When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother’s ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother’s place and date of death over and over again. “Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma’am?” asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her […]
When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour. I prop myself up on my open locker. My hands are shaking, too. My fingertips are blue, […]
My labor pangs are mild at first. They’re intense, sure, but it’s mostly warmth and pressure like my abdomen is hugging itself. I’ve got time. Hours maybe, before I have to flee the enclave and get myself to the birthing hideout. In the meantime, I’m in our makeshift infirmary, trying to get water past old […]
The day you arrive at the academy, you spend just three minutes outside the car before begging your mom to drive you back home. There are too many girls. They’re too loud. They’re laughing. Some of them are flying. Even if you weren’t a mindreader, you’d be overwhelmed. Your mother, who took a day off […]
I was in the parlour of 427 Cheyne Walk, listening to the occult detective relate his story. I had knowledge of the events of the White Studio—the letter from the artist’s son about his father’s death, the reports of a mysterious pearl-white glow from the studio, and, of course, what happened after—but I wished to […]
We never know when the market will come, though it comes twice a year; a stretch of three days, or five, or seven or nine, but never more. Overnight, the sound of wood and nail and turning wheel in the fields that are never plowed, never grazed, where no brambleberries grow, and in the morning […]
I’m told that the recipe never changes. It’s the same taro congee day after day, no added powders or ingredients. The taste is supposed to be consistent with only a few shifts in nutrients. I palm the sensoring pad and the vending machine squeezes it out from the robot with the mixing bowl behind glass. […]
(Content Note for emotional abuse and mentions of sexual abuse.) For Shirley Jackson and Charles Dickens “This is a true-crime tale?” Two reporters sharing the shuttle with us, and of course I got the one who hadn’t done her homework. I suppose I should have been flattered that they were there—a Broadway musical spun off the […]
I. I feel the morning sun first in the bones of my shoulders, and then the high of my back and, when I turn to face the clearing where the clay is soft and red and ready for wounding, I feel it on my face. This is how it talks to me. It says the […]
I know something’s wrong, the way we’re both hunched over your tiny table in your tiny kitchen, and you keep looking at the tea you’re not drinking. My head grazes your ceiling as I snatch another scone off your plate and pop it into my mouth. Crumbs scatter across my shirt, already stained with moss […]