Issue 133 October 2024

Table of Contents

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Editorial: What Weird Horror Reveals

by Avra Margariti

October 1, 2024

Weird horror for us has a sticky quality. It tends to stay around long after the story is over. All successful horror can linger in the mind of the reader, but weird horror for us goes one step further. Instead of confirming the nightmares you already have, it reveals the wrongness that has always existed around you by letting you peek through the fabric of the world.

Weird horror forces us to interrogate the boundaries between the body and the mind, as well as the relative position of a story’s protagonist: in space and time, within society and anti-society, in the meatspace universe and the memory palace that the self can simultaneously occupy.

Body horror becomes a tool of oppression, as well as transformation. Grief becomes a well that, yawning open, births floral monsters. The binds of propriety and complacency tighten to the point of sundering, at which point the devils come out to play. Strange phenomena become even stranger as you fight against them, only to give in.

Everything is slightly off after reading such a story. Everything is disturbing—even little children, as you will see for yourselves in Within the Dead Whale.

After meeting The Clockwork Sisters, you’ll never stop wondering what’s hiding inside someone’s beautiful skull. Or what the Dissection of a Mermaid might reveal about your own well-hidden grief.

They say something is better than nothing but what if The Trade is that you are now constantly reminded of what you lost? What if bringing terrifying justice to those who deserved it came with the sound of a Vinegar-Gurgle? Would you open your ears to hear it?

When you entered The Tub for a few moments of peace, you wouldn’t have guessed that this peace (and your body) could stretch for eternity. You’ll experience the deliciousness of motherhood like nobody else if you wish To Serve the Emperor. The Final Harvest of those motherly actions might look like plants, sprouting from a rotting corpse.

In these stories, all kinds of borders become porous and permeable. The self merges and clashes with the environment and the other. The body and mind ooze between interconnected vessels. Reality and unreality become two sides of the same cursed coin as they enter into communion with the Weird, to emerge into something beautifully grotesque and wholly unrecognizable.

***

Ⓒ ​​Avra Margariti & Eugenia Triantafyllou

Within the Dead Whale

by Spencer Nitkey

October 4, 2024

Content Warning: Animal death, drowning, bodily fluids

The dead whale washed ashore with a hole in its stomach so wide you could drive a truck through it. Clarence came with other parents to stare at its size and smell its briny rot and wonder how something so large could have ever been alive in the first place. He shivered when he saw the skin worble like a guitar string. Something was moving, formicating, inside.

A dozen children poured out from the hole in the whale’s side, dripping with viscera and laughing tremendously. They tumbled into the sand, panting and chasing one another. One boy threw a handful of foul ooze, and it sailed through the air, breaking into droplets that rained down on all the children.

Clarence’s son and daughter tumbled forth from its belly and cartwheeled across the beach. He called for them from the splintering boardwalk above the dune and they turned to him and waved. A mom near him cleared her throat loudly until she noticed her children within the whale, too.

He’d heard once that the risk of beached whale corpses was their exploding. The pressure of death built and built inside them. The hole in the whale meant the children were safe from bone shrapnel.

He stayed on the boardwalk. The swell of children running into and out of the whale grew. So did the crowd of parents. His daughter crawled back inside, a bloody katabasis. Minutes later, she poked her head out of the sockets where its tremendous lazy eyes used to roll before the seagulls ate them.

They were here for the summer because he was a bad husband, and only the summer because he was a mediocre father.

Kim, why? He’d asked beneath the recessed kitchen lighting.

Because it’s dead, she’d answered.

The divorce was smooth, like slipping beneath the water’s surface. The children chose their mother, and he chose the beach house.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the parents said, and everyone agreed but no one moved.

The children were ecstatic by the water and the whale. A group of boys pushed a mound of sand up near the whale’s side, and all the children began to help. Soon, great sloping steps led up the whale’s side and the children could climb the sagging creature’s exterior.

Strangely, he felt he was a better father now that he wasn’t married. The distance from the kids made loving them more urgent and therefore easier. He loved them better but knew them less.

Parents, seeing their children high in the air, became certain it was time to remove them from this great and dead thing.

Clarence walked slowly. Most children came to their parents’ call. The ones that didn’t were carried like surfboards or pulled by their ears.

Up close the smell overwhelmed him. He wondered why the children were so happy in the mess. After most of them were collected, Clarence and the calmer parents gently told theirs it was time to leave.

His daughter, 8, took his son, 6, by the hand and they slid down from the whale, his son laughing.

