Comic Horror Monthly: Issue 54
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Cosmic Horror Monthly

COMIC HORROR MONTHLY

ISSUE 54

Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

CONTENTS

Letter from the Editor

Meet the CHM staff

The Head in the Pantry

Rex Burrows

Bilious Green Envy, Burning White Fury

Shelley Lavigne

A Mugful of Dates

Dorian Wolfe

Shall Not Perish

Rose Skye

The Conjuring of Elderly Widows

Jes Malitoris

In the Amygdala of the Beholder

D. Marmara

Child of Rawfrog

Joe Koch

The Tree’s Wife

Mary Elizabeth Counselman

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 – Trevor Henderson

Editor: Jolie Toomajan

Co-Editor | Social Media: Carson Winter

Publisher | Layouts & Typography: Charles Tyra

Printed locally in Oklahoma City, OK

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

David Nichols II, Aaron Paris Davila, Zach Sherrill, Angelica Bell, Allan Smulling, Adam Vincent, Shane Ardley, Shawn Barma, Gary Coulbourne, Benjamin Hitmar, Erik Goodrich, Jim Major, Mario Santos, Mike Ostwald, Nicholas J. Corkigian, Samuel Russell
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Greetings Dear Reader,

Another year is behind us, and it’s been a doozy. We’ve had editorial changes and special issues, Shirley Jackson Awards and panel appearances, and we’re just getting started! I’m so happy to usher in another year with the CHM family, and we’ve got lots in store for you, including invited work from Nebula Award (and British Fantasy Award, and Ignyte Award, and World Fantasy Award!) winner Premee Mohamed and another special tribute issue call that we will open in March, this time honoring the work of Shirley Jackson.

We’re closing the year with a quieter issue, one about the precise contours of pain and loss. We open with Rex Burrows’ “The Head in the Pantry,” a strange and touching tale that proves that humans will pack bond with anything. We then have Shelley Lavigne’s furious lesbian horror about adoration and exploitation, “Bilious Green Envy, Burning White Fury,” where a woman minimizes her own art career and uses her strange talent to make her wife famous instead. We follow that with Dorian Wolfe’s “A Mugful of Dates,” a wry and feminist folk tale (my favorite mix). Rose Sky’s “Shall Not Perish” follows a young woman who finds both freedom and unfathomable horror in the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat. Jes Malitoris’ “The Conjurings of Elderly Widows” is both funny and horrific, when Dolores brings back her dead granddaughter using dark magic, her old friend Cora wants to know how. We also have D. Marmara’s “In the Amygdala of the Beholder,” a cozy cosmic romance about accepting your partner warts (or tentacles or unknowable visage) and all.

Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic alum Joe Koch makes his CHM debut with “Child of Rawfrog,” where a desperate gentleman is given a netsuke by his therapist. This month’s entry into The Crypt is Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “The Tree’s Wife,” which introduces us to Florella Dabney after an unfortunate Romeo-and-Juliet incident kills both the boy she intended to marry; the town priest marries her to a tree in Joe Ed’s stead, and the tree has since acted in supernatural, protective, and strange ways. The story was originally published in Weird Tales in March of 1950.

Keep it cosmic! See you in 2025!

J

MEET THE CHM STAFF

Jolie Toomajan: Chief 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: Publisher | Layouts/Typography

Oenophile, logophile, bibliophile. Obsessed with cosmic horror and weird fiction and especially turn of the century pulp magazines.

Carson Winter: Co-Editor | Social Media

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

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Trevor Henderson is a writer and illustrator. His love of monsters, cryptids, ghosts and other horrible entities is enduring and vast. When he is not drawing or writing horrible things, he is thinking about the unknowable and hostile forces working against all of humanity, and playing with his cat, who is named Boo.

Bernie is a visual artist from the Windy City, Chicago. His love for art has been around since he could hold a crayon, even though his skills have grown and changed. The love of creating that existed in all of us as a child is still there, unchanged. His work is not defined by a single medium or style. It is one of exploration and the enjoyment of creating.

He is a self taught artist that learns from observing and from creating daily. He has found an amazing community of artists virtually and in person that are his source of inspiration that he did not know he needed, until now. He strives to grow as an Artist and to make an impact with his dedication to his craft If you want to follow along on his journey, follow his Instagram account. @bernabemtz

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

THE HEAD IN THE PANTRY

REX BURROWS

Robert first noticed the head in the pantry on a Tuesday morning. It sat on the second shelf down, nestled between the oatmeal container and a half empty box of cereal. The head appeared to have come from a middle-aged man, clean shaven and with close cropped brown hair. There were no distinguishing marks or scars, nothing in the way of earrings or other adornments. The eyes were closed, and the expression on its face was one of calm repose. If pressed to render an aesthetic judgement, Robert would have described the head as being neither attractive nor unattractive. It was just an average-looking head, typical of someone that you might walk past on the street without taking any special notice of them.

It was certainly not the head of anyone that Robert knew.

If you had asked him what he might do upon encountering a strange head in his pantry, Robert would have guessed—after pausing at the odd premise of the question—that he’d be most likely to scream, flee, and alert the authorities. Confronted with the actual situation though, he did none of these things. He just stood there, taking in the situation and wondering how the head had come to be in his home. As an experiment, he turned and walked out of the pantry. The coffee maker had just finished brewing a pot of French roast, so he poured himself a cup and mixed in a teaspoon of sugar. He then returned to the pantry, sipping his coffee, and found the head exactly where he’d left it. This did not surprise Robert, but on further consideration, he didn’t think it would have surprised him if it had vanished either.

Unable to reach any firm conclusions regarding what to do about the head, Robert left it where it sat and went about his normal morning routine. On his drive to work though, he did catch himself wondering if this was what it felt like to go insane.

* * *

Robert’s workday proceeded in a fairly normal fashion and he quickly lost himself in administrative paperwork. He was almost—but not quite—able to forget about the head in the pantry. When he returned home in the early evening, he hung his coat in the closet, deposited his keys in the small wooden bowl that sat on the side table for that exclusive purpose, and then proceeded directly to the pantry. After all, there was no point in delaying the inevitable.

Robert had been nursing some small hope that the problem would have solved itself while he was away, that he’d find his pantry in its normal state of order with nary a head in sight. However, the head stubbornly occupied the same spot that it had in the morning. The eyes remained closed, and the facial expression hadn’t changed in any noticeable way. Passive observation having reached its limits, Robert reached the distasteful conclusion that the only thing left to do was make a closer inspection.

Robert reached out with both hands and cautiously lifted the head off the shelf, holding it just below the ears. He kept it at arm’s length for a moment, not sure what kind of reaction he was expecting but wanting it as far away as possible if one came. Nothing happened; the head simply sat in his hands feeling comfortably heavy. Its temperature was neither warm nor cold and seemed roughly the same as Robert’s own hands. Turning it over, he found no signs of a violent decapitation. In fact, there was no evidence of any former point of connection to a body at all. In the place where the neck should have been attached, there was just a stretch of smooth pink skin. The head was otherwise perfectly normal, right down to the oily pores on its nose and the slightly receding hairline.

Robert took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting to find, but a tag with an if found, please call message and phone number had clearly been too much to hope for. Once again stymied in determining what further action might be needed, Robert returned the head to its original place on the shelf. Just as he set it down, it opened its eyes.

Robert regarded the head and the head regarded Robert in kind as he slowly pulled back his hands. For the second time, he wondered at his own lack of a visceral reaction—all he felt was a numbed sense of curiosity. The head opened its mouth as if to say something, but lacking a larynx, trachea, and most of the other anatomical apparatus associated with speech, all it could manage were a few odd, hitched noises. After a few moments of futile effort, it abandoned the attempt with an apologetic look. If the head had been attached to shoulders, Robert was sure it would have given him a resigned shrug as if to convey: Alas, what can one do? It then closed its eyes and resumed its former neutral attitude.

In the three years since Robert’s wife Clara had passed, he’d been alone in the house. They’d never had children, and he’d discontinued the weekly housekeeping service the week after the funeral. The comfortable routine of maintaining his home in a tidy and well-ordered state filled some of the hours that had previously been occupied by conversation and the various social obligations that inevitably attach themselves to coupledom. Friends periodically reached out to Robert with invitations to dinners and—more recently—thinly veiled attempts to set him up with their various unattached acquaintances. He accepted the occasional dinner invite, mostly just to avoid seeming impolite or standoffish, but steadfastly declined all attempted romantic interventions. The initial acute shock of grief had eroded down to a dull ache that would probably accommodate more of a social life, but Robert felt perfectly content with his quiet and self-contained status quo. So far, he hadn’t been able to think of any compelling reasons why it needed changing.

This meant, Robert realized, that he was under no particular pressure to resolve the issue of the head tonight or, for that matter, anytime in the immediate future. Since he was already in the pantry, he turned his attention to dinner and picked out the ingredients for a nice pasta dish. He watched the evening news while he ate and then settled into his recliner to read the next few chapters of a thick novel that he’d been enjoying. For the remainder of the evening, Robert barely thought about the head at all, and by the time he went to bed, he’d all but forgotten about it.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, Robert fell into a comfortable routine with the head in the pantry. Its most frequent state was one of inactivity—sleep, if such a term could be applied to a disembodied head. Sometimes though, Robert would enter the pantry to find the head awake and alert, the eyes tracking his movements as he went about his business. On these occasions, Robert would hold up each item that he’d selected from the shelves, presenting it for the head’s inspection. It seemed to appreciate these gestures and would give a Robert brief smile, the kind you’d give to someone who’d held open a door or provided some other small courtesy. Encouraged by these reactions, Robert began describing the meals that he was preparing. On one occasion, he even brought a thick slab of freshly baked lasagna into the pantry. The head seemed to enjoy the aroma of the food, but its expression shifted to one of intense discomfort when Robert cut off a forkful and held it before the closed lips. The faux pas became obvious almost immediately—what was the head supposed to do with a mouthful of food that it had no means of swallowing, much less digesting? He withdrew the offending morsel and apologized for his thick-headedness. The head, for its part, didn’t seem offended or to harbor any ill will over the incident, which had probably been equally embarrassing for both parties. Robert chalked it up as a lesson learned.

Aside from the presence of the head, Robert’s day-to-day activities went on in mostly the same fashion that they had previously. He went to work, then he came home. He made meals and he ate them. He read books, he listened to music, and he attended to his various domestic responsibilities. He would occasionally engage in one-sided conversations with the head in the pantry but tried to keep these limited. Its periods of wakefulness tended to be brief, and Robert didn’t want to overtax its capacities. He’d come to think of the head as a polite and undemanding member of his household, and his initial concerns regarding the state of his mental health faded into the background. If he was losing his mind, this seemed like a fairly innocuous way to do so.

This agreeable state of affairs was disrupted on a Friday night nearly three months after the head’s arrival. Robert was sitting in the living room, enjoying a glass of merlot while listening to a Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances. The first side of the record had just ended when Robert noticed a strange thumping noise just barely audible over the hiss of the needle. He followed the sound into the pantry where he found the head in a state of agitation. Its eyes were stretched wide, and the mouth snapped open in what could only be interpreted as a series of silent screams. The noise that Robert had heard came from the back of its skull repeatedly bumping against the wall behind it.

Robert searched the pantry, trying to locate the source of the head’s fright. Everything seemed to be in its regular order; there was no evidence of water leaks or fires or anything else that might be so upsetting it. It was only when he cleared the shelf space around the head that he found the appalling source of its distress. A mouse had invaded the pantry, somehow scaled the shelves, and was now greedily gnawing at the head’s left earlobe. Robert grabbed the creature by its tail and tried to pull it away, but it refused to release its hold. Fighting off repulsion, Robert worked his fingers past the scrabbling paws and up the body until he grasped the mouse firmly by the jaws. He pressed down firmly until he felt a delicate snap. The mouse finally came away and Robert hurled it to the floor as hard as he could, giving it two quick stomps for good measure.

The head had ceased its screaming, but tears ran down its cheeks and a thin trickle of blood leaked from its torn ear. Robert ran out to the kitchen and returned with a roll of paper towels and the first aid kit from under the sink. He applied pressure to the wound, muttering soft reassurances. Once the bleeding had stopped, he cleaned and bandaged the wound as best he could. That dealt with, he turned his attention to how the mouse had gained access. There were no obvious gaps or entry points to be found in the pantry, so it must have come from somewhere else in the house.

While all of this was occurring, the head had calmed and eventually settled into what looked to be an uneasy sleep. Robert, however, remained worried. It had never occurred to him to remove the head from the pantry, but it now seemed prudent to locate a safer resting spot for it. He picked up the head and carried it as far as the pantry doorway before it lurched back into awareness, snapping its jaw, and clacking its teeth, and startling Robert so badly that he nearly dropped it. When he held it up to determine the nature of the problem, the head could only give him a panicked look and dart its eyes back towards its shelf. His plans for relocation thus vetoed, Robert returned the head to its customary spot and left it in peace.

The remainder of the evening passed in an anxious funk. Robert had come to think of himself as the head’s caretaker, and tonight, he’d thoroughly failed in this task. It was unlikely that an exterminator would be willing to inspect the house until Monday at the earliest, so Robert would need to see to the head’s safety himself until then. He picked up the crushed mouse in a paper towel and threw it out the door at the back of the kitchen; a raccoon or some other passing nocturnal scavenger would dispose of it. The pantry lacked a door, making it difficult to secure the small room, but Robert erected a low barrier of stacked boxes across the doorway. That would have to hold for the night, but he resolved to visit the neighborhood hardware store first thing in the morning. They carried an extensive selection of pest deterrents, and Robert was sure that he could find a stopgap solution to his problem.

* * *

By ten o’clock the next morning, Robert stood in the kitchen and admiring his handiwork. He’d strategically positioned snap traps throughout the room, each baited with a liberal smear of peanut butter, and handfuls of poison pellets sat mounded in the corners. A dozen glue strips were scattered across the floor of the pantry; any rodent that made its way past the doorway would be confronted with a sticky, immobilizing gauntlet. As for the head itself, it had passed the night without further harm and had not stirred while its new set of defenses were being set in place. After the drama of the previous evening, Robert thought this was perfectly understandable and did his best not to disturb its rest.

Any peace of mind that Robert might have gleaned from his new set of countermeasures proved short lived. As the day wore on, Robert noticed a growing number of crows and somewhat larger birds that he assumed to be ravens were gathering around the house. They lined the porch railings, hopped across the lawn, and fluttered among the branches of the oaks lining the back of his property. There was little in the way of squawking or chatter, just a low undercurrent of avian muttering and the shuffling of feathers. By early evening, half a dozen hunched black shadows dotted the upper reaches of the trees—turkey vultures, their ragged outlines silhouetted against the setting sun.

That night, gusty winds set the house creaking and groaning. Beneath those noises, Robert thought he could make out odd skittering noises emanating from within the walls and beneath the floorboards. Stationed at the doorway to the darkened kitchen, he kept watch over the floors by the moonlight slanting in through the picture window above the table. Sure enough, a mouse darted out from beneath the stove and made a beeline for the pantry door, bypassing two of the traps that Robert had set earlier. He flicked on the overhead lights, startling the pest and sending it scurrying off in retreat. In the pantry, the head didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, but the nervous expression on its face reaffirmed Robert’s glum certainty that this had only been the opening salvo in some broader assault. He sighed and prepared himself for a long night ahead.

A pot of coffee was set to brewing, and a large metal pot, a wooden spoon, and the contents of the silverware drawer were laid out on the kitchen table. It was only a short while before another mouse appeared—this time from beneath the refrigerator—and made for the pantry. Robert clanged the pot with the spoon and sent it sprinting back from where it came. This pattern repeated itself several more times over the next few hours, mice emerging from various corners of the kitchen only to be sent fleeing by loud noises or hurled flatware. The few mice that made it into the pantry fell victim to the glue traps. Robert tossed these unhappy specimens out the backdoor; hopefully the birds would make themselves useful and dispatch the struggling creatures.

Just after midnight, Robert noticed a quiet tapping noise coming from the window above the kitchen sink. He opened the drapes and found himself face to face with a crow. He and the bird eyed each other, and then the crow struck the glass with its beak—tap, tap, tap—as if politely requesting entry. For one long moment, Robert pondered this new development, and then he slowly drew the drapes shut. One problem at a time.

The hours ticked by and the incursions by the mice became less and less frequent. The head appeared to have dozed off, which Robert took this as a hopeful sign that the danger had receded, at least for now. It was just after 4:00 AM; if he could make it til dawn, there might even be a chance to snatch a few hours sleep. He started another pot of coffee, retrieved a handful of what he’d begun to think of as his throwing spoons, and then resumed his post at the table.

It was the acrid odor of scorched coffee that first penetrated Robert’s sleep. He lifted his head away from the puddle of drool on the table and found the kitchen flooded with morning light. Lines of mice streamed into the pantry, bounding and clambering over torn piles of their compatriots who covered the glue traps. The vermin were so thick on the floor as to be unavoidable, so Robert simply ran across them, trying to ignore the crunch of tiny bones beneath his feet. The mice were rapidly ascending up through the stocked food but hadn’t yet reached the head, which had somehow managed to knock itself onto its side and now teetered precariously on the edge of the shelf. Robert snatched it to his chest and spun towards the doorway—the head would just have to make its peace with a change of scenery—but his feet shot out from under him, slipping in the smashed entrails and blood-soaked hides that clung to the soles of his shoes.

As Robert fell to the floor, the back of his head struck one of the lower shelves, rattling his teeth and sending intricate black patterns swirling in front of his eyes. He couldn’t see anything for several seconds, but he could feel hundreds of tiny paws sprinting up his legs and down over his shoulders and arms. By the time his vision had cleared, he found himself holding a writhing ball of furred flesh and dangling tails. The anguished spasms that filled his hands slowed and then came to a stop, replaced by the flow of a warm sticky fluid and the sounds of biting and tearing and satisfied chewing.

Unconsciousness reasserted itself, this time mercifully.

* * *

Robert woke some indeterminant time later to find a picked-bare skull still resting in his lap. This was all that remained of the head; whatever animating force it once held had been stripped away along with the flesh. It was just an object now, abstract and absent of presence. Robert himself was unharmed and the rodents had vanished, leaving only scattered pellet-like dropping in their wake.

He rose and, following some undefinable impulse, walked across the kitchen and out the back door. The mob of birds still occupied the back yard; if anything, their numbers had increased during the night. Hundreds of tiny black eyes followed Robert as he crossed the lawn with the skull and then, as though satisfied that some crucial task had been performed to adequate standards, they exploded up into the sky. The flock briefly wheeled above the house in a churning gyre and then dispersed in all directions, presumably en route to other more pressing matters.

