You Will Need: – a Heart in a jar; – a Knife (sharp); – a Tarp. Prep: Lay down tarp on clean surface. Place prybar and knife within reach. Place self on tarp. Instructions: Think of your most recent ex. Now, take the knife in your dominant hand.

What is the colour of pain? In the growing carmine tide that creeps in her heart-mind, Mathilde would swear all that hurts is red, like her scratched hand, her wounded wrists, her slashed ankles. It’s the blood trickling from her fingers.

The possible worlds hung and spun in five-dimensional space like ever-twisting jewels of sand-brown and burgundy, frost and ocean. Mother, Father, and Amelia made their camp on a relatively flat piece of spacetime, stretched between three clusters of possible worlds. Mother and Father were careful campers. They’d drilled Amelia on the dangers of disturbing the possible worlds, so she watched them float and sway from the corner of her eye, making sure that her soft footsteps didn’t jostle them.

You are sitting on the third-floor balcony facing the beach when you see it breach the water. It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there. You know because water that close to the coast never drops below fifty feet and this thing, breathing heavily in the ocean air and stretching its toothy jaw, must be all head and no body, but there it is.

Finch’s dad always said a book could neither plow the earth nor feed a mare, so Finch wasn’t surprised when his secret bestiary turned out to be alive. He inherited it upon his father’s death in the summer of Finch’s fifteenth year. After burying his father in the meadow near his favorite horse’s grave, Finch read the handwritten will that wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of Law, but was good enough for them.