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Anything can be bought or sold at the Night Market. A dozen hummingbird tongues curled like tiny snails, basted in honey and chili oil and served on a silver tray. A mermaid’s song, caught in an antique bottle of smoked glass. A gleaming dagger carved from the ivory of the last true unicorn-whale. Gowns of moonlight and mist, trimmed with sea-foam lace. The lost diaries of one’s youth.
The ballads of grief are sung in the moonlight. You were a minute old when you knew this story predates your mother’s mother’s mother’s birth. But the knowledge within was older still, notched inside you like food through the umbilical cord. And there it had coiled since you were but a seed, pulsating under your navel and releasing into the air on the sharp crescendo of your first cry on the eighth of Shaʽbān. The window panes shattered. The town mourned.
We’ve never been so busy. The cave where we work used to be calm and, if not entirely devoid of sound, then split only by the crash of waves at high tide and the occasional cry of a woman who didn’t listen when we said listen this will hurt this will hurt this will hurt.
The towering granite shoulders of the mountain god braced against the blue heavens above. Eero’s eyes remained closed beneath his glacial mask, his body swathed in a cloak of green trees. Halfway up the mountain’s body, jutting out of a gray cliff, stretched his wide, verdigrised hands.
There are a near-infinite number of strange and marvelous worlds in this Universe, and in all of them there are Cats. I see that you are an ordinary person and not a Cat; thus, I can ascertain that you know very little about the Universe.
Deep in the abyss of the Unholy Bazaar, in a shop that reeked of death and god-blood, Sparrow lay screaming in a web of rope and unbreakable silk. Around her, the Aunties bustled: sawing and rinsing and hammering; cursing, grunting, and muttering.
The night before the comet hit, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke restless and well before dawn. He slipped carefully out of bed—Pat needed her rest, ever since the second stroke—and walked in slipper-feet down to the den. He thought he might see what the news was saying—Pat didn’t like it when he watched the news; it always made him angry.
Gemma checks and rechecks the stories and songs, but she can’t find anything that says you have to go back. There’s a lot of stuff about how you should, but most of it is about souls, and Gemma is pretty sure she doesn’t believe in that shit. Souls are for people who fit, and she never has. Souls are what they threaten when you don’t do what you should.
I joined The Ministry in 2009. Before that, I worked in grocery stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores. It was shift work, shit work, all of it minimum wage. I lived in Jasper, in East Texas, and I took what I could get. My husband was a mechanic. We met when we were young, when we were in school, and we married shortly after.
As with Robert Johnson, a lot of people who believed in the devil also believed that Jack Malagan had made a deal with him. Jack was a six-string prodigy, getting pulled onstage by the likes of Grohl and Kravitz by the time he was twelve. He could swing the blues as hard as Bonamassa, but it was just the foundation for his love for rock.
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