night haunted him. Wind so loud it felt like it would break his skull, ice sheets screaming like banshees in the bay. Not a leaf, not a flower. Not even a housefly in this godforsaken place.

“You ok, Fredo? You look pale.”

“Yep. Fine.”

“Sun sets at eight eleven,” Shelley said to his back. Her tone was placating, like she was talking to a rampaging toddler. “Get out there at eight twelve and you don’t see daylight again until September, got it?”

Alfredo grunted uh-huh, and waved a dismissive hand. He shuddered, his shirt clinging and catching on his many wounds.

Martinez found his voice.

“Base, we need backup. We don’t know what we’re getting into. Over.”

The radio was silent.

“Quinn, do you read me? We’re alone in here. The Colonel isn’t with us and my gut is telling me something’s off. We need backup.”

“Copy, Martinez. There’s no one to send right now. We got a lot of upset people in the barracks and a transport plane that has to take off before the weather goes to shit. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Martinez holstered the radio and looked at his men. He straightened his back, set his jaw, and tried to set aside the fears that crept around the recesses of his brain.

“Alright, men. We’re gonna check the galley for this guy and then we’re done. Judging by the scene, we’re looking for a body, not a bogey man. And if he’s not here, we get the fuck out and make it someone else’s problem. We do our jobs, ok?”

The men looked at each other, and in their fear he could see the little boys they used to be.

At eight eleven Alfredo was in his bunk, blackout curtains drawn.

Between his fingers, he rolled a blade of dried grass. He had found it on his rug shortly after arriving to Antarctica and something possessed him to save it.

Twenty minutes at the bottom of Creation, white sky above meeting white earth below in a cottony, monotonous wash, and he already craved green. The grass had blazed in his eyes like a lit match.

Eighteen months later, it was dead, nothing but a crisp brown strand. But when he held it to his nose, Alfredo could somehow smell lawn mower trimmings, muddy puddles, and his Nona’s daffodils—even the stink of sulfur at his sister’s house when she inevitably overcooked the Easter eggs.

He missed spring with a fervor he had not anticipated. His heart broke for the pastel-plastic optimism of real spring— for soft things and little plants, for the feeling of a body waking up after winter.

A cheer came from outside his window, a bunch of drunk jerks actually celebrating when the sun fell below the horizon. There it would hover out of sight, drenching them in soupy twilight for a few months, before disappearing until next Fall.

Spring.

Whatever.

Antarctica was upside down and backwards. Fall, spring, day, night, none of it made a lick of sense.

Alfredo would not watch the sun set. He would not grieve as the frozen land turned silver, hard as steel and untouchable as mercury. He would stay inside with his grass.

The galley was silent and the grayish fluorescent lights flickered on and off. Martinez felt like he was in a morgue, not a kitchen. They stood in the room’s big double doors, squinting at a shape in the distance.

A mound of dark, wet mud was heaped in front of the pizza oven.

As they got closer they saw it was a garden. A weird looking garden, somehow transported in one piece to an industrial kitchen in Antarctica. Martinez squinted, unsure how to make sense of it.

Thin red vines that looked chillingly like arteries snaked across the floor. A bed of short grass in a bizarre pink color seemed to sway in invisible air currents. And, reaching for the lights, eerie, bone white stalks raised beige flower heads.

A red liquid, viscous and awful, pooled around the wretched garden. The trail of blood ended here.

Martinez crept closer, sure this was a science experiment gone wrong, and soon he saw there was no mud, but a grotesquely swollen human body. Behind him, he heard Anders gag.

There was a face, or the suggestion of one, carpeted in tiny leaves. From the open mouth spilled a thick vine, bright green and splattered in gore. On the floor nearby, a name badge read Aiello. Cook.

Martinez reached for his radio.

“Base, come in. We found…something…we found…the pizza guy…”

“Copy. Is he alive?”

Martinez looked at the mound in front of him, a mass of vibrant, alien plant life like he had never seen.

He opened his mouth then closed it again.

“Find whatever scientists are still on the continent and get them in here. It’s definitely alive.”

Alfredo carefully stripped off his uniform, which stuck to his skin, pulling at scabs and suppurating spots. He unwrapped sticky gauze from his arms, his torso and thighs, becoming as giddy as a kid with an Easter basket.

Underneath, his skin was shiny and hot, and blood dripped and oozed out of him.

The smell was not good, not fresh or green, but it was undoubtedly alive.

Shoots sprouted from his body, each one reaching for the light. Some were getting quite large. His fingers drifted over the leaves. He wiggled a thick, fibrous stalk that curved out of his inner arm, and he felt its roots holding deep inside, a sensation that made him a little lightheaded. Fresh blood spurted from the spot, spraying the wall with a fine mist.

He looked around his bunk and noticed there was blood everywhere— it had really started to accumulate after his weeks of planting.

He wondered if he should prune himself or just let the growths stick out of his uniform, come what may. There were rules about piercings in the kitchen, but there was no rule about plants.

He found his pizza cutter, round and sharp and true. Locating an unmarked place on his forehead– rare real estate– he made a cut, simple, straight, and shallow. For a second, nothing happened, but then the blood came, a tiny stripe that emerged from his skin like new growth. From his apron he pulled today’s treasure– a wilted tuft of green fringe pinched from a carrot, the last fresh produce of the season.

He pressed the leaves into his wound, then held the cut closed and sealed it with super glue, as he had been taught by the cooks in his uncle’s pizza shop back home.

He checked the other slits. Here, the leaf from an apple lost in cold storage had begun to sprout new buds; there, the seeds from a discarded tangerine bumped under his skin. The eyes of an old sweet potato had begun at last to vine, their ghostly white heads peeking out from his arms. On his face, he found one tiny, spade-shaped leaf growing near his hairline. It had been neatly covered by his bandana and emerged a happy surprise.

Blades of grass, plucked from carpets around base where they fell off the boots of new arrivals, had been carefully planted in a thick bed across his chest and belly. Of this he was intensely proud. His little lawn wasn’t green, but a sort of beige-pink color, and he understood that he and the plants were becoming one.

Symbiotic.

The super glue held in some places, but in others yawning wounds had opened up. Some he tried to seal again, others leaked so much blood the glue couldn’t hold. He hoped his body would make enough to feed his garden.

He laid back on the blood-soaked mattress, feeling pleasantly full. His skin ached and wept, but he was so pleased with his work that the pain felt like confirmation of something magic.

He wondered if he should find some soil— maybe a discarded experiment left in the science lab?— and pack it into the wounds.

Maybe he could get down to the galley and sleep by the oven…the plants would surely appreciate the heat.

Cynthia Masterson perched on the arm of a big, white sectional, sloshing her martini back and forth. Her platinum hair gleamed in their home’s tastefully low light.

“There was red paint spilled everywhere and someone called in an emergency! Can you believe it? They actually called soldiers from the base thinking it was blood! Tell them, hon,” she elbowed her husband.

The Colonel smiled at his wife and their gathered friends, his square veneers holding back his bile at the memory of that terrible day.

Outside, the sun was just setting, the Virginia dusk as sweet as a chocolate bunny. A little pruning here and there made the story so much better. More palatable.

And boy did they love a good Antarctica story back home.

“Well,” he began, “what you have to understand about Antarctica is someone always goes woo-woo. Happens every year.”

Subscribe now

This story is part of Spring Fever, a Spring Equinox horror event hosted by the talented and . Click the image below for all the spring horror you could ever want.

By the way, I’m working on a snail mail scary story that I hope will arrive to you later this spring. I…

Read more

“Dear Fairview Square Mall—“

“Wait. You’re serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious.”

“You wrote an actual letter to the dead mall?”

“Yes. What did you think I was talking about?”

“I don’t know— I thought it was a metaphor, I guess? I’m sorry. What are we doing?”

“I wrote a letter to the dead mall because they’re going to tear it down and it makes me really sad.”

“What are you going to do with the letter?”

“I’m going to deliver it.”

“To the dead mall?”

“To the dead mall, before they tear her down.”

“Her?”

“Yeah. I need to say goodbye. I feel like— I don’t know, like something is unfinished for me. Do you want to hear the letter?”

“Not really. Do you want a ride though? I kinda want to see it before they tear it down.”

The Fairview Square mall was a grande dame, rising peach and curvaceous above the flat suburb surrounding it. To Tamara, she looked like hope and optimism sitting on her cracked parking lot plain, patchy grass and weeds whispering from the asphalt.

Tamara’s eyes slid over the mall’s decorative flourishes, a cathedral as much as anything, by far the most deliberately ornate building in town. Even the churches couldn’t match it. She was truly sad to see it go.

“It’s about time they tore this thing down,” came Kimmy’s voice. “It’s hideous.”

Kimmy, nine years younger than Tamara, could only see the failure of the mall, its ugliness and tragedy. She hadn’t spent any formative years in its faux marble halls. Tamara shot her a glare in the burning orange light.

“The mall was a great unifier, Kim. Probably one of the last collective experiences in this town. It let you do things with other people that now you all just do alone. Plus, it was actually nice. It was pretty and clean, before the great enshitification of the world.”

Kimmy raised her eyebrows.

“Right. Well, we’re here. And it looks pretty enshitified. So now what, mall rat?”

“Now I read the letter. I say goodbye to my childhood.” Tamara hesitated, the folded paper in her hand. The mall itself loomed large, a forbidden cavern guarded by an empty asphalt moat.

“Well, at least go up to the door.”

“Don’t record me with your phone or something.”

Kimmy saluted.

Tamara left the car, grateful for the privacy. She turned thoughts over in her mind— was it the fascination of the abandoned building that touched her like a live wire? Or was it pure, sweet nostalgia, a chance to recapture some buried memory she forgot she knew?

Standing in front of the entrance she realized the glass-fronted doors were miraculously intact, boarded up from the inside. The glass was etched with the Fairview Square logo as clear and perfect as it had been the last time she stepped through, twenty years before. She traced the logo with her finger.

A strangled creaking sound came from the door and Tamara drew back her hand as it lurched inwards. Through the opening, she glimpsed the heart of the mall— its central fountain, long dry. The pink tiles were magically pristine, glittering in the sunset light, which poured in through the skylights above. It looked like it could burst into motion at any second.

Looking at the fountain she tasted cherry cola chap stick, a ghost of a memory. She felt the fabric of her jeans— not the jeans she was wearing but the ones from long ago, the jeans she got for her fourteenth Christmas, the perfect baggy jeans that would tell the world who she was.

She looked back at Kimmy’s car in the parking lot. Kimmy flashed her lights, impatient as always. Tamara waved, then ducked inside.

***

Kimmy leaned on the horn. Did her sister just go inside the abandoned mall? What the hell was she doing?

That crazy bitch, Kimmy thought. She’s going to get herself killed. She turned on the ignition and drove straight up to the mall’s grand entrance, her front tires bumping up over the curb. She got out and slammed the door, shouting for her sister before she even reached the front.

“Tamara! Tamara, get the fuck out here. What the Hell are you doing?”

Tamara was older than Kimmy but she was the dreamer in the family, the one who never worried. The who took all the risks.

The glass doors to the mall were completely smashed. All that remained were metal skeletons covered in graffitied plywood. Concrete planters on either side held pools of tea-colored rainwater, cigarette butts, and stray garbage. Kimmy put a hand on the metal frame and pushed, but the door may as well have been a brick wall.

Kimmy took a step back, frowning. She tried the door again, shoving it harder. She called out for her sister, banging her open palm on the plywood.

“Tamara please!”

She pressed her ear to the wood but she could hear nothing. The sun slipped behind the mall’s roof, and the parking lot was suddenly dark.

Kimmy shook her head. This could not be happening. She got back in the car and locked all the doors, searching the weedy parking lot for any sign of movement.

Inside, the mall’s corridors were shadowy caves. Only the fountain was still bathed in the warmth of the sunset. But the floors beneath Tamara’s feet were intact and smooth, and the air smelled vaguely like air freshener and sweet, doughy pretzels. Her mouth watered. She couldn’t believe how strong her memories were— walking in the mall was like swimming in nostalgia.

She made her way to the fountain, her sneakers hardly making a sound in the great empty building. There was just enough light to get there, read her letter, and then make her way back out before the sun set.

She remembered tossing so many pennies in that fountain, wishing to be noticed or forgotten, depending on the day. She remembered the liquid sadness of her adolescence, the yearning, the feeling she was never quite enough.

She took a breath.

“Dear Fairview Square Mall—” Her voice sounded big and deep in the empty corridors. And it summoned someone with a flashlight.

