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On the morning Gwen woke with the ability to manipulate time, it was already too late. She didn’t immediately realize she could stretch or compress time—that would come later. At first, all she knew was Dianne was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
Dear Members of the Community,
As we begin yet another fall semester in the throes of the rogue timestream unleashed on our campus, I cannot help but take a moment to marvel at just how vibrant our community has become. In addition to our current residents, our University’s campus grounds and buildings have come to support thousands of students, staff, affiliates, and visitors from past, future, as well as alternate Universities.
When we moved Dad to the care facility, his only complaint was the Wi-Fi. “Laggy,” he called it when he was having a good day. “Fucking piece of shit,” he called it the rest of the time.
At first I was relieved. I’d been worried that he’d bristle at the cramped room, like a zoo animal pacing its enclosure in a sad documentary. But he never said a word about the bedsit quarters or the unfamiliar, ever-churning staff.
And all the devils are here.
“What’s that from?” Millie asks as she gets her coat.
I stand at the back window, looking out. Usually, you can see the downtown skyline from this position. Today, it’s just the hellmouth. A long tube that looks like an esophagus that’s been yanked out of a kaiju and dangles from the ground. Bloody, meaty, smoking.
I beg you, let me tell you about my daughter. My brilliant daughter will be one of the four people who survive their airplane crashing into a giant. Or, more accurately, a giant swiping their airplane out of the sky. Perhaps it meant to catch, or caress. My daughter will never know. Usually airlines predict giants ahead of time, from sightings or seismic activity, but this one was not easily seen and quick as a whip, like my daughter.
This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had taken a plea deal, promising to name names, promising to name the name.
In summer, when the ocean ebbs at dusk, when the sand turns to glass and it becomes impossible to discern the difference between reflection and sky, the Tide Folk emerge from their pools. You might think, if you clamber on the cliffs searching for those tiny ecosystems the sea leaves behind twice a day, that you can see all there is to see—that you could, if you tried, touch the bottom of the pockets of water with your fingertip.
The earliest videos went something like this: disembodied female voices singing strange intonations of the words “girl dinner” in a voice-over effect as the visuals of the video featured dozens of increasingly strange combinations of food. A handful of Cheez-It crackers, grapes, and a stick of string cheese with a line of sriracha along the top? Girl dinner.
If you are reading this book then you must have either completed your might and magic training or succeeded in killing a spirit hunter and found their copy a spoil (no spirit hunter in their right mind will hand you this book under any circumstances). But whatever means you’ve acquired it, it will guide you into hunting, capturing or, in the worst case scenario, running when you come across any of these spirits.
The AI surgical bots that reconstruct Warren after the accident have no clearer a concept of human anatomy than AI has ever had. He emerges from anesthesia to discover, in stages, two extra fingers on his right hand, a tentacle emerging from the left side of his ribcage, and a third eye, gummed shut by mucus, in the back of his head. Also, one of his feet is backwards.
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