Yesterday morning, before breakfast – before coffee even – I stood in my pajamas with a mixing bowl in one hand and a lid in the other trying to coax a mouse out of my pantry. It happens about this time every year. After the first few frosty nights, our house is looking a little too warm and welcoming, a little too safe from hungry hawks and foxes.
My first alien was a Cetitharian. Slender, mirror skinned, beautiful as a solar storm. I never asked him why he came up to my home-ship. I never asked him much of anything. Reflected in his skin, the cargo hold’s dull gray walls were silver. Even I, little brown mouse that I was, polished into tiger’s […]
The river nudged my log raft against its mooring post with a steady thud on the night I first saw Old Qiu’s woman. Sitting on her knees at the end of his boat, she offered his cormorants a few of the small fish they’d caught that day. Her young, round face echoed the full moon, […]
My name is not Elisabeth. My eyes are not full of tears. My life has not just changed forever. My best friend is not dead. Mum screeches my full name like a fishwife, carrying over the howling winds of the bay, and the magic is broken. Every evening I sit looking over the sharp rocks […]
HARLAN LEANS OVER TO PLANT A KISS ON MY CHEEK. His fingers wriggle beneath mine so that our palms rest together, our fingers interlocking. It would be so easy to kiss him. Too easy. I lean back in my seat and pretend to be focused on the movie, letting the bright light of the fictional […]
I MISSED THE FIRST APPEARANCE of the wish-dragons, so I had to hear about them second-hand from my friend Boomer. He’d been feeling pretty mellow and not fit to drive, so he’d wandered down to the docks and started singing. The moon hung low and full. Boomer said the sky filled up with streaks of […]
When that Cratch am watchin’, you better do right. Suck a corncob if them striped birds go over. Cranes pass on high, you best bury you some young mouse teeth. Wear radishes round you neck. You see leaves blowin’, best get gone quick. If it a odd number day, stay away from metal. Don’t move […]
Wheee. The death baby goes, wheee. It also gurgles something awful. We have a problem with them in the town, not the town proper but right outside. The death babies have gotten brave in recent years, crawling right up to the gardens and even to the homes. Nobody knows where they come from, only that […]
The smell of wet ash slicked her throat. Jo felt the new skin stretching on her thighs and stomach as she stumbled past pools of plastic that might have been patio furniture. Blackened beams poked out of the rubble and the dead lawn crunched under her slippers. Nothing had survived that heat. Only Jo herself, […]
Nyarlathotep… the crawling chaos… I am the last… I will tell the audient void…. I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and […]