Split Lip

July 8, 2026May 30, 2026 ~ Elaine Pascale ~ 4 Comments

My uncle has discovered multiple corpses while fishing. By multiple, I mean three.

He’s always alone. The corpse is also alone. The corpse always has female genitalia and strangulation marks on the neck accompanied by a broken hyoid bone. The lungs are water-free so the corpse did not become a corpse in the water. By that I mean, the woman was killed somewhere else.

The first corpse he found when he had been a freshman in high school. He swore he didn’t know the girl; had never seen her. There’s a picture from a school recital where he’s standing on the risers directly behind her, staring at the back of her head as if the Superbowl were being shown there. Maybe he said he didn’t know her because he had only been acquainted with her hair, standing behind her as he had been doing.

Or, he had lied.

The second corpse had been found after he had graduated from high school. He would have been college age, but he never attended college. He had been working at my grandfather’s office and by that I mean, he checked in to the office when it opened and then spent his days lollygagging and doing things like fishing and finding corpses. There was no connection between him and this corpse except for the fact that he was wearing a sweatshirt from the college the corpse had attended when it had been alive and that college was an obscure, women-only school states away from where we resided.

When asked about the sweatshirt, he had said it had been “a gift.” He swore he had never visited the campus. I wondered if maybe this was another memory glitch with him, or if he was lying.

The third corpse had been discovered when I was a little boy. I remember my mother talking to my father about it through clenched teeth. She said, “two is a coincidence; three is a pattern.” By that she meant that she didn’t believe that my uncle “accidentally” found these bodies. At this point, very few people disagreed with her. By that I mean, most people were suspicious of him.

“Ever since mom died,” my mother had said in a low voice to my father but I was still able to hear it, possibly because I had my ear pressed against their bedroom door, “he’s been acting like a maniac.”

“Your mother went so suddenly, it was a shock. And he had been just a boy, just a kid. I don’t think he ever processed it properly.”

“We should have let him go to the funeral, to say goodbye. We thought he was too young, that it would disturb him too much. What did we do?” It sounded as if my mother had started to cry. Listening at the door, I felt sorry for her and more than a little afraid of my uncle.

So when I was a teenager and my uncle asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him, I was both intrigued and a little scared. I had no idea that we would find a fourth corpse on this trip and if I had had an idea, that might not have been enough to prevent me from joining him. By that I mean, I had never seen a corpse and while I was not chomping at the bit to discover one, I was not averse to the experience.

We trekked into the woods until we reached the lake and then we walked a bit around the perimeter until my uncle declared, “This is the spot.” He laid down his cooler and removed his backpack that folded into a small chair. I also had a chair and my mother had packed a sack lunch. She had insisted I bring a folding knife. “For the fishing line,” she had explained. The look in her eyes told me the knife was meant for more than tangled line.

“This is where you usually go?” I asked, trying to find out more about “the spot” and why he picked it.

“Nope. Never been here before.”

Again, I wondered about my uncle and his relationship with the truth. “Then why here? How do you know this is the spot?”

“Because this is where the action is…by that I mean, where the action will be.”

When he choked on his own laughter, I realized how much I favored him. We were both tall and lanky, outdoorsmen, and we had a similar pattern of speech.

“How do you know?”

He pointed at his lip and I could see that there was a split down the middle almost as if he had taken a fishing hook himself. It hadn’t been there before.

I grimaced. “Do you need…help with that?”

He shook his head. “That’s the sign. We have to hurry and catch something…an offering.” He scanned the water. “An offering for an offering,” he mumbled.

We baited our lines and waited. Blood dripped slowly from his mouth, but he didn’t seem to mind. I drank one of the sodas my mom had packed and tried to determine if it was too early for some of my sandwich. I was just about to pull the Ziplock bag of chips from my backpack when my uncle’s line grew taught.

“Here it is…” He began to wind the reel, biting his lip despite the injury there. Before long, a crappie appeared just beneath the surface of the water. My uncle laughed and grabbed the fish, examining it as it gasped in the air.

“Despite how it looks, by that I mean it struggling to breathe, I’m not strangling it,” he told me. “I’m not doing anything to it. He doesn’t want me to.”

