Advertisement
Rat was sure the silent, four-eyed skull of a dead god was staring at him. He followed the crowd off the train toward a rickety stand with the word Orientation painted on the front. But he couldn’t stop looking into the giant god’s eyes. Every dead person Rat had seen had eyes like that. Unseeing. […]
A tithe convoy of the Fivefold Church, in Ander Carmora’s sad experience, left three kinds of wakes. Armored wagons and oxen ripped lasting ruts in gravel roads, scarred them down to the mud. Tithe collectors gleaned their due from all and sundry, and left long swathes of land poorer than they’d found it. And the third wake: the bodies of any bandit crew daft enough to try its luck.
Tilda stands at a crossroads just outside of town. It’s a place where worlds meet, and the perfect place to create a new person. The crescent moon glimmers through the oaks bent thick along the roadside. The cold-burning stars in the sky hold a sort of magic if you know how to swim in their light. Tilda spits in the dirt, turns a tight circle, and recites the incantation she learned as a child.
We put my body double together in June Lee’s basement. Her mom was one of those chill Asian moms who liked having an artsy-fartsy daughter she could brag about at Bible study. She was already pushing the whole portfolio-for-college-apps deal, so she didn’t mind staying out of the basement to avoid contaminating our radiant artist auras humming at the frequency of the Big Bang.
I heard you’re returning to our world again. What do you want here exactly, Orhija? The Earth is dying slowly. It’s losing its sheen and glow. The blackness of the soil that you used to say was as beautiful as mine has changed since you left. It’s redder than black. The air is tense and heavy with smoke. I doubt you can survive it.
As her head hit the pillow, Yadira felt exhausted and relieved. Exhausted, because she’d worked on a very large collage almost the whole day straight. Her shoulder blades ached from hunching over her worktable, and, despite scrubbing, she still had ink under her nails. Relieved, because she felt like she’d left it all out on the field, rather than still vibrating with artistic energy.
The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the boy’s eyes on her, Jackie felt a strange prickling. A warning pacing behind her ribs. A mouth about to drip.
Mark was aware that he looked more dead than alive, so he did not have high expectations for his first, and last, night on the town. He had fled the hospital’s cancer ward fuelled by stolen methamphetamines, wearing stolen clothes, and armed with just his credit card.
My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of moss eating like acid through fallen tombstones. In the haze of tree-shadowed dark, huge stone towers loomed in the distance, wrapped by vine and tree limb.
By the time he went to reclaim himself, it was too late. As a young man, he’d realized there was a power to being alone. Relationships were tethers that held you back, sapped you of strength, of will. People were poison. And not all poisons were bad; sometimes the toxic taste, the caustic kiss, was a good thing. But too much killed you all the same. No matter how alive it made him feel in the moment, he knew that in the end, it would cost him.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement