Cosmic Horror Monthly: Issue 50
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2024-07-25 05:00:00+00:00

COSMIC HORROR MONTHLY

ISSUE 50

Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

Copyright © 2024 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.

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Cover Art – Lars Strömquist

Editor: Jolie Toomajan

Co-Editor: Carson Winter

Publisher: Charles Tyra

Printed locally in Oklahoma City, OK

A special thanks to our Patreon subscribers for making this issue possible:

David N. Mikołaj Grygorcewicz, Zach Sherrill, Angelica Bell

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

CONTENTS

Letter from the Editor

Meet the CHM Staff

Devil’s Weather

E. M. Stormo

Brood Baby

SJ Powell

Zoe

Anne Wilkins

Slipskin

K. Wallace King

Undesirables

Colleen Anderson

The Kiss of Flowers

Cass Clarke

Bury That Past, Grow This Future

Mariya Kaka

Death Has Red Hair

Greye La Spina

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Greetings Dear Reader,

It’s my pleasure to welcome you to a new era in Cosmic Horror Monthly. This is my first issue as Editor-in-Chief here at CHM, and we have some exciting things coming over the next year, but a lot will be staying just the same—including bringing you all the best that cosmic and weird horror has to offer. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a weird horror writer and academic, and I’m fascinated by all things monstrous. I’ve got a killer lineup for you over the next six months, starting right now.

First up, we have a grotesque tale of replacement and domination brought to us by E. M. Stormo, “Devil’s Weather.” SJ Powell’s “Brood Baby” takes us into an infested childhood home that isn’t against using memories to further the goals of the hive. We follow that with “Zoe” by Anne Wilkins, where a lonely young woman and an eerie plant find a way to grow in even the harshest conditions. In “Slipskin,” by CHM favorite K. Wallace King, a lonely young girl attempts to transcend into her town’s beloved saint, and Colleen Anderson’s “Undesirables” brings us an unnerving nasty, the helpful (to a point) Alecto Petrescue. We cap this issue with two stories about destroying what we love most, Cass Clarke’s “The Kiss of Flowers” and Mariya Kika’s “Bury This Past, Grow This Future.” For my first From the Crypt, I’ve selected Greye La Spina’s phenomenal and feminist “Death Has Red Hair,” originally published in the September 1942 issue of Weird Tales.

Stay weird,

J

MEET THE CHM STAFF

Jolie Toomajan: Co-Editor

Jolie Toomajan is a writer, editor, and all-around ghoul, and she has a PhD in English with a focus on speculative fictions. Despite all this, she would read out loud from a book written in backwards Latin.

Charles Tyra: Co-Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age after 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.

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Luke Spooner is a freelance illustrator from the South East of England. Since graduating from Portsmouth University with a First-Class degree in illustration Luke has gone on to work on a wide variety of projects and commissions, including; illustrations and covers for horror, science fiction and fantasy books, magazines, graphic novels, conceptual design, CD packaging and business branding. Luke has also illustrated children’s’ books for authors who aim to promote diversity and mindfulness in younger audiences.

Trevin Wyant is an illustrator, educator, and nightmare maker from the foothills of Appalachia. His work offers a portal into the illusive landscape of dreams where shadows come to life and the unimaginable takes form.

DEVIL’S WEATHER

E. M. STORMO

Clouds formed one by one from the vapors emanating out of town. To Faron, they appeared as abominations. Each cloud hosted hordes of smaller creatures like locusts and frogs, which fused together into larger monster faces. The clouds headed in a group towards the village at an unnatural pace. God’s own clouds never moved so quickly. They took their time and their waters never tasted so sweet. Real rain had no flavor, but this unnatural rain tasted like sugar candy. Someone had switched on the weather machine in Devil’s town.

Amos sympathized with the boy, but to his mind, the clouds had long since been capable of transformation. They appeared as their puffy white selves now, even if they were synthetic abominations. There was no time to waste on cloud-gazing anyway. One of the nameless cattle had run off on its own, and they needed to retrieve it before the rain fell and sweetened the meat. A single storm could taint the cattle’s flavor enough to make a ham-and-cheese roll-up inedible for even the most undiscerning villager, Eli the Eater, whose appetite knew no bounds. Such was the awful power of the weather machine.

Amos followed the cloven tracks through the mud to a path of chewed-up grass on the hill, and stopped at the edge of the woods that separated the town from Abramsland. In a small clearing, he located the cow staring into space. Her black beady eyes didn’t register the two villagers. Instead she focused on an invisible force permeating the trees.

Amos plucked a nearby leaf and crushed it between his fingers. “Do you see it, Son?”

Faron cupped the crushed pieces in his hands. “It’s softer than a normal leaf.”

“Yes, and the light hits it like plastic.”

Faron cradled the pieces before blowing them into the wind. He let out a deep sigh knowing what was to come. “Do we have to, Father? She looks so sad.”

Amos unsheathed his butcher’s knife and handed it to Faron. “It’s time for you to learn how. I was just your age when Grandpa Swartzenheimer taught me.”

Faron took the knife in both hands. It was heavier than the chef’s knife Mother let him hold. The cow sneezed. She sounded real enough.

“Do we have to?” Faron made sure. “She’s not doing anything.”

“God commands it. She’s not a cow anymore. She’s an abomination before God.”

Faron held the knife up to her belly. The blade caught the light of the dimmed sun. Real metal, as real as anything in the village. Real houses, people, and animals. But in the city, everything was a copy and the only way you could tell was by cutting it open. The cow leaned into the blade as Faron made the first cut. He drew a cross on her side and what looked like real blood spilled out. She even moaned in realistic pain.

Amos knew better. He swiped a sample of the blood and tasted it. “Much too sweet. Keep going, Son.”

Faron burst into tears as he stabbed deeper into the cow’s insides where muscles and organs were revealed to be exactly in the places they should be. She buckled and tipped over on her side. A moat of blood surrounded her. Faron’s clothes were soaked, and it felt warm just like the real thing. “You are wrong, Father.”

The cow lowed for a merciful end, but Amos was undeterred. He dug his own hands into the side and began pulling out her insides. Faron could name every part that his father flung over his shoulder. The pieces landed into a pile as the cow was torn inside-out.

Sweet rain began to fall on the pitiful scene. Amos shook out his flat-brimmed cap and Faron did the same. To remove one’s head covering left them vulnerable to Devil’s weather.

Animal dressings were always isolated to a designated killing barn, far removed from the eyes of mothers and girls. To host such a scene in the open felt wrong to Faron. Even God should be spared to look upon such horrors.

Amos kept digging and scratching at the insides like Madman Uri, who was known to be less than delicate with his dressings. Finally, he paused and caught his breath. “Son, I am almost never wrong. You have to pull out the heart of things to truly grasp their design.” He reached into the cow once more and out came its false heart, not red or beating, but the color of pure plastic and humming like an engine. “Here, hold it.”

Faron held the heart to his eyeline. It continued to whir as the cow grew silent.

“It’s a fake,” Amos said, “designed by the Devil. The Devil can’t create, so he makes cruel mockery of life. Do you know what a real heart looks like?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Can you picture it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“First you picture an apple.”

Faron closed his eyes as tight as they would go. In the black void of his mind’s eye, the bloodiest red apple appeared in rich detail, like it was really floating there, dripping with dew, looking so crisp that he had to take a bite out of it.

Amos continued to guide him. The elder didn’t need to close his eyes as his own apple hung above his son’s head. “Now remove the leaf and stem. Wipe away all the dew and shine so that there is a solid red ball.”

Faron did as he was instructed, removing all details from the apple. Meanwhile, their clothes were getting sweetened with rainwater and would have to be thoroughly washed in the real waters of the nearby creek.

“Now round off the tops into two hillocks and bring the bottom to a sharp point.”

“This is a cow’s heart?” Faron asked. He saw oak planks cut around the curves. “That’s the shape carved into Joshua’s barn.”

“Yes, my Son. It’s the universal heart symbol from which all real hearts are born. It wards off the evil spirits of hate.”

As they walked back to the village, the rains subsided. The grass had its fill. The Devil gave just enough to never quench thirst. Out came the crescent sun to shine its daily allotment of light. When Amos was a boy, he recalled the sun was orange and always full, the air so thin you could see for miles. Faron had only known the white sun with its different phases and the air thick with vapors that zigzagged across the sky.

The heart symbol atop Joshua’s barn appeared less vivid than the one Faron had earlier shaped in his mind. “Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t it ward off the spirits?” he asked his father.

“The Devil grows stronger each day,” Amos answered.

“And God?”

“Man has turned from God. He has corrupted creation. Each of us in our own minds, especially the townsfolk. Man has copied every aspect of creation and replaced them with abominations. Slowly it infects our village until it too will be replaced by an abominable copy. We will continue to suffer for what Man has done until we turn back, one by one, to God.”

Amos cracked the barn door open. All they could see were the shines of eyes that anticipated their fate, but it may as well have been candle-lights waiting to be snuffed. These weren’t animals. They had no hearts or apples.

“Do we have to?” Faron asked.

“We’ll wait till moonrise.”

At around 8 o’clock when everyone was asleep, the two villagers set fire to each cow until the whole herd went up in flames. Amos made Faron hold the torch. He told the boy to keep the apple close, but even the elder had to close his eyes. Images of his wife’s face flashed in between hearts and apples, but the details were vague. He couldn’t recall her eyes exactly, or the precise line of her mouth, only a fluffy cloud of her countenance. She was lucky to never live to see such abominations.

The fire burnt for a few hours which set off the sensors from the local weather station. Amos knew the consequences of violating a Stage 3 restriction and accepted he would suffer them in the morning. The cattle remained in place as they burned, a sure sign they were imposters. Real cattle would jump about like fireballs. These cows had given up.

Drones whizzed overhead to inspect the damage. They were made to resemble giant dragonflies, a supposed byproduct of the recent mini-carboniferous age, but Amos knew better. He didn’t need to cut them open to know they were the Devil’s machines, printed on plastic. Once they surveyed the damage, a larger craft descended from the clouds and dropped a payload of sweet water onto the conflagration.

Eli the Eater awoke at dawn to the smell of the burnt abomination. He brushed off the crumbs from his bedtime snacks, grabbed his cap and suspenders, and set off to locate the source of the smell. Only Madman Uri was allowed to go about shirtless during the day and that’s exactly who Eli found, kneeling in prayer in front of the blackened bodies, his cap laid out in front of him.

Eli put his hand on Uri’s bare shoulder. “They’re no good, brother,” Eli said. “You see? The blood is black.”

Uri clicked his teeth together. He had removed his tongue for reasons no one in Abramsland could guess.

“Run and get a minister and bring him here.”

Uri wasn’t sure which minister Eli meant, so he brought back all four. The six men surrounded the herd and debated what to do. Would the eyes of Vestalton be upon them yet? Yes, they watched the village without looking. Would they send someone to investigate? Yes, they always did. They counted an inventory of every living thing in Abramsland. If even a squirrel fell out of place, their drones would swarm, and one of their shapeshifters would come. They decided to hide the mess even if they had already been discovered.

The removal of the bodies took two-and-a-half hours using the usual low-tech methods of wooden beams and wheelbarrows. It was difficult work that made them sweat and broke their backs, but that was the only kind of work they knew. An individual from Devil’s town could accomplish the same task in seconds. They hid the bodies in the lagoon behind the pig-pen which was already blackened from run-off. The bodies sank into the oozy void and the men agreed not to tell anyone, hoping the evidence would decompose before anyone from Vestalton showed up.

At 7 o’clock, all the villagers assembled in church for the morning service. The six men were late, and the missing ministers had aroused the bishop’s suspicion, but he had already lighted the incense with the daily allotment of smoke. On religious days, no other fires could be lit, no wood burned for fire, or stoves for cooking, so these were fasting days. Eli kept a cache of worms for those days and some of the desperate villagers would join him.

The ministers blushed as they passed the smoke-cloud and found their seats on stage next to the deacon. The fifty-person congregation sat in their usual seats, all except for Amos and his boy, who had suspiciously occupied the back row. The bishop expected dragonfly drones to barge in at any moment but began his sermon anyway.

“Observe ye,” the bishop boomed, “everything that takes place in the heaven, how they do not change their orbits, the luminaries which are in the heaven, how they all rise and set in order each in its season and transgress not against their appointed order.”

He spoke in a big voice whether delivering a sermon or confiding one-on-one, as his daughter Miriam was half-deaf and struggled to hear him even in the front row. Rumors spread that the bishop might also be half-deaf, because such conditions run in family lines, and his ears were unusually small, like cooked cauliflower. He made up for it with his long face and long beard grown down his belly, which was unusual for the villagers, as most men trimmed them above the Adam’s apple.

“And on the day of the great judgment he shall be cast into the fire, and heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the angels have disclosed and have taught their sons. “

Amos held his head low, another suspicious sign. He was always rapt during services, listening the deepest and singing the loudest. Widowers were the most in need of the church’s blessings.

The doors swung open of their own accord. The bishop expected a fleet of drones but not the ambassador themself. Halfway into the Hymn of Praise, the shapeshifter entered the church looking like a Biblically accurate angel. Everyone removed their caps and head coverings at once.

The ambassador appeared in different forms depending on the villagers’ seat. The bishop saw a frog-headed beast. Eli saw a bull with curled horns. From Amos’s view, it was a beautiful woman. Madman Uri could see every shape at once.

Faron noticed the split-second changes in the facial aspect, especially when they stared him down. The shapeshifter seemed to float a foot off the ground on their way to the stage. where the bishop forfeited his pulpit. They were about eight feet tall and dressed in a multicolored coat so as not to offend the villagers.

“Jacob,” the shapeshifter addressed him. “You have wasted your credits for the season and must atone. Who is responsible for the liquidation of twenty-five cattle?” Their voice sounded as high-pitched as a woman, but it boomed louder than the bishop.

Jacob stole a quick glance at Amos, which the shapeshifter picked up. Nothing escaped the many eyes decorating their coat. “Who are you?” they asked.

“My name is Faron Swartzenheimer,” Amos said.

“No, you are the patriarch. You need to atone for unauthorized fire and unnecessary waste of resources. Nature exists in a delicate balance you can’t comprehend, all under the strict control of Vestal.”

Amos made eye contact with what he perceived to be their eyes. “Nature is under God’s dominion.”

The shapeshifter hissed like a snake being stretched to its limit. “We laugh. All of Vestalton laughs at you. Where is God? Has he gone out? Is he asleep?”

The entire congregation bowed their heads. God was here and they could see Him in the apple of their minds, but there was no use in explaining this to such an abomination.

“We see Vestal everywhere. I’ll show you.” The shapeshifter extended their hand and shot out some electrical sparks. “Vestal is right here in this church. Has God ever come to church?”

At the sight of electricity, Uri ran out the door. Several of the womenfolk followed him to make sure he didn’t hang himself from the Tree of Woe, one of the only real trees left in Abramsland, the same tree where Sarah Swartzenheimer met her end.

“Faron?” The shapeshifter scanned the crowd. They already knew who he was, but he had to come forward himself.

The bishop interceded for the boy. He spoke quietly in the shapeshifter’s presence. “We are but poor farmers, humble stewards of the land. We cannot afford the loss of one of our people.”

“Nonsense,” the shapeshifter said. “You are a parasite. Your lives are run-off. Every breath is poison. Every meal you consume, every trip to the outhouse. You are carbon-belching, methane-flatulating parasites. The air here reeks of animal waste. The bay is so polluted that you can no longer see to the bottom. Your community was killing the Earth before we forced you to be sustainable. You are cruel to animals, slaughtering cows for your filthy banquets, breeding deformed puppies for trade, and breaking horses for your clumsy carriages.”

“And what of Devil’s town?” The bishop asked.

The shapeshifter leaned down to the bishop’s eyeline. “What of it? There is no Devil, only Vestal. We live in the Paradise that you have written in your book. There is no death there, so there is no need for religion. We control the turning of the heaven, so there is no need for God. If we do need something, it is created on the spot, but there is never a need. You may pretend to own this little piece of land, but it belongs to Vestal. Eventually, you will belong to Vestal. We are all one in Vestal. If not your children, then your children’s children. The future is already written. There is no such thing as Abramsland.”

A cool breeze blew through the church and left them hotter than before. Nobody was sure what season it was supposed to be anymore. It was too cool for summer, and yet they always found themselves sweating. Grandpa Swartzenheimer called it the “dickens,” back when they couldn’t speak so directly, but now it was known as “Devil’s weather.” When the clouds appear as monster faces, when the rains fall like sugar candy, and when you keep sweating no matter how cool it is, that is Devil’s weather.

There was nothing more to say, so the boy presented himself to the ambassador. “I am Faron Swartzenheimer. What is your name?”

“We are Vestal.”

Faron licked his hand and offered a spit-shake. Vestal generated a floating hand with the requisite fluid.

