CHM May 2023
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-04-21 21:44:50+00:00

Copyright © 2023 by CHM LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Art: Lars Strömquist

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

May has arrived and I hope you remembered to order flowers for, if no one else, the black goat of the woods. Either way, we are glad you are here with us this month. May is historically strong in short fiction, seeing pieces such as “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” in 1932 and “A Star-Change” in 1933 by Clark Ashton Smith. Not to mention “The Statement of Randolph Carter” by Lovecraft in 1920. We’ve worked hard to create a strong penultimate issue for CHM’s third year. Love it? Hate it? Reach out to us and let us know. But for now, on to the lineup.

We open with a unique collection of increasingly horrifying correspondences in “Inbox” followed by an original story by three-time Bram Stoker award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste beautifully blending elements of cosmic horror and atom punk in “Melting.” A young woman revisits her past on a journey to a strange town filled with even stranger inhabitants in “Welcome to Brine Cay.” Then, for our first flash intermission, a neighborhood is abruptly taken over in “This Morning I Was Still a Paperboy.”

A family finds darkness can be rooted deeply in the eerie and atmospheric “In Dark Tabitree” by Christi Nogle. We’ll discover how real a mirage can be in “The Yellow Carousel” before our second piece of terrifying flash fiction and cautionary tale: “The Parlor Door.” Finally, the latest viral sensation has existential and deadly consequences in “The Swish.”

Enjoy.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age upon first reading the story: Dagon by HPL.

Resides in the flatland that is Oklahoma City.

Carson Winter: Co-Editor | Social Media

Horror fan and author with works featured in Vastarien and the No Sleep podcast. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Featured artists this month

Lars Strömquist is a illustrator and artist with a taste for the dark and fantastic. In his art you’ll often find the small hero set against some greater force. Lars lives with his awesome family in the cold and dark northern part of Sweden. When not drawing he enjoys playing the occasional boardgame or tabletop rpg. For more of his art you can visit his instagram or checkout his deviantart page: www.deviantart.com/happytodraw

Pietro Rotelli works as a freelance graphic designer, as a comic book writer and illustrator for Panini (as well as cover artist for CHM, Lovecraftian Studies, Delos Digital, Watson Edizioni and others). My hobby is stop motion and 2D animation with 3D contamination.

Maxwell Marais is an illustrator and author of all things horror currently living in Montreal, Canada. Their work is often featured in the pages of CHM, and their stories can be found in such publications as Thuggish Itch and The NoSleep podcast. Find their art at www.instagram.com/insanity_inc

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

A monthly tome of terrifying tales, lovecraftian, cosmic, and weird.

Inbox

By Alex Wolfgang

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Thank you for your interest in Capital Corp!

We received an overwhelming response to the Senior Labor Provider opening, which makes us feel a wholesome pride that so many talented individuals (like you!) want to join our synergistic and fast-growing team. This volume of response makes for an extremely competitive selection process. Although your background is impressive, we regret to inform you that we have decided to pursue other candidates for the position at this time.

Just as we at Capital Corp value our customers, we value our job candidates and invite you to review future job openings. We hope you find another position that sparks your interest! We are always hungry for new talent.

Thank you for your interest in our expanding enterprise,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Thank you for your recent application for the position of Junior Labor Provider with Associated Assets. We received a large volume of applications from many extremely talented and qualified individuals. Unfortunately, we have decided to move forward with other candidates, and we have not selected you for an interview.

We here at Associated Assets appreciate your interest in our mission to grow and generate capital for further growth. We hope that you will continue to look for future positions in our company. We also encourage you to seek employment from Capital Corp, whom we will soon be absorbing in our upcoming merger deal. The larger we grow and merge with other corporations, the more talent we will need to sustain us.

Thank you for your interest in our increasingly expanding enterprise,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Thank you for applying to our ANY OPEN POSITION position at the State Job Board.

A great deal of talented job seekers applied for this very same position, and it is our sincerest regret that we cannot hire every applicant. Unfortunately, despite your openness to provide any sort of labor, we have decided to move forward with other candidates for ANY OPEN POSITION.

We thank you for your interest in assimilating into the workforce. Please feel free to nourish us with more applications. We also encourage you to seek employment from large, growing companies in the private sector.

Please see our website for the latest job openings from companies we love like Capital Corp and Associated Assets.

Thank you for your interest in converging with expanding enterprises,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

We have received your application for benefits at the State Unemployment Office.

The growing interest in receiving unemployment benefits has been staggering, which makes us feel both humble and proud that so many talented individuals (you included!) want to eat, pay your bills, and avoid homelessness. We know that everyone wants to feel secure in their surroundings. It is unfortunate that as unique individuals, we are surrounded by so much chaos and uncertainty related to employment.

Unfortunately, these numerous applications make our selection process extremely difficult. While we find your lack of employment impressive, we regret to inform you that we have not selected you for benefits at this time.

We here at the State Unemployment Office appreciate your interest in our mission to receive many applications, and we hope that you will not hesitate to send additional applications for unemployment benefits in the future. We recommend sending a new application at least once per week.

Thank you for your interest in continued consumption of necessary resources,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Thank you for applying for employment with Fuse-ex Distribution Unlimited!

The response to our Street Dealer opening has been overwhelming to say the least. Our crack team of chemists have synergized with our hiring department in order to best choose candidates for application acceptance. We are sorry to inform you that, while we think your drug-selling potential is impressive, we worry about your lack of previous experience. In our opinion, only the most passionate and dedicated dealers are reliable as team players. After all, it is of the upmost importance that we provide our customers with the drugs they need to prepare for future mergings.

Just as we at Fuse-ex Distribution Unlimited value our customers, we value our sales team and invite you to review future job openings and apply again once you have some experience in the field. Now that we’ve partnered with both Capital Corp and Associated Assets, we will see a great deal of further expansion in the very near future. We do not yet know to what ends our expansion will go, but we are thrilled at the prospects and are confident that many more team members will be needed.

Within months, we are projected to have more available applications to fill out than applicants to fill them, so please come back and apply then. Keep an eye out for our merged company, BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc.!

Thank you for your interest in preparing customers for convergence,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Thank you for your interest in BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc.!

We received an overwhelming number of applications for the Fraction of Total Mass position, which makes us feel both humble and proud that so many talented individuals (like you!) want to be a part of this exciting new conglomeration of companies. Unfortunately, we have decided to move forward with other candidates for synthesis and have deemed you unworthy of an interview. Although your potential to dissociate from an individual identity and merge into a unified mass is impressive, we believe your lack of real-world experience in this field makes you a hiring risk at this time.

Just as we at BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc. value our customers, we value those who merge with us and invite you to review future openings for total corporate synthesis. We hope you continue to apply for positions repeatedly until we deem you ready for the merging. It is important to us that we continue to receive your applications. Your continued applications are essential to our well-being. Do not stop sending us applications.

Thank you for your interest in a homogenous existence,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

We are disappointed to see that you have not applied for a position in our company for some time. Those of us employed here at BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc. pride ourselves in the go-getter, team player attitudes that led to our employment here in the first place.

We understand how disheartening the job search can be. This is why we encourage you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and continue to fill out applications for more positions. You may have noticed that most of your friends and family have already assimilated with our company. They all sent us many, many applications. Do you really want to be the last individual to join our biomass? If we seem intimidating, don’t worry! We’re less like a company and more like a family.

We urge you to fill out and send us more applications. If you just keep persevering, we are sure you’ll find the perfect spot in our giant, gelatinous ball of carbon tissue. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Thank you for the future applications you are sure to feed us with,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

After rolling our mass over your supposed place of residence this morning, we were forced to conclude that you were not present! Now that it has been over a month since you last filled out an application, we’re beginning to worry about your safety and well-being. We hope our last email didn’t frighten you away. Or maybe we do! After all, existential fear brings additional sources of power to the BioFinance mass, allowing for corporate synergy impossible under more comfortable circumstances. But no day of work is complete without a little sacrifice!

We’re just kidding! Here in the HR office, we’re known for our sense of humor, not just our go-getter and team player attitudes. Maybe if you filled out more applications for employment here, you’d have the chance to get to know us a little bit. We may work hard here at BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc., but we play hard too!

We sure hope you’re somewhere working really hard on new applications for us to receive! Growing so large often leaves us famished.

Thank you in advance for revealing the location of your physical body,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

It has come to our attention that you are no longer opening these rejections. As of this morning, you are among the last ten people on Earth still not employed by BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc. Does that make you feel special? Well, it shouldn’t. There’s no merit in not being a team player, Mr. Mutz. Part of being an adult means putting aside your selfish delusions of grandeur and becoming a part of something bigger than yourself. That’s what being a part of our biomass is all about.

Despite your lackluster application-filling performance, we are still open to the prospect of receiving more of your applications. Here at BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc., we pride ourselves in providing second chances to those who are down on their luck and need the support of a close office family. So please, please, fill out the series of applications you can find on our website. We’re sure that if you simply keep trying, you’ll find the proper place in our mass. Many of our top-performing team members sent us many more applications than you have before they were cleared for ingestion.

Thank you for not giving up on being a part of our amalgamation,

HR Team

* * *

Dear Mr. Mutz,

Congratulations! Despite your unwillingness to fill out further applications, we’ve decided to offer you a position in our biomass.

We were extremely impressed by your clever decision to strap a boat anchor around your leg and sink into the ocean. Did you know that our aquatic sister company is stricter in their hiring process than we are? Regardless, that go-getter attitude is just what we’re looking for. Based on the ingenuity of this plan alone, we’ve decided to break our typical protocol and bypass the application process.

Your body is still technically dead at this point, but our medical department is rapidly resurrecting your cells and preparing you for assimilation as we speak. Before you know it, you’ll be a fully functioning member of the BioFinance Conglomerations, Inc. team!

We know the transition will be a little stressful, but don’t worry! Our assimilation department are experts in biochemical stabilization. Some of our team members describe the somatic liquidation process as unpleasant or painful, but by the time you are resolidified and employed in our homogeneous biogel, those feelings will have passed. We find that within just a few minutes of employment, nearly all of our team members are thrilled at the opportunity they’ve been given and are sincerely proud of the many applications they filled out and sent us.

As soon as you become conscious, the merging will begin. Good luck at orientation! We can’t wait to see you succeed here.

Best wishes,

HR Team

End.

Alex Wolfgang is a horror author from Oklahoma City. His debut collection, Splinter and Other Stories, is available now. You can find his work in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Nocturnal Transmissions Podcast, and the anthologies Howls From Hell, Bloodlines, and the upcoming Fiend in the Furrows III: Final Harvest. When not reading and writing horror, you can find him hiking and camping, playing tennis, drawing with ink, and watching movies with his wife. You can follow him on Twitter @alexwolfgang, on Instagram @alex__Wolfgang, or visit his website: www.alexwolfgang.com

Melting Point

By Gwendolyn Kiste

On the morning the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor turns to liquid, I’m sitting at my kitchen table, wishing I was someone else.

My mother’s in the other room, the television humming with the latest episode of The Price is Right, the live studio audience going wild.

But my mother isn’t going wild. She’s barely moving at all, slumped in her frayed La-Z-Boy recliner, her eyes gone filmy and gray, her mind dissolving like sugar in boiling water.

“Do you want breakfast?” I ask her, but she doesn’t answer.

I hold my breath. Today’s going to be one of the bad days.

“Mom? Did you hear me?” I start into the living room, desperate to rouse her, to make sure she’s okay, when a voice on the television cuts into the morning like a knife.

“There’s been an incident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Reactor Unit Two.”

The broadcast is from the KBO newsroom. My heart seizes in my chest, as I edge closer to the screen.

“We’re yet to learn all the details,” the announcer continues. “Representatives for Metropolitan Edison, however, say there’s no danger to the general public.”

My eyes shift toward the bay window, and through the ragged gingham curtains, I see it. The nuclear reactor, practically in our front yard. All you have to do is cross the railroad tracks and take a road across the river, and there you are. Three Mile Island.

“What are they talking about?” my mother asks from the recliner, suddenly awake.

“I’m not sure,” I whisper and kneel in front of the television, twisting up the volume. Except there isn’t any more to hear. It goes back to regular programming, as if there’s anything regular about this day now.

My hands shaking, I pace the house, trying to decide what to do next. I could call my sister Pam. She lives up past Harrisburg. She’d let us stay with her. But what if that’s not far enough away? What if there’s no place far enough away?”

Through the kitchen window, there’s movement in the next yard. Our neighbor Rose is lying out in her striped bikini, curled up on an old beach towel. She’s always outside, and she’s always alone. Her husband’s a truck driver, prone to long hours at work and long benders at play. The only time he’s around is the only time I’m truly terrified of living in this neighborhood.

I open the back door, and she glances up, giving me a small smile.

“Hello, Stephanie,” she says, as though she wasn’t expecting me, as though I don’t live right next door.

“You shouldn’t be out here.” I shield my eyes from the sun. “They’re saying on TV there was an accident at the plant. It might not be safe to be outside.”

“What difference does it make?” She turns over and adjusts her bikini, her skin glistening in the pale sun. It’s the end of March, too cold for sunbathing, but that won’t stop her.

“That girl’s got no common sense,” my mother used to say. “If she did, she wouldn’t have married that no-good husband of hers.”

Despite being neighbors for five years, my mother’s never spoken to Rose, not even a passing hello, but she always considered herself an expert in everyone, no matter how well or little she knew them. Now I wonder if she remembers Rose at all. Some days, I wonder if she even remembers me.

Rose sits up on her beach towel, her long brown hair cascading across her face. “Do you want to come in?” she asks and then adds, as if to reassure me, “My husband’s out until next week.”

She ushers me into the kitchen where she makes a pot of Lipton.

“It’s been a long time since I had a guest,” she says brightly.

Instantly, a wave of shame washes over me. I should be nicer to Rose. I should bring her over casseroles or cookies and ask her how her day is going. But my mother’s never liked her, which means I’m not supposed to like her either.

I glance around the house, every window polished, every floor gleaming. It looks like an advertisement in here, like something you’d only see in make-believe. “The house looks lovely,” I say.

At this, Rose blanches a little. “I’ve got to keep it sparkling clean for when my husband gets home. If he gets home.” A long moment, as she stares into her tea, her quiet face looking like a porcelain doll ready to crack. “How’s your mom doing?”

I shrug. “The same, I guess.”

For the last year, ever since my mother got sick, everything’s always the same. At least until today.

On the counter, an old Windsor transistor radio crackles with static and the distant sound of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me.” An easy listening station out of Harrisburg. It usually comes in better. Maybe it’s the reactor mucking things up. Or maybe it’s something else.

I finish the last sip of my tea before starting toward the door. “I should get back to my mom.”

“Stop by anytime,” Rose calls after me. “So long as my husband’s truck isn’t in the driveway, I’m alone here.”

At home, the television is still on, but there’s no updates about the plant. Soon, the day evaporates into evening, and I make supper for Mom and me. Meatloaf and boiled potatoes. Her favorite. She must remember too, because she even smiles at me. She never smiled like that when I was growing up.

“Mom’s changing,” I always say to my sister Pam.

“The doctors say that’s to be expected. The illness can make strange things happen,” Pam reassures me, apparently never realizing that two daughters shouldn’t ever consider their mother smiling as a ‘strange thing.’

After I tuck Mom in for bed, I retreat to my own room and linger at the window, the power plant standing just across the river, a line of orange lights on the stacks illuminated like a warning.

When they built that generating station, it felt like a fresh start for this town. Nuclear power was supposed to make our lives better. It was supposed to be our future. Now all it feels like is an ending.

My head heavy, I turn toward my unmade bed, ready to sleep, but a shadow is waiting there. My mother in the doorway, her eyes gone black. “You’re nothing but a spoiled little brat,” she says.

“A brat?” I gape at her. “I’m forty years old, Mom.”

“That makes it even worse,” she says with a sneer. “You should know better.”

She advances a step, and my heart tightens in my chest. I don’t know which part of this is the disease and which part of this is her. I wonder if there’s a difference anymore. There’s somebody in there, but I don’t know who it is.

Then I shake my head, guilt sinking marrow-deep into me. If I were a good daughter, I wouldn’t think things like that. But then if she’d been a good mother, I wouldn’t flinch every time she’s near me. If her temper hadn’t always been as bright and unforgiving as a nuclear flash. If her hands hadn’t so naturally curled into fists. If I hadn’t always stuck by her side, cowering from her but in awe of her too.

“Come on,” I say, and with a gentle hand, I usher her back to her room.

By the time she reclines in bed, the rage in her eyes has faded away, and all I can see is fear. “Are we going to die?” she asks.

“Someday,” I say. “But not right now. Goodnight, Mom.”

I kiss her forehead. Through the window, the plant towers over us, pale white smoke billowing like a tuft of spun sugar into the sky.

* * *

The next morning, every news station is still talking about the reactor.

“Officials from Met-Ed and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be holding a press conference today to give the public the latest updates on the Three Mile Island accident.”

As my mother settles down in the recliner, her feet in slippers, her hair in foam curlers, I huddle at the table, preparing a grocery list. We need to be ready to hole up here. We also need to be ready to run. Either way, we’ll need a couple loaves of Wonder Bread.

“I need to go out for a bit,” I say, clutching my purse. “Will you be okay, Mom?”

She waves me off. “I’m fine,” she says, and her eyes shine back at me.

I can’t help but smile. Maybe it’ll be a good day today.

When I get to Fox’s Market, there are people everywhere, their faces lined and pallid, all of them asking the same questions.

“Have you heard anything? Have they said anything? Do you think we should leave? Do you think we should stay?”

I do my best to nod and sneak between them. I need to get back to my mother as soon as I can. I turn down the cereal aisle, and Rose is at the other end, nudging her cart past dusty boxes of Fruit Brute and Magic Puffs. She smiles as if on cue at each person she passes, but there’s a grayness in her eyes, like she’s hiding something.

“They seem like a nice couple,” everyone says about Rose and her husband, but none of them lives next door. They don’t hear them fighting in the night. And Rose is so good at seeming happy, at seeming normal, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? People expect a certain kind of victim, one with a swollen face or an arm in a sling. But I know from growing up with my mother that it doesn’t always look like that. It can be a red welt on your back that disappears before supper. Or a handful of hair yanked out by the root. Or a shove across the room, hard enough to shake the dinnerware from its shelf.