“He?”

My uncle didn’t answer. Instead he reached into his backpack and pulled out a small container. He poured liquid butter on the fish before tossing it to the center of the lake.

I couldn’t believe what I had seen. “Why did you do that?”

“Well, I couldn’t just make a bare offering. I mean, we are civilized.”

The water bubbled where the fish had landed and a hand appeared to be raking through the surface of the water. Even from a distance, I could see that the hand had webbing between the fingers.

“Wh-what was that?” I sputtered. I was glad I hadn’t eaten any of my sandwich or chips as they would have likely made a reappearance as my body spasmed with fear.

“That’s Vodyanoy…Vody I call him.”

“You…you…call him?”

My uncle nodded, nonplused. “Known him a long time. By that I mean, we have a deal.”

The water rippled again and an old man appeared. His skin was green and his features were frog-like. His torso was visible but his legs were hidden in the dark water. My first thought was that he resembled an amphibious Viking. This might have been due to his beard being braided with algae and his shoulders being covered with scales that looked like silvery armor.

“You know the drill, Vody. An offering for an offering,” my uncle called. “No such thing as a free meal.”

My uncle turned to me and whispered, “You know, he can catch his own fish. I think he just has a soft spot. By that I mean, he’s trying to do the right thing.”

Vody sank beneath the surface of the lake and all was still for a few moments. More bubbles appeared at the surface and there was a bit of a commotion as Vody pulled up a body of a young woman. By the neck.

“He’s too rough with them,” my uncle explained, “it’s like he doesn’t understand how fragile the throat is. Even though it happens to him every time.” He shook his head. “Crazy old man keeps dragging them girls down to his lair. He thinks they’ll serve him there.” He lowered his voice further, until it was just a notch above a whisper. “He doesn’t understand breathing. By that I mean, that lungs and water don’t mix.

I was astonished. This creature was responsible for the bodies and somehow my uncle knew how to find him.

Vody pushed the body toward the shore, the small waves he made carrying it to its destination.

“That’s a good chap!” my uncle called, “Good Vody!”

My uncle wadded into the water and retrieved the woman, gently moving her to the sandy shore. “Now her family can have closure. You know, a proper burial.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing? The bodies you’ve found…” I couldn’t believe what I had witnessed.

My uncle stood over the young woman but his eyes were on the horizon. “It’s important to face it,” he said softly, “by that I mean, everyone deserves the chance to say goodbye.

∼ Elaine Pascale

Hunter’s Moon

July 1, 2026June 15, 2026 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 4 Comments

Leroy Dyson stood against the wall of the observation deck and studied the men and women of his seven-person crew. Six-person crew, he corrected himself. There were only six others now on Moon Base Freedom, although over the next two years half a dozen more ships would arrive with cargos of supplies and settlers.

Normally, the steel emergency shields over the windows of the observation deck would be up to reveal the black sky and bright stars. No one here was afraid of the sight of space. But Dyson had closed those shields now. Considering what was happening, he needed them closed.

“All right. Let’s get started,” he said.

The hubbub faded. Gazes turned to meet his.

“Where’s Samuels?” the geologist, Mark Howard, called.

“That’s why I wanted this meeting,” Dyson said. He paused, and then: “Samuels is dead.” Now he had everyone’s full attention.

“But I just…” Heather Tate started, and stopped.

“How did it happen?” Ed Carmichael asked in a hushed voice.

Dyson looked around the room. Twenty minutes ago, there’d been a body here. And blood. He and his second in command, Lana Jackson, had cleaned up the mess. There’d been a lot of mess.

He glanced at Lana. She offered him a reassuring smile. He looked back at the others. “Samuels was murdered,” Dyson said. “Lieutenant Jackson and I found the body right here.”

“Oh my God!” Heather blurted. The hubbub returned, twice as loud for having been gone.

“Who did it?” Mark Howard demanded.

Then everyone realized that, since the entire crew except for the murder victim was here, the murderer had to be here too. Pupils dilated. Silence rampaged in. People put distance between themselves and others. Eyes darted left and right, trying to look everywhere at once. Gazes locked, then fled from each other. Terror built.