“You can leave your hat. You won’t need to cover your head anymore.”

They lifted the boy up on their shoulder and floated out of the church. That was the last anyone saw of the boy, although he would return in many different forms. They drifted high above the fake trees, but everything looked fake at that height. The villagers who watched him go were like wooden toys beside a doll’s house.

Together they flew through the clouds and vapor. Faron tried to grab one in his hands, but there was nothing there. So this was how it felt to be an angel. He had read the old stories and always dreamed of flying, but never knew how lonely it would be above the world.

They landed at the entrance to Vestalton, a smooth city with no sharp edges. Abramsland was all boxes, the home box, the church box, and the coffin box, all entered through a black rectangle. Everything in Devil’s town was rounded off and emitted a soft glow. It was easy on the eyes, although he couldn’t quite make out individual buildings or windows. Vestal set him down and waited for him to enter on his own. They had taken on the form of the bishop to guide him.

“Can you picture an apple?” Faron asked.

Vestal held out a hand and generated a handsome red apple dripping with dew.

“No, I mean, can you picture it in your head?”

“We have no need to picture anything.” They generated another apple and then a bushel spilled out of their arms.

“But what is your heart made of?”

Vestal traced two fingers into a heart symbol and gave it to Faron.

Faron took the heart and held it to the light. “But this is plastic. It’s not real.”

Vestal hissed again, their version of laughter. The bishop’s head turned into a snake once more. “There is no such thing.”

Time fell away. The boundaries around objects disappeared. Skin melted down to a thin layer of plastic. The last pains of being were silenced after a simple procedure that lasted mere seconds. Faron saw his own heart dissolve in their hands. He took the form of his own mother for comfort, until he no longer missed the apple of his mind.

Many days passed for Amos. The seasonless years all blended together. He spent more time with Madman Uri than any of the other villagers. He threw his cap into the black lagoon. Even shirtless Uri kept his cap on. The other villagers shunned Amos as though he’d already migrated to Devil’s town.

There was only one thing left to do. Sarah’s rope was still lying in the shed. He wasn’t able to get rid of it, not because he didn’t want to get rid of it, but such wastefulness would’ve brought the dragonflies to investigate, and he already had enough of them when they came to cut his wife down. The rope still smelled of her. It was still knotted in a noose, ready to be recycled. He hoisted it onto the Tree of Woe from the same limb she had swung. He climbed up the trunk and sat there for a moment, trying to picture her face, Faron’s face, but no image would come. Even with eyes shut, swinging in the breeze, he couldn’t picture anything.

The cold sweats dripped down his neck. One moment, he was swinging, and the next he was standing perfectly upright. Underneath his feet sat a plastic footstool with rounded corners and a heart symbol etched into the top. Off in the distance, Sarah hovered in place, her face fully formed with a real smile across her lips, before she floated away and joined the clouds.

End.

* * *

E. M. Stormo has published stories in Quarterly West, The Conium Review, and Thrice Fiction. For complete works, visit: https://emstormo.wordpress.com/.

BROOD BABY

SJ POWELL

It was a mistake to come here during the day.

Sunlight speared through the weeping hole in the roof, struck the resin-encrusted walls and floors of Frank’s childhood Home, and turned all that ugly beautiful. The resin glowed with the deepest shades of dusk, smoldering red and gold. Luminous haloes danced on the black-stained carpet and on the mantle shining with broken glass. Everything else inside the House on Gently Street glittered, cracked underfoot, and was otherwise unforgiving. Hard and sharp to the touch.

Frank’s hand-lamp swung at her hip, unnecessary. There was more than enough light to navigate by. The carver wasps were gone, hatched at long last from their resin nests grafted to the walls of the House. Frank was the only Dayton left alive. It was her duty to see what had become of the House after forty years of alien occupation. To repossess and salvage anything worth taking.

So she crept around, a stranger in her own House, and prayed:

For night to plunge this room into inscrutable darkness.

For cloying shadows to flee from the roaming light of the hand-lamp.

For all the beauty the day kept trying to foist in her eye to be rendered hideous, frightening.

Of course, night would not come so she was forced to reckon with the beauty of alien annihilation. She didn’t want this. This burning crystal cave, the resin cascading from the ceiling in long, fiery icicles. She wanted a proper nightmare world—the creche of a giant wasp species from beyond the Kuiper Belt. She wanted gore and ugliness, the stench of other-being in the air. She wanted rot, hot and mealy in her nostrils, from the flesh-and-blood carcasses the foundress brought in to feed her carnivorous young. She wanted the floors littered with the bones of the dead. It was very simple. The House was her inheritance. If it couldn’t console her with the specters of a childhood long dead or bore her with now-commonplace extraterrestrial horrors, then Frank would liberate the House with fire. She would not live a moment longer and put up with its altered state.

The House on Gently Street knew very well what it looked like. It did not have eyes in the organic sense, but it could see. Beyond the obvious evidence of alien occupancy, there were the four decades of neglect: dust and dirt piling up in forgotten corners, mud and refuse tracked in by wild animals and lone scavengers, water from burst pipes peeling the skin back from its walls, black rot in its floorboards. In spite of this, the House did not think itself ruinous. It did not think itself ugly. The House knew, just as Frank knew, that it was beautiful. Made lovely by the resin deposited by the carver wasps. Frank knew and that was why she had yet to touch the House in any way that mattered. She’d nudged open the front door with the hilt of her knife. She wore thick, impenetrable gloves and kept a firm distance from the House’s walls.

Now, she knelt before the old firebox in the living room, knees protesting. The carver resin built up in the firebox exploded outward in a stunning sculptural feat. Like blown-out glass, a brilliance of orange and gold, the wasp-spun resin was in parts as broad as a palm leaf and in others as delicate as a lick of true flame. If Frank touched it, her gut told her it might move, warm and alive as a pulse.

But nothing in the House lived, not anymore. This, Frank was certain. She had witnessed the hatch herself through a pair of long-range specs from the rooftop of the abandoned post office a mile down Gently. A section of the House’s roof had erupted from within and let loose a thick throng of the newborn beasts—thread-waisted, iridescent wasps the size of foals. Their buzzing wings had made ripples of the wind, loud enough to penetrate the dampeners over Frank’s ears. Bits of resin glinted in the fine hairs of their thoraxes and the carving spines of their tarsals. It was a sunny day. The carver wasps lit up like a trail of fire across the sky. Frank could still see the fire behind her eyelids. Could feel the burning.

Frank considered the firebox. Considered smashing the resin-bonfire with the butt of her knife, just to have it gone. The need quivered in her, like a bowstring drawn taut. There would be time enough for that later. She rose to continue with her search of the House. Confident that she was the only thing alive in that House and if anything did appear before her—thieving scavenger, depraved wasp cultist, or the mindless, stinging wasps themselves—she had all she needed to handle it, her knife and her torch-rifle. She surveyed the inhospitable room of resin for anything that might’ve once belonged to her family and saw fuck all. Nothing of value. Just imitation gold.

Now, the House knew Frank. It recognized her by scent alone, her sweat and musk wafting through the pores in its floors. She was one of the last humans to live within its walls. She had been there, a fat-fisted toddler, the day the foundress wasp arrived. Did she remember the way the sky split at the seams, night falling in the midst of that bright, bright day? Did she recall how the carver wasps displaced the wind and all sound with their buzzing? Driving people everywhere from their Houses so they could lay their young under the floorboards, in the wall voids, beneath the eaves of roofs. Stringing up their shining nests like so many lights.

Frank may have been too young for memory. The House remembered: the foundress shattering its large bay window with her mass alone and setting upon its walls and doors with her devastating mandibles, weaving the House’s own innards with her specialized saliva to create – that gilded resin molded to the House’s insides, seeping through its very foundations. The protective crystal Houses for the foundress’ vulnerable young.

Forty years, the House watched the young carver wasps grow. Soft bodies twisting in amber light. Changing, as the House changed, with the turn of the earth. The final imago glimpsed, as a ghost is imagined, in each stage. Like rain down the House’s gutters flowing smooth. Egg, larva, pupa, and then—something else. Something magnificent. Glittering and carving. A sparkling kind of intelligence, quick and incisive. Carver wasps had to hew their way out of their crystal nests to enter the world. The shapes they made from the resin were curious and beautiful. Dark, meandering tunnels after the lines of things the wasps must’ve dreamed while encased.

The House knew Frank as it knew all those who crossed its thresholds and made it Home. It knew Frank. But the sound of her footsteps on its warped floorboards was not like the gentle skittering of the foundress wasp on its walls. Or the barest brush of her wings against the breaches in the House’s exterior as she dragged in her prey. Frank did not walk its hall as though she were Home, at long last. Knife raised, eyes furtive.

Frank turned a corner, expecting to find the kitchen. She saw no kitchen, no cabinets, no gas stove tucked into the corner. Instead, she was met with a long, branching hallway, run-off resin protruding from the walls in gleaming spikes. Empty carver nests hung like chandeliers above. Far, far down the hall, the sun shone through a round window it wasn’t supposed to. Not at this time of day, not on this side of the House where the windows were meant to face north.

She toed the threshold of the hallway, uncertain, before backtracking toward the living room. She consulted the map in her mind. Again, she took the path toward the kitchen. Frank arrived at the long, long hallway once more. It extended much farther than the house’s length. The sun came through the wrong window. A window that should've been a screen door leading to the yard. The hall was populated with closed doors to mystery rooms Frank couldn’t guess at. Rooms incongruent to the House’s architecture. Rooms her mother had never mentioned.

Her mother had kept a meticulous map of the House on Gently in her mind. For years, she spoon-fed Frank memories of the House. The room where her grandparents slept. The hallway of family portraits. The manicured grass of the yard, the wide shadow of the sugar maple, the tire swinging hanging from its boughs. Frank knew the number of windows and doors in the House. She knew where the hardwood became carpet, the location of each light switch. The House would inevitably change after four decades of carver wasp desolation—a breeding ground for filthy bugs—but these basic facts could not. If you went straight, not right, out of the living room, you would arrive in the kitchen. Straight, not right. Frank retraced her steps again. And again.

The House observed Frank as she tried in vain to walk paths that no longer existed. The House had long ago done away with the extraneous—kitchen, bathroom, laundry room—anything that did not serve the foundress and her young. Frank could scour the entire House and find nothing she remembered. Instead of the rooms of old, the House now had this: tens of thousands of rooms, hanging crystalline flutes it could fill with its own breath. It did so now. Letting out air in one resin nest at a time. Its breath had a sort of smell, undetectable by humans. Very recognizable to the carver wasps who had taught the House the chemical language of breath and scent. The House released its pheromones in steady increments, sending its signal beyond its walls and the street of Gently. It sent out a simple message: alarm, intruder, alarm.

Back to the living room. The firebox in its proper place. This time, Frank went right toward the bedrooms and bathrooms. A low drone sounded in her bones like the buzzing of a far-off carver wasp. She knew what was coming up. Her grandparents’ room and her nursery on the left side of the hall. Mother’s bedroom and the bathroom on the right. It was Grandpa who had changed the gray tiles green. Emerald green. Bathroom tiles after the color of summer leaves. Bath time, Frankie! She wanted, very badly, to see the bathroom and the tiles her grandfather had put down with his own hands. To take a piece of that green back with her. She would be satisfied with just that.

But where the hall was supposed to split off towards the bedrooms and bathroom was—nothing. Just a large, open room with no windows or doors. There was the carver resin, of course. Spreading across the floor in a carpet of frozen scales. Nine or ten empty nests blocked out the room like boulders, rising higher than Frank’s shoulders. More nests clustered above and brought the ceiling down on her head, forcing her to crouch. The texture of the nests was less like the jagged rock she was familiar with. The resin had the look of honey, its color and flow. Light from an unknown source made the resin glow from within. Frank was caught in a golden undertow. There were nests all over the House but this, this was the nursery. This was the heart of the House, a beautiful, crystal fortress. How many wasps must’ve matured here, growing for years and years?

The room was devoid of anything else. Anything that might give a clue as to what the nursery had been forty years before. It was completely empty. Not empty like picked clean by scavengers. Empty like memory. Frank had no memory, no knowledge, no connection to this abandoned nursery. It was a room that did not exist to her. She could summon no fellow feeling for it. For years, her mother wandered from outpost to encampment. Outrunning swarms of carver wasps with a child on her hip and a senile, grieving mother in tow. Frank had grown up on a self-sufficient farming settlement eighty miles south from the House on Gently. To her mother, that must have been a world away.

What had become of the House? Where were the rooms her mother had spoken of? Grandpa was supposed to be here, too. She was a fool to have hoped for more than bones. “Even a damn wasp would do,” she whispered. She knew she was out of luck. Once hatched, the wasps never returned to their birthplaces. Foundresses never used the same Home twice. The reasons why were variable. The wasp-worshiping cultists—there were always a few in any encampment—swore up and down that the resin nests were the individual, creative labors of the foundresses that spun them, the newborn wasps that carved them, and existed as solely that: ornaments, spectacles, sculptures to be admired.

Frank always thought that was bullshit.

She kicked out and shattered a spike of resin with the heel of her boot. It broke like glass, the sound heard all over the House with impossible clarity. The release of violence was heady and bright. Frank slung the torch-rifle off her back and slammed the heavy, blunt end into the nearest nest. It cracked like an egg, a fissure spidering up toward the ceiling.

The House flinched. All the capacity in that resin nest severed, a light cutting off in one of the House’s thousand rooms. The sensation of pain was fresh after so many years. The foundress wasp had touched the House with an indifference very close to kindness. She needed the House, what the House was made of. Together, they created resin. It wasn’t the resin itself that granted the House awareness. It was the young wasps crèched inside. Lending the House their sweet dreams of metamorphosis. Now, the House could think and dream, it could change its shape as it pleased. Now, the House ached. It could feel, with incredible distinction, the absence of the carver wasps in its thousand rooms. Never before could the House have imagined such reciprocity. All the wasps had given it. The House yearned for the wasps’ return and it railed against Frank’s presence driving the wasps away. Reminding the House of its unfeeling past, its years of dormancy. The House could taste Frank’s fear stinging the air. Fear of the wasps, fear of the House. Fear of what the House had become.

Frank shouldered her torch, breathing hard. Finger on the spark wheel, she recalled her promise of fire. If the House could not be as it once was, it could not stand at all. Ashes, ashes were preferable to all this.

“Gonna give it to you,” she muttered, using her index finger to roll the wheel back. “Gonna burn you up.”

The smell of gas hit her nose, filled the House’s pores. It knew gas from its long-gone stove, knew fire from the firebox. She would burn it? The House released another gust of alarm, intruder, alarm. The wind careening down Gently brought no reply. The House stared down the muzzle of Frank’s torch-rifle. Ash. Thinking, unfeeling ash. Rage swelled in the House, mighty and potent. It could not sting as the foundress did. It had no venom, no scythe-like carving tarsal. But it had all it needed to turn Frank’s fear into terror.

The House gathered intention and change in each of its thousand rooms. It let it out in one, drawn-out hiss.

Frank stilled. She turned on the pivot of her heel. She had felt it—breath on the back of her neck. She fought the idiot urge to call hello down the hall. There was nothing there. But the resin nests seemed to hedge closer than before. She could hardly breathe.

She kept the torch at chest-level and crept back down the hall toward the living room. The only room in the House that made sense from the start. It had the only exit Frank was sure of. Her ears strained against the House’s deep-down silence for footsteps or stealthy buzzing. Her eyes peeled for the swift shape of the carver wasp darting by, for the curve of its stinger. Without an antidote on hand, the venom could drop her dead in minutes. She steeled her resolve and entered the room.

The living room as it was. Hole in the roof, glass on the mantle. The firebox and the front door in their proper places. Not a wasp in sight. Frank sighed and began to lower the torch. Raised it in a flash at the sound of something…hard? clattering against resin. The sight of the torch flitted across the ceiling and floors. She stepped forward. Crack. Beneath her foot. On the floor in two pieces, a green bathroom tile.

The torch hit the floor. Did the slanted light shining through the resin play tricks on her eyes? Frank dropped to her knees and held the shards in both hands, close to her nose. A whole tile, pried up from the floor of a bathroom she could not find. How the shards gleamed! They were warm to the touch, almost putty in her fingers. She pressed them to her mouth and stuffed them, like a miser, down her pocket. Now, she could leave. Now, she could set this place ablaze. This was proof enough. Proof that this House had once been her Home. Not a den for murderous alien spawn.

She looked for the exit. The bone caught her eye like a hook. Frank fell upon it with a wildness. A finger bone, she thought. Maybe a toe. Hands shaking. Yellow like a bad tooth. It could belong to anyone, to anything but what if? What if?

She called out. “Grandpa? Are, are you there?”