The dim glow made its way toward her. An oval shape, like a spotlight. Of course there’s a guard, she thought. But there was something odd about the light. It shimmered and it drifted. Not a light of authority, but of curiosity.

As she watched, she saw a person step into the oval. A young girl, her dark ponytail low at the back of her neck, an oversized flannel shirt and baggy jeans hiding her body like a tent. The hem of the pants was frayed from dragging the ground, and the sneakers it revealed were bright red— a detail begging to be seen in an outfit designed to be forgotten.

Tamara brought a shaking hand to her mouth, and felt the heat of tears behind her eyes. She recognized that girl from the back, even though it was an angle she had never seen before. She knew by the hairs on her own arms standing up, the acid feeling in her chest, and her sudden shortness of breath. She knew because she felt nervous, a stone in the pit of her guts and a fluttering excitement just above that: the hope that something good could happen to you and the certainty that it wouldn’t.

The physical sensation of being fourteen.

The girl was her. And around her, in the faint circle of light, the mall was not dead but alive.

As she moved past a storefront, staring into its window, Tamara saw mannequins in bright outfits, track lighting, and the reflection of other shoppers in the glass. The spotlight was a telescope into her past. She moved slowly behind herself, peering through this viewfinder at a film of her younger self.

She watched her own ghost— the limp ponytail, the aimless walk— with tears streaming down her face. The feeling was of uncovering a hidden tomb.

Tamara desperately wanted to scoop up her younger self, to tell her she was perfect, smart, beautiful, to protect her from what would be, but she was mesmerized. Her teenage self, all pain and angles, shuffling through this capitalist cathedral, stuck in here after all these years.

But why? Why would the ghost of her adolescence be stuck in Fairview? Tamara wasn’t dead– she touched her own arms at this thought, chilled.

But there she was, slight and wavering, and as far as Tamara could tell, she was the only ghost in the place.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My sister is trapped inside an abandoned building.”

“Is she injured?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“How old is she?”

“Um thirty-something. Thirty-four, I think?”

“How do you know she’s trapped?”

“She went inside the mall, she walked up to the door and went inside. And when I tried to follow her, the door was stuck. I couldn’t open it.”

The operator sighed.

“The abandoned mall?”

“Yes, the Fairview Square Mall.”

“And your name is?”

“Kimmy– Kim Chapman.”

“Right. It’s ok, Kimmy. We’re going to send someone to help you. Just stay where you are.”

Tamara watched as her ghost made her way toward the center of the mall. She stopped every couple steps to look into a store, or to talk to someone just out of frame. But she always faced away from her.

Tamara’s thoughts of leaving the mall — like how she was going to find the door now that the place was in total darkness— drifted away.

She watched her ghost circle the fountain, and realized she was finally going to come face to face with her. She held her breath. Would she see herself through the wormhole? Would she recognize herself?

The parking lot lit up blue and red. One single police car pulled slowly up to Kimmy, lights flashing, sirens quiet. An officer got out and strolled to her car. Behind the cruiser, another car raced in, a beat-up old Subaru. Kimmy’s mother’s.

An officer tapped on Kimmy’s window with his knuckle.

“Ms. Chapman?”

“Yes, thank you for coming. My sister went in there and when I tried to go get her the door wouldn’t open. She could be hurt or stuck. Can you break it down? Don’t we need the fire department?”

Her mother ran up to the car window. Her white hair had come loose from its bun and her face was shiny with tears.

“Kimmy, get out of the car. Let me take you home.”

Kimmy looked from her mother’s face to the officer’s.

“What about Tamara? We can’t leave her in there!”

The officer stepped back from the car with a shrug and looked up at the building. Kimmy’s mother hooked her hands over the window. Her voice was strained.

“Kimmy, please. You have to stop this. You have to stop coming here. Tamara’s not here. Please, listen.”

Kimmy shook her head and her face cracked. She looked at the doors to the mall.

“Kimmy, Tamara is dead. Remember? You have to remember.” Her mother was sobbing now. “Right here at the mall, she was taken and killed. You know this. You remember. It was twenty years ago. Please, please stop coming here and reliving it.”

Kimmy couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to believe what she was hearing but some seed had been planted. In her mind sprouted a vision of her big sister at fourteen, in a flannel shirt and red sneakers, little Kimmy sitting in the backseat.

She remembered the grand entrance to the mall with its etched glass doors. She remembered watching her sister’s back, her low ponytail bobbing away from them. She remembered what it was like to feel whole.

“Please Kimmy I’m begging you,” her mother said between sobs.

She remembered the police coming to their house that night. She remembered how no one would talk to her or tell her what was happening. At five years old, she was left entirely to her imagination to put together the story.

The mall had swallowed Tamara. Kimmy couldn’t see her face, only her back, walking away for eternity.

“I —I think I’m supposed to read something, before they tear it down,” Kimmy said, quietly, like she was waking up from a dream. Had she written a letter to the mall that took her sister? An obituary to that hungry building?

“I just need a minute, ok?”

She patted her pockets. Where was that piece of paper?

From inside the mall came a howling shriek, heart-stoppingly loud.

The officer startled and put a hand on his gun. Kimmy’s mother gasped. Kimmy looked at them, the spell broken. Her sister was in there, trapped. If they wouldn’t get her out, she would do it herself.

She put the car in drive and pressed the pedal to the floor. Her car growled and lurched, then flew up the curb and closed the short distance to the doors. The plywood splintered, the metal bent and cracked, and Kimmy’s car rolled to a stop.

The little girl stopped, her spotlight only inches from Tamara’s face. The hem of her giant flannel drifted on an air current, and Tamara remembered the softness of that exact shirt. The ghost slowly turned toward her. Tamara was frozen.

The ghost had no face.

Tamara stared into a yawning abyss where her own baby face should have been and she screamed. Then the spotlight blinked out and the girl was gone.

Tamara lunged toward the front door as the air around her started to warp and tear. She grasped for something but it felt like the entire world was crumbling. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. She felt like she was disintegrating.

She was in complete darkness but she tried to remember where the doors were. She flailed in that direction, but the floor was uneven, with cracked and broken tiles tripping her every few steps. Then she heard a crash, saw a flood of bright light.

And then there was nothing.

***

Kimmy kicked her car door open and rushed inside the mall before they could stop her.

Her headlights bored tunnels into the darkness. The inside of the mall was a wreck. Parts of the ceiling had fallen, broken glass crunched underfoot, the beautiful central fountain was a crumbled heap of pink tile and broken pipes. A cloud of bats was disturbed from the rafters and fluttered around.

“Tamara!” She shouted, and her echo came back to her, loud and empty.

“Tamara!” The echo bounced around every corner of the mall, seeking every forgotten corner, every memory too tired to go on, every last gasp of the past. It came back to Kimmy’s ears like a scream of rage. At the sound, the bats poured out of the mall, a panicked exodus, leaving Kimmy alone.

When they tore down this building, Tamara would be gone forever. A little girl in flannel, trapped in amber for all these years, wrapped in the embrace of the mall’s loving corridors. Would she be bulldozed along with the fake palm trees and the fake marble floors and the garish pink tile?

Or could she manage to fly away?

Something bright and clean floated to Kimmy’s feet, glowing in the headlights. Kimmy stooped to pick it up. A piece of white notebook paper.

The others came through the hole in the wall, climbing gingerly over debris as Kimmy unfolded the page and started to read her goodbye.

“Dear Fairview Square Mall–”

The mall stood up proud and solid around them for one last time, her crumbling flourishes as sacred as any mausoleum could ever be.

I should have known last year, when January opened like a tomb.

A heavy stone door, cold as ice and thick as earth, creaked open, revealing a dark triangle barely big enough for me to wriggle through. I didn’t want to go through. I didn’t think I had enough in me. I worried the future would be much worse than the past.

Read more

I hope you love this gift— I made it myself! If you’re unsure, I’ll give you a preview: this is a horror story told from the point of view of a homicide detective investigating a family murder. The deaths happen off-screen, but there is some gore and the subject matter might not be to your liking. Please, take care of yourselves.

Of course, if you love a gift wrapped in blood and black, read on…

Forty-nine-oh-two Pleasant Street is splashed gory by red lights, a plastic Santa tipped over in the snow. A dozen Bluecoats mill around in the driveway, stomping their feet to keep warm, breath puffing out around their heads in slow-moving white clouds. Inside, something horrible has happened.

I park in the street, lean against my car and light a cigarette, letting the cold morning air prickle my temples awake. Pleasant Street is quiet, sanitized. No visible garbage cans, no barking dogs or chain link fences. It’s mansion after mansion in every direction, each one shuttered and slumbering on its own snowy bed.

Overgrown gingerbread houses on dead-end drives. Everyone thinks they want one until they get it.

It’ll make you crazy, that cul-de-sac life. Trust me. Round and round on a road to nowhere, watching your neighbors upgrade to nicer grills, bigger pools, younger wives with better boob jobs. Watching your grass grow and die, grow and die—

“Detective Lamarque?”

It’s the rookie from County, transferred in November. She’s cute, is the first thing I think. Her face is half in red light, half in shadow, her thin beak of a nose riding a soft, round face. You wouldn’t think those things would go together, but they do.

“Ash,” I correct her, and then I ash my cigarette with a little flair.

Her mouth twists up, trying to hold back a smile.

“Ok,” she pauses, lips puffing out. “Ash.” She looks back at the house, then her tone goes flat, business-like. “Vics are the homeowners, Eddie and Estelle Jones.”

“Guess they didn’t find the street all that pleasant.”

“Right. Four DBs laid out under the Christmas tree, real sweet. Doors locked, security system armed. Looks to be a family annihilation.”

Ahh, Christmas. Family killing season.

“Kids?” I ask.

“Two boys.” She pulls out her notebook, flips some pages. “Eight and nine.” I suck breath through my teeth.

“Posed?”

“All in a row.”

“M.O.?”

“Smothered, probably a pillow, then carried downstairs to the Christmas tree. Shot his wife through the heart, then laid himself under the tree and put the piece under his chin.”

“He a broker?” I ask. I don’t play the markets myself, detectives’ pockets being light on scratch, but I read the rags. When the market goes belly-up, so do the brokers.

She flips some pages back and forth but I know she’s stalling.

“No. Wife was the breadwinner. She was an… internet personality.”

I raise an eyebrow. The rookie flushes.

“An adult personality.”

I drop my cigarette on the street, crush it under my shoe.

“Who called it in?”

“Subscriber to her channel. Apparently he and Estelle were supposed to have a Christmas Eve video call and she never showed. According to him, she was quite attentive to her subs.”

“Subs?”

Her neck burns red.

“Sub—scribers? I think? Sorry, uh– anyway, said he knew something was wrong when she didn’t show.”

“Any other family?”

“Well, that’s a weird thing, Ash. There’s an old bird in the house– Grandma we assume– but she can hardly string three words together. We don’t know if she knows anything. Haven’t even figured out whose ma she was.”

“In the house?”

“For now. Medics itching to get her out, but she’s stable, so they’re hanging back. Agreed to wait for you.”

I squint into the dark windows. Unusual for a family annihilator to leave their mother upright. Double their mother-in-law.

“TOD on the family?”

She clears her throat. This girl has got to toughen up.

“Thirty-six hours, minimum.”

I turn my head so fast I feel a little explosion in the side of my neck. My hand flies to the spot and I work my jaw, my muscles still sleeping.

“You’re shitting me. Grandma was—”

“Inside the house for while with her dead family. Appears that way.”

“Shit.” My mouth fills with saliva and I spit on the street. The rookie rubs her eye.

“Anything else?” I ask, hoping there’s not.

“Yeah. I’m just gonna spit it out,” she looks me dead in the eye. “Somebody poked a bunch of holes in the husband’s back, filled ‘em with cloves.”

“With what?”

“Cloves. The pokey things on the spice rack?”

“A pomander,” I muse, under my breath.

“A what?”

“One of those oranges with the cloves stuck in it.”

“Oh,” her eyes are bright. “I was gonna say like a ham.”

There’s a pause. The rookie pulls her lips back like she’s about to smile. I catch a glimpse of her incisor, sharp and white. Very fucking cute.

“Ritualistic?” I ask, to stop us both from laughing.

“Uh…”

I roll my eyes. Ritualistic is a dirty word in police files, DAs hate it. Some small town Blues got hyped up on urban legends thirty years ago, now we gotta pretend there’s no such thing as a ritual.

“Did he do it to himself?”