“Do we have to?”

“Absolutely. We’re getting lobster rolls tonight and you both need, conservatively, an hour shower each.”

He carried his son in one arm and held his daughter’s hand with the other. Both of them spent the whole walk looking back at the whale.

When they got home, he hosed them off. The pink and black sludge congealed and ran toward the sewers, dripping from their wet heads and skin. In the shower, more ooze slicked from them, combined with the foaming soap. They only talked about the whale. Neither child explained its appeal, but they shimmered. When he put them to bed, they were asleep before he closed the door.

He stared at them in the semi-dark and remembered them both as babies, wondering how anything so small could ever be alive. He wasn’t a great father, but he wanted to be. He walked down to the beach and stood at the edge of the whale’s body. The smell was so strong he had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

The moonlight sieved through thin clouds. He stepped into the stomach. The dark encased him along gnarled walls. He sat and thought about his children’s laughter and wished he understood it. He inhaled deeply.

Another parent soon crawled through the opening and sat down beside him. More came. Each sat, smelling, staring, crying, all trying desperately to understand what made their children happy, hoping that whatever song the whale had once sung, that their children had heard ringing from its corpse, would reach their ears, too. They listened, terrified that the pressure of life might blow a hole in them, too.

The whale shook. The clattering voices of children gathered round the whale and each adult smiled as they picked their child’s voice out. Noticing their parents gone, they’d come to help them hear.

The whale moved. Impossible, but true. They listened as their children grunted and shouted directions at one another through the rotting blubber. They stayed inside. They had not heard the song.

“Forward,” his daughter shouted, and Clarence beamed. The whale heaved. The ocean grew louder.

“Pull!”

Water seeped into the whale through its thinned skin, then lapped through the hole in the whale’s side.

“They’re going to drown us,” someone said. A few worried parents tried to hurry out but found their children guarding the exit with kitchen knives.

Clarence did not move. Even as the cool water reached his ankles. He hadn’t heard the whale’s song. He wanted his children to be happy. The water came up to their necks. He inhaled deeply as it rose above their heads. He listened as water filled his lungs. Within the dead whale he waited, children impossibly pulling them all into the sea. In the drowning midnight Clarence heard his children’s laughter as a melody. Good, he thought, as the whale and everything within it was lost to the sea. Good.

* * *

Ⓒ Spencer Nitkey

Comments

  1. James Miller says:
    October 22, 2024 at 11:23 pm
    First, gross!

    Second, nice! Some thoughtful plays on an analogy without entirely closing the loop for the reader. Sort of an eerie, mysterious feel without actually becoming horror. I like this a lot.

  2. Peter Palmqvist says:
    November 25, 2024 at 3:47 am
    I struggle massively with feeling mediocre when it comes to being a father, so this really hit home. also, that ending. Beautiful.
  3. ZD Dochterman says:
    March 7, 2025 at 12:16 pm
    Wonderful work. Cetacean-human death drive vibes.

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The Clockwork Sisters

by L.M. Guay

October 8, 2024

Content Warning: implied child abuse


When Sister leaves me, I am ten and she is fifteen. She gives five extra twists to the secret key in my spine to make sure I do not wake, one for each year she is older.

We live in a home of clear glass atop a sighing marsh, where our walls sink each year and cloud over with fog each morning, like a candy counter breathed upon by covetous mouths. Our parents will never leave this place, far from the city. Nearby they keep their workshop—our playland—full of gears that glitter like spun sugar and the pearls they use as baby teeth, all for the bespoke children our parents make to sell in the night market.

“The humbler the setting, the more beautiful the jewel,” Father often says of me and Sister. Like all children, we are made to gratify our parents’ desires, only more perfectly: Father’s wish that his work may outlive him; Mother’s hidden longing for a sibling; their joint preference for platinum skin and fine copperwork hair. Even our flaws are artist’s signatures, deliberately placed, from the gold-limned crack in Sister’s tongue to the diamond in my left iris.

I am born loving Sister, who is cleverer and taller and our parents’ favorite. I love how she links our pinkies to make silly promises, that one day we will run away and be pirates or librarians, and how she wipes the oil sweat from above her upper lip, and how she grows quiet when birds linger too long in the noxious air and plummet noiselessly to earth. I love how I can creep about the marsh and always watch her moving around our home, even at night, long before she learns to catch the sparkle off the diamond in my eye and know that I am there.

* * *

After I tattle on her about the flesh children, Sister does not want to be an us anymore.