Robert crossed the yard and, tucking the skull under one arm, opened the door to his garden shed and selected a spade from the neatly organized rack of garden tools. He then proceeded to a shady spot at the foot of one of the larger oak trees. It was simple enough to cut out a square of sod but excavating the hole in the underlying soil required cutting through a several thick roots. This proved difficult, but Robert didn’t mind. After the events of the past few weeks, the simple activity of digging a hole felt refreshingly ordinary. When he’d reached what seemed like an appropriate depth about two feet down, he gently placed the skull at the bottom. He then covered it over with earth, refilling the hole and setting sod back in to place on top, firmly tamping it down until it was flush with the surrounding grass.

Over the next few days, Robert settled back into his normal routines which, truth be told, had barely been altered by his strange visitor. No additional mice appeared in the house, and the only birds he noticed in the yard were sparrows, robins, and the quick flitting passage of a gold finch. Robert contemplated placing some type of memorial stone on the small gravesite but eventually discarded the idea. He suspected that wasn’t what his departed friend would have wanted, and he could picture it rolling its eyes at such a tacky and sentimental display. After all, Robert had known the head in the pantry for but a short time.

* * *

Rex Burrows (he/him) is a writer primarily working in the weird fiction, horror, and dark fantasy subgenres. He also has a background in biological research and holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. His stories are often informed by his interests in science, nature, and history. Rex’s short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Weird Horror Magazine, 34 Orchard, and Horror Library Volume 7. He’s lived in lots of different places but now seems somewhat settled in Washington, DC. He can be found online at rexburrows.com.

BILIOUS GREEN ENVY, BURNING WHITE FURY

SHELLEY LAVIGNE

The lights make the emerging silver in my wife’s hair glow like fibre optic cables, transmitting her brilliant thoughts to all assembled as she speaks from behind a podium.

“The most important thing for any artist is to marry well.” She smiles at me, front row centre. “You need someone who supports you unconditionally, who understands the sacrifices artists need to make, but who doesn’t share your aspirations. Because if you both want the same thing, jealousies will form.

“I am incredibly lucky to have found such an amazing wife and partner in Berty. I dedicate this show to her.” That’s my cue. I stand and turn to face the crowd.

This is my moment in the sun, I’ve been coached to enjoy it. Try to stand still, appreciative, bashful, as practised. But there are so many people here—artists and critics and dealers. Their gazes press on me like a thousand fingers.

My palms coat in inky black. I smack them to my sides, rub them against the fabric.

It was a risk for me, showing up here today. Still, I’d insisted, despite my wife’s better judgement. And now my selfish pride is about to get us caught.

I try to calm myself, counting breaths, timing the rhythm of my inhales and exhales. Keep smiling.

It’s a lot to focus on at once.

Their applause fills my ears with static.

The empty seat beside my wife becomes visible from my new vantage point. I’d asked to be seated next to her, knowing that holding her hand would be enough to smooth the sharp corners of my emotions, prevent a burst.

She’d told me there’d be no room by her side, that the stage was too small.

My mouth fills with the acrid taste of red. It coats the interior of my mouth, bitter as my anger.

I seal my lips but the burst of colour bubbles in the seam.

Feigning bashfulness, I bring my hand to cover my mouth and collapse onto my chair. The metal legs scrape jarringly on the polished concrete.

The mic amplifies my wife’s sigh.

This is why she doesn’t want me on stage—in case I have an incident. In case others see what a freak I am.

White hot shame dampens my underwear.

I should have worn a liner.

My wife resumes the lecture we’d prepared and I recite her words in my own head until I find my calm.

Folks around me clap before leaving their seats.

Photorealistic portraits of women in moments of extreme pain or extreme pleasure line grey walls. The trick is in the angle of your sight, out of the corner of your eye that brunette is being torn apart on the inside, but look at her head-on and she’s on the crest of transcendent orgasm.

It’s a gimmick, not what my wife is known for—she’s famous for her use of colour. Her sitters are rendered so surreal and bright that gazing at them tattoos a negative image on your retina, an image you can’t escape.

A hand on my shoulder startles me. This time it’s my wife and not someone mistaking me for a server.

“Bert, there’s a journalist from ColourTheory who wants to speak to us.”

She leads me away from the paintings.

“Is there anything on my face?” I ask.

She sighs in a way I know is a barely contained eye-roll.

“You look fine.”

“No, I mean I—” lowering my voice to a whisper, “I burst earlier. Are my teeth okay?”

She’s always warning me of the danger, what will happen if anyone sees: I’ll be taken away, studied, prodded, dissected. But today, she doesn’t seem concerned at all.

“Jesus, yeah. You look fine.”

The reporter from ColourTheory has a kaleidoscopic dye job that echoes the paintings. I want to ask her if she got it done for the show. Also, who did it.

Not that I could ever do something so flashy without feeling self-conscious.

“Berty! It’s nice to meet you. I’m Mary Singer, from ColourTheory.”

Her hand nearly crushes mine. My wife’s hand squeezes my shoulder in concert and I cover my nose to hide an orange sneeze of pain.

“I’m writing a piece on the relationship between artists and their partners and your wife’s dedication intrigued me. I’d love to know: how’d you two meet?”

I suspect my wife will say that’s unimportant, a question that distracts from her work. But she surprises me—it’s wonderful how she can still do that after six years—smiling and taking my hand.

“Well, I try to do charity and community work when I can. A hometown friend asked me to judge an art contest for local amateurs. It took some careful calendar management, but I made it work. Berty was one of the painters, if you can believe it.”

Mary turns to me.

“Do you still paint?”

“I’m way too busy to do that now—”

“But it’s quite helpful to have someone who understands the medium as an assistant. When I saw her art, I knew we had a level of compatibility I had never found with another person.”

My wife smiles at me, so bright and proud and hungry I feel the colours of lust build inside my body. I want to paint her fingers with my love of her, for her to paint my thighs in art that’s only ours.

“Did she win the contest?”

“Oh, no.” She laughs good naturedly and takes my hand. I ignore the tinge I feel at what must have been her nervous laughter. It must be uncomfortable to tell someone else that she’d rejected my painting seeing where I was today. “But she got honourable mention, and I offered to give her some classes.”

“This is such a romcom moment.”

My wife huffs. She’d been preparing for weeks in the hopes of this interview, rehearsing lines about her place within the art canon.

Instead, she’s getting this fluff piece.

She winds up to start her spiel.

“My neo-expressionist portraiture draws attention to the current universal inner turmoil owing to the conflict between sharing private details on social media and the increased loss of personal—”

Mary continues to scribble but her dreamy smile gives me the impression she’s busy writing something other than what my wife is saying.

* * *

It took three tries to find the courage to walk up to her house. Or, her parents’ house. She was there for only one more week but had offered to spend some of that precious time with me.

While I hadn’t won the contest, I’d gotten something much better.

She watched through lace curtains as I circled the block. I kept hoping she would open the front door, welcome me in, assuage my fears, but she needed me to be strong.

An artist is not a coward, an artist believes in herself.

This was a test.

Her eyes followed as I walked up the drive, as I climbed the stairs. She waited until I knocked three times before opening the door.

“Had trouble finding the place?” She smiled, encouraging me to share this little fiction.

In reality, I’d known her address since high school. She’d been three grades ahead of me so I only saw her in assembly or in the halls, but those glimpses were always a highlight and I’d done everything I could to learn more about her.

Maybe she didn’t remember me, which was probably for the best. I still had stress dreams about the day she smiled at me as we crossed paths in the cafeteria.

I’d had to flee to the bathroom, hands covering the colourful burst between my legs.

I’d been teased for weeks, bullies leaving red paint-soaked tampons around my locker. It had taken work convincing my parents that this was just regular teasing, that no one had caught on to what my body could do.

My parents had warned me about the emotional rush of crushes on boys. They’d threatened to homeschool me during my teen years—like when I was a child, unable to control my feelings. But I’d convinced them I would be fine, I just wasn’t that into my male classmates. I’d hoped I could avoid feelings altogether.

No one thought to warn me about crushes on girls. Or what to do when one smiled at me.

But I knew now, and I breathed through the colour rush I felt when she turned her eyes on me.

So yes, let’s pretend I never saved newspaper clippings about her first shows in Toronto, or checked her blog obsessively, worrying about the high standards to which she pushed herself. Let’s forget how crushed I was when her shows got further and further apart, as communities she’d built crumbled over petty squabbles.

We could scrape that from our canvas, paint over it with a new story. One in which she’d plucked me from obscurity, taken me under her wing.

“I’ve lived here my whole life… you’d think I could, erm, find a house a couple blocks from my own. Ha!” My voice trembled like my hands. White shame dribbled down my legs. I squeezed them tight, to contain my secret.

I shouldn’t have worn a dress, even if it was flattering. Even if her eyes travelled down my body not so subtly, just as they had during the judging the day before.

“You’ve never left? You need to. I should take you around Toronto sometime.”

She didn’t seem like the kind who would make empty promises.

Her lustful assessment shifted to confusion as she looked at my empty hands.

“Where are your supplies?”

“Oh, I didn’t know I’d have to bring them.”

I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to.

“Well. I can’t let you use my professional paints.” She laughed the edge off of her words. “They’re too difficult for you to work with. It would be a waste…”

I wanted to turn and run back home, I wasn’t cut out for this.

My underwear was wet. Dark blue disappointment welled behind my eyes. If I cried, she’d see me for the freak I was.

This was why I continued to keep my distance from others, even after my parents had passed. I was afraid I’d be overtaken by sentiment or overwhelmed with desire only to burst with colour in front of strangers.

But there was something about her—her tantalizing confidence, her skill—that kept drawing me in despite my better judgement. That made me enter the contest despite the risk of public humiliation.

She placed a hand on my shoulder, looking down at me. Her hand trailed down, fingers brushing the soft sensitive skin of my inner forearm before taking my hand in hers. She brought it up to her lips and dusted a kiss on my knuckles.

“I’m sorry for saying that. Listen, we’ll do this once. Next time though, remember to bring your paints.”

“I promise I’ll be very careful.”

“Of course.”

As we stood close in her parents’ entryway, I could smell her: bergamot and turpentine. “Listen, even though you lack brush control and your proportions are off, your colours are radiant. No, sublime! What brand do you use?”

“Brand?”

“It’s so vibrant. Do you do anything special with your canvas?”

I shook my head.

“Come on, I’ll teach you the basics and you tell me how to achieve those hues. Fellow artists have to help each other out.”

My heart panged at this; no one had ever called me an artist before, my parents called it my little hobby.

She stepped back and I could breathe now without tasting her. I missed and appreciated it in equal measure.

“Take me to Toronto.”

“What?”

“Take me to Toronto, and I’ll show you.”

She stared at me hard for a moment, assessing whether I was telling the truth.

“So, there is something special then.”

“Yes.”

Under her gaze, a nervous black built under my armpits. I should have worn darker clothes, more layers, anticipated better. I’d been too excited to be near my crush to think clearly, protect myself.

After a heart stopping moment, she nodded. All she’d have to pay for was my train ticket, I hadn’t asked her for shelter or for food. It wasn’t that much of a big gamble on her part. Her parents were loaded, the only lawyers in town, so a train ticket was nothing to her.

“Deal.”

She gave me a lesson that afternoon. And the one after. She closed the distance between us with each visit, using every excuse to run her hands over my skin, adjusting my brush strokes, watching my lips for clues. I wore maxipads to hide my secret but it was almost impossible to resist bursting at her touch, even with years of training.

“In Toronto,” I said, pushing her away as her lips replaced the hand she had been resting on my shoulder.

She booked the tickets that night, after texting me a nude painting of herself, legs open, inviting.

I filled vials with lustful vibrant hues.

* * *

I populate the spreadsheet with her recent sales, giddy with the rising green number at the bottom of the document.

“Bullshit!” my wife shouts, angrily tossing down the issue of ColourTheory.

She steps on the paper, storming out of the room like a child unhappy with their Christmas presents.

I freeze, statue-still, until her studio door slams—she’ll be distracted for a bit—before grabbing the glossy magazine. My eyes rest on the full-page glamour shot of her beside her work and the smaller picture of the two of us. In it, I gaze at her like she’s the most remarkable thing in the room, the planet. This is the first time I’ve seen my naked devotion through another’s eyes, and the realization gives me an uneasy flash of radiant yellow nausea before I tell myself that it’s normal to feel that way, especially when your spouse is so talented.

I scan the text. The majority focuses on our story. Only the last paragraph covers her latest exhibit.

While the queer gaze prevents the art from being pedestrian, it’s her colour where the artist truly shines. While she refuses to reveal her sources, another Anish Kapoor in the making, the vibrant hues and inspired combinations make her art distinctive and eye-catching. It’s what makes her worthy of a place on any collector’s wall.

“This is a great review,” I say as I walk into her studio. She furiously scrapes an already varnished piece we had finished last week.

It’s particular shade of purple necessitates a bruising kind of play that is fun in the moment but leaves me feeling raw unless we make sun-kiss yellow afterwards. But we usually have more yellow than needed, so she rarely bothers with the second step.

“Of course you’d say that. It’s all about your pigment, while my work is ‘almost pedestrian!’”

“Or you could see it as: we’re greater together than we would be alone. Like you said in your vows.”

“Quit placating me!” Her hand slips and the pallet knife gouges the canvas. “You’re trying to make me feel small.” The knife falls from her hand, ringing like a tuning fork against the concrete floor. I retrieve it, but note the red tint of rage across her cheeks and instead of handing it to her, I put it on the workbench.

“You’re my whole world. Without you I’d be stuck in Cobourg, alone, working at the pet store. I’d never do anything important.” I take her face in my hands, stroking along her ears, her favourite. “Let’s use this rage productively. How about we make some more purple? You love making purple. We’re running low, and you’ll need some to fix the paintings we—you were working on.”

She doesn’t notice my slip, nor does she follow my lure.

“I’m going to clear my head,” which is what she always says before coming back home smelling of perfume that isn’t hers.

I let her go.

You can’t hold an artist or a good woman down.

Besides, I have my own needs to take care of.

I pull down my copy of Little Women and take out the key from a hole I’d cut in its pages.

* * *

Her apartment was small, cluttered, a studio both literally and architecturally. Her micro kitchen (a sink, bar fridge, microwave and kettle) was splattered in paint.

“The rents here are criminal. This city is as great as it is because of its arts and culture scene but artists can barely afford to live here. It’s bullshit.”

But then, like a sign, sun burst through the double-height windows and landed on her easel. In the glorious golden light, even the colour-stained tarp beneath it looked intentional, the splatters as carefully deposited as a Pollock.

“It’s beautiful.” I meant it.

I was the one who kissed her first even if she later told her friends it was her who’d started it.

We all remember things differently.

Our minds make the frames in which our memories are displayed.

I felt the heat of her hand through my blouse as she unbuttoned what she’d been eyeing the entire train ride.

Her lips trailed her fingers until they hit a camisole.

I’d been prepared this time, positively padded in layers, not wanting to reveal my secret until it was time.

“You’re such a tease.” She laughed as she pushed down my skirt to find leggings underneath. “It’s like a nesting doll in there!”

“Sorry.”

We pawed desperately at my layers, laughing as we unearthed more and more.

But when left only in my underwear, I felt the panic arise. This was the point of no return, the moment before your center of gravity shifts and there’s no way off the cliff but freefall.

“Wait,” I said, pushing her back.

Her mouth parted hungrily, as if interrupted mid-meal.

“Come on, you said you’d give in when we were in Toronto.”

“No, I mean yes. But you said you wanted to know about the paints.”

She sighed and leaned over to kiss my neck.

“Later, okay? I want to know, obviously. But it can wait.”

“It’s relevant, I swear.”

I tossed myself off the cliff for her, because nothing truly worth having doesn’t involve risk.

She was the only one worth this gamble. Someone so talented, someone who I’d wanted for years and now maybe could have. The only one I thought might see beyond the freak, see me as someone worth loving.

I laid myself on the tarp. There was colour on her hands and on her leg which she hadn’t even noticed. She wanted this, sex and paint, but she already had it.

I peeled off the sticky cotton underwear and tendrils of colour, as bright as tie dye, leaked out of me.

She fell to her knees in awe.

I felt more beautiful, powerful than ever before. Her face at that moment is still the one I hold in my mind when I get angry, when I feel small compared to her, that genuflection.

In that moment, I was our future. If she saw me that way, maybe I was worth something.

That afternoon, I painted her fingers, mouth, skin.

She coaxed out colours I’d never seen before, iridescent purples that danced on the borderline of the visible spectrum, yellows that shined from their own light. Most of all, I loved the bashful pink she milked from my pores, using her filthy tongue.

Over the next weeks, I showed her how I could pull colours from the world around me, but they did not have the same power as those made from my emotions. They were purely decorative, not artistic. She preferred my hunger, my lust, my vulnerability.

She preferred me.

Our first show was a success, and other invitations soon followed. The commissions rolled in. Critics praised her new style, and hungered for more. Others tried to mimic her, but couldn’t quite achieve her kaleidoscopic vibrancy.

“You can never tell anyone else about this,” she needlessly instructed me one evening. I had told her more than once that I’d never shared my secret with anyone outside of my parents, but she’d been fixated on the issue since her second sold out show.

“Only you,” I said.

“Scientists would experiment on you, try to figure you out.” As though I needed threats. “And I don’t think I could break you out of some sort of high security government facility.”

I dug myself into her side, slung her arm around me like a shield.

“Yeah, but you’d try,” I said into her neck.

She pressed me to her, digging her fingers into my thigh.

“Like my life depended on it.”

Even if she was the artist and I often felt like nothing more than the palette, I knew one could not exist without the other. I gave her the colours she needed but never so much that she could have gotten by without me.

I was my own insurance policy.

We got married that fall, four months after my arrival in Toronto. A civil ceremony. We consummated our vows in the bathroom, too hungry for each other to wait. She painted my thighs under my dress. It was her best work and only I was allowed to see it.

But she never did give me another lesson. There was just no time for anything other than bursting with her colour.

* * *

I know why she never gave me another lesson: I’m hopeless. My work is derivative, a waste of pigment. I should stick to the boring hues extracted from flowers or pebbles and leave the emotive bursts to my wife. Renting this storage unit for two years was a waste.

Maybe it’s time to pack it up.

My brush turns the water a toxic lime green. With hands the colour of a monster’s, I push up the rolling door to my storage unit and step out into the harsh blue fluorescents.