It turns out you can hurt a girl a hundred different ways without ever breaking a bone or bruising an eye.

My hands gripping the cart, I start to say hello to Rose, to ask her how she’s doing, but she moves toward the other end of the aisle and disappears into the crowd.

I tell myself that’s for the best. There’s no time for chitchat. I gather everything we’ll need to survive a few days and head to the front of the store. At one of the checkout lines, a cashier’s got a portable radio, and a few patrons are huddled together, listening to the latest update.

“We’ve collected samples around the nuclear reactor,” a staticky voice is saying. “It appears there’s radioactive iodine on the ground.”

“What does that mean?” a blue-haired lady in an oversized parka asks.

“That means it’s a lot worse than they’re telling us,” Rose says. She’s suddenly standing next to me, her scent like fresh raspberry and honey. As I put my items on the conveyor belt, she and I glance at one another, an electric spark passing between us.

“Are you heading home, or are you leaving?” she asks.

“We’re staying,” I say. “At least for now.”

“Good.” She smiles at me. “I’d rather not be alone.”

Outside, there are rows of cars with out-of-state plates filling the parking lot. They belong to journalists, all of them descending on us like vultures. Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post. Nobody’s ever cared about this town before, and by tomorrow, there might not even be a town left to care about.

When I get back to the house, it’s past noon, and my mother is watching Hollywood Squares. For a moment, I stand in the doorway, frozen, and everything seems so normal. But then again, everything always seems normal here.

“I don’t see why you’re so upset about taking care of Mom,” my sister Pam always says. “You got the house, didn’t you?”

Like dwelling in this gothic dungeon is some kind of consolation prize.

I’ve lived here in the Middletown area all my life. When I turned eighteen, I never left home. I never did much of anything. By now, I figured I’d have seen the world, or at least have seen the other side of the state. Instead, I haven’t left Dauphin County in more than a decade, and with the power plant alarm blaring like an air raid siren, it’s looking like I might never leave home again.

Out front, a police car drives slowly past the house, a bullhorn attached to the roof.

“Close all windows and doors,” the warning drones on. “Stay inside your house. Close all windows and doors.”

My mother and I stay glued to the television set, waiting for updates, waiting for anything. She dozes off as always in her recliner, and I curl up on the floor, the periodic announcements from the KBO newsroom always just more of the same: that the company Met-Ed won’t tell us anything.

“They’ve got no right to do this,” I murmur, as I close my eyes.

* * *

When I awaken, it’s already dusk, and there’s a small note taped to the back door.

Stephanie, can you come over? I need to show you something. Rose

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she says when I appear on her doorstep, “but I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

She leads me into a narrow hallway, the floors polished, everything in its place. For an instant, she looks around like someone might be watching. Then with an unsteady hand, she pulls up the hem of her t-shirt. Beneath the fabric, her skin doesn’t look at all like it did yesterday. It’s red and angry now, peeling worse than the most vicious sunburn. It takes me a long moment to realize what I’m looking at.

Radiation burns. There are radiation burns covering her whole body.

“It must have happened yesterday when I was laying out,” she says.

I swallow hard, panic setting in. “We need to get you to a hospital. We need to go now.”

At this, her face goes gaunt. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” I ask, the question curdling inside me.

“Because then my husband would find out. And that would make everything so much worse.” She stares at the shiny floor, her eyes distant and unfocused. “You know what it’s like, don’t you?”

My body trembling, I steady myself against the wall. “Not really,” I say. “I’ve never been married.”

“But you still understand.” At once, her gaze meets mine. “You know what it’s like to be afraid.”

“Yes,” I say, my heart clenched in my chest, “I do.”

Upstairs in the bathroom, I help her clean the burns with soap and warm water, a washcloth gently wiping away the thin slices of dead skin. Other than my mother, I haven’t been this close to anyone in years.

“Thank you,” she says, leaning into me, and there it is again. Her scent like raspberry and honey. I want to stay near her. I don’t want to leave, but all around us, the sparkling clean house is a reminder of her husband, of what he expects from her, even when he’s not here.

She shivers a little. “Why do we care for people who never cared for us?”

Her words hit me in the gut. “I don’t know,” I say.

In a way, she and I have the same problem. We’re both trapped in a life that’s not our own, an emptiness inside us, cavernous and profound as eternity.

“I need to get back,” I whisper, but before I can turn away, Rose catches my hand.

“Good luck,” she says and means it.

* * *

Late in the evening, my sister Pam calls, her voice thin as piano wire. “You and Mom should get out of there,” she says. “Stay with me a few days. You can’t handle this on your own.”

Of course, that’s what she says. Pam and her charity and her good heart. She always makes sure that everyone knows she does the right thing. She also makes sure everyone knows I do the wrong thing, her silly, wayward little sister.

“I’ll think about it,” I say and hang up the phone.

Outside, the Three Mile Island reactor looms like a concrete haunted house on the Susquehanna River.

“What’s going on inside you?” I ask, but the darkness never whispers back.

* * *

The next day, they announce the evacuations.

“Pregnant women and children only,” the newscasters say, but soon, everyone on our street is packing up their station wagons with Igloo coolers and bulging Samsonite suitcases, their faces gray as the skyline.

“Should we leave too?” my mother asks, and I tell her I don’t know. There’s no way to be sure what to do when everyone in power is just keeping quiet. That’s the thing about silence: it’s the worst kind of lie because it doesn’t seem like a lie at all.

It’s almost three in the afternoon when I hear a soft knock at the back door. Rose is standing on the other side, wearing an oversized sweater.

“I need your help,” she says and leads me back to her house, the flimsy screen door slamming shut behind us.

I breathe deep, following her every step. “Have the burns gotten worse?”

“Not exactly,” she says. She takes me into her upstairs bedroom, and with a careful hand, she closes all the curtains. I linger near the door, my heart in my throat. Then without a word, she undresses in front of me, stripping off her sweater and her tight Levi’s, even her bra and underwear. The world holds still for a long moment, as I gaze at what’s left of her.

The radiation burns are gone. So is most of her skin and muscle. In its place are strangely shaped gaps like the outlines of undiscovered countries. And inside those gaps, there’s something else, something waiting. It’s not until I creep closer that I can see them.

The stars glistening within her skin, mapping out universes no one’s ever fathomed before.

I recoil from her, backing suddenly against the wall. “You need to go to a hospital,” I wheeze, everything in me gone numb. “You need to get help, Rose.”

But with her cheeks blooming red, she only shakes her head. “I think it’s too late for that,” she says, and I realize she’s right. How is any doctor in Pennsylvania going to be able to cure this? It’s looking like she needs an exorcist more than an emergency room.

My breath coils in my chest, and I know I shouldn’t get close to her. Whatever is swirling in her skin could swallow me up. Or it could infect me the same way.

But when I look at her face, she’s peering back at me, grief churning in her eyes. “Please stay with me,” she whispers. “I don’t want to be alone.”

We sit together on the bed, an old crocheted blanket concealing a few of her wounds. But no matter which way she turns, I can still see so many of them, glinting back at me.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“Not anymore,” she says. “Once the burns faded away, it’s like I don’t feel anything.”

I nod, our bodies nearer. We should be more afraid right now. We should be screaming or sobbing or something. But after years of living in fear, this doesn’t seem so strange for us. In a way, this is just more of the same.

On the nightstand, her transistor radio buzzes with static and distant voices. They’re talking about evacuation centers for people who have nowhere else to go. There’s also a curfew now. From 9pm until 7am every day. It’s such an arcane plan: we either leave altogether or don’t leave at all.

My fingers trace the outline of a gap in her thigh. “Why do you think the fallout did this?”

“Maybe it wasn’t the radiation,” she says. “Maybe it’s just something wrong with me.”

But when I look closer, it doesn’t seem like anything’s wrong at all. Inside her skin, the night sky is clear, all the stars glistening like diamond rings.

“Where do you think it leads?” I asks, and she lets out a small laugh.

“Wherever it goes,” she says, “it has to be better than here.”

The hours pass by, the announcements on the radio fading into nothing. I want to invite Rose to stay with me tonight, but I know my mother doesn’t like visitors.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow, all right?” I say, and squeeze her hand, one of the only places left to touch on her body. She smiles back at me, and all I want is to stay, even though I already know that I can’t.

When I get home, my mother is waiting in the living room. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, her jaw set, her eyes gone dark again.

“Nothing.” I fidget in front of her, feeling suddenly guilty for no reason. “There’s nothing wrong, Mom.”

She edges another step closer to me. “That girl is married,” she says, the accusation sizzling in her voice. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

My throat closes up, and I don’t even know where to start. “We’re… we’re just friends,” I stammer.

“Friends?” She lets out an ugly grunt. “Is that what you call it now?”

She stares me down, hatred boiling in her eyes, until I feel so small that I swear I could just vanish into thin air.

“You’re not feeling well,” I say at last, but that’s not true. In this moment, my mother feels perfectly fine. For once, she feels exactly like herself.

I don’t say another word to her. Instead, I just head upstairs to my room and close the door. As I curl up on my cold bed, a string of questions rattles through my mind. Is this all my world will ever be? Just sitting around a darkened house, being afraid of the woman who raised me?

I put my hand on the wall, the one nearest to Rose’s house, and I imagine that I can feel her there. What’s waiting within her skin? Is it something worse than what’s happening on Three Mile Island? Or is it something better, something that nobody could ever imagine?

With the cops still making their periodic announcements, warning us that that air itself is poison, I do my best to sleep. It’s three in the morning when my mom crawls in bed next to me. Once again, she’s forgotten everything that came before, and now she’s just cowering like a scared kid.

“I don’t like it here,” she says, her arms wrapped around me.

She never did this when I was growing up. The only time she ever put her hands on me was to teach me a lesson. But now there are moments like this, moments when she honestly feels like a mother to me.

A siren wails in the distance, and she falls asleep in my arms, her brittle body wheezing against mine. The curtains are peeled back from the window, and I stare outside, the orange lights on the stacks glinting back like tiny alien planets.

* * *

My sister Pam calls first thing in the morning and tells me we’re coming to stay with her.

“No argument,” she says, as if that’s that. I hang up the phone, realizing I shouldn’t expect anything else. I didn’t get a say in taking care of Mom, and I won’t get a say in this either.

I help Mom pack a bag, and I put all her orange bottles of medication in a brown paper sack. Then when I know she’s not looking, I slip out the back door and over to Rose’s house.

“We’re leaving for my sister’s,” I say, as she and I stand together in her kitchen, still glossy as a 50s sitcom. “They say it should be safer there.”

Rose nods, but doesn’t say a word, the crevices in her body speaking more than enough for her.

But that can’t be the end. I can’t leave her here like this.

“Come with us,” I say. “My sister’s got a spare room. I’m sure we can all—”

“I can’t,” she says, not letting me finish, not letting me daydream a moment longer. “You know that.”

My stomach clenches, because she’s right. It isn’t safe for her out in the world now. They’ll turn her into a sideshow attraction, a wide-eyed rat in a lab. She’ll never be able to have a life of her own, because they won’t let her.

Outside, my mother calls my name, desperation seeping into her voice. She doesn’t know where I am. She doesn’t know where she is either.

Rose clasps what’s left of her hands in front of her. “You should go on now,” she says. “There are people waiting for you.”

“And what about you?” I ask, my mouth gone dry, tears stinging my eyes.

“Nobody’s waiting for me, Stephanie.”

We linger in silence for a long time. All I want is to stay right here. To stay with her. But I know I can’t do that. I have to be a good daughter. I have to get my mother to safety.

I gaze at Rose for what feels like the last time. The wounds on her body have grown larger overnight, and all the constellations have gone strangely dark. I can barely even see the stars from here.

“Goodbye, Stephanie,” she says, not looking at me.

“Goodbye,” I whisper.

With my head down, I retreat home where I pack up the rest of our bags. Before climbing into the car, I glance up once more at Rose’s house, but there’s no one waiting at the windows.

I drive my mother to Pam’s place in silence, the road clotted with cars, everyone honking and panicking, convinced that at any moment the power plant’s sure to explode in the rearview mirror.

But I’m not thinking of nuclear fallout right now. I can’t stop imagining Rose all alone in that gleaming house with her gleaming skin, fading away into nothing.

We get to my sister’s house in time for lunch, and she’s got PB & J sandwiches waiting for us.

“For my weary travelers,” she says, and I don’t bother to remind her that I’ve been allergic to peanut butter since the third grade.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asks me, and when I shake my head, she just snaps her tongue. “You always were a picky eater.”

Together, we watch the news all afternoon. There’s talk of how the plant isn’t cooling down and about a bubble in the reactor. Governor Thornburgh keeps telling everyone to stay calm, but even he doesn’t seem particularly relaxed these days.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Pam says to my mother, the two of them cozying up. “I was worried about how you were getting on in that house with Stephanie.”

“I was doing my best,” I say, my shoulders hunched, my arms crossed.

“Well, we’ll do even better now, won’t we?” She takes my mother’s hand, and the two of them sit together on the couch, five feet and a thousand miles away from me.

This is all I’ll be, a punching bag for my family, a mild inconvenience to them.

Unless I make a different choice.

It’s almost midnight when I bolt from the couch. “I need to go back,” I say. “I left something at the house.”

My sister gapes at me. “What are you talking about?” She cuts me off at the door, trying to grab the keys from my hand. “You can’t go home now. It isn’t safe.”

I wrench away from her. “Leave me alone, Pam.”

She follows me out to the car, hollering as she goes. “If you don’t make it, then it’s your own fault.”

“That’s exactly what I’m hoping,” I say and disappear from the driveaway.

The whole trip back, the radio DJ keeps chattering on, blithe as Easter Sunday. There’s been a change of luck, they’re saying. The bubble in the reactor isn’t going to explode after all. And as a show of faith, the president’s coming to visit tomorrow. They’re saying the worst is over. Of course, they said that two days ago too.

At last, the state route back home appears through the darkness. As I drive through town, everything is as quiet and sullen as a tomb. Part of me is convinced Rose’s place won’t be there, that nothing of her will remain. But when I take the last turn, there it is, our homes side by side, nestled together like they belong that way.

The engine cuts out, and I stumble toward the backyard where I won’t be spotted. I knock once at the door, but when nobody answers, I sneak inside.

“Rose?” I whisper.

She’s alone upstairs, sitting cross legged in the middle of the empty bed. Her skin is almost entirely consumed now, wounds overlapping more wounds. In a single evening, she’s become a living, breathing abyss, a galaxy all her own.

But even so, I can still see her there, see the way she brightens when I walk in the room.

“You came back,” she whispers, and then all at once, what’s left of her face goes gaunt again. “My husband’s coming back too. He should be here soon.”

“I heard on the radio,” I say. “They think everything will be okay now.”

“Stephanie,” she says, and my name suddenly sounds like an apology. “You know this won’t be okay for me.”

We sit together on the bed until we hear it. The rumble of a truck in the driveaway.

“He’s here,” she says, her voice splitting in two.

This is it. He’ll come up here, and he’ll see her like this, and he’ll take her away, exiling Rose where nobody will ever find her. Maybe that’s in a shallow grave, or maybe it’s in custody of those who want to keep this whole thing quiet. The people who want us to believe that everything is going to be fine, even when it’s not.

But what I believe doesn’t have to do with them. It has to do with Rose. My hand steady, I reach out for her.

She recoils from me. “You know I’m getting worse. I’m not safe anymore.”

“Nothing’s safe,” I say. “And I’d rather take my chances with you.”

I touch her nearest wound, the one on her left thigh, and my fingers slip inside her, warm and strange yet welcoming too.

Downstairs, the front door creaks open.

“Rose?” A voice harsh as sandpaper against flesh. “Where are you?”

I ignore the sound of him. Instead, I just keep pulling her closer to me.

“Are you sure?” she whispers, and I smile back at her.

“Like you said, it’s got to be better than here.”

Her husband’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. He’ll find us now. He’ll find us unless we go where he can never follow.

Outside on the street, the sirens have faded away, the so-called danger dissolving into nothing, but in this house, the peril will never wane like the moon. It will always be with us, unless we find a place where we’ll be safe, a place that’s made for us alone.

Through the darkness, Rose looks at me, and I look at her, and we know beyond reason, this is what we want.

We wrap our hands together, our bodies closer than before, her scent like raspberries and honey overwhelming me. We move together like a singularity, like a cosmic union that no one else can comprehend, what’s left of her skin merging with mine, all of who we are and will ever be collapsing together into the constellations, into a world we’ll never stop exploring.

“Rose?” Her husband’s standing in the doorway, his jaw slack at what we’ve become, and for the first time in his life, he’s the one who’s screaming, who’s cowering at what he’s witnessing.

His fear is sweet as marzipan, but we don’t get to stay and savor it. Our bodies merged, the universes beyond are calling to us now, and we’re eager to listen.

One final smile, and the starlight swallows us whole.

End.

Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, and Pretty Marys All in a Row, among others. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor Nightfire, Titan Books, and The Dark. She’s a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Premios Kelvin and Ignotus awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com

Onirica by Pietro Rotelli

Welcome to Brine Cay:

An Eldritch Romance

By Rae Knowles

When her letter first arrived, I’d marveled at the beauty of her penmanship, the graceful swirls of her curled letters. I’d held it up to my nose, caught a whiff of her lavender scent. Weeks later, it was damp with sweat as I clutched it, watching defunct train cars and graffitied underpasses whip past the window. My thighs were numb from hours of sitting, and I could scarcely believe I’d bought the ticket, left my dog with Alma, and boarded the train. I checked the time, 10:30. Gray morning light pushed through the thick, scratched glass and faded my phone’s screen. No service. She’d mentioned that in the letter. Don’t bother with your phone. You won’t need it, and it won’t work anyhow. This is about us. Our unfinished business.

I wondered if her skirts still flowed from her hips as if immune to gravity, if her hair was still long and strawberry blonde, if she’d still absentmindedly bite her lip when she saw me. I shifted my weight in the chair as we passed the sign, Brine Cay 5 Miles. Our last argument still menaced the edges of my mind. I flipped open the letter, traced where she’d touched for the hundredth time.

It didn’t end right with us. I told you I needed a different world, a place where we could be… well, where we wouldn’t be gawked at. That wasn’t enough for you, and you didn’t understand. You hated me for it. But Gem, I’ve found it. And you have to meet me here. If you ever loved me, you’ll meet me. If not to stay, then just to see. How can you decide if you don’t come see? I hope you’ll come. Take the Four Train through Rhode Island, head East and East until you can’t anymore. That’s where you’ll find Brine Cay. That’s where you’ll find me.

Ever your love,

Becca

A conductor strode through my empty car. I offered my ticket, he glanced, nodded, and began to move on when I reached for his arm.

“Excuse me.”

His young, smooth face clenched. He raised a full brow. “Yes?”

“Brine Cay, is it part of Rhode Island? I haven’t heard of it before.”

“You wouldn’t have. It’s East.”

“Eastern Rhode Island?”

“East,” and a flicker in his eye. “You enjoy your stay, Ma’am.” With a nod he dipped into the adjoining car. Natural light sucked away, a tunnel cast the train car in an orange glow from circular bulbs that raced past my window, too quick to count. Dim morning sun poured back in, and the tunnel gave way to my first glimpses of it. A harbor in the distance, boats with folded sails obscured by heavy mist. A lighthouse, classic white and red, weather-beaten, towered above a rocky beach. I pressed my palm against the glass. It looked cold, felt cold and gray even now, in summer. Water rushed in, embracing the boulders which broke it, black wave after black wave, seaweed in their grip. Gulls shrieked, flew in pairs and groups of three. They dive-bombed the beach in turn, lifting and dropping trash from high in the steely sky.

When I’d thought of a beach town, I’d imagined warm blues and greens and primary colors, happy families plodding back to overstuffed vans, skin burned and smiles wide. But Brine Cay existed in cool tones, like a black and white photograph town. The ocean, the sky, the sand, all shades of gray. The train lurched to a squealing stop, tossed me forward and I had to catch myself on the seat in front of me. I slung the strap of my backpack over my shoulder, found my way to the door, and took long, expectant steps into the seaside air. I thought I’d smell pleasant salt in the wind coming off the sea, but instead the fetid scent of rotten seaweed and decaying shellfish made me cringe, pull in breaths through gritted teeth.

Nerves urged me forward. I looked around for Becca, for her strawberry blonde locks, her aloof, hazel eyes. She couldn’t know I’d arrive today, but I searched for her without reason, every movement summoning a wave of illogical hope that crashed into disappointment.

“You came,” I heard from behind and a hand squeezed my shoulder. Her electric fingers curled into my flesh, her nails coated in chipped emerald paint. I breathed deep before I turned to look at her, forced myself to resorb my welling tears.

Her lacey black bra shone through her thin white button down. A brown bohemian skirt danced around her ankles, and a large wooden necklace dangled in the seductive space below her neck, a carved symbol I didn’t recognize; the sharp upper edges gave way to cursive swirls like an angular squid.

Her hair, still mermaid long, had taken an ashen tone, as if the salty air had leached out the warmth.

“I came,” I said, too dumbstruck to recite the speech I’d been practicing. I cleared my throat, suddenly aware of my greasy forehead, the weight I’d gained since she’d left. The station was little more than a few concrete benches in open air. From a car farther back, a couple emerged, mid-twenties, his arm around her shoulder, then a single man, maybe late forties with a girthy auburn beard, his chest exposed through the several buttons he’d left undone, ginger chest hair curling outward and pressing at the linen fabric.

Becca gripped my hand, pulled me forward. “Ivan,” she yelled. The man with the auburn beard turned, nodded when he saw her. “Meet Gem, she’s an old friend.”

I winced. Old friend. Should’ve known there’d be more of Becca’s bullshit.

He extended a hand which dwarfed mine, could have crushed my fragile bones making half the effort. I shook it as firm as I could without inviting a squeeze out of spite and noticed an intricate silver band on his index finger, interlocking patterns.

“Nice to meet you. Is that Celtic?” I asked.

He pulled his hand away, “No,” and smiled at Becca, tousled her hair like he was petting a dog. “You be good to this one.” He winked at me and moved into the misty haze, first faded then disappeared beyond the station platform.

I froze. The Becca I knew would have a meltdown over his insinuation. She’d introduced me as friend after all, and now some acquaintance, a man, assumed we were together. She’d blame my hair, even shorter since she’d last seen it. I should’ve let it grow. I’d known I was coming for weeks, after all. I squinted and braced for the impact. But instead I felt her palm cradle my hip.

“You gonna be good to me?” she asked, cocking her head to the side like a fascinated bird.

“Becca, are you—”

“Late?” She smirked. “Yes, very. Let’s go.” She yanked me into the fog, which rolled in on crashing waves two hundred feet below the rocky incline and blanketed the shore.

“Late for what?”

She ignored me. Becca’d never been one for answering questions. She got away with it, too; at least with me. No matter how many times I told myself I wouldn’t be bewitched by her, the spell remained unbroken. After all these years, this space, this distance, I found myself once again hypnotized. Anything to make her laugh, my sanity for her smile. I followed behind her, arm pulled in front of me like a loyal terrier and reached into my back pocket to check my phone for service. Something to ground me to my real life. I tilted the screen to nudge off the glare when Becca rounded a corner and saw. She pinched my phone between her fingers, looked me dead in my eyes, and frisbeed it into the black sea. It landed with a plop and little fanfare.

“Becca, what the fuck?”

She grabbed my cheeks with both hands, laced her fingers around my ears. Her lids fluttered and closed, and I smelled that lavender scent, felt her lips brush against mine, her tongue swirl. I lost all sense of time, and when she finally released me, I didn’t care about the phone, couldn’t remember why I ever had it in the first place.

“This time is about us, remember?” A glimmer of sunlight danced off a breaking wave, reflected in her irises. “There’s no service here anyway.”

I tried and failed to restrain my smirk. “And when I leave? What will I do then?”

She pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. “Maybe you won’t.”

“Won’t?”

“Maybe you won’t leave.”

I expected a laugh, but instead her smile flattened, and she was deadly serious, and I felt the hot rush of memory flush my face, the deep gulley of obsession and grief between us. I thought of that first night, when drunk on champagne she’d danced against me, twisted her fingers into my belt loops, said take me home in that throaty voice I couldn’t deny. Her slick, sweaty figure on top of me, riding me, throwing her hair back as I gripped her tight hips. It didn’t feel like her first time then, and looking back, it couldn’t have been.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, and blood rushed between my legs, then flushed my cheeks as I grounded in the present moment.

“I could eat.”

“It’s a short ferry ride, twenty minutes, then there’s this place I’ve been dying to show you.”

I followed her through a maze of mist and waist high walls built of stone. The tide lapped along the rocky shore and Becca showed me to a barnacled dock, green and orange with algae, that groaned and bent beneath the weight of our steps. There we found the couple, intertwined and doing their best Titanic moment against the ferry’s stern while the girl filmed with her phone. Ivan hoisted a rope up from the water.

“Is he part of the crew?” I asked.

Becca patted my shoulder, “Just helpful.”

From port, the ocean stretched into the fog, now opaque and blocking the view of the nearby island.

“What’s it like?” I asked. “Brine Cay.” I set my backpack beside our chairs, and she promptly unzipped it and began rifling through my carefully folded clothing.

“It’s a special community, you’ll see.” She pulled out a wifebeater top and pressed it to her face, inhaled deeply, her long soft waves flowing over her chest. She looked at me and smiled before wedging it back into the bag. “I’ve missed you so much.”

The ferry boat churned through the slate sea until the tops of imposing pine trees poked through the fog and my eyes could make out the outlines of pitched roofs in the distance.

“There’s no cars on the island,” Becca said as she leapt from the starboard side to the floating dock. “You can ride on my pegs.”

Her bicycle waited on the platform, unchained and rusted by salinity. I climbed on behind her, gently gripped her shoulders as she pedaled. The taut sensation in my calves reminded me of middle school, hitching a ride from Casey, my neighbor. But I’d grown up in suburbia, Floridian suburbia, and next to that colorful, cookie cutter landscape of golf courses and pink plastic flamingos, the misty haze of Brine Cay, with its seafoam painted, shuttered shops, and windows coated in salt spray might as well have been an alien planet.

Becca bicycled through Main Street, past boarded-up picture windows on either side. An old saltwater taffy stand, a souvenir shop, The Salty Crab restaurant, paint flaking from the sign. A ghost town on the sea. A stray cat scuttled across a sleepy avenue, a lizard dangling from its bared teeth.

Ornately carved totems of tangled tentacles stood ten feet tall at Main Street’s end.

“Those are interesting,” I said, searching for the head of the octopus but unable to find it through the mess of swirling shapes.

“They’re tributes. Nick told me about the old fisherman’s tale when I first showed up, but I can’t remember now. You’ll have to ask him.”

“Nick?” A twinge of annoyance pursed my lips, and I was glad Becca couldn’t see me. She had a way of assuming you knew everyone she knew, went everywhere she’d been. As if her life was the baseline for all conversation. It was maddening. She was maddening.

“He’s the captain. Last one since the trade took a turn.” She turned to face me over her shoulder. “Oh shit, of course. You wouldn’t know. Brine used to be a real center for the fishing trade in the area, but the fishing dried up years back, and most fishermen learned other trades: carving, woodwork, culinary, whatever. But Nick held on, catches the odd crab or two. He makes it work.”

I wondered how she knew Nick. Whether he thought about her naked. Whether he’d seen it.

“I think you’d like him,” she said.

My guts turned over. I think you’d like him. She’d used those exact words once before, when she was trying to ease the pain of running off with Charlie, leaving me at university. I think you’d like him, a twist of the knife. I didn’t like Charlie. And I doubted I’d like Nick much either.

You’re not together, I reminded myself like a mantra. I turned my mind to the totems. The carvings were beautiful, intricately detailed but somehow unsettling, voyeuristic. At their base was a pattern, Celtic-looking, much like the one I’d seen on Ivan’s ring.

“What’s that pattern?” I asked. “Wasn’t it on Ivan’s ring too?”

“Oh nothing.” Her voice was light, almost drowned out by the passing breeze as Becca pedaled faster and speed picked up downhill. “That’s sort of the island symbol.”

“Would make a nice souvenir.”

Becca shrugged. “We’re almost there.”

The tires hit a gravel driveway, crunched stones beneath them, and Becca pulled the bicycle into the yard of a faded white craftsman. On its porch two chairs rocked in the wind and chimes made of bleached seashells clattered in the humid breeze.

“This your place?” I asked as Becca pranced up to the door.

“No.” She grabbed the brass knocker, heavily tarnished by years of wet air, and knocked hard four times. My toes curled in my shoes.

“Just a minute!” I heard from inside.

I waffled from one foot to the other, keeping distance between myself and the porch, feeling as much an outsider as I had when Becca and I were dating.

Beige sand crunched under Becca’s feet as she slid to the window panel on the side of the cerulean door. Hands cupped around her eyes, she peeked inside.

“Minnie, we’re hungry out here!”

My ears got hot. Pestering strangers for food was not the first impression I would’ve planned for Minnie, whoever she was.

The door creaked on its hinges, opened wide to reveal a hunched woman, hair stark white, in a pale pink blouse and a string of freshwater pearls. Her concave lips suggested her teeth may have gone the way of the fish. Becca embraced Minnie with a warmth I’d never seen from her. Arms thrown around with abandon, she pressed her body to the older woman’s with care, didn’t leave an anxious gap between them.

“Ev! They’re here,” Minnie yelled inside. I knew the accent right away. Long Island.

Tchotchkes with blanched faces and painted red circles for blush leered at me from a glass cabinet. The house smelled of mothballs and seafood, and I heard oil popping in a pan. Peering into the kitchen, I saw another woman fiddling over the gas stove. Her salt and pepper hair clung to her head in permed curls. Ev, I assumed.

“Well, sit down, you’re late,” Minnie croaked, and she retreated to the kitchen without introduction.

Becca sat at the head of the table, because of course she would, and motioned for me to sit beside her. A set of floral painted plates were offset by gold toned cutlery, two forks at each setting.

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“They’re my friends,” Becca said, loudly enough for them to hear.

I pulled my lips tight around my teeth, as if I might swallow her words before the women would hear.

Ev emerged from the kitchen carrying a casserole dish in mitted hands, followed shortly by Minnie who set down a glass carafe of apple juice.

“Glad you could join us,” Ev said.

“Gem, is it?” Minnie continued, as if completing Ev’s thought.

“Yes, that’s right.” All three women stared at me.

“Well, you gonna eat or did I do all this cooking for nothing?” Ev asked with a New York sneer.

I removed the glass top from the casserole dish, found fish filets inside. “This looks lovely,” I said.

“Don’t blow smoke,” Minnie retorted. “We know it’s not five stars, but we’re a small community here and we get by.”

I looked to Becca, but she was already helping herself to green beans.

To quell the unease, I sought my own introduction. “How did you two come to live on the island?”

Ev replied. “We’re longtime residents, Dear. Came here after our husbands passed in—”

“‘72,” Minnie replied.

“That’s right. April 27th, 1972.”

“The dirty bastards,” Minnie grumbled.

“A mining accident, isn’t that right?” Becca asked.

“An accident, yes.” Ev’s gaze drifted away, her forehead creased with a tilting brow.

My knife fell through the tender filet, flaking off meat in chunks. “What kind of fish is this?”

Ev swelled with pride. “It’s local, Dear. Nick is kind enough to drop off some of his catch each week.”

“So, enough fishing left to—”

“We get by,” Minnie said, squishing white meat between her lips, not looking up from her plate.

Becca sliced green beans into unnecessarily small squares.

I cleared my throat. “You must love it here then, to have stayed for so long.” The sound of teeth gnashing on textures hard and soft filled several seconds, and all my body craved for Becca to fill the uncomfortable silence, but it was Ev who spoke. With unusual cadence.

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

Minnie grinned. Stared at me through narrowed eyes. “You know who said that?”

I shook my head.

“Lovecraft.”

Dinner passed, an exhaustive effort of uncomfortable pauses and suspicious looks, Becca blissfully unaware, as if preoccupied. We departed as the sun began to dip beneath the horizon, and the fog swallowed up even the brightest orange haze from the setting sun. She walked her bike this time, and conscious of my fishy breath, I was glad to be out of proximity. Her one-bedroom shack sat alone on a rocky beach. It seemed apart from time. All practical sense told me the land must be worth a fortune, beachfront with unencumbered views. And yet it sat here alone. Its roof sagged and shingles curled from neglect.

“I’m tired,” Becca said, as if bored of me already.

I offered to sleep on the wicker sofa, and she did not object, which tore a fissure in my heart.

I tossed and turned all night, and when I did sleep, it was with feverish dreams of tentacles and indistinguishable masses of slimy flesh. A voice, otherworldly, boomed. I am The Great Dreamer. The Slumbering One. Monstrous fish glowed with bioluminescence, cast a pearly green haze as they weaved through architecture both ancient and advanced, dizzying geometric patterns coated in jagged coral and dripping with algae. You do not comprehend me. I awoke, slick with sweat, to an empty house. Becca’s door was slung open, her bed unmade, her purse missing from the counter. She’d left me.

A knock on the salt crusted window made me jump to a sitting position. Through the opaque glass, a hefty figure loomed, too stout to be Minnie or Ev. I pressed the threadbare blanket between my fingers. My heart thrummed in my chest. And I eyed the door, hoping it was locked.

“Gem, it’s Ivan. Becca sent me.”

All pretense slipped away, and I flung open the front door, eyes stinging even in the muted daylight. He wore an army green cap, another linen shirt that loosed his chest hair upon the world.

“Is she alright? Has something happened?”

“Calm yourself,” he grinned. “Everything’s just fine. She sent me to fetch you.”

I pressed my bare legs together, tugged at the hem of my oversized t-shirt.

He turned to the leaning wooden fence framing the property, surrounded by shoots of bristly grasses. “You go ahead and get dressed.”

I washed and dressed and pushed up at my hair until it was something passable for style, pulled on my leather boots, and found Ivan sitting on the porch steps, staring into the lapping sea.

“Ready?” I asked.

He tensed then settled. “Yup.”

Hermit crabs fled our path along the water. Gulls squawked from above, streaks of motion through the fog.

“Seems strange to me, the island so close... We’re near Nantucket, right?”

He shrugged.

“So much tourism there. Not that a place is better for that,” I quickly added. “But here—”

“You want to know why it be how it be here. Is that it?”

A stone tumbled from underfoot. My ankle rolled, but I shifted my weight just in time to avoid injury.

“I’ll tell you. I’m sure that’s what Becca intended. Clever girl.”

Though he was several steps ahead, I felt him grinning.

“Used to be different here, back in the day. Tourism, and all that. Waters teeming with fish, booming trade. Before my time, of course. But here’s what I’ve heard.”

I took swift steps, tried to catch his eyeline, but his long strides outpaced me.

“Sailor went out, hit his usual spots. But when he came back, his nets were empty and he was changed. Wandered for days muttering of bubbles and tentacles. And on the third day, he plucked his eyes from his head. They say he saw something he could not unsee.”

Staring at his broad shoulders and the back of his head, I couldn’t be sure whether he believed this tale or delighted in scaring me with the mythos.

“Infection set in, and he passed shortly after. That’s when the fishing dried up. Scores of sailors with empty nets, like the schools had packed up and moved away, or were called back to the deep. Sea burials were common around here, still are, and when they laid his body in the sea, well—”

Over a hilly outcropping, I spotted her slim figure. Wind wrapped wavy hair around her face. From the distance and with the sun behind her, it appeared stark white. A familiar twinge of resentment coiled up inside me like a snake.

“You’ll have to excuse me.” I jogged over sputtering rocks to Becca’s spot on the hill. I stepped between her face and her view of the ocean.

“Why did you ask me to come here? You were bored of me again in less than a day.”

Becca grabbed my stiff, splayed fingers, laced hers through them. “Don’t you see?”

White foam on the breakers reflected in her eyes. My tension slipped away, coaxed out of my muscles by her gentle touch.

“Minnie and Ev, that could be us.”

My jaw cracked open, head bobbed back and forth in buoying trepidation. She brushed her torso against mine, looked up at me with a tilt of her chin. Her pleading eyes and lavender smell dulled my senses.

“Do you remember the night we met?”

Vibrant flashes scrolled through my mind like a stop motion picture. Sweat rolling to her bellybutton, the salty taste of her skin—

“The island isn’t like back home. The house is big enough for two. We could have a real shot here.”