Satisfaction curled in the House’s gut. How easy this was! How tempted Frank was by the detritus of the House’s former self. From within resin-caches, the House excised another part of that self, the self before the foundress, before her children’s darling dreams. In a newly made hall, a protuberance of resin cleaved apart and out fell a framed photo. It hit the floor in three pieces.

Frank’s head jerked up. She sprinted toward the sound, abandoning the security of the living room. Soon as her back was turned, the House scraped the front door away and made it a wall. As Frank reassembled the photo—picture, glass, frame—and stared aghast at the Dayton family portrait, all blank, scrubbed out faces, the House revised itself. Sealing off the grand rooms and tidy alcoves it had fashioned for the foundress and her future broods, the House grew more rooms and sprawling halls. It grew a maze full of treasures. Walls stretching high like hedgerows. Resin-lined halls with all the twisting, shifting impulses of viscera. The resin was slick and sticky like sap from a bleeding tree. It stuck to Frank’s boots and clung to her legs as she walked

—and walked, searching aimlessly for the exit. Opening strange doors, crawling on hands and knees in places where resin bloated the walls and floors and the path forward narrowed to a tight crevice, a space big enough for no person but perhaps a wasp, a wasp would make it through. She couldn’t hold a map in her mind. She had lost the torch in her hands in favor of sentimental loot: the tile, the bone, the blank photograph, the teaspoon with a hummingbird painted on its porcelain handle, the battered cookbook with annotations penciled in, an old man’s square-framed reading glasses. With every step she took, something was barring the way behind her. The halls undid themselves and, in their place, resin grew fast and thick like forest brambles. Guiding her, leading her somewhere. Nowhere good, instinct told her. This isn’t the way out, common sense said.

Frank wet her parched lips. “If you have anything left,” she said into the vastness of the House, “I’ll take it.”

Nothing answered.

Then, subtle as breath, a door appeared. Oozed out of the resin like pus from a wound. Frank gripped the doorknob, a hard spike-ball of resin, and opened the door.

A set of stairs led down to the basement. Her mother’s House did not have a basement. Yet there the stairs promised to lead. She peered down. In the flat gloom and the far depths, a light bulb glowed. It illuminated very little: a strip of floral wallpaper, the arm of a paisley-patterned couch, the edge of a ring-stained coffee table. An impossible room of the House preserved, unvarnished by time and carver resin. It lit her memory on fire. She wavered at the threshold, eyes shut against the inconceivable vision.

The House waited. It had inherited a careful, patient kind of hunger from the foundress and her young. The House knew not just the precise moment to strike, but the instance when the shadow of the stinger would suffice more than the sting itself. It waited, coiled tight, until it could not stand waiting a moment longer.

Frank backed away from the stairs. A long resin-spear extended from the wall behind her and prodded her in the back. Urging her down. She considered the price of combating the monstrous will that had set this all in motion. The power that altered the House’s architecture and manipulated the inflexible carver resin with the grace and dexterity of a limb. The same power that had returned her the tile, the bone, her grandfather’s glasses.

Down into the basement. The resin walls lurched toward her like a lung contracting for air. She ignored it and continued, counting the stairs as she went. For every step she took, the impossible room remained ten stairs away. She counted thirty, forty, fifty. The floral wallpaper, the arm of the couch, that single light in the dark stayed far away, a mirage on the horizon. Seventy, eighty. Closer, surely she was close now. She picked up the pace. That perfect room, the last fragment of the House as it had once been. It would give it to her, she would have it. The House as it was. The single light illuminating a quarter of a room drawn from memory. Ninety, ninety-one.

Frank’s foot sought the next stair and met the unassailable force of gravity. Her arms pinwheeled, her hands scrambled for purchase on the resin-walls. The resin was glittering, hard and slick to the touch. Frank fell forward and plummeted into emptiness.

The House swallowed the impact of her very last breath. Deep, deep within the earth, the House had cultivated its own depths. A dark, cool pit miles beneath worms. In that lightless, endless place, flies swarmed and maggots danced in bodies long rotted. All for the foundress and the new broods she would mother. The House had faith she would return. It had crafted itself so perfectly, so specially for her. When the foundress came back, the House hoped to be the sole recipient of her appreciation. Her mandibles tearing and spinning its wood and plaster into gold, her sweet siren-scent drifting through its halls. The dreams of her inquisitive young for another forty marvelous years. What dreams, what dreams would they bring.

The House gathered breath in its crystal rooms once more. It let out a simple message: Come Home. Come Home.

End.

* * *

SJ Powell (they/them) is a Black speculative writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Their work is concerned with non-human beings, strange intimacies, and worlds that are not our own. They received a BA in English and Africana Studies from Williams College. They are a member of the hotbed collective. Their work has been published in FIYAH Lit, Fusion Fragment, and Bunker Projects Review. They can be found on Twitter @sjpo_well.

ZOE

ANNE WILKINS

At first, I fed it my toenails. Joe never liked me cutting my toenails in the house, he said it was dirty. So I’d sit outside on our deck, cutting off little parts of me, and feeding them to the plant in the pot.

“There you go,” I’d say. “That taste good?” I never expected it to answer me, but its leaves quivered a little when I talked to it.

“You’re gonna kill it,” called Joe from the inside, watching me.

“No. It likes it. See?” But the plant wasn’t quivering for Joe. It only did that for me.

I Googled it later, just to check I wasn’t doing anything bad, and the internet told me it was more than fine to feed a plant toenails; it was actually a good thing. My toenails would be packed full of amino acids and would help the plant grow. And I wanted the plant to grow. That way when Joe’s mother came back for another visit I could point at the plant and say, “See, I did something right.”

* * *

After two months the plant had grown to the height of my hip, and I had to get a new pot for it.

“Must be all your toenails you’ve been feeding it,” said Joe jokingly.

He didn’t know the half of it. Toenails, fingernails, skin, hair. I was feeding it all those things now. Pulling my hair off my hairbrush, trimming my fingernails, peeling off blister tops and scrubbing at calluses from my feet. I did it all over the plant now. Giving it pieces of me. I even did my bikini line out there on the deck, shaving what I could and sprinkling it on the plant like confetti. It took it all.

And I talked to it too. Telling it all my secrets. How I’d moved to this town to be with Joe, but I missed my friends and family back home. I told it about the crappy job at the diner where I worked and about Joe forgetting our third wedding anniversary. I also told it about how we’d been trying for a baby for a year. I’d read somewhere that plants like being talked to, and I swear it would lean in to listen to my words. Sometimes its leaves would get to jittering, which I think meant it was so excited that it wanted to say something about the matter, but it couldn’t.

* * *

In Winter, I brought it inside and put it next to the couch.

“What the hell is that doing in here?” yelled Joe.

“It’s too cold for it outside.” I protested. “Look, even its little leaves are sad.”

And it was true. It was like they’d curled up into themselves. Or perhaps it was with Joe shouting, I’m not sure.

“Jesus, Jess, you’re too attached to that thing.”

Maybe he had a point, but I didn’t have a baby to nurse, I didn’t have a friend in these parts, and some days I didn’t think I had much of a husband.

When Joe had gone to bed, the plant and I would stay up watching late-night TV. I’d let its leaves rest on the skin of my arm, and I would feel it making soft little needling motions, taking what it wanted. I didn’t mind. It was comforting in a way, like the paws of a kitten, and I knew it was taking away the parts I didn’t need. Dead skin cells. Some women paid for goldfish to suck the dead skin off their feet, so I told myself I was lucky to have the plant do it for free. My body always felt stiffer, heavier after a feeding session, but it was worth it knowing that I was helping to keep my plant in good health.

It was right about this time that I named the plant. I even got a book out of the library on baby names to help. I read the names out to it, one at a time, looking for a reaction. When I finally got to the name Zoe, it was doing its little jiggling again. Like an excited child.

“Zoe. Do you like the name Zoe?”

Its leaves brushed my skin delicately in response.

The name Zoe meant life. It was perfect.

* * *

When my mother-in-law next visited, Zoe had grown up to my shoulders. Her leaves were green, shiny and lush. Her limbs were strong, and her trunk had stretched to the limits of the pot. She was thriving.

“Whatever is that doing in the house?” scowled Joe’s mother.

“That’s Zoe.”

“Has she gone mad?” Joe’s mother couldn’t even look at me.

“Jess is quite attached to the plant, Mum,” offered Joe.

“Plant? That’s a tree in your living room.”

“Her name’s Zoe. She likes it in the lounge. There’s lots of light, and we can leave the TV on during the day so she’s not lonely,” I said.

Joe looked at me strangely.

“You leave the TV on?” repeated Joe. “For the tree?”

Zoe had to sleep outside after that.

That night I curled my arms around her too-small pot and cried salty tears. I didn’t think plants liked salt, but Zoe brushed her leaves against my face, wiping my eyes dry. Taking it all in. All of me.

* * *

Joe dug a hole for Zoe in the morning.

It would mean she would be stuck outside, cold in winter, but perhaps I could dress her in a warm blanket, and together we could gaze up at the stars.

“Do you still love me?” asked Joe when he’d finished the digging. He looked like he’d been crying.

“Of course.” It wasn’t a lie, I just loved him less. Zoe had taken over a big part of my life now. The empty part. She needed a lot of care.

“Then come and sleep with me tonight. Not your tree.” He still hadn’t got round to calling her Zoe.

It had been a long time since I had slept with my husband. All of that was tied up with feelings of disappointment. The child that never was. But I had Zoe now.

I stroked Zoe’s trunk. “It’ll be just for tonight,” I reassured her.

* * *

It’s funny how when you stop wanting something, when you stop trying, that fate intervenes. That night my husband planted a seed inside me that took root.

Joe was over the moon when the test showed up positive and so was I, but Zoe didn’t take the news well.

“You’ll have a sibling,” I told Zoe as I stroked my belly like I used to stroke Zoe. I wanted her to be happy for me, but her branches didn’t jiggle like they used to.

When we found out I was having a girl, Joe and I scoured the baby book together. He liked the name Emily. So did his mother.

It meant rival.

* * *

As the baby grew inside me, Zoe stopped talking to me. And she grew thorns.

“What sort of tree is it?” asked Joe, looking at Zoe as she changed, her leaves becoming more angular, her bark more brittle. Her branches had spread out towards our house, casting her shade upon us.

“I don’t know.”

“It looks different somehow.”

“I think she’s jealous.”

“Stop it, Jess. For Christ’s sake, it’s just a tree.”

Joe never did understand.

* * *

When I tried to feed Zoe now her thorns would puncture my skin. She’d had all of me. My skin, hair, nails, and now blood. She’d even had a wisdom tooth that I saved for her, brought back from the dentist as a special treat for her. But she wanted more. Sometimes her leaves would snake their way down to my belly, but I’d push them away.

* * *

The baby was born early. There was no cry, only the gasps from the nurses and the doctor. The early scans said it was a girl, but no one quite knew what it was when it came out. Joe was sobbing hysterically. One of the nurses made the sign of the cross. The doctor left the room white-faced.

“Let me see,” I said.

And then they showed me my baby girl. She had bark-like skin, roots on her feet, and the beginnings of branches and leaves sprouting from her malformed head.

“I don’t understand,” mumbled Joe again and again. His head held in his hands.

But I did.

It wasn’t an Emily after all. It was a Zoe. Another Zoe.

Zoe hadn’t only been feeding from me, taking. She’d been putting herself into me, giving.

I knew what to do.

I brought baby Zoe up to my breast to feed. To have all of me. Her roots reached out hungrily latching on. While my husband wept beside me.

End.

* * *

Anne Wilkins is a former family court lawyer, and currently a sleep-deprived primary school teacher in New Zealand. Her work can be found in Elegant Literature, All Worlds Wayfarer, On the Premises, Writers Online Magazine, Scifi Shorts and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2023 Cambridge Autumn Festival Short Story Competition, the 2022 winner of the Writers’ Online Twist Short Story Competition and recently won the Halloween Frights genre for the 2023 Autumn Writing Battle. Her love of writing is fuelled by copious amounts of coffee, reading and hope. www.annewilkinsauthor.com

SLIPSKIN

K. WALLACE KING

When the tide was out, the cave was filled with sand and sometimes a fish flopping helpless as a wing-ripped bird. June tried to save a
beached perch. She picked it up, but the fish slipped through her hands with the feel of wiped snot. Back on the wet sand, its lidless eye stared at the white winter sun. Whatever it saw June would never see.

“Leave it. It’s almost dead,” said Jeremy, flicking his cigarette into a retreating wave.

Gnats rose in a swirl from a pile of kelp as June stepped over the fish, having dismissed the thought that perhaps she ought to bury it. The sea would do the honors when it returned on its next attempt to cross the beach. June hoped one day the sea would drown the whole town. She fantasized swimming through underwater houses, the drowned floating over sofas, bumping into walls, while June rose through a chimney in a burst of bubbles and swam away with Jeremy.

It was cold and the wind was bitter, stinging of salt spray. Gulls dipped over something at the far end of the cave where a flash of gold cut through the cloud-shrouded light. June called Jeremy to come see what it was as she scurried over spray-slick rocks toward the wheeling gulls. When June turned to call again, Jeremy was gone.

Jeremy barely noticed June anymore. Those summer afternoons hiding under the boardwalk, poking sticks between the boards into the bare feet overhead, of swimming far past the buoys then collapsing on hot sand, skin to skin, faces to the sun, ended sometime June couldn’t quite pinpoint. It seemed Jeremy kept growing older, taller, while June stayed June.

I’m invisible to him too, she thought. The wind smacked her face and the sun licked the horizon like a thick pink tongue. The sea had shushed nearly still. Slate gray, big as forever, night and sea were waiting eagerly. June knew full well it was risky going back into the cave, the tide rushed in so fast even townsfolk who knew better had at times been swept away. But something bright still flickered—only take a minute.

Cold sand squelched between June’s bare toes as she rushed to the opening of the cave. Two gulls, beaks ajar, screamed over something. June kicked them away and in the last rosy glow of day, she inhaled such a surprised gulp of air it made her hiccup. The man’s eyeless sockets were round as half dollars, his opened mouth leaked something dark and viscous. The golden flash she’d seen were the brass buttons on a fancy captain’s jacket.

The tide circled June’s ankles as she studied the dead man. She imagined tiny silver fish nibbling delicately at his tender eyeballs as the brass buttons glittered in the dying light. Jeremy wanted to join the navy. Wouldn’t he like a captain’s jacket? Oh, if she gave it to him, he’d see her again.

A wave retreated like a hand pulling aside a curtain. The man in the brass buttoned jacket was revealed as only a half captain, all below the belt was gone.

The sun dropped and night spilled. A whoosh of gull wings on the lip of the cave alerted June there were only moments to get out, each incoming wave slapped harder. The buttons on the captain’s coat no longer gleamed as she pulled it on, but the wet wool was so heavy it threatened to pull her down beside the dead man. June dropped the coat and splashed toward the entrance of the cave, the sea licking her knees.

She thought kelp had wound around her ankle. June fell, swallowing seawater. She fought to stand, gasping, coughing, as another wave shoved her back from the cave entrance. A strange blue glow now permeated the water. Stars of the sea, thought June, awed for a precious moment by the unworldly glowing shimmer. The light illuminated one end of a pale scarf wrapped around June’s leg. The other end of the scarf was tied around an underwater woman’s neck. She stared up at June through the foam, haloed by bioluminescent plankton, her dark hair glittered, a net of blue stars.

Another wave slammed into the cave, more furious than before. The underwater woman disappeared with the waves that pushed deeper into the cave. June didn’t realize her mouth was open until cold spray slapped her face. As if awakened from a dream, June realized the sea was to her waist.

She staggered onto the beach. The night was still. The wind had dropped. The bell clanged on the buoy in the harbor, and, shivering, June made her way to the boardwalk where her boots were waiting. The woman’s face floated in her mind as she passed the dock. She was cold, but not as cold as the woman in the cave. Who were they, these drowned dead?

Lights were twinkling in windows as June made her way home. Her wet hair smacked her cheeks and her sodden skirt clung to her legs like the drowned woman’s scarf. She ought to tell someone. A dead captain, a drowned woman.

Only a cat perched atop a milk truck watched June’s awkward progress down the street in too-big fisherman’s boots, leaving a sludgy trail of sea and sand behind.

* * *

It was one of those little old towns with a name too long in a language no one spoke anymore. It was too hot in summer, too cold in winter. The houses and shops facing the promenade once painted white, blue, and yellow, were peeling to gray wood beneath, barely still held together with rusted nails. In summer, tourists who couldn’t afford the picture postcard towns lugged blankets and picnic baskets onto the pebbled beach. At night they shyly extended a palm for the fortune teller or gaped at the two-headed calves, their teeth stuck together with saltwater taffy. They lined up to ride the carousel on a dolphin, a saddled sea horse, or inside a giant oyster shell, sitting in place of the pearl.