We are nine, fourteen (I always think of us this way, hour hand and minute, tick and tock). I write her months’ worth of apologies, which she burns, holding lenses up to the watery sun. I bring her crystal gems and discs of nacre when she is troubled—she has occasional fits of soundless, motionless screaming, which make our parents frown—and find them in smithereens. I repaint the dials of her finest displays when they begin to peel, but she refuses to wear them, gouging them with one of Father’s cutting tools.

The day before Sister leaves me, I am watching her change in her room through the walls of mine (I am always watching Sister). An array of faces covers her vanity, slabs of flattened lapis and ruby and quartz, marbled like meat. I can’t imagine what she’s looking for—she smashed all her mirrors months ago. I was made to know Sister, and I hate not knowing what lies within the adamantine curve of her skull. It is like not knowing what lies within my own.

“Stop it, Little,” she says without turning, fingers tracing the bezel that wraps her forehead and cheeks. “Haven’t you done enough?” She tugs. Another face flops onto the floor.

Only one of us is careful with our parents’ handiwork. I learned this when I caught her behind the market with her shirt unlaced for the flesh children, encouraging them to make a game of it—to shatter her hair, crack off lustrous pieces of her chest. I ran wailing to my parents. Sister was banned from market and wept for three weeks, though Mother took a chisel and scraped her cheeks every night to prevent rusting.

“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” I tell Sister. This is how I will remember her, a laugh like a trapped gear squealing.

“Oh, Little,” she says. “Safe for who?”

* * *

Sister does leave me one gift: when I have daughters, I know just how to fix them.

When I grow up, I realize the blame must lie with our parents. They made us too similar in looks yet too separate in age, so that we would always clash, as like magnets do. They forbade me from telling Sister about all my special features—the rows of alarms studding my tonsils like hidden mouths, the camera that blooms in my unshining right iris, the tape our parents unspooled from my ribcage each Sunday in a room full of chemical smells and red, wet darkness. I’ll never know how she knew about the key tucked between my vertebrae, filigreed and cold.

Sisters shouldn’t have secrets.

I surpass my parents in horology. I study the candle, the hourglass, the clepsydra. In a well-received monograph, I argue that timekeeping is the study not of time but of keeping.

The relevant literature has been tested only upon twins, but this is a challenge, not a deterrent. I gather supplies in my parents’ old workshop, the walls still hung with their unfinished pieces. I trace these with an absent hand while I prepare, plucking lullabies from stainless ribs to quiet the pink things babbling in their bassinets. Flesh is easy enough to acquire; the night market travels, these days, but it does not diminish.

I tell them of the fun we had together, Sister and I. Even when I tickled her or caught her in hide-and-seek. Even when I painted her dials with radium, thinking her jaw might swell and her teeth fall out, which I would collect under my pillow and use for stray wishes. I would have wished to see the inside of her skull one last time.

I have made sure nothing will come between my daughters. The experiment goes seamlessly. That night, I listen to the faint tick-tock of their hearts, sloshing with exquisitely calibrated blood; I sleep and do not dream to the gentle, pendulous sound of one child filling while the other empties, like two lungs breathing in separate rooms.

* * *

Ⓒ L.M. Guay

Comments

  1. Amara Uju says:
    October 9, 2024 at 7:25 am
    Loved the story. It is similar to one I have lived.
  2. Joseph says:
    October 9, 2024 at 8:03 pm
    Wow! I have no idea what’s happening, but a wave of images, questions, and stirring uncertainties flood my head. Stimulating story!

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Dissection of a Mermaid

by Wailana Kalama

October 11, 2024

Content Warning: body horror, child death, grief & loss


1. Begin by making an incision at the anus. A large scalpel will do. The anus is located inferior to the anal fin, roughly two palms away from the humanoid/ichthyic seam. Since she is much bigger than a human woman, nearly twice in length and width, with a tough scaled hide, you might encounter resistance. Persevere.

2. Extend the incision below the rear fins and across the mermaid’s hips. Despite first appearances, the mermaid does not have a human’s vaginal cavity. It is a mistake to consider the mermaid a mammal; she is ectothermic, cold-blooded, of the taxon sarcopterygii that has evolved over eons to resemble a swimmer or a seal in order to attract prey such as sharks, killer whales, unwitting polar bears… and in recent times, humans. Much in the same way the flower of an ophrys apifera mimics a bee.

3. Don’t be fooled, however. You only have to look into her gaping jaws, those pointed teeth as unnerving as a shark’s, to see her for the predator she truly is.