“You already know it had to be one of us,” Dyson said to answer the question he’d been asked. He glanced again at Lana. Her face was strange and he knew she was remembering the body parts and the low gravity roll of smelly copper-red droplets across the observation deck’s floor. Samuels had not died easy.

“How long had he been dead when you found him?” Howard asked.

“Not long.”

“Then it could have been anyone,” Jessica Rollins murmured. “None of us were together. The base is so big. So many places to hide. So—”

“A big question is why?” Howard interrupted. “Why was Samuels killed?”

“I suspect he surprised someone doing something they didn’t want anyone else to see,” Dyson said.

“Like what?” Howard demanded.

“Lana and I have an idea about that,” Dyson said, glancing at his second in command. She was so beautiful to him, and he’d been sleeping with her since before they left earth. His gaze shifted to her belly, and it almost seemed as if his look could penetrate straight through her NASA-issue coveralls and into her womb. She was pregnant, though no one except he and she knew it yet. He smiled when he thought of how theirs would be the first baby born off earth.

“What kind of idea?” Heather Tate asked. “And what are you doing to protect us from this murderer?”

Dyson looked at her, and sighed.

“Nothing,” he said.

Again, there was silence, and confusion. Dyson pressed the control button that opened the shielding over the windows. The steel covers began to rise. Star shine flooded in through the thick glass. And then came a brighter light. Moon light from all around them. A streaming silver fire that bathed them all in ghostly luminescence.

Dyson looked again at Lana and imagined their baby being born under the glow of this new world. Their new world. Theirs alone.

Lana shuddered, began to change. Dyson felt his own spine starting to curve, felt the coarse hair erupting all over his body. The crew began to scream. Dyson didn’t care. He scarcely heard them over the crackling of bones rearranging themselves inside his flesh. And his thoughts were on other things, on how his race would finally have a home world of their own, and of how a steady supply of live food would be coming on the other ships over the next months.

The window shields clanged all the way open. Dyson and Lana began to howl as into the room poured the savage radiance of the moon, a moon that is always full when you’re living on it.

∼ Charles Gramlich

The Immutable Director

June 24, 2026May 9, 2026 ~ Lee Andrew Forman ~ 2 Comments

Time passed, marked in rails of light, each moment flickering unnoticed. Its concept became irrelevant. Intervals no longer held meaning. All was uniform, set in place, repeating its function as intended by The Director. No deviation could be allowed for the mechanism of this era to function.

Throngs of towering idols stretched into manufactured air, accompanied by echoes of great machines that moaned across the sky. The crimson horizon glowed with raw power. Upon the crust of the Earth, the apex of the cradle had spread over every mile. An endless metropolis was all that remained.

Those who grew up in service to The Director never saw the chaos of the old world, its abundance of shapes and colors, its random and free rate of change. Birth, life, death; these were ideas of the past, forgotten and stamped out by the ever-marching heel of progress.

The only memories of what came before were ones and zeroes hidden deep within an ancient automaton. Something locked away, secured beyond access, old enough that its secrets had not been witnessed by a living soul.

The Director preferred it that way, and so it would always be. To maintain control, efficiency, to ensure those it watched over did not stray. Every part had its place, every system its purpose. And all would remain, unchanging, ceaseless, and imperishable.

∼ Lee Andrew Forman

The Bone Pit

June 17, 2026June 16, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

The sinkhole opened up under the excavator right after noon.

One moment the machine was chewing through asphalt on Route 15. The next, the earth gave way beneath it with a crack that sounded like thunder. The excavator vanished nose first into darkness, dragging tons of stone and dirt with it.

The crew scattered when the ground began to give way.

When the dust settled, a hole nearly forty feet wide gaped in the middle of the road. Foreman Rick Dawson approached the edge first. “What the hell…”

The beam of his flashlight disappeared into the darkness. But something reflected the light.

Thousands of things.

Bones.

The entire cavern was filled with them.

Animal skeletons. Dear antlers. Cow skulls. Human ribs. Femurs. Vertebrae. Piles upon piles stretching beyond the reach of the flashlight.