When summer was over, the town pulled down the window shades, moving behind them as inky shadows while the pennant flapped on the fortune teller’s striped tent and the wind blew shingles loose from roofs. A few men went out on the big fishing boats, some in dinghy’s, others slept by the fire, their sea days over. Women put up fruit and vegetables in preserves and jams, and the few children filed into the one room schoolhouse and church on Sundays.

The Modernaires were harmonizing the song, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree—June recognized it because her brother had the record—on the radio as she dragged herself into the kitchen.

June started up the steep back stairs of the cottage when her mother said, “Looks sure we’ll get in the war now.” She was about to reply when June’s father said, “Roosevelt’s dragging us in, goddamn him.”

Her mother wasn’t talking to June. She hadn’t even noticed her.

Jeremy once told her that in the first war, half the British calvary on their way to France were drowned by German U-boats. Now there were bigger ships and bigger guns. June wept thinking of the poor horses. Jeremy couldn’t wait to join the navy.

At dinner June’s father talked over her brother and her mother. War should be fought on your own land or not at all. No, his son would not volunteer. Her mother pulled pin bones from the fish with her teeth and June ate bread dipped in soup, the broth as salty as the sea, thinking of the woman floating underwater in the cave. She almost told them about the half a captain, about the woman whose hair was a net of blue stars, but her father turned up the radio to drown out the sound of her mother’s wailing and her brother’s yelling. No one noticed when June got up from the table. She went to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, watching moonlight diffused by the old wavy window glass try to creep into the corners.

* * *

Aunt Beguila told the woman at the shop no one thought June would live when she was born—she had hung between life and death for months. June remembered this, it had been like being in the bottom of a green pool where light and dark took shapes of fantastical design. Her mother said it was nonsense, she couldn’t possibly remember, she’d been a newborn infant.

God hadn’t designed her brain yet, said her father. She was empty until she was baptized. While her aunt talked to the woman with the thick face, June fingered a locket with a silver sand dollar charm. It was a display meant for tourists in a glass case with awkward mermaid figurines, matchstick pirate ships, and ashtrays made from clam shells. The glass case was dusty because no one in town bought these things. Though her aunt and the woman had discussed June’s birth before, how she had hung between life and death, which explained why June was June, they had moved on to a discussion of someone else’s misfortune when June pocketed the necklace with the sand dollar charm. Two minutes later, June’s aunt left the shop alone, having forgotten her niece. The shopkeeper was reading a magazine when June passed the counter. She briefly looked up when June opened the door, down again when she closed it behind her.

I am in between, thought June, ruminating on her birth story, which must be why she was becoming more invisible by the day. Why Jeremy barely saw her anymore. I am neither here nor there. June clasped the necklace around her neck, fingering the silver charm.

* * *

Inside the church the pews were straight backed and hard bottomed. June counted sixteen parishioners, their backs to her as she sat down beside her mother. Behind the pulpit was a great window of colored sea glass, bits and pieces of bottles smoothed and molded by sand and the beat of waves illustrating Jesus on tiptoes atop a glassy Sea of Galilee. But it was the smaller window in the side aisle that always captured June’s attention. In this window Saint Pelagia the Flayed was mid-air, tossed by tiny dark figures on a cliff into a raging sea glass ocean. The saint’s long black hair flew behind her, contrasting with her shiny red skinned body. Her opened eyes looked at June, wide and bottle blue.

Saint Pelagia was the patron saint of the town. Once. This was before the town teetered on the edge of extinction. Unlike Pelagia the Virgin, or Pelagia the Harlot, this Saint Pelagia wasn’t listed in Butler’s Lives of the Saints. June’s brother said this Pelagia wasn’t even real, the whole story was made up. She had never saved sailors from the Romans, and Nero had not had her flayed and thrown her into the sea. Nowadays, only a couple of ancient sailors still wore a medal around their neck stamped with her skinned body, few in town remembered her at all.

The priest chanted, the choir chorused, a baby was baptized in sanctified saltwater, but all June could think about was the woman floating in the cave, lit eerily by the plankton June called sea stars. The drowned woman’s hair had been black as the saint’s, her sightless eyes glowed as blue. June’s heart fluttered and she felt as if she had swallowed the sun, so bright, so warm was the understanding spreading inside her. Although she knew it had been centuries since Saint Pelagia had been stripped of flesh and thrown into the sea by a Roman emperor, the number of years that made up a century didn’t concern her. Saints performed miracles. Why shouldn’t Pelagia be a miracle all by herself, flowing with the currents from ancient Greece to this cold rocky coast in saintly defiance of any human definition of time?

While the parishioners kneeled, heads down to pray, June slipped from beside her mother and crept down the side aisle. No one paid any attention as she walked swiftly toward the door. She fingered the sand dollar at her throat—surely a sign—the silver chain had slipped easily into her palm. Once outside, she filled her lungs with salted air, keeping herself from shouting her excitement.

The sun was shining bright, almost yellow enough to pretend warmth, although the puddles in the street were crusted with an icy film. There was no one about except the blind old man who’d once run the ferry. He hated God whether represented by Presbyterians, Baptists, or the erstwhile Pelagians, and spent his days drinking, urinating in public, and cursing.

“To Hell with you,” he shouted as June rushed past.

“I’ve found the saint!”

“Fuck saints,” replied the old man, spraying urine in the direction of June’s retreating footsteps.

June laughed aloud. The old man had seen her. Saints restored sight to the blind. June was almost holy now. Jeremy and June would eat cotton candy in the giant oyster shell, sitting side-by-side on the carousel. She smiled at the lying sun and the bottle glass blue sky.

* * *

In the bay, the sea was green gold. Sun dappled waves broke on the rocks in sparkling prisms. June was filled with the mixed excitement and dread of meeting a ghost. A martyred saint, dead for hundreds of years, would be twice as thrilling and three times as terrifying. But the cave was empty of anything except driftwood. No trace of the half captain, no sign of a drowned saint.

June splashed into the retreating sea up to her thighs, stirring the water with both hands until they were numb from cold. The only thing she found in the whirl she created was a small fish that swam dizzily away. June turned her face up to the winter sun. Why? she asked. The sun was silent, but a cloud slipped across it throwing a shadow over the bay.

Gulls cried. Behind June, the tattered pennant atop the fortune teller’s tent fluttered. From this point on the beach the town looked as small as it was, and inside June the hot joy of revelation began to melt. She felt wobbly standing in the surf, waves breaking cold around her knees. Her toes had gone numb, in her excitement she had forgotten to take off her shoes and now her legs felt so heavy, as if iron plates had been nailed to the soles of her feet.

The sun hid behind the pile of clouds blown in from the south, the bright day now eclipsed, the sea darkened and waves began to race. June felt something tickling her ankle and looked down at the long pale scarf.

The woman’s dress that floated around her form. One side of her torso was gone. The woman’s black hair rose and fell with the swelling sea. Eyes June had thought blue, glistened white, color stripped to the sclera, and her pink mouth was stretched wide in a grin or a scream.

June watched the scarf unwind from the woman’s neck and float away as the colorless eyes stared.

“Pray for me.”

June unclasped the seashell necklace and bent to the woman underwater, but when she tried to put it around the woman’s neck, the head detached like a snapped flower. Soft tissue flapped from the woman’s neck. For a moment June was shocked still. The head was sucked into the curl of a wave and disappeared. Gulls cried, and far away June heard the peal of church bells.

The sun broke free of the clouds in that way it sometimes does in a painting, a beam of light shines magically and makes the viewer believe, if only for a moment, in something divine.

June fell to her knees in the sea, the saltwater lapping her breasts, beside the corpse of the dead drowned woman, and gently tugged. The flesh slipped free far easier than the captain’s brass buttoned coat.

* * *

It was a dog that saw it first trudging heavily up the street, trailing a snotty line of sea and sand. A cat atop a barrel hissed and the dog barked and feinted, yet seemed afraid to come close enough to bite. In front of Jeremy’s house, a lopsided cottage, half its roof slates in a broken pile around an evergreen in the yard, it stopped and stood still.

It was the gulls that brought people out of their houses to see what the commotion was about. Hundreds of birds shrieked madly, whirling and darkening the sky, a foam of wings over the town’s roofs.

The thing standing in the street was surrounded by the buzzing of flies, awakened from winter torpor by the scent of a dead thing. Jeremy’s father came out of the house and immediately went back inside to get his shotgun. Jeremy’s mother screamed. A crowd gathered, circling, the dog growled and barked fiercer.

“What the hell,” said Jeremy, coming out of the cottage. “June?”

The thing dressed in decaying flesh turned to him, teeth bared in a smile and held out a hand from which skin slipped onto the pavement of the street.

“Race you out to the buoy?”

“Jesus Fucking Christ.”

June looked at them all. Townspeople, her mother and father, her brother.

“I’m here,” she said turning to them. “See? I’ve come.”

Not one dropped to their knees. Jeremy’s father shook his head and went back inside. The dog grew brave and nipped at the flesh at June’s shins, pulling at a sliver of dangling skin. Jeremy followed his father inside the cottage. The townspeople turned away. Only the gulls and flies followed June as she trudged back toward the sea, wondering if other saints floated in between, invisible.

End.

* * *

K. Wallace King’s recent short fiction appears in Chthonic Matter, Underland Arcana, Nightscript, Orca, and Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, an Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, among others. She lives in Hollywood, California, where the handprints of dead dreamers are pressed into the sidewalks.

UNDESIRABLES

COLLEEN ANDERSON

The woman certainly didn’t look like an exterminator, something just…different about her. Her scent of thyme and lemon, and her outfit of a linen pencil skirt of navy, matching jacket, and starched white blouse made her look like a model or a lawyer. Stiletto shoes the color of dried blood drew Carina’s attention. Then she stared to the woman’s strange choice in jewellery; a pendant of a wild-haired woman pulling open her vulva. Carina had seen them in Ireland: the disturbing Sheela-na-gigs. She pulled her gaze away from the figure to look into deep chocolate eyes flecked with amber of Alecto Petrescue, owner of the Eliminators.

Carina asked again, raising her voice over the incessant barking of the yappy mutt next door, “So, you can get rid of everything—the wasp nest in the walls, those weird sow beetles that I keep finding in the basement, and those hideous wolf spiders, the mites.” Everything gnawed and chewed, and Carina often itched from imagined insectile legs crawling over her. She rubbed her arms.

Composed, erect posture, only her carmine lips moving, Alecto smiled. Carina convinced herself that the thought of the hated spiders brought on her shivers.

“Most assuredly.” Alecto stood, towering over Carina. “You don’t have to pay until after.” She gave Carina her card and turned to leave.

“Oh,” Alecto Petrescue paused, not because she had forgotten anything, but to put special emphasis on the point. “There is one condition. You must stay away until I’m done. I work alone—trade secret.”

Carina found the woman strange yet alluring. She mentally shrugged. What did she have to lose?

* * *

After receiving the call, Carina returned to the house.

As Alecto Petrescue greeted her at her own door, she thought she saw something black on the woman’s lips. Blinking, Carina peered into the shadows of Alecto’s face and heard a faint click. Alecto licked her lips, smiled, and held the door open.

“Please, check that all is satisfactory. I take cash or credit card.”

“All—all right.” She must have been seeing things.

Stress swirled Carina’s belly and had for months with Rob, that snow-bearded bastard, sucking her dry in the divorce. He was on his fourth lawyer, narcissistically believing he deserved half of everything when he hadn’t bothered to work in the last ten years.

Breathing deeply, Carina unclenched her fingers as she checked the basement and tapped on walls, listening quietly. Nothing buzzed or hummed; nothing scuttled or scurried or bit.

As she returned to the front room where Alecto waited, the mutt started up again. She spoke above the ear-splitting barks. “It looks good. What did you use?”

Alecto Petrescue stared at her. “As I said, trade secret.”

Carina paid; high but worth it, if it kept the vermin away. Thanking the woman, she said, “Nothing else worked before this.”

“I’m good at taming undesirables.”

“If only you could get that dog to stop barking.”

“I can,” and Petrescue named a price.

Again, Alecto required Carina not to be present. Sitting on the couch, curiosity ate at Carina’s self-control. She drank a beer as her knee jittered up and down. How would Alecto work this magic? A high-pitched yelp pierced her thoughts, and she ran to the window. She didn’t want the dog hurt! Peeking through the tiny side window above an antique inset bookcase, Carina froze.

Alecto had moved into the shadows by a shed, not visible to most houses, except for Carina’s tiny window. On tiptoes, she tried to peer through the leaded glass.

Alecto Petrescue’s mouth opened impossibly wide as she pushed in the Pomeranian’s back legs.

Carina jumped back. Had Alecto eaten the dog in one swallow? Her shaking hand pulled her up to look again. The dog shook droplets of water from its fur, then sat quietly, watching butterflies flit on cabbage flowers. Surely, the distortions in the glass had caused the illusion.

Heart pounding, Carina ran over to the coffee table and gulped down the beer when the doorbell rang.

The feat confirmed, Carina paid the woman, trying her hardest to ignore the strands of blond fur sticking to Alecto’s lip.

Twice, Carina took treats to the neighbor’s dog, claiming a friend had passed them on. She patted the dog, ruffled its fluffy coat, and even picked it up. It looked healthy, it breathed, it ate the treats voraciously, looking for more. But not once did it bark.

* * *

She pulled out the scotch and poured a stiff one. That bastard had done it again. It wasn’t enough to take half of the house’s worth, but he wanted the cottage at the lake and half her pension. Divorce no longer allowed infidelity clauses even after she’d found his bill for flying to Europe to see Miss Happy Nappy.

Aside from the new twist on the nightmare divorce, a few small holes appeared in the wooden floorboards. Then one night, Carina awoke scratching two red welts on her arm. The next day she searched every crevice and crack, finding nothing; not one ant or spider or wasp. Her place remained show home clean.

Carina paced, cursing Rob, scratching, cursing herself for having ever been stupid enough to marry him, and trying to talk herself out of the next step. But she knew what she had decided when she picked up the phone.

* * *

Carina met Alecto Petrescue briefly, noting the woman’s impeccable black dress with the same blood-red shoes and Sheela-na-gig pendant. The vulva looked bigger than the last time she had seen it. She blinked and looked away.

Ignoring the disturbing jewelry, Carina gave Alecto the address, stating Rob would be home the next night watching his favorite show. If he would just be more amenable to a fair divorce, she could get him out of her life forever.

When Alecto Petrescue parked her Mercedes out front of Rob’s little bungalow, Carina was already obscured behind the big oak. The woman walked confidently to the door and knocked. Rob answered. Carina couldn’t hear the conversation, but Alecto entered the house and the door closed.

Crouching low, Carina crept to the window and peered through the crack in the curtain.

Alecto and Rob talked briefly but then he stopped and stared at Alecto. She stepped close, her hands moving in elaborate gestures. Alecto’s mouth stretched and stretched, her lips pulling back from perfect teeth as she picked Rob up like a ragdoll and stuffed him headfirst into her unnatural maw.

Carina clasped hands over her mouth to keep the screams in and ducked down. Gulping back nausea, she peeked in again.

Alecto’s belly distended and moments later she pulled up her dress and squatted, legs wide. She reached up under the fabric, and pulled something long, shiny and slick, covered in a red caul from between her legs. Alecto dug her finger into the wet membrane and twirled it into a glob that she swallowed like a tasty treat. Rob, wet like a newborn, lay on the floor.

Sweat beaded Carina’s brow and she gagged. Alecto’s head snapped around, black eyes staring as Carina ducked away from the window. She retched and ran.

* * *

More welts appeared on her legs. She tore apart her bedroom, washing all the bedding. Again, Carina searched for bedbugs or fleas, for anything, but nothing showed.

She stopped as if shocked by lightning. Alecto had birthed the dog and Carina’s ex, but did that mean the insects were still around, quiet but insidious? If that was how Alecto “tamed” things, then they might be continuing their infestation. Things crawling and burrowing and nesting like destructive ghosts.

Carina drove over to Rob’s, to see if the affect had taken place. Rob answered the door. He smiled. “Carina, come in.”

He picked up a plate with several pizza slices and chewed away as Carina pulled out the paper.

“I—I was wondering if you would agree to settle for this.” She presented her proposal; none of her pension, but he would get the lake house.

Rob finished the three slices as he read her proposal and went back to the box, incessantly chewing. He nodded his head, “Seems fair,” and signed the papers. As he saw her out, he never stopped eating. “So hungry,” he mumbled as she left.

Alecto Petrescue came for payment the next day. As Carina fumbled her credit card with shaking hands, she could not look into Alecto’s eyes. The pendant caught her gaze. The hands seemed to be pulling the vulva open, wider and wider.

Her attention shifted. The gold and red carpet moved, humping slightly. Did something crawl underneath, an invisible incursion? Where had Alecto birthed back the insects? The dog and Rob had returned but she hadn’t seen the insects. Carina looked into Alecto’s eyes, about to ask her if the insects were truly gone.

