“Onuna has blessed you.” Elijah’s mother had often told him that when he was a boy yet he had never shared the sentiment. His mother’s goddess had cursed him, making him a harbinger of bad news and death simply because he dared to leave his mother’s heaving body not as a daughter but as a […]

Will you talk to me? Please? In the still of each obsidian night, in her restless half-sleep, her torment, she doesn’t know what is dream and what is memory. Even her waking hours are cloudy and blurry, often distorted, like she’s viewing the world through a rain-streaked, ash-strewn window. She stirs. Sits. Rubs her eyes. […]

Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking others were living in his house. Not intruders. Not burglars. They were full-time residents. They had voices too tiny to hear but put them all together and they suggested the most dreadful noise. First thing in the morning Julius thought he could see them, […]

When does a woman become a witch? It’s different for all of us. Some come to it naturally. Others struggle for a while. For me, that contest of arms started in a few inches of water with my lover’s hands firmly pressed down on the back of my neck. He won. I don’t know how […]

Vivisepulture (noun): the practice of burying someone alive. The ghosts are loud tonight. Eric hears them howling around the house in the wind, but mostly inside his own head. If you asked him, Eric would say he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Like a million other folks, he’s far from special in that. He believes in […]

I: Breathe “What is it you want?” I whispered, hands hovering over the melted sugar, eyes fixated. The first time I performed the spell, I burnt off the tips of my fingers with the prints singeing right off. Soot rested on the ground along with dead skin. The raw flesh sat exposed for a month […]

Before the archaeologists contacted you—a cryptozoologist—they initially reached out to an entomologist, since the first creature appeared to be, mostly, an insect. The peat bog in Sumpit had brined an unusual body, preserving the chitin wings and exoskeleton just as well as similar anaerobic environments in other parts of the world conserved hair, skin, primitive […]

Mara was thirteen the first time she whispered her hatred into the ground, her fingers earth-stained as she tore a squirming, pink worm into smaller and smaller pieces. “I want her to hurt,” she said and then dug until her fingernails cracked, the delicate skin beneath raw and bleeding, before dropping the pieces into the […]

In the quiet, you will hear us, our voices rising above the hush. How do you tell the difference between thinking and hearing? It used to come so naturally. Clarence had lived alone for some time. It should have been easy. One weekend he tried counting all the people on his picture wall he knew […]

She calls them pig-oons instead of pigeons. “Look at the pig-oons!” Does it with a little sly smile every time, waiting to be asked why. She’s scattering seed all over the place, all over the lawn, so next year it’ll be sprouting thick-shafted wheat and barley in amongst the grass. Not much of it, though—the […]