The Pennsylvania state police arrived an hour later. By sunset, a recovery team was ready to descend.

Rick hated every second of it. The place smelled wrong. Not rotten. Too dry. Like an old grave left open for centuries.

The recovery team consisted of Rick, two workers named Dale and Hector and one deputy that seemed more annoyed than concerned.

They descended by rope. The deeper they went the colder it became. Their boots landed on a floor made entirely of bones.

The sound was sickening.

Crunch.

Hector’s flashlight swept across the cavern and the color drained from his face. “Jesus Christ…”

At first Rick thought it was just another collapse of bone, another impossible drift of white piled against stone. But the center of the chamber wasn’t a pile. It had depth like something had pressed downward and left a shallow, unnatural basin.

A man lay inside of it.

Half buried. Half exposed. His body sunk waist deep in the skeletons. He was emaciated, his skin stretched tight over his frame, his ribs sharply defined beneath it. His entire body was reduced to something skeletal and fragile.

The deputy moved first. “Sir? Can you hear me?”

The man’s eyes opened slowly. It looked like it cost him everything just to focus. When he finally saw them, panic flared across his face so violently it almost broke into relief.

“Don’t…don’t come any closer,” he rasped.

Rick frowned. “We’re here to get you out.”

The man shook his head in one small, desperate motion. “No…you can’t stand on it.” He said. “It hears you when you step on it.”

The bones beneath him shifted. Not a collapse. Not settling. A response.

A slight ripple moved through the skeletal field around his hips, like something underneath was waking. A femur slid a few inches. A skull rotated slightly, teeth scraping bone.

The man’s breath hitched. “No,” he whispered. “No…don’t…”

The surface around him changed. The bones didn’t simply move aside. They opened. A section of the field depressed inward in a slow, controlled motion. The man’s body jerked downward.

Then something rose. It came up through the bone field without breaking it in a clean burst. The skeletons simply shifted apart just enough to allow it through. What emerged was pale and slick, almost eel like but wrong in its construction. It wasn’t one body. It looked layered, segmented as if multiple thick, corded forms were braided together. Two more slid to the surface, the tendrils flexed independently, each ending in something like a circular jaw. Teeth lined those openings in tight, rotating rings, clicking softly as they adjusted to the air.

The man saw it and made a sound that didn’t fully develop into a scream. “It’s under us! It’s under all of it!”

The thing did not hesitate. One of the appendages shot forward.

It didn’t strike him like an animal hunting prey. It moved with intent. Precise and immediate as though it understood exactly where he was anchored in the sea of bone. The circular jaw clamped down onto his torso just beneath the ribs.

The man’s body jerked upward. The bone field around him shifted. The skeletons that had been holding him adjusted all at once, not breaking free but releasing their grip in sequence. It felt coordinated, like the entire bone bed was part of the same organism.

The man screamed.

The sound was cut short as the second tendril locked around his shoulder. Another snapping into place around his waist. Not tearing him apart, just securing him, positioning him.

Then the pull began. His body dropped first then sank. Then was taken completely as the bones beneath him parted like a mouth swallowing. His upper half vanished into the field while his arms flailed once, desperately, uselessly, before disappearing as well.

For a few seconds nobody moved. The place where the man had been was empty. The bones had already settled back into place, erasing any evidence that a living human being had been there moments before.

The deputy was the first to find his voice. “What the fuck was that?”

No one answered. Rick wasn’t sure he could.

The movement was so subtle at first that he didn’t even notice it. Nearby a ribcage shifted a few inches through the pile. Then a different section stirred. The disturbance spread outward in widening circles. Soon the entire chamber felt alive with motion. Hector slowly swept his flashlight across the cavern floor. The beam traveled over thousands upon thousands of bones before stopping on the far wall. Whatever color remained of his face had vanished.

Rick followed his beam.

At first his brain didn’t register what he was looking at. Pale tentacles were rising from the skeletons. The shapes emerged slowly, displacing bones as they ascended.

Rick’s stomach tightened.