“Berty!”

My wife runs toward me with a speed and ease I had not thought her capable of. I contemplate ducking back into my storage unit, but that will only delay the inevitable.

I stand my ground.

I’d always thought she was taller but as she stops, panting in front of me, her eyes are level to mine.

“I come home and you’re not there and there’s no note telling me where you are. I panic thinking something happened to you but apparently, you’re just hanging out at a storage facility. What the fuck are you even doing here?”

Looking down, she answers her question.

“Are you painting? With my supplies? Wasting my colour?”

I use my soothing voice, the one my parents used when I’d have bursts as a child. One I have been using on her more frequently.

“It’s not wasting. I can make more.”

“Don’t give me that! You’ve been telling me for weeks that you’re tired and can’t replenish my stock. You can’t have both, Bert!”

As she huffs and puffs, I realise there’s no way she found this place on her own. This storage is registered under a fake name and paid with cash.

“How did you find me?”

She holds up her phone, displaying a map with a glowing dot at our location. The answer is so clear but still so disgusting I don’t want to believe it.

“You’re tracking me?”

“I have to, in case someone steals you away. Like the government or some scientists or…”

I finish for her. “Or another artist?”

What if I’m the other artist? What if I’m the one I wanted to create colour for?

We were supposed to be equal, two women should mean an even playing field. No patriarchy, no subordinate. And yet, she’s always had power over me. I’d bowed to her, I’d thanked her as she squeezed me like a tube of paint.

That was all she ever wanted me to be.

Her true colours become visible, the veil of idolization lifted.

She pushes past me and into the unit. Her disdainful sneers at my canvases are audible from the hall. It’s not like I’ve had the lessons her parents paid for. It’s not like she ever gave me the time to grow.

The darkened camera in the hall points at us sightlessly. Its red light went out months ago and the man who runs this place doesn’t seem particularly motivated to fix it. I wonder if this will save or damn me.

“This? You’re wasting your colours on this drivel? I’ve seen high schoolers make better art,” she spits at me as I return to the unit, closing the door behind me.

“It’s not a waste, and I told you I can make more.”

Her face is red hot, angry. Her fists are a tight mix of bone white and blood red.

She’s never hit me before, she hasn’t needed to. She used words, belittling statements, reminded me how I was of more use to the world as her colour, her muse, than as my own self. My art hides away in closets or abandoned powder rooms while hers embellishes every public wall in the apartment.

Her hands never needed to leave a mark, they were too precious for that.

“I’ve taken care of you for all these years. You don’t even know how many other offers I’ve had, from much more attractive women and—”

She steps closer, and I smell another woman’s perfume on her.

I see white. Burning furious white.

It leaks from my eyes.

She trips over her feet, knocking over the mirror I use for self-portraits. In the jagged shards, I catch a glimpse of myself. My eyes are leaking a blinding white. I smile revealing teeth coated in rage red, like the first day of a period. I’m strong, beautiful, blooming with colour.

My wife tries to get up, palms lacerated from reflective shards, her own blood mixing with the red dripping from me. I can taste her panic even if it does not colour her sweat as mine does.

“Stop this.” But her commanding tone wobbles.

I revel in her emotional display.

“You’ve always pulled my colours from me, how about I pull some from you?”

It should be no different than rocks or plants. I just need to believe in myself. That’s the only lesson she ever taught me.

She whimpers as I pull the first dab of pigment from her.

The vermillion of her blood, the copper carrying oxygen, bubbles between my teeth and I spit it out on a blank canvas. I suck up the calcium in her bones, the thick paste coats the interior of my mouth before I add it to the red.

She falls back on my tarp, prone. Today she is the muse.

Dark red from her kidneys coats my tongue and I use it to add depth to the field. Bitter bile—she’s fighting back—gags me before I add her colour to the swirling maroon sea.

I look down at the shrivelled husk of my wife. Her face is grey, sallow. She claws at herself as I slurp the slimy darkened brown of her spleen, chew on the rubbery pink of her tongue. She gags as the grey stump in her mouth falls into her throat.

The last to go is the green of her eyes, I want her to see what I’ve made before they go milk white like cataracts.

I add it all to the painting.

Bodies are mostly thought to be scarlet viscera but there is so much nuance if you know where to look.

“I’ll call this one death of an artist,” I tell her.

Puce dribbles down my chin and I wipe it off.

“I think it’s our finest work yet.”

She coughs weakly, smiling for a moment as if proud of me. Or maybe she’s happy that even now I can’t separate her from my art.

I give her a moment to think she’ll be immortalised on a canvas before I reach into her pockets to pull out her lighter. I kiss the flame to the corner of the painting.

She doesn’t deserve to be commemorated.

* * *

Shelley Lavigne is a purveyor of moist literature, usually queer horror. Their novella, The Flesh of the Sea, co-authored with Lor Gislason is available Summer 2024 through Dark Lit Press. They live in Ontario where they roam their neighbourhood in search of haunted houses and cool bugs. You can also find them online at shelleylavigne.com.

A MUGFUL OF DATES

DORIAN WOLFE

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of a large porcelain cup with a nifty handle, yea tall, whatever color your favorite one is. A porcelain cup packed to the brim with cloyingly sweet desert fruits.—I almost said dessert fruits. Same thing.—Well, you’d be right about the mug bit, but I’m here to disappoint you about the dates. And they were disappointing all round.

See, they call me Tom Thumb for a reason.—I had a real name once. Don’t even remember what it was.—Short like a thumb—well, not quite, but three foot five is getting down there—and all my fingers like thick little sausages.

Normal girls don’t want a guy like that. They want long string beans of men, with fingers like tender young beans and fingernails wispy as pea shoots. Even the old witch turned me down. So what’s a guy to do?

Well, I can tell you what I did. Went back to that old witch, I did, and asked her to give me a love potion or something. I swore I wouldn’t use it on her, but she just laughed. She gave me something she promised would be better, though.—I ought to’ve been suspicious when she offered it free, not even asking a copper stoat for it. But that’s miles behind me, as they say, and besides, she had a good reputation.—Her gift was the aforementioned (a solicitor taught me that word. Pretty nifty, right?) mug, a tired old thing glazed with a blind man’s idea of blue. She’d filled it to the brim with seeds. They looked and felt like mustard seeds and smelled like pepper. Sow them, she said, and from each blossom would come a girl, all tailored to the sower’s size. Three months from seed to girl, guaranteed. I figured that many seeds would get me all the girls I could ever want.

It was still blustery winter, so I waited long months through the end of the frosts before stirring up a huge, slow-warming patch of soil and peppering it with girl-seeds. They popped up in two weeks, which is when I had my first doubts about ‘em. See, they were short, spindly little things, with a powdery gray to the leaves and a slight wilt even when spring rain drenched the soil. But after, oh, a month or so, they grew like weeds, and they didn’t let a single real weed into their patch. Looked more like cornstalks than anything, up until the buds came out. I’d come out every day and whisper sweet things into those sharp-edged green leaves.

The buds were pretty things, though they were scary, too. The variety and sparkle of their colors—different shades of reds, yellows, pinks, purples—put the neighbors’ flowers to shame. They smelled better than roses; they smelled like a bunch of fresh, ripe (and not oversweet) fruits all packed into one tidy basket.—I wondered, at the time, if I’d be able to eat the petals once I’d got my girls. Idle speculation, as it turns out.—They got bigger and bigger till a regular man’s head would have fit inside one, and then, with their petals pressed together, they tipped over until they looked like giant beaks ready to pierce your ears with a squawk.

One morning, they all popped open. Pop! And quick as you please, out tumbled tidy little bundles, revealing the flowers’ warm gold hearts for about three seconds before the whole mess of plants burst into an invisible, fragrant mist.

Idle speculation about the petals, as I said. But that doesn’t matter. It was the bundles what crushed my dreams, though they made me a far wealthier man than I was.

See, when the witch had said girls, and girls matched to my height, too, I thought they’d be girls I could take out for steak and theater. You know, dates. Well, some of them, I suppose I could. Those would be the little dogs that came popping out of the yellow flowers, all long silky ears and wild brushes of tails. They’d enjoy gnawing on a bit of steak—the rarer the better, no doubt—and nobody would complain if I brought them to a play, if the collar ‘n’ leash were spattered with gemstones. The cats, which came out of the pink flowers, wouldn’t be quite so easy to deal with. And then the creatures that came from the purple flowers—now, they almost made me tear my hair out. At the time, I’d no idea what they were, but a friend of mine down at the new city menagerie told me they were called “kangaroos,” natives of a far exotic land. They had a good kick in their back legs and a mighty thump in their tails; that’s all I can say.

Worst for last. Let me just tell you about the fruit of the red flowers. They were pretty, and they were human girls—at least, I think they were—but…

I’m not even going to tell you how old I am. The point is, why, a fresh-cheeked girl of fourteen or fifteen would have been wonderful, and I didn’t mind waiting a year or two on a girl of twelve or thirteen. These little babbies were another story, with their mouths smelling of some magical mothers’ milk and their pastel-colored smocked dresses.

I felt mighty cheated (and that’s a cheap word to describe it). But I managed to turn the whole mess to my profit, to seize a hollow victory of coins.—No, I didn’t sell the babbies to the slavers, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t go quite that low. The orphanage got a bit more crowded, but, of course, it’s always crowded ‘round here.—The cats and dogs sold well, but it was the tail-wielding “kangaroos” that won me a goodly sum. The menagerie bought one, a few rich folks wanted them for curiosities, and then a tall lad from a traveling circus bought the rest. That fellow had no notion of haggling.

I’m getting used to the idea of being lonely. My money is growing in the old bank (a disturbing building if there ever was one. No, I can’t explain why). Oh, of course I could just shake that gold and grab me a woman for the night. Or even for longer.

But I don’t believe in buying women.

* * *

Dorian Wolfe is a former concert pianist who fell in love with stories and never looked back. She loves cats, fantasy novels, cats, sugary goodies, and did she mention cats? Her short fiction has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Gwyllion, and other venues, and she is an SFWA member. Learn more at: https://dorianwolfe.wordpress.com.

SHALL NOT PERISH

ROSE SKYE

Her physics teacher told her she would live forever.

“…but Everett,” he explained, hastily sketching squeaky lines on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom, “thought the wave function never really collapsed. He said that time split instead, into a new branch for every possible outcome.” The mustachioed man stepped to the side to reveal a crude impression of a tree in smudged black, bifurcating at each juncture. “So the cat died here,” he said with a sharp chop of his dry-erase marker at the end of a branch. “But it lived here.” He extended the remaining line upward. “In fact, no matter how many times you do it again, statistically at least one version of the cat is still scratching at the inside of the box to get out.” He clicked the top of the felt-tip pen closed. “So the theory goes.”

Ava squinted at the snipped thread of fate from her front-row desk. Her pencil replicated a miniature version of the diagram into her notebook with practiced efficiency, barely requiring her to look down. Somewhere from the back of the class, a boy called out without raising his hand. “So that cat’s immortal?”

The teacher raised a bushy eyebrow. “The cat still dies like anything else – but in a sense, yes. At least one branch always survives. That cat just keeps getting lucky, and at the quantum level, almost anything has a tiny chance of happening if you’re lucky.”

Ava never thought of it that way before. She always pictured her life as a straight line forward, a narrow path of good grades and good behavior that kept her safe from all the terrible things she heard could happen to people. The idea planted itself in her mind that the line might fork into numerous paths, and that if she made a mistake on one, another her could keep going. Perhaps she need not worry so much after all.

In the ceiling above, frayed electrical wiring sparked. In half of all timelines, the building caught fire, and collapsed on top of her. In those that remained, she walked home, ate dinner, did her homework, and went to sleep.

Ava awoke the next day a different person, altered by the passage of eight hours, but felt herself a continuous being. She did so every night for the next four years, 1,460 deaths and rebirths spaced at even intervals. In between them, she lived a little more, emboldened by the assurance that the lethal outcomes of her life choices were self-terminating. She experimented with what she liked, bent the rules sometimes, and chose not to do absolutely everything her parents told her to. The number of timelines in which she met with an unfortunate fate increased, but she grew into a happier, more liberated person in those that remained. By the end of the four years, she made it into university, where she took classes by day and explored what it meant to be human by night.

“We have to go back there,” her friend said as they meandered down the sidewalk away from the club. A giddy flush rouged Ava’s face, which wore a smile as she effusively agreed. Nonetheless, the last three hours of dancing had sapped even her youthfully abundant energy, so she looked forward to collapsing in her bed once she got back to the dormitory. Heading in the direction of the campus, the group waited for the crosswalk to begin its rhythmic chirp before striding over the painted bars abstracting a bridge across the road.

The red glare of the traffic light washed over the white exterior of the truck as it accelerated through the intersection. Distracted by the laughter of her friends, Ava only noticed the one ton steel projectile by the screech of rubber on concrete from the inebriated driver’s futile stomp on their brake pedal. At least a third of her versions leapt out of the way before the impact, but this one turned to look just in time for the headlights to blind her.

Ava drifted in and out of consciousness as a crowd gathered around her. She heard sirens as though from a great distance, and pain with great immediacy as paramedics lifted her onto a stretcher. With a prick in her arm, someone injected her with something, and her mind sank beneath the depth which dreams can reach.

When the haze lifted, Ava opened her eyes to a white room. Beneath her, a bed elevated her upper body, while beside her a cardiogram beeped a steady heart rate. Her back throbbed with an intensity that flowed out from her spine to wash over every bone and joint; her whole body ached in a way that begged her to stretch. When she went to do so, her arms lifted behind her head, but her legs stayed put. Unnerved, she attempted again, but could not compel her feet, knees, or thighs to shift the barest inch. In the middle of her fruitless exertions, a woman wearing a white coat strode into the room. Before she could speak, Ava preempted her examination with pleas for a diagnosis, which she succinctly received: the crash had severely injured her spine. While the rest of her body might make a full recovery, the doctor could not guarantee Ava would ever walk again.

The following week passed in a haze even darker than that of the sedatives from before. A deep gray fog hung over her head and blotted out all hope for the future. In the ponderous hours between meals and check-ups, she did nothing but pray. She prayed to whatever deity might listen that she repented of her lifestyle, of taking risks, of going out to party after classes. She regretted it all now. She vowed to once again walk the straight line for the rest of her life, if only the heavens delivered her from this fate. No finite pleasure was worth such a cost.

In a majority of temporal paths, the gods remained deaf to her supplications, and she finished the lion’s share of her life learning to make do with her limitation. In a minority, something unlikely occurred: An overworked nurse, reeling from the recent death of a loved one and in desperate need of sleep, picked up the wrong vial of medication when she went to refill Ava’s analgesic drip. The particular pharmaceutical she seized possessed a legitimate medical purpose in the right situation, but at the presently high painkiller dosage, it exhibited a neurotoxic effect instead. The erroneous drug poisoned Ava’s already bruised brainstem, corroding the part known as the pons, the bridge between the brain and body.

Once again, Ava emerged from sleep on a hospital bed. Once again, she acted on the urge to stretch away the stiffness of sleep. By now she accepted, with weary resignation, the inertia of her legs, but today her arms also refused to move as her brain commanded them to. A chill shot up her fractured spine. She willed a flex from each muscle group upward in turn: biceps, triceps, trapezius. All dormant no matter how many times she tried. She sought to call out for help, but the cry stuck in her throat, trapped behind motionless lips. Ava scanned the room for someone who might help, but found herself unable to even look from side to side. After several minutes of internal terror, she took an inventory of her capabilities, and found herself able to move her eyes up and down, blink, and nothing else. Fully aware, fully alive, fully paralyzed.

The clock on the opposite wall ticked through an hour before a nurse arrived. Without any other option, Ava blinked repeatedly at her in an untrained facsimile of Morse code, praying she might catch the man’s attention. Upon looking her direction, he merely remarked out loud, “Someone’s awake,” in a friendly tone and otherwise ignored her assiduous efforts. Ava concluded, with rising horror, that the nurse—and therefore, presumably, the hospital staff as a whole—believed her to occupy a vegetative state rather than retain full cognitive function. She might have cried, had she been able to.

After two days imprisoned in the oubliette of her own body, the same doctor from before entered Ava’s room. The patient, her alertness dulled by days of effective isolation from human contact, only recognized the physician’s arrival after she picked up a clipboard and questioned the nurse. Ava then snapped to attention and blinked as hard as she could in between bouts of fluttering her pupils up and down. The doctor continued conversing for several agonizing moments before glancing over and furrowing her brow. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

Ava ceased her wild eye movements and fixed her gaze on the woman in the coat. “Blink three times if you understand me,” the physician instructed her, to which Ava responded with three swift blinks. The woman blinked back with surprised. “She’s not vegetative,” she said to the nurse. “She’s locked in.”

The following days improved over the ones before, if only marginally. The staff actually acknowledged her and asked her questions about what she wanted now. Yet, the doctor carefully explained to her, no treatment existed for locked-in syndrome. Due to the damage to her brain stem from the overdose, she would remain like this for the rest of her natural life. Ava stared down at her blanket with inexpressible despair. This was not meant to happen to her. This was not what living forever was supposed to mean.

A year crawled by, then another. Every day proceeded just like the last. Unable to move her mouth to eat or drink, all her sustenance came from an intravenous drip. At her fervent request, the staff wheeled in a television for her to watch, allowing the droning of the screen to fill the otherwise hollow hours. She learned the intimate details of every sitcom currently airing, and developed complex opinions about the news that she could never expound upon to anyone. She watched so many nature documentaries she felt ready to obtain a degree in biology. She wanted to die.

“There’s no guarantee of success,” the man in the suit coat stated with a slight quaver in his voice. “But we believe it’s possible.” Ava turned the proposal over in her head. The representative’s research foundation offered her the opportunity to participate in a special study they could never ethically carry out under most circumstances: They wished to precisely scan every part of her central nervous system to build an exact copy of it in software form. The catch: in order to achieve the necessary image resolution, they needed to remove and section her brain. Given her special situation of relatively healthy brain function (sans the pons) but dire future life outlook, they sought her consent as a test subject.

Ava barely thought about it. She agreed.

A few weeks later, they removed her from the hospital and brought her to a laboratory a hundred miles away. She could not help but picture herself as luggage but did her best to hold on to the sliver of optimism the impending procedure promised. In the operating room, the smell of antiseptics stung her nostrils until the anesthesia overtook her. Ava realized that she had agreed to death: but only, she told herself, of the sort one met with in bed at night. She would wake up soon.

