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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.
You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail. “I didn’t raise a son of mine to count on his fingers,” your father says in the dream—because ah, yes, it’s all of your worst moments rolled into a single nightmare. You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands.
05.22.2028 — Dear Teejay_009: Today makes it a decade and a day I have been keeping tabs on you. I started by watching your mother, monitoring all her movements while she housed you. There’s no better time to relay this message but now.
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 trouble started after my husband reported a strange Zoom call at work. The company he worked for was a tech company that dabbled in defense contracting. I know all tech companies make weapons, but I didn’t want him working on that kind of stuff. He never promised he wouldn’t.
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.
Udo Gehler saw his next opponent was the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance and didn’t even blink. He’d been curled up in his personal ARMOR lounge, holo-projecting the replay of his last match frame by frame, noting every instance he’d lost momentum or ceded terrain control.
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.
Dawn shot a quiver of cirrus that smeared like sunscreen across the sky. Bini had been awake for hours, back aching. She was too old for this shit. Mox still slept like the dead, her snores a regular wheeze. Hard to imagine Bini had once slept beside that noise every night.
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.
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