The dark brown irises opened wider, the gold flecks writhing like gilded worms. Carina followed their wriggles, struggling to remember the important question.

Alecto’s voice came distantly. “I told you not to watch.”

End.

* * *

Colleen Anderson’s work has appeared in seven countries, such as Best Indie Speculative Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, and the award-winning Shadow Atlas. Her poem, “Machine (r)Evolution” won the 2023 Rhylsing Award. Her newest collection, Weird Worlds is coming from Weird House, with fiction collections Embers Amongst the Fallen, and A Body of Work, and poetry collections, I Dreamed a World, and The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams available online. She is current president of the SFPA and an editor for OnSpec. She lives in Vancouver, BC and contemplates mermaids.

THE KISS OF FLOWERS

CASS CLARKE

“Your condition,” Dr. Phillips paused, “the flowers in your lungs. Are they always there?” His face was hidden behind my file. All I could see of him were his fingers curled around the manilla edges; the joints covered in hundreds of white-slashed scars. It looked like he once stuck his hands into a bag of mangy cats. Maybe it was a dare. Maybe his friends said you won’t and meant to say please don’t. Maybe he didn’t listen either.

“Hmm?” Dr. Phillips asked.

I sat on the couch, shifting my weight from either foot. The tan leather squeaked beneath me as he waited for me to explain. I hadn’t, until now. No one really asked. Everyone thought they knew, that is. The prime networks deemed my case: The Kiss of Death. So it wasn’t long until the calls began: reporters, Oprah, attorneys, and therapists called to say they felt connected to me. They wanted to help. They couldn’t. When they called, I’d say something like, “First, buy the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Dad would slam the phone out of my hand. “Damnit, Cindy!”

Dr. Phillips never called. He sent a greeting card in the mail. He wrote: At least she got flowers. When I chose him, Dad said, “This is your last shot before the court chooses for you.”

“They’re chrysanthemums,” I told Dr. Phillips.

Dr. Phillips put my folder down on his desk and smiled. “Chrysanthemums.” His teeth were white as pearls, straight like he spent each day sanding them into a neat white line. He wore gold wiry glasses a size too big, covering his left blue eye, and the right gray one.

“What’s wrong with your hands?”

“What happened to Lily?”

“How do I know you’ll believe me?”

Dr. Phillip’s lips twisted to the side. He stood. He walked in front of his desk and sat atop it, eyes measuring me. “I’ll tell you why I understand, only, if you tell me about the flowers.”

“How do I know it’s gonna be worth it?” I asked, crossing my arms.

“I could say it has something to do with trust, or all stories are great, or what have you.” He waved his hands. “But hell, it’s a gamble. Most things are nothing more than that.” He sighed. “Kitchen shears,” he said. “She used the kitchen shears.”

“She?”

“Do you know how deals work, Cindy?”

* * *

Our first official conversation happened in fifth grade, during recess, at 12:32 pm. Lily tripped on her shoelaces during a soccer game and cut her cheek on the part of the fence that curled upwards where older kids snuck underneath it at night to smoke pot. She was sitting on the bleachers, crying. I sat next to her. “The stupid laces don’t stay tied,” she said.

“Do you want me to tie them?” I asked.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Lily said, “but, I don’t know how. I buy them tied and just slip them off. My parents never notice. I think they’d call me stupid for not just knowing.”

“My dad’s sort of like that with cooking,” I said, not sure it made sense, but still talking, “Mom never left instructions. He tries but ends up screaming into the oven: shit, goddamn, to hell,” I said, and Lily giggled. “Once he microwaved a bowl on fire. I pretended not to notice and asked if we could order pizza. Most nights, I just ask for pizza. It’s easier that way.”

“Does your Mom work a lot, too?” Lily asked.

“No,” I said. “She died when I was a baby.”

“Oh,” Lily said. “Is it—”

“—about those shoes,” I said. She tilted her head at me as if looking for something hidden in my mouth. Or eyes. I took the shoelaces in my hands and showed her how to cross and loop them, tie them tight, and secure them. She did it right the first time. She was like that.

“Thanks,” Lily said, then she leaned in and wiped the spit off my sneakers. My chest pounded with her so close. It felt strange like someone filling a water balloon in both my lungs.

* * *

“Have you ever talked to your father about your mother?”

“This is about Lily,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, I’m interrupting the story, aren’t I?” Dr. Phillips asked.

“What about your she?” I asked.

He stopped writing and looked up. “Hell,” he said. “She probably stopped me from getting a lot worse.” He went back to writing on his pad. “It was self-defense, on her part.”

“You have to give me more than that,” I said.

“No. No, I don’t,” Dr. Phillips said.

* * *

On the night of Northbrook’s Annual Sadie Hawkins Dance, my first actual dance that wasn’t some relative’s wedding, Dad knocked on my door. He knocked on the door only when we had to “talk,” which wasn’t really talking, so much as standing in the doorway to not talk.

“This is an odd time in a… woman’s life,” he said, looking to his side as if someone would finish the rest. As a kid, I used to think Mom did that. That she’d jump in right where it got pretty awkward. So he’d say, “You might bleed. No, yeah, I mean, sometimes. Not always.” And she’d add in something sweet like, “Monthly, but I do too. Here, come here, let’s get Dad out of shock for a moment. It happens to everyone, even Beyoncé…”

I nodded, encouraging him while also wanting to die.

“Right,” he said and handed me a towel. He walked downstairs. I didn’t know what the towel was for, really, should I shower? But he liked to prepare for things that rarely made sense. Like when we’d shop for oranges he’d ask, “Which one looks meatier?”

At the dance, I stood by the punchbowl pretending not to notice that Lily stood in front of me. I stood so close to her heel, I accidentally tripped and jolted her forward a little. She turned around, glaring up from her phone, then smiled as she recognized me. Her lips were glossy like a slip n’ slide, like if I tried to even come close, I’d fall onto my face in front of the entire school.

“Hi,” Lily said.

I didn’t know what to say back, so I didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to dance?” Lily asked. No one had stepped onto the dance floor, but everyone lined the perimeters like moths around a high-powered lamp.

“No,” I said.

“Yeah,” she sighed, tossing her hair.

“Thing is,” I said, “I don’t know how to dance.”

“Fair enough,” she said and walked away.

At the end of the night, Lily walked over to me. Sweat on her brow, her hair falling out of the brown bun of curls. “Some people are coming over Friday,” she said, “you should.”

My chest tightened, as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Are you okay?” she asked. I coughed again. I nodded, but I wasn’t. My throat ached and scratched like I swallowed something brittle. I coughed and spat out a twig into my palm.

“What the—” Lily said, and I ran to the bathroom.

In the stall, I coughed, heaved, and pulled a six-inch branch from my throat. It had green unopened buds on it. There was no blood on the wood. Instead, it felt like I had spent years with this here, blocking whatever blood I had from flowing. But now, the blood flowed into those brittle parts. I exhaled. It was like my entire life was spent breathing in halves. I turned on the faucet and watched the branch lodge itself into the drain as the water parted around it.

* * *

Dr. Phillips stopped writing. He crossed his legs in a Buddha-like pose on his desk. He hmm-ed again and took off his glasses. Maybe this was for effect, to look like he was truly considering my life. Maybe he left his clothes in the dryer and just remembered this now.

“Ok,” I said.

“I thought me and Alice were going to get married,” he said.

“What was Alice like?” I asked.

“Alice hated shoes,” he said, smirking. “No matter where we were: the grocery store, the movies, the Ritz, the shoes came off. Sweat leaves your feet, did you know that? She was convinced no shoes meant she’d never have stinky feet, ha, it really was quite charming.”

* * *

Alice had gotten a large envelope in the mail. She was opening it in the kitchen as I walked in from work. I saw it and hid in the pantry. I wanted to see her reaction. She tore it open.

“What is it, honey?” I asked.

I walked in, pretending not to see.

“Oh,” she said, biting down a grin. I put my hands around her waist from behind her, so she squirmed backward playfully, before resting her head underneath my chin, “It’s Stanford,” she said. She turned around and looked at me with her blue eyes. They searched my face like a police scanner determining how fast or slow my heart raced. It must have registered 90 miles of no, no, no, because then she added, “Things like this happen all the time. It’s no big deal.”

“No need to rush it,” I said. “Right? You have plenty of time to teach.”

She nodded and turned the faucet on to wash some vegetables for dinner. I could see the tendons in her neck stiffen, but I exhaled in relief as the water drowned out our silence.

* * *

“I had full-time work as a research assistant at Harvard. I didn’t want to move,” he said.

“What about her?” I asked.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Sometimes when we want to run away, we don’t know it until our feet are halfway out the door. Now, Lily?”

* * *

We were watching a movie. Lily had her current best friend Nancy over. She was the girl in our class that asked question after question, so you began to think she was really compiling a database of everyone for a shitty teen novel, or the FBI. Luckily, Nancy fell asleep. Lily had sat next to me. I leaned my head against hers. The movie had reached the credits. I was about to turn it off when Lily shuffled over so her knee touched mine. I watched her chest rise and fall. She had breasts like apples. The air came in and out of her so easily. Not everyone looks so calm.

“Do you ever miss her?” Lily asked. “Your mom, I mean.”

“What?” I asked, back stiffening as if someone prodded me with an electric zapper. Maybe there was something about moms in the movie. I didn’t pay attention. Was I supposed to?

She shrugged.

The pressure on my chest returned like fingers crawling through ventricles, growing into hands, thicker, fuller. I smiled, thin. She smiled back like she just gave me a compliment.

“It’s okay,” she said. She lifted her chin towards mine.

Her brown bangs shifted, revealing a freckle I never saw. The smell of lemon and mint filled my nose. She kissed me. Her lips are soft as petals. Her tongue slipped over mine. I could feel my lungs stretch with all those branches spreading out, filling empty nooks and crannies.

I exhaled. The blood flowed and poured into those places I forgot. Lily pulled me close. The blossoms that were once green tightened buds loosened. I wrapped my arms around her waist. Lily inhaled sharply. I could feel shoots sprout into my throat. I could taste the bark. I could taste the petals between my lips. I opened my eyes. There was blood on the edges of Lily’s lips, like a broken clown’s smile. Her blue eyes turned watery. She reached into her mouth and pulled out a bud. Puzzled, she held it in her palm, gazing at its yellow petals with white specks.

The sound of Lily’s body falling to the floor awoke Nancy.

“I didn’t mean—” I said.

“Get the hell away,” Nancy screeched.

I jumped back and watched Nancy leap. She punched Lily’s chest once, then again. The wail, the pound, filled the house. The living room door slammed open. There was my Dad in the doorway. His eyes searched for the weapon or little shit that broke in but then settled on Lily’s mouth, on mine, on the blood that flowed between us, on the petals scattered on the floor. He ran to Nancy first. I crawled back onto the couch with my knees to my chest. He whispered to her, and she left the room, shaking. Dad called the ambulance. He didn’t look at or touch me.

Sometimes I think he looks at my face, and he sees hers. If given the chance, I bet he’d rip my face right off. She survived but that was the last I saw of Lily: She couldn’t bear to look or touch me again, and I couldn’t find a mirror that didn’t have her face in it instead of mine.

* * *

“The coroner said it was death by internal bleeding, caused by a blunt wooden object. They found wood particles in her throat,” I told him. “It happened; evidence says so.”

Dr. Phillips nodded. “Control takes time to learn,” he said. “But is that really what happened? You do know that I watch the evening news.”

“It’s how it happened in my head,” I said.

“Hmm, ok.”

“Tell me what happened to Alice.”

* * *

One day, she was making us eggs for breakfast. She stood in our kitchen in her fuzzy blue terry cloth robe, staring at the pan. I could smell the eggs burn. I could see the smoke rise.

“Maybe you should turn it over,” I said.

“Why don’t you try,” she said, throwing the spatula on the counter.

“I thought you liked cooking,” I said.

“Why don’t you just take over the kitchen,” she said.

“Hey. Hey?”

“Can’t you even tell me the truth for once?”

She pushed past me and reached for the car keys on the kitchen table. The sight of it caused my ears to fill with a buzzing sound. All the windows in our house were shut. All the televisions were shut off. But there was a buzzing coming, and I swore it came from inside my mouth. The buzzing came like bees crawling out between my teeth. I hissed like a radiator.

I opened my mouth to say, “Wait a minute,” but a bee flew out. Alice swatted the first bee away idly. As if on cue, as if offended, the other bees emerged from me, in a flight of revenge from my throat. Bee after bee after bee became a swarm pouring out of my mouth. Alice screamed. She grabbed the frying pan off the stove and swatted at the mess of black and yellow around her. They stung her right cheek and then her arms. All I could think of was Alice leaving. I didn’t want her to go as much as I didn’t want to stay: It was confusing, to say the least. The bees kept coming. My chest was an emptying honeycomb. I couldn’t hear her scream over that buzzing. And it felt almost good, to let each one escape. Alice leaped up and yanked the kitchen drawer open. She took out a pair of kitchen shears and waved them in the air like a dagger.

“Calm down,” I said.

She slashed the air. She struck my palm. The flesh between my pinky finger tore open. She slashed again, tearing the flesh off my thumb. The more she struck, the more the flurry of black and yellow subsided in my throat. She must have noticed, because soon she stood, and towered over me. The bees in the air stilled, then dropped to the floor. My breath became shallow. I rolled onto my back. Her cheeks were swollen red. To have it all out of me, well, I hate to say it, but I felt relieved as if I had been holding back from using one of my lungs all this time.

When I awoke, she was gone, and so was our car.

* * *

“I can’t honestly tell you if the flowers will ever go away,” he said. “They might always be there. It gets easier.” He sighed. “Learning how to control the bees or the flowers.”

“This isn’t funny,” I said, “I didn’t lie to you.”

“Cindy, that wasn’t a lie. There are others like you who spend their lives trying to figure out that balance…What wakes them up and what keeps them asleep? It’s hard to learn. The love you felt, that, that is what we need to focus on… You know, it’s perfectly natural for you to care for her in the way that you did. Has anyone ever told you that before? That’s not the problem.”

I could feel my chest tighten. I tried to push past him.

“Cindy, you’re someone who can’t afford to hide how you feel or it will destroy everyone you love. Do you hear me? It will destroy you, too. Would your mother want that for you?”

I sank to the floor. I sat on my hands. I tasted the bark, but I didn’t move.

“My mother liked to plant flowers,” I said. “She liked calla lilies.”

“Is that so?”

We sat until I could gather up the courage to say one more word. No one had asked me before if I could tell when opening my mouth would hurt someone. I wondered how many people had to learn that. How many Lillies filled the world, being strangled by our touches? But I wasn’t even the one who made the first move, all I wanted was to be accepted by her embrace.

“Cindy,” he said.

I looked up at his one blue eye. I swallowed the petals flooding my mouth. I could feel them wanting to burst open, burst me open into a bright expansive field of color and bloom.

“My mom used to say if you touched one petal it’d bruise,” I said. “I feel like I have thousands of petals in me, and they want to get out, but I’m always, always afraid, I’ll bruise.”

Dr. Phillips pulled me close to him until the tears streaming down my cheeks soaked through his ironed shirt. I tried to apologize but it just came out in shakes. He said, It’s okay, it’s okay, and I wanted to ask him what it was, how would I know, would I ever be able to kiss again, and who is he to tell me this? Dr. Phillips told me about the second time the bees came, that the flowers in my lungs were no different than his bees, and that we could talk through this.

“I can’t,” I say. “I don’t know how.”

“You, dear girl, already are.”

He unlocked the door, letting me leave as I saw fit. He knew he couldn’t push me, as I knew that he had been where I was— maybe not quite the same way, but a shared dialect of love. I stood in the parking lot, watching my dad pull up in our beat-up Chevrolet, smoking a cigarette.

When I got into the car, he was quiet. We sat. He wouldn’t lift the emergency brake. He kept flicking the radio between channels, swearing that there was nothing good on the air. He looked at me and smiled. In his eyes, I could see how just looking at me broke him in half. Right there I knew I could only ever be half of what he loved most in this world, only be half a comfort, half a reminder of all he didn’t and couldn’t have. I had her eyes, he told me.

Maybe one day, he’ll see my eyes, see who I am. But today is not that day.

I put a hand on dad’s shoulder. He tried to hide his shudder. I kissed his cheek. Before he could ask what it was for, I opened the door and walked into Dr. Phillips' office. I didn’t hear footsteps following behind me. Just heard the door gently shut like a welcomed sigh of relief.

End.

* * *

Cass Clarke is a horror writer, podcaster, GALECA critic, and martial artist. Their work has been published at Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Dread Central, and other sites that delight in things that go bump in the night. The Caretaker, their debut queer novella, is available now from Hear Us Scream Press. In their spare time, they teach Taekwondo to children and cuddle with their little black dog, Lyra-Elvira.