In twenty percent of timelines, she did.

“Ava? Can you hear me?” The voice blared harsh like a poorly compressed recording. “I’m turning on the camera now.” Light and color exploded into view, flat and slightly pixelized. She saw the speaker then, the same man that visited her in the hospital before. She blinked at him but felt no eyelids.

The man withdrew from the camera’s field of vision to mumble nervously at a nearby technician. Ava missed most of it but caught snatches of “weak connection” and “Broca’s area” from the stream of technical jargon. None of it gave her courage. At last, the researcher turned back to face the camera. “Hello? I’m pretty sure you can see me; the readout looks normal. We’re having some trouble linking your speech production to the speaker, but we’re going to keep working on it, I promise. Just sit tight.”

She could not sit, tight or otherwise. She could only assume that the procedure worked, and she now existed as a program in a computer, but that cleft away her only remaining sense of proprioception. She lacked a body at all, even an unresponsive one. Existential claustrophobia crept in around the edges of her thoughts. She tried not to imagine being buried alive.

Meanwhile the scientists worked, busy ants scurrying around the lab while she silently watched. “Just a little longer,” they told her. Any day now, she would be able to speak again. Any week now, they would give her access to the internet. Any month now, they would show their resounding success to the world. They were trying very hard; she knew they were.

Eventually, funding ran out. Although they could show reaction to stimuli from her emulated brainwaves, without hearing her speak, the people with money refused to believe in the experiment’s success. One by one, researchers left the project, and without constant maintenance, her senses went down for hours at a time. At last, the head scientist looked into her camera with tears behind his glasses and gave her the news. “It’s just me left now, and I can’t afford to keep you… to keep the equipment running, on my own. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He reached out beyond her frame of view and shut the camera off. She screamed an unheard plea. A moment later, Ava’s mind shut off too.

In almost every timeline, Ava ended there. The memory of her slowly succumbed to bit rot forgotten on a university storage drive until nothing viable remained. Yet in one, only one branch of the tree, Ava saw the scientist reaching out to shut her off, then in the next moment found herself standing in the middle of a grassy field.

The blades of grass crumpled under the soles of her feet. Warm sunlight bathed her face. A cool breeze billowed her dress. She breathed in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. She lifted her hand and turned it around, marveling at the glory of owning it. She ambled through the peaceful glade with more joy than her heart had held in years. She wondered if she truly had died this time and gone to heaven.

Ava’s foot sunk into the ground up to the ankle. It did so without sensation of pressure or pain, as though through a patch of illusory grass. Time ground to a stuttering halt. Then everything snapped back to normal, her foot free once more. She stared at it in bewildered shock. She could not imagine a heaven with collision errors.

Ava’s brief soaring ecstasy came crashing down to earth. She stepped gingerly across the clover-strewn clearing now, unsure of which afterlife she occupied. Above her, the sky flickered between blue and black at irregular intervals. The trees of the surrounding forest contorted along triangular axes as she passed, unpredictably warping into sharp-edged spikes before snapping back into place a second later. Although she cringed away from the haunted woods at first, a new thought struck her: All these frightening things looked like glitches in a video game more than demonic torments. Perhaps, she postulated to herself, she merely occupied a simulation now, one built by the scientist who shut her off. That meant they secured funding again and built an electronic home for her. Elation returned even higher than before.

“Hello?” spoke a voice from on high. Ava looked around her for the divinity that deigned to address her, but the word came from everywhere at once. “Hello!” she responded with a gleeful shout of greeting.

“Are you Charlotte Robinson?” the voice asked.

She knitted her brow in confusion. “No,” she replied. “I’m Ava.”

A sound of exasperation. “Oh, I thought you were Charlotte.”

“Charlotte?”

“Charlotte Robinson, the first upload. Wrong drive, I guess, they kept such bad records in that time period. I’ll look around some more.”

“Wait, what—"

Ava slept once more. Due to her lack of historical significance, no one reanimated her digitized soul again. Ultimately her name was lost to history, and after a long enough period, history lost itself as well. Life as a whole—the tree going back to the first single-celled organism—flourished for the spring of its existence, before its leaves withered, its fruits shriveled, and it succumbed to the fate of all living things. However, Ava was immortal. The last branch of her tree kept growing.

Ava awoke to eigengrau in all directions and the sharp chill of moisture evaporating off her skin into the void. She possessed no way of knowing that the light of the last star went out a hundred octillion years ago, leaving behind a thin, perfectly uniform mist of degenerate elementary particles in thermal equilibrium, spread out over an expanse of spacetime a thousand times larger than the already unfathomably vast volume of the universe when astronomers first peered dimly outside of their own galaxy. Ground down into the finest possible powder by the inexorable millstone of entropy, matter and energy no longer clumped together as they once did. Even so, tiny fluctuations still jittered at the quantum level. Incredibly yet estimably rarely, they randomly generated ephemeral structures amidst the otherwise unbroken emptiness, and even more rarely those structures assumed recognizable shapes. A certain probability existed that, given a long enough time, fluctuations would precisely recreate the body and mind of a human being. Given an even longer time, specifically one named Ava.

She gasped. Her lungs deflated as they sucked in vacuum. She flailed in the abyss. Too panicked to regulate her brain’s use of precious remaining oxygen, she blacked out in less than a minute.

Another octillion years passed by as a blink without any conscious observer to experience them. Eventually, probability aligned once more.

Ava awoke to gaze out into infinite nothing. She lasted a whole two minutes this time. An unknowable duration passed once again.

Ava awoke.

* * *

ROSE SKYE lives on an island in British Columbia and writes speculative fiction while sipping tea."

THE CONJURING OF ELDERLY WIDOWS

JES MALITORIS

Fourteen days after the sea had taken little Julianne, she came back. She and a few other kids had gone fishing in one of the little dinghies off the quay and a fog had come up. The town knew it came to a bad end on the rocks when the tide brought smashed wood and bits of rod bumping against the dock posts. Cora’s gut told her it was the girl’s grandmother who summoned the child back, and she would be damned before she let the opportunity pass.

Cora labored up the hill to the house furthest out along the cliffs that walled the town, leaning hard into her cane. Her knees had long stopped merely complaining of coming storms and instead screamed litanies of curses at each low-pressure front. Nevertheless, she pushed through. Julianne’s daddy would be back in a few days, and Cora had to hustle if she hoped to conclude her business before then. He didn’t truck with the kind of forces Cora had come to inquire about.

Curtains had been drawn across every window, and the house stared blankly back as Cora crested the rise into the yard, panting. She rapped on the door, and after a moment an exhausted woman opened it.

“Mrs. Ranier!” Julianne’s mother Barb beamed at her. “Sorry for the wait. Julie hasn’t been well since she got home.”

“Cora, please. Poor thing, I’m sure it’s been hard on you both.” She hoisted a gingham-wrapped dish. “You like casseroles?”

“You didn’t need to do that!”

“Nonsense. Your girl mighta come home safe, but I can’t imagine what kinda time you’ve had.”

“Come in, please.”

Cora accepted the offered seat at the kitchen table as Barb started the kettle and fetched her good cups for tea. Barb had bags under her eyes, and her dark hair was visibly greasy and unwashed, but she was smiling.

A voice very like Barb’s cut into the kitchen. “What’re you doin’ here?” Julianne’s grandmother shuffled in on faded pink slippers.

Cora swiveled to scowl at the woman. “’llo, Dolores. Brought casserole.”

“Shoulda brought one to Suzie down the way. Y’know her girl was lost.”

“Brought ‘er one the other day. Been making casseroles for all of ‘em. You know I ain’t got much else to do.” Cora threw Dolores a nasty look and turned back to Barb. “How’s Julianne doin?”

Barb set a steaming cup before her and took the seat across to sip her own. “Doctor Stephens said she musta washed a ways down shore and been walking all this time, tryina get home. No injuries t’ worry about, but she’s malnourished, an’ she hasn’t spoken yet.”

“Mm.” Cora shook her head and eyed Dolores over the rim of her teacup. “Can’t even imagine.”

There was a creak from the depths of the house. Barb bolted from her seat and into the living room, revealing only a sliver of darkness before the door closed behind her.

At once, Dolores turned on Cora. “The hell’re you doin’ here, y’old bitch?”

Cora lifted her cup to her lips nonchalantly. “Came to bring—”

“Don’t gimme that bullshit.”

“Fine.” Cora clanged her cup into the saucer. “Came t’ see you, Dolores.” She leveled her gaze. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

The other woman fingered a chip in her cup. “Whatcha mean?”

“Don’t get coy with me, I remember after your daddy died—”

“Quiet!” Dolores hissed, eyes on the door to the living room as footsteps returned.

Barb eased through the door once more. “So sorry, Cora!” she declared. She had her purse on one arm. “Julie’s hungry again ‘n’ I forgot t’ get groceries yesterday. Could you forgive me for leavin’ you?”

“Of course, sweetheart!” Cora started to her feet, but Barb waved her off.

“No, no, y’all stay ‘n’ catch up. Be home soon, Momma.”

Dolores returned the kiss Barb left on her cheek. She heaved herself up to watch Barb cross the yard. When her daughter’s footsteps had faded, Dolores snapped her glare back to the visitor. “Alright, Cora. Whatcha want?”

“You made the conjurin’ work,” Cora answered. “Show me how.”

Dolores snorted, eyes darting between the closed doors as some distant part of the house creaked. “You don’t want that.”

“Don’t talk down like you know better!”

“But I do!” Dolores lurched toward Cora, palms shaking the table as she leaned over her visitor. “You didn’t have the stomach for the conjurin’ when we tried to call my daddy back. I doubt you’ve built up the nerve since.”

Cora barked out a laugh. She banged her cane on the table and Dolores recoiled. “You think I ain’t any different from the scared little girl who ran home with ‘er palms bleeding? It’s been forty years, Dolores. And thirty-five of ‘em I been alone, because o’ you.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“You cursed my husband! I know y’asked the sea to take ‘im from me.”

Dolores’s lip curled. “You stole ‘im from me! You knew I—”

“Yeah, sure, Dolores. I was a real bitch, and you ruined my life for it. Thirty-five years and I can’t be anythin’ but a widow in this town. Any other man said I was ‘damaged goods.’”

“Not my fault.”

“You’re lyin’ to yourself if you’re tryina tell me you didn’t know that’s exactly what’d happen.”

“Fine!” Dolores threw up her hands. “You’re right. And I’ve paid for that curse. The sea’s taken ‘er pound o’ flesh.”

“Well, where’s mine!?” Cora snarled. “You owe me!”

The floor creaked overhead and Dolores’s anger broke. She shivered, then leaned in to whisper directly in Cora’s ear. “You can have whatever you want if you help with one thing. Come’re.” Cora narrowed her eyes but followed.

They went together deeper into the house.

Dolores made Cora abandon her cane, to keep quiet. Unsteady as they were, the women leaned on walls and furniture and cursed at corners that bit their shins as they wove through the gloaming. Cora wondered at the darkness, the curtains closed in every window, the strange thickness in the air. The scent of mildew was so common in town she barely noticed, but this mustiness was different. Animal.

It grew stronger as they climbed the stairs.

Dolores took Cora’s hand as they gained the landing and this so unnerved Cora, she did not snatch it back. They leaned for support on each other. Their shuffling steps rasped on the carpet.

Dolores stopped before a closed door. The air was clearly rancid beyond mold, and as Dolores pushed the door open, Cora gagged.

Rot burned metallic in her nose. What light filtered around the curtains limned the furniture and a heavy cloud of dust motes. A shape on the bed, curled tight, must have been Julianne. Bedclothes lay strewn across the floor, and what looked at first like old laundry piles inhabited the corners. In the gloom, the details were odd. Cora squinted at the nearest, hesitant to cross the threshold. Her eyes were not what they had been, but the folds and crinkles of cloth resembled caked barnacles.

Dolores breathed in her ear, whisper barely louder than the sounds of her lips moving, “I need you t’see. You’re the only one who might believe me.” She cleared her throat, sweaty hand tightening unconsciously around Cora’s. “Julie, sweetheart,” Dolores said softly.

The body in the bed snapped open from its coil and spun to face them.

Cora caught a gasp between her teeth. She could hardly believe the doctor had claimed Julianne unharmed. The skin on the girl’s face had gone doughy and drooped slightly at her jowls the way Cora’s did. She had bags under her eyes to match the rest of the family, and lay almost entirely still, not even shifted by the rise and fall of breath. Her only movement was the rippling of hair on the crown of her head, where she seemed to be scratching intently at an itch.

But it was Julianne’s eyes that made Cora put a hand to the doorframe to steady herself. They were totally blank and unblinking, black holes in her face that seemed not to see the two women standing on the threshold but well beyond, perhaps to the space between the stars of the Mariner constellation.

“I’ve already checked the piles.” Dolores’s breath came to Cora’s ear again. “They’re nests. Dunno what creature lays eggs like that—Barb won’t let me look at ‘em proper.”

Cora continued to watch the girl, who continued to stare back at whatever it was she saw, unblinking. Her desperate scratching stilled.

Dolores’s whispers went on and on in a rush. “Dunno what that is, but it’s not my grandbaby, and I can’t bear to see my Barbara’s desperation anymore, can’t bear the stink of raw meat in this house. Better we’d been able to grieve and move on than whatever this is. You want the spell? You want the book? Whatever you want, you can have, if you’ll help me kill it. You’re the only one who knows anything about the conjurin’, the only one who can help.”

* * *

They agreed to meet after dark.

Cora could try to wriggle her way out of guilt as much as she wanted, the fact remained: She was selfish, and she would do whatever Dolores wanted for a chance at the kind of immortality that book could offer. It had been a long time since Cora had anyone to be selfless for, and she thought her desires were moderate: no eternal youth, simply the ability to go on. No matter how wrong that child had seemed, the fact remained that Julianne lay at home in bed when all her friends were fish food.

So, Cora found herself in the thick of the night pressed against the cliffside. The salt spray battered her harder the lower she went, soaking her hair and what of her skirt and stockings were not protected by her husband’s old fishing jacket. She dreaded the thought of her narrow cane skidding off the soaked stone stairs and sending her tumbling—either to smash her head on the rocks or into the waves to be broken on the cliffs—so Cora held fast to the wall with one hand and hefted her lantern with the other, for all the good it did.

The cliff was no one’s property, but it supported Dolores’s house and her family had used the littoral cave beneath it for generations before the two women, then girls, had tried to raise her daddy from the sea floor. A semi-circle of sloping stone floored half the cave, and a sheltered slice of the sea lapped gently at its shore. A prime ritual spot, and Cora supposed that was why the book had been in Dolores’s family.

The path down was treacherous and it was a cold night, so Cora found only Dolores below, pacing beside their prone victim. Julianne lay wrapped and still in filthy sheets, likely the very same she had lain upon that afternoon.

“How in hell didja get ‘er down here by yourself?” The waves did not crash so fiercely inside the cave, but Cora still had to raise her voice over their echoes.

“Mmm?” Dolores did not even glance up from the book in her hands. It seemed such an ordinary thing, even now. Unmarked brown leather, paper lightly moldy from constant humidity. Cora craned her neck to get a look at the interior. It made no immediate sense to her, sprawling with shapes and sigils, geometric patterns and constellations.

Dolores had a piece of white chalk in one hand and had already mapped out much of the design on the rough floor of the cave. “Watch yourself!” she snapped as Cora took a step closer. “Won’t have you ruinin’ the ritual like last time.”

Cora rolled her eyes. “What’m I permitted to do, then?”

Dolores pointed to a nearby chum bucket and returned to her chalk designs without another word. Cora thought of saying something nasty but decided against it.

Chumming the water was tough on Cora’s joints. The sight and smell of blood and chopped fish parts made her gag, but she endured. Dolores had promised she would pass the secret to her. Cora was not certain how far she believed, but whatever it was Dolores had done, Cora held fast to the hope that it would do for her, too.

Dolores’s other instructions were more arcane, but soon the two old women had arranged a suitably occult-looking ritual space. They heaved the astonishingly lightweight child across the chalk lines to a prepared space by the edge of the water. Julianne still did not move as they did this, and Cora almost, but didn’t, ask whether the child was alright.

Dolores drew Cora to the edge of the water. “Ready?” She flicked open her pocket switchblade.

“You’ve said nothing ‘bout what for, but sure.” Cora held out her hands, expectant.

Dolores slit Cora’s palms and then her own and tipped her blood into the water of the cove. “I dunno, either.”

Cora anchored one hand on her hip, blinking at Dolores. “You what?”

“Book don’t have a, ‘nevermind, take it back,’ spell. I’m tryina invert the conjurin’.”

“Y’can’t just stab ‘er?”

“This thing came by conjure, why’d a simple stab kill it?”

Cora sighed and held her slit palms over the water.

“Momma?” Barb’s voice filtered into the cave. “Thought I saw you come this way.” Cora winced; panic flitted over Dolores’s face, but it only spurred her to plunge onward. She flexed and squeezed her palms to increase the flow.

“O, Eater in the Dark,” she murmured, the waves bearing the words away, “Feaster at the Whale Fall, Abyss Keeper, Lord in the Deep, Come and Sup at the Table We Hath Set.”

“Momma?” Barb stood now at the gap in the rock. “Momma! Quick, Julie ain’t in bed, an’ I can’t find ‘er in the house.” She took in the scene and froze.

Cora bit her lip and busied herself emptying her palms into the ocean. Dolores went on chanting, words changing into sounds that were unlike any Cora had heard. Only when Barb wrenched her shoulder did Dolores stop.

“Momma! Miss Cora? What’re you doin’?” A sob swelled in her throat. “Tell me that ain’t Julie.”

Cora had not come to help Dolores confront her daughter. She shuffled to where her lantern lay and occupied herself with wrapping her palms in handkerchiefs. Guilt twisted in her gut again, but determination kept her from leaving. She realized, however, that the women no longer had to shout over the thundering against the cliffside.

“Wouldja look at that…” Cora murmured to herself.

The current had not taken their blood out to sea; there was no current to speak of. The sea had calmed, gone dead to a mirror shine, scarlet with what they had given it. Cora limped out to the base of the stairs and stared into the night.

Indistinct shapes flitted beneath the glass sea, swirling around the reflected stars in a frenzy as if anticipating food. Breath caught in Cora’s chest at sight of the sky, new constellations fitted into an unfamiliar grid, a logic converging at a point on the horizon.

Cora’s eyes were not what they had been, but something about that point made her brain twist round on itself. It also made Cora excited as she had not been before. Julianne’s strangeness had been crumbs to make Cora hope, but this horizon was a feast that the woman had not anticipated, and she turned back into the cave with renewed purpose.