“Definitely not.”

I curl my lip. Some kind of kink?

She tilts her chin at the house’s porch.

“Packages piled up for a couple days, supports the timeline. We’re pulling doorbell cam.”

“Neighbors report anything unusual?”

She winces.

“We’re– ah, waiting to go to the neighbors. You know…” she trails off, her eyes darting from house to house.

“Oh. Yeah,” I say, and I do. The light on the horizon has gone misty. I guess we’re an hour, hour and a half from sunrise. Any minute the cul-de-sac will empty itself into the street— kids in plaid pajamas testing out their new wheels, half a dozen dads putting basketball hoops over half a dozen garages.

Only this year everyone’ll come out to a mess of cops at the Jones place, yellow tape on the lawn, the only twinkling lights coming off the ‘bus out front.

We can give ‘em a little while.

Without thinking, I pull out another cigarette, light it, take a drag. The rookie clears her throat.

“Don’t you want to come in?” She asks, her eyes on my cig.

I pause. No, I think, I’d rather take you out for pancakes. Wanna?

I nod, sigh, and drop it on the street. I pull my hair back into a ponytail, smooth the edges with my nails. I should cut it off, that ponytail. I never had any use for long hair…except, well, without it everyone thinks I’m a guy. That’s something I used to care a lot about.

I wonder if the rookie cares.

“Goddamn Christmas,” I say, as we trudge across the wet grass, Santa’s shiny black eyes following us in.

At the threshold we pause and tug paper booties over our shoes.

I pull out a handkerchief and hold it over my face. If I had been a lucky person, thirty years of smoking would have dulled my sense of smell, sparing me the familiar perfume of decomp. But no, not me.

It’s the smell of cloves that hits first. Something nostalgic about it, warm and old, until it lands in the back of my throat like I swallowed a dish of potpourri. And just there, underneath it all, creeping through the air on greenblack fingers: decay.

The smell is ritualistic. Gives me the creeps.

Other than that, 4902 Pleasant Street is like every other McMansion I’ve been in: an expensive grey prison. White rugs, shiny finishes, minimalism.

Well, except for the Christmas tree. She’s a big one, stately and full and decorated in matching baubles, the kind that were bought all at once. The kind someone was hired to hang. But that’s not what’s weird.

What is weird is the lower branches of this tree are painted in high-velocity blood spatter. And under it are four bodies laid out in a row, all of them smaller than I expected. DBs are like that though– sorta like movie stars– no matter how many you see, they’re always smaller in person.

The kids almost look like they’re sleeping. I reach for the cigs inside my coat, pat the pack, cellophane crinkle nearly panacea for my nerves.

They’re in pajamas. Regular ones, not Christmas ones, and this detail feels like a mercy.

Estelle Jones is in bright green leggings and a matching sports bra. She has a hard, shiny body, with a scooped out midsection, smooth tits like softballs, and hair the color of steam. It tumbles around her smooth, plumped face, almost alien in its perfection, everything sprayed with a fine mist of red.

She’s laid out under the tree just like a brand-new Barbie, but for the gaping red hole in her chest.

Eddie Jones is a few inches shorter than his wife, hairless and overly muscled. His mug collapsed when he blew off the top of his own head, so it’s hard to say what he looked like, exactly. The hardware is on his chest under stumpy fingers. It’s too big a gun for both his frame and the job, and I start to understand him. I think he had a goatee.

The rookie is at my elbow, all in a lather. In the light of the house, I can see the freckles on her nose, her golden-brown eyes lined in blue. I’m definitely asking her out.

“The witness is in here,” she gestures toward a back room with a closed door.

Ok Granny, I think to myself. What can you tell me about your dearly departed?

The rookie opens the door to what I guess is a guest bedroom, everything done up in expensive-looking shades of grey. At the edge of a huge bed perches a tiny old woman, her feet dangling above a stone-colored carpet. She’s wearing a thin white nightgown, its lacy straps draped over her bony shoulders, and heavy black snow boots. I see bluegreen veins through her skin.

Her head is crowned with a haystack of hair, as white and spiky as hoarfrost on a branch. She kicks her feet, lost in thought, and I think she’s humming something.

“Hello,” I say, in a gentle voice, crouching to get closer to eye level, but she’s looking down and away. “My name is Ash, I’m a detective.”

It’s Silent Night she’s humming, I realize, high and wavering in the back of her throat. I reach out, lay my fingers on the back of her hand. It feels like a dead fish.

“Can we shut that window please?” I coo at the rookie in that same high tone. “She’s freezing.”

The rookie faces away from Granny, answers with her teeth closed.

“She kept saying she was hot, Ash. The boys didn’t know what else to do.”

I look back at Grandma. She’s skin and bones, a pale snowflake of a person. The kind that couldn’t melt butter in a closed fist.

Just then, the woman’s black eyes click to mine. In an instant, I’m plunged into darkness, my thoughts going blank. I can’t find words. I feel like I’m falling, like she’s pulling me close to the edge of something.

I manage to break away and step back, stumbling into the nightstand, rattling the lamp shade and sucking in a sharp breath. There’s something in the air that snaps, a tether broken.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I – uh,” I look over my shoulder at the rookie and she shrugs, then takes a sudden interest in her own shoes. I realize she’s already done this, didn’t know how to warn me. I realize this is why they called me in.

I grab a notebook out of my pocket. Grandma keeps humming, this high-pitched frequency that’ll make your ears bleed. I clench my teeth against it and get serious.

“Ma’am, can you tell me your name?” Cop voice.

She smiles then, like a light switch, but the smile never climbs up to her eyes. It’s more like she’s baring her teeth, which are a set of huge white dentures, so big and square they seem like they belong to someone else’s face.

I don’t know what you’re playing at, Granny, but I’ve seen creepier things than you. I puff myself up, don’t smile back.

I can wait all day.

She finally stops humming and speaks, the dentures clacking in her mouth.

“Lilith,” she says and laughs, a screeching, wet sound. The chill in the room soaks through my skin. I shake it off.

“Do you live here?”

She goes back to humming Silent Night on that warbling breath. It’s working against my skull like a hand drill.

“Is Eddie Jones your son?”

All is calm.

“Ma’am? Is Estelle Jones your daughter?”

All is bright.

“Lilith, answer me. Are those kids out there your grandkids?"

‘Round yon virgin, mother and child.

I turn to the rookie to ask if they pulled any IDs, a wallet, library card, but she’s gone.

I turn back and Lilith is standing right in front of me, our boots touching. She closed the gap between us in a fraction of a second and my mouth drops open. The chill settles deep.

She pokes her index finger into my chest, and it’s a shard of cold metal, as hard and lifeless as the barrel of a gun. I breathe out and my breath hangs white in the air between us.

“Naughty Joneses,” she says in a slimy voice.

“Ma’am,” I croak. In my mind I grab her by the shoulders, stare into those black eyes and shake the Hell out of her. In my mind I scream in her powdery face, those are kids, you psycho! Are you saying those kids deserved to die?

But in the room nothing happens. I open and close my mouth like a goldfish, wishing I had a lungful of smoke to cling to.

“Naughty,” she says, and cackles again, tapping my chest with that gnarled finger. I have a vision of bleeding lungs, of black bile. I back away from her, my hand fishing around behind me for the door frame.

“Ma’am, do you know what happened here?” I try to sound important, to snatch authority out of the air between us, but I feel like a child. My teeth start to chatter and I clamp them down.

“What happened to Eddie Jones?”

“So naughty.” She flicks her thumb against her finger and it clicks loudly, bone on bone. I smell sulphur on the air, like a burned match.

“Officer?” I call out, and my voice warbles. I cough it out, then bellow. “OFFICER!”

A uniformed officer appears at my side.

“Detective?”

“Get a medic in here.” When my eyes meet his, and they’re plain-ol’ brown eyes, dumb as a golden retriever, I think I start to feel my fingers again. I hold a hand to the side of my mouth and lean towards him, whispering, “She’s batty.”

I don’t even believe my act. I turn back to Grandma, speaking too loudly.

“Ma’am I need you to have a seat, the doctors are going to come take care of you.”

She stares up at me, her black eyes swirling gyres. My heart thumps like crazy in my chest.

She starts to hum again.

…sleep in Heavenly peace…

I smell almonds, burnt toast, rotten eggs. I wonder if I’m having a stroke.

Then I see the old lady’s skin shatter like a sheet of ice, crackling and opening, something monstrous bursting out. It’s dark green and greasy, with talons like a vulture and scales like a snake, a long worming tail as thick as my wrist.

A pool of black ooze bubbles out from under the bed, so dark it has its own gravity.

…sleep in Heavenly peace…

And then she stops.

The air, sharp and frozen, brings me back to myself. The room is grey, the woman is white, wrapped in eggroll-thin skin, not scales.

She turns around and takes five shuffling steps to the bed. I blink, because I swear a tendril of smoke rises from the carpet. And when she climbs onto the bed—

No.

I don’t need to wait for the whitecoats, I need to get the fuck out of here. I duck out, closing the door behind me with a loud clap. Never have I been so relieved to see a blood-splattered Christmas tree. The rookie looks at me.

“Get anything?”

“Nah,” I sigh, hoping to sound tired, cynical, overworked. Anything but what I am. “Nutty as a fruitcake.”

My hands shake in my pockets. Crazy old lady, Ash. Fucked up scene. Don’t let it under your skin.

“What are we doing with her?”

“I spoke to the uni– the one with the puppy eyes? Told him to bring in the medics.”

The rookie frowns at me.

“Uniforms are all outside, Ash. And the medics are gone– kid down the street broke his arm on a new bike. We told them we’d transport Grandma—I’m sorry, should I have asked?”

I turn back and practically leap the few steps to the guest room. When I close my hand around the doorknob it’s so cold it burns. The skin on my palm goes white as death.

“Ash?” I hear the rookie behind me, hear her unsnap her gun.

“No, no, no, no, no,” I spit out rapid fire under my breath. I shoulder the door and find an empty room.

I rush to the open window, rookie on my heels. We look down and see boot prints in melted snow, trailing away across the lawn. It might be a trick of the sunrise, but I could swear it’s steaming.

Rookie’s on her radio, calling it in before I even turn around, but I know they won’t find her.

I rub my eyes. My fingers smell like smoke, and I reach for my pack, making quick for the front door, past the stiffs lined up like tin soldiers. Their skin is waxy on top, bruised purple underneath where the blood has pooled. Just a regular scene, Ash. You’ve seen it a million times.

But it isn’t.

Outside, I pull in a lungful of air, hold it until I see sparks, then I cough so hard it doubles me over. Cops on the lawn back away, making a path to my car. I trip to the street and collapse into the driver’s seat, turning the heat on full blast.

I close my eyes. I force myself to think about the rookie, how she woke up at four in the morning to respond to a murder scene and took the time to line her eyes in blue. I try to picture them now, but there in my head is the thing I never want to see again. That little glimpse, swish, when she climbed onto the bed.

An oily, leathery tail, peeking out from the ruffle of an old lady’s nightgown.

The sun rising turns the snow on the lawns baby pink. My forehead touches the steering wheel and the car’s horn blares, a scream in the cold air on a perfectly Pleasant morning.

I’m working on something. It’s a spirited and wild something that has resisted me pinning it down for more than a year. But I’ve managed to get my lasso around it at last, and my novel is starting to emerge. It’s not behaving, no. It is and will always be as feral as I am. But it is emerging, and I’…

Read more

The day before Thanksgiving and the sky was a velvety grey from end to end. A wash without cracks, behind which the sun buzzed faintly and evenly. On the ground, leaves like splotches of paint— brown, red and yellow—bright green grass poking slender fingers in between. And in the distance, behind a row of benches and a snow fence, a tree stood silent in…

Read more

Our twisted ringleaders have decided to open the Midnight Vault once again. If you enjoyed my story for last year’s event, The Creative Lives of the Lichtensteins, you’re going to love this one.

In your travels across the Substackiverse today, keep an eye peeled for those eerie images that will let you know you’ve stumbled into the Vault, or click the b…

Read more

I wake in the early morning to voices—hushed, official-sounding—and the tin-can chirp of someone calling through a handheld radio. Outside, it’s barely dawn, the sky through my windows a smoky orange. I know the tone of these voices.

Someone died, I think to myself. I knew it. 

The white porcelain teacup on my bedside table sits empty and cold, and I peer at the leaves clinging to the inside. They still reveal the unmistakable shape of a skull. I wrap my arms around myself, chilled all over again.