We could’ve had a real shot there.

Her wooden necklace scraped against my collarbone, and I stepped back, rubbed at the red mark.

“What is that?”

She clutched it, eyed the dark tones against light.

“It’s oak and pine.” As she traced the swirl, another chip of emerald paint flaked off her fingernail. “Handmade from remnants of a sunken ship.”

“Very… nautical.”

She smirked.

Heavy clouds rolled in from the West, and the air took on an electric quality as if charged by distant lightning.

“We should get back,” Becca said, taking me by the hand. Ivan had gone, and Becca traced the same rocky shoreline back to the beachside shack. Thunder echoed and a thin flash broke through the cloud cover. Home in sight, I wrenched my arm from her grip.

“Is this real?” The question vomited up from my guts.

She paused and turned back to me, just as a sheet of rain fell from above. Her eyes seemed colorless, absorbing the translucent tone of rainfall.

“Do you think it’s real?” Her voice fought through patterning raindrops on stone, her own lips, on the sagging, shingle roof.

I clutched her dripping cheeks with both hands, pressed the tip of my nose to hers. Eye to eye now, my own green reflected back at me. Clamping my lids shut, I mingled my lips with hers, and my body warmed with the same rush I’d felt the very first time. Lightning cracked over the ocean.

“This is real,” I said. “The only thing that ever has been.” Water streamed down my lashes. I blinked it away.

“The only thing,” she repeated.

We were inside in an instant, peeling sopping clothes from our goosed skin. I fell backward over the wicker sofa, pulled her on top of me. My hands searched her. My tongue twisted along her earlobe. Hot blood rushed to my—she pulled away.

“I can’t.”

There it was. The familiar sinking.

“Not unless—” She stumbled back, pulled her hanging towel from the bathroom door. “I can’t lose you again.”

Sorrow turned to rage. You left me, my mind hissed.

“When—if you decide to stay, then maybe—but I can’t—” Her breath hitched and tears welled in her eyes.

Could it be true? Could her heart have torn just as mine?

I covered my body with a sofa cushion. “I understand. You’re right, that was—we should… be more careful.” A lie from my lips. I wanted to grab her, possess her, swallow her whole like Jonah’s whale.

Becca excused herself for a nap, left the door open a slat. She always knew when to go, when she had me hooked, dangling like a fish on a line. But I wanted to be there. Wanted nothing more than to be caught. Mounted like a trophy on her wall.

Slipping on a spare change of clothes, I fused to my spot on the sofa. The storm poured a river over the paned windows. I watched the world outside melt through distorted glass. Could I stay? I brushed it off as foolishness, but it burrowed in deep as an earwig. Peering over my shoulder into the bedroom, I watched Becca’s feet flex and relax, her intoxicating form wilted over the comforter. It was a queen-sized bed. Large enough for two.

* * *

The rain cleared in late afternoon. I’d spent the time unpacking my scant belongings and folding them into neat stacks beside the coffee table. Becca woke when the first pokes of sunlight leaked through the salt-crusted windows, as if the storm had kept her dreaming.

“Did you bring anything nice?” she asked, sleep still warping her voice.

“Nice?” I eyed the square piles of slacks and cotton tees. “No.”

“No matter, Nick suspected you wouldn’t. He offered his suit and brought it early this week. Wasn’t that kind of him?”

The layers of her words rolled over in my mind. “How did you know when I’d arrive?” How did you know I was coming at all?

She shrugged as if to say, Dependable Gem, you always run when I call.

“Come look.”

I followed her voice, took hesitant steps into her bedroom. It smelled of lavender, of her.

She pointed to the closet, where a tweed suit jacket hung over matching slacks, a white button-down nestled inside, and matching brown suspenders folded over the hanger.

“It should fit,” she said.

“Are we going somewhere?” My mind conjured images of the shuttered Main Street, surely no formal restaurants survived the—

“A special dinner. In honor of your visit.” She pushed a flat cap, the same material as the suit, into my hands. “Get dressed.”

I stowed away into the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised when the musty suit clung and hung in all the right places. Perhaps there was a chance I might like Nick after all. Cap secured over my unruly black hair, I strode into the living room, chest puffed.

“Well?”

Becca dipped into view from behind her door, a sheer white dress flowing around her like gossamer. She leaned back, balanced her weight with a curved hip. “Wow.”

Her silver heels clacked on the stony path, and I marveled at her ability to glide over the unstable terrain which slipped and slid beneath my boots. Her fingers danced around my palm as we walked, and I grasped her hand, to which she smiled her coy smile and said, “It’s just ahead.”

The stony path gave way to white, shelly beach peppered with tufts of serrated grass. We crested a hill and below stood a smattering of people, positioned in a semicircle where the white sand faded into black. Becca removed her shoes, left them careless beside a billowing clump of feathered beach grass.

“What is this?”

Becca led me to the semicircle. Minnie and Ev stood off to the side, muttered between themselves under their breath.

“I’d like you all to meet Gem.”

Faces turned, twenty or so. A slender man with a wry expression moved to the front of the group and offered his hand.

“It’s good to meet you, Gem.”

I shook his calloused palm.

“This is Nick,” Becca said. Then pointing around to the group, “You already know Ivan,” he tipped his head, “Minnie, and Ev. Over there is Richard and his wife, Sarah. Nick’s wife Chrissy, Ivan’s son, William…”

They nodded one by one like a roll call, some with warm grins, others with steely hesitation.

A middle-aged woman with sun-browned skin spoke up from the back, hands on her hips. “So you want to join our community?”

I looked to Becca, whose lips trembled with nerves.

“I do,” I said, voice shaky. Becca’s fear dropped away, and my own heart steadied.

“Well,” the woman went on, “we all contribute. That’s the way we get by.” Her gaze drifted behind me, and I turned to find four men carrying a makeshift stretcher over the hill where Becca had dropped her shoes. Atop the stretcher, irregular shapes jostled with each movement, covered by a shroud.

My heart thrummed as they grew closer, and the group watched me, especially Becca, her eyes boring holes into my cheek. The townspeople made room for the stretcher in the middle of the semicircle, and the four men carrying it laid it down on the sand, wiped sweat from their brows. Unmoving, I knew the shapes, felt the blood drain from my face.

Becca knelt beside the shrouded figures, reached into her dress and retrieved a small box. Black sand, stirred by the wind, collected in the folds of her dress like pepper on snow. She opened the box, and inside a velvet cushion cradled a silver ring, an intricate, braided pattern matching the one I’d seen on Ivan’s finger.

“Gem, I’ve loved you for many years. And finally I’ve found a place where we can be. Will you join me, be my partner in this community?”

Time moved as if through gelatinous muck. I heard my breath, in and out. A breeze pushed her pale hair off her neck, and she had never been so breathtaking, so terrifying. I bent down, reached for the ring, when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.

“First you have to show you will contribute,” Nick said.

I let him guide me, as if in a dream, to the handle of the stretcher, and Becca mirrored my movements, grasping the opposite handle.

“You are making me the happiest woman in the world,” she said, and heaved the stretcher toward the sea.

I helped her pull, an animal instinct to protect her. The breaking waves soaked the tulle train of her gown and filled my boots. The townspeople looked on. Still Becca pulled, and so did I, the wooden stretcher floating despite its heavy load. Waist deep, she stopped, grasped the corner of the shroud, watching me all the while. I grasped my corner, and together we pulled it away, revealed the bodies beneath.

I remembered instantly with a twinge in my gut. The young couple from the ferry. Their skin now gray, gray like the fog, the stony beach, Becca’s eyes.

“Deliver them,” Ivan called from the shore.

My stomach turned over, and the hairs on my neck stood at attention. But Becca reached for the body on her side, the man, and so I reached for mine, the woman.

“We pay tribute, and the ocean provides,” Ivan said, as if reciting a sermon.

Becca tugged at the body’s shoulder, but was unable to move the stiff corpse, so I trudged through the water, boots sinking into soft sand. Together we gripped his tissue-paper skin, rolled him into the sea with a plunk.

When the waves engulfed his body, his skin receded. Hands separated at the wrists, bloodless, feet at the ankle. His torso split and divided like multiplying cells, easily into even parts. Gray flesh morphed to brilliant silver scales. What was bobbing, lifeless, sprouted fins. A school of silver fish, healthy and wriggling, darted off in separate directions, disappeared into the sea. When the last of the school had swum from my sight, I looked to Becca. Tears poured down her face, dripped off her chin.

“It’s—so beautiful.”

I wiped them from her cheeks, her tender visage my only tether to reality. “What…” my voice was a whisper, but still Ivan responded.

“It’s not for us to question this gift from below.”

Bile singed the back of my throat, but beneath a veneer of horror, my core filled with growing wonder. The terror could not hold. Not against my humble gratitude for these strange unions: death and birth, man and fish, Becca and me. Together we rolled the young woman’s body into the bountiful sea, and she too took her final form, a glistening school that darted into the deep. I grabbed Becca’s hand, firm as she trembled, overcome with the beauty of it. I had to be strong for her. We returned to shore and a sea of approving looks from our audience.

“Now,” Nick said.

Becca once again retrieved the braided ring from her bosom. I extended my fingers, enchanted as she slipped it on. The clapping started slow, then picked up in pace, accompanied by cries of laughter and joy.

Ivan slapped my back, “Welcome to Brine Cay.”

Even Minnie and Ev shed their sour expressions. Ev mouthed, “Congratulations.”

Nick sighed. “I best be going.”

“Ya better, we don’t need to be waiting around for dinner all night,” joked the woman with the sun-browned skin.

“I’ll gather the nets, you just prep the boat,” Ivan said to Nick, who nodded in acknowledgement.

The crowd split off in different directions like the fish, leaving Becca and me alone on the black sand. I twirled the silver ring around my finger.

“I knew you’d stay,” she said. She nestled her head into the crook of my neck, and my arms encircled her. I felt her heartbeat inside her chest, in time with the lapping waves, in time with mine.

End.

Rae Knowles (she/her) is a queer woman with multiple works forthcoming from Brigids Gate Press. Her debut novel, The Stradivarius, is coming May ’23, her sapphic horror novella, Merciless Waters, is due out winter ’23, and her collaboration with April Yates, Lies That Bind, in early ’24. A number of her short stories have been published or are forthcoming from publications like Dark Matter Ink, Seize the Press, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Nosetouch Press. Recent updates on her work can be found at RaeKnowles.com and you can follow her on twitter @_Rae_Knowles.

This Morning I Was Still A Paperboy

By Jonathan Gensler

This morning I saw a light moving through the twilight, faster than an airplane. I thought That’s an awfully bright satellite, and I don’t believe I have ever been more wrong.

I had a schedule to keep with my newspapers, so I kept a slow trot through yards and around fences. I’d grab a paper out of my shoulder bag, then fold it, wrap it with a rubber band, and drop each bundle on a porch, sometimes inside their door if they’d been generous with tips.

With October in full swing, the early morning darkness persisted and stretched out. While occasionally a light would brighten a window as someone awoke to begin the day, outside, there wasn’t a soul to be seen, and I kept my eyes skyward on the satellite.

The light in the sky veered off its straight-line path, growing brighter, larger, and closer, moving erratically through the sky.

I gotta be seeing things.

I shook my head after one last glance to the weird light above and dropped down below the fog line heading into the valley of houses. Now trotting downhill, I felt the wind pick up behind me, rushing me forward, the swirling fog around me glowing a soft blue from behind.

What in the—?

Distracted by the radiance, I slipped on wet grass and landed hard on my shoulders, knocking the back of my head. Stars swam as the light in the sky filled up everything, and then flew off and away. I rolled over and looked back up the hill. I’d slid down maybe ten or fifteen feet, papers spilled and scattered across the yard, and I was scrambling to stack them back up as the lights came down again through the gloom.

I inhaled deeply and froze.

As the light streamed closer and split into two, an old pick-up truck emerged from the mist, sides red with rust and a cracked bed cover rattling in the back. The muffler was shot, and the whole thing belched blackish smoke out the back, creeping down through the dense morning haze.

I didn’t recognize the truck or the driver, but in this part of West Virginia, everyone had to have at least one beat up old pick-up around. My old man did, and he’d be heading out in it to his job at the refinery anytime. I needed to finish up so I could get a hug and say goodbye.

The unknown truck eased its way down the road into the valley and disappeared. I followed, brushing myself off from the fall, rubbing the back of my head.

That is going to hurt like hell later. A nice little golf ball-sized bump was swelling up under my hand.

Shit. Better get back to work and finish this so I can ice it before school.

I continued the paper route, and the truck continued to belch it was way down the road. No one else had made it out of their garages yet at my wrist’s Swatch-assured time of 5:33am.

I was about halfway through the when up ahead the truck’s engine revved and backfired twice. Mere seconds later the sound of crunching metal drifted down through the fog, followed by an inhuman scream. The blue lights of the truck whirled around, facing me from the hilltop.

My heart raced as I dropped my carrier bag and dashed into a sprint across the short valley and up the hill, Boy Scout training kicking in.

What did he hit? Is he alright? How can I call for help?

As I crested the line midway up the hill, I noticed the lights weren’t from the truck.

Well, at least not all the lights. Something else was there too, in the swirling pre-dawn darkness.

The something cast a man-like silhouette, perched upright in front of the flashing lights. Man-like, as it looked about as tall as a man would be.

But this something wasn’t human.

Through the murkiness, I counted what must have been four, maybe six arms.

It was standing as still as a rock one second, and moving through the fog with a fluid, dreamlike aggression the next. The form blurred into disappearance, then appeared right beside the wreck, where the truck had crashed into a tractor trailer-sized mass of indistinct metal, all curved lines like a submarine, and the source of the flashing lights.

The creature tore the crumpled door off the driver’s side of the pick-up, and a bearded man inside was shrieking like a hungry, tired child.

Until he wasn’t.

The figure’s armlike appendages efficiently whipped out and sliced off the man’s head, neatly tossing it into the mists right at me.

Downhill from the thing, I remained shrouded in the whirling dark as an awful slurping sound slithered down to me from the direction of the wreck. The head rolled to a stop an arm’s length away.

I recognized the face now—Old Man Stroby. I barely knew him, as he didn’t take the paper, and only came outside at odd hours. Kids joked about him like he was a serial killer, and seeing him up close now, he did have a strong Robert England likeness, so—

What was I thinking? I was unfocused and frozen in place. Try as I might my feet were pinned in place, my gaze locked on Stroby’s glazed over eyes.

At last, the scent of burnt meat and fat made its way through the damp air to my nose. My eyes found the blackened flesh and sharply severed vertebra poking just through the charred and cauterized remains of his neck.

The slurping above me stopped.

I eased my eyes up.

As the sun’s rays began peeking over the far hilltops the shape had straightened up and dropped the remains of Stroby’s body.

In the emerging sunlight, the creature was jerking its head side to side without rhythm or pattern, its now eight arms waving in the fog like an octopus, searching.

Thinking I need to be somewhere, anywhere, but here, I finally regained control over my body. I slunk lower to the ground, creeping backwards like a cornered mouse, when it turned toward me.

I was still hidden in the edge of the fog, but this creature was now in the clear crisp air above me. Its nightmare face burned into my memory: two rows of what I first took for dark yellow eyes, that next began to open up like nostrils, taking in the air, breathing in the morning’s first rays of sunlight.

I prayed that the sunrise might somehow blind the beast for an instant as I scrambled backwards. I continued down and to the side, managing to stay hidden in the dissipating fog line and watched as it hunted.

It couldn’t see me. Those bulbous shiny appendages on its face weren’t like human eyes, but they were doing something to try and find me.

And not only me.

To my left, a front door opened, a hushed “Oh my God,” was followed by a louder, “Honey? Call 911; there’s been an accident.”

A barking dog ran through the doorway past a woman standing in her nightgown. I had a clear view of the monstrous creature melting into the air, a blur of color emitting a sharp clicking SNAP! and reemerging almost instantaneously behind the barking dog. Its arms were slicing right through the dog’s neck singeing both ends as faint, black smoke fluttered up off its blade-like limbs.

The inhuman face buried into the dog’s carcass before it’s body stiffened at a bellow of absolute terror from the woman in the doorway.

The creature blurred again and stretched into eternity. It struck out one of its arms into the gap between her collarbones, pulling its way toward her.

It caught the woman caught mid-scream, and her head flew off into the yard, the creature cradling her body with its face holes burrowing down into the headless neck with that hellish slurping.

That’s the last I saw of it. I found my will to move, and a good thing as the fog was burning off with the sun fully up over the horizon.

I turned and sprinted home.

My dad had already gone off to work when I returned home. His office didn’t pick up this morning. Now the phone isn’t working anymore. No dial tone.

I hear occasional screams from outside, but I have drawn the blinds closed and am down in the basement, waiting. For what? I don’t know. But I am not going outside.

My dad has a shotgun, but it is upstairs in his closet. Thinking about going after it makes my whole body shake. Thinking about the thing and its face full of holes, waiting and stalking outside, is almost enough to overcome my shakes.

I am thirteen years old. My name is Jimmy Beeler. This morning I was a paperboy.

End.

Jonathan Gensler(he/him) grew up in a haunted house in West Virginia, and now writes dark, speculative fiction. Prior to writing professionally, he served as an officer in the US Army, worked as a day laborer in Aotearoa New Zealand, and helped build companies as a cleantech entrepreneur. He is an Affiliate Member of the Horror Writers Association, has degrees from West Point, MIT, and Harvard, and lives in Nashville with his partner and three children. You can connect with him on Twitter @jgensler.

Art by Maxwell Marais

In Dark Tabittree

By Christi Nogle

They entered a gently winding road canopied by trees, and the temperature dropped in the car. The children sighed with relief.

“Lovely,” said Rena, half awake. In her half-dream, the road was a bed and the bright green tree cover a snarl of silk and lace.

The house impressed them, tall on its hill above the quaint little town. Rena’s fantasy had been to change every single thing in the house. She’d picked out the colors and all, but after they’d stood looking up at it with the car engine ticking behind it, after the children had run upstairs to claim their rooms and Tomás had toured her around, guiding with a hand at her hip, she realized nothing needed changing. The inside was perfect just as it was, with its worn floors and woodwork, its frayed wallpaper richer than anything she might have bought. Clawfoot tubs, deep closets, an earthy musk that would build until they opened windows in the evenings and let in the cleansing scents of honeysuckle and rain and the sounds of birds.