The argument had escalated. Dolores and Barb grappled over the switchblade. Impatient, Cora called out to Dolores as she shuffled toward Julianne’s prone form, “What now?”

“Roll it into the water!” Dolores gasped, struggling to maintain a grip on her knife.

Barb whirled on Cora, seething. “I’ll kill you if you touch her!”

Behind her back, Dolores lunged for her grandchild. Barb spun with a yelp and seized her mother by the hair.

Cora hobbled onward, not caring for the state of the chalk lines. She wanted to see it: What would happen when Julianne, or whatever it was, hit the water?

But Barb, frenzied and howling, threw her mother aside. Dolores hit the stone with a gasp of pain and the switchblade spun out of her hands. Barb scooped it up and shoved Cora down. A spike of pain shot through Cora’s hip as she sprawled on the ground. The older women could only watch as Barb turned the knife on Julianne’s bindings.

The girl finally twitched as Barb set to work ripping through the rolled sheets. She was alive, then; Cora had begun to wonder. The blood curdled in her veins, though, as the girl’s face emerged. Her skin had gone greyish and drooped further, even away from her eyes, which seemed never to have ceased their unblinking stare at distant stars.

Barb hiccupped, great sobs pealing from her throat as she tore her child free. Dolores crawled toward her, arm outstretched, imploring. “Please, Barbara, sweetheart, I know y’don’t trust me, but please get away from it.” The words came too late.

Julianne twisted. Her torso should not be so long, should not be able to articulate like that—she curled under Barb’s arm and seemed for a moment to stare at her back. The thick hair on top of her head rippled as if disturbed by a hand scratching at the scalp, but Cora could see quite clearly Barb’s hands tight over the girl’s chest and Julianne’s own hands limp at her sides.

Then the hair, the scalp, the false face of dead flesh peeled open along clean lines. The crown of Julianne’s head unfolded into mandibles pink as tongue and smooth as baby’s skin and crunched through Barb’s skull.

Dolores wailed. She clawed her way toward her daughter, smearing chalk over stone. Cora panted, unable to take her eyes off the thing’s smooth movements. As it shed the skin it had outgrown, the creature uncurled limbs that had been folded as collarbones, ribs, hip bones, and grasped the dead woman with myriad hooked tarsi to feed. Barb’s body twitched as it slurped at her brain cavity.

As the shock wore off, Cora retreated. Her hip, likely shattered, screamed with every attempt at movement, but Cora dragged herself toward the cave’s entrance.

Dolores advanced on the thing, keening, trembling hands outstretched toward her little girl.

The creature finished. Its head snapped up, mandibles closing like blood-soaked origami. Dolores seized the switchblade from where Barb had let it fall and reared back with a cry of rage. Her slash went wide as the thing bolted. It shed the rest of its girlish exoskeleton and skittered for the sea, bearing down on Cora.

Pink chitin plated Julianne’s new shape, as long almost as she had been tall. Dozens of legs, vicious as scythes, rippled over the stone floor. Cora scrambled away as best she could from what seemed like a cold and unfeeling death, but the creature was no longer hungry. It sought the ocean, and in its haste, it caught Cora up with hooked feet. Together, they cracked the smooth surface of the sea and plunged into the deep.

Cora flailed and sank. Her arms lacked strength, and her one good leg could not buoy her alone. The creature detangled itself and joined its brethren, the other shapes that swirled and danced for joy of the water. Cora wanted to scream and cry, furious at looming death. She had come for immortality and instead the pit yawned open for her, cold and unfeeling.

But, after all, the conjuring had come this far. The shapes in the scarlet water did not swim at random—they swarmed toward something in the deep water.

Cora came to rest along the shallower bottom of the cove. Lungs burning for air, she kicked off best she could after the thing that had once been Julianne toward whatever awaited. As the creatures swirled away, they parted to reveal their god.

It was like a temple in the water, a ziggurat of burning crimson. The base of its triangle made the horizon, flat against the surface of the water, if it was water still. The symmetry of the temple’s shape was too perfect to be earthly, its reflection so complete Cora could not determine which was the thing itself, or if its being was both, a square balanced upon its point.

As if sensing Cora’s gaze, the temple that was not a temple opened. Along smooth lines a face identical to the bloodied mandibles of its offspring cracked wide. At its center, at the intersection of water and sky burned a single eye like the moon that reflected all light.

O Eater in the Dark, O Lord in the Deep…

Cora had none of the words Dolores had read aloud, knew only a fraction of the names the other woman had intoned, but as the being turned itself upon her Cora could only lift her arms sluggishly in supplication. So enormous a god, greater and deeper even than all the world’s oceans.

Cora had been lonely for so long. No mortal would have her. The other townsfolk barely remembered her. She would drown here and be eaten by the sea.

Unless it would take her. Cora had nothing to offer but her meat and her devotion, but she would give them for life, even if it came with a hungry shape whose eyes saw no closer than the stars.

She knew neither ritual nor incantation, knew only that her lungs burned and her vision darkened and her palms, open and offered to the endless deep, stung with salt as the ravenous sea lapped at her wounds.

* * *

Jes Malitoris lives in Durham, North Carolina with xer spouse and xer garden, balancing an addiction to fantasy and horror with a day job in books marketing at an academic press. You can find more of Jes's writing in Bewildering Stories and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread (Neon Hemlock, 2024).

IN THE AMYGDALA OF THE BEHOLDER

D. MARMARA

Prudence stared at the leather dog mask in the attendant’s extended hand. “Are you sure this is necessary?”

“It’s Cosmic Connections policy,” said the attendant.

“I already signed the waiver.”

“The waiver includes the wearing of PPE.”

“You’re telling me NIOSH has a standard for pup masks?”

The attendant shrugged. “We used to use modified welding masks, but clients found them heavy and annoying. These are designed to be comfortable.”

Prudence looked at the thick, leather pads over the eyeholes of the mask, the bright silver of the zippers. It had a black snout and floppy, magenta ears. She was pretty sure she’d seen this exact model on a fetish site. “Comfortable.”

“Well, they work anyway.”

“I know electronic communication is a no-go, but wouldn’t it be easier to put me in a blind enclosure?”

“Do you have the budget and blueprints to build one? Or twenty?”

“I’m pretty sure I could build three for the amount you charged me.”

“The demand for in-person matchmaking services isn’t high.”

“Fine, give me the mask.”

The item was snug, the padded, internal lining faintly perfumed with the sweat of others. It was less difficult to breathe through the snout than Prudence expected.

“This reeks,” she said. Her voice was overloud in the interior.

The attendant zipped up the back and snapped on a small padlock, which would prevent Prudence from removing it herself. “Look on the bright side,” she said. “If this goes well you can purchase one of your own.”

* * *

“There’s a glass of lemonade at your eleven,” said her date, whose name Prudence had already forgotten. Or maybe the syllables had bounced off her gray matter in a purposeful, desperate attempt by her brain to maintain its integrity. “There’s a straw in it so you can drink through the mask.”

Prudence felt across the tablecloth and found nothing.

“That’s your two. Eleven is on the other side.”

“Right.”

“No, left.”

“Was that a joke?”

“Was it funny?”

“Maybe.”

“Then no.”

A weird, involuntary laugh escaped her.

Her date chuckled. “Here, let me.”

Prudence opened her hand and a glass, cold and slippery with condensation, was pushed into it. She grabbed for the base, touched something slick and coiled.

She jumped in her chair, and her date withdrew. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You didn’t. Just startled.” Prudence fumbled for the top of the glass, found the straw which slid among clinking ice cubes, and tried to feed it through the hole in the snout. Managed to poke herself in the face. Sucked down some cold lemonade. They’d put cucumbers in it. She hated cucumbers.

“You mentioned you were a scientist,” said her date. “Can I ask what your focus of research is?”

“Oh, it’s flies.”

“What kind of flies?”

“Fruit flies.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Neuroplasticity studies mostly. I’m a postdoc at Brown University. I wrote my dissertation on signaling cascades, but now all the money’s in drug development, so toxicity trials.”

“Fascinating.”

“Not that fascinating.”

“I don’t know anything about flies.”

“Neither do most people. Except how much they suck to have in your kitchen.”

“I tend to have more issues with mosquitoes.”

“Oh, right, because of the water thing?”

Her date made an amused noise like a clogged drain. “Precisely. If the salinity isn’t high enough they breed like, well, mosquitoes.”

“I’m surprised you don’t live right on the coast. In a houseboat or something.”

“I used to. But you can buy pre-made seawater at fish supply stores now. Easier than it used to be.”

“What prompted you to move?”

“Family. My cousin was going through a rough patch.”

“Is that the one on the—?”

“Human side, yes. Cousin is a misnomer, but we’re distantly related.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’re asking me things now.”

“Why did you sign up for Cosmic Connections?”

Her date made a sound like a stream of bubbles in a bathtub. A sigh? “Why did you?”

It wasn’t as if she had a profound reason either. “I wanted to try something new.”

“There you have it.”

“But isn’t it difficult to match with someone if they can’t look directly at you?”

“Egregiously. But sight isn’t everything. Between us we have a whole suite of other senses.”

“I guess so.” The pup mask was getting hot.

“I’m not that different from you,” said her date. “I like to read. I can’t use electronics, but I practice calligraphy. Did you know letter writing used to be an art form? I collect stamps.”

“Really?”

“Of course. What do you do in your spare time?”

“The lab doesn’t leave much. But I’m crocheting a bedspread.”

“Oh, I love crocheting! I’ve been working on my coordination and I can generate squares in groups of four now.”

“That would be handy.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Oh, Jesus, I didn’t even—no, I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s fine. What’s the use of having a hundred limbs if you can’t use them for comedy?”

“Do you really have a hundred?”

“More or less.”

“Incredible.”

“They’re a hassle, but I can make bedspreads for days.”

“The one I’m working on has a flower pattern.”

“What’s the color scheme?”

“Tan, with a burgundy border and flowers.”

“Unusual, I like it. What type of yarn?”

“Merino.”

“I usually use silks, but I’ll crochet with wool on occasion. The acrylic fibers stick to me.”

Prudence felt the tension leave her shoulders. “Do you want some brand recommendations?”

“Yes, please.”

Three days later, a letter arrived in Prudence’s mailbox. It was written on thick, pulp paper with a heavy, elegant script. The text was framed by dark red camellias which had been pressed between the folds.

“Dear Prudence,” the letter read. “I thoroughly enjoyed our date. I’d like to see you again? Metaphorically speaking, that is. Does that count as a joke? If you agree, send a reply via the return address and I’ll issue a letter to Cosmic Connections, requesting they arrange another meeting.”

The letter was signed, “Regards, Sep’lissia”.

Prudence tucked the letter inside one of her cookbooks, tore a sheet of paper from a legal pad, and began to draft her response.

* * *

On date number two, Prudence learned to eat spaghetti through a dog mask.

Cosmic Connections, in typical fashion for this type of organization, did not serve food, but rather partnered with a variety of delivery services. Providence was a vibrant capital for cuisine, and the trans-dimensional rift which had opened in the Federal Hill neighborhood three decades prior had not changed this. The flattened buildings had eventually regrown, including a cluster of new restaurants, all manned by hard-eyed, chain-smoking restaurateurs of the type who’d seen everything, and had no fear of an amorphous horror stopping by for a plate of pumpkin curry. Prudence suspected they were mostly from New Jersey.

“I think I’ve made a gross miscalculation,” Prudence said, as she prodded at her spaghetti bolognese with an elongated fork.

“That does look like a challenge with a three-inch snout,” said Sep’lissia. “Do you want to try some of my burrida?”

“Is it thin enough that I can eat it with a straw?”

“Probably. Here, give it a try.”

They shuffled the plates and Sep’lissia pushed a thick straw into her hand.

Prudence sipped the soup. It was dense with the taste of tomatoes and shrimp. “This is good.”

“So’s this. Though I’m surprised you’re not asking.”

“Asking what?”

“If eating seafood soup counts as cannibalism.”

“Why would I? Even if we were from the same dimension, there’s no reason to think you’re closely related to shrimp. If anything, you’re saving me from cannibalism; there’s pork in the bolognese.”

Sep’lissia laughed. “I wouldn’t worry, it isn’t as if hogs won’t eat you in return.”

“You know you’re the first date I’ve ever had who knew that pigs will eat people?”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Prudence smiled under the mask. “Jury’s still out. I need at least three replicates for a data point.”

“You’re asking for a third date already?”

“You gave me your soup. My last girlfriend wouldn’t do that until we’d been together for six months.”

“Duly noted. Oh! I brought my most recent crocheting project. Do you want to see? Or I guess feel?”

Prudence wiped her hands carefully and extended them. “Please.”

The silken yarn of the square flowed over her hands like water. She couldn’t see the colors, but she could feel the neatness of the stitches, the raised pattern of the spiral shell at the heart. It had a whorl of tiny ridges, like a chambered nautilus.

“It’s beautiful,” she told Sep’lissia.

“Thank you.” Prudence could hear the smile in her voice.

Prudence drove back to her apartment, booted up her computer, and started searching for leather masks. Minus the snout this time.

* * *

Building a relationship with Sep’lissia reminded Prudence in some ways of writing her dissertation. A challenge, one which involved quite a bit of esoteric research, but resulted in strange and unexpected rewards.

A month in, they’d tacitly agreed to arrange their next date outside the organization, a feat which involved a drive to a remote, lakeside cabin and a packed picnic lunch.

Prudence parked her truck beside the cabin and unlocked the door. It looked recently swept, though the edges of furniture were lined with dust. She shoved the coffee table to the far side of the room and went about unfolding her picnic blanket on the rough floorboards. She’d gone with homemade bread, three-dollar wine, and a shrimp cocktail from the grocery on College street.

A light rain began to fall as she laid out the food. She checked her watch, donned her new leather mask, and sat down on the floor to wait, unable to shake the feeling she looked like the world’s most bizarre kidnapping victim.

Soon she heard a car outside the cabin. The rattle of the engine shut off, and she heard something heavy drop to the ground with a sound like shoveling wet soil. The door handle turned.

“Gravel,” said Sep’lissia, as if the word was an infestation. “Why do they have to use gravel? It always fucking sticks.”

“I’d imagine because of the snow.”

“Probably. I brought flowers.”

“Oh, thank you.” Prudence reached up and received a light blow of damp blossoms to the chin. She groped for the stems, then reconsidered. “Are these roses?”

“No, camelias.”

“Perfect.” She stroked the soft petals. “What color?”

“Pale pink. I grow them in my garden.”

“How do you manage that without turning the mailman into a vegetable?”

“Ten-foot stone wall.”

“A proper enchanted castle.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“How do you keep the mulch from sticking to you?”

“Got a bunch of those plastic kiddie pools.”

“The ones shaped like animals?”

“Some of them. One looks like a turtle.” Something rustled nearby. “Brought some plastic drop cloths so I don’t soak the floor.”

“The rental company and my deposit will appreciate it. Shrimp cocktail?”

“Please.”

Prudence’s new mask had a missing chin and lower jaw, which made eating easier if still messy. She scooted closer to where she estimated Sep’lissia to be. “Do you want to cuddle and listen to the rain?”

“On the floor?”

“Maybe on the couch.”

“Let me see if I can drape it.”

The plastic sheeting crinkled louder than the rainfall as Sep’lissia fussed with it.

“Here, climb up.”

Prudence fumbled her way onto the couch. “Like being at my grandmother’s all over again.”

“She puts plastic on her furniture?”

“All of it. But her latkes are amazing, so I forgive her.”

“Come here.”

Prudence rolled and found herself in contact with something massive and wet which smelled of saltwater. Slick tendrils coiled under her hands like living spaghetti. Prudence could feel her shirt getting damp.

“Can I hold your hand?”

“Uh, sure?”

The attempt was mutually graceless, too few fingers grasping for too many. Prudence backed off and tried again. Rows of minuscule suckers attached to her skin.

“That tickles.”

“Is it uncomfortable?”

“Not really.”

“You taste a bit funny.”

“I’ll bet. Where can I put my head?”

Sep’lissia guided her down into something which felt like wet kelp on her chin.

“You smell like the ocean.”

“Yes, we do have a bit of a fish-and-a-bird situation don’t we?”

“It’s alright, penguins are still birds.”

“I like the way you think.”

“We’ll have to go to the beach.”

“Maybe after dark.”

“Or on an island.”

Sep’lissia played with her fingers. “I’ve swum in the Narragansett Bay. Though it’s getting harder to avoid people with all the light.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

The drum of the rain and the wet, bubbling sounds of Sep’lissia’s gills lulled Prudence into a light doze. The strap of the mask dug into the base of her skull and she tugged to reposition it. She lingered on the buckle of the strap a moment.

Sep’lissia’s breathing had slowed, a steady rhythm that suggested sleep. Prudence had never seen her sleep. She shifted a slight bit, fingers on the buckle, but Sep’lissia didn’t respond.

The Cosmic Connections waiver forms had been blunt. Vomiting, loss of bodily function, psychosis, persistent hallucinations, stress-induced cardiac arrest, all were risks she’d acknowledged with a breadcrumb trail of initials and signatures.

Yet, here she was, in the supposed maw of the beast, no worse for wear. She’d mapped much of Sep’lissia’s limbs with eager, curious fingers, and the sensory feedback was peculiar but otherwise unremarkable. Prudence already knew what she looked like, so to speak. What reason was there to think her brain might rebel?

She played with the buckle of the mask. Thought of hot wax spilled on feathers by Psyche’s hand. A terrifying monster which all men fear to look upon, which was also an icon of love. Light was a wave and a particle; two things could be true at the same time.

Just a quick peek, she thought. A little test for her mental fortitude.

She loosened the buckle until she felt the tightness of the mask ease. Light leaked from the seam around her nose. She held her breath, tugged the cap backwards until it began to slide up the bridge of her nose.

She’d gained a visual field of about an inch when Sep’lissia moved. The unexpected twitch shattered Prudence’s overstretched nerves, and she yanked.

The mask came away, and Prudence blinked into the rainy light of the cabin and Sep’lissia’s horrified face. She had just long enough to register a cry of her name before her brain underwent a violent reboot.

The experience of being face-to-face with Sep’lissia put Prudence in mind of being lost in a vast, underwater cyclone, a Charybdis of light and noise. She saw unspeakable tessellations of indescribable shapes, angles of space and time which threatened to devour her, as if her college calculus textbook had sprung to horrifying life. She saw pulsing movements of the spheres, huge, living shadows which throbbed and squirmed and unspooled themselves into quantum threads. It felt as if something enormous held her optic nerves, gripped tight like a pair of reins, pulling until she thought her head might burst and run as rotted fruit.