I swirled those leaves yesterday, searching for a clue about the month to come, but when the tea leaves tell you someone’s going to die, well that’s not exactly news around here. The only way out of Lily Gardens Retirement Village is on a stretcher.

Maybe Marian next door? Or Lorraine across the hall? The ghouls’ll be lining up for that corner apartment.

Tucked under the saucer, I spy my little love note from Elroy. A glittery feeling fizzes in my chest, burning away the chill of death. Elroy Marshal, the single most beautiful man in this swamp of an old folks’ home, has that effect on me. Elroy Marshal, with his thick mane of hair that still holds its black streaks, can warm any room, melt any heart. The girls mob him at dinner every night. And he wrote me a poem. Me. It’s too dark to read it again now, but his hard-edged, slanting handwriting makes my heart flutter.

It’s November first Vinnie, I think to myself, swinging my legs out of bed. Some old biddy is dead but you’ve made it another month, and this time you’ve got a man. 

Rolling my neck and shoulders, I glance at my standard-issue Lily Gardens alarm clock—a silver box with big red digital numbers on its face. It’s almost as old as I am, a testament to the way things were made back then, but today the numbers look weird, like they’re backwards or something. It must have died too.

I stand and immediately something is wrong. The air pressure in the room seems to change— my ears crackle and pop— and my head goes light. I reach for the side of the bed but my hand doesn’t find it, and I feel myself tip through empty air. The walls and ceiling arc around me at dizzying angles, and the floor seems to pull away from my feet, like my bedroom is falling into a sinkhole. The voices get louder and faster outside.

I lunge for the bedroom door and realize the sounds are not coming from Marian’s or Lorraine’s, but from inside my own apartment. My stomach flips. Something’s not right.

I reach for the doorknob but my hand passes through like it’s made of water.

Then the door swings wide, and suddenly Jed is standing there, skinny and bird-chested in white scrubs, looking right at me in my nightgown.

Jed is my favorite of the orderlies, sweet and patient and kind. I think of him like the grandson I never had, and he always looks the other way when I burn incense in my room, or ask for an extra salt shaker without explanation. I’m relieved to see him because I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I reach for him, but he doesn’t move.

He looks into the bedroom at my empty teacup, my unmade bed. A shadow passes across his face.

Behind him I see a stretcher being wheeled away, with a white sheet covering a tiny lump of person underneath. One wrinkled hand with red dagger fingernails dangles off the side, wearing far too many rings for an old woman.

It’s my hand.

No, no, no, no, I think, looking down at my own hands, then searching the faces of the orderlies, frantic to show their mistake. I wave my arms in Jed’s face. I’m not dead! My grandmother lived to be a hundred-and-two!

He turns his back on me.

The front door is open, and as the stretcher leaves the room I see Elroy peering in. I call out for him. My voice creaks and shudders. It doesn’t sound like me at all— it doesn’t even sound human. The orderlies whip their heads around like they’ve just heard a ghost. Jed mumbles something about air ducts, but he can’t wait to get out of my apartment. He slams the door behind him, shaking the pictures on the wall.

I am dead.

I make my way into the silent living room and find the scene that brings it all back. A dozen black votive candles, strictly forbidden by Lily Gardens’ rules, burned down to misshapen puddles. A line of salt across the threshold, now streaked and stomped to oblivion. The pillows from my sofa tossed around the room, blue rubber gloves on the rug.

The faded Lily Gardens carpet, with its field of ugly yellow flowers, stained and damp where I had lain.

A little brown bottle lies tipped on the floor, its tiny cork a few inches away. From its lip drips a thin grayish liquid. I am mortified. It’s the love potion I impulsively cooked up yesterday, an eighty-six-year-old kid on Halloween.

I can’t believe I got it so wrong that it killed me. A spell book lies open on the coffee table, but when I search for answers, I find I can no longer read the letters. Everything looks jumbled and strange, like I’m reading in a mirror.

I picture Elroy standing outside my door, looking at my crumpled corpse. I hope he didn’t put it all together. His eyes flashed black from inside deep sockets. I wonder if he’s torn up about me. I bet Diane is already over there comforting him, bringing some burnt cookies to his corduroy easy chair even now.

I’ve failed many times in my life, but never like this. I storm around my room, anger and fierce grief burning off me in gusts. A stupid child dies playing potions, not a woman with a lifetime of knowledge.

The curtains ripple when I pass by, so I do it again. I can’t hold things in my hands anymore, but I learn I can still make things happen. I can shake the cabinet doors, rattle the teacup in its saucer. I can tilt this painting or that one, rustle the leaves on a potted plant. I manage to knock a votive off the shelf, but only the one that was teetering already.

But every lap around the apartment, I find myself hovering near the stain on the carpet a little longer, a heavy sadness drawing me near. It seems to get darker instead of drying out, a persistent reminder of my terrible mistake.

I didn’t realize I was so small. A tiny smudge on the surface of the Earth, shrinking every year that I stayed alive. I didn’t realize there was so little left of me.

Mourning myself seems pitiful, but I do it anyway. Why didn’t I write that book? Why didn’t I spend more time outdoors? Why didn’t I ever go to Tokyo?

Why didn’t I ever find love?

That one hurts.

I let it sink in. Loneliness was my assassin, a drippy blue neediness that clung to my skirts for seventy years. I tried to resist it, but loneliness lurks. It persists. It lies in wait.

Eventually, that groaning, insatiable urge not to die alone, I guess it wore me out. The hungry void inside me was so desperate to pair up, it pushed me to take the biggest risk of my life, to gamble on a mandrake potion when I knew better. I’ve worked with roots for almost a century, but wisdom and maturity are flimsy things when they’re up against love. Everything is.

I find myself clasping my hands in front of my face— a position of prayer— but I don’t know what I’m asking or of whom. Tears drip down my hands but they never land on the floor; this sadness is mine alone. I press my knuckles to the bridge of my nose and they feel every bit as hard as they did yesterday. I am not here, but I am not gone. I have only myself to ask for forgiveness.

Questions ripple through my mind like starlings but I let them fly away. I don’t know why I’m here or where “here” is. I feel myself at an exquisite crossroads, and I note the moment, as I always have. Those sweet and dangerous times in life when I knew my choice would change everything to come.

I always made my path by walking it, one small foot in front of the other, stubborn head held high.

I loved being an old lady when everyone told me to hate it. And now I will love being a ghost. There must be a reason I’m not gone.

It is late afternoon, only hours since they carted away my body, and a key turns in my front lock.

My pulse quickens and I reach for my robe. It dangles off the edge of the sofa and crumples to the floor. Old habits die hard.

The door pushes open and the Queen of Crones Sandy Gillis shuffles in, her spine bent nearly in half, pink scalp shining under a cotton candy nest of bluish-white hair.

She makes the tiniest turn of her stiff neck, waving a knobby finger in the air, and from behind her emerges a battalion of moving men in blue jumpsuits. They take a few steps in and stop in their tracks, and that’s when I realize I’m wailing—it’s the only sound I can make, and I’m so glad it’s scary.

But it’s not enough. Sandy is ninety years old. She probably can’t even hear me. She flicks her fingers at the movers.

“Come on, boys.” She shuffles up to one of the men and adjusts her glasses. Her posture means she’s looking approximately at his belly button.

“Let’s get this junk out of here and you’ll see. It can be a very nice apartment. Lavinia was a sad old lady, not a witch.”

I look around the room. My ancient leather-bound books, brought over from the old country in my grandmother’s trunk, their parchment pages stained with herbs and blood and sweat. My shrine with its sigils carved into the wood— for weeks I worked on those designs, despite the tremors in my hands, despite having to abscond with a steak knife from the cafeteria to get it done. My precious jars of seeds and thorns, rainwater and graveyard dirt. Even the glass is imbued with power—each jar purchased from an artisan who blew the essence of creation into its heart.

“I AM a witch!” I screech. It comes out as a high pitched whine, unintelligible, but scary. I push across the room with all I have in me. The curtains billow dramatically, and the movers go stock still, their eyes bugged out of their skulls.

Right then Elroy comes through the front door, his black eyes glinting like stones. I stop, feeling relief at his presence. My Elroy will stand up for me. He’ll rescue my things from the bin.

He puts his hand on Sandy’s bent back, and when she cranes her head to look at him he winks. His smile lines crinkle and crease into something beautiful.

“All good little Miss Sandra Dee?”

I can’t believe my eyes but that old crone blushes. My hands curl into fists.

“All good, Mr. Marshal. The residents’ committee is only too happy for you to move into this unit. It will be a lovely space, once you get all this trash out of here.”

“Those heavy bookcases are the first to go,” he suggests to her. “Put in something light and airy, open up the space. This move has been a long time coming.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Marshal, I think one of your golf course paintings would look splendid over there.”

Elroy leans back, looking through my bookcases to the wall behind them. He lets his eyes go misty. My dead heart thumps.

“Honestly, Sandy, as soon as I met Lavinia I just knew,” Elroy begins, pausing for effect and then smiling his square denture smile, “that I wanted her bay windows.”

My…windows?

Sandy squeaks out a giggle and flicks her hand at him, an oh you gesture that hints at familiarity. It makes my stomach turn.

A real estate maneuver?

My chest feels like it’s caving in, my rib cage crumbling like old stone. Seduce the old witch and you can move in to her choice apartment with the bay windows.

I wonder if Sandy was in on it from the jump. Chair of the residents’ committee, she had it out for me since the day I moved in. Always sniffing around my door, accusing me of breaking rules, she would have loved to see me humiliated.

But Sandy Gillis is no mastermind. No, I think. Elroy cozied up to her too. Made sure he was top of the relocation list, even though he’s only been here four months.

“Let’s get on with it, guys. Everything must go!” Elroy claps his hands, commanding the movers, and they start around the room, team-lifting heavy furniture, tossing plants into a garbage bag.

Sandy begins croaking instructions, pointing to various bins. I have no heirs, never got around to making a will. My things will be picked over by my neighbors— they’ll choose the best baubles, the jewelry and china, select the most interesting candlesticks to give their grown daughters—and the rest will go to the incinerator. I’ve done it myself, walking my fingers across a dead woman’s bookcase, rifling through her sewing kit.

My eyes go again to my books and I feel sick. Why did I think I had time?

Elroy charges into my bedroom. As he passes me our arms entangle, and he slows for a moment, turning his face toward me and rubbing his forearm with his hand.

Look at me, you prick, I think, boring into his eyes with my own. See me. I realize I’m still searching for sadness there, in his cruel black eyes.

“Turn on the heat, will you?” He barks at no one in particular. But fear passes across his face for a moment. “It’s drafty in here.”

I follow him to my bedside table where he pulls the poem out from under my tea cup, folds it neatly, and slides it into his pocket. Probably to give again. He calls to the other room.

“Let’s get these sheets and clothes out of here A-S-A-P! Bring the trash bags!” Then, to himself, he mutters: “It smells like old woman in here.”

A door slams inside of me, holding back the tears that want to fall.

For the first time, I notice Elroy’s skinny arms with their weird liver spots, his droopy ear lobes and the sweat stains in his armpits. His fingernails need clipping, and his ear hairs, too.

He’s just some guy, I realize, far too late.

I wonder if he would have had the guts to kill me, or whether he would have moved in and slept next to me for the rest of our lives. Enjoying the view and tolerating the woman. I think of the ways he would have squeezed me into being something I’m not— someone light and airy— and all the ways I would have let him.

If he asked me to get rid of the bookcases, would I have done it?

I let him off so easy, killing myself in a desperate attempt to be more lovable! I did all his dirty work for him. He sent me to the bottom rung of human dignity, a shallow, self-absorbed needy thing, so easy to manipulate. But I kept on going, putting myself in the ground to please him.

As I’m ruminating, Elroy flings open my bedroom curtains, taking stock of his new view. The trees outside are flame-orange, the sun bright, and the room fills with a spiced glow. A curtain catches the side of my exquisite hurricane lamp, an antique oil lantern that has been in my family for generations. I hear the heavy glass scrape across the windowsill until it is hanging over the edge. I watch the oil slosh inside. I throw out my hands to catch it before I remember I can’t.

I can’t hold things in my hands anymore.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t exist.

I bring my clasped hands to my face once again, pressing my knuckles to the bridge of my nose until it hurts. Bone on bone. I am real. I close my eyes, shutting out Elroy and Sandy and the movers, the sounds of scraping furniture and Sandy’s grating giggles. I feel the hot orange light on my eyelids.

This is it, Vinnie, I tell myself. Time to be everything you’ve ever wanted.