The things they had sent ahead with movers were settled in among the things left behind so perfectly, it was as though everything they owned had always been there.

They only needed to dust. Or she did, with Teddie and Gully for helpers. Tomás went into his book-filled study and closed the door.

* * *

The children’s negotiations involved rock, paper, scissors. Teddie won the entire third floor, and with much grace Gully accepted the vast attic floor with its fancy stained glass window and shaky little balcony. They had been skeptical about parting—had stayed in one bedroom back in the city—but there was just so much space here, they felt obliged to spread out.

The children were entering their teens now, each an only child who had long wished for a sibling and, oh, sometimes wishes come true! Sometimes the things your father or mother says will be a gift actually is a gift, and unlike in movies and books you make friends with your step-sibling and find, really, a soul-mate who looks like you and is the same age. Sometimes you make believe you have always been together or even that you are twins.

They had felt this way for five years now. It was time to separate just slightly, and all was well and good.

They busied themselves arranging their items in their separate spaces but always saw each other first thing in the morning and last thing before sleeping. The final days of summer rolled out happily, the last happy days they would have together as a family.

* * *

Tomás had moved back to Tabittree with a sense of pride and a sense of failure strangely mixed. As a child he had often looked up at this fancy house on the hill with desperate longing, so there was that, and yet leaving the city was giving up a fight.

On registration day he had ushered the kids out of the public school red in the face. It had never been like that here, or did he misremember? Everyone so vapid and slow, everything so poor and dreary.

A woman was waiting by his car with a brochure about a new progressive arts-based school. She was a teacher at that school and wore that certain mix of bohemian and upscale recreation-store clothing that made a woman instantly trustworthy.

The kids whispered together in the backseat, not listening, and so Tomás said to this woman, “My Gully. . . “ and did not know what else to say. He thought Rena’s daughter Teddie just might be all right in the dismal public school, but not Gully. They were too sensitive.

“Just follow me,” said the teacher, gesturing toward a silver Outback. “Just see.”

After they had all toured the four-room schoolhouse, after the children were once more whispering in the backseat, the teacher said something strange:

“You’re starting to remember some things, aren’t you? I’m returning to Tabittree too. It takes time. Relax.”

Tomás didn’t press her on the meaning of that. God, he’d never even asked if the school was accredited.

* * *

Tomás and Rena sat in Adirondack chairs looking out from the front porch, out at the dark little town.

“It reminds me of. . .”

“What?” said Tomás after a moment.

She ran her thumbnail along her lower lip. He didn’t like that tic. “It reminds me of something.”

It reminded her of Breughel—or Bosch, even—the town and the people rushing and trudging in tall trees and little glints of sky. Felt like a god’s-eye view.

The air was damp and close. It announced itself over and over, like the longing for some addictive thing she was trying to quit.

* * *

Rena, Gully, and Teddie sat in a porch swing looking out from the back porch at the acres of natural land, tall trees and complicated undergrowth in many shades of green, brown, and violet with the blue hills beyond. It was not jungle—not in this place, which was the South or the Midwest, depending on whom you asked—but it felt like jungle, vast and close at once. Nothing but nature.

The scene before them occurred to Teddie as a pattern, as though it were printed—no, woven into fabric.

The scene felt close like the air felt close and tugged at her mind the same way. An addictive thing that kept announcing itself, though, for the longest time, she did not venture outside in that direction. When she and Gully left the house, which was seldom, it was over the front porch and down the many steps into town.

No need to drive here, which was a blessing. Since arriving, no one had felt like driving at all.

* * *

Gully and Teddie cooked breakfast on the first day of school. Rena was not up to it, and Tomás was nowhere to be seen.

Rena sat in the breakfast nook looking out to the back jungle. There were many steps leading down to it, just as there were in front, but she had never taken those steps. Maybe the children had.

She said, “I have been asking around, because I was interested, you know. . .” and she trailed off.

Gully slid the final pancake onto the stack. Teddie gave the scrambled eggs one last turn and ground ample coarse pepper onto them. So smoothly they worked together. Teddie gathered three napkins, three forks, and they sat beside Rena.

The food was so good, they all fell silent for a while, thinking their own thoughts.

Suddenly Rena said, “Interested in local history, and the name is so strange, don’t you think? And I asked at the library—have you been there? It’s terrible, damp and claustrophobic. But I suppose no one would want books, living out here. Why would you need to escape into books when you can escape into the . . .”

“Mom, are you all right?” said Teddie. She eased the plate from under her mother’s hand and stacked it with the other plates for rinsing.

“I went to the library, and the woman there was so old, you know, and well I’m sure she’s not a librarian really, but she was the one they had set up as the librarian, and so I thought this was because she knew things. Wouldn’t you think so, a little place like this? But she didn’t seem to know much of anything at all.”

“Mom,” said Teddie, grasping Rena’s hand. “We have to go. We have to go to school.”

“Oh, have a nice day, sweetie,” she said and then she stared into Gully’s eyes with a soft, serene expression, adding, “Sweeties.”

The children hurried off through the hall, over the porch and down the many steps toward school. Rena sat sipping on orange juice.

“The name came from Tibbetts’ Tree,” the old lady had said. The lady in the library. She’d said, “An old man founded the town, name of Tibbetts, and the town was named for a tree he planeted near to the center of town.”

Planeted, she had said, not planted. Rena made note of that because it brought the strangest image to mind, a sprawling broad tree like the tree of life in the middle of town, a spaceship’s beam sizzling down.

“Or Talbot,” the old woman said a moment later while Rena was browsing.

“Or maybe it was Tabbott,” she said, just as Rena was going out the library door, with the door-bells tinkling.

* * *

The Fancy House, Tomás had thought of it, as a little boy on his way to fish in the ponds on the weekends and on his way to school in the afternoons—and it had not been nearly so fancy back then, had been somewhat decrepit in fact. And now it was just perfect.

He spent his days walking through the town and beyond. Sometimes he stopped and took an ingenious folding fishing rod from his satchel.

“I’m not looking for work right now,” Tomás had several occasions to say. Saying it warmed him. He had never imagined being in the position at so young an age, to take a few years off to think and plan. He had expected to work every day bleary eyed and desperate with need. But the luck had come because houses in the city were worth so much more than houses in Tabittree.

As though life were dearer there, when in fact it was dearer here than anywhere. Oh, how could he have ever left? He supposed that was what you were supposed to do, if you were smart, flee, but why? A half-ring of hills cupped the north side of town while the south spilled out into fertile fields and pastures. A lazy stream ran through, pooling into ponds loud with birds and, in the evening, frogs. The old folks had liked to eat those frogs, but there didn’t seem to be any of that sort of distasteful back-woods business anymore. It seemed now that people drove into the town of Barber for groceries and they probably ordered a great deal of things online as well. No place was an island, after all. Not anymore.

“You will remember things,” the teacher had said. Something like that, and he was beginning to, especially with the fishing rod in hand, leaned back against a tree with a blade of stiff grass in his mouth. Beginning to remember.

* * *

The two of them stood in front of the class, as they’d anticipated doing. They had not expected the room to be so crowded. Someone had brought in more desks since the tour they’d taken with their father.

Their teacher was the very one they had met with Tomás. She introduced them as siblings. Though Gully was darker-skinned, they were both about the same build, with short black hair and wide black eyes. It occurred to them, as they squeezed along narrow paths to assigned desks, that no one here suspected they were stepsiblings.

They had not expected the classmates to favor Gully, but that was what happened, so that all through the many interactions that long first day, Gully kept having to pull Teddie into conversations, kept having to look toward her so that other people might follow the look and see her. If this had ever happened at their last school, Teddie had been the one to do it. Something had shifted.

Gully wondered if, without these efforts, their sister might simply disappear.

* * *

“I’m worried. I mean the school is fun and all, but we do need to get into college someday,” Teddie said over their dinner of fresh-caught fish. “We had like ten recesses today.”

“It was five,” said Gully, whose body had tensed. The school had been such an unexpected pleasure, and they worried Teddie might ruin things.

“It’s better than the public school, I promise,” said Tomás, gracing them with his presence in honor of this first day of school. “Unless you want to be home-schooled,” he added, looking to Rena.

She had pulled one of the parlor’s brocade wing chairs up to the dining table for her greater comfort and sat there cross-legged with a very full glass of wine in hand. Whatever else was going on with her, this new happiness was something all of them savored and felt grateful for.

She said, “In my humble opinion, a little relaxation is not the worst thing.”

They did agree.

* * *

Rena and Tomás sat in a porch swing looking out at the acres of jungle with the purple-brown mountains beyond. The day was more humid than any so far, and more than ever it felt that the scene before them was printed or embroidered onto fabric. The closer the air, the closer the scene.

“It’s so lovely, it doesn’t seem real,” said Rena.

“It doesn’t seem real because you haven’t walked out that way, have you?” said Tomás.

She’d put herself a new, firm limit on wine and so she was quite sober. If she’d had a couple of glasses, it might have felt more normal to take Tomás’s hand and then drop it to hold the stair rail but as things were, it felt overstimulating, the light too stark and the printed scene looming judgmentally.

They moved single-file down the steps and onto a vague path with ferns at its edges, little wildflowers, wood-litter and rocks. The path disappeared in undergrowth, but he kept them going straight, stooping under trees and rounding bushes from time to time. Things were blurred as in mid-distance, even up close. It was the air.

They walked a long time and heard many birds but saw no crawling animals.

Tears came to Tomás’s eyes for no clear reason. He felt he needed to speak before he lost control of his voice. “It’s all right. You can do this every day if you like. Not all day, maybe, but every day walk out here and have a good soak. The path will make itself if you do it. I think it would be good.”

“A soak?”

But she already heard the warm water flowing out of rock ahead and smelled the hint of sulfur. It might have been a natural hot spring pool at one time, but rocks had been laid in patterns around the edges later on so she knew people had soaked here for a long while.

Tomás felt close with her, but he felt far away, too. It made him want to walk ahead, maybe loop around toward his fishing hole, and in fact he should have walked away, but instead he took the things from his satchel. He spread the blanket on the damp grasses. He laid out the towels, loosened his tie.

After that, it was all a rush: stripping, entering the pool, kissing her deeply like he had when the marriage was young. The kissing went on a long time like sucking a candy so slowly you never wore it away. He brought them out of the pool onto the blanket. He knew what he was doing and kept himself deep inside, which she loved, but when the time came to pull out, he plowed deeper still, and her spasms were harder than ever before. Like clenching fists. She started to push away and then she pulled him hard against her so that he knew.

“That was not smart,” she said, after. “You know you need to be a full year past your last period before you’re safe.”

But this was what would make her safe. He felt it.

Somehow, he knew, this was what had already made her safe.

* * *

After lunch and the third recess, they started a mural on the side of the school, a lovely forest scene that, when it was done, if it was good, would make the school almost invisible. The teacher insisted that when they did the low parts, they did not stoop but instead maintained a flat-footed squat. Their teacher’s husband hung around just going off about “P.E. and art at the same time, kiddos. Looking good, looking good.” He came around a lot, always sort of cheerleading the teacher’s efforts. Gully thought it quite sweet, but it was one of the many things that bothered Teddie.

“Art, well sure it’s art. What else would you call it?” the teacher’s husband said, like someone had challenged his point. Gully watched the teacher walking out towards the woods. She liked everyone to pee outside when they could—something about the septic system—but Teddie took the opportunity to sneak inside.

“Art, you know, art,” said the teacher’s husband. He didn’t make note of Teddie leaving, but the teacher did just as soon as she came back and caught Gully, for once, alone. She squatted down next to them. This teacher was always beaming, and now she beamed a little more brightly than usual. “You’re doing great,” she said, though Gully hadn’t done much besides a tentative stippling of green.

“Teddie just needed something from, uh, inside,” said Gully.

“Great.” The teacher offered Gully a hand up. “I’ve been meaning to see how you’re doing.

“Wonderful.” Gully made an effort to beam because it really was true. Everything felt right here. There was none of the stress and pull of the city, and everyone so welcoming, and this school-work like nothing they had encountered before, so fitting to Gully’s propensities.

“Let’s stretch those legs a bit,” the teacher said, and Gully turned away from the school doors so they’d not catch Teddie coming out. Protecting Teddie was one of Gully’s strongest impulses.

They walked a long while in a prairie-like clearing and into the woods. The teacher talked, and Gully answered, feeling only half awake.

“And so how are you feeling, really?”

“You’ll remember things—if you haven’t already . . .”

And Gully had one firm, clear image: their hand stroking a mountain, grasping a mountain and feeling it give.

“Your sister, what can you tell me . . .”

“Well, she’ll remember soon enough, too.”

* * *

Gully and Tomás sat in the porch swing looking out at the acres of greenery while Rena, unconscious of being watched, skipped along her path toward the hot spring pool. She wore a sagging fuchsia one-piece. Her trail was already walked quite clear.

“It’s a fantastic school,” said Tomás.

“It is, truly.” Gully had never in life been so solemn or felt so familiar with Tomás. He was a good father, generally, as far as that went, and yet there had never been all that much between them. Now it felt like there was something unspoken.

“I hear that Teddie’s not getting on quite as well,” said Tomás and then more softly, “Are you remembering anything yet?”

Gully didn’t answer but watched Rena laying out her blanket. It seemed wrong that, as long and as far as she must have walked, they still saw her clearly.

“Little animals, both of them,” Tomás said. “That teacher of yours thought Teddie was mine all this time. I corrected that misconception, of course.”

Teddie was up in her rooms where she stayed so often now. She read and drew, but Gully thought the bulk of her time was spent reconnecting with friends online. Probably complaining about Tabittree and their little school she hated and that Gully found so dear.

Rena was lying back on the blanket now, easing her shoulder-straps down. Gully felt uncomfortable watching and turned to Tomás. “I haven’t ever been here before, have I? Before we moved in, I mean.”

“My God, she seems so close, doesn’t she? Like a tiny little figure on a curtain pattern, like you could reach out and touch her.” Tomás winked at Gully.

“I don’t think she knows we’re watching. We ought to . . . you know, privacy.”

“You wouldn’t blush, you wouldn’t walk away, if you saw a beautiful horse prancing around in the yard. Not that I’m saying she’s so beautiful anymore.”

“I’m feeling uncomfortable right now,” said Gully. Oh, they were terribly uncomfortable. Skin cold and crawling.

“Maybe not a beautiful horse. Maybe an old nag. I mean, she nags, a lot. Weren’t you the one to point that out, actually?”

And Gully’s cheeks grew hot. They had talked about that early on. Years ago, Gully had spoken against Rena and was ashamed by it now.

Firmly, Tomás said, “Reach out and touch her.”

Gully smiled, looked down. Tomás gripped Gully’s hand and brought it partway up, leaving his child to raise it the rest of the way on their own volition. Still the uncomfortable smile, but Gully raised the hand to eye level and lined the fingertip up with one of her pale, bare, distant kneecaps.

Deep in the forest, Rena’s shrieks rang out.

* * *

“I think you better stay home sick tomorrow,” Gully said one long afternoon near equinox. They were curled at either end of Teddie’s windowseat watching the town bustle along below them. Some of the trees had turned gold, orange, and pink.

“They have been saying I don’t look well,” said Teddie. “Are you all right? You look pale, like that. But I feel fine.”

“You seem fine.”

Teddie squinted. “I seem fine, but I should stay home sick tomorrow?”

Oh, she was like a little animal, wasn’t she? Dear and sweet as ever, but lacking some ability to make her fully—

No, Gully decided. That was a terrible thing to think. They would not think it.

“You better be sick for the rest of the year, actually,” they said.

Teddie’s lip quivered, and she pushed her foot against Gully’s. “Why? What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” said Gully.

“I don’t want to be like she is.” A glance down. She meant Rena. “I don’t want to lose my mind.”

“Then stay home tomorrow.”

“Why?”

Because tomorrow we will sit in a circle and try to imagine we are moving outside of time.

“Because you look pale.”

* * *

“Something touched me, out there,” Rena said as they drifted toward sleep.

Tomás rubbed her shoulder and shushed her. He pulled her close, stroked her bare, rounding belly.

* * *

“I’m not, but if I were, you and I would be going on a trip, don’t doubt that,” Rena said from the kitchen. Teddie heard it because the walls were not so thick as everyone thought.

“Don’t say that,” said Tomás.

“Of course I’ll say that. I’ll say what I want,” She whispered. “You know I never wanted . . . I only wanted Teddie. That’s it and that’s all.”

“I said don’t say things like that.”

“Surely the old women around here have herbs and things. I know what these people are like. I know. But that’s not even what I want. I want to take the car, and you can stay here and look after the kids.”

“Herbs and things? Sweetheart, you’re not making sense.”

“Oh, you know what I mean. What was that in Hamlet?”

“What?”

“Oh, Ophelia lists off all these flowers. I could have sworn I’d memorized it. My head is all fizzy.”

“It is. Fuzzy, though.”

“What?”

“Fuzzy. You shouldn’t be making any decisions in this state of mind.”

* * *

Tomás and Gully sat in Adirondack chairs looking out from the front porch, down at Teddie and Rena planting bulbs around the base of a tree.

“They look the same, but the one is a vessel for something greater. Mine is precious and the other is just—”

“I’m not going to listen to this,” said Gully, standing.

“You’ll understand. It takes time. There’s nothing you can do to rush it. Just go to school. Those are good folks. Like us.”

“Okay,” said Gully with a little of the edge they used to always have before coming to Tabittree.

“Like us,” Tomás said again, but Gully had gone inside.

* * *

They were curled at either end of Teddie’s windowseat watching trick-or-treaters hustling along amongst the purple and orange lights and the gold and pink trees.

“I think you should leave here,” said Gully.

Teddie’s eyes went wide. “I have nowhere to go.”

“Take your mother and leave here. She’ll get better once you’re gone.”

Teddie scooted closer, whispering, “Can’t you tell me?” but Rena had come up the stairs, was peering through the railing.

“Something touched me,” Rena said. “When I was out having my soak. Not just today, the last few times. I’m afraid to go out there now.”

“Go lie down, Mom,” said Teddie. “I’ll bring you tea.”

Rena stood for a moment and turned back down the stairs.