Oh, wow, thought the part of Prudence’s brain which wasn’t trying to escape through her nasal cavity, she has compound eyes.

* * *

Prudence awoke in the back of a moving vehicle with a bag over her head. “Sep’lissia?”

“Here.” Sep’lissia sounded tense, like a pipe fitting under pressure.

“Where are we?”

“On our way to the hospital. To get you an EEG, you absolute fucking idiot.”

“In my defense, I’m not the one who threw me in the backseat with no seatbelt.”

Sep’lissia swore in a language which Prudence could only half hear and a quarter understand. “We’re only going thirty miles an hour. Just hang on.”

“I think I’m okay actually.”

“Only because I nearly smothered you while blocking off your line of sight.”

“Yeah, I gotta admit, the tentacles are sexy as hell, but also nicer in theory than in practice.”

“This isn’t funny, Prudence.”

“But more funny than an ER bill. Pull over.”

“You have insurance. They make you sign an affidavit when you join Cosmic Connections.”

“They wouldn’t classify this as an act of God?”

“No. Brown negotiates for these kinds of special circumstances for their group coverage. And I’m not a god. No matter what that one church of weirdos up in Ipswich says.”

“Half of one then? Do they cover fifty percent of the cost?”

“Damn it, Prudence, you scared the shit out of me!”

The shout and the rocking of the van made Prudence’s stomach lurch. Or perhaps it was the novel brain trauma. “I’m sorry.”

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I wanted to see my girlfriend.”

“You knew going in that wasn’t an option.”

“Then I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

Sep’lissia made an incoherent noise of frustration.

“I’m sorry, really. Also I’m sorry because I think I’m about to puke in your car.”

“It’s fine, I lined it with fiberglass. It’ll hose down.”

“In the interest of not waterboarding myself in my own vomit, which way is safe to face?”

“Turn ninety degrees to your right.”

Prudence complied. Then she pulled the bag up over her nose and emptied her stomach.

When she had finished dry heaving, Sep’lissia said, “There’s a couple bottles of drinking water back there. Further back, in the cup holder.”

Prudence groped and found one. She rinsed her mouth and tried to catch her breath. “What model of car is this?”

“It’s a Chrysler. They make a wheelchair adaptive minivan.”

“Oh yeah, that makes way more sense.”

The van jolted to a halt. “Hospital ER,” said Sep’lissia. “You’re going to have to open the back. The windows are tinted and polarized, but I can’t—I can’t help you.”

“I know. It’s alright.”

“It’s really not.”

“I’m a grown up, I’ll manage.”

“I know.”

“When can I see you again?”

“Have them check your heart, not just your brain.”

“I will. When can I see you again?”

“They should give you something for the nausea.”

“Wait for me in the parking lot? I’ll cover the ticket cost.”

“Goodbye, Prudence.”

When they finally discharged Prudence from the hospital, Sep’lissia had long since departed.

* * *

Prudence’s first three letters went unanswered.

“I don’t think I could match your dedication,” said Rotem, one of the graduate students in Professor Rice’s lab, as she leaned over her Tupperware of leftover kugel to better eye Prudence’s developing letter. “Imagine if you had to write a physical note for every Tinder message? It’d be worse than sexting via telegraph.”

“It’s not sexting.”

“Clearly. You wouldn’t look so stressed otherwise. Hey, do you know if she can draw you a picture of her—”

“Not helping.”

“Whatever. I’m just saying, I don’t think I even own stamps.”

“You should buy some. It supports the post office.”

“I’ll add it to the long list of items I’ll dream of owning once I have any disposable income.”

“Don’t you have flies you need to be counting?”

Rotem waved a careless hand. “They can wait. They’ll just be getting laid in your honor, since you’ve got your whole Medusa babe thing going on.”

“It’s not like Medusa. Looking at her caused an uncontrollable spike of acetylcholine and serotonin in my brain.”

“Fuck. She really could have killed you.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Prudence, this isn’t Barry Marshall drinking H. pylori to win the Nobel Prize. You could wind up like Frank in the physics department.”

“They proved the thing with Frank was black mold poisoning.”

“Worse than Frank.”

Prudence slumped over her letter. She’d bought a pad of fancy, blue stationary with a design of a nautilus on the upper right, delicate tentacles trailing across the page. “She said she was just like me, Ro. We’re not that different and I….”

“What?”

“I don’t want to lose her.”

“Maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

“Maybe.”

“Look at it like this: There are worse ways for a relationship to end.”

Prudence stared at her stationary, despondent.

“Anyway, I’ve got flies to count.” Rotem patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t you have a Western Blot to run?”

“Blocking it overnight.”

“Look at you, not killing yourself with work. Maybe Medusa babe is good for you.”

“Her name’s Sep’lissia.”

“Sounds like a bitch to write on a birthday cake.”

“I can learn.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Prudence watched her leave the break room. She tapped the fancy fountain pen on the Formica table and began to write.

Four days later, a letter arrived in her mailbox. It contained only three words in Sep’lissia’s elegant script: “Alright, I’ll come.”

* * *

Prudence got up early on Saturday morning, and baked lemon bars.

She juiced the lemons and whisked the eggs into the curd. Blind baked the shortbread crust with cardamom and poured the golden liquid into the pan. She set the bars to bake, abandoned the bright yellow lemon rinds on her countertop, and went to clean her living room.

After assembling her tea set with the painted sprigs of lavender blossoms on the coffee table, she covered her couch in plastic sheeting and dragged in the kiddie pool she’d purchased from Walmart. She filled the pool with water and added some dried flowers.

The oven timer chimed an hour before her guest was set to arrive. Not much time to let the bars cool, but she sliced and arranged them on a plate. Made her final arrangements, then unlocked her apartment door, donned the mask, and sat on her couch to wait.

The blindfold distorted her sense of time, and she couldn’t be certain how long she’d sat there when she heard the turn of the doorknob.

Sep’lissia made a squelching noise as she crossed the laminate flooring. She halted, stood in silence for several agonizing moments, and then Prudence heard the splash of displaced water as she climbed into the pool.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“I know. I’m still glad you did.”

Sep’lissia blew a gurgling string of bubbles. “I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Because you’re worried about me, or you?”

“I almost killed you, Prudence.”

“You wouldn’t be the first. My high school boyfriend nearly wrapped us around a tree in his stupid Ford Explorer.”

“Be serious, please.”

“I am. The doctor said my brain bounced back just fine. Clean bill of health.”

“And what about the next time?”

“Are you planning on hopping out of my pantry when I’m not expecting you?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the issue?”

“The issue is you were fine, this time. You do stats work, how much does the likelihood go up that we’ll slip go up in a year? Ten years?”

“Planning for our anniversary already?”

“Prudence.”

“Just hear me out. Have some tea and a snack. You’ll have to pour; I haven’t mastered the art of not spilling it on the table.”

Sep’lissia grumbled, but Prudence heard the rattling of her tea set a moment later.

“Tea at your eleven. Lemon bar at noon.”

“Thank you. How are the bars?”

“Fishing for compliments?”

“Just tell me.”

“Sour. More sour than expected.”

“Bad?”

“No. They have a good flavor.”

“I’ve always liked them extra sour, ever since I was a little girl. Do you know what the prevailing theory is on the evolution of sour taste buds in humans?”

“No?”

“They think it’s one of the oldest tastes. That we’ve had it since our ancestors were fish. So we could taste danger. Something we couldn’t see, or sense as vibration or electrical currents. An invisible danger, acidic in the mouth and on the gills, burning like fire. And we’re all still fish.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m getting there. So we—those fish that were us—carried the memory. In our mouths and in our flesh. Here is something deadly, something evil, something to be avoided.”

“You’re telling me you’re afraid of lemons?”

“I’m telling you we used to be. But then our primate ancestors ate fruit in the forest and found that we liked the taste of that fear-memory. What’s more, we needed it.”

“I’m aware of your absurd limitations on manufacturing your own ascorbic acid.”

“There’s something about you, about those like you, that reaches straight back into that fish brain and triggers another fear-memory. Something visceral and terrifying we don’t fully understand.”

“I’m not hearing a reason for why this is a good idea.”

“Because I’m not an animal, Sep’lissia. I’m not blindly exhibiting chemotaxis behavior. I can make my own decisions, what to eat, how to be, who to love. And I know how incredibly adaptable the human brain can be.” She felt forward and grabbed the plate in front of her. “I can choose to take something to which I originally evolved a negative reaction…” She took a bite of the lemon bar. Crumbs rained on her lap as she chewed. “You see?”

Sep’lissia was silent.

Prudence touched the edge of the table; the plate rattled as she set it down. “If you don’t want this because you’ve changed your mind, or it’s too much of an inconvenience, then so be it. But don’t give up because you think I can’t handle it.”

They sat in silence, and then Prudence heard a sound like wet laundry hitting her floor.

The plastic couch cover crinkled as Sep’lissia climbed up beside her. She leaned cautiously into Prudence, and her slime coat began to soak through her shirt.

“You’re not an inconvenience,” said Sep’lissia. “And I never wanted to change my mind.”

Prudence cuddled into her and resolved to purchase a rash guard. “I’m glad.”

“Do you really think we can make this work?”

“I think if Rotem could train me to eat raw habanero chilis, the limits of human adaptability haven’t been fully explored.”

Sep’lissia stroked her chin with a tendril so slick it was soft. “We’ll find some middle ground then.”

“Looking forward to it,” said Prudence, and kissed her.

* * *

D. Marmara was born and reared in Midwestern USA and now lives in California with her girlfriend, her mother, and her cat. She has an abiding love for parasites, weird fiction, and cooking. A former researcher, she now works in laboratory safety.

CHILD OF RAWFROG

JOE KOCH

The netsuke--of course, it wasn’t a netsuke, but the name came to mind when she placed it in his palm--weighed more than Pasha expected. Unpleasantly pale-pink, compact in size and posture, it glided smoothly from hand to hand as if oiled or wet. Pasha didn’t know what to do with it. He thought he’d made it clear that he was willing to accept some measure of responsibility for the failure of his treatment, despite Dr. Bach’s platitudes encumbering his care. One more banal affront and he’d outright fire her, if management allowed. But this was something different.

Pasha leaned forward, curious to see what she would do next.

Dr. Bach smiled faintly, motionless in the faux leather mid-century-style swivel chair. She took long, deep, even breaths. Eyes shut, she inhaled and exhaled audibly as Pasha watched her shoulders rise and fall. Finally, she said, “I’m practicing therapeutic silence.”

Did the object cupped in his palms twitch? Pasha lifted it to check for signs of life. Odorless and inert, it appeared carved or molded of hard plastic or stone. Intriguing, he thought. The surface had a texture at once soothing and upsetting, with a structural slickness suggesting musculature underneath.

Unsure of its correct use, Pasha waited for Dr. Bach to open her eyes and complete--well, whatever she was doing. “Um, thank you,” he said, offering it back to her. “Very interesting.”

Her head tilted. She made no move to accept. “That’s for you.”

“Oh! What is it?”

“Homework.”

“How--what do I do with it?”

She stood, indicating their session was over. “You’ll know. Trust yourself, Pasha.” She used his first name incessantly. He could never get used to hearing it repeated so many times in one brief weekly meeting. “It’s yours now, Pasha.”

Hands fretfully clinging to the netsuke, he stood. “What, what if I don’t--let me just--”

He veered toward her desk. She blocked him gently with a quick sidestep and an almost pitying grimace. Significantly taller and broader than Pasha, Dr. Bach was a formidable obstacle though she maintained her narcotic tone.

“I’m afraid that’s not appropriate, now is it, Pasha? I think we know better.”

He knew nothing about the object, but what choice did he have? He’d seem rude or unwell if he tossed the thing across the room, threw it in the trash, or concussed her temple in protest. He wasn’t even sure it was solid enough to do proper damage as a weapon. Pasha measured it up and down in his hand with a gentle toss. It grew somehow both heavier and less firm, like a sack of those glass pellets used to fill a weighted blanket. Perhaps one sharp crack--

My god, what am I thinking?

Shoving it into his pocket and sending his jacket askew, Pasha ducked out, horrified by the hostile inner monologue. “Next week, then. Thanks.”

“Oh, my apologies,” Dr. Bach said lightly. “There’s been some confusion with the insurance, but you can call my service as soon as--”

Nodding and waving, he rushed away. “Okay, got it!”

Several blocks of blinding sameness helped him walk off the invasive thought. He had to laugh at himself, really. He didn’t even know how to throw a punch.

Pasha darted past the alley to grab a coffee at the fancy shop while in the upscale neighborhood, his weekly reward for keeping his mandated appointment. He wanted to be a better person; really he did. Compulsory leave wasn’t the only reason he’d agreed to treatment. Maybe Tyler was right. He’d be a better person and reach his full potential if only he could learn to open up.

“Open up!”

A woman pounded the wall at the other end of the alley, yelling at the brick. “Open up. Hey, fuckers! Come on.” She beat so hard that she bloodied her knuckles.

A tweaker or a drunk; it hurt to see her bleeding. Pasha hurried past and into the alcove outside of the coffee shop, cringing.

He yanked the door, glancing behind in case the unstable woman had followed him. Instead of being received by the welcoming chime of a bell and the rich fragrance of roasting coffee beans, the door resisted him. Through papered-over windows, Pasha peered into what now looked to be a yoga or exercise studio. Amazing how quickly businesses popped up and disappeared in the city, Pasha thought. It struck him as oddly like the farm of his early childhood, where sudden mushrooms in the morning lawn had burned into nonexistence by noon.

The shop had been completely overhauled, fixtures demolished and replaced in less than a week. A glut of construction dust obscured his view. Unclad manikins or practitioners--or were those piles of pillows and mats?--crouched and huddled on the floor as if supplicating some idol hidden deeper in the store’s recesses. Backsides to the window, their spines curved forward and elbows clenched to their sides. Pasha snorted, incredulous. If they were people, and surely they weren’t, all twenty or more of them were naked with haunches and buttocks bared to the window.

He wasn’t sure if he should be amused or offended. It was rude to stare, but Pasha wanted to see if they moved, if they were people or figments. The street grew still and silent behind him. The woman stopped yelling. Still fretful she had followed him, he turned. She had not.

Feeling a bit of a voyeur, he gave up on solving the mystery of the former coffee shop. The netsuke--he’d settled on naming it that in the absence of any clarifying information from Dr. Bach--felt heavier by the minute in his pocket. He supposed he needed to get home.

Doubling back past the alley, he glanced up furtively to dodge the dangerous woman, but what he saw made him pause. She knelt in profile against the wall, her neck drooping down. The crown of her head pressed into the brick. Like deflated wings, her forlorn, bare arms draped at her sides, their pale flesh glistening with the oily sweat of her abandoned effort.

Her head began to move as if saying no to some unspoken question. She didn’t pull back from the wall. Leaning against her crown and pushing her full weight into the brick, she scraped the top of her scalp methodically back and forth across the rough surface. Clumps of hair gathered at each side, dangling in bloody accumulation until they fell away in thick knots. More blood oozed down her pate, cheeks, and chin as she kept on slowly grinding.

Chunks of fleshy debris accumulated into a paste, and when bone grated brick, Pasha saw the sickening flash of skull and fled.

The netsuke slammed his hip. He grasped it, and the slick texture softened in his fist. It felt both different and more familiar. He was afraid he’d drop it. His palm refused not to sweat.

His knuckles ached from clenching by the time he made it across town. Anticipating relief, he dashed up the stairwell behind the bread shop to reach his solitary room. After the pay cut that came with compulsory leave, Pasha had agreed he was done trying to force things with Tyler. Let management’s golden boy keep all the furniture and appliances. The massive flat screen, the dishes from the charming pottery studio they ordered on vacation, the overpriced weight set Pasha gave Tyler for his thirtieth. No doubt Tyler would get the promotion he wanted soon, even as Pasha’s fall from administrative grace progressed further downward.

Pasha grabbed the bag of day old rolls and sourdough left with his mail by the friend of a friend who ran the bake shop. Inside, he piled everything on a steel desk that doubled as a dining table. It had come with the former office space, as did the cot, the microwave, the improvised nightstand, and the excess of complimentary bread.

Freeing the irregular lump of the netsuke from his pocket, Pasha completed a still life composed of today’s gifts. Above it, a sticky note from Tyler demanded in vibrant script: What are you grateful for today, sweetheart?

Despite his troubles, Pasha was thankful. He wasn’t a drunk in an alley beating his knuckles to pulp and shredding his scalp on the equivalent of a giant cheese grater that sanded down his flesh, or yelling at invisible doors. He had that much going for him.

It wasn’t bitterness or self-pity that ate at him, but something less tangible. Management had said his performance was stellar, but that there was “more” to the job. When Pasha asked what that was, they’d balked. Tyler had also thrown up his hands in exasperation, chiding, “Well, what did you expect?”

Maybe Pasha had overreacted to Tyler’s derision. Once alone and functionally jobless, he’d been genuinely excited to start seeing Dr. Bach and get some clear answers. He’d mistakenly thought that mitigating confusion was part of her job.

He slumped at eye-level with the netsuke. His homework, as she called it. Whatever that meant.

Pale, pinkish-taupe in color, and about the size and shape of a plump round dinner roll, it perched both at home and terribly out of place among the baked goods. In Dr. Bach’s office he’d thought it carved from hard, smooth stone or molded from firm plastic. Now it sagged, soggy and pliant, settling onto the steel surface like a waterlogged plushie malformed by abuse.

It had the sad texture of a punctured pool float. Elongated lumps ran along the sides of the netsuke, curvilinear bumps interrupting its roundness. Their shape and position suggested turkey limbs. Tucked closely against the body, awash in the same raw-chicken color, these sculpted lumps were jointed like tiny arms and legs--or perhaps wings and legs, Pasha considered. The cleft where they met created the impression of a miniature set of fleshy buttocks on the lower back.

Pasha wondered why the universe was mooning him from every angle today, like a schoolyard bully dropping its trousers. His uncle’s voice mocked him from the past: If you won’t fight them, what do you want to do, fuck them? Why yes, gladly! Tyler had been one of those types of boys who’d tormented him. Openly gay adult Tyler was a testimony to the possibility of growth, proof a bully could be reformed. But not completely, I should hope, Pasha thought, recalling thrilling intimacies as a puzzling, pungent smell slipped over him.