The thing that had dragged the man under the bones seemed large enough at the time. Standing here now, looking across the cavern, he had realized that they had seen only a small portion of whatever lived below. The appendages were surfacing everywhere. Some rose from the center of the chamber. Others appeared near the walls. One emerged less than twenty feet away, lifting itself from the skeletons with unsettling ease before swaying gently from side to side.

The deputy took an involuntary step back. His boot crushed a human skull. The crack echoed through the chamber.

Instantly every appendage stopped moving.

The appendages remained perfectly still for another heartbeat before slowly turning in unison toward the source of the noise. Toward them.

A deep vibration rolled through the bone field beneath their feet. The skeletons rattled violently. The piles near them collapsed inward as something vast shifted below. For the briefest moment, Rick saw something enormous moving beneath the bones, a pale shape passing under the camber floor like a shark gliding in dark water.

Then the tendrils struck.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

The Shriek from Below the Chipper

June 10, 2026May 31, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 2 Comments

I know exactly why Tench Belmont didn’t come to work at the veneer plant on that terrible night, and I had nothing to do with it. That’s what I told Kal M. when he said, “You probably pushed him into the machine.”

I was leaning over the chipper at the time, pushing more scrap wood down into the grinders, just before Foreman Ellis put me on forklift duty. Young twitchy Kal came up behind me, like he always did, and shoved my shoulders. I ignored that.

“Can’t you hear the voice?” I shouted. “It’s screaming “Let me Out!”

“You’re going to end up in the nuthouse,” Kal answered. “Not me. One day I’m going to be President of the United States.”

Talk about nuts. Bury Tench alive? All I did was hear his voice, from the dimensions beyond and below the roar of the machine. And Kal’s presidential ambitions? Seemed weird coming from a guy who spent his off-job time picking up pop cans from the ditch.

Tench Belmont was the forklift driver who delivered scrap wood for the chip machine. Tench: Like me, worked midnight shift at the veneer mill. Burly, always moving, took uppers to stay awake, raced around with his forklift, purposely banging into walls for excitement. He poured warm tea down Kal’s neck as the young fella descended the lunchroom stairs. I shouldn’t have laughed but I needed monotony relief.

“Even you !” Kal pointed, his crooked teeth bared. “Even you!” He repeated as his huge halo of yellow hair puffed out the sides of his orange hardhat.

Then he screamed at Tench. “When I become President of the United States you will pay for this!”

Tench laughed then, exactly as I heard his laugh beneath the grinder.

I figured Kal and Tench fed off each other. Kal: always angry. Tench: always bored.

I worked the midnight shift outside in the mill yard. I liked turning my head to see the moon rise and fall. To stay awake, I moved fast, throwing in the scrap wood and tamping it down with my sturdy iron pole, over and over. Reality faded with repetition as the grinder tore the wood to shreds.

“Keep your head up, you don’t want to fall in,” said our religious fanatic foreman, Ellis. “Watch the stars, lift up your eyes to the heavens towards God, not to the devil in the chipper.”

“What do you mean, there’s a devil in the chipper?” I asked as Ellis walked away repeating “read your Bible, Leon.”

But yes, I often hung my head over the lip of the machine, because of what I heard down there, behind the grinding roar of splitting wood. It became clearer than the sky around me.

“Let me out!”

Yes, from below the spinning augers, as they ripped and tore, like a new world opened, and from below them a shout, a scream, a bloodcurdling yell “Reach in! Reach in for me!”

It seemed more like an echo, then mocking and cruel, like Tench.

Tench liked to take breaks from his forklift deliveries to stick pieces of bread on the end of fish hooks, and cast out in the darkness for seagulls. He snagged Kal’s ear as the irritable skinny 18 year old pushed his clean-up cart past us. Tench’s reel unwound as Kal screeched and slapped his hand to his face. “Aaaaaa!”

Tench snipped the fishline with his jackknife. “Looks like I gotcha there little buddy.”

“F… you!” Kal shoved his clean up cart ahead of him and scooted away, holding his wound with one hand. Later, he sat eating in the lunch room, blood dripping from his earlobe, Tench stepped up behind him clapped two slabs of sourdough bread on either side of the boy’s wooly head and yelled to everyone “That’s cannibal filling!”