4. Pass the incision anteriorly between the pelvic fins, used by the maid to slow her swimming. Cut on either side of them in a “V” to loosen them from the pelvic girdle and belly muscles. Lift and pin the fins up and away to reveal the body cavity and expose the internal organs: the liver, pyloric caeca, and adipose tissue. Be sure to wear a proper face mask. The stench of ammonia coupled with sour blood can be overwhelming.

5. Here is where you must be cautious. Tenderly pull out the pyloric caeca, the two finger-shaped pouches that serve as a second stomach, each roughly the size of a newborn. Deposit them in a surgical bucket. Be careful not to damage them, as you recover the evidence.

6. No. Now is not the time to hesitate. You owe her that.

7. Cut gently into these soft pouches; finger through the mess of enzymes and bile until you chance upon a piece of flesh, or two, or three–paler, softer, than their envelope. There, gently, that’s it: what you’re really after. It’s fine if you can’t say it yet.

8. Pull away the fatty tissue to expose the bladder, nested inside a pair each of ovaries and kidneys. Superior to these is your next target: the stomach. With the utmost care, slice it free and lift it into its own surgical bucket. Be mindful; it will have unbearable weight to it.

9. Slice the stomach sac to reveal an intricate net of hard cord, in tatters; and shards of plastic, perhaps once a bottle.

10. Pause, if you must. Don’t tremble.

11. Take a moment.

12. With your blue gloves, pull aside the net to reveal what time and acid have not yet secreted away. A hand… chewed off at the wrist. A popsicle ring, fastened to one finger. Its candy whittled away to a nub.

13. Don’t stop. Don’t stop until you find all of her inside. You owe her that.

14. The mangled lower leg. Its black shoe and buckle. The drenched sock, with zebras on them because they were her favorite.

15. It’s all you can find, and it all fits in a single, stainless steel pail.

16. The rest is up to you. If you must, grip the scalpel harder, take it to the mermaid’s useless breasts, to those wide, mocking hips. Shred them all to rags. Strip away any whiff of motherhood from her, this caricature of empty potential. Slash her throat that it may never sing lullabies; lacerate her mouth that it may never kiss temples goodnight. It’s what this monster deserves.

17. And those eyes. Those flat, barren gels give no hint of envy, even though you know she must’ve—dreamt of it, of bearing what only mammals can, a single, precious pearl. The evidence is here, after all. How long did she lurk beneath the kelp-ridden docks at the pier, waiting? How long did she lick her jagged teeth at the schoolchildren loitering there that day, picking one soul from the crowd, murmuring that one?

18. Well, she got what she wanted. What she mimicked, she became.

19. Welcome to the human world.

20. So yes, maul her. Mangle that awful pastiche. Split open those cheeks and bare those stained teeth so that no God, so that nobody else forgets what she is.

21. Only, take care not to linger in those eyes of hers. Even so distant from the shore, they still carry all the gray hopelessness of an ocean. Stare too long and they’ll get their hooks in you. Stare too long, and you might just catch a glimpse of your own mirrored self.

22. And what a self. What a stupid, useless self.

23. What a worthless thing you are.

24. What a gift you squandered.

25. You, who said she could go. You, who weren’t there.

26. Who mocked her once, taunting her from the waves, your toes bobbing in the surf; calling her a scaredy-cat, a weak-willed thing quivering on the sand. Not daughter enough to join you swimming in the ocean.

27. You, who weren’t at the pier that day to hear her friends laugh at her, see her tiny chin clench, that little black-toed foot inch toward the edge of the dock in an effort to prove them, you, everyone wrong.

28. What a model you are.

29. What a mother.

30. But. Not a mermaid, yet.

31. After all, you still have all your cavities, don’t you?

32. Begin by making an incision in your abdomen, a long line left to right directly below the navel. A fine scalpel will do. The surgery to never harm another child is simple.

33. And that searing pain, like someone tearing you open from the inside? Bear it. Bear it.

34. It’s what this monster deserves.

* * *

Ⓒ Wailana Kalama

Comments

  1. C Charlotte says:
    October 13, 2024 at 1:40 pm
    Excellent!
  2. Haji SM says:
    November 26, 2024 at 8:29 am
    Frighteningly good and sad.

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The Trade

by Erin MacNair

October 15, 2024

Content Warning: supernatural animal mutilation

Afterwards, Marty and I erected two tiny crosses under the willow next to the remains of the barn, even though we hadn’t found them.