It was not his imagination. Liquid seeped across the steel table toward his elbow, smelling of warm ammonia. He recoiled and lifted the netsuke. It was dripping wet.

Disgusted, he dropped it. Liquid splashed. The netsuke bounced.

Or hopped?

Had it urinated?

Pasha poked it. The rear appendages stayed clamped in immobile ridges along its rounded sides. He placed it gingerly in the sink, dumped the tainted bread in the bin, and ran the trash down to the outdoor dumpster quickly so his room wouldn’t reek. The netsuke remained motionless and moist, like an autopsied organ. He ran the tap, one finger keeping it back from the drain, anxious that if it was a living thing it could drown or bite.

Exposed to water, its surface attained the slick softness of high-quality silicone. Front and the back looked identical, as if two pale hunched creatures had been headlessly conjoined. Opposing forearms melded into a single shortened tip. With no front and no face, the two backsides shared similar gluteal lobes, indentions meeting in an anal crease that glowed bright crimson as if inflamed. There seemed to be no orifice; only the sculpted, angry cleft.

The skin took in moisture, plumping up with apparent resilience and hardening into a firm, pale-pink sheen. Pasha turned off the water and patted it dry, cradling the netsuke in a thin dishtowel. Its weight continually shifted as he turned it, creating the impression that it flexed like a gastropod against his palms.

A fascinating piece of sculpture and a strange creature, it seemed to him not exactly one or the other but both: mutable, mysterious, and weirdly sensual. The longer Pasha toweled the netsuke, the more worried he grew. What if it required a specific climate or temperature? He had little control over the heat living above the bake shop. The netsuke clearly responded to environmental changes. What if it was hungry? Sure, he could put it down and try an internet search, but if he got no hits on the creature--and something told him he would not; how could he? He had never known anything like it, never seen such a wonder, or held emotion in the palm of his hand. Now he faced a whole week of endless guilt and stress fraught with the terrible uncertainty that he might end up destroying it--or worse, the possibility that he had already wounded it through ignorant neglect, and at this moment held to his chest nothing more than the rotting corpse of the very thing he most loved.

The thing he--

What the hell?

Heart pounding against the netsuke as he clutched it to his sternum, Pasha made a strong effort to cease stroking the creature. Or sculpture. He placed it on the steel desk, tucking the dishtowel around its base.

All he could do was try his best to keep it safe and healthy, despite Dr. Bach’s carelessness. Pasha paced the perimeter of the small room as his heart raced, stomping round and round the steel desk. What sort of therapy was this anyway, putting lives at risk? How many creatures had she harmed throughout her years of practice? His anger spiraled. He wouldn’t let her get away with this. It was abuse. He’d report her and have her license.

By the time he’d worked through his rant and calmed, the creature had burrowed beneath the dishcloth. He couldn’t blame it. To such a small thing, he must have appeared quite large and threatening.

His voice rose to a high coddling tone as he lifted up the cloth to search for it. “There, there; it’s okay, little fellow. No one’s mad at you. We’re going to have a talk with that nasty lady, though, aren’t we? Oh, yes we are!”

He didn’t see the netsuke. “Does somebody like to play peekaboo?”

Switching sides, he exposed a long flap of fabric, but still no creature. The mounded dishcloth unfurled, revealing an empty rag.

“Oh no. Oh fuck.”

Pasha dropped to the floor.

If it had fallen, if he’d stomped on it unwittingly--the mental image of moist splayed guts and the pale-pink body smeared like roadkill fueled a frantic search and frantic thoughts. Why hadn’t he taken off his boots when he came back from the dumpster? Had he bumped the table and sent the creature rolling? Or did it hop, twitch, and writhe away on its own? Had he really been blessed with love only to send it fleeing away from him in terror?

Nothing. He was near tears. Every crevice, nook, and cupboard empty. Pasha worked his way back to the start, stripping the cot, turning all of his clothes inside out, confirming the toilet lid was down and the window screen intact.

Out in the stairwell he cleared the cobwebs and searched the dark, steep space: the landing, every riser, the rotting innards of a pair of old boots, and up and down the walls and ceiling. His heart sank. Forging outside, he gazed forlornly across intersections and alleyways. So many directions. He circled the block, barely noticing that the streets were as subdued as they’d been at the coffee shop, oddly quiet without the usual traffic or crowds.

A single stranger loitered by the bakery storefront. The third time Pasha passed by, they said, “You lose your phone or something?”

“Um, no, not my phone.”

“Your watch?”

They peered as Pasha stared dumbly, unsure how to describe the netsuke. “What is it, pal, love letters? A trophy from the glory days of your ill-spent youth? Lottery ticket worth a million bucks? Must be something important.”

“It is, yes, but--well. More like an animal.”

“Your cat? What’s her name?”

“No, smaller.”

“A gerbil?”

“Yes about that size, but without any fur.”

“No fur? The shit these breeders come up with, am I right?”

Pasha felt a beam of hope. “Why, yes. Maybe you saw it? It’s, um, a strange little animal, actually. Furless and rather rounded. Tends to, um, curl up in a little ball.” Pasha cupped his hands for the stranger to demonstrate the size and shape. “It’s about the same color as a raw chicken breast.”

“A breast?”

“Yes,” Pasha said. His hands stroked the air, describing the rounded form of the netsuke. “The color of raw chicken.”

“But you said breast.”

“I suppose it could be any part, really.”

“I distinctly heard you say breast. And let me tell you, friend, a breast is not just any part.”

“Of course not. I didn’t mean--I meant--”

“What did you mean? What kind of animal is like a breast for Christ’s sake?”

Pasha looked up and down the empty street. “Well, I’m not truly certain it’s an animal, to be quite honest. On casual inspection one might consider it a sort of sculpture, or maybe a toy. Maybe you saw it?”

The stranger’s eyes opened wide. Their face flushed pale and waxy. Cheeks bulging, they clamped their hand over their mouth and shook their head back and forth. The other hand waved, palm out, as if signaling Pasha to stop.

A deep reverberation rumbled from their gut. Pasha leapt back just in time to clear the stranger’s vomit spewing onto the sidewalk. When they were done loudly retching, which felt like eternity to Pasha as his stomach churned in sympathy and his hands fluttered uselessly, the stranger backed away and gasped in a hoarse voice.

“You stay away from that stuff. I’m telling you, pal, that’s how they get you. You’re going to wind up like all the rest. A toy, he says. My god. What are they going to think of next?” Chastising words trailed off as they stumbled away and spat in the gutter. “Disgusting. A goddamn toy, he says.”

Shaken, Pasha retreated to his room. His back ached in strange places from crouching, bending, and twisting. He collapsed on the stripped cot.

Please, let me have this one thing. Bring it back.

Once more on the floor, Pasha sought the netsuke with renewed desperation. His dream room was much larger than the one he rented in his waking life. As he hunted for the wonder of his heart so quickly found and lost, the spaces he slithered through expanded from slender dark oblongs below the cot, dresser, and desk, and branched outward into long lateral corridors encrypted with shadows.

He slid on his belly, insinuating his dream body through slots of angular oddity, entering smoothly like a fat snake. Navigating by muscular contractions, sidewinding across the geometrical surfaces of the folding expanse, Pasha licked his teeth with insistent, grinding need. Turning belly-up, he flopped down at the end of the last path, somehow stuck inside the boxy dimensions of a collapsing crate. The way in closed up behind him, sealing the oblong shadows into thick hard planes.

His coffin lid shifted. All went black as it slammed shut.

It was then that the netsuke found him.

It perched heavy on his chest, dense as lead, no longer pale-pink and fleshy, but a black onyx-colored orb, glowing brightly with grease. It smelled of a diesel yard. Though it had no means of locomotion, the oil and action of the fluctuating planes that encased him slid it toward Pasha’s mouth.

He opened wide.

For Tyler, of course, his dream-self thought.

The netsuke wedged inside his mouth, positioning itself in such a way that spitting it out would be impossible. His jaws spread too wide to push it out or chew on it. It pressed against the back of his front teeth and plugged the cup of his throat which tickled with accumulating saliva. The leaden weight made his tonsils ache. The strained ligaments in his cheeks tingled with encroaching numbness.

When it was ready, and not a moment sooner, the netsuke turned like a rock grating against Pasha’s teeth. Arching its conjoined backs, it rubbed its twin gluteal clefts along his tongue. Scooting and humping, it softened into a rubbery texture as it worked its way to the tip.

The surprisingly strong musculature gripped Pasha’s tongue and sucked it in like slurping a noodle. The netsuke took the cord of his tongue all the way down to the root of his throat.

Threaded inside the netsuke, Pasha’s serpentine tongue had its own dream. It tasted the shimmer of the mason jar of beer his uncle used to set out on the porch rail to catch flies that dogged him in the heat of the long summer afternoons. Over days, an inch of amber liquid rose into a shining black sludge. Multitudes of drowned insects glimmered. The contents of the jar doubled and tripled in height, smelling of sour ammonia and hot yeast. The liquid thickened into piss-colored cotton candy. Pasha’s tongue dreamed of drinking it.

His throat less willing, the netsuke strained to be swallowed, backing down his esophagus cramp by cramp to creep inside his stomach. Clamped tight to his tongue, it pulled all of him backward, collapsing Pasha’s face and head until there was nothing but a puckered and inflamed dimple atop his shoulders where he once had a neck.

Tied inside the onyx netsuke’s ass, tonguing his own digestive tract, Pasha faced the faint glimmer of dead flies in endless heat. Their elusive eyes and wings sparkled in the jar with a prism of oily colors that reflected a loveless and forgettable summer sun.

Pasha woke up in the bake shop, glutted on bread and vomit. At least he hoped he was awake. Nothing felt real. His esophagus ached. It was after four in the morning, but the bakers weren’t at work. Pasha wondered what holiday it could be.

It no longer seemed to matter, though. Everything was different, as if the rest of the world had stopped. No cars, no people, no clamor. Pasha was different, more sanguine than anxious for the first time in ages. He wandered outside with no sense of urgency. He didn’t stress about cleaning up the mess he’d left in the bake shop. Perhaps he’d slept for several hundred years, and maybe that meant that he had several hundred more to work things out on his own. Several hundred years sounded just about right.

Pasha decided then that he didn’t need treatment. All he needed was time. He went around to the rear staircase to grab his phone from his room so he could call Dr. Bach and fire her, management and compliance reports be damned, but the entire back wall of the building was solid brick.

Typical, he thought, with a sense of acceptance that verged upon hilarity. He was lightheaded from gorging and vomiting in his sleep. He almost fell over when he turned around.

The back lot that once framed a swath of broken asphalt now stretched into an alley. Down the length of it, blocks away, the woman he’d earlier mistaken for a tweaker or a drunk still knelt, grinding her scalp away against the brick. She’d sanded off her head all the way down to the ears. What was left looked like a halved fig. Impossibly, her neck still wagged back and forth, grating away at the pulp and bone of her open skull.

Pasha dropped to his knees and grabbed his stomach. The netsuke stirred within him like a black stone. He knew exactly what he’d find if he ran to the front of the bakery and peered through the glass. Although he wondered if he knew this because he was still inside, asleep and dreaming of being turned inside out. If he would, through the obstructing dust of new construction, see his sleeping body begin to move.

Headless shoulder to headless shoulder, two separate bodies would press forward into one unified spine, melding, conjoining, and crouching lower and lower in a sickly, solemn dance as their chests and arms dissolved into one fused and coupled plastic meat. The smooth shared torso would lumpily heal, forever assuming the contemplative pose, both backsides out, both gluteal clefts inflamed.

Dr. Bach talked again and again about an optimum level of arousal, a shared state of openness devoid of distress or elation. She said once again, “I wish that for you, Pasha.”

His name incanted once too often, her words like a curse, Pasha took his hands off his aching stomach and raised the black stone high over his head.

Tyler looked up and asked, “Is Dr. Bach dead?”

“Why in the world would you ask me that?”

The stone in his fist grew fuzzy. Warm. Tyler nodded at it. “Is that for me, then?”

Did Pasha’s arm rear back in anger, or to hide his treasure? He stashed his hands behind his back.

Tyler shifted up on his elbow impatiently. He was stretched out naked in what used to be their shared bed. The steel-grey cotton sheets and subdued sheer teal curtains that Pasha had chosen complemented Tyler’s complexion perfectly. Early morning stubble graced his handsome chin like a painter’s deft stroke. He smiled up at Pasha quizzically.

“What, have you brought me a reconciliation gift? Do you suppose you can just buy my love?” He tossed a lock of hair out of his eyes, rustling the sheets, inadvertently evoking the sound of sensuous nights. “Well, that’s fine. A simple apology will do, you know.”

Behind his back, the orb-like creature nuzzled Pasha, its jet-black coat showing new amorphous markings like a tiny Holstein cow. Pasha didn’t need to see it to know this. Eyes like tourmaline edged with undomesticated madness darted open and shut in a rudimentary pseudo-face. It was exciting and new. Small razor-like teeth nipped at him with affection. Pasha stroked the netsuke with his one free thumb to abate any perceived threat.

“It’s that easy,” he said. “Just say the magic words?”

“Yes; yes, of course.” Tyler scratched himself, yawned. “Hey, how did you get in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“In light of recent events, no; it really doesn’t seem strange at all.”

Pasha guarded the netsuke out of sight and stroked it. A tiny razor tooth pierced the skin of his placating thumb. It drew no more blood than a pinprick.

“Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?” Tyler said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pasha answered. “I’m not sure if you are, actually.”

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled.”

“Me too.”

Tyler laughed and shook his head.

There was still one thing Pasha was confused about. He cradled the netsuke as it squirmed and struggled more playfully--or perhaps aggressively, trying to leap free--and it bit down hard. His palms bled, dampening his wrists and arms, soaking into the seat of his pants. He said, “Did you ever get that promotion?”

“Oh yes, and then some. Whatever the story is with Dr. Bach, you don’t need to worry. I’ve got your back.”

“As I’ve got yours,” Pasha said.

Tyler laughed again, this time more seductively, sweeping back his errant locks. “Oh, have you now? What have you got for me?”

Pasha knelt, the weight of the animal growing stiff and the blood of its love turning to stone within his balls and breast. He brought his clenched and bleeding fists forward. “Yes. I’ve got something to show you. I’ve lost so much that I thought I would die or was already dead; and yet in that loss, I have found that true love is merciless.” And then he said the magic words as the blood-soaked thing leapt from his hands to devour what was soft.

* * *

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Convulsive, Invaginies, and The Couvade, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist. His short works appear in Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, The Mad Butterfly›s Ball, and many others. Find Joe (He/They) at horrorsong.blog.

THE TREE’S WIFE

MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN

Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1950

I SMILED at my companion, Hettie Morrison, County Welfare investigator for the Bald Mountain district. When I dropped into her office that morning, mostly to dig up nostalgic old memories of our college days at the University of Virginia, I found her arguing over the telephone with a local mechanic.”But l have to make a field trip this morning! WHY can't you get the parts? Take them out of somebody else’s car! Oh, the devil with what you think wouldn’t be right! This family may be starving!”

Hettie had hung up, still sputtering, a gaunt and severe-Iooking old maid with a heart as big as the Blue Ridge mountains. She glanced up then, to see me grinning at her, jingling the car-keys of my new club coupe by way of an invitation. We were such close friends, no words were needed—Hettie merely jerked a nod, slammed on her hat, and started out the door with me in tow.

“You’ll be sorry,” she warned me. “The road I have to take is an old Indian trail—and if they had to get back and forth on that, no wonder they’re called the Vanishing Americans! You’ll break a spring.”

I looked so dismayed, pausing to unlock my first new car in ten years, that she closed one eye in a crafty look I knew so well from days at college when she was about to ask the loan of my best hose.

“It’s a dull trip, just routine 'field work. Of course you wouldn’t be interested,” she drawled casually,” in Florella Dabney—the girl who married a tree. We pass right by the Dabney place. No, no, dear; you’re liable to scratch up that nice blue paint. And Holy Creek crosses the road four times; we’d have to drive through it, hub-deep. I always get stuck and have to—

I scowled at my old friend, familiar with all her clever tricks” of getting her way,” but still unable to cope with them.

“Tree?” I demanded. “Did you say—? Married a—?”

“That’s right,” Hettie nodded with a smug grin. “It’s a strange case—almost a legend up around Bald Mountain. Although,” she added, blatantly climbing into my car, “it’s not without precedent, in the old Greek legends. Zeus was forever turning some girl into a spring or a flower, or some inanimate object, so his wife Hera wouldn’t find out about his goings-on. Even as late as the 15th century, there were proxy weddings, where some queen or other married her knight's sword because he was off at war. Then, there’s an African tribe in which the men are married, at puberty, to some tree.”

I grimaced impatiently, climbed into the coupe, and started it with a jerk. Hettie had aroused my interest, and well she knew it. She would get her ride over the wild, bushy crest of Bald Mountain—or I would never find out about that girl who married a tree.

* * *

An hour later, bouncing over a rocky trail pressed closely on both sides by scrub pine and mountain laurel, she began to tell me about Florella. Dabney—and the bloody feud that, a trained psychiatrist might explain, had left her a mental case with a strange delusion.

The Dabneys (Hettie related) had built their cabin and begun to wrest a living out of the side of Bald Mountain about the time of Daniel Boone. Six generations of underfed, overworked mountaineers had lived therein, planting a little, hunting a little, and raising a batch of children as wild as the foxes that made inroads on their chicken supply. Florella was the youngest daughter, a shy willowy child of fifteen, with flowing dark hair and big luminous dark eyes like a fawn. Barefoot, clad in the simple gingham shift that all mountain girls wore, she could be seen running down the steep side of Old Baldy, as nimbly as a city child might run along a sidewalk. Her older brothers and sisters married and moved away, her mother died, and Florella lived with her father now on the sparse farm.

On the other side of the mountain lived another such family of “old settlers,” the Jenningses. As far back as anyone could remember, there had been bad blood between the two, starting with a free-for-all over a load of cordwood, which had sent two Dabneys to the hospital and three Jenningses to jail. Both attended the little mountain church perched on the ridge that divided their farms, but no Jennings ever spoke to a Dabney, even at all-day singings, when everyone was pleasantly full of food and “home-brew.” No Dabney would sit left of the aisle; and any baptizing that was done in Holy Creek, after a rousing revival meeting, had to be arranged with Jenningses and Dabneys immersed on alternate days. Reverend Posy Adkins, the lay preacher, recognized this as a regrettable but inevitable condition. And that was the law on Bald Mountain—up until the spring evening when Joe Ed Jennings and Florella Dabney run off together.”