“Tell me,” said Teddie, and Gully did try. Rushed and confused, Gully tried:

The school wasn’t pretending to be a regular school now that Teddie was gone, now that all the kids were starting to remember things. Gully was slow to remember, maybe the slowest, but there were still little hints of things. The mountain—they’d held a mountain in their hand and crushed it once, in some other life. They’d sewn or woven something once. It had to do with time and space, finding a way to see past them. It wasn’t easy for anyone, not even the teachers. They were all beginners, really. All they did was try to find the ways to make it happen. Sitting in a circle either out in the forest or on the classroom floor, they did that a lot now. The desks had been moved out. Sometimes the forest would start to lean in on them, like it was inhaling, and things far away became close. Sometimes they would touch things far away, or speak—that was another thing they tried—one would stand many yards away and the other try to whisper in their ear. They would do other things, things that were hard to remember.

They would try talking about their progress, but the talk was all empty. “Are you doing well? Are you remembering?”

And so there wasn’t anything much to tell. But there was a sense of something greater coming, something real.

And, yes, something had touched Rena in the forest. Gully had touched her but only once and was so sorry. Telling this, Gully started to cry. The other times, it must have been Tomás or someone else. And Tomás was the one who had lost his mind. Not Rena. Oh, Teddie really ought to take Rena and go while they still could.

“I can’t really even drive,” Teddie said, the tears streaming down her cheeks too now.

“You’re going to have to try,” said Gully. “Now go and get Mom some tea.”

Gully had never called her Mom before.

* * *

Rena whispered, “Tabby Street was what the old woman at the grocery store said.”

“What’s that mean?” said Teddie, though she guessed. It would be like a red light district, wouldn’t it, like a whorehouse was a cat house?

* * *

“Tonight your parents will be here,” said the teacher. “Some of them might not be, but each of you will have someone here, that’s the thing. And we’ll do this like we have been, only the adults will be there too. It will be much more powerful that way, can’t you imagine? We’ll go all the way.”

“We’ll have a breakthrough,” said the teacher’s husband.

“What about my stepmom?” said Gully.

The teacher smiled and nodded. She touched her belly.

“What about Teddie?”

They turned their eyes down to the grass.

The teacher said, “Tapestry was the original name for the town because that’s what the landscape looks like, a lush dark tapestry. But it was always more than that. This was a place that flattened, or could flatten, so that the space before you shortened, so that it looked like figures embroidered or woven into fabric. Everyone senses that, even people like your mom and Teddie can sense that, all the people in the public school and all the rest. But we are special. We don’t just see this place. We navigate it.”

“And who is we?” said Gully. “What is different about us?’

“We don’t know that just yet.”.

“We’re all just beginners,” said one of the younger children. It was something they had all been saying.

“I think we’re fairies,” said a girl who reminded Gully of Teddie. How was it this girl could stay and their dear Teddie had to leave?

“I think we’re gods,” said a boy and the others thought it too. Gully saw that in their quiet attention. No one had spoken so brazenly before. It was the night coming up, making them careless and bold.

“My dad says the people of Tabbitree, the important ones anyway, were all called back together,” said another child.

The teacher’s husband nodded; the teacher nodded. They were about to move off toward separate spaces to read, to comb their hair, to nap and otherwise save their energy for the night ahead.

They were just about to rest when the parents began arriving, Tomás among the first of them.

Gully felt the tug toward their father’s power, the wish to be allied with such a force. Nothing of the old Tomás remained now, or was that right? It remained, perhaps but was only held off, as Gully held off so much now.

Their work was not supposed to happen until night, but here it was not yet dusk and the forest already shuddered and gasped around them. A thunderous feeling in the guts and some turned away from the circle to vomit, and some who were stronger moved away from the group to heave, returning more eager than before.

A great discomfort fell over Gully. Was this feeling something to overcome, or was it a guiding hand?

They looked at the father beside them and felt he was so massive, so distant, it would take hours to run to his side. Tomás’s eyes burned orange. Gully’s guts twisted, and they moved away from the circle.

* * *

Rena and Teddie sat in the porch swing looking out at the near-winter jungle. They thought that Tomás would be coming home soon, and Teddie had already packed some things into Rena’s trunk. All to do now was the convincing.

“I think Tabittree must come from tapestry,” said Teddie.

“Yes, that’s exactly right,” said Rena. “Exactly that.” The trees were drawn in silvery floss on a deep green velvet, the ground-cover leaves were tiny little stitches and the pebbles were loops of thicker thread.

“Because sometimes something comes to the forefront that you wouldn’t know was there,” said Teddie.

“It’s so lovely here,” said Rena with a pained smile.

“It is.”.

“But we have to go, don’t we?”

“We do, and now,” said Teddie. “Can you drive at all?”

“I’ll do it,” said Gully.

They turned.

Gully wore a heavy backpack. They reached out and took their mom’s hand, saying, “I’ll drive.”

Teddie hugged them, Rena too, quickly. They didn’t lock or even shut the doors as they hurried through the hall, across the porch, down the steps.

“Tomás will be here,” Rena said.

“He won’t. They started early,” said Gully. They were already getting in the car, anyway.

Gully drove down the steep drive. A couple of turns and they were out of town. They watched the rearview windows for a while, watched the fabric of Tabittree seem to pull and fold, and after the fires started, they didn’t watch. They looked forward.

A moment more and they were under the snarled-lace canopy, all brilliant orange now.

“Last night I dreamed I went to Tabittree again,” said Rena with a bitter laugh.

And Gully said, “Fuck that.”

End.

Christi Nogle is the author of the Bram Stoker Award® nominated novel Beulah (Cemetery Gates Media, 2022) and the collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future (Flame Tree Press, 2023). Her recent fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Obsolescence from Shortwave Publishing, and Monstrous Futures from Dark Matter INK. Follow her at http://christinogle.com and on Twitter @christinogle

The Yellow Carousel

By Timothy G. Huguenin

It was a warm September evening in High Point, West Virginia, when Silas first saw the Yellow Carousel.

A retired surface miner, he and his wife, Emma, had lived near the top of this ridge for most of their fifty-two years together. The land behind their modest home sloped gradually into a flat, wide depression, before rising again to its piney crown. Silas and Emma had made it their custom to sit on the back deck and watch the sun go down behind the pines as many nights as the weather was comfortable.

Emma had turned in early that night, complaining of a headache, so Silas considered the fading twilight in solitude. Venus opened her diamond eye on him, then gathered her star-children to come watch the field with her and the man below. Katydids chanted as a chorus of other insects added their harmonies to summer’s evening song. A barred owl questioned him from the edge of the pines.

Silas’s tea was nearly empty and his bladder full. He walked down the steps and leaned his shoulder against the railing. He peed in the grass, craning his neck back to study the Milky Way. It shimmered—perhaps movement of heat overhead? The air changed, suddenly very dry and charged with static.

Silas shook off the remaining drops and stowed himself back in his sweatpants.

Time to go. He swung his gaze once more across the hill. His eyes halted on a large shadow hunched in the depression. A nebulous black figure, larger than any animal, smaller than a house. Even in its vagueness, its silhouette was familiar to Silas.

He peered into the dark. His eyes, hungry for light, must be playing tricks. A chimera of his imagination, desperate to make sense of these shadows.

Yet his eyes were well adjusted, and though the moon was not full, he could see silver grass waving in the cool breeze sweeping the ridge.

“Emma?” he said, half-choking on the name. He repeated it again, louder.

She did not respond. Even if she could have heard from inside, she was probably asleep.

He hiked up his pants and walked down the hill toward this apparition. Though it was a gentle descent, his breathing grew heavy.

A high-pitched, ear-splitting buzz stopped Silas for a moment. He chuckled when he realized it was only a conehead katydid calling for a mate. Probably hanging onto that sassafras sapling a few feet ahead. He carried on.

As he passed the sassafras, his ears confirmed the plant as the location of this sound. But he was no longer troubled by this. The thing’s outline was solidifying. He saw now—again, how could he believe it? He must be mistaken…

A carousel.

His pace quickened, despite a creeping feeling that the thing watched him from where it crouched in the field. Yes, it was certainly a carousel, a big one, and as if its impossible appearance wasn’t enough to make Silas wonder, another breeze, seeming to emanate from the object itself, brought to him aromas that sparked the memories and emotions of fairs he had been to long ago: kettle corn, cotton candy, fried dough. A childlike giddiness overtook his fear and disbelief. He ran to it.

It lit up, beautiful and welcoming, shutting out the rest of the surrounding field. Graceful, playful curves adorned its crown. Wide, pointed petals painted sunflower yellow radiated from its base. Instead of horses, all its animals were deer, varying in shades of brown, skewered by gilded poles.

A tear slipped down Silas’s cheek as he breathed heavily in its nostalgic atmosphere. He felt that if he could look in a mirror, he would see an eight-year-old boy whom he hadn’t known in too many years. But there were no mirrors in its center, only a blank, black wall.

He was sure now that this was a dream. Afraid this knowledge might soon bring awakening, he hurried to its edge. He gently knocked on a petal. Carved and painted wood, not fiberglass. Solid. They were chest-high, so that instead of stepping up, he was forced to climb, awkwardly leaning his torso over the edge, grabbing the nearest pole, and swinging his legs up. He rolled onto his back and caught his breath. A dream in which he felt like a child yet felt the fullness of his age all at once—strange. But if he wanted to ride this thing before he awoke, he knew that he must not waste time.

Grasping the heel of a nearby doe, he pulled himself up, then mounted it. There was a sound of gears meeting as the ride began to turn. The deer rose and fell, rose and fell, the carousel revolved. Silas was known by his wife and friends as a somber man, but he could not repress the grin that stretched his lips, nor did he want to. He gripped the gold-leaf pole with his right hand and rubbed his left palm against the wooden doe’s muzzle, patted its neck.

“Good girl,” he murmured. “Good girl.”

He rode for hours, all the while wondering how long this would last until he would open his eyes, still sitting on the deck beneath the stars, his tea spilled next to his foot.

The carousel stopped turning at last. He dismounted the deer and sat on the base, his legs resting on the flower petals. He held a trembling hand in front of his face. He must be dreaming—but this felt all too real. Confused, scared, and delighted, he scooted off, dropping the remaining few feet to dewy grass.

The carousel’s lights shut off, leaving him to walk up the field in the dark. Coyotes yipped and howled. The sound chilled him.

* * *

Emma snored softly, her bedside lamp still on. Silas stood at her feet and watched her, still trying to understand what had happened. He was no longer sure it had been a dream. He would have awakened by now. Was there something wrong with him?

He slid open the door to the small balcony above the deck and walked out. If there was anything out there, the lamp had ruined his chances of seeing it. But on his way up the hill, while the coyotes were singing, he had turned back, like Lot’s wife, for one last look. A pillar of salt he had not become, and there was nothing left in the depression but a bobcat slinking across the field.

He returned to the room, shutting only the screen so that the fresh air could circulate. Emma opened her eyes and smiled.

“Hi honey. You have a nice sit?” She glanced at her clock. “Wow, it’s late. You been out all this time?”

“Yeah.”

“Fell asleep in your chair?”

He looked away and nodded. “Something like that. You feeling better?”

“Yeah. Sleepy, though.” She rolled to her side, tucked her hands beneath her pillow. “You’re coming to bed now, right?”

“Uh-huh.” He stripped off his clothes and sat on the mattress. “Emma…”

She grunted, nearly asleep already. Silas wondered how she did that, just turned off at will. It took him at least twenty minutes to drift away.

“Don’t forget the light, honey.”

“Huh? Oh.”

She fumbled around for the switch for a couple seconds, half-awake. Soon, all was dark.

“You smell like cotton candy,” Emma muttered.

* * *

Rain kept them indoors for the next few days. Silas started a new Zane Grey novel, but thoughts of the Yellow Carousel distracted him. In three days, he only made it through a few pages, and even then, he wasn’t sure what was going on in the story.

He knew he should talk to Emma about what he had seen, but he was too afraid. Not that she would think him crazy—

(Maybe I am?)

An unreasonable weight of guilt hung onto him. As if something that gave so much pleasure must be inherently dirty. So he kept this secret from her. He wasn’t used to hiding anything from his wife, and as much shame as it brought him, it also thrilled him.

The gray blanket finally moved on. A cool, clean sky made him overwhelmingly impatient for twilight. At last, the sun grew heavy. He brewed some tea and settled into his chair on the deck. Emma looked at him with amusement as she sat next to him. but he hardly noticed. His gaze scoured the landscape for some sign of the carousel’s coming.

What if it was a one-off thing? he thought. What if it don’t come back?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t return—or if it had never appeared at all. He could live the rest of his life marveling over that night, free from this continued compulsion to hide it from his wife.

“What’s wrong, Silas? You seem so… I don’t know. Uptight.”

“Nothing,” he said, grateful for the low, rose-colored sunlight that hid his burning red ears. “Just watching the deer. Looking for a buck.”

“You thinking about hunting again this fall?”

“Maybe,” he lied. He hadn’t been hunting in five or six years. Though he missed the thrill of a successful kill, it no longer made up for the trouble. His knees hurt too bad to drag anything worth shooting, and he was more sensitive to the cold. What really had sealed his decision was discovering on his last couple hunts that he was no longer able to field dress a deer without vomiting. He felt immensely ashamed of his weakened gut.

“Well, that’s great,” Emma said. “You really should. You been in such a slump. Get out there and get moving, get the blood flowing.”

Silas’s guilt deepened. He did not want to disappoint his wife. He almost came clean right then, but something kept his mouth clamped shut.

She put her hand on his wrist, then slid it into his palm. Her fingers gently sought to interlace with his. He accepted them despite his feeling that this sealed a promise he couldn’t keep.

“I been worried about you.” Emma’s voice was hoarse and tentative. “Why don’t you talk to me like you used to?”

“We talk, don’t we?”

“I mean about… I don’t know.”

“Now you got me worried.”

She shook her head and watched the shadows creep. He didn’t press her to explain. He would rather not talk. Not tonight.

When she excused herself, he didn’t watch her leave. He was too afraid of what he would see in her eyes, and that it would change his mind, that he would follow her inside and miss what might come.

And just after the stars appeared, when he had almost given up, it came.

He laughed as he ran to it, ignoring the undercurrent of dread that seemed to grow with his excitement.

“What does it mean?” His whispers shook with each knee-jarring stride. “How can it be?”

He pressed his palms with wary joy against its smooth sunflower petals. Its lights switched on, blacking out the surrounding field and his house up the hill.

He climbed on. The deer’s eyes followed him as he chose one to ride. He inspected the head of a darker doe. Painted deep chestnut, the details of its face were skillfully hand carved from wood. Yet its painted eyes met his gaze with awareness. A wordless breath of amazement left his mouth. In return, the doe blasted warm air into his face, though he could not see how respiration was possible without an open orifice. He resisted an urge to plug his fingers into its eyes and nostrils. Contrary to its outward appearance, the thing was living, and he didn’t want to hurt or anger it.

It warmed with pleasure as he mounted it. The other deer eyed them jealously, though not with malice, as each knew that the next night would bring a new chance to be ridden.

The carousel’s gears clattered, and the ride began to turn. No music played to conceal its noise, he noticed—now that he thought of it, there hadn’t been music on his previous ride, either. For a minute or so, the sound of its inner contraption filled him with ominous loathing. Coyotes joined in chorus as if to make up for the ride’s lack of song. Silas hugged his doe’s neck with one arm and gripped its golden pole tight with the other.

Its gentle undulation soon lulled him, and they rode in increasing joy until all his dread and misgivings were forgotten. He didn’t even wonder at the meaning of all this, he only smiled through tears. The surrounding field obscured, he could not mark a full revolution, which made it feel like one continuous, everlasting turn.

And why couldn’t it be? Why should it end?

Somewhere else, Emma turned in her sleep, muttering of cotton candy and kettle corn. She cried out for her husband, but he was not there.

* * *

Fair weather continued, though the nights became cool. Silas kept returning to the carousel. Emma often awoke in the night, breathless, reaching for him. The true meaning of his empty pillow never occurred to her. She feared that some kind of sickness kept him from sleeping.

She pictured him at the table, brooding over lukewarm tea. She considered venturing downstairs to retrieve him. But her knees and back ached, and Silas would come to bed when he wanted.

* * *

Another quiet evening sit between them. Silas’s pulse quickened as dusk approached. He smiled when Emma at last left her chair.

But instead of going inside, she said, “How bout a walk?”

Silas hoped that his expression would be taken for surprise and not disappointment. “It’s almost dark.”

“I know. Won’t it be fun? Just you and me and the stars. It will be like when we were young.”

“My knees, though.”

“Ain’t no worse than mine. So it won’t be a long walk, that’s fine. I just want to get a bit of blood flowing through these old joints for a change.”

He couldn’t disappoint her. They stepped off the deck, and she turned for the field.

“Why don’t we take the road?” he said.

“I want to see the sky. Hear the rustle of deer sneaking through the woods. Feel the ferns on my legs.” Her eyes moistened as she spoke. “I want to remember why we settled way up here on this mountain, away from neighborhood church bells and laughing kids riding bikes past.”

“Kids don’t ride bikes anymore. They got their iPhones and shit.”

But he could see she wouldn’t change her mind, so he walked with her along the field’s edge, hoping desperately that the Yellow Carousel would know well enough to wait.

They neared the depression, which remained empty. The strong wind chilled him. Emma did not seem to notice it. She took a deep breath.

“I know better than to press you till you’re ready to talk,” she said. “But I just wanted you to know that I love you and I hate seeing you this way.”

“It ain’t that. I just…”

“I told you, you don’t gotta tell me till you’re ready. But you don’t gotta suffer alone. That’s all.”

“Thanks. I love you, too.”

She smiled with her mouth only, not her eyes, then took his hand. They reached the edge of their property and stepped over the low-bent section of rusty barbed wire. Silas glanced over his shoulder at the open spot where the Yellow Carousel might be. Still absent. He was both relieved and sad, wondering if she had somehow ruined his chances of seeing it again.

Emma produced a tiny flashlight from her knit sweater and pointed it into the woods.

“It gets steep,” Silas said. “My knees.”

“We’ll just cut the corner, come out to that bend in the road. Stay on the ridge.”

“It’s dark.”