We’d screamed their names from the doorframe against a howling wind, a pea soup sky. The silo ripped free of its moorings, steel screeching like a murderous banshee. They cowered in the deepest corner of the barn, waiting for us to rescue them. We stumbled to the basement, Marty’s face a rubber mask of tragedy. He pulled a mattress over our heads as jam jars fell and exploded into a sweet strawberry-rhubarb fog. Stupid mutts, Marty said, crying, clutching my arm as we breathed into the dirt. Stupid mutts. There was a moment of eerie silence­–our lives suspended between having and not having–and I thought I heard Bartlett’s hoarse yelp rising away from us before the roar moved on.

When it was safe again, we’d walked the property, slowly. Our loss wasn’t anything insurance couldn’t handle. One wall of the house was peeled away like a layer of skin, scabby drywall curling at the edges, like looking into a tidy dollhouse. The bedside lamp still erect, my thin book still under the bed: Starting a Hobby Farm in Oklahoma.

The yard was in ruins, the laundry line wound tight around the VW bus tipped on its side like a trussed bull, the silo rolled into a giant metal joint. Our heirloom corn, kernels in burnished purple and gold, were piled in front of the door in a perfect pyramid, like an offering.

Here, I made this for you. A trade.

I’d stared at it for a while before ripping my hand free of Marty’s and attacking, kicking the mound loose with my muddy boot, screaming, falling into the drift, a few cold nubs like wooden teeth sliding down my shirt collar.

“It’s ok, Sarah. We’ll keep at it.” Marty laid down with me in the pile of corn as I sobbed. We’d kept at it, though, for years. It was my physiology, my withering insides. My idea the country life could summon miracles. My idea to get the dogs instead. I thought he’d grabbed them and put them in the cellar. He thought I had. What awful parents.

At night we heard the sad braying of beagles throwing their voices across the universe. Marty kicked in the sheets, dreaming in canine. We stapled flyers to telephone poles; in black and white they looked like anybody else’s dogs, eyes like polished marbles. You couldn’t tell anything from those pictures. You couldn’t hear Tip’s Baarow-roww-roww singing, head cocked to one side, couldn’t feel her nose nudging the inside of your hand, searching for strokes. You couldn’t see the pattern of spots against Bartlett’s stomach, like rusted barbeque grates, presented for scratching, or laugh at two tennis balls crammed in his mouth like some yellow buck-toothed hillbilly. You couldn’t see the infinite, stretching past their dark pupils.

We searched the fields and the fire lanes and found lots of other things we also didn’t want to talk about: the chicken with no eyes, the goat impaled in a tree, a random toilet in the deep woods, lid unhinged, hanging like a menacing jaw. Other people had pyramids, too, had things taken. Some had thought to take pictures of this phenomenon and briefly relished in small- town fame, in prairie newspaper headlines.

I took the clippers and sheared my long hair to nothing. I didn’t want to be in pictures. Marty understood and ran his hand along my head, scratching me behind the ears, not realizing he was doing it.

 

Two months later, Marty hollered for me from below the bedroom window.

“Sarah! Sarah come NOW…” I peered out to see Marty’s thick hands scooping up some small, wiggling animals from atop the broken slab of concrete in front of the old barn. He was running to the house, cradling the things in his arms: piglets, bunnies maybe.

I swung open the front door to see what had put the spark back in Marty’s voice. There they were, another miracle on my doorstep — shuddering in Marty’s arms were our dogs. Parts of them, anyway.

Bartlett’s floppy ear, torn off like a broken leaf; Tipple merely a front leg, paw-pad callused and raw. They shivered in Marty’s hands as he bawled, rubbing his face all over them.

“I knew they weren’t gone.”

 

Tip pulled herself along just fine, paw first. Bartlett inched along after like a caterpillar. If he was tired, he’d flop over Tip for a ride, like Dali’s melting clock. We heard their questions, or our own projections. Either way we made it work.

“How could you?” we felt them say first, quivering with anger.

Crying, we explained how sorry we were. They forgave us, slowly. We put their food bowl back. They rolled in it, remembering the stinky pong of kibble; afterwards we’d bathe them in the kitchen sink with Palmolive. We let them lounge on the couch which they obviously enjoyed, spreading themselves out so Marty and I only got one cushion to ourselves.

One night I lay with Bartlett’s ear pressed against my cheek, the warm fuzz undulating as if panting, and stared up at the ceiling.

“What was it like, in the storm? Could you see the farmhouse below? What were you thinking about?” I asked aloud. The ear folded in next to mine, rubbing, rubbing.