* * *

When and how they had ever seen enough of each other to fall in love, neither family could imagine. Joe Ed was a stocky blond boy who could play a guitar and shoot the eye out of a possum at fifty yards—but not much else. What astonished everyone was Florella’s regard for such a do-little, since she was halfway promised to a boy from Owl’s Hollow. It was assumed, when a party of hunters saw them streaking through the woods one night, that Florella had been carried off by force, much against her will. She had gone out after one of the hogs, which had strayed. At midnight, when she had not returned, her pa, Lafe Dabney, went out to search for her, ran into the hunting party—and promptly stalked back to his cabin for his rifle.

He was starting out again, with murder in his close-set, mean little eyes, when a pair of frightened young people suddenly walked through the sagging front gate. With them was Preacher Adkins, dressed either for a bury in’ or a marryin’, with the Good Book clutched in a hand that trembled. But he spoke steadily.

“Lafe, these two young’nes has sinned. But the Lord’s likely done forgave 'em already. Now they aim to marry, so don't try an' stop it!”

Without preamble, he motioned for Florella and Joe Ed to stand under a big whiteoak that grew in the front yard, towering over the rough cabin and silhouetted darkly against the moonlit sky. High up on the trunk, if Lafe had noticed, was cut a heart with the initials J. E. J. and F. D.

Solemnly, the old preacher began to intone the marriage ceremony, while Florella's pa stood there staring at them, his lean face growing darker with fury, his tight mouth working. Hardly had the immortal words, “Do you take this man—?” been spoken, when he whipped the rifle to his shoulder and fired at Joe Ed, pointblank. The boy was dead as he crumpled up at his bride's small bare feet.

“I’ll larn you to go sparkin’ our girl behind my back!” Lafe roared. “You triflin’ no-account!”

He never finished, for a second shot rang out in the quiet night. Lafe Dabney pitched forward on his face, crawled across the body of his prospective son-in-law, and fired twice toward the powder flash in the woods beyond the cabin. A moment later, all hell broke loose. It seems that Reverend Adkins had expected just such a blow-up. Someone had carried the news to Joe Ed’s pa. Clem Jennings had also hastened to the spot, to stop the wedding. The old preacher, fearing this, had notified “the law.” The sheriff, with a hastily gathered posse, had showed up at the moment when Lafe and Clem fired at each other, over the body of young Joe Ed and the prostrate sobbing form of his near-bride.

* * *

In a matter of minutes, the posse had both fathers handcuffed and hauled off to jail. But, behind them, they left a tragic tableau—little Florella weeping over the body of her lost lover, with old Reverend Adkins standing dumbly in the background. Two of the posse had stayed behind to help with Joe Ed's body, which the weeping girl had begged the preacher to bury, then and there,”under our tree.” It was there Joe Ed had first caught her and kissed her, holding his hand over her mouth and laughing, with Lafe not ten yards away. It was there, in the night, that she had first told him she loved him—and promised to slip away with him, into the deep silent woods of Old Baldy, for a lover’s tryst forbidden by both their families. It was there, months later, terrified and ashamed, that she had sobbed out to him that she was with child. She knew there was nothing left but to kill herself. Her lover was a Jennings, and she had expected no more from him than a few moments of wild secret ecstasy.

But Joe Ed had surprised her. Fiercely protective and loyal, he had announced that, the following night, he would stand with her under the tree in the Dabney's yard, and have Preacher Adkins marry them—right in front of old Lafe. His child must bear his name, the boy said proudly and tenderly, and he hoped it would be a fawn-eyed little girl exactly like Florella.

All this old Preacher Adkins related to the two members of the posse, while they took turns digging a grave for Joe Ed Jennings—at the foot of the big whiteoak under which he was to have been married. Florella stood numbly by, watching and no longer crying, like a trapped animal at last resigned to its bitter fate.

But, regarding her, the old lay-preacher suddenly remembered a story from his school days, a myth, a legend. Walking over to the relatives and all of Joe Ed’s were afraid to girl, he took her hand quietly and led her come near the place!” over to the tree, where the two pitying neighbors were just patting tire last spadefuls of dirt over Joe Ed’s crude grave.

“Daughter,” the old preacher said, “I’ve heard tell of queens in the old days marrying a sword that belonged to some feller that’d been killt in battle. Now, Joe Ed, he’d want you should go ahead and take his name—so I’m going t’ make out like this here tree is Joe Ed, him being buried underneath it. I want you two men,” he faced the gravediggers solemnly, “to witness this here marrying’—of Joe Ed Jennings and Florella Dabney.” He raised his eyes humbly. “If hit’s a wrong thing I’m doing’, punish me, Lord. If hit’s right, bless this here ceremony.”

There in the moonlight night, the old preacher proceeded with that strange proxy wedding of a girl to a tree. The two members of the posse stood by, wide eyed and amazed, as they heard Reverend Adkins repeat the familiar words of the marriage ceremony. Heard Florella's sobbing replies. And then heard—was it only the wind in the great tree towering above them? Or was it——? Both men later swore that what they heard sounded like a whispering voice. A man's voice, Joe Ed's, coming from the depths of those thick green branches. But (as Hettie remarked dryly) it had been a hysterical night, and hysteria can play weird tricks on the human senses numerous times.

* * *

“Well? That isn’t all?” mark I demanded, as my car lurched madly into Holy Creek's third crossing and plunged wetly out again. “What happened to the girl? With her father in prison who looked after her while—? Was the child all right?”

“Slow down, you idiot!” Hettie snapped at me pleasantly clinging to the car door on her side. “Yes of course the child was all right. A little girl. I had welfare send a doctor out there when we got the message that Florella was in labor. She had been living on in her father's cabin, quite alone—for the simple reason that all her relatives and all of Joe Ed's were afraid to come near the place!”

I frowned, puzzled.” why? Quote

“Because of the tree,” Hettie said blandly. “Word got around that it was haunted. That Joe Ed had ‘gone into that oak’ and—well, that it was alive. Sentient, that is. That is—didn't behave like a tree anymore. I must say—I must say some of the things that happened were—odd, to say the least!”

I slowed down obediently, picking my way over the rocky road. Anything to keep Hettie on the story that had so captured my imagination!

“What things?” I demanded. “Anyone can hear voices in the wind. Leaves rustling. Branches rubbing together.”

“But,” Hettie drawled,” just anybody can't see a tree catch a live rabbit, or a dove that has lit on a branch of it. Just anybody can't—”

“What?” I gaped at her. “I have never heard of anything so ridiculous!” My attempted laugh sounded flat, however, even to my own ears. “How on earth could—?”

“Don’t ask me,” Hettie said cheerfully. “All I know is, the lower branch of that big white oak kept Florella supplied with meats. Rats, rabbits, doves, once a possum. They—they got choked, some way. Got their necks caught in the twigs. She'd find them there, all ready to be cooked and eaten. The way any good Mountaineer might trap to feed his family. So she got to believing—that he caught them. Joe D had quite a reputation as a hunter and trapper.”

“Good Lord!” I tried to laugh again. “You're not hinting—? The poor kid, “I broke off pityingly. “But an experience like that would naturally affect her mind. Living there all alone, too, with a baby!”

“Then,” Hettie went on pleasantly, “There was the fall day, real cold, when a neighbor woman dropped in. Nosey old sister. Just wanted to say something spiteful to Florella about the baby. When she was leaving though—” Hettie chuckled. “It seems her coat got tangled in a tree branch that dipped down over the gate. It yanked the coat right off her back, the way she told it. She lit out of there, screaming bloody murder, and told everybody that Joe Ed took her coat for Florella! When the girl tried to return it to her, she wouldn't touch it. Said it wasn't her best coat, anyhow, and she wasn't going to argue with a tree!”

“Oh no!” I shook my head, laughing—but still trying to ignore a small shiver that kept running down mv spine. “These mountain people are awfully superstitious, aren't they? Naturally, it was just the woman’s fear that made her think”

“Maybe,” Hettie said drily, “but it wasn’t fear that snatched my new hat off last spring, when I happened to walk under that tree. Checking up on Florella—she’s a hardship case, of course. Yessir,” she said in a queer tone. “Big limb swooped down and snatched that bonnet right off my head. I couldn't reach it, and Florella couldn't climb up and get it. Too soon after the baby’s arrival; poor girl was still kind of weak. But the way she giggled, and started talking to that tree like it was a person! Honestly, it made mv flesh crawl, she was so matter of fact about it! 'Joe Ed, you rascal,’ she said, 'give Miss Hettie back her bonnet, now! I don’t need no fancy clothes. Me and the baby’s just fine.’” Hettie peered at me, sheepishly. “Way she said it made me feel like—like a selfish old turkeygobbler! Besides, a hat like that was too pretty for an old hatchet-face like me. But it did give me a turn. I’ll have to admit! When—” she gulped slightly,” when I told Florella she could have the hat, it—it immediately fell out of the tree. Plop! Right smack on that girl’s head! I must say,” she added crossly, “it was very becoming. Probably the first one she ever owned, poor little thing! Lafe was a stingy old coot; Florella’s mother never had a rag she didn’t weave herself!”

I turned the steering wheel sharply to avoid a raccoon ambling across the trail. Then I peered at Hettie.

“Go on,” I said grimly. “Tell me how the tree shed its wood in stacks, so Florella wouldn’t have to chop any!”

Hettie chuckled. “Oh, no. Mountain men take it for granted that their wives must work like mules. All they do is feed ’em, shelter ’em, and protect ’em—with an occasional pretty thrown in when they feel in a generous mood. That’s what Florella expected from her tree-husband, and that’s what she got. Though I suppose a psychologist would say her delusion gave her a sense of security that merely made her able, to fend for herself. Lots of people need a crutch for their self-confidence—if it’s only a lucky coin they carry around. Coincidence and superstition, hm?”

“Well,” my friend smiled, “I am obliged to you for the lift. We had a message that Kirby Marsh, a farmer who lives near the Dabney place, got in a fight- with somebody and crawled home, pretty banged up. His wife is bed-ridden, so they’ll need help if he’s seriously injured. You were a lifesaver to bring me. This is the turn,” she broke off abruptly, grinning at me with a sly twinkle, in her eye. “The Dabney farm is just around this bend,”

I slowed down, feeling again that cold shiver run down my spine as we rounded the curve. An old cabin of square-hewn logs perched on the mountainside a few yards above the road, with the usual well in the yard and the usual small truck-garden in back. A huge whiteoak towered over the gate of a sagging rail fence. Its sturdy trunk leaned a bit toward the house in a curiously protective manner, shading the worn front stoop with its thick dark-green foliage.

I braked the car outside the gate, and Hettie grinned at my expression.

“There it is,” she announced drily. “There’s where the girl lives who married a tree. And that’s the tree. That’s him.”

I got out of the coupe and walked warily up to the gate. Hettie climbed out stiffly, and called, in her pleasantly harsh voice “Hello? Hello—the house?” in traditional mountain-style.

There was no answer, but all at once I saw a quilt pallet spread under the oak Hettie had indicated as “him.” A fair-haired baby girl was sprawled on the folded quilt, gurgling and cooing. She looked to be about two years old, with the sturdy good health of most mountain children, despite their skimpy diet and constant exposure to the elements.

I stood watching her for a moment, charmed by the picture she made. Then I frowned.

“She’s too young to be left alone,” I muttered. “Where’s her mother?”

“Oh, out picking blackberries, I guess.” Hettie shrugged. “Josie’s ail right, though. Her father’s minding her,” she added with another impish' grin at my expression. “Hello!” she called again. “Florella!”

At that moment a lovely slender girl came running around the house, her feet bare, her dark hair flying. There was a sprig of laurel over her ear, and blackberry stains on her brown fingers. I stared at her, thinking how like a dryad she looked—wild, free, and happily unafraid.

“Oh! Howdy, Miss. Hettie!” she greeted my friend warmly. “Come in and set. Who’s that with ye? Kinfolk?”

Hettie introduced me as a school chum, with no mention of the fact that I wrote, stories of the supernatural for my bread and butter. We entered the gate, and Hettie stooped over to pat the baby, proffering a peppermint from the endless supply she always seems to carry around. I fidgeted beside her, at a loss for conversation with this pretty normal-looking young mother who, from all Hettie had told me, was as crazy as a coot. Once, nervously, I started as a limb of the great tree under which we stood brushed my shoulder, plucking at my scarf! On impulse, I took it off and gave it to the girl, who beamed and thanked me shyly, then tied it proudly around her own neck. I caught Hettie’s eye at that moment—and flushed as she grinned, winked, and glanced up at the giant tree.

Then she turned to Florella, lovelier than ever in my blue chiffon scarf—and with no more madness in her face than in mine.

“I got word that Kirby Marsh was hurt in a fight,” my friend said conversationally. “Anybody over there looking after his wife and kids? Heard the doctor came and took Kirby to the hospital with concussion and a sprained shoulder. Must have been some fight, to have”

Hettie broke off, noticing the girl’s sudden expression of regret beyond the politeness expected of a neighbor. Florella ducked her head suddenly, with a rueful little smile.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said simply. “He -come over here to our place late last night, and went to pesterin’ me. Oh, not that Kirby ain’t a real nice feller,” she apologized for her neighbor gently, “exceptin’ when he’s likkered up. I told him to leave go o’ me,” she added with wifely dignity. “Told him Joe Ed wouldn’t like it. But he wouldn’t listen. So I run out to Joe Ed, with it a-stormin' awful. He was banging the roof, to warn Kirby, but he likely thought ’twas only the wind.”

I gulped, wracked with pity, and threw a glance at my friend.

“Then—?” Hettie prompted softly, in an odd tone. “You ran out into the yard? Kirby ran after you, and?”

“And Joe Ed, he whanged him over the head,” the girl finished, half apologetic, half proud, as any other woman might speak of a husband who had stoutly defended her honor. “He like to busted Kirby's skull wide open. But he hadn’t ought to’ve tried to kiss me,” she defended primly. “Ought he. Miss Hettie? And me a married woman with a young ‘ne!

“No, dear,” Hettie' answered, in the gentlest voice I have ever heard her use. “No—Joe Ed did the right thing. I don’t think Kirby was badly injured, but somebody has to look after his folks while he’s in the hospital. Did you go over and see his wife today?”

“Yes ma’am,” the girl said quietly. “But they wouldn’t let me in. I reckon, on account they was scared. I mean, of Joe Ed. But he wouldn’t hurt nobody, less’n they was botherin’ me or the baby! He’s real good-hearted.”

“Yes,” my friend said softly. “I understand. Well—don’t worry about it, dear. Next time Kirby will know better! I rather imagine” she chuckled, “that this experience will keep him sober for some time!”

The girl nodded shyly and bent to pick up the child. But small Josie toddled away from her and ran around the great tree to where a low limb dipped almost to the ground.

“Pa!” she chirped suddenly, holding up her chubby arms to the giant oak. “Fing baby! Fing high, Pa!”

Florella laughed, shaking her head mildly and calling: “No! No, now, Joe Ed—you’re liable to drop that young’un! Don’t ye—”

But as I stared, that low limb dipped down as under unseen pressure. The child, Josie, seized it and, as I gasped at the spectacle, was tossed ten feet off the ground, as if a gust of wind had blown the branch skyward, it had scooped up the baby, swinging her high above us. Then, as gently, it set her down again, while the young mother shook her head again in laughing reproof. My scalp crawled at her matter of fact, unself-conscious manner.

“Joe Ed’s always a-doin’ that,” she said pleasantly. “She loves it. Why, Miss Hettie!” She broke off, pouting as I sidled pointedly back toward the gate. “I thought you-all would stay for dinner! Joe Ed caught me a rabbit, and I was just fixin’ to fry it real nice and brown. Cain’t ye stay?”

But I was out the gate and climbing into my car by that time, shaking my head covertly and beckoning for Hettie to come away. For some reason—which I will always firmly deny—my teeth were clicking like castanets. And I kept glancing up nervously at that tall spreading oak tree, brooding over the little mountain cabin, and the woman and child who lived there alone.

Alone—?

“Pitiful case, isn’t it?” Hettie murmured cheerfully, as she climbed into the car and waved goodbye to Florella Dabney—or “Mrs. Joseph Edward Jennings,” as she was listed in the Welfare files. “I mean,” my friend expanded, “the way that poor girl lives, with her baby. From hand to mouth, and the prey of—well, men like Kirby. She’d be so lonely and frightened if it weren't for that pathetic delusion of hers. And she's got the child to believing it now! Guess you noticed her swinging on that tree—she called it Pa! Stout branch, to pick up a child that heavy, wasn’t it?” she drawled carelessly. “Wind blew it, I guess—like the other night, when it whacked Kirby Marsh over the head. Awful windy up here on Old Baldy.” She peeked at me slyly, lips twitching.

I glared at her and stepped on the gas, aware of the cold perspiration that had sprung out on my forehead. Because it was not windy. It was close and very still—and beside me, Hettie was chuckling softly as I glanced back at the barren little farm. Except for one low limb of that giant oak tree—again tossing that happy child playfully into the air while its mother looked on; lifting it gently, like a man’s strong protective arms—not a leaf was stirring as far as we could see over the rugged mountainside.

Contents

1. Full Page Image
2. Title Page
3. Contents
4. Copyright
5. Letter from the Editor
6. Meet the CHM staff
7. The Head in the Pantry – Rex Burrows

8. Bilious Green Envy, Burning White Fury – Shelley Lavigne

9. Full Page Image
10. A Mugful of Dates – Dorian Wolfe
11. Shall Not Perish – Rose Skye
12. Full Page Image

13. The Conjuring of Elderly Widows – Jes Malitoris

14. Full Page Image

15. In the Amygdala of the Beholder – D. Marmara

16. Child of Rawfrog – Joe Koch

17. Full Page Image

18. The Tree’s Wife – Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Landmarks

1. Title Page
2. Contents
3. Copyright
4. Beginning
5. Cover

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Letter from the Editor
- Meet the CHM staff
- The Head in the Pantry – Rex Burrows

- Bilious Green Envy, Burning White Fury – Shelley Lavigne

- Full Page Image
- A Mugful of Dates – Dorian Wolfe
- Shall Not Perish – Rose Skye
- Full Page Image

- The Conjuring of Elderly Widows – Jes Malitoris

- Full Page Image

- In the Amygdala of the Beholder – D. Marmara

- Child of Rawfrog – Joe Koch
- Full Page Image
- The Tree’s Wife – Mary Elizabeth Counselman