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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.…
(Originally published in Weird Tales #363.) 1 I’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…
(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 moving inward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tallas knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.When the arms of the larkspur dial open…
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. …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, 1921 A 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…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.…
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 & begged to live. Back then, I believed she couldspike me with faith, a silverweed stolon—she’d appear in the break before sleep pronouncing my name in her languageof radial burn. Name, name,…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…
Bright Crown of Joy
(Originally published in Children of Lovecraft.) [::AFTER::] Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there were birds. Thin delicate arrows of bone and feather, crossing the dry horizons of the earth like the needles of the universe, stitching the planet together with their call. Billions of them, spiraling in coils like wind-swept…
The Facility
It had always been there, until it wasn’t. The sound was like a low hum, so low as to be inaudible, so modulated as to be the cadence of your own heartbeat. Just like the structure, which was taller than an airplane tower, kept going up and up, seemingly attached to something in the clouds…
Cyborgs, Spiders, and Designing For the Space Age: The Place Where Sci-Fi and Fashion Meet
Humans have always had a fascination with futurism, gazing at the zenith as we imagine the other worldly atmospheres beyond our selves. Since the dawn of the space age, fashion has flirted with the galactic, but now as we face the climate emergency, the industry has a more pressing responsibility to do better for the…Voracious Black
Originally published in Shock Totem. The darkness has teeth. As children, we knew it. We were terrified of sleeping in our rooms alone. Afraid of the monsters that lived in our closets with toothy smiles that wrapped most of the way around their heads. Scared of the things that lived under our beds, knowing…My Friend Smiley
Originally published in Norran. Many years ago, when I went to London for the first time, I spent half a day looking for Bywater Street. You may not know it as a tourist attraction, and it really isn’t. Even though I was armed with a map, I managed to walk right past it on my…
The Tissot Family Circus
Originally published in Twice Cursed. The road into Pleasance does it no favours. The big old welcome sign telling you where you are and how many souls are living there looks as if it’s not been maintained for some time—peeling paint, colours bleached by sun and wind and rain. The grass is high along…
The Exorcism of Taylor Swift
My favorite conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift is the one where she is the clone of Zeena Schreck. Zeena is best known as the daughter of Anton Lavey, and long-time spokesperson of the Church of Satan. The theory came about when the internet realized the two looked startlingly similar. Never let the high improbability of…The Boy With the Painted Face
The boy keeps the ghosts at bay. That’s why I birthed him in the front bedroom overlooking the garden. Stained the sheets with blood and shit over the blood and semen of his conception. There are too many of the dead on our street. At night we hear them grind against each other, tearing and…
Belladonna
Her last memory was a hand prying her jaw open and settling a small, round fruit on her tongue. She couldn’t tell whether the touch was coercion or caress as she bit down, teeth sinking into the explosion of sweetness and juice that spilled down over her lips, painting them red. ••• Her first memory…A History of Ghosts
The execution of Antoine Villeneuve, the butcher of Barringtown, takes place every Tuesday at half past noon on the tether ball courts behind East Haverford High. My classroom windows, which face the tether ball courts, have been covered with plywood to keep students from distraction. To hide the recitation of his name and crimes, as…
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