“We were thinking, Stupid Marty. Stupid Marty.”

I shook with laughter. Bartlett gave a shiver of happiness and fell off onto the wooden floor with a plop. It took me awhile to stop laughing; him too, his ear flip flopping. I think he was laughing, anyway.

Each day we get to know them a little bit better, get to know what they need. We don’t ask any of the other people who were gifted pyramids what they got back. We decide to leave the crosses where they are, though, for what we did lose.

* * *

Ⓒ Erin MacNair

Originally published in Orca, Winter 2022. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

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Vinegar-Gurgle

by Andrew K Hoe

October 18, 2024

Content Warning: racism, bodily mutilation, murder


After we burned her with acid, I started sketching.

Rich would’ve burned my drawings, except I wanted to report what we did—what they did, and when I started penciling in my dingy apartment, I stopped with the I can’t sleep, we gotta tell. 

Just a joke, Rich said. I stayed back because I didn’t want anything to do with it, the woman didn’t belong, the pandemic was their fault, but I drew the line at pouring acid over her. It’s just… they poured it wrong, she turned, he slipped, it went down her throat, she was slipping and sliding where she was throwing out trash, not just scratching her eyes, but gurgling, gurgle, gurgle and we all scattered, shit shit shit did she see us.

I didn’t stop until I got to my apartment, cockroaches scuttling away as I tromped the walkway, and I clicked the bulb, flick. Then I clicked it off, and I swear I smelled vinegar, ‘cuz when she was dumping the trash it smelled like vinegar, goddamn. There was a rat somewhere in the walls, and I heard it rustling, but tonight I didn’t care. We learned she was in the hospital from the news broadcast, anyone with information, please call, Rich was saying lay low, it’ll blow over, she deserved it because her people started the pandemic, there was camera recording, but we were masked, it was dark, haha.

I couldn’t sleep, and I was smelling vinegar and the sink gurgled, and I squeak-walked across my old floor, but it didn’t help. I remember someone saying it helped to write it down, writing was like dumping, so I got a notepad, but I didn’t write, I drew.

No, I masked it, I changed faces, made it a street, woman wasn’t dumping trash but strolling, scribbled “Vinegar-Gurgle.” I always wanted to draw comics, so I drew, like, a story. I could finally sleep, the more I drew, the more I slept. Rich caught a peak, not finished yet, but—shit, this is… this is good. Vinegar-Gurgle, huh? 

Really?

For sure, just finish it.

We’d gotten to watching the recording of her slipping and sliding now, clawing her face for laughs—no sound but we all remembered her gurgling. She lived, was recovering miraculously, so it was okay.

But I kept drawing to sleep, and I felt cockroaches on my feet. Shit, I jumped, threw my notepad down.

In the dark, I smelled vinegar. I flicked the bulb and the cockroaches were convening over the notepad, fish-wire antennae waggling. What the— No, they were entering the pages.

Then I woke—yeah, nightmare—daylight streaming through the window. I picked up my crumply comic and gurgle gurgle there were cockroaches. Not smushed roaches, but the panels had them crawling. I’d drawn Vinegar-Gurgle covering her eyes and screaming but now she had roaches gushing out her mouth, when’d I draw that?

There were lots of Chinese, Chinese flu, what’s the boo-hoo, it’s just a describing word, like Chinese food, like Spanish flu. I went out and found Rich. They all looked the same, not our fault. Our woman lived, but this old guy that got pushed—Thai—and cracked his skull. Long name, started with V. Our woman lived, news said there was an investigation, call this number if you know, here’s a sketch-artist’s sketch, but it was terrible, nobody came looking, we were clear, she was healing fantastically well.

You did good, Rich said. You stayed back, but you didn’t snitch.

Come to think, whenever we did stuff like we did to the woman, it was Rich’s idea. But Rich had my back, yeah?

I returned to the sketches on the couch. I flipped through, and know what? The roaches were cool. Like, they added something. Never knew I was so good with pencil. Vinegar-Gurgle shuffling the streets, roaches dropping from her every step. She’s looking, gurgle-gurgle, looking, what’s she looking for? Rich was right, this was good. I started sketching again, streets like a maze keeping her in. Rich was gonna come get me, we’d go out. Maybe get one drawing in…

It was quiet, I missed the real roaches. Hey, where was the rat? 

Always heard it in the walls, now it was like an old friend missing.

I flipped the page, and shit, a rat following Vinegar-Gurgle like some puppy, how’d I miss that, when’d I draw…

Was dark now, Rich should’ve been here hours ago.