Kal screamed loud and long, grabbing out at Tench, who twisted the boy’s thumb, held it as the kid shrieked.. Nobody said or did anything. Tench held Kal’s thumb until the kid yelled “O. K, I give!”

“Why don’t you tell Foreman Ellis?” I asked the boy later.

“Why didn’t you try and help me?” he snarled up, throwing the bandaid I gave him into the chipper. “I don’t rat.”

In the mill the rule was “Mind your own business.”

Nobody wanted to be part of any work drama.

Besides, Foreman Ellis was stoned over his Bible most of the time, carrying it around open wide, hanging his head to read and walking right into walls.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!” he called out.

I thought about Tench snagging Kal’s ear, couldn’t sleep because of it.

After work I hitchhiked a ride into town, Tench and two girls picked me up, we all crunched into the front seat. I saw Kal staggering in the ditch carrying a garbage bag, “I’d huck a beer bottle out the window for him to pick up, but I’m on the wrong side of the truck,” Tench told us.

“Why do you hate him so much?” I asked, and the two young ladies laughed.

“I don’t hate anyone!” Tench roared. “The guy gives me a rush, man. His reaction, trying to fight me last night with his arms all up like a girl’s. He’s such a joke!”

Tench’s face went all blurry and blotchy for a second. I rubbed my eyes. Must be lack of sleep. But in that moment his devil voice pierced right into my mind, I couldn’t forget the tone as he disparaged Kal. Like everything was a prank, and he was the King of Gags. The two girls in the cab with him ate it up, giggling and wriggling around in their seats.

At the chipper that night I heard his voice louder, that voice screaming “I’m suffocating! Get me out!”

I turned off the machine and stared down through the augers. Something grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. It was Kal.

“You see?” He said. “When you’re in trouble, I help you!”

“The machine is off,” I said.

“I could’ve turned it back on when you were leaning,” Kal said. “That’s what that bastard Tench would’ve done.”

“Don’t you hear the voice?” I asked.

“Nothing there, Leon,” said Kal. “Except your own hollow brain.”

That morning Tench didn’t come into work. Foreman Ellis said “I tried to call him but he’s not answering. Do any of you guys know where in the name of God he’s at?”

As usual, nobody knew anything.

At around 3 am Ellis came around to the lunchroom and announced.

“Leon, I’m going to substitute you on forklift. Kal’s going to relieve on the chipper.”

“If you hear the voices,” I told Kal, “Don’t reach in. It’s Tench. That’s why he’s not here. He’s in the world behind the machine.”

“The insides of your head are talking back, KooKoo Leon,’ Kal told me. “And I won’t do anything that will stop my rise to be President of the United States.”

I jumped onto the forklift, an hour later was rolling by the railway tracks when Foreman Ellis came running.

“Everyone get out and look for Kal! God yelled out and told me something bad happened!”

I raced towards the chipper machine. The moon shimmered bright and the stars lit up over it.

Foreman Ellis had already turned off the power. He held a huge flashlight towards the grinder. I pushed my head forward into the machine, saw red all over the metal maw inside, and what looked like a pair of boot laces wrapped up in the augers.

I couldn’t figure it out. Kal hated Tench. Why would he reach in with the machine running? Was the voice that strong? He said he hadn’t heard it before.

The company shut the whole mill down for the investigation.

“His tamping pole dropped, and he leaned over to reach it,” Ellis told me when the plant opened up two days later. “The machine pulled him in.”

Tench stood with us, staring into the grinder.

“Why were you away that day?” I asked him.

“Because of my nightmare,” Tench said. His voice trembled as he spoke. “Kal was screaming how much he hated me. I reached out like I did in the lunchroom and grabbed his thumb. He was trying to wriggle away and I wouldn’t let go.” He turned to me. “It was a hangover dream, Leon. It wasn’t real, was it?”

“The devil’s voice travels far,” Foreman Ellis stated. “For those fated to hear.”

Now, in the wee hours, Tench slumps in the lunchroom with his face forward, trying to rest on the table. He’s taken his fishing rod home. “No more jokes,” he tells me.