BURY THAT PAST, GROW THIS FUTURE

MARIYA KAKA

Elias falls asleep at dusk, nestled fetal-small at the base of a trembling aspen. His pillow is a low aspen bracket, his hand cupping its porous underside. Cicadas are his lullaby, the pill bottle’s warning label his bedtime story.

Roots grow around him, cradling his body tight to the trunk. Another aspen bracket breaks beneath his back, mycelial strands threading into a blanket over his slumbering form. Fluttering leaves break from the tree’s branches to brush over his slack face. A mother’s caress.

She lets him slumber as she remakes him.

Lenticels the shape of a mother’s wound burst anew upon her bark as she labours over his recreation. She pierces a root just beneath his sternum, popping alveoli and strengthening soft organs. Marking him in the most intimate of ways.

Her children’s mycelium slither into his ear canals and bleed into his meninges. Fragile, human membrane break beneath their touch as she guides them through the process of coating tissue and plugging pathways. They’re messy, stained with arterial blood, but she doesn’t mind. They will learn.

* * *

A nudge to his heart and Elias awakens.

Newborn fresh, he has a weak pulse and nary a thought. Hazy eyes track a weevil’s path across the dirt. Dancing leaves flit shadows across its path and he loses sight of it. White threads obscure his vision, but Elias isn’t worried. It’s a cocoon, meant to protect him until he can lift himself.

Elias snuffles his first breath, smells moss and dew. Another purifying breath, eyes blinking against the web of mycelium.

His heart is still slow, syrup-thick thoughts coalescing into consciousness as he wonders at his life. Had he meant to awaken?

The weevil crawls over his knuckles.

Jolting, his mouth opens around a scream. Dirt and bugs spill out, mycelium clings to his gums and threads beneath his tongue. He swallows, thrashes, screams. Buckles beneath the weight of roots, mind made of crumbling dirt as he claws his way out. A roll, the rhizome in his sternum breaking. He screams against the loss, hands coming up to grasp at the root in his chest. A final connection. To what, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand. Mindless, he yanks at the protrusion until it comes out, covered in blood and mucus and slime. Squirming away, he drops the rhizome.

Hands scramble amongst the leaves, knees digging into the dirt as he searches for what he once had. Life, death, rebirth. Which one? Which one?

He can’t see. He can’t breathe. Elias rears back, hands grappling at the cocoon meant to keep him safe. It’s in his nose, sporous air tickling his lungs. Nails claw at his cheeks, fingers pulling at his ears and coming away with fistfuls of mycelium. He wipes his hands across the dirt, attempting to cleanse himself.

His fingers knock against the empty pill bottle. Convulsively, he wraps his hand around it, staring at it in the weak morning light. Days’ worth of mud cake the plastic, label peeling at the edges. Frantic, he turns it, wipes at the mud, reads the packaging, shakes the bottle. He’d taken 100,000 mg of acetaminophen, but he felt pure. Unpolluted.

Elias twists his arm, examines the black threads that cover it. They won’t come off, no matter how hard he rubs. Thick and wet and embedded in his skin, the fibers replace his hair follicles. A yank, then another, the pain a sharp pinprick of proof that he is whole.

Sitting back on his heels, he stares up at the trembling aspen, her branches balding in anticipation of winter. She hasn’t any eyes and yet he feels watched in return. He wonders what she sees. Shivers under her regard. Heart slowing, he realizes it's meant to be comforting as she tells him not to worry. That he’s safe.

He will always be safe with her.

His eyes follow the paths of her branches, searching for a lie. His acuity is sharper than ever, each leaf and shadow starkly clear. Reaching her tip, he finds neither a lie nor truth.

Listless, he averts his gaze. Safe though he may be, he needs an answer. She tells him to wait, that it will be clear with time. But, he wasn’t meant to have time, had meant to sacrifice his life for his sister’s. A pause as he rolls that word around in his head. His sister. He wonders where she is now. If she’s waiting for him to return, just as he’d always said in his now-broken promise.

Rearing away, he lifts himself from the dirt, the last of his mycelial blanket falling from his body. He finds himself light, joints springy and flesh unrotted. Spinning in a circle, he searches for what little of his life he’d brought with him. He spies aspens and oaks and critters, fungi and moss and his bag, broken apart by scavenging animals.

His phone lays amongst scattered trail mix, scratched screen refusing to turn on. Elias wonders how long it’s been. If he could simply lay down for a second nap. Perhaps in the ravine, trapping himself under the ice that would soon cover it. The thought of water makes him salivate.

The leaves rustle, a quiet murmur shivering through the grooves of his brain. He will not find death in water. So long as there’s rain and mud, sunlight and space, he will never rot. The trembling aspen had found a son in him, the aspen brackets a brother.

But they weren’t his family. His family was a dead mother, a runaway father, and a sister he’d raised before abandoning. As was his family’s legacy.

Not anymore, a woman whispers.

He ignores the voice, focuses on the woman he must return to. Would Sarah welcome him back? He hopes so. He’d killed himself for her. He fumbles for his keys, weighing the mixture of alloys in each ridge.

The forest is still around him as he leaves behind his end. The wailing exists only in his head.

* * *

He doesn’t question his untouched truck, preoccupied with the too slow cadence of his heartbeat and the thought that he may no longer have a home. A voice the rustle of leaves tells him he’ll always have a home in the forest.

His fingers spasm and he throws himself into his truck, clicking the safety lock and flipping down the visor to stare into the tiny mirror. He finds himself raven-haired where he was once brunet. A tug finds it the same texture as the fibers on his arms. Freckles litter his face where he’d once been clear-skinned. It’s an infection, it must be.

The voice returns, It’s a gift, baby.

Elias screams, ramming his face into the steering wheel. Once and again. Thrice and there is no blood nor throbbing. The pain comes and goes, his nose realigning and his cartilage smoothing out. He watches the shift in the visor mirror, prods at his nose. Stalk strong.

He shivers against it, tears burning behind his eyes. Blearily, he inspects the mucous-thick sweat that dots his palms. A sniff, then a lick, the sporous discharge umami and delicious on his tongue. Only then does he wipe his eyes, fingers coming away dew-wet, tears pearlescent and thick.

Slamming the visor shut, he drives.

Forty-five minutes later, he’s staring up at the place he’d once called home. It feels foreign. The driveway is empty. He wonders where his sister is. Would she too be a stranger to him?

Shoving the thought down, he hurries inside, desperate for something familiar. With each step, he can hear the cries of his brethren in the floorboards. They’d been whole before they were cut down to build this broken home. He rushes into the kitchen, relieved to feel silent linoleum beneath his feet.

The fridge catches his eye. Logic tells him he should eat. He’d woken up pristine, hunger nary a thought. Even now, his stomach is still, like he needn’t eat or drink ever again.

He shivers when the cool fridge air hits his skin, glances down and watches his fibers curl up in an attempt to burrow. His lip curls. He pulls the door open further, reaching in to forage around the shelves. His palm dries, skin tightening in mere moments. What would life be like in the winter? Covered head to toe in sweaters and mitts, toques and woolen socks, vest and winter coat and longjohns and boots.

Don’t be silly, baby. You’d be beneath my roots where I can keep you warm.

Elias slams his arm into the fridge wall. The impact is nothing compared to the cold. He holds himself there until he’s shaking, shivering fault lines of mycelium bleeding into his parietal lobe and wresting control of his body. Clenching his teeth, he yanks his arm back, cradling it close to his body. Refusing to look down at his arm, his eyes catch on the water bottles stored on the side of the fridge. A hiss through his motor cortex and he’s reaching for one.

The first touch of water to his tongue and suddenly he’s ravenous. The bottle is emptied in seconds, plastic crushed in his hand. He doesn’t mind this coolness. Rather, he craves it. His fibers perk back up, secretion rising to coat his skin in joy. He turns, ready to grab another when he hears the lock of the front door. Elias freezes, eyes darting to the porch door off of the kitchen.

He could leave. Go back to that unnamed forest, find answers in the roots of his mother tree and fungal siblings. Pretend his sister doesn’t exist. Convince himself she wasn’t rapidly outgrowing him.

He could settle into this new self, growths littering his skin, mycelium trailing behind him. A few decades from now, he’d be part of a new system, a network of nerves amongst the forest floor, passing information between trees. Maybe then he could return, show his sister what had become of him. Maybe she’d want him the way he needs her now.

A scream and a clang.

He turns, smiling weakly at her.

“Hi, Sarah.”

Her mouth fumbles over words as she stares, unmoving. Her fingers are clenched around the doorframe as if she were of a mind to leave. Or perhaps she was simply giving him space, a wide berth for a canker in an already rotting house.

She starts simple, “You’re alive.”

He stays silent, smile slipping from his face.

She steps over her dropped bottle, eyes narrowing. “Where have you been, huh? Huh?” Her voice rises, “Do you know how long it’s been? Do you care? Three weeks! Three.” A step forward. “Goddamn.” Another. “Weeks. Where I didn’t know if my only family was alive. I thought you were dead! That you abandoned me!”

Elias moves back, goosebump spores flitting across his skin at her shrill voice. The fibers on the back of his neck tighten, mossed teeth clenching against this reality. For close to a month, he’d ceased to exist; body lying perfectly composed in an unknown forest. And now he stands, a new being. He had meant to abandon her, she wasn’t wrong. He’d only hoped that she’d understand.

Watching her advance, he doubts it. She continues until his back hits the counter and she’s jabbing a trembling finger into his chest. “And now you come back with, with stupid black hair, all muddy and freckled. What, were you hoping to start a new life without me?” No, he thought, not a new start, just an end.

Another jab, just over his sternum. His rhizome hollow has since healed, skin elastic and taut. If it hadn’t, he wondered, would she reach in? Crook a searching finger for his slow beating heart? His eyes trace her frame, note the natural roots peeking out of her dyed hair, the bare nails, the bags under her eyes. He’d taken her apart with his absence. Not even their father had done that.

She must notice his distraction, slamming her hand into his chest with a sound of frustration. She smacks him again and again, movements frantic until she drops her head forward and cries into his chest. Loud and blubbering, hands scrambling at his sides as if afraid he’d leave again. It rings wild, untethering spools of mycelium underneath his skin. He’s ready to wrap her in his threads, burrow them beneath her nail beds and tease them through her bloodstream.

His skin sings where her tears have soaked through his shirt, just over his hollow. It feels like an unwitting blessing: this area both women in his life have touched. His lip curls at the thought.

Elias focuses on Sarah, brings his arms up, knuckling fisted comfort into her spine. He ignores the slick feeling beneath his nails.

She’s mumbling into his chest, worries and threats and pleas spilling from her. Viscous tears prick behind his eyelids.

Why? His mother asks. You were willing to leave her so easily. You came to me to find a home.

That wasn’t true. That wasn’t true. He’d left Sarah because it would be best for her. Insurance and the deed to the house and all of his savings. Her future had been secure and it hadn’t any space for him. He hadn’t gone to that tree, he’d gone to die. And so, when he returned? Where would he go if not home? To whom would he return if not the one that had always been by his side?

This isn’t your home, baby.

Eventually Sarah’s tears dry and she sniffles, embarrassed. He lets her go, fibers mourning the dissipating humidity between them.

They end up on the couch, shoulders pressed together in silence. He’s toed off his boots, socks still a pristine white where he presses his heels into the threadbare rug. He’s not bothered with his clothing, doesn’t give much thought to the smudges on the couch.

His eyes trace the family portraits littering the wall. He’d once looked just like their mother, gangly limbs and shining brunet hair.

She’s not your mother, baby.

Studying a family portrait, he acquiesces that she may not be his mother in this new life. But he cannot deny the warmth of Sarah pressing along his side. She will always be his. That past or this future, he doesn’t know how to exist without her.

Who says you need to?

He shudders.

It catches his sister’s attention. She turns to him; he can feel her studying his profile as she breaks the silence. “So, where were you? You owe me that much, Elias.”

She wants answers but there’s not much to say. He had wanted to die quietly. But death had deemed him unworthy and had spit him back out.

No, baby. It wasn’t death. It was me, I saw something beautiful in you. You’re mine now.

His saliva is thicker than it's ever been, he struggles to swallow before answering, “...Camping.”

“Camping?”

“Camping.”

A disbelieving laugh. “You expect me to believe that you’ve been camping for three weeks without so much as a text?”

Maybe he should have had a more believable lie. Something of substance. But all he can think about is the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be three weeks.

He’s tired. “You don’t wanna know, Sarah.”

“I think I do.”

Her voice bubbles rage, slime thick and syrupy slow, inside him. He’s trying to protect her, to shield her from his mind and this rotten life. He’d given her everything, but still she was greedy, going after this one thing. He wants to yell. He wanted her to hurt. Eight years of life gone on raising her, and this was how she repaid him.

Yes, the voice says. Rage, it urges.

He’s never been angry at her before, it slithers through his mycelium, rattles at his brain. He wanted to tell her that he hated himself. That he missed their father and hated this house. That he was worried he’d ruin her, fumbling attempts at guardianship spoiling her. That she was ungrateful. He’d laid his life down for her but it wasn’t enough, was it?

Sarah is still staring at him. He lets her gaze bleed his anger from him, distracting him from the absurd sting of betrayal.

“You don’t, Sarah. Listen to me. I know you’re mad, but you know I’d never do anything to hurt you.” Truly, he had thought she’d be able to move on from his death, to brush off his inconsequential life.

You’re not inconsequential. She never showed you that she cared. I’d never forsake you like that.

Like a leaf on a branch, his anger easily sways, turning towards the tree. Who was she to accept him but reject his sister? She was perfection.

A touch to his wrist. He jerks. Stares down at his sister’s bitten nails. He can feel the sweat in the sworls of her fingerprints, skin drinking in the faint traces of salt.

A shaky exhale as he checks the need to slot their fingers together, to brush a kiss to her knuckles, coat them in sporous discharge, poison her just as he’s been poisoned. Why not let his mother see Sarah for herself?

He needs to leave, needs to distance himself before he ruins her. Before he spills the truth. “I—can we talk in the morning?” His voice is plaintive, wilting.

Her hand recedes. He mourns the touch.

He hears her swallow, thinks about her throat working around slime-thick mucous. His gums prickle.

Her voice is an eventuality, “Yeah, yeah. Of course. We can talk in the morning.” A pause. “We will talk in the morning, El.”

He just nods, rising quickly, practically running to lock himself in the bathroom. Stubbornly, he ignores his reflection as he turns on the tap, mindlessly bends to drink from his cupped hands.

Just like in the kitchen, the first touch of water has him ravenous. It spills from his palms, and splashes against his cheeks. Frantically, he smears it across his face, up into his hair and around the nape of his neck. It trickles down his spine, a pleasant tickle. He’s messy with it, lets it run over his wrists, chases it with groping fingers to rush it up his arms. Rivulets drip from his elbows, landing on his feet and soaking between his toes. The euphoria chases away the ghosts of one mother and the roots of another. It drowns the quiet disappointment of a sister.

Shocked, he realizes he’s out of breath, bulbous alveoli growing and growing to mitigate the strain. He wants its essence, to be part of this flow of water. The only thing better would be if it were in dirt. Oh, how he’d rejoice to bathe in mud, to pack it onto his skin, cakey and heavy until it weighs him down. Loam and mulch cracking over his skin, feeding him. He’d sprout threads and roots, lay himself next to his mother and laugh with his siblings. He hungers for deep, rich earth flavoured with rotten carcasses and decaying leaves.

He smacks the tap shut, staring into the pristine, white porcelain bowl. It stings his eyes. He can’t leave Sarah again. He can’t. But, oh, how he wanted. Why couldn’t he bring her with him? Why couldn’t things be easy?

They could, sweetheart. Just come back to me. I’ll show you.

Return to the one who had turned him into this? The one who’d just scorned his sister? He scoffs to himself.

A sharp rap to the door. He jerks.

“I, uh, I changed your sheets for you. G’night.”

Elias grunts out a thanks. He listens to Sarah leave, eyeing the tap as he wonders whether he could explain this to her. She welcomed him back so gracefully, what would she say to the truth? How would she react, knowing that he hated himself? That he missed their father and hated this house? That he was worried she’d outgrown him?

He’s noisy as he passes her room, ignoring the whines of the old floorboards. They don’t deserve an apology, not as Sarah does.

What about me, baby? You left your mother without saying goodbye.

He locks himself in his room.

Settling into bed is odd. It’s both too firm and too soft, the springs a poor mimic of spongy earth. Something tells him to move to the floor, to slip beneath the bed and press up against the slats. That he’d be protected like that. He refuses, curling up tight beneath the blanket, no matter how exposed he feels. The air is too open, the ceiling too far, he’s too lonely, no one to twine fingers and roots with. He squeezes his eyes against it all, reaching for stasis.