I flip, flip, flip gurgle gurgle. Rich is in my comic. Vinegar-Gurgle is looking for him. Yeah, I did sketch him for practice, I sketched all of us, but… flip, he’s scared. Zoom in on his face, he’s smelling something. Vinegar-Gurgle’s a shadow behind him. Flip, zoom—his eye looking behind.

Flip, pan out—his face again. His palms against the page, like it’s not paper but a wall, lemme out PLEASE. Pan—Vinegar-Gurgle, roaches-for-eyes, holding something over his head. Pan—gurgle gurgle it’s not acid, it’s crawling, it’s wiggling, it’s falling onto him—

Gurgle gurgle.

I draw, yeah, but not this good. Flip, that’s another of us from that night. What’s that on his face shit, going down his throat. Flip—another of us. Flip, flip, flip—everyone’s screaming but not-screaming in pencil, who drew this.

Gurgle gurgle.

It’s dark, I flick the bulb and everything’s grey… like, pencil grey. I touch the wall, it’s crumply like paper. Something strange about this quiet room, no roaches scuttling, no shuffling rat. How long have I been here?

It’s not like I’m some poor woman on a gurney, gurgle gurgle—can you describe him, ma’am, if you can’t talk, here’s a sketch pad. And she’s penciling in a little each day, and each time she gets one of them on paper, those that did this to her, gurgle gurgle, she heals a little, and if she can just get that one who stayed back, maybe she could talk again.

Gurgle. Someone behind me.

I look up, vinegar-smell, something drops, crawly-crawly on my face.

* * *

Ⓒ Andrew K Hoe

Comments

  1. Maria says:
    October 30, 2024 at 8:50 pm
    Vivid and haunting.

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The Tub

by Meg Elison

October 22, 2024

Content Warning: body horror

“I don’t want to be disturbed,” she yelled through the locked door. “That means you are a single father for the next forty-five minutes.”

Her husband may have answered; she didn’t care. She turned the water on to a roar and as soon as it rose, she sunk her ears beneath it.

Salt, copious salt. Poured out the same way she did when boiling pasta. She imagined herself straight and starchy as a noodle, finally coiling and relaxing, slinking to the bottom of the pot.

The tub was deep, the tub was wide. She could be totally in it, knees bent and beneath the surface, arms in, only her nose above the blue horizon and even then, she could hold her breath. There, her only moments of peace. There, the only silence she would ever get in this house of where-did-I-leave-my-Switch and how-are-we-out-of-ketchup and who-took-my-brush.

She breathed in and went all the way below. Not pasta, but a potato. Softening, but round. Never a noodle. Fuck it; a potato needs oil. Emerging, she reached for the pump bottle of green seaweed oil made to float in a fat layer on the surface and then glove against her skin, coating her all over, sealing in the heat and the salt and making her delicious to herself.

Maybe I can get straight into bed still warm. Soft. Fragrant. It was a dream, but why not dream? The bath smelled expensive; the room was quiet.

Quiet is no bulwark against the coming of the noise; this she knew. She reached for her Bluetooth speaker and turned it on. It connected to her phone and she played a cello album that she loved. Looping and lulling. She laid her head back and exhaustion took her conscious mind like a subway pickpocket takes a wallet.

How many gallons in the big oval tub? Fifty, maybe sixty. How many degrees when it was fresh from the tap and turning her red? A hundred and three, maybe four. How many hours for it all to have gone cold? The house was silent. How many hours and the kids were in bed? The house was too silent. How many hours could her husband have gone without asking her where to find something he could absolutely find on his own? Surely not so many. The tub was cold and the house was silent as the grave.

It was panic, no more than that. She was graceful, she was careful. She could catch puke in her bare hands before it touched the floor mats in the car. But panic told her to get up fast, and panic forgot that the surface of the water was dotted with floating slicks of green oil. Her right hand pushed against the wall, and that was steady. Her left hand balanced on the edge of the tub and just at the crucial leverage point, it slipped out from under her.

The wrist was the first to go, crushed like an aluminum can. The elbow was a bonus, bashed too hard to resist. So much calcium had gone into those kids. So much skeleton given away. The hip took all her weight on impact, and that pain was so bright and blackening she thought I’m going to pass out and drown drown drown drown so that when she slipped two discs in the final fall, she didn’t even know it.

She did pass out.

Who knows how much time passes in the deep reaches between lonely neurons? They fire in the dark and never see one another: ships lost at sea. By accident two may find each other, but that doesn’t mean they are saved. 