Time to crack open every lesson about being polite, reveal the chains and break them.

Time to burn away your empathy, your shame, steel yourself against softness.

Time to drop everything you learned about femininity, peel it away like layers of lace.

You have nothing left in this world but rage.

I pick my way through the maze of my mind, traveling down long-forgotten alleys of betrayal and shame, doubling back to experience every past wrong afresh. I rip through layers of anger, of hurt, breaking down doors I constructed to hold them in year after year. I surge into the darkest corners of my soul, ignoring my fears and gathering up the nightmares I’d been storing there.

I find it at last— that licking flame of rage I’ve always tried to smother.

I am Pandora with the box, but the box is me and the terrors are everything that makes me powerful. I am rage. I am Lucifer. I am the light bringer.

The spark ignites and I open my eyes to see the wick in the lamp catch, seemingly out of thin air. My gorgeous glass lamp, used by all the women in my family to light their way. It will do this one last time.

The flame grows, hungry, feral, then climbs the sides of the lamp, blackening them. As it leaps out the top I rush it, moving the air around me and the air that I am and I manage to rock the big lamp. It rocks once, twice, and then it falls, crashing to the floor in a liquid dance of fire that claims the curtains in seconds.

I fly at the bedroom door, slamming it shut with a terrifying crash. Sandy isn’t my concern, or the movers. Let them go.

It’s only Elroy, reigning King of Lily Gardens, and me, his worst nightmare.

Elroy panics, spinning in place, not knowing which way to turn. His phony black hair dye begins to mix with his sweat and drip down his face. He’s so ineffective in this moment of urgency, any lasting attraction I might have had for him dries up and blows away.

Somewhere a fire alarm sounds, adding to the chaos. I wail over it, louder than I ever have, louder than I ever was in life. This one is born not of longing, but of anger.

This is why I’m still here.

Elroy’s hands fly to his ears and his eyes look like they’ll pop out of his head. As the flames crawl across the carpet toward him and the room fills with black smoke, he falls to his knees, grips his chest and groans. Quite pathetically, if you ask me.

A tongue of flame licks the sweat off his temple, and it is delicious.

It’s November first, I think. I’m still here. And I have a man.

One night after dinner, we visit the graveyard Tommy bought. The centuries-old headstones are so eroded you can only see them in the dark, when you shine a flashlight bright enough to cast a shadow in the worn grooves. Of course we have to go in the dark.

As we crunch around in the grass the air ex…

Read more

Elias watched Anderson wipe bloody hands on his dungarees. At their feet, a colossal elk lay on its back, split from throat to tail, its body steaming in the cool air.

“Too bad the boys at camp won’t see them big antlers,” Anderson said with a grin. “‘Bout the biggest I ever saw.”

The elk’s head, crowned with branching antlers tall as saplings, had been removed, a sawing procedure that made a raspy sound Elias could feel in his molars. Each pull on the blade had been ecstatic, releasing flesh from hide, severing the rubbery arteries and crunchy windpipe.

The head now sat upright on a ragged stump of neck, its velvet muzzle buried in sparse grass. Its antlers clawed the sky like lightning bolts in reverse.

Elias had propped it up that way, muscling it into place against a rock. He had thought it funny, and somehow appropriate, for the animal to watch the proceedings. But now the elk’s eye seemed fixed on him. Neither empty nor docile, the eye shimmered a fiery amber, fringed with dark lashes that looked as if they could blink.

“Think they’ll believe us?” Elias asked, stepping out of its sight-line. He found himself relieved they couldn’t haul the head back.

“They best believe the meat,” Anderson laughed, taking a swig from his flask.

He and Elias had tied the elk’s legs to four small trees to hold it, open and vulnerable, while Anderson made the long incision. Dressing the elk was splashy, physical work, and while Anderson moved expertly, he was a fraction of the size of the beast. He sweat gloriously, his compact body contorting, muscles strained.

Elias was keen and attentive; the sight of so much blood had clarified his mind, sharpened his senses. He was riveted by the ritual— the exacting steps done just so, the way he never knew what was coming next until Anderson made a move. Though he hadn’t been the one to shoot the beast, its capture felt completely personal.

And now, with the elk’s torso open and his hands gloved in crimson, Anderson began to untie its legs.

“Get on in here, Eli,” said Anderson. “Help me shove ‘im over.”

Elias placed his palms on the elk’s flank and dug his boot heels into the dirt. He felt embodied in a way he never had. The animal radiated heat. Its hide prickled with wiry hairs. Anderson grunted.

The carcass rolled onto its side and Elias– who had been a schoolteacher back East, with no experience in such practicalities– suddenly understood why they had bothered to drag its body to the top of a small rise.

With gravity’s help, Anderson reached a hooked blade into the cavity and worked out a mass of purple guts in a sack-like membrane. They plopped onto the earth and wobbled a ways downhill.

The air seemed to waver. Anderson’s competence with blade and flesh was captivating. Elias shivered, his chest dotted with gore, the skin on his arms crackling with gooseflesh. The eye flashed, drawing his attention.

He wished they could kill it again.

It was men’s work on the frontier, life-and-death work that moved the blood and built a fire in the gut. Elias felt hungry and powerful and alive. He had been chosen for this. He felt a tight pulse in his pants and tugged on the seam.

At the same time, his gaze landed on a twitching bit of purple jelly stuck to the other man’s crotch.

Blood painted Anderson’s arms, his clothes, even his boyish face, and when he smiled his teeth shone out of the mess.

“Pull yerself together there Eli,” he said, as he pinched the bit of tissue, squishing it into his pants. He stopped, hand on himself, and winked.

Elias blew out a long breath but didn’t look away. He stuck his tongue into his cheek, leaving things open a moment longer than he should. Anderson coughed and turned back towards the elk.

“Best if we debone ‘im out here,” he said, chewing a bloody thumbnail. “No need to haul out a hundred pounds of bones.”

“Right,” Elias said, bringing his own thumb to his mouth. The elk’s blood tasted sweet and stony.

“Takes ‘round an hour,” Anderson continued. He looked at the sky, which had gone a shade toward dusk. “Might take us into the night.” He leveled his eyes at Elias.

Elias felt his chest squeeze.

“You get started, Anderson. I’ll fetch us some water from the stream.”

“Andy.”

“Right. Andy.” The intimacy of the nickname dried his throat. Possibilities rose from the dirt.

Anderson squatted down by the elk’s head, curling his hand around a thick antler. He seemed to be counting under his breath.

“Shit,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Twenny points…” Anderson’s voice faded. He looked down at his boots.

“Twenty…what?”

“I hope he wasn’t The One.”

“The One– ?”.

Anderson shrugged, chewed his lip. The yellow eye stared past him to Elias.

“Heard things, is all.”

“Things?”

The head was haloed with flies, unperturbed by Anderson’s closeness. The men were quiet for a long moment.

“Things,” Anderson sighed, getting to his feet. “‘Bout a twenty-point elk. ‘Bout the particular patch of woods he reigns. Not a place I want to disturb, exactly.”

He shook his head, fishing his flask from his pocket.

“Legends, is all.”

With the toe of his boot, he nudged the huge sack of viscera. It rolled down the rock face, leaving a wet trail, and came to rest against a tree.

“Legends,” Elias tried to say in agreement, but it came out as a question.

“Best we get back ‘fore dark.”

Elias was unnerved. He thought the men had understood one another. He thought, when Anderson asked him to go hunting…

The Reverend’s stern, grey eyes appeared in his mind. Suddenly, the elk’s gory neck, its unblinking eye and jiggling innards, the blood that seemed to be everywhere revolted him.

Passing the hateful animal’s head, Elias kicked out a foot and knocked it over, sending flies into disarray. It rocked at a weird angle, huge antlers holding it off the ground. Dust coated the animal’s wet eye, but didn’t blot it out.

By the time he reached the bottom of the ridge, Elias had lost his swagger. He felt cold and exhausted. He spit the bloody taste out of his mouth.

It had been nearly a year since he had left icy Wisconsin, digging deep into his soul to find the courage to follow Reverend Watson to their Promised Land. Sixty-five Watsonite men had departed Madison; just fifty-one made it to California.

Soon they would have enough of a settlement to bring in some women, he reassured himself for the hundredth time. A woman would stop his nonsense. A woman would fix him.

But imagining himself though a woman’s eyes, he felt he could drown in shame. He had the overwhelming urge to hide— from Anderson, from Reverend Watson, who would see the sin on him plain as day.

Rather than head for the stream, he turned toward a shaded hollow at the base of a Redwood tree. There, in the comforting dark, he decided to pray for strength and endurance, to return to his men’s work with a clear mind.

As he approached the hollow he began to get a sense of the size of the tree straddling it, surely the biggest he had ever seen. Its bark was rusty red, softened with flaky gray lichen, with grooves bigger than Elias’s outstretched hand. The hollow was deep, velvety black. From its mouth streamed a cold mushroomy breeze.

He craned his neck to the crown, and found himself blinded by the glare of the bright noon sun.

He tried to estimate how much wood was in such a tree. He viewed it with hungry desperation, wishing for a team of men with saws to let their will fly at this great pillar of resource. To bring these giants down to size; God’s trees turned to wagon wheels, spoons, bedposts, sawdust. That’s how they would claim the land.

He stepped back. Looking at the sky again, he felt his heart drop. The sun, directly overhead, burned a hot shaft of light through the foliage onto his upturned face.

The midday sun.

But it wasn’t noon. It was an hour from sunset. Two, at best.

He spun around, but the ridge was gone. No longer the sloping rock face he had scrambled down, he saw a chalky cliff soaring into the sky. He felt a sickening vertigo as he realized he had somehow climbed to the bottom of a deep chasm.

Looking down he now saw his hands and arms were red with fresh blood. It seeped into the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and across his gut, soaked black-red on the front of his pants. He wiped at his arms but could find no injury. The blood sheeted off him then came back, replenished from some unseen source.

Worse, the bloody seam of his pants distended, his wretched desire pulsing, tormenting him.

Elias pressed his hands to his crotch. He called out for help, hesitantly at first, unsure he wanted to be found in such a state. His voice ricocheted off the impossible cliff walls and echoed back. The noon sun, eerily focused on that tiny patch of earth, bore down its heat. He felt his head for an injury— had he fallen off the cliff?— but everything was intact.

He thought to pray but his panicked mind couldn’t settle on the words. When he clasped his hands they were wet, dripping as if he had dipped them in a bucket of blood. Viscous drops fell from his fingers and landed on the pine needles at his feet.

“God–,” was all he could spit out, and sticky saliva stretched between his lips as he sputtered. He adjusted himself, squeezing his legs together. “God! Oh God, please God…”

On the back of his neck he felt a warm exhale, an insistent pressure nudging him into the hollow. He dared not turn around. He heard the elk’s snort, pictured its black muzzle tracing the grass, its sawed-off neck soaking gore into the earth. He relived his relish at the death of the beast, his proximity to Anderson, his thirst for blood and flesh. What did Anderson say? Twenty points? He fell to hands and knees, weeping, and crawled into the tree’s belly.

Around him were great roots, cold and serpentine, wood walls thick and impenetrable. In the dark, that earthy smell turned to something sulfurous, rotted, decaying. He gagged as it pushed into his throat.

Was there a Devil’s Elk? A Devil’s Wood?

Deep in the cavern, something glinted in the dark. Some kind of surface or membrane that held the glare from the sun and flashed it back at him. He didn’t want to go deeper, but when he turned around, the passage he had stooped through was no larger than a fist. Only a yellow dot remained in the wood, and as he lunged for it, it seemed to roll towards him. A pupil. A blink. The elk’s eye gleamed out from the wood, regarding him with slow hate.

He threw himself backward, whimpering and crying, his slippery hands sliding across the ground.

He was trapped in a Hellmouth with nothing but his sins.

Scrambling away from the eye, he crawled toward the flash in the dark heart of the tree. He reached out a trembling hand until it met something cold. Ice? No, glass. He smudged it with that awful blood that would not dry. He knocked on it. It sounded hollow; maybe it would break.

And then he saw her face.

An angel! Bathed in spotless white, she had a round, beautiful face, youthful and unmarred, and her cheeks were pink and glowing. He lurched towards her, gory hands sliding across the glass, nearly blotting out his view. She flinched and spun like she was searching for something. He yelled and she turned away, eyes full of tears.

She could see, he realized. She could see the rotten center of him, his failure as a man, his turn away from God.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry for all of it!” Saliva flew from his mouth as he babbled pleas for deliverance.