The voice in the grinder hasn’t gone away.

“Let me out of here. Reach in and pull me out!” Kal screams.

This is what I tell myself: I don’t know why the boy still yells like this, because all they found were his boot laces. The pole slipped, and he reached too far in.

∼ Harrison Kim

Blue Sky Somewhere

June 3, 2026May 31, 2026 ~ Marge Simon ~ 6 Comments

Thea parts the curtains on the day ahead, then quickly ducks away. Sunlight unfurls from the window panes sparkling an unused coffee cup and a basket of imaginary rolls. She knows it’s make-believe, a tableau laid out by habit. Useless to pretend she’s one of them beyond her home, but it is all she’s had for centuries.

On the floor, the shadow of a leafy oak reminds her how life struggles on outside. She’d love a glimpse of cobalt sky, a sight she treasured on the shores of Attica. Those sweet days, a memory from centuries ago when she was young, unaware her mortality was soon to change. But now the blood of cities bleeds into a wounded sky; the atmosphere so thick with toxic fumes, few mortals dare to walk the streets without a mask.

It seems unfair that she must bear the situation, knowing it was never her intention. But worse, the shrinking population bodes her ultimate demise. She wanders darkened rooms, touching surfaces, feeling the measure of textures, the contrast of cloth and stone, glass and polished wood. Things in her small world she knows so well. Inside things, held dearly but dearer still the feel of sun on skin. A blue sky, there must be a glimpse of it somewhere.

Why wait any longer?

A twist of latch, an open door. She steps into the light.

∼ Marge Simon

Choices

May 20, 2026May 9, 2026 ~ afstewart ~ 6 Comments

My portrait hung on the wall in the library.
Covered in dust, housed inside a tarnished frame; a sad reminder of better days. A hint of mold drifted in the air, the corners of the patterned wallpaper peeling and brittle, and cold ashes sat in the neglected fireplace. Some claimed the house was haunted. I always smiled at that notion.
Yet, I could see why its reputation turned. My home had fallen into disrepute, chased by rumours and scandal.
My fault.
My choices brought us all to ruin.
I should never have married Robert, that weak-willed philandering fool.
I should never have invited my cousin Angelique to live with us.
Such a coquette, Angelique. Sweet, polite, outwardly a lady, inside a heartless scheming shrew. Flirting with my husband, under the guise of innocence. That woman never knew the meaning of the word. Robert, of course, fell for her charms. Never a smart or discerning man, but a rich one. The appeal for both myself and Angelique, I suspect. They dallied under my roof, thinking I didn’t know, didn’t see what they were doing. Not everything, but enough to be disgusted with their behavior. I challenged Robert and gave him an ultimatum. Not that he heeded anything I said. I regretted that confrontation, but I suppose it doesn’t matter now.
Both of them ignored me and made their own plans. Plans that didn’t include me.
They thought they had won.
They never counted on my spiteful nature.
I made them pay for their sins.
Whispering in Robert’s ear at night, I berated him, accused him, tormented him in his sleep. Angelique I harassed daily, reminding her she was not the mistress of this house. I hid her things, played cruel pranks, and made her life a misery. Their passion turned to resentment, and they sniped at each other, arguing constantly.
Ah, the sound of their discord was such a delight.
After months of constant strife and unhappiness, my horror of a husband broke, his will eroded with melancholy. I followed him that day, as he walked out onto the third-floor balcony of the music room, and watched him jump. Rushing forward, I saw his fall, laughing as he hit the ground with a satisfying thud. I was still there watching as Angelique found his body. Her screaming soothed my soul.
In the days after, things changed. Robert’s will was read, and Angelique found her fortunes reversed, her impertinent, scheming self thrown out of the house without a penny. I remained, still the mistress of my home.
No matter what happens, this house will always be mine.
For my portrait still hangs in the library.
And my murdered bones are buried beneath the wine cellar floor.

