i. He visited me in the night, carrying his head. Dead men would sometimes visit the city this way. I had known this could happen with the executed, but I could not bring myself to accept the visitation. Yet there he was, in my apartment: holding his severed head just above the waist, eyes open […]

We always died before turning twelve. Then we returned to the afterlife, lived briefly, and became flame souls again, reborn only to repeat the cycle of dying. We wore skin and moved like ordinary humans, but we are not like other children. We are Abikus, spirits of the dead who visit the living. Mist that […]

Guilt and blossom chase me along the mausoleum path. The guilt because I’m late, but not only that. Coming here makes me realise how badly I’ve neglected a friendship. The blossom sticks to my shoes, already fringed with brown corruption before it left the tree. It’s been too long since I last saw Abigail Goudy. […]

For sale: one-of-a-kind secluded home in nice family neighborhood. private drive. inquire wilson realty, 432-6600. Beatrice knew she would buy the house before she saw it, even before she knew the price. In a tough real estate market, people bought properties as-is, regardless of the home inspection report. They wanted entry into the cycle of […]

What I saw and how I saw it: As if through a cracked piece of sea-glass, worn to kaleidoscope etching, all lights forming haloes and all darknesses eddying like some fungal sea. Through dry and bleeding eyes. At a distance, through the mind’s dirty windshield. In shreds and patches, drips and drabs, bits and snatches. […]

“Awa, did you see this?” My sister is holding out her phone for me to read. There are streaks of brown henna, which she has been trying to apply in preparation for a friend’s wedding, on the cracked screen. Kana refused my help, saying my hands were too clumsy for the intricate, precise patterns she […]

Trauma is a ghost that haunts you. Grief another. Dad was dead. Mom gripped in a pall of anguish. And Sophie wouldn’t shut up. “Ophelia,” Sophie was saying, “we all perish in the end. Sometimes our end comes sooner than we’d like.” I stared at her. It was night. We were on the backyard patio. […]

This month, the dead bird on her front step was accompanied by a tooth. Renata gazed at tooth and bird both for long enough to miss her bus, then went inside to get a dustpan and brush. Paul was there when she returned, crouched over the dead bird. “Neighborhood cat’s back,” he said. “Thought we’d […]

He was on the way up, the poor lad. Up from an infancy of neglect, out of the fistfights of his adolescence, the mind-addled haze of his twenties. Now, early thirties, he was peeling away from that self-sabotaging behavior, proudly clean of booze, weed, fast food. He was working out. He was healthy. He had, […]

It was hard to miss the large wooden O mounted by the door of the bungalow. O as in obedient, onerous, obscene. The stain along the bottom of the letter conjured an image of ragged teeth and a tongue. Gray and black rotting leaves filled one side of the porch. The window screens were rusted […]