She waved her flashlight with a smile. It occurred to Silas that she had planned this little jaunt all along. He tightened his jaw. Did she know about the carousel? Had she seen it one of these nights, when the coyotes howled and the gears clattered without music and time disappeared?

But that made no sense. If this walk had something to do with the Yellow Carousel, why the trek through the woods? He searched her eyes and saw sadness but also a spark of mischief and adventure that took him back to when they had first met. But those memories were interrupted by the scent of kettle corn wafting in from behind.

He looked over his shoulder again. The clearing lay tranquil and empty, but the air was thick with its waiting. He knew now that the Yellow Carousel was not gone forever, nor would it betray their secret to Emma until he was ready to come clean.

He smiled and held his wife’s hand. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Their walk had tired Emma more than she had expected. And though she had tried to give him the time and space to open up, Silas still had not confided in her. But he did seem less tense as they reached home, his smile no longer forced.

“Are you coming to bed now, dear?” she said, hoping that he would follow her for once instead of wallowing in the kitchen with his tea.

“Sure, honey. But you got me all sweaty. I’ll be up right after my shower.”

She waited in bed with her bedside lamp on. Her knees were hot and achy, and her thighs hurt in a good way. The lamp faded off and on. She checked the cord, then laughed softly at herself when she realized that it was her heavy eyelids that were flickering.

The shower started to run. Silas had not lied about that. And why would he? She would have liked to clean up a little too, if she wasn’t so sleepy.

The sound of spraying water put her at ease. She fell asleep.

* * *

High, whiney yelps nearby, babies howling in the nursery—

But Emma had only dreamed of kids, Silas having discovered he was sterile after they married. Adoption had seemed an insincere option to her, something she would only have done as a last resort, and back then she had not wanted to become a mother to any child who would know that Emma was only settling. Having grown older and wiser—too old for parenting, and wisdom wasted—she now realized her excuse had been a copout born from bitterness and self-pity.

The crying, which had sounded so human and infantile as she approached wakefulness, came from coyotes, all joining in one another’s lonesome yowls from holler to holler.

Except they sounded so near, all together.

As if they knew she was listening, they fell silent as abruptly as they had started. Emma reached across the bed to a cold absence.

Silas must have awakened sometime in the night and gone downstairs—if he had ever come to bed at all. Had the shower been a deception? Or had that heaviness of spirit slugged him as he washed, so that he abandoned hope of rest?

The coyotes had made her anxious. Sleep would come no easier for her now than it would for her husband. Wincing, she rose from bed, put on her robe and slippers, and crept down the stairs.

All was dark and deserted. Her loneliness became a being to her, an intruder in the house. She clutched her robe tight around her neck. Not because of the chill so much as she felt exposed to this lack of company. She could feel it leering at her, grinning with lust to consume her, still hungry even though she knew it was eating her husband from the inside out, and she didn’t know how to stop it, didn’t know how to save either of them.

Now the chill came, hitting her back as she gazed at her black shadow cast long on the carpet by the moon. She turned to find the sliding glass door open.

She called to her husband, but no answer came. Loneliness’s hot breath warmed her neck.

She could see their chairs on the deck, both empty. But he might be in the yard, obscured by the bushes. She went outside.

An initial survey of the immediate yard did not reveal Silas in the day-bright moonlight. Then the bloodcurdling yips started again from down in the lower field.

The wild canines sat in a circle, muzzles opened skyward, shrieking their praises or laments around several larger animals. Deer, judging by the size and shape, though it was hard to see clearly into the liquid shadows lapping in the depression.

Knowledge came to her, from some sense other than sight, that Silas was down there, with the deer and the dogs. She ran, crying his name.

The deer scattered early. The coyotes glared at her with lowered heads, backing away sulkily, and they did not flee fully until she fell to her knees in the grass next to him.

Lying naked on his side, arms wrapped around his knees, Silas’s whole body shook. His cheekbones shined with tears.

“Oh honey. Oh God. Oh honey.” She covered him with herself, prayed over him with her heart’s intention since she didn’t have words for it.

After an immeasurable moment, he gasped, coughed on mucous, then, hoarsely, he spoke her name.

“Emma. Emma, did you see it?”

She squeezed him tighter. “Oh Silas, Oh God. Can you stand?”

She pulled him to a sitting position. He stared at her wildly, reminding her of the coyotes. She felt their eyes on her neck, watching her from the woods.

“Did you see the Yellow Carousel?”

“Honey, we need to get you to a hospital. Can you stand?”

Without waiting for an answer, she threw his arm around her shoulder and lifted. He did not resist. Her chest constricted as his frenzied whispers fell on her ear.

* * *

It had not appeared again since that night Emma found Silas outside. He believed the carousel no longer felt safe. It must have known that Emma was watching him more closely now, especially at night, never leaving his side no matter how long he waited on the deck.

The alternative explanation for its abandoning him was that his new medications somehow kept it away. He didn’t like this theory, because it implied that all they were saying about him was true. Even if some of it was true, he knew that the Yellow Carousel couldn’t exist only within his own mind.

But if it was wary of his wife, perhaps it was also wary of the meds. It could be real and also know the pills he was taking, treat him differently for it, as everyone else did.

* * *

“You can talk to me, too, you know,” Emma said as Silas read the paper with his coffee.

“I talk, don’t I?”

“Well, I mean. What is it that you discuss with your doctor every week?”

This again. He tried to hide the annoyance creeping onto his face, knowing she cared and not wanting to insult her for her concern.

“We don’t talk about much at all,” he said. And that was the truth, really.

“All right. Watch out, here comes breakfast.”

He slid his coffee away and lowered his paper to make room for the plate of toast and bacon—only two slices, anymore. Damn that blood pressure. Damn getting old.

A splinter of pain shot into his gums as he bit on it. He spit and swore.

“What the—”

He stopped, his tongue instinctively poking the sore, empty spot where a molar used to be. He searched his plate for the tooth, wondering how a piece of chewy bacon could have dislodged it so easily. All he saw among the saliva and chewed meat was a wet sunflower seed.

“You all right, Silas? What is it?”

The sunflower seed had traces of blood on one end. He reached his finger slowly into his mouth, fingering the absence, checking the rest of his teeth. They all seemed strong enough. And normal.

“Nothing, uh… Just too hot.”

“Be careful, honey. Here. Drink some water.”

* * *

Emma made sure to watch Silas take his pills, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that he had started hiding them under his tongue and then going to the bathroom to spit into the toilet. They didn’t even flush down all the time; sometimes she would find the evidence floating there when she would go in later to relieve herself. She didn’t think he had been doing this for more than a week or two.

She didn’t know how to talk to him about it. And he hadn’t seemed so different, so maybe it wasn’t a big deal. She had always believed that doctors leaned on their prescription pads a little too much. Perhaps all he needed was some time. He had stopped sitting outside and staring so wistfully at the field, now that the nights had become too chilly to sit through the sunset. Maybe the therapy was enough.

She stroked his hair as he slept.

“Rest easy, darling,” she whispered.

She would talk to him—or maybe call his therapist, get some advice about the best way to do it. As long as the therapist didn’t bring it up in his sessions without giving her a chance to do it herself. Then Silas would know that she had gone behind his back.

“Tomorrow,” she said to herself. “Tomorrow, I’ll call.”

“What was that?” He grasped her hand. “I was sleeping.”

“Nothing. I just need to remember to call the credit card company tomorrow. I noticed a strange charge on the statement. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Uh-huh. That’s nice. You know something?”

She squeezed his hand in return, waiting for him, wondering if tonight he would finally open up.

“I know that I complain about visiting the doc. But I think it’s helped. I think I’m getting better.”

“Oh Silas. I love you so much.”

“I love you too. You’re the best in the world.”

* * *

It was back.

Silas knew this immediately upon opening his eyes. The air in the bedroom seemed to vibrate silently, thick and warm. Through the window, the moon painted a silver rectangle across his and Emma’s bare legs. They both had kicked the duvet off in their sleep. Silas touched Emma’s forehead and found it clammy. He wondered for a moment if the thermostat had broken, but he quickly understood that this had nothing to do with an overactive baseboard heater. This was all part of it.

He fought himself to rise slowly and quietly, fought his skyrocketing elation, lest it all be a mistake and the disappointment devastate him. The bedroom door’s latch stuck and then released loudly. A small cadre of coyotes barked. Silas froze.

Emma stirred, breathlessly squeaked something about someone’s babies, and their father endangered.

“Darling?” Silas said.

“He needs your prayers, my babies,” she returned. “I will talk to him. I won’t wait another day.”

So she had not awakened. He told himself this would be a quick visit. She would not notice he was gone. It was a bit of a risk, he knew, but he could not miss this chance. One more ride.

His mouth tasted rotten from sleep, and his gums ached. As he passed the bathroom, he decided against brushing them. Too risky; Emma might hear the water running.

The door slid open freely, without noise. Silas’s shallow breathing puffed tiny clouds into the humid moonshine as he stepped out onto the deck. Sweat dotted the back of his neck. It felt like mid-summer, not autumn.

His breath halted. His pulse surged, fingertips throbbing. A soft moan sounded from high in his throat.

“True!” he whispered.

A nearby great horned owl echoed in agreement.

“True! True!” they said together.

His joy was so intense that another man might have mistaken it for terror. He leapt from the deck and ran, arms outstretched, heart straining.

Down in the lower field, the great flower awaited him.

* * *

Tonight, her children plead. You must talk to him tonight.

I will call the doctor first thing in the morning, my babies. I will call the doctor and then I will know what to do.

No, Mommy! Her children begin to bawl. No, please.

Their wails grow in pitch and volume, until they are feral sounds, no longer the anguished screams of young children.

Emma hugs her own sweaty arms as her children fade from her. She sits up in the bedroom’s stuffy emptiness. She knows without looking that Silas is not at her side.

Dear God, not again!

She does not even bother to throw on her robe or slippers—too hot for all that, anyway.

Maybe it’s all a dream, a nightmare recounting that one bad night. This ain’t that night, it’s a dream…

There is something different than last time. Something new.

A draft meets her on the stairway, fragrant with cotton candy, popcorn, burning oil. A clockwork cog-grind drills through her ears.

She runs through the open door, down the deck’s steps, then stops in the grass, unbelieving.

Spinning, spinning, grinding, surrounded by the dogs. Yellow petals bright in a spotlight that comes from nowhere. Deer bounding on gilded poles. There goes Silas, appearing and disappearing with each revolution.

How can this be?

A dream! Yes, it must be. Oh, let it be!

She screams something, probably his name, then she runs.

The carousel slows. Silas dismounts one of the deer, then steps down from the ride. The coyotes, just outside the lighted area, remain quiet.

She is close now, close enough that Silas should be able to hear her screaming. But he doesn’t acknowledge her. A divot in the field trips her, and she rolls several feet in the high grass. It becomes suddenly dark, and the clattering gears stop. For a moment she thinks she has blacked out. But as she lies there, she realizes that the carousel’s mysterious light has extinguished itself, confusing her night vision.

She pushes to her knees, sticky with sweat, itching from her tumble in the grass. As her eyes readjust to the moonlight, she sees that the Yellow Carousel is gone. Silas stands now amidst a group of deer, as if the wooden ones dislodged themselves from their poles and walked off the contraption with him before it vanished.

The coyotes lean back and cry to the stars. The miserable cacophony sends a shiver through her. She springs to her feet and rushes for him.

The coyotes pay no attention to her as she infiltrates their circle. The deer don’t scatter, either. Silas’s glassy stare registers surprise but not recognition. She stops a few feet from him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, his voice wavering unnaturally.

“Silas, it’s me,” she shouts over the shrill canine din. “It’s me, darling!” She is afraid to come closer to him, not sure what he might do in his trance-like state.

The deer shift slowly around them, surprisingly calm. A bulky twelve-point buck settles just behind Silas. It stomps and glowers at her.

“Please, come home,” she says. Her eyes brim with tears. “I don’t know what’s happening, but you have to come home.”

He blinks slowly, then he shakes his head. Long, hairy fingers wrap around her arms from behind. She screams and struggles. Whatever has grabbed her is too strong for her to break from its grip. Hot, rank breath on the nape of her neck petrifies her so that she can’t turn to see its face.

“Help! Help me, Silas!”

“Don’t fight.”

The buck behind Silas stomps again, then it lifts itself fluidly onto its hind legs, more like a man standing rather than a horse rearing. As its spine straightens, its front hooves become long, spindly hands that stretched down past its knees. The rest of the deer, all female, transform in a similar fashion. Emma no longer needs to turn to guess at her captor’s appearance.

The coyotes stop suddenly. Emma whimpers in the humid night’s pregnant stillness. In her mind, she pleads with herself to wake from this inconceivable nightmare; with her eyes, she pleads with her husband to save her.

The immense, bipedal buck monster steps closer to Silas, who looks up at it with adoration and expectancy. The creature snorts.

Silas nods before turning briefly to his wife. His lips turn slightly upward, and he says, “My seed,” as if that should make her understand.

“No!” she says. “Please, no!”

The buck snorts again, impatient. Silas opens his mouth wide. The moon hits his face just right so that Emma can see that something is wrong with his teeth. They are all too narrow, sharply pointed.

“What’s happening? What have you done to my darling?”

The creature holding her squeezes and jerks so that her own teeth click shut. She moans in fear and agony.

Incredibly, Silas’s mouth continues to open. His head tilts back so that his eyes point up at the stars, while his chin remains low, ninety degrees. Emma thinks first that he has somehow dislocated his jaw, but then his forehead continues further back, the angle between them widening impossibly. As his face unfolds like a paper fan, the pointed things she thought were teeth multiply, filling his mouth’s open void.

Her stomach heaves its contents, spewing over her chest and seeping into her bra. She wishes desperately to wake up or to pass out, but for some reason she cannot close her eyes. The one holding her shoves her forward so that she sees her husband’s open face closely, now more resembling a ripe sunflower than a human head.

They are not teeth. They are seeds.

The buck snorts again, and she is jerked backward, giving room for the antlered leader to continue this nightmarish ritual. A doe presents a large tool. The buck claims it with freakish hands and raises it well above its antlers as the doe bows out of center. The tool appears to be a massive pair of gardening shears. They gleam like silver in the sky, but Emma knows they are gold.

The buck lowers the shears and stomps. All step back. The does begin to mew, and the coyotes start another round of frenzied caterwauling.

The buck’s long-fingered hands open the shears and raise them to the flower’s neck for harvest.

Emma’s screams are lost in the rest of it.

At the field’s edge, a barred owl voices his own confusion. Deeper in the forest, a bobcat growls, then defecates. Overhead, stars watch without judgment or interference, as per their aeonic station and privilege.

As the Yellow Carousel spins, so turns the world.

End.

Timothy G. Huguenin is a hillbilly writer of the strange and spooky, living in the dark Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. His books include Little One, When the Watcher Shakes, and Unknowing, I Sink. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Dim Shores Presents Vol. 2, and The Saturday Evening Post. You can find out more about his work and get a free ebook by visiting https://tghuguenin.com/

The Parlor Door

By Tim Snider

Patrick grabbed Malcolm’s arm, stopping him midstride. Malcolm pulled his foot back and, where he was about to step, saw the brown layer of matted weeds, dried grasses, and tangled thatch.

“There it is, right where I said it was,” Patrick said.

Malcolm knelt down to get a better look. The patch was somewhat circular, about 3 or 4 feet across. He reached out and pressed the surface lightly, feeling it give a bit. He then ran his fingers around the edge, examining its structure. Malcolm stood up and walked around its perimeter while Patrick watched. Malcolm then pushed the toe of his shoe under its edge and lifted it slightly.

“You’re right,” Malcolm said. “It sure seems to be a hood or lid covering something.”

Patrick nodded in agreement. “I was just lucky I didn’t fall through the damn thing during my hike.”

Malcolm opened the cover up so they could both see. The lid covered a hole of similar size underneath. While Malcolm held it open, they both craned their necks to look in.

“What do you think it is? Maybe an old well or cistern?” Patrick asked.

Malcolm took out his cellphone and turned on the flashlight app. He shined it down into the hole to give them both a better look.

“No, I don’t think so,” Malcolm said. “It only goes down about 20 feet. Looks dry too.”

“Maybe a house or cabin sat here years ago, and this was a root cellar they dug,” Patrick suggested. They both glanced around the clearing. Seeing no evidence of a foundation or other signs of construction, they rejected the notion.

“Here, give me your light,” Patrick said, taking the phone from Malcolm. He placed it in his shirt pocket, so the beam faced outward. Patrick sat down at the edge of the hole and swung in his legs.

“What the hell are you doing?” Malcolm asked as his brow furrowed. Patrick’s bravado would get the best of him some day.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Patrick said, rolling his eyes. “I’m just gonna shimmy down and see what’s down there.” He kicked at the tunnel’s wall. “Haven’t had rain in a while, so the walls seem hard as rock. Should be able to climb down easily enough.”

Before Malcolm could protest the idea any further, Patrick turned around, grabbed the edge of opening, and began to climb down. He lost his grip once and slipped a bit, which caused Malcolm’s breath to catch in his chest. A few minutes later, Malcom saw Patrick land on the tunnel’s floor below.

“See anything?” Malcolm shouted down to his friend. He saw Patrick take the light from his pocket and shine it around.

“Yeah, it looks like there’s an opening in the wall, probably a cave,” Patrick shouted in reply. Malcolm watched as Patrick entered it, disappearing from view. The light cast shadows on the wall as Patrick went deeper into the cavern.

“Damn! Hey Malcolm, you should see this!” Patrick’s voice echoed from the darkness. “There are some dead animals in here! Looks like a couple of deer fell down here a long time ago and couldn’t get back out! Ugh, they’re dried out and pretty much mummified!”

Malcolm could hear the excitement of exploration in Patrick’s voice, but he was becoming more nervous with each passing second.

“Pat? Why don’t you climb back up here?” Malcolm shouted into the hole. “We can go back and get some rope and better equipment and do this right! Come on back!”

An echoing shriek of terror exploded from the tunnel and the shadows flashed wildly against the tunnel wall, as if the light Patrick held was being whipped violently around. The screams abruptly stopped, and the shadows stilled. Malcolm’s eyes, wide with horror, glanced about the tunnel’s floor for any trace of Patrick’s return. He watched as the various flickering shadows grew larger and coalesced, as if something huge was crawling over the cellphone light to fill the cavern opening, approaching the tunnel to the outside.

