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Issue #1
“You know about the uncanny valley?” he asks.It’s one of those questions where your answer doesn’t matter, he’s going to explain it to you anyway. He’s already mansplained a number of things to you tonight, including the end of Inception, which is the reddest of flags, as far as things men can mansplain go. But…
(Originally published in Weird Tales #363.)1I’m going to start with the pregnant woman because she survived.79 other Amtrak passengers weren’t so lucky. 243 people boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Penn Station; we left at 3:40 PM. I had an appointment in Syracuse; me and a couple of lawyers in a windowless room. That occupied…
(Originally published at the Ploughshares blog.)When the arms of the larkspur dial openit’s only natural to want to dissolve. In the glinting hazeyou have nothing to do but keep movinginward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tallas knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.When the arms of the larkspur dial opendraw your wedding…
Estival
Until the day she died, George Forster’s wife wanted to live with him. Instead, she lived with her mother; George rented a room in a boarding house. Of their four children, one had died, one was a babe in arms, and two lived in a work house. You know the sort of place—Dickens would later…
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Date Night
Jan StinchcombNobody thinks of the mother, given the babysitter’s ordeal. The mother, still young, is counting on dinner and a movie with her husband. It is the best time of her life—the children aren’t babies anymore, but they still need her. They’re good at school. They have interesting things to say, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant. They…Anne Gare’s Rare and Import Video Catalogue, October 2022
Jonathan Raab(Originally published in Hymns of Abomination: Secret Songs of Leeds)“Elephant Subjected to the Predations of a Mentalist”– Dir. B.S. Stockton, 1921A harrowing 47 seconds of early black and white motion photography, this film appears, at first, to be a derivation of the popular 1903 silent film short Electrocuting an Elephant, but is in fact something…Eight Vases of Njideka
KasimmaI am tucked in like an ovary, en route to Kentucky, in the belly of the bird; my mind is a vase of Njideka. Maka mberede nyiri dike. Njideka is my mother’s name, but its meaning is what I say like prayer: what I have is more. And what do I have with me? Nothing.…Persistent
AGA WilmotYou smile when you tell them your name. Wide but not too wide—show your teeth without being creepy, without them thinking that you’d like to eat their eyelids.Can you spell that please?The woman—you’re not sure if she’s a receptionist or a nurse, if the uniform is the same or different—has a kind voice. Sweet with…
Maria
Kiki Petrosino(Originally published in Witch Wife.)She’d appear in the break before sleep.Her face a glass zero. Her dark buzzing.I was twelve. I sweated & beggedto live. Back then, I believed she couldspike me with faith, a silverweed stolon—she’d appear in the break before sleeppronouncing my name in her languageof radial burn. Name, name, name, name.I was…To a Puppet, From a Dummy
Jon Padgett(Originally published in Mannequin: Tales of Wood Made Flesh.)First I feared them. Then I pitied them. Then I envied them.Popular culture presents us with the “killer doll,” either as a supernatural hobgoblin or as a psychological delusion born from a ventriloquist’s psychotic split personality. As a child, fear of this demon—born of The Night Gallery’s…
Body & Blood
Colson has “10 MILLION$” tattooed in gothic script across his forehead, but of course he’s not worth a fraction of that, not when he’s slugging gallons of cloudy rotgut that’s like drain cleaner on his insides. Every time I see him, Colson taps the scars over his liver and says, “It keeps coming back, man.…The Last Box
How do you do it? How the hell do you manage to fit inside such a small box without breaking your back?I’ve been asked that question so many times.You see, it’s a matter of training every day since I was a kid, combined with a peculiar physical predisposition. Apparently people like me have ligaments that…The Suffering and Sacrifice of Hans Christians Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”
Many of us are familiar with the Walt Disney animated feature “The Little Mermaid.” Of course, some of us may have read variations of the children’s tale, but not all of us have read Hans Christian Andersen’s story or are familiar with its story’s origins. There are multiple versions of this tale. Andersen was influenced…
Death Machines: Grim Harbingers of Doom
Death machines have always varied in design and construction—from the barbaric cruel rituals of being burned at the steak, or hanged, drawn and quartered to modern, efficient devices such as the guillotine and the gas chamber. Women convicted of violent crimes frequently succumbed to rigors of death by fire or a modern-day gas chamber execution.…
A Cut Rock Does Not Bleed, It Shines
(Originally published in Another Name for Darkness.)I uncover the first gem by peeling my right palm open, tripping over one of my mother’s decorative stepping stones.The ground rushes to meet me with more enthusiasm than my parents ever have and I put my hands out to catch my fall.At first, there’s no pain and, despite…
The Exorcist’s Guidebook
I. DON’T WORRYNot yet. Especially since you just had your sixteenth birthday, and with it, gained your learner’s permit and sprouted a row of coarse wiry hair on your upper lip. Don’t worry, even when the book spines along your father’s shelves—mathematics titles and dissertation—flash scarlet red. Or when the family photos are replaced with…Christmas Eve In An Old House: The History of Christmas Ghost Stories
(Portions of this work were previously presented live at the Seasons Screamings 2021 convention.)“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to…The Velveteen Goblin
The parcel arrives on Christmas morning in the frozen hours before dawn. A mysterious giftbox left upon the manor’s front porch, wrapped in handsome brown paper and made lovely with pinecones and mistletoe. Nana bustles the package inside the hearth-warm foyer, and within this stirring rock-a-bye motion, the velveteen monster’s mismatched button eyes first widen…Blood Debt
(Originally published in The Dread Machine.)The doctors call it bad blood, but you know you’ve stumbled on something bigger. And so you find yourself in front of a steakhouse, lips parched, juices releasing, anticipating aged steak, the best Malbec, a full stomach, and a reckoning.The steakhouse is in a strip-mall. You have to cross the…
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