The sirens were far away, but they woke her. Her face wedged between her shoulder and the tile wall. The neck ache was a mouthy soprano wail, noticeable above all the singing of her broken bones. Unwinding herself, she began to cry.

No longer caring what time it was. Wake them. Wake everyone. Wretched wreckage where once was the body that made you. “Babe? Baby? Baby, please come here. I’m hurt.”

But anybody can tell the difference between the quiet of everyone-is-asleep and everyone-is-gone.

What could have happened that he’d leave with all the kids? Leave me. Left me. Left me here. Oh god.

No efforts could raise her. The reach for the plug was agony, left her screaming between clenched teeth. 

A pickle, floating in brine. Bloating, changing. Soaking it all up. 

Too salty to drink, despite her trying. Maybe it was curing her insides. The softest parts suddenly softer. Did her hips always touch the edges? She thought not. She knew her thighs never had, but there they were, pressed to the walls. 

Water evaporated. Or was she simply pulling it all inside her? Tongue swollen thick and the rest of her, too. Her broken elbow she pulled up on top of her chest just in time. The next spate of hours split open like a spud boiled for potato salad and found her shoulders crammed edge to edge. 

Was she always an oval? She thought so. Snugly fit to the whole tub, as if it were the mould into which she’d been poured. Comfy now. Supported, even. Cold water made warm again with the pumping of her heart. Sounds outside, terrible sounds coming and going at an irregular interval. The Bluetooth’s batteries died and the silence set in further. No more sirens. No more neighbors. Sunrise and sunset and nothing at all to disturb her peace. 

“But won’t I split open? Won’t I bust?”

The swelling in her tongue made her impossible to understand, but it didn’t matter. No other ear to hear. 

So much collagen given to those kids. Stretch marks like lightning in the summer sky. She could give and give, until she was stretched so thin. She could contain it all: baby and bathwater alike.

* * *

Ⓒ Meg Elison

To Serve the Emperor

by Damián Neri

October 25, 2024

Content Warnings: pregnancy, cannibalism, infanticide


I’d always wanted to have a child, but I never imagined that in order to earn that right, I would have to give birth to the Emperor.

After only two months of pregnancy but intense hours of labor, the Emperor’s fully formed homunculus emerged through my birth canal, clad in a blood-stained gold and purple robe, and an exalted smile on his reddish, swollen face. A miniature clone of the Supreme Leader.

The homunculus awkwardly unsheathed the sword with which he was born, barely larger than a finger, and cut his umbilical cord.

I could hear my husband’s screams and bangs against the delivery room window. I had told him not to come with me because I didn’t want him to witness what was about to happen.

Doped up on the drugs released during childbirth and gestation, which allowed his development without rejection from my body, the Emperor’s homunculus appeared to be the most perfect thing that existed, and I had birthed him myself.

Before placing him in my arms, the doctors performed the royal greeting, cleaned his robe, and kissed his small feet and hands. The homunculus spoke in a high-pitched, rat-like voice that I could barely comprehend, but his intense gaze and the midwife’s gestures reminded me of what I needed to do.

While the doctors sang the imperial anthem, I delicately undressed the homunculus, and he handed me his sword.

I didn’t have to use it. His delicate, cartilaginous body was easy to chew. I began with the left leg, tearing it off with a bite, splitting the femur. The homunculus writhed in ecstasy among the blankets, bleeding. His tiny brain was linked in real time to the Emperor’s, who was experiencing the same thing in his palace.

Through the window, my husband’s face filled with terror and despair.

“Don’t you want my son?” I asked him, savoring the tender flesh with a mouthful, even though he couldn’t hear me through the window. “Don’t you want a piece of him too?”

I knew that if it hadn’t been for the drugs that the homunculus had flooded me with, I’d be incapable of devouring my baby. Because he was exactly that, my baby. It made no difference that the Emperor had implanted him in my womb to satisfy his fetish for being eaten alive. I had conceived and delivered him. And by consuming him, he was all mine once again.

I felt pity for my former self, who would have refused to experience this miracle.

I severed the other leg and the right arm. I took my time savoring them. I’d never tasted anything as delicious as the tender flesh of his feet and hands.

I felt sorry for my husband because he would never be able to experience something so wonderful. There was something primal about giving birth and consuming my own offspring. Mice and pandas did it to maximize survival; so we did too.

I looked at the homunculus’s grateful face; his enormous, yet little, erection; and his