Damned Words 63

August 12, 2026August 10, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 2 Comments

The Harvest
Kathleen McCluskey

The Pillar was our world.

Its white bark fed us. Its roots gave us water. Its branches held our villages high above the dark earth below. The elders taught us that beyond the crown was only The Empty Blue, where no living thing could survive.

When the Pillar began to die, I was chosen to climb.

The trunk stretched farther than any man had ever dared. My hands bled. The air grew thin. At last I reached its highest branches.

The elders had lied. There was no endless forest of Pillars. There was only ours in a vast field beneath an impossibly blue sky.

The ground shook and a shadow blotted out the sun. Something enormous began descending from the sky.

Five gigantic shapes cascaded down from the blue, their pale flesh creased and lined like living canyons. Dark pores gaped like caves. Fine hair, thick as tree trunks bent in the wind of their approach. They wrapped around the crown. The branches groaned beneath their grip. Our homes splintered. People clung to the bark, screaming as our world was torn free.

I was lifted higher and for one impossible moment, I looked beyond.

A polished wooden table, a crystal bowl. Countless other Pillars with shriveled, purple worlds.

The sky began to split apart, but it wasn’t a sky. It was a mouth.

The first bite shattered half of the villagers. Mountains of teeth crushed wood, stone and flesh all together. Our mauve worlds popped and oozed. The air filled with a thousand screams before they were swallowed into the darkness.

As the jaws closed around what was left of my world, I finally understood why the Pillar had given us everything we needed.

We had never been its children, we had been its fruit.

The Last Tree
Richard Meldrum

In the wind torn desert it was a fixed point, like the stars and rocks the tribe used to find their way across the featureless landscape. It stood thirty feet high, with arms spreading out from the main trunk. The tribe never considered its origin or that it had once been a living organism. In this blasted world, bereft of vegetation and animals larger than a mouse, it was unique.

The tribespeople had no sense this world had ever looked any different. That food was once abundant and water fell in unending cascades from the sky. That buildings once stood hundreds of feet high and machines flew in the blue sky. There were legends of the old ones, but no-one took them seriously.

The outsider arrived uninvited. He claimed to have found the secrets of the ancient ones and wanted to spread this truth to the desert tribes. He spoke of untold wealth and knowledge in a faraway place, where he had seen the remnants of the ancient world with his own eyes. He spoke of something he called forests, where living objects called trees extended green arms towards the sun. He told them the object they used for navigation was a tree, long dead.

Fearing heresy, the tribespeople honored their own gods by tying him to the object he called a tree and burning him. Afterwards, they gathered round the corpse. No one believed the object he was tied to had ever been alive.

Broken Bough
Elaine Pascale

The climb was always the best part.

Roy felt guilty that his job entailed installing environmentally detrimental teleports. He knew that humanity should have learned its lesson when they forcibly evacuated Earth, but they were simply repeating the same old patterns.

He could quit but he needed the job. When he wasn’t causing climate catastrophes, he enjoyed the scenery. And the wildlife was starkly different than that of Earth. For instance, the avian creature that was observing him as he ascended the smoothly barked tree. The creature appeared to be on a nest and Roy hoped it was not guarding eggs as that would make the installation more of a battle than a job.

“Hey bird,” he called cheerfully, knowing that “bird” was not the correct label, but not having a better term to use.

“Hey Earthling,” the creature responded, shocking Roy enough that he lost his grip and slipped down a few feet before righting himself.

Roy realized that the bird, as he now thought of it, was communicating telepathically. It showed him images of the history of its planet; it showed him of the destruction to come in a very short timespan due to the activities of Roy’s species. The devastation was heart wrenching.

“Now you understand. And now I hope you will forgive me.” The creature left its nest and swooped on massive wings toward Roy. It attached its scissor-like beak to the ropes that held Roy aloft and sliced through them as if they were made of paper instead of thick cables.

As Roy fell, he realized there was no need for forgiveness, and he enjoyed the last few seconds of scenery.

Earthbound
Lee Andrew Forman

When the tower grew to its full height each lobe unfurled itself into reaching extremities, a network of points that would work in unison. Its design was born of life, of hope, of the vast loneliness endured by great thinkers. Their theories would finally be put to work; their ideas would soon find truth…or nothing. No one could predict what answers, if any, it might discover. Only that it would perform its function with the precision it was meant to achieve. It would seek the above, the endless abyss that until that day had been unreachable by all who tried before. The sky would either open, or come crashing down on them with disastrous despair.

When the device had fully formed, it stood ready to serve its designers. A new life, created to search elsewhere for that very thing. It listened to the points of light in the dark to see if they would speak, or whether their bodies were cold and silent. It employed the many senses it had been given to look for another voice in the cosmos, another world where consciousness existed.

As far as it could see, near into eternity, it found only one. A small world busy with noise of all kinds.

The travelers had already been prepared, and their vessels ready to launch. They would soon meet their only neighbors in the boundless darkness, whoever they may be.

The Tree of Life
Charles Gramlich

My eyes opened. I lay on my back looking up at a tree with strange, fractal limbs embedded in an achingly blue sky. The tree had no leaves, though it wasn’t cold so it didn’t seem to be winter. I didn’t remember what time of year it was. I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. I tried to sit up and failed. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I strained every muscle but couldn’t even turn my head.