“Have you been sent to punish me? Oh, please, please answer!” The angel’s eyes were wide, her mouth open in a silent scream.

“I am not a good man. I am a sinner, I have sinned, oh please, allow me to repent!”

He pulled off his boot and bashed it against the glass, desperate. The angel covered her face.

“Deliver me! Save me from this Hell! I’ll do anything!” The sound echoed through the tree with a horrible emptiness, but the surface held.

A bright light flooded the glass, and then the angel was gone. He gasped for air in the putrid dark, his body sagging, boot dangling in a bloody hand. All was lost.

When Elias opened his eyes, he was lying in the open air. A full moon had risen and lit the forest silver. His arms were dry, clotted with dirt and smudges of dried blood.

He wondered if the whole thing had been a dream.

He got to his feet, stumbling as his knees gave out once and then again. He realized he was wearing only one shoe; the other nowhere near. He remembered taking off his boot, trying to smash through glass with it— but still, he wondered how any of that could have been real. A window, inside a tree? He ran his hands across his head and neck, checking for injuries, and he recalled doing that before too.

He limped and clawed his way up the ridge, tears and snot streaming as he took in his new reality.

At the top, he sat back on his heels and wondered at the scene he beheld. The earth was soaked in gore. The vile sack of viscera had burst, spilling its mess of offal and tunnels across the rock face. Hordes of ants and beetles shivered across its tangled blue Hell.

Then there was a pile of bones, stained black in the moonlight, big black birds fighting over the dreck. Elias retched.

The elk’s head, with its evil, watchful eye, was nowhere.

He wondered how long Anderson would have waited for him, if the man had considered camping out, or even looked for him at all.

Or was a lost soul left to die alone?

If this was a test, he would fail. Had already failed, he knew, in every possible way. He didn’t belong with the Watsonites. Here he would succumb to hunger and terror, his useless body food for bugs and birds, his ruined soul pinned forever to the spot he knelt.

Then he remembered the angel, with her perfect smooth face, her big true eyes beholding him in all his filth and wretchedness. The divine in the tree, how she had flinched from him. How she had cried.

He thought of the way she turned her back.

Had he crawled to the very edge of Hell, only to come back alive? Or was he in Hell now, having been judged and found wanting?

Would he spend eternity on this dark ridge or would he die here alone, rejected on Earth as he was in Heaven?

The sounds of the forest rose around him— owls and insects, winds and whispers and creaking wood. Elias fell forward to his palms, pressing his forehead to the rocky soil, digging his fingers into the earth. The dust was warm and smelled like life.

Chasm is a two-part story. Read the companion piece, by the incomparable , here.

Subscribe now

My sorority sister’s husband died in a car accident. I learn this fact while doing cocaine in the bathroom of a Jacksonville, Florida dive bar.

A tiny amount of cocaine, I want you to know. It’s just that I don’t like laughing on weekdays. Or standing around in Jacksonville, Florida dive bars with my shoes sticking to the …

Read more

Josie’s ears filled with the crackling background sound of the ocean, and as the heavy water rolled over her head she felt free for a moment, light and loose-limbed. She let her neck wobble under the pressure from the wave. And then she kicked something.

She knew immediately that it was Something. Not a rock or a clump of seaweed, but something that wasn’t meant to be there.

She doubled over and opened her eyes into the solid green water. Grains of sand like static blurred anything more than a few inches away. She swept her hands through the murk, her fingers blanched in watery sunlight, trying to grab whatever it was before the waves sucked it away. Her neck prickled. She didn’t know what she hoped to find.

She bumped it, then finally wrapped her fingers around it. Hard rubber, pillowy fabric: a sneaker. When she pulled her hand back through the silt she saw a bony ankle sticking out of the top. A skinny leg leading off into the gloom. Her heart beat hard. Julio.

She pulled the leg and it suddenly kicked out, jerking against her grip. He was alive! She grabbed his calf with both hands, dragging him towards her, dragging them both toward the surface. Her lungs burned.

Julio’s face swam into view. His skin was bloated, hazel eyes bulging, hands windmilling wildly. He clawed her collarbones and pushed her down into the depths, climbing her body like a ladder in a desperate dash for air.

Even though he was half her size, he had the immeasurable strength of a drowning person. Josie’s chest began to spasm as the last air left her lungs in a sheet of bubbles. The impulse to inhale was overpowering. She reached for his head, her training taking over. She needed to immobilize him, or he would kill them both.

Her fingers found a lock of his hair, slick with ocean slime. She wrapped it around her hand and yanked him back, turning his body away from her. Looping her arms underneath his, she interlaced her fingers behind his head, locking him in a hold, and kicked for the surface.

They broke through. Josie coughed, fresh air stinging her lungs. She blinked against the salt and began to swim for shore.

But Julio, locked in her arms, disintegrated, his limbs coming undone from the whole, one by one. She tried to catch an arm as it floated across the waves, but as she did Julio’s head rocked forward off his neck, landing face down with a splash. Inside the stump of his neck Josie saw a nest of scuttling crabs, dozens of legs and claws picking away at his flesh from the inside.

She woke up with a searing pain in her chest, the feel of that sneaker on her fingertips.

Thigh-deep in the surf, Josie linked arms with Seth on one side and Hendricks on the other. The water was as warm as it would be all year, but her muscles felt cold and stiff, her bones heavy as lead. The Atlantic hissed and growled, spitting salty mist and hurling sloppy breaks at the trio.

The lifeguards fanned out perpendicular to the shore, and began trudging through shifting wet sand and relentless waves, their bodies the teeth in a giant human rake. Hendricks, at just under six feet tall, was submerged to his waist. Beneath the cloudy surface they dragged their feet, sweeping for a sign. Any sign would do, but finding a whole body would mean they could go home.

Julio Acevedo had disappeared from Watson Beach two days ago. He was ten years old, with skinny arms, skin the color of a wet sandcastle, and hazel eyes that burned out of his school photo— the one his mom had given to the cops and they had flashed to the lifeguards in turn.

As if lifeguards needed to know what his face looked like.

The September rip tide pulled at Josie’s legs— a steady, swirling pressure as insidious as it was insistent. It was as if the ocean knew that Labor Day had come and gone, as if the Atlantic itself had struck a bargain with the naked apes. After lapping sleepily all summer, welcoming swimmers with pats on the back, September was when the sea reclaimed itself, clawing at the sand with white-peaked waves, thirsting to suck late-season swimmers into the void.

“Let’s find this crab food so we can go home,” Hendricks barked at them.

Rod Hendricks was too old to be a summer lifeguard. Muscular, with a square head, his bronze chest and arms were speckled with black stubble. He was an ex-marine or something— the younger lifeguards all speculated about him— and a surprisingly inelegant swimmer, heavy and flailing during water tests. But his lanyard was stacked with the black beads they were awarded for rescuing people, and he had a way of barking orders they all listened to.

Josie felt his sandpaper skin against her arm and suppressed a snarl. Two days ago she had opened her eyes to his hard angled pecs in her bed, plastic and shiny in the dawn. He had shaved his arms in her shower, a scene she found so revolting she left him to lock up her apartment himself. She swallowed it like bile, closing her eyes behind her sunglasses to block the whole thing out.

The summer was supposed to be over; she shouldn’t have had to see Hendricks again.

“Dude, you’ve got it all wrong,” Seth shouted over the waves. His broad swimmer’s chest rose and fell with the effort of staying upright in the break. He was a hair taller than Josie, but also lazier, so he took the shallowest spot in the line.

“We’re getting time-and-a-half for this shit! We should be going as slow as possible. Maybe a couple more kids’ll drown while we’re out here.” He laughed his high-pitched laugh.

“Seth, please shut the fuck up,” Josie said through clenched teeth. She considered kicking his leg out from under him. “I’ve had to listen to your bullshit for —”

“Roller!” Hendricks yelled, interrupting her tirade and ducking his head under a big swell.

Josie ducked too, dropping both their arms, glad for the respite. The summer had been punishing, hot and hard, and it should have been over days ago, but they’d agreed to stay on to help find Julio. Other teams of lifeguards were combing the beach between jetties, methodically sweeping the surf for Julio’s little body. Divers searched a grid farther out.

This effort, though it weighed heavily on her, made her feel like part of something important. Watson Beach Search and Rescue. She would return to classes a couple days late, humbled by the burden of her Very Important job, maybe with a story to tell about the moment they found him. While she knew somewhere in the back of her mind they would not be rescuing Julio after two days, she hoped the recovery would fall to someone else.

And then, in the two seconds she was submerged under the swell, she kicked it. Something in the waves, inorganic, hard and soft. Just as it had been in her dream.

She swept her arms back and forth, hoping she had imagined it. But as soon as her fingers grazed it she knew, the tactile sensation was so exact. She grabbed on, despite herself, then found her feet and stood. She sputtered then shouted “spot!” — code to alert the line that they’d found something without raising the curiosity of stragglers on the beach.

She looked down at her shaking hands and saw she was holding a black Nike, half full of sand. Her skin rippled with goosebumps.

Josie turned the shoe over and seawater poured out, followed by a river of sludge. The boys stopped where they were standing, as if she was holding a severed limb. She stood in the whitewater alone, the little shoe not a dream but something so real in her hands.

Its black lace was knotted twice, a double bow impervious even to sand and sea, and Josie saw Julio tying it tight, his little legs running out on the slick jetty after dusk, his rubber soles wobbling on uneven stones. She saw a seagull taking flight just out of his reach, heard its teasing caw. She saw the boy squatting down to inspect a ripped fishing net tangled in the rocks, dark hair ruffling in the wind, one little finger tracing a mussel shell.

Then a September wave, full of all the hunger and swirling madness the ocean could hold, grabbed his knobby ankle and pulled him under. Brine filled his nose and mouth, smothering the cry before he could muster it. Josie coughed and spit up a stream of cloudy sea. She looked to Hendricks, panic in her eyes.

But Rod’s eyes were Julio’s, hazel and shrieking. In her mind, she saw the rip tide curl like a constrictor around Julio’s ribs, little bones striped across his narrow back. It dragged him out, deep into the belly of the ocean, where his thrashing only tightened the grip. A cool, wet mist zipped up behind him, like he was never even there.

“Check the jetty,” Josie croaked, her voice hoarse and scratchy with salt. Hendricks high-kneed through the surf toward her.

“Did you see something? Is it him?”

Josie felt Julio’s panic and her heart surged as he clawed for the surface, white water blocking his view of the sun. His mind in her mind reeled with cartoon images of great white sharks, but it was only the ocean he should have feared, it’s unending hunger for things on land.

She tasted the iron tang of his fear, watched his little sneaker snag on the rocks and his socked foot slip out.

She thought of his mother, pressing a thumb onto the toe of the Nike, checking there was room to grow.

Stay off the jetty, Julio, she begged him. But it was much too late.

Hendricks dived into a wave and swam toward the jetty, his strange loping stroke like he was tackling the surf on a football field. Josie stumbled onto the sand, waving the shoe over her head in the direction of the lifeguard station.

“Call the divers! Tell them to sweep the jetty,” she panted, before falling onto her hands and knees, overwhelmed by the new signals in her brain. Seth stood frozen, mouth open, tan skin gone ash.

She sat on the sand, the shoe in her hands like a relic, as a couple uniformed police officers jogged out to her. She watched the big white police boat cutting wake back to the jetty.

Then the police were with her, their black boots kicking up sand. They pulled the shoe out of her grip and dropped it into a paper evidence bag, where it landed with a dry crackle. Evidence of what, she wondered. The Atlantic Ocean kidnapped a child? The September tides committed a murder?

After a few minutes, Josie saw a diver’s hooded head pop out of the water, his hand raised. A body bag was passed over the side of the boat, and Josie watched them drag it through the waves and disappear below. Over the radio, she heard a crackle, then a gravelly voice.

“Pretty sure this is the kid, L.T. We got him.” The divers passed the bag, now heavy, over the side of the boat. It was hauled in like a fishing net, water draining from the feet.

One cop clapped the other on the back. She answered on the radio.

“I imagine he looks pretty bad Cap. You sure it’s him?”

“Diver says right size, hair color, skin color. Eyelids and lips pretty much gone. Crabs like the peely parts, you know how it is.”

Josie tasted acid. She looked out at the boat but a black dot in the waves caught her eye. She watched as it was carried in on a pillow of white foam and deposited neatly ashore.

A black Nike.

Then another one washed up next to it. She pointed, but couldn’t find words.

