Sommerset House is enormous. A white rectangle, two storeys and an attic high, columns wrapping all sides, sash windows, dark shutters. Manicured lawns. Innocent-looking as if its history is nothing to do with it; the outbuildings dismantled some while ago. Nothing to see here. Rather like a man pretending he hasn’t just stepped in dog […]
Anon, Agnes could never say which came first, the tale, the witch or the snatchings. By the end of that year, the Year of Our Lord 1598, the elders themselves fained not to speak of it and that autumn became a tale in itself. All told, Dannet was a humble place, a hamlet on the […]
Houmi woke up with a thousand arms today, though she usually woke up with this many—give or take a few. On certain days, perhaps she could even get the number down to the mid hundreds. But only on a really, really good day. Before she made her morning tea—chamomile for the headaches caused by the […]
Everything has a purpose, Ayaan’s mother would say, and a man usually finds his through marriage. Which is what brought them to the matchmaker whose diary had been lined with names and mobile numbers in ballpoint ink. That detail had struck Ayaan. In this day and age he’d just assumed everything was in an app. […]
You are a crow in Klang, and you wake up trembling again. The sun is rising, but the sky is still gray. You stir in your nest of twigs, looking out at the Ng house just across the road. You flap your wings, and your brothers and sisters and friends and neighbors start waking up […]
The dawn is just uncurling from itself, leaning towards a hot dry season day. Egoabia watches as grains of sand jet out of her son’s eyes and ears: jagged, cavern clay. Ude’s body deflates, slowly, slowly as if his skin were a covering merely cradling all the things he embodies. A small wind blooms in […]
I know what you will say. You will say to me, Arseny, there are enough real monsters in this world—why do you make your own? But before I begin, before you make your judgments, like the others, before you tsk-tsk-tsk our failures and tell me what you would have done, there are some things that […]
When Yipp came to the village and took the five girls set to turn seventeen during that year’s River Harvest Ihmani found herself awoken by a sea of wails. Tumbling from her covers she hurried to the front door where she found her parents already outside amongst the gathering group of mothers and fathers. A […]
My father told me that there must not be fear in our village. Whether we are born as girls or boys or whomever we may choose to be and become, we must overcome our fears. I had yet to turn fifteen, but it matters not to my father, nothing ever did except for his face, […]
Suffolk, 1557 O Domine! Such was the cry in Abacuck’s heart up on the roof of St Mary’s. Save us. The steeple above was all the answer he needed, a dark, judgemental finger. Treacherous his path was, slippery as the tiles under his boots, the removal of which the rector had charged him with that […]