Scream! No sound came from my mouth, but I heard something—a slithering. Needle-sharp stabs pierced my back and legs. Roots gone rogue? My mind went nova; I struggled as I’d never struggled before. My eyes were the only things to respond, roiling wildly. Fluid began to burble, began to drain. From me!

My cheeks grew hollow; my belly shrank until it touched my spine. The trunk of the tree flushed pink; the pink spread upward. Muscles and organs inside me began to liquify. Like a tire with a slow leak, I deflated, while the tree unfurled healthy leaves and beautiful blooms. The leaves were a wet, fresh green but the blooms were red, red, red—the color of a man’s life being leached away.

Under the Fractal Tree
Miriam H. Harrison

Angering the gods was always dangerous. Cliffs and eagles, hills and boulders—their punishments were known to be equally cruel and creative.

He pondered this as he sat in his place, chained to the fractal tree. Each thought led to another, churning on and on with anxieties and uncertainties. His restless mind had brought him here; his ceaseless questions of the gods had forged his chains.

And so he sat here—as he did each day, as he would forever—watching the branches of the fractal tree grow out above him, reaching like unending questions, like racing thoughts, like a restless mind that knew no peace.

Big Stick Chapter One
Harrison Kim

A giant vegetable stick grows from my stomach and everywhere I go I yell “Stay back!” because I don’t want to hit a stranger with my protruding organic matter.

My local grocery clerk and amateur naturopath Jilly Van Loon says the plant is a delusional consequence of my diet. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she says. “You’re a truly green guy.”

That’s for sure, I’ve been eating only salads for years.

Jilly insists I need protein “eat more beans” but look at me now, a healthy companion veggie stick always with me. If it keeps growing, I won’t ever have to search for shade. The main trouble is the measurement. Just a foot last week, now it’s four and I keep it covered with a blanket and carry it about in a wheelbarrow. At the health food store, I transfer it to a shopping cart, and use another one for the groceries.

The security guard approaches and I tell him why I need so many wheels.

“There’s no veggie stick there, man, nothing there at all,” says the big guy.

I understand his concern, but I’m not a crazy person.

“You can’t see it because you don’t feel it,” I tell him. “I know from my lived experience what is real.”
“Well, if it’s real and getting that big, don’t you think it’s almost time to harvest?” he says.

Good point. This thing is becoming truly cumbersome.

Tonight I will stand in the shower, with a knife in my hand. I’ll strike down, slice into my veggie stick, and feel the weight drop.

But the more I think, to really cut it out, I’ll have to go into the roots.

I’ll let you know the results in Chapter 2.

Each piece of fiction is the copyright of its respective author and may not be reproduced without prior consent. © Copyright 2026

A Party to Forget

July 29, 2026July 21, 2026 ~ Nina D'Arcangela ~ 2 Comments

Pushing through the mist, I sauntered into the ballroom; my finery somewhat unrefined, my gait swaying with a slight hitch. I’d often heard tell of Madam de Vere’s elaborate soirées, but had no opportunity to attend—until now. One was not welcome at an after-life party without the requisite stilled breath, else those without take it from you.

I’d imagined a grand reception; privileges granted a seer of my strength and heritage. Surely they’d know I was coming. After all, the world’s loss was the losts’ gain…or so I deluded myself.

Many gathered to greet me, my Great-gran the first. Her eyes bore through me as they drew from head to toe. She pulled me into her chilled embrace, ripped the Cameo from my bosom. I stared in shock. For the lack of life left in me, I couldn’t fathom a reason for the hostility. Her alabaster countenance held the kind gaze I remembered from my youth, but her actions belied the placid façade.

Enamored with her reclaimed broach, she turned away, both distracted and disinterested. A ghoul leaned toward her ear, but before he could speak, she waved a dismissive hand.

“Nonna…” I croaked, distress broadcasting from my entire being.

She pivoted toward me, the semblance of her gentler nature gone. In its place a mask of pain, anguish, and anger. She jerked forward with a ghastly trill. The others took her cue, and descended.

∼ Nina D’Arcangela

The Despicable Pickle

July 15, 2026July 9, 2026 ~ Richard Meldrum ~ 3 Comments

Of course, he could have made his own sandwiches for lunch, but he was a traditionalist. It was woman’s work. He bit into the sandwich from his lunchbox and visibly recoiled. She’d put pickles in again, which he detested. He thought after their last ‘conversation’ she would stop doing this, but she’d started it again. It was simply to annoy him, petty and vindictive. He thought he’d made himself clear the last time. He threw the sandwich in the garbage, deciding she needed another lesson when he got home. She’d learn not to annoy him. She’d learn, not for the first time, he didn’t like wasting food and, more importantly, wasting money.

He entered the house after his shift, still in a foul mood. She stood in the kitchen, her back to him. He remained silent and walked up behind her. He wanted her to know he was angry, but it was a cold wrath. No need for raised voices, his retribution would come another way. She turned, and before he could react, the knife slid into his chest. She was silent too, she’d decided her revenge was going to be cold. He fell onto the kitchen floor. There was very little blood, but the damage had been done. She reached back toward the counter, picked something up and shoved it into his mouth.

The last thing he tasted was the sour, unpleasant taste of his least favourite vegetable.

∼ RJ Meldrum

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

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