“L.T., you seeing this?” The gravelly voice came back over the radio. Josie heard the cop say “what the,” and she got to her feet, sand clinging to her wet skin like fur.

The cop fumbled with her radio and dropped it in the sand.

A dozen black sneakers dotted the beach, more arriving with every crash. Seconds later, there were a hundred, the waves throwing up black Nikes like a person spitting watermelon seeds. Soon the tide line was fringed with them.

Josie stumbled into the surf, arms out to her sides, and waded through the black current. The ocean spray tasted mineral and ancient, but it seethed with the sharp smell of rubber and nylon, a sloppy, immiscible brew of element and ersatz. The rip nudged her calves.

She grabbed a shoe as it floated by on a current of shoes, black laces double knotted on each. She saw Julio tying those knots, over and over and over again.

I’m excited to share my story for ’s colossal Weather Reports project, and to introduce you at long last to the mayor of Winter Port. If you like this, or want to learn more about the project, check out Jon’s page here. Many thanks to Jon for his deliciously eerie idea.

Percy wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, even though he’d been told not to do that.

It makes you look old. Like, antique, the consultant had said, looking herself no older than eighteen.

He shoved the handkerchief in his pocket. The other guy was going on and on about the end of the world.

“…manmade weather patterns we have unleashed through unending greed and cowardice…”

Manmade? Percy thought with a swallowed sigh. Y’all wish.

He pretended to take notes at his lectern, pressing his lips into a thoughtful line. He had been advised to take notes, but he didn’t have any use for them, so he doodled instead, swirls and spires, those “manmade” weather patterns he couldn’t stop thinking about.

It didn’t matter what either candidate said in the debate. A Sackett man had been mayor of Winter Port for going on forty years. Percy Thorne Sackett IV was born to shake hands, regurgitate sound bites, and remind voters of his father, the late great Mayor Trip Sackett.

A light on the moderator’s desk flashed red. She turned to face Percy.

“Mayor Sackett? Same question.”

Percy widened his eyes a touch, allowing that little fire to ignite behind their blue irises. He heard his father’s voice: The people don’t want a lecture, they want a leader.

“Folks, I don’t know about you, but my SUV never coughed out anything that looks like that sky out there. If it did, I’d have taken it over to Mel’s Texaco a long time ago.” Percy held for their chuckle, and for the little squeeze in his throat to subside.

Talk about it without talking about it, the consultant had said. It being the apocalyptic sky outside.

It was just after eight, which meant the shining, iridescent cloud veil was gone for the day. Colossal black spires would be rising up on the horizon to blot out the stars, like they had every night for three months, a cosmic gathering no one on Earth understood.

“My opponent,” Percy said, pointing but not looking at the thin man in black-framed eyeglasses, “He wants you to change your lives, shrink them down. But that’s not what God wants for Winter Port.”

Percy remembered those frantic first weeks after the sky went dark— his mouth flooded with a bloody, metallic taste, ears ringing from the constant hum until he could feel it in his molars. On the news, it was scientists battling preachers, professors teaming up with kooks, everyone drowning in fear as their senses abandoned them and the eerie sky leered.

But while others wept and panicked, Percy became aware of a little sliver of light. A door had cracked inside of him, and something seductive was leaking out. An idea. A dream. He began, with a feeling as alien to him as the shimmering clouds, to wonder if he could become someone else.

Being mayor wasn’t his choice; it was a skin each Sackett son donned the day his father died. But surely, human creations like mayoralties would fall away in the face of cosmic unrest. Surely, a new path was opening up for Percy. Imagining the coming apocalypse– the way it would tear down human walls, break their chains– he thought for the first time ever about the word freedom.

“God wants us to be big,” he bellowed to the TV audience. “God wants us to be magnificent, worthy of his creation. But most of all, God wants us to get on our knees and pray.” He paused and someone in the studio audience shouted YES!

And then…nothing. City business continued. Emails flowed, traffic lights blinked, garbage cans were dragged to the curb. Percy, so convinced he had found a way out, was carried toward another election on an unstoppable wave of tradition.

The very sky had changed but the people of Winter Port could not.

“I know God has a plan for our town,” Percy delivered this line, engineered by speechwriters and consultants, for the hundredth time. “These clouds— whatever they turn out to be— they’re part of His plan.”

The audience clapped without enthusiasm. The moderator turned to him.

“Mr. Mayor, the question was about the parking situation downtown. Will you commit to adding two hundred more parking spots if the voters give you another term?”

Percy looked up into the studio rafters, strung with heavy lights and snaking with cables. His eyes burned. Parking spots. He suddenly envied his father, dead at fifty-nine of a spectacular heart attack, his still-blond hair combed over his head. He wanted to scream until his chest caved in.

Instead, he leveled his shining blue eyes to the camera, staring into every Winter Port home at once. He knew what his people wanted like he knew his own name. Even if he hated them for it.

“God willing,” he said, and the applause was thunderous.

After a break for commercials and a tired handshake line, a production assistant in oversized headphones met Percy backstage and escorted him to his waiting SUV.

“Time to go, Mr. Mayor,” she said.

“Thank you very much, Miss. You get home safe yourself.”

He reached for the door handle and her hand flew out, landing there first. It was the color of an undercooked biscuit. She didn’t open the door but pressed her palm flat against it.

Percy noticed her long nails were painted with an oily sheen, same color as the haunted sky. Strange tattooed lines crept up her arm, like veins in marble, and he suppressed a wave of nausea.

“Your god is dead,” she said, sneering to reveal teeth filed into horrible points.

Percy let out a strangled, grunting chuckle. The back of his neck felt cold. His eyes darted to the driver’s seat, where his clueless brother-in-law Ed was scrolling on his phone.

“Now, I’m not so sure about all that,” he began, trying the aw shucks on her.

“The new world will be born from the ashes of the old,” she said. “In oblivion, there is freedom.”

Percy looked at her, unable to move. Her eyes were different colors—one brown, one the color of olive oil, so clear and luminous it looked like it might spill over onto her cheek.

Freedom. The very word felt subversive. The hairs on his arms stood up.

“Time to go, Mr. Mayor,” she said, opening the door. He nearly fell into the car, she had so unbalanced him. She closed the door. At the sound, Ed met Percy’s eye in the rearview.

“Ready to go, Boss?” Ed asked.

“Yep,” Percy said and his voice came out as a dry squeak. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go.” He looked out the window and she smiled as they pulled away.

“Clear night tonight, brother,” Ed said from the front seat. “Spires are really something.”

“Yep,” Percy said. “D’you think Genie watched the debate?”

Ed’s eyes shot to the rearview and he looked afraid.

“Not sure, Boss,” he looked down, fiddled with the air conditioner. “You know she’s busy these days.”

Percy felt bad baiting Ed into the little white lie. The only thing his wife was less interested in than politics was Percy himself.

“Yeah, she never stops,” he smiled, letting Ed off the hook. Everything is fine.

Percy reached for the earphones he kept in his pocket, cramming plastic nubs into his ears to block out the hum from the sky. Most people wore earphones these days— going through their lives with private soundtracks in their heads. Percy preferred white noise.

As they pulled away from the garage, his eyes were dragged across that strangely compelling horizon. Instead of stars, curved and swirling black shadows spiraled up from the edges of the universe, sealing off the world like a great dark mausoleum.

The twinkle came back into Percy’s eyes as he traced the dizzying outlines of those shapes, feeling as small and precarious as he ever had. The feeling wasn’t a bad one, as he had always thought it would be to feel small. It was a stirring in the center of his torso, an indigestion of the soul, something electric and enticing. The spires were a sentient Mandelbrot nothing, an end that wanted to be born.

The sour taste of metal filled his mouth, tangy and bloody like iron. He licked his lips. Genie and the kids didn’t get the metallic taste. Instead, they spoke of a fresh, sweet perfume on the air that he could never access. Every time Percy was outside he felt like he was sticking his tongue in an outlet.

No one knew he was one of the metal mouths. If it got out it could hurt the campaign.

“Ed, you got a bottle of water in here?” Percy asked. “I’m about as dry as a sandbar in July.”

“Yeah Boss, should be under your seat.”

Ed turned onto Harrison Road, a dark, winding path that ribboned around big Lake Harrison. Earlier generations of Winter Porters had cleared out the swamp, dredged the bottom, and hacked through the palmettos, revealing a wide lake that flooded the neighborhood every chance it got. It was the crown jewel of Winter Port.

Percy and Genie had met on Lake Harrison: she a water skier, the golden daughter of Winter Port’s Chevrolet King, and he the town’s royal scion, sloppily driving a speedboat and throwing out wake. Harrison was chock full of gators, but it sparkled in the sun like a giant swimming pool.

Well, it had sparkled. Back when there was a sun.

Percy looked at the dark water, colossal sky spires rising up behind it like a crown, and his chest felt like it would cave in from grief. The human world had persisted in its meaningless patterns– even become slightly worse–when given a chance to reconsider. The traps, once laid, could not be pried open.

He thought of the woman at the studio, her strange eyes, the way she had spoken his truest desire out loud.

“Ed, can you pull over please?” Percy leaned forward, tapping Ed’s headrest.

“Boss?”

“Can you pull over please? I want to look at the lake.”

Ed pulled to the side of the road and the tires were muffled by damp grass. Percy opened the door and swung his legs out. For an instant, he smelled something familiar— green things, muddy banks, cedar bark—before the metal in his mouth crowded it out.

The perfume of the swamp brought a ghost of a memory to his mind and he grasped for it. A sky dotted with white clouds, a black moccasin slithering across the lake. The smell of boat gas, the sleepy quietude of skin drying in the sun.

“Ed, you go on. I’ll walk home.”

“Percy, I—.” Ed’s eyes didn’t always point in precisely the same direction, especially when he was under stress. Now it seemed he had one worried eye on Percy and one on the lake.

“What is it, two miles? I think I can handle that, Ed. Didn’t get my steps in today!” Percy smiled his buttery politicians’ smile and felt a lurch in his guts.

“Ok, Percy. If you’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Take the car home, you can pick me up in the morning.”

Ed saluted weakly and Percy shut the door. He waited for the car to pull away before stepping out of his shoes.

His sock feet were cold on the wet earth and he walked towards the lip of the lake. There was hardly a border between land and water here, only progressively wetter grass. He took the earphones out of his ears and dropped them into the lake with a plop.

The hum roared and sang, stirring his brain into mush. Over its maddening tone he heard a splash, pictured a gator cutting through the swamp to check him out, its yellow eyes absorbing light Percy could not see.

His pant cuffs became heavy with lake water.

He took another step into the velvet mud, then another. Soon, the water reached his thighs. He dragged his hands across its surface, sending shining ripples out and watching them sync with the hum. He felt the pressure wave of something big swimming past.

He opened his mouth, letting metallic saliva ooze out and drop onto his tie. He realized if he didn’t try to swallow it, the taste subsided. He breathed cool lake air through his open mouth, tasting tannins, muck and duckweed, until he thought he would choke on grief. He looked up, sobbing, at the spires that had failed to end the world.

The spires stared down at him and hummed.

Hello from the past.

By now I am many days into my Analog August, a brief season of shrugging off the digital chains and running my fingers through the grass.

Too cringe?

Oh-the-fuck-well. Analog August is when you can be cringe from top to toe and no one even has to know about it because you don’t tell on yourself in onli…

Read more

Peter knew for sure that if they’d named him Twyla, he would have been beautiful.

He knew this truth like he knew his own name was wrong. Out of time, out of sync. Uncool, unbeautiful. Twyla wove through his body like a vein of gold, a barely hidden lode of soft glittery truth. She would have been something.

His mom loved to tell the story, how she’d been…

Read more

Welcome to Beach Reads for Goth Kids, my summer horror extravaganza. All summer, I’m delivering short stories that pack a pulpy punch, best consumed with a tiny paper umbrella. Think heatwave madness, monsters from the deep, and things that go bump in the backyard.

Oh, and they aren’t really for kids, but the misunderstood goth teen who lives inside us all.

This week, just when you thought it was safe to go back to the bottom of the sea on a deep water technical research dive, we present Dive Log.

Dive Log, 07 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

Vis. 35-55m

Temp: 72F (surface)/66F (bottom)

Depth 72m

Time at Depth: 22 minutes

My first dive to the “rings” with Daniela (Dr. Lefebvre) and the French team. Visibility clear and excellent. As we reached the seafloor, the rings came into view in all directions. A stunning, otherworldly pattern, they stopped me cold on the descent. I’ve never seen anything like them.