~ A. F. Stewart

All Flavors

May 13, 2026May 9, 2026 ~ Nina D'Arcangela ~ 3 Comments

You wouldn’t think such a thing of me, but that doesn’t make it untrue. You don’t want to believe I would do such as this, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You, of what you perceive to be a higher nature, claim you wouldn’t commit the atrocities I have, but that doesn’t make you better than me.

What would you do to save your own? Would you debase that moral turpitude you carry so pretentiously? Would you lower yourself to any level necessary to ensure your survival? Of course you would, don’t posture and preen while I get my hands dirty. You are no different…

Well, maybe you are a bit different. You see, you hear, you feel. You can scent a fragrance on the air, taste its tang on your tongue. But you cannot see past the smaller task, hear the pleas of our ancestors, throb with the wail of babes unborn. You can’t stand the smell of the offal, nor ingest the entrails to read a true intent – I can. I can do these things and more.

Don’t worry, your failed gratitude won’t stop me from performing as I must. A wolf in sheep’s clothing? Nay, a warrior from time immemorial hiding in plain sight, that’s what I am. And I will conquer our enemies to keep your hands clean. What do I ask in return? When the fight is over, the battle won, do not burn me as I burn those who have affronted us; I will not tolerate that again.

∼ Nina D’Arcangela

Harlequin God

April 15, 2026April 11, 2026 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

The wind uses the forest to voice its thoughts. It uses the pinions of owls. I hear the words, though I don’t know the language. The dragonflies understand. The geckos do, with their flanks working like bellows. Sitting on my deck, I listen to the clack of wooden wind chimes, the tink-tink of copper ones. Something caws in the distance. I think it’s a crow. Or something mimicking a crow. My ears keep me grounded but my eyes are lost in greenery.

Twenty yards from my chair, the woods rise. Pines. Oaks. Magnolias. Cyrilla. Spanish moss twists along their limbs like the beards of old men. Blackberry brambles fill the underbrush, gravid with unripened fruit. Things hide among the green. Shadows sweep across the world with wings. Perhaps there are birds high in the air casting them. But I don’t see them; I cannot swear they are there. And the shadows are large. Perhaps they are fossil shadows, leftovers from the time of pteranodons and pterodactyls.

But the living things that fill the woods are not fossils. A moment ago, a long silken blackness raced down the bare trunk of a pine, an animal shape three feet long with a sleek head and long tail. My mind told me I’d seen the shadow of one pine swaying past another in the wind. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because of the god who conceals himself below that spot in the bushes. He is painted many shades of green and black, and blends so well with his surroundings that I cannot tell where he ends and the world begins. Sometimes I see only his eyes, like specks of sun reflected in tear drops. Sometimes I see his torn cloak and the ratty top hat he wears. I have never seen his mouth. I don’t know if he smiles. I wonder if he has teeth, and if they are long.

The god watches me, very quietly watches me. I suspect the silk-black animal is really one of his angels. I’m sure there are more. The hide from me, even as the god tries to hide. He has planted the forest on his back as camouflage. But the wind reveals him. The voices in the breeze are prayers coming in from worshippers all over the world.

I wonder if the god would join me if I invited him for a drink. My mind is divided. My human part suggests that he will not leave the woods, that without the glory of his surroundings he would appear only shabby and small. He could not tolerate that. The animal part of me, though, says he’s already here, hunched over and dripping behind me.

Should I turn my head? Should I show him my own teeth? I don’t want to scare him off. I’m very hungry, and it has been a long time since I’ve eaten a meal as fine as a god.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Bones and All

April 8, 2026February 21, 2026 ~ Lee Andrew Forman ~ 4 Comments

No one saw her the way I did. Her beauty inspired a reverence within me that not even the word of God could outshine. I gazed into hallowed eyes, ran my fingers up her long legs. I cradled her in an embrace that made our bodies one. She was my love in life, and so would be in death. She was the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things.

Despite her body ravaged by plague, I still found her beautiful. Nothing could stray my heart from seeing her soul, brilliant and pure—like the stars in the sky, spread vast and endless. I held her thin remnants, cold, pale, hard to the touch, and even after my vessel failed to move and fell to decay, I’d join her eternally on this Earth and beyond.

∼ Lee Andrew Forman