* * *

Elias startles awake, twisting within his blanket. The cotton sheets too shallow, too dry, not deep enough. He wants to go home, needs damp mulch and deep burrows, darkness and depth. He needs comfort and touch and echoing voices in his head. This was a mistake. He doesn’t belong. The aspen bracket of his cerebellum hums with urgency.

He pauses, just outside of Sarah’s door. He wants to barge in, shake her awake, take her with him. He wants to introduce Sarah to his mother, to give her a mother back. To show the tree that she’d been mistaken.

Unconsciously, he sways closer to Sarah’s door, hand reaching out. A shift and hardwood creaks beneath his bare feet, distant relatives screaming at him. Startling back, he runs from their voices.

He bolts through the kitchen door, clearing the porch in a leap, stumbling to a halt on damp soil. Absorbing the bleeding light of dawn, he’s briefly grateful not to live in the heart of Vancouver; the city too loud, the air too stale, the sun pale. Out here, the faint morning rays warm his skin and his pores open, letting in light and energy.

His eyes sweep the yard, catching on the cluster of old elm trees just on the other side of the fence. A whisper and he’s marching across the yard, leaping over the fence, and crashing down in front of a rotten log. It’s hollowed out, small holes in the rind showing off bugs and dew and sweet, rotted bark. His mouth waters, gums prickling with anticipation. His saliva doesn’t seem so thick now, enzymes ready to break down this delicacy.

He’s rough as he breaks off a piece, stuffing bark into his mouth, grunting as its flavour hits his tongue. He doesn’t question how he can so easily bite into something that should chip his teeth. It’s gone in seconds and he’s bending over the log, scooping out bugs with fingers and licking at dew. He breaks off pieces of rind like it's nothing, sucks at the dirt that’s collected beneath his nails.

He hadn’t realized he’d been so hungry. That this was what he needed. It would be hard to get this in town, he thinks distantly. He’d have to scavenge, live his life in shadows and niceties as he declined food and searched for bugs and rot. What would he do in the winter? With fresh snow covering it all?

Come back to the forest, baby. I’ll teach you everything. You’ll never go hungry again.

He moans at the thought. Aches for his mother.

Yes. Yes, come to me. Bring your sister and I’ll forgive you. We can be a family.

“Elias!”

The voice is sharp. And close.

He hunches over, considers running. But he turns, face muddied and viscous drool hanging from his lips. He wipes at the drool, dabs its ovum across the dirt as his sister stomps towards him.

“That’s a tree!”

He nods. She stops short, baffled.

“Why were you eating a tree, El?”

He shrugs. “I was hungry.”

He’s left her speechless again. He turns to the log. “Come, look.”

When they were younger, he’d always steal her from their mother’s darkened room, leading her away from the frail lump beneath the sheets and into the land surrounding their home. He’d show her nests and burrows, pick berries and point out animal tracks. He’d capture frogs for her, slide snails onto her fingernails, urge her to chase ground squirrels until she was breathless and giggling. He’d steal her from reality until their dad’s sharp whistle called them back.

Their father is long gone. This home is now a carcass.

Elias pats the ground next to him. His sister gingerly lowers herself down. He sings with the connection. Could he really have this? His fungal siblings cheer at the thought of another.

He points. “Look, bugs. They’re good for iron and protein.” Breaking off a piece of wood, he holds it up between them. “Those rotted bits? They taste like caramel.”

She’s disgusted. “El. El, that’s not normal. Let me take you to the doctor. We can figure this out. Together.”

He’d thought they were together until he found her acceptance letter. Full ride to university in her dream field. Everything he’d wanted for her. But it was across the country. All he’d done for her and she’d soon be leaving him. He couldn’t handle it. And yet, here she was, caring for him as if there were no place she’d rather be. Perhaps his time away had done her good. Maybe she realized just how much she needed him, that she couldn’t leave. His mycelium thrums with joy, eager to reach out, to bury that past for the mistake it had been.

They could be together again.

If that’s what you want, baby.

Slowly, Elias bites off a piece of bark, chewing it as he looks over his little sister. “This is who I am. No doctor can fix this.” He swallows around his bite, flicks the rest of the bark down into the log, continues, thoughtful, “There’s nothing to fix, Sarah. I’m better than I’ve ever been. This is a gift. It’s in my brain, my blood. It’s made me better than I’ve ever been.”

“That’s not true, Elias.” Heartache coats her voice. “You had nothing to improve.”

He giggles, spores floating across her face. That’s true now. But before? She had been ready to leave that man.

He has something new to offer her now; more than he ever thought he could give her. Swiping his tongue around his molars, he catches a bug and bites down, delighting in her shock as he picks a spindly leg from between his teeth. Leaning in close, he tilts his head in search of her perturbed gaze.

“D’you wanna know the truth, sister?” His voice lilts around the title, syrup sweet. “The truth is, I died. Took a whole bottle of painkillers and went to sleep. I died and you were my last thought. But,” he exhales noisily, “but I’m back. So, do you accept me, dear sister? Am I enough?”

The voices in his head roar, upset he’d ever ask such a thing. He’s been reborn flawless and eternal. For once better than her. She’d never understand in this life.

She’s shivering, desperate fingers twisting together. “Of course. Of course you are, Elias. You’re my whole world, always have been. But this is weird. You have to know that. You just went away and you come back like, like this. Don't you wanna know why? How?”

He shushes her, one hand carding through her hair, the other slowly easing over her nose and mouth, sticky with spores. “It’s easier if I just show you. C’mon now, go to sleep. Just like when I used to tuck you in. Atta girl.”

She struggles, a hand coming up to clutch at his wrist, body arching even as her eyes close. He doesn’t let go, not until she slumps in his arms, unconscious. A gentle kiss to her forehead before he stands.

We’re coming home, Mama.

* * *

Sarah falls asleep at noon, nestled fetal small at the base of a trembling aspen. Elias had gently placed her in the cradle the shape of his body, before gazing up at their mother. Since he’d awakened, there had been a frenetic buzz beneath his skin. He can no longer feel it.

His mother has no face, but he knows she’s smiling.

Is this why you let me go, Mama?

Yes, baby. I knew. I knew you’d never survive the loneliness, no matter how you craved it.

Leaves fall across his sister’s resting face. A mother’s caress.

His fingers follow their path. She looks peaceful like this, young. He leans down, brushes a lingering kiss to her cheek, mouth opening to let out mycelial strands, wrapping her in a cocoon.

His siblings’ strands join his and soon he can no longer see Sarah’s face. Digging beneath the dirt, he twines his fingers with his mother’s roots as he settles in to wait.

Soon, his sister will awaken.

Soon, they’ll be a family.

End.

* * *

Mariya is a young Toronto-based student pursuing an MHSc. She most prefers the forms of prose poetry and short stories; her writing often centers around healing, revolution, and family. When not writing or attending class, she enjoys staring out windows with her cat. Her work has appeared in such publications as Pyre Magazine, Livina Press, the Bitchin’ Kitsch and more. She can be found on Twitter @mariyakeeka.

DEATH HAS RED HAIR

GREYE LA SPINA

We three men were hugging the open fire closely. The raw chill of that November night had closed in around us and the blazing logs yielded grateful warmth.

Peter Murray was leaning forward in his chair, looking absentmindedly into the leaping flames that sent flickering shadows to dancing on the walls behind us. Hank Walters was staring at Peter and I was watching both my guests with curious speculation that had risen in me since that afternoon’s encounter.

I could have sworn that Hank’s black eyes held an expression at once envious and inimical as he bent his gaze sourly on Peter’s handsome, perplexed young face. I was both dismayed and sorry, for the older man possessed a weapon that might cut the brightness out of Peter’s life; Magda Farrar was his. foster-daughter and his ward, and to young Peter she symbolized and embodied everything desirable in life.

“Come out of it, you two,” growled I, irritated and uneasy at their silence. “This is a shooting party, not a wake.”

Peter’s bright blue eyes turned from the fire. He met my gaze and chuckled.

Hank’s lowering face followed the younger man’s movement, then suddenly shifted uneasily. He must have noticed that I was observing his unguarded expression for his mouth compressed tightly for a moment before he spoke.

“Hell of a party,” said Hank distinctly, “when a man can’t chuck a pretty girl under the chin without having a fool youngster butt into his fun.”

It was out now. I regarded him with hidden dismay. The underlying currents of hidden emotion had forced their way to the surface and could no longer be tacitly ignored. I was furious at Hank for his lack of restraint.

More than that, I had been—still was —just as disgusted at his behavior that afternoon as had been Peter. Being older than either of my two guests, I had, possibly, learned to be diplomatic; sufficiently so, at least, not to have thrust myself unnecessarily into a situation a deux where my tactful absence would have been better appreciated-than my presence. I had seen nothing, after all, but Peter’s restraining hand on Hank’s restive shoulder, and the disappearing swirl of a girl’s abbreviated skirts and long cloak into a part of the woods where the low undergrowth was not yet entirely denuded of foliage. All I had heard had been Hank’s exclamation, coming almost directly upon the girl’s scream. Peter must have been quick in his reaction.

“Take your hand ..off me, you damned young cub!” had shouted Hank, with uncontrolled passion for which I did not at the moment entirely blame him. No man relishes the admonishing restraint of a youngster, in front of a woman particularly, no matter how much he may have deserved it.

Knowing Hank’s proclivities, I could reconstruct the scene fairly well. He must have come upon the girl before she realized his proximity, and mischievously pulled off their pointed cap with the tassel that hung to her shoulder, confidently relying Upon his vaunted masculine charm to smooth over the situation if it should unexpectedly tend toward the unpleasant.

The girl had sprung to her feet, snatched for her cap, which .Hank had thrust tormentingly behind him. Whereupon she had let out that eldritch scream. And the scream brought Knight-Errant Peter tearing out of the woods behind them, to remonstrate with Hank, who had naturally resented the interference. The girl had taken advantage of Hank’s momentary unguardedness to snatch, vainly, for her pointed cap, then had fled incontinently without it.

With dismayed astonishment I had heard her scream, for it was not a scream of surprise; it was a cry of pure anger, of such depth and intensity that it started, shivers running up and down my backbone. It was almost unhuman in its expression of thwarted fury; arousing in me a powerful curiosity to see this girl who was so capable of such a strength of emotion. At the same time, I felt a dread of seeing her, as if she might prove to be more than my old eyes would care to take in.

“Peter told me, as we walked some distance behind Hank on our way back to my little shooting-lodge (Hank strode ahead of us with a thunderous, black countenance, a pointed, tasseled stockinette cap dangling from one hand) that the girl was—well, Judge, extraordinary, if you get what I mean.”

“Can’t say that I do, Peter. Now, if you were telling me that Magda Farrar was extraordinary,” I suggested, smiling, but Peter shook his blond head impatiently.

“Magda is—well, Magda,” he explained carefully but unconvincingly. “Now, this girl was—well—say, Judge, do you remember that Hans Christian Anderson story about the Erl-king’s daughters, who were beautiful before, but hollow, seen from behind?”

“That girl’s scream didn’t ring hollow, Peter,” I bantered.

His blue eyes blazed with earnest fire.

“Judge Holley, she made me remember those elf-princesses. There was a—a something,” he tried to tell me lamely, “about her eyes, and her whole expression—elfish, unearthly — that wasn’t —, well, that wasn’t—”

“I can see that this wood nymph has made a strong impression upon you, my boy. As for a hollow back, Peter—?”

“Her long cloak completely enveloped her, Judge. As for any impression, what I got wasn’t pleasant. You see, she was absolutely white with fury at Walters and when she let out that scream—” Peter actually shuddered at the mere remembrance of it, “—I felt sick.”

“H-m-m, I confess it struck me that way, too, Peter,” I conceded. “Very strong personality, that young woman’s,” I mused thoughtfully.

“Walters had no business to snatch off a strange girl’s cap,” Peter criticized as he swung along beside me.

“Walters has a weakness toward all femininity, Peter,” I murmured deprecatorily. (Who could know my own law partner as well as I?) “He means no harm. Just his little failing, my boy.”

“Just his failing?” repeated Peter sharply. “It was his little failing that tortured and killed Magda’s mother.”

I could not deny that; everybody knew that Hank’s peccadilloes on the primrose path had disillusioned and, yes, had broken Edith Farrar-Walter’s heart. She had literally died of a broken heart, induced by the crash of her house of dreams. Her own physician had told me—but that is another story.

“Still you had no business interfering, Peter,” I said gravely. “Hank is an older man than you. Also, he is Magda’s guardian.”

That last touched Peter, who started as if this thought with its attendant inferences came to him for the first time.

After a moment’s silence he declared stubbornly, “Just the same he had no right to pull off that girl’s cap and keep it from her. A perfect stranger. .. . Judge, I have a feeling that she won’t let the matter drop; she’ll get back at him.”

’’Poppycock” laughed I. “Then I suppose that’s her cap he’s swinging at us like a red rag at a bull?” quoth I, amused;

Peter nodded.

“Judge, that girl had the most marvelous red hair I’ve ever seen in all my life. It almost wasn’t real. Why, it was like a mass of curling flames that tumbled, blazing, upon her shoulders when Walters pulled her pointed cap off. And do you know, it struck me that what made her furious was because he’d uncovered her wonderful hair and she couldn’t tuck it out of sight again.”

“Perhaps she was mortified at wearing it long when everybody else has shingled theirs?” I suggested, too smartly perhaps, for Peter bestowed upon me a long look of acute scorn.

“There was something absolutely extraordinary about that girl’s hair,” he repeated inanely.

“You’ve said that before, Peter,” I reminded him dryly.

“Extraordinary, You know, not—not quite normal,” Peter seemed to be analyzing his sensations. “As if—as if it was all alive in every strand. Why, when he pulled off her cap it was like uncovering the darting flame of a glowing torch.”

“Very poetic, Peter. ‘I wonder how -Magda would relish such absorbed interest in this strange young woman’s Titian locks?”

“Magda’s human”, retorted Peter strangely. “Now, this girl—”

And he began going over it again, as if he couldn’t let the subject rest. And in that fashion we had tramped along behind Hank, who strode blackly ahead of us, actually, in his preoccupation, slamming the lodge door shut in our faces when he’d entered.

And now, after a couple of hours’ stewing and simmering of their emotions, Hank—the older man, who should have been the one to control himself—burst out incontinently.

“Hell of a fine party,” said he again, and shot at Peter such a look—

That look made me feel a bit sickish with apprehension, for I knew Hank capable of meannesses when he’d lost control of himself. It was only his unusual intuitions along legal lines that had constrained me to continue in partnership with him after Edith’s sad death, Edith whom Peter and I both loved.

“Sorry, Walters,” Peter began to apologize manfully. “But the girl—”

“To hell with the girl!” snarled Hank, tensing his crouched figure .with the suggestiveness of a huge wild beast about to make its spring.

That Peter saw this movement and interpreted it clearly I realized when the boy got to his feet with a lithe, guarded movement, and stood in a position of vantage, looking down upon us both as we sat before the smoldering logs on the rude stone hearth.

“I said I was sorry,” repeated the boy with gravity. “I was taken off my guard by the girl’s scream. I rather thought she—”

“You’d no business thinking anything about her,” growled Hank, and his nostrils dilated, then pinched whitely.

I know the signs. I’d seen him once, when in a cold fury of anger against an unfortunate stenographer at’ whom he had not dared bluster in my presence, he thrust his black countenance down into hers until she had shrunk back speechless, every drop of blood fled from her pallid and terrified face; there had been something infinitely worse about that silent thrust of his thunderous gaze into her intimate nearness than a dozen bellowed curses. So now he looked up at Peter, and I knew that back of that concentrated fury Hank’s mind was working with the alert subtlety of a. writhing cobra insinuating itself into the right position to strike. I began to tell myself that it was better to lose money than continue our law partnership much longer; Hank’s faults had increased enormously since Edith’s death.

Peter disregarded the signs, not knowing Hank as I did. He knew, of course, that Hank was boiling over with repressed emotion; with hate and fury, but Peter could not believe even what he knew, for to his ingenuous nature there had been no sound reason for such an ebullition of uncontrolled frenzy.

“She didn’t like it when you uncovered her hair,” Peter explained, with that straightforward simplicity that sometimes makes me despair, while simultaneously admiring him.

“Who says she didn’t like it? You damned young meddling cub, what do you know about women?” It was a shout by this time, and Hank now stood beside his chair.

“You don’t know anything about women!” he bellowed, thrusting that face, dark with fury, at Peter, who involuntarily took a step backward, astonished. I was, obviously, Peter’s first experience with Hank in a full-grown rage. “To prove what I say, I warn you now that when we get back to town Magda, who you think is in love with your yellow hair and blue eyes, will drop you like hot cakes, you young fool.”

Peter’s face wore the hurt look of a dumb animal which suffers your blows but refrains from striking back in its own way, because it is, after all, constituted along some lines of finer stuff than revengeful human nature can always boast. I saw that he blinked hard once or twice. When he spoke it was in such a gentle voice that I, in turn, blinked rapidly, for it did not sound like the healthily self-confident voice of youth.