Malcolm released the cover, which dropped back into place with a dull thump. He took a hesitant step back and his heel caught on an exposed root, dumping him on the ground. From where he landed, his unblinking eyes never left the concealed door. It opened a crack, and Malcolm saw two glistening eyes staring back at him, coal-black and lidless. When he didn’t move, the door opened a bit more. Malcolm could now see the creature’s six other eyes staring at him as well. Its mandibles eagerly opened and closed in a chewing motion, dripping with gelatinous ooze that may have been saliva.

Shock gave way to panic, and Malcolm frantically tried to scramble to his feet. With lightning speed, the giant spider lunged from its concealed lair, landing on Malcolm’s legs. Its forelegs held him down as its fangs sank deep into his thigh. As Malcolm struggled, the monstrous arachnid dragged its newest prey back toward its nest where it could feed. Malcolm clutched at the ground, finding nothing to grip. The spider gave another tug, and Malcolm’s legs dropped into the tunnel. As the poison began to take effect, Malcolm groggily fumbled to grab the door but failed to do so. His shrieks of pain and horror trailed off as he began to lose consciousness. As he dropped into the hole, the last thing Malcolm saw was the trapdoor snapping shut, cutting off the sunlight.

End.

Tim Snider is an academic text and TTRPG editor by trade. He has written several supplements and adventures for game companies including Goblinoid Games, Pacesetter, and Goodman Games, and his horror fiction has appeared in The Creeps magazine. He lives with his wife, Chris, in frozen northern Ohio, where the chills are less esoteric and much more physical.

The Swish

By Laura Barker

It’s called The Swish and it starts on TikTok. One of your daughters shows you while you’re confiscating her phone – a daily occurrence: you stand by the front door and you put their phones in a box with the promise that they will get them back the next morning. Your youngest, Brielle, named after the town her donor was born, does not care. Her latest obsession is aquaponics and she puts the phone in the box and dances away to the back garden, a former concrete jungle now home to an enormous fish tank, a kindergarten of tilapia, and a riparian zone of plants from coriander to snake gourd who are fertilised by the waste materials of the fish. Your oldest, Dakar, named for the city in which she was born, does care. She protests every day of the week. Sometimes it’s a list of every way you annoy her and restrict her freedoms, sometimes it’s histrionics, today it’s trying to entice you to look at things on her phone. It’s compelling. You tell yourself this is why you have to restrict their mobile phone usage: it’s because things on there are so compelling, it’s like the sharp sugary sweetness of the confectionaries you steer them away from. Treats so interesting it will have them demanding luminous wafers over your carefully prepared vegetables and proteins and slow release starches. It’s not just the taste. It’s the photo of the wafers on the packaging. You remember an article you read once about how blue tits prefer hyper-real photographic images of blue tits to the real blue tits right next to them on the tree.

“Look Mama,” she tells you.

Whenever she calls you Mama, she wants something. When she’s annoyed with you, she calls you Tshwane, when she’s conspiratorial with you she calls you T, the rest of the time she calls you Mum. You look.

There are a group of teenagers dancing. This is surely nothing remarkable. The majority of videos you’ve seen on TikTok are teenagers dancing. But there is something about the way they are dancing that is different. It’s not exactly tap, although some of the moves remind you of that advanced tap masterclass you took at Brixton House earlier in the year – something about how the dancers lurch as if they’re going to fall over and then regain their footing. Their arms are all swishing to the left, and for some reason it doesn’t look like a boy band move, them all going in tandem with each other, or like synchronised swimming. It’s more of a weird point to that side. And you find yourself staring at the left. You are certain there is something there, although you can see nothing. There is an odd space in what looks like their dance studio there – they are all dancing way over to the right.

The video stops. “Very nice,” you say, “Now put it in the box.”

Her eyes are bright and wet with some kind of excitement. “Don’t you think its amazing Mummy?”

“What’s amazing?”

“The Swish. The dance.”

You consider it. “Yes, it’s pretty amazing,” you say. You pluck the phone out of her hand.

Immediately she wails. She has always been able to turn on the waterworks just like that, but it’s been a while since she’s done this over her phone. You are filled with panicked concern before you remind yourself that she’s full of hormones. It’s a difficult time for her. You must not collapse – under no circumstances should you relent and give her back her phone – but you must be here for whatever she’s feeling, you have to hold the space around her so that she can fall into it and explore her emotions whilst still feeling safe, but not too safe: in order to make this difficult transition from childhood into adulthood she must also experience danger and consequences and ambivalence about you and their other mother.

She stops wailing. “Fine,” she says. And then, “I detest you.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” you say, as she stalks into the kitchen to eat what will be one in an entire series of toast slices.

Two days later and your wife Didi sends you a video of Dakar dancing The Swish in your kitchen after you left for work. You open it at reception and you stand there wide mouthed while your boss Maureen peers over your shoulder. She’s pointing her arms consistently in one direction, lurching them back to neutral, and then pointing them again, but the dance is strangely unstylised. You’ve never seen her dance like this. It doesn’t look like moves she could have copied from anywhere, and it also is not the sort of dancing people do when they’ve been moved by the spirit. Her face is completely focused. She’s not smiling, or pouting, or posing.

Maureen says, “The Swish,” and shows you a video of her teenaged child Mee doing something very similar, waving their arms to their right, a look of vivid concentration on their face, their legs buckling wildly as if their kneecaps are dislocating and then gaining control again.

The two of you watch the videos over and over again, and then you remember that you both have jobs, and you get on with things: you with client notes, her with arranging whole-group continued professional development training. Later, you do a little side Googling. The Swish and drugs. There is a concerned thread on Mumsnet, and reassurances from many parents that whilst The Swish certainly looks like it could be a drug induced dance, there is nothing to suggest this. Someone posts a link to a school’s statement that many parents have contacted them concerned about The Swish and so far there is nothing to suggest this latest dance craze is anything to worry about.

A mother on Mumsnet recalls how the dutty wine was banned from her school because the headteacher thought it would break their necks, someone else posts an article about how the dutty wine did actually break a street dancer’s neck, and someone else points out that the article does not name the dancer or any sources and she thinks it’s a rumour. Someone else posts a link to an article about the tragic death of dancer Amancia Campbell, but this is a completely different kind of dance to The Swish. Still, you read testimony from Amancia’s mother and your heart seems to compress onto itself. You think about this poor woman now raising her three grandbabies and how shocked she was that a dance routine could have ended her daughter’s life. You cannot—cannot imagine living without Dakar, and yet you are imagining it. There is a video available to watch, where Amancia’s dance partner accidentally puts her full weight on Amancia’s throat. You know this is not a healthy rabbit hole for you. You close the Chrome window. You open it back up and search for the video. You click on it. You press play, then you press stop immediately after. You close the window again and take some of your box breaths, breathing in, holding it, breathing out, holding it, breathing in.

You message your wife. “What do you think of this dance?” you say.

“Ha-ha it’s too athletic for me,” she messages back. Then, “At work, talk later. Love you.”

“I’m spiralling,” you message her. She’s already gone.

You get home early and are immediately comforted by the sight of the slow cooker bubbling away on your kitchen island. The slow cooker makes you feel like the smuggest parent in the world. While other parents are scrabbling around, multitasking, trying to arrange dentist appointments and keep three-year-olds from sticking things in plug sockets and cook at the same time, you glide your serene fat body into the kitchen and whisk the glass lid off the thick ceramic bottom, ready to smell the delicious dinner that has been preparing for you all day.

You gag. The smell is terrible and toxic, and unnatural. It takes you back to a time in a science class where one of the rude boys mixed acetone with bleach. You put the lid back on and go to the bathroom to vomit profusely. You haven’t vomited like this since you were pregnant with Brielle. You swill your mouth out with the mouthwash your friend and herballist Janeen made you for ulcers and you vomit again, thin liquid rushing up your gullet and projecting at the back of the sink.

Something makes you take your phone out of your pocket, even though it should be in the box already – no phones on weekday evenings is a rule for all of you, not just your kids – and you watch that video again. Didi obviously stood in the kitchen doorway to take it. Dakar is behind the kitchen island and her arms are pointing right at the slow cooker. You are about to Google The Swish and toxic smells when you hear the crunch of your children’s feet on the woodchip that mulches the fruit trees in your front garden. You run to the hallway and dash your phone in the cardboard box before opening the door to greet them. You scan Dakar’s face for signs of drugs or chemical toxicity or anything unusual but she looks normal. The two of them are arguing about the tilapia in the aquaponic farm outside. It’s a familiar argument they both enjoy, about whether they are going to ever grab the fish and kill them and eat them.

Brielle takes the lid off the slow cooker before you have time to warn her. She is not the screaming sort of child, and the piercing sound she lets off slices your nerves in half. Dakar has her head in the kitchen sink to vomit in seconds – neither of them have thought to put the lid back on the slow cooker – and you worry fleetingly that she is pregnant before you dismiss this thought and you walk into the kitchen to do some parenting.

You all talk about the mystery of the evil smell over take-away. Didi came home with black eyed bean duqqa dip, snake gourd chichinga, plantain, breyani, chakalaka with vegan sausage, wilted greens, and garlic smoked whole cauliflower, and you eat straight out of the compostable containers. The kids come up with theories and you watch Dakar closely to see if she is hiding something. She seems not to be. Brielle tells you, spiritedly, about the worst smell known to humans, which is thioacetone, and Dakar surprises you all by saying the worst smell in the world is actually from the carrion flower. You say the worst smell in the world is Didi’s gym socks, and you giggle. You say it because this is something that a mother would say in an ordinary family where nothing strange is going on, but it has the opposite effect you hope for: everyone looks at you as if something is wrong. Didi squeezes your hand under the table and whispers, “Are you okay babe?”

You realise it was the forced giggle that made you sound unhinged. You have got to get a grip on yourself. You say you have a headache, and you leave Didi with the kids while you go upstairs and have a lie down. You slide your phone into your dress pocket on your way up and you strip down to your slip, slide a night scarf over your locs, and lie under the covers pretending to be asleep while you scroll through articles about The Swish and smells. It doesn’t help your search that a commercial cleaning company called Swishly Does It claims to remove all unwanted odours, and the Smithsonian Museum has several articles on olfactory hallucinations. You go to Page 3 of Google, a place you haven’t visited for several years, and there you find it. Some little known parenting forum. A woman complaining that her teenaged daughter made her younger brother’s birthday cake smell like toxic garbage by dancing The Swish too near it. Most of the advice given pertains to sibling rivalry and gift jealousy, but one other parent responds with a similar experience. Her youngest was dancing The Swish near a fish tank and she came home from work to find all the fish upturned with death and an unholy smell in the entire aquarium. Without thinking it through you race downstairs and bolt outside to check on the tilapia. They’re fine. Your children and wife stare at you from the table and you say, weakly, that you thought you smelt fire.

Didi follows you back to your bedroom but you pretend to be asleep, and she sighs, kisses your forehead, and goes downstairs to engage both children in an extremely loud game of 40-40. You message Maureen and ask her if there’s a weird bad smell in her house where Mee danced The Swish. Maureen messages back that Mee danced The Swish at their father’s house. Maureen asks if you’re okay and you put your phone down. You fall asleep.

The next day Maureen is telling you that there is, in fact, a terrible smell at her ex husband’s house where Mee danced The Swish, but this is old news now: the story broke early that morning that The Swish seems to make terrible smells. Nobody can understand why. The smells have been analysed. Scientists thought it was chloroacetone but initial tests with sodium hydroxide seem to suggest it must be something else. Not thioacetone – people are vomiting, but not in the volumes thioacetone would cause. Teenagers interviewed so far do not seem to be able to explain why they dance The Swish and they don’t know anything about the smell it’s causing. A breakfast news presenter who herself has twin teenaged sons demands to know what their arms are pointing at, and she is denied this information by the smug faced seventeen-year-old she interviews who also refuses to perform the dance. Influencers slash creatives on Instagram are saying The Swish is a sacred dance and it will not be performed for the exchange of money.

You have been messaging Didi frantically to ask what she thinks The Swish is about. She has told you several times that she doesn’t know, and now she is asking you if you are having compulsive thoughts about The Swish. You had a nervous breakdown five years ago, when Brielle was little, before you took a career change and became a therapist, and you know she is worrying about you. You don’t do or say anything to reassure her. You can’t, because you know something bad is happening, and you don’t know what it is.

When you get home, your kitchen island has melted. Yes, melted. It is, or was, a reclaimed railway sleeper wooden island with pewter handles and towel rail, gifted to you by your neighbour Drakeson’s cousin who was going to chuck it when they got their kitchen redone. In the middle, where the slow cooker was before it was unceremoniously emptied into the hot compost, the glass lid recycled, and the ceramic pot put out the back to hold Namaqualand daisies after you declared it a public health hazard, is what looks like a sinkhole. The wood has somehow oozed and expanded, dropping down to the floor. The pewter handles have stretched completely out of shape. It looks like a Salvador Dali clock. And it stinks. Not as bad as whatever was inside the slow cooker, but it does stink, a foul, acrid, chemical smell. You throw open windows and take a photo of the island to send to your wife.

“Weird,” she texts back. “I’ll be home early, by the way.”

She is never home early. It’s your arrangement that you will be home before the girls. Supposedly so they don’t become latchkey kids, but really so that you don’t take on too much.

Didi arranges for the kids to go to the cinema with their godparents. The two of you sit on the sofa under a cashmere blanket you won in a competition and usually keep in a box under the bed to stop it getting ruined by the girls. It’s autumn, and not at all cold, but it’s cosy under the blanket, and you feel safe and protected, even when you watch the news on Didi’s laptop and see that sinkholes are erupting over the country, near the site of The Swish dances. They show a group of teenagers dancing The Swish in a public park in Croydon, pointing their arms to the right, and, days later, a large cavity in the ground where they were pointing. The news reporter’s eyes are misted over and although she’s wearing a mask, she’s still trying to breathe through her mouth so as to avoid the toxic smell. The teenagers explain that the dance just takes you over. It’s not a deliberate thing. You and your best friend have taken a break from each other for a month or so after a big argument but you message her to ask if she’s seen the news. She messages you back an hour later while you’re eating take-away pizza and half watching a family film about dogs that Didi selected and she says there’s a sinkhole in her street. She sends you a photo of it. It’s an enormous abyss in the tarmac and you can almost smell the bad smell emitted from it. Also, it seems to have teeth.

Later you drop a kimchi stone into the melted kitchen island hole and your wife says, “Look, there is something up. I’m not going to deny that. I just want us to approach it as calmly as possible,” and the stone hisses and fizzles and is gone except for a trail of thick grey smoke. You look to see where the smoke is coming from and you smell burning hair. It’s from thick tufts of the stuff that are coming out of the melted kitchen island hole. There is no fire that you can see but the hair is sizzling, smelling of keratin sulphate. You pinch your nose closed and look closer and you see a tooth coming out of the pewter. “Look at this,” you say to Didi.

“Yeah, bit strange,” says Didi. You can see she is determined to not get upset about the fact there is some kind of giant teratoma in her kitchen.

Then you feel it come over your body. It’s the smoke. It drapes over you like a shroud, and when it touches your shoulders, they start to jerk back and forth. Your body feels like it is no longer yours. You have some vague notion of your knees and that they are wiggling in a way you are no longer capable, but mostly you feel nothing, your eyes are fixed on the kitchen island, and your arms are pivoting themselves forward, fingers outstretched.

When it’s over, you’re on your knees, panting, and your children are looking at you in horror at your dancing. Genuine horror, not the fixed faces of horror they get when they catch you and Didi wining in the kitchen after they’re supposed to have gone to bed.

“Go on, then,” you say. You have no idea why you say it. Or perhaps the hole said it. You genuinely can’t tell.

Then Brielle says, “Okay,” and not in her normal voice. She says it automaton. She goes outside. She returns with ten flopping tilapia in her hands, gasping for air, choking. Her school sweatshirt and shirt are soaked through with the stinking natural fertiliser of aquaponics water. She throws the trawl into the kitchen island hole. The fish disappear. Smoke comes out. Then, without warning, she scrambles to the top of the island and throws herself into the hole. At one point it looks like she’s stuck, but then the hole widens, and then she is gone, just her socks, which got caught on the melted pewter, are left behind.

Dakar is next. She runs and dives in head first after her sister, screaming the entire way. Didi looks at you, but it’s not her looking at you, it’s something else. She is gone down the hole before you can open your mouth. Shaking all over, you walk to the hole and look down. It is completely dark. It is a hole so big you can see nothing down there. It goes down way beneath the floorboards and the foundations of the house. You don’t register that you are climbing onto the kitchen island, squatting at the top, and peering over, and so when you topple down, it takes a few seconds for you to know what is happening. You are being pulled, by teeth, by a strong and supranaturally muscular tongue, into a colossal malodourous mouth. You start screaming. You wish you had taken Brielle’s sock with you. The smell is vile – a yellow pungency that fills up your nostrils and your throat and your eyes. Perhaps you could go back for the sock? You vomit as you’re falling – or is it that these walls are lined with bile? – and then you try to cling onto something, to claw your way back up. Between the undulating fondle of soft palate and gullet, you can still feel sanded patches of reclaimed railway sleeper under your fingernails as you try to dig your way to the top, but your nails stick and split almost instantly, sending waves of shocking pain through your fingertips, and you let go. The hole is horrifyingly warm to touch and the stench seems to be coming from a churning basin of acid below. Something wet comes over the top of your head as you are squeezed and compressed downwards. You turn your head feverishly from side to side, trying desperately to find air. You close your eyes, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

End.

Dear beloved reader,

I hope you found the chills you were looking for. Perhaps while entrenched in the pages of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, you questioned both your own sanity and your place amongst the malevolent whims of our cold universe. If so, let not your thirst for more cosmic terror go unquenched. Simply visit COSMICHORRORMONTHLY.COM/SUBSCRIBE and offer your tribute to the old ones at a reduced rate!

Again, thank you for taking the time to read our fiction. I hope we meet again soon.

Charles Tyra

Editor

Table of Contents

- Inbox
- Melting Point
- Welcome to Brine Cay
- This Morning I Was Still A Paperboy
- In Dark Tabittree
- The Yellow Carousel
- The Parlor Door
- The Swish