Huge, perfect black circles are scattered on the white sand as far as you can see, exactly as Didier described. Sonar mapping shows they extend about half a mile in every direction. Each ring has a “bullseye” or small mound in the center and is outlined by rocks and small debris.

While these are typical materials for the location, how they formed into hundreds of perfect circles has so far evaded explanation. We are among the first humans to verify this phenomena with our own eyes, previously only sonar and remote subs have been here. Truly a career-defining moment.

The pattern is even more striking because the seafloor in this area is nearly barren, nothing but a few swirls in the sand. Not even a stray piece of plastic or any trace of the human world, which we see on almost every dive these days, even at far greater depth.

There is a near total lack of marine life inside the rings, while the borders show some growth of calcareous algae (CA) and gorgonian corals. Did see some sea slugs and a few snails among the gorgonians (See Daniela’s log for biology notes). But it is truly a desert down there— vast, quiet, and defying our understanding. Forgive the poetic license, but the stillness gives it a sacred quality, almost like a cathedral.

We took measurements— rings are between 3 and 5 meters across. Photographed as much as we could, but time at this extreme depth is limited. 4+ hours decompression needed for a 25 minute dive. Note: we are breathing a custom tri-mix, developed by the French dive team exclusively for this expedition. Will of course note any anomalies with the gas.

Dider is talking submersibles given the extreme depth and wasted time on decompression and surface intervals. But you miss so much behind glass. Can’t wait to get down there again.

Dive Log, 09 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

Vis. 50 Feet

Temp: 71 (surface)/66 (bottom)

Depth 72m

Time at Depth: 24 minutes

Daniela and I were joined by two divers from the French team— Elias and Anne-Laure— to help operate the drill. Descent was breathtaking once again. Water electric blue. These black rings emerge out of the depths in every direction as you sink. Undisturbed, quiet, powerfully symmetrical. Feels like landing on the hide of a colossal spotted animal, or the cratered surface of the moon.

Drilling was not a success, leaving me mildly concerned for my part of this project. Obtained several core samples from around the bullseye centers, but the hills themselves are made of harder material than expected— perhaps igneous in origin. Broke two drill bits trying to get into one.

Tried a second site, and when we managed to punch through, there was a heavy rumbling sound and a dark fluid burst out and seeped up through the water column. Daniela was lost in a cloud of the effluvia for almost a minute— I joked later that it looked like she exploded. She didn’t find it funny.

The French divers thought we struck oil, but I suspect it is heated water, due to geologic activity beneath the rings. Rusty color most likely indicates iron deposits, which could account for the difficulty drilling as well. Took samples.

The rumble might have been caused by our equipment, hard to pin it down. Onboard sonar picked it up as well. Remote chance it was unrelated to us— far off whale call or shipping activity?

Decompression uneventful, if tedious. The gas is unremarkable so far, except that it’s keeping us alive.

Dive Log, 11 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

Vis. 90 Feet

Temp: 77 (surface)/68 (bottom)

Depth 75m

Time at Depth: 28 minutes

Conditions today were spectacular, the best we have seen so far. Nearly zero sediment— vis at least 90ft. This led me to stay at depth a bit longer than I should have. But the tri-mix feels great, and I think I can push it a little. Might as well get some new data for the techs.

I’m feeling quite at home on the bottom, adjusting to the extreme depth, the way it squeezes your eyes, lungs and guts so you feel a little like a tube of toothpaste. I joked to Daniela that my hands were flattening at depth, like tentacles. Imagine how easy things would be! She doesn’t think I’m funny. I find her rather humorless, to be frank.

The rings have gone from an alien landscape to my own research lab. I’ve never been more comfortable, in fact. I feel like I can anticipate everything that’s going to happen down there, I’m navigating the field like swimming through my own living room.

[add.: I am aware that confidence, relaxation, euphoria are early symptoms of narcosis. Gas mix is performing well, and I am under constant supervision by med team]

So far, the composition of the red liquid has been tough to nail down. Onboard lab is so limited, they could only say what it is not: oil, oxidation (ruling out the possibility of iron) and algal bloom. What it is remains a mystery.

Oddly, Daniela’s skin has taken on some staining from her exposure to the leak. She was in full gear at the time— hood, gloves, etc. but her arms and chest show wine-colored blotches. Med cleared her to dive but I can tell she’s distracted. She asked to avoid the site of the leak today, but that’s our most interesting site so I did not assent.

She hovered around observing marine life while I took additional samples.

The fluid continues to stream out of the knob at pace— I would estimate six to ten liters an hour. Visibly, the mound itself seemed a little smaller today but the ring around it is actually bigger. These are not static formations, as was believed. All we have is possibility.

Dive Log, 12 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

Onboard log

No dive today. Daniela is experiencing some reaction to the fluid, perhaps an infection of some sort. Her skin is dark red and deepening, the blotches no longer individual spots but connected with each other. There is a salty, tangy smell about her— bacterial I believe, but I am not an expert.

Elias, Anne-Laure and I are clear. Didier unreachable. Connectivity spotty.

After time at depth, the boat seems unusually bright. My eyes have begun to ache. Will discuss with med staff.

</Personal Record/>

I emailed Kelley today for the first time in three months. No idea if the message will reach her. But stuck on the boat, with Daniela sick, I found myself experiencing an unusually powerful dread, almost a literal whispering in my ear this might be my last chance to tell Kelley everything. [Ears checked out— nothing medical.]

Why foreboding? Conditions are good, I am surrounded by support staff, my research is on the precipice of greatness. And yet…

I wanted I needed Kelley to know why I left. And more than that I needed to tell her about the rings— my drive to describe them is overpowering. Their sublime, silent, awesome perfection, put simply: their magic. Something about this site offers an affirmation to me that life is not as straightforward as I thought.

The rings are the pinnacle of my questing, the reason I spent my adult life under water. I wish desperately for her to suit up and join me, to see them with her own eyes, to experience profound geometry 200 feet below the surface. Down there, I think only of possibility.

At sea bottom, there are 89 pounds of pressure per square inch of my simple human body. Compressed by the weight of the atmosphere and the weight of the entire Mediterranean, I am released.

At surface, I fear I have foreclosed all possibilities remaining in my life.

Creating this record of my mental health puts my career at great risk. But I am a scientist. It is out of my deep commitment and respect for science that I am recording my observations as possible symptoms of narcosis or some other poisoning. Sentimentality, pathological nostalgia, and a general, deepening malaise. Symptoms, not epiphanies.

Dive Log, 12 July 2029, Entry 2

Agriate Marine Park

</Personal Record/>

1800h: I came upon Daniela in the lab, typing notes. Her back was to me and her hands on the keyboard were as red as Cabernet.

To my great horror, as I stood there, her hair began to lift from around her shoulders and float up through the air around her—like seaweed, like she was submerged. I could see the back of her neck is splotched burgundy. That sour milk smell filled the room, so sharp I covered my nose.

A snaking line of red fluid began to rise from the top of her head and waver in the air, exactly as it had done 200 feet below, at the drill site. A red ribbon unfurling in reverse. A sea snake or, to be perfectly frank, a surging current of blood in water.

I saw the fluid gather in a puddle on the ceiling, thinking I must be having a hallucination or perhaps a seizure. I backed away from the door just as Daniela turned to face me. Looking at her, my eyes stung— the feeling was exactly that of salt water trickling in through a mask. I knew then I was awake and lucid.

Instead of a face, I saw the rings— the black stony outline, the blue sandy center. And all around, a halo of red water.

At that moment I briefly lost consciousness. I woke in Med bay with an ice pack on my head, my lips swollen and salty exactly like they are after a dive.

I did not explain what I saw. I blamed it on exhaustion, dehydration, whatever pedestrian cause would get me out of there.

I don’t think the problem is me.

Dive Log, 13 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

Daniela has sealed herself in the lab and has obscured the viewing ports with a red substance. Crew members fear the substance is blood, but I believe it to be the fluid produced by the rings.

Expedition financier Didier Grant is has been unreachable for days and internet signal is poor. Catastrophic outcome seems nearly certain.

We are appx 26 hours from port in current cOnditions.

</PersOnal Record/>

When I close my eyes, I see rings. Repeating rings, inverse rings, their patient sentience, their cOlOssal satori. My mouth tastes like the Ocean. My skin tastes like the Ocean.

I have 26 hours to figure Out as much as I can befOre it all ends one way or another.

Dive Log, 14 July 2029

Agriate Marine Park

This lOg is being maintained by Dr. Alex Ramoundos, senior lecturer at North Atlantic University. This is a firsthand account of events aboard the research vessel Hydra, a multinational expedition to explore circular formations found at the bOttom of the French Mediterranean Sea. I will not survive this jOurney, but my records may.

It is nearly impOssible for me to recount recent Occurrences with fidelity or insight. What I have seen defies explanatiOn.

BiOlogist Dr. Daniela Lefebvre of the University of Utrecht is experiencing some sort of systemic infection which is changing the cOmposition of her bOdy. I have fortunately escaped infectiOn and

I am quite pleased with the

Outcomes of my new research: drawing perfect circles. T

here are many surfaces that require circles

but

I’m getting faster and quite good at it, and th

e rings are pleased with me. sO pleased.

I’m nearing perfection. cOmpletion.

I am experiencing periOds of a fugue state during which I have no memories, except of the rings and the red fluid. Anytime I close my eyes, even to blink, the rings appear. It is a psychedelic haunting vision, it is an invitation,

it is a threat.

This is not in my imaginatiOn, as has been surmised by the unqualified and pedantic medical staff aboard the Hydra.

The red fluid is in me, though it has not stained my skin as it has Daniela’s. I have managed tO release a gOOd amount of it back to the sea by cutting circular Outlet flows into my skin. My effOrts have been thwarted several times by meathead crew and tediOus medical staff.

After Daniela sealed herself in the lab, the rest of us were confined to med bay, for close Observation. From there, we watched on security feeds as crew members attempted to force open the lab dOOrs. When the doors were pried Open, we saw Daniela mOmentarily. Her hair wavered in an invisible ocean current— everyOne saw it; I have not been hallucinating.

She exists in a state neither above nor beneath the surface. She smells lactic, unctuous. Her smell is in every part of the bOat.

I will never forget the image on that surveillance feed. Her eyes were invisible in the dark red of her face, her hair floating. Her body appeared streamlined, almost eel-like if yOu will allOw me.

As we watched on the feeds, Daniela’s arms, which have been stained a dark red since Our second dive, began to grow and flatten. It looked like they were being extruded through a die, like she had no bOnes. The arms behaved like liquid in air, eventually stretching impossibly long and thin. We watched in terror and fascinatiOn as she pushed her tentacles intO the nOses and mOuths of the crew members who brOke in, suffOcating them.

Their bOdies have been sealed inside with her. The team barricaded Med bay so I am now a prisOner.

I estimate my chance Of survival until interception by the French navy at 5%.

Dive Log, 14 July 2029, Entry 2

Dearest Kelley,

I want yOu to knOw I am happ

y. My Only regret, and it is a staggering regret, is yOu are nOt here with me, my lOve. I understand

sO much mOre nOw than I did.

Our petty happy mOments and dry little tragedies. Our airy lives, flaking and trivial, Our scratchy cOughing deaths in searing bright light,

heavy bOdies dragged thrOugh insipid atmOsphere. These lives are a mistake, an Offense to our mOther Ocean. We exist on a slim crust of rock that must be swallowed again by the tides.

The human body contains sO much water Kelley, SO much that there is a jOke among Ocean scientists that humans were created by water sO that it cOuld get Out of the water. Did I ever t

ell you that One? That water invented us to get Out Of the sea?

NOw. I must return hOme, take my water back tO its bOdy. If given Only a mOment, One preciOus mOment alOne, I will release the fluid frOm my veins,

the burning air frOm my tired lungs,

and

dive.

I lOved yOu.

Before you go…

In This Way We Bind Them

Limited copies are still available! (seriously, fewer than ten copies still in stock!)

Four authors. Four forgotten towns. Four tales you were never meant to hear. This handcrafted horror zine invites you to the shadowy edges of the map, where the trees whisper, the locals avoid eye contact, and the rituals never stopped.

From cursed woods to silent swamps, each story offers a chilling glimpse into the folklore that binds its town, and the things that still linger there.

Featuring new stories by EJ Trask, , , and and original artwork by Shaina Read, this limited-run zine is a collectible. Get yours here: https://buymeacoffee.com/keithlong/extras.