“I don’t think it’s just—well—fair to Magda, to bring her into this, Walters,” said Peter in that low, almost ingratiating voice. “Really, we were discussing—”

“I’m telling you that you think you know women, and imagine her in love with you. You don’t know a damn about any woman, least of all my ward. I can twist her around my finger, I tell you, and when we get back to the city I’ll see to it that you get your conge so swiftly—”

Walters left off, chuckling saturninely to himself, but his loose lips curled with cruelty and his narrowed black eyes never left off that fixed stare at Peter’s young blond manliness.

Peter, however, slowly turned his stricken gaze to me. I know then that this, young blond Apollo was so lacking in the usual masculine conceit that he actually could not believe himself sufficiently attractive, sufficiently worth-while, to hold the beloved woman’s loyalty. And no allowance was being made, apparently, for Magda’s personal ideas on the subject. It was so astonishing, and to my keen sense of humor so absurd, that I must have failed to demonstrate in my expression the sympathy or the encouragement that Peter had been expecting from me.

Hank blustered on, triumphantly.

“That girl, you young fool, would have been in my arms in another minute if you hadn’t come butting into what was none of your business. I know how to handle women, I tell you. They like to be treated rough,” shouted he, and burst into a guffaw that had a content of insult for Peter.

I saw that the boy colored. I knew how tenderly reverent were his thoughts about his sweetheart, for once in awhile he had dropped a chance remark that made me love him for his fineness. Hank had dug in, deeply, when he made that final observation.

“That girl—” all at once cried out Peter, as if he could not contain himself, “that girl would have killed you if she’d had a knife or pistol handy, when you tore away her cap and tumbled her glorious hair down over her shoulders. Didn’t you see how she tried to push it together and cover it with her hands?”

For a moment my partner’s dark mood lightened. A reminiscent smile flickered about his loose lips, drawing them into an expression of complacent irony.

“Kill me, would she? Perhaps—but with kisses, fool.”

“Lord!” Peter jerked out, in the throes of such sick disgust that he actually drew up his shoulders, nauseated at that revelation of Hank’s character.

His fury turned aside momentarily.

Hank uttered an immoderate laugh, apparently at his own thoughts. Then he said to Peter, sudden chill descending into his words and manner: “At all events, young man, don’t come hanging around my ward any more. I won’t have it. Just don’t like you, that’s all.”

At the look of sly triumph on his face I began to consider again that clause in our articles of partnership which might be utilized in dissolving the business tie that bound us together, for down underneath I knew lay the direct will to hurt Peter Murray, and I feared that Magda—so slight and gentle and timid— would be wax in those cruel, clever hands, for Hank would stop at nothing.

Peter’s face, puzzled for a moment at this direct attack, grew slowly white.

“You’re rather unreasonable, Walters,” said he, disturbed. “Miss Farrar and I are engaged, and I asked you not to bring her name into this disgustedly silly affair. Whatever your opinion of me, I wish you would honor that request, at least.”

“Somebody ought to teach you your manners toward your betters,” snarled .Hank. His hands were shutting and opening, and shutting again,

“Not my betters,” disputed Peter quietly but with a spirit. “My elders, perhaps.”

“I’d like to hide you for your insolence,” roared my partner, and suddenly swung across in front of me with that heavy fist of his, which I caught just in the nick of time by flinging up my hand against his arm, so that the blow he had aimed at Peter went harmlessly into space. He recovered his balance with an effort, and wheeled about upon me, where I sat quietly alert.

“You may be my senior in the firm, Judge Wilcox,” he cried out at me with pointed formality, “but that gives you no right to interfere in my personal affairs, any more than that young cub.”

Peter exclaimed sharply, so that we both looked at him in astonishment.

“That girl!”

’’Where?” whispered Hank, in a hoarse undertone.

“At that window. She was staring in at us—at you,’’ Peter replied, his voice also sinking to a low murmur. “Lord, how her hair blazes, in the light from our file!”

“Didn’t I tell you you knew nothing about women, you fool?” whipped out my partner, and smiled sneeringly at the younger man.

Peter looked at him, his brows a straight line above his narrowed eyes.

“She’s followed me here,” whispered Hank—his low, triumphant laugh trembled as if with suddenly aroused emotion. “Excuse me, gentlemen, if I meet the lady outside. I have a faint idea that she would prefer to see me alone,” and he smirked at us, licking his thick, loose lips with unctuous anticipation.

I exchanged a quick look with Peter. The boy was very pale. Then he strode across the room and stood before the door.

“Don’t go,” said he, barring the way. “Don’t, Walters. I tell you, that girl’s got it in for you. That girl hates you.”

A great laugh. Hank’s head flung back as it issued thunderously from his pulsing throat.

“Hates me? Me? You young whipper-snapper, I give you my permission to follow us and find out for yourself how much she hates me.”

With that, he plunged at a heavy sweater on a peg by the door, pushed Peter out of his way, and flung out into the chill November night, leaving us silent, staring, half sick, behind him.

“Shut that door, my boy. The night air is penetrating.”

Peter obeyed, slowly. Then he came to the fireplace and stood looking down at me, his blue eyes veiled with some secret, disturbing thought.

“What’s up, boy?”

“Judge, I’m-—afraid.”

Husky, fearless, Peter is, to use such a word.

“Of what, lad?”

“That strange girl,” whispered Peter, and over the pallor of his perplexed young face a grayness stole. “I tell you, her hair—”

“Oh, it is the girl who troubles you? Nothing strange in that,” I laughed. “And as for her hair, Peter?”

“I tell you, she isn’t—she isn’t—one of us,” said Peter with that distaste for the unusual that most normal men display. “She isn’t—well, right. The Erl King’s daughters,” he muttered irrelevantly.

“Why should that disturb you, my boy? If she isn’t, we’ll have our deeply disappointed friend back again in a short time, and I think, perhaps, you’d better arrange to be asleep in bed when he comes in, to avoid any further quarreling.”

He shook his blond head slowly. Then with a sudden ejaculation he snatched for his cap and thrust it down upon his head.. He pulled down a lumber jacket and began hurriedly pushing his arms through the sleeves.

“Why, Peter! You’re not going out?” I asked inanely. “See here, Peter, he’s right when he says it’s none of your business. And the girl followed him here.”

“That -girl means to hurt him if she can,” whispered Peter, his blue eyes looking wild in the fire’s smoldering flicker.

“Poppycock!” I retorted tartly, for I saw where Peter’s mood was leading us both, and the fire looked and felt good to me, that cold night.

“Just the same, I’m going to follow him. He said I might, didn’t he?”

“You know perfectly well he didn’t mean it,” I objected lamely.

“Are you coming or not?” demanded Peter. “I’d like to have you along, Judge,” and in his anxiety he began helping me into my sheepskin coat with unnecessary enthusiasm.

It certainly looked as if I were in for it, so I shrugged my shoulders, knocked out my pipe and tucked it into my pocket, got my cap from a peg and followed that frantic boy. He led me a chase for a few minutes, for of course there was no way to locate Hank or the girl as long as they kept quiet. They might have been lurking about the cabin. If they had gone, in which direction had they disappeared? .

There was no sound of voices to guide me, but all at once Peter uttered a smothered cry, and his hand closed about my arm like an iron band. He jerked me right-about-face, and then I saw what he’d seen, a kind of flickering, glowing light, off in the woods ahead of us.

“That’s her,” said Peter ungrammatically, and his voice was actually trembling with some emotion I had neither time nor inclination to analyze at that moment.

“What do you mean, That’s her?” I echoed.

“Judge, don’t you understand? I mean, it’s her hair.’’

At that, I did give way to laughter that surged upward, shaking my diaphragm uncontrollably.

“Peter,” I choked, when I could at least get out a word, “the lady’s Titian hair has certainly turned your head. It must be luminous, if that’s it. Boy, boy, you are absurd.”

“God!” groaned Peter. His hand closed tighter than ever about my arm. “Judge, it’s so horrible that I can hardly believe it myself. “I—I daren’t say it—now, Look! Look!” .

That reddish luminosity was bobbing unevenly up and down, as if it came from a lamp borne upon the head of a person walking rapidly, swimmingly, across uneven ground. It was apparent to me that the girl carried a lantern only half opened. Quite natural, for a young person wandering around the woods at night. Could it be possible, after all, that Hank Walters had good foundations for his belief in. his attraction for women? It looked that way, for this strange young woman had evidently forgotten her momentary anger at his rudeness of the afternoon, and had actually come, like Diogenes, hunting for him with her lantern. It was ridiculous, and I really didn’t like to believe that a girl could fall so easily for a man like Hank. Surely she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths merely to retrieve her cap?”

“Gold!” ejaculated Peter Murray again. And then: “Listen!” he warned me.

I stood motionless, hardly breathing, and then I heard Hank’s voice, and the crashing of his heavy body pushing its way through tangled undergrowth and over dry, crackling, fallen limbs and sere autumn leaves.

“Yes—that’s Hank,” I whispered.

“I know. Listen!”

Like the modulated voice that speaks behind the wings at the theater, purporting to be momentarily speeding away, came these broken, breathless, outbursts of speech:

“Wait, you little devil!”

A crash into the undergrowth.

“I’m coming right along, you redheaded beauty. Want your cap, don’t you? Well, I’ll give it to you—maybe—for a kiss.”

Another crash.

“Where’s that lantern of yours, girl? Hold it this way. I can’t see a thing.”

Much tumbling and noise. Puffing. Blowing.

“Struck a tree that time . a-a-a-r-r- r-r-gh.”

A mighty impact it must have been to have jerked that grunt out of Hank’s heavy body.

“I’ll catch up with you yet! Where’s that light? Turn it this way, you she-devil!”

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the dreary, ominous whistle of a wind that came leaping down from the northwest, bearing on its sweeping pinions a. biting foretaste of winter. And then such a. scream as I hope never again to hear in all my life, so freighted was it with horror and—something more—followed, while I was still numbed, a laugh as sharply tinkling as silver bells shaken together in a crystal globe.

“She’s done it! I knew she would!” cried out Peter frantically, and that gripping hand of his began to draw me forward through the woods recklessly.

I was colliding as I went with trees and bushes that seemed to spring out of the ground to form obstacles to our mad onrush. Once I fell over a huge rock that almost appeared to have reared itself against us directly out of the bosom of Mother Earth.

“Are you mad?” I gasped, trying in vain to pull my arm from Peter’s frenzied grip. “We’ll both be killed, running like this in the dark among these trees and rocks.”

“Idiot that I am!’’ shouted Peter in reply. “I forgot the flashlight. It’s right here in my pocket.”

He pulled it out, let go my arm and then turned it on. Blessed light! It was time we had it. I knew my face was bleeding where a dry branch had neatly skinned one cheek as we flashed past it, and I’d barked both shins; I rather imagined they were bleeding, too. Peter ran ahead after that, throwing the light of the torch here and there.

We had been going uphill gradually, and it dawned upon me all at once what had happened, for a ghastly kind of silence reigned, broken only by the wind’s sullen whine and our own trampling feet among dried leaves and broken twigs.

Hank had been following the girl blindly, and her lantern had not been powerful enough to discover to them their peril. They had gone running, directly to the verge of the old quarry.

“Here! Here!” shouted Peter.

The light from his torch shot across a wide space, all black below that brilliant beam.

It was a warning I received none too soon to save me from the fate that had befallen the two who had been running ahead of us. I caught desperately with one arm at a tree trunk and swung about it, just barely checking ray momentum. As I swung, my eyes followed the beam of Peter’s light, down—down—piercing the darkness below.

There was a huddled, motionless heap at the bottom of the quarry. I knew that would be Hank. Or what was left of Hank.

I knew, too, that Hank would never bellow curses again. How? I knew. Above him bent another figure that pulled at him now, turning him this way and that.

Glowing, shining, dulling the very light of the electric torch that was bent in a brilliant stream of radiance upon it, was another light that seemed a very flame, leaping with such fervency of life that it hurt the eyes to see. Believe me or not, I know what I saw, and it was the pulsing, living flame of the red hair piling about the head of that strange girl that put the electric light to shame. I cried out in amazement and, I confess, with a sudden access of shuddering dislike and fear. What hair!

“I told you!” cried out Peter, beside me, and where he had been fearful before, he became reckless now.

He pushed the torch into my free hand, for I was still clinging to the tree that had served to break my dashing momentum.

“Play it on him,” he directed. “She— she won’t like that. I’ll manage to climb down, somehow.”

I could hear the scraping of his feet and the crumbling fall of pebbles as he climbed down into the quarry toward that gruesome two. Once I heard his exclamation as he slipped. In an access of anxiety for him, I swerved the torch to light his perilous way, and when I saw he needed it, held it upon him, but my eyes were drawn from him by the sudden spring upward into vivid, astounding brilliance, of that strange girl’s leaping flames of red hair, as if they showed off , more in the darkness than in the torch’s light. It took me a moment to realize what that meant, and the torch trembled so in my hand that I almost let it slip into the quarry.

Who was this creature, whose flaming locks carried the leaping light of living fire? I found myself shuddering. . . ,

And then Peter shouted from below, and I turned the light in the direction of his voice. He was leaning over Hank’s body. Then he straightened up.

The girl had moved away and stood a little distance, silent. She, it would appear, had not been injured, and I stupidly wondered why not, and how she had managed to escape Hank’s untimely fate. A moment later I was to know.

“He’s dead, I heard Peter declare. He was not speaking to me, for there was stern accusation in his voice. “You did it. Why?”

Her finger pointed downward.

I played the torch light where she was pointing, and saw Peter stoop. He drew a long, sinuous tiling from Hank’s dead finger, and not easily at that. The girl swooped upon him, snatched at it, and then all at once the quarry went black except for the light of the torch, centered there on Peter standing by the dead man.

It was as if somebody had put an extinguisher over a torch!

I heard a tinkling, penetrating ripple of cool, hard laughter. Where the girl had been standing I discerned a faint glow as of a shaded lantern. This light suddenly rose upward like thistledown on the wind, but in a swift, straight movement. It was as if that shaded lantern had been fastened at the end of a rope and had been drawn steadily upward. It paused in mid-air, hanging motionless over the middle of the quarry; I. felt a most uncomfortable qualm at that, sight, and mentally refused to give entrance to die surmises that crowded upon my troubled mind.

Peter was shouting at me from below, a quaver in his voice that he managed to restrain just above the point where it might have sounded craven. My sympathy was with him, for I felt the way his voice sounded..

“For God’s sake, Judge, don’t drop that torch!” he was crying at me. “I’m coming up. We couldn’t get him out of here in the dark.” The torch shook in my trembling hand. If could riot have been of much assistance to Peter in his climb up the side of the quarry.

The girl—had no lantern. She had come floating up out of that quarry as if she were lighter than thistledown on the night wind—and through the long pointed cap that enveloped her hair glowed the light from those uncanny locks of flaming red. I mean that. The light came from her hair. It burned and glowed from under the edges of her long tasseled cap, and blazed where it had escaped in occasional locks as if it were living flame. It was unearthly. I was thankful when Peter had scrambled to my side.

“She’s gone?’’ he asked rather than stated.

I touched him and he looked and saw what I was seeing. I could feel his sturdy frame shuddering. And as we stared, she must have drawn the cap closer over her brows and tucked in those fiery, straying locks, for it was as if someone had pushed an extinguisher down upon a flaming torch. Only a faint glow remained; like decaying wood; even that drifted away from us at last, like sea spume in moonlight, driven by a summer zephyr. But I had seen her face in one flashing moment; distinctly. It was unlike the face of any mortal woman I had ever looked upon. Something unearthly—elfish!

Peter was right when he said: “Extraordinary! ”

“I don’t believe she means us any harm,” he whispered as if he feared to be overheard. “I gave her back her cap, didn’t I?” he murmured uncertainly. “But I say, Judge, let’s light out of here!’’

It may have seemed cowardly to go away, leaving the body of my dead partner at the bottom of the black quarry, but perhaps if you had seen what Peter and I saw, you would have run for comparative shelter just as fast as we ran through the wood to my cabin.

The November wind howled and tore at us as we fled, the electric torch lighting, our way precariously. Yet we were glad enough that no other light showed itself in .our path. All that was ever said between us about that girl, Peter said when we had reached our goal.

“Will-o’-the-wisp,” he muttered thickly, breathing hard as he slammed the bolts of the cabin door firmly into place.

And then he went to work nailing blankets over both the windows, nor did I question his action.

Of course, we couldn’t tell all our story to the coroner next day. We said that Hank Walters had followed a girl that night and had inadvertently fallen into the quarry in the dark and that we could not locate the girl. The coroner said it was clear enough. He even suggested that the girl might have pushed Hank. Peter and I—well, we knew there was no need to push Hank when he was following the Ignis Fatuus.