Families moved into the underwater pods at staggered times, so we never met our neighbors. On the long car ride to the ocean, as the air became saltier and the types of trees changed outside the windows, it felt like a beach trip. In the trunk, in Dad’s cooler, ice sloshed around as it melted. […]

Devyn visits the Winchester Mystery House on a rainy day in San Jose. The house is a mess of architectural features, all spindlework and stickwork, red scalloped shingles, rooms jutting out everywhere—an asymmetrical madness. Despite this chaos, the house is beautiful, with yellow walls and so many windows. An enormous layer cake of a house, […]

The river brought the man, but Grace let him spend the deep night on the softly-ferned bank, refusing to budge from the tuff walls of the old granary to bring him in from the darkness. Hunger clawed at her belly. She had not been outside for two weeks. Morning light was slow to pierce the […]

Stacey comes home from school with a small wooden box. It has a hinged lid and is slightly smaller than a shoebox. It’s varnished and is quite dark in colour, but not black. The design is very simple and rustic. It’s the kind of box someone might make in a woodworking class, but Stacey’s only […]

Everything was under control, except the alarm system shouting for attention, the noise piercing into her headache, except the cracked glass of the windshield. Raíssa pushed aside the slowly deflating airbag, head spinning, and the radio continued its lulling song, stopping only when the broadcast announced the hour: it’s a quarter past two, and we […]

The dead woman was drawn to cars. She latched onto them like an unseen scrap-feeder on a marine giant, unsure why she was still here, earth-bound, in some form of consciousness. Cars offered exhilarating speed. Flight. A maybe if I keep moving whoever is supposed to notice me will not notice me and I can […]

What happens first: she survives. She climbs out of the rubble, leaving two corpses behind: a human who helped create her, and the Monster who tried to murder her, the Monster who showed the human lovers mercy but said that she belonged dead. The Monster, sometimes known as Frankenstein’s monster, also known as her husband. […]

“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, […]