By the dim light of a dying candle, Grandmother’s hunched back looms over your small, quivering body, fever high. She presses horn against stone—withered skin pulled taut over smooth bone. Smooth bone hard against jagged, carved rock, pour water, mix—the murky water is magic. When did her hands stop looking like […]
An Elegy for Horns Read More »
A flipped boat, he clings to the metal bench seat slick with mossy water, his feet spasming in the unknown depths below him. Because at sixteen, there’s something fucked up about not knowing how to float or tread water. He had skipped swimming lessons because he couldn’t imagine a world where he wouldn’t know how
Each Death Gets Us Closer Read More »
B e watchful of voices that shout shouldn’t, mustn’t, don’t. They said she shouldn’t climb up the fire escape and whisper conversations with the night sky. It was one thing to perch on the roof’s edge, feet dangling, and look down on the city below, taking in the glow of neon lights. But who was
The Wise Internal Voice Read More »
T he truth glistens in its glass jar as I lift it down from its hiding place on the top shelf. My customer eyes it hungrily as I take her smaller jar and remove its lid. The young woman wears her hood low and speaks little–I do not ask her name.
The Truth Merchant Read More »
B reathe deep and break the surface. Ice blue waters tingle on lips. Your arms pull like longboat oars, thrusting you down. Since childhood, you’ve explored every inch of the seabed in front of the beach house, searching for your lost twin, your fingers brushing gray-black sand, which whips into underwater
One Hundred and Thirty-Five Seconds Read More »
S he seemed to sit on the moon. A waning gibbous, her dress draped over the edge. Although far away, I could see the red of her eyes, crusted and tight from crying, and her mouth gaping a hole of perpetual wail. I bowed to her warning, for I’d been expecting her.
For Whom the Banshee Wails Read More »
D ecember 19th. Her birthday. Cathy cried softly into her pillow, a copy of the local paper spread out on her bed. The paper was open to the horoscope page, and she’d enclosed the entire paragraph for Sagittarius with a pink heart and highlighted the relationship sentence:
Where are they going? Beyond the sky, behind the moon, To wait for us someday soon. ~Cold War-era children’s lullaby O lena had planned it this way from the beginning, before the Agency had recruited her, before she began tracking the moon’s phases on the dormitory wall, scratching hash marks into
The Revolution of Olena Read More »
i f you had believed in the old tales, you wouldn’t have gone out when the full ice moon rose in a satin sky and shone down milky white, like a blind eye, its silver river reflecting daylight-brilliant across the unblemished snow; no footprints to follow––man nor beast––only a feeling that something uncanny skulked beneath
when the ice moon rises, and the night is strangely bright Read More »
W hen the knock came, Penny had thought it would be insistent and bold. The way she remembered him. Instead, it fluttered, hesitant, against the door like the wings of a broken bird. She might have missed it if she hadn’t been waiting for it. He’d been smart to send a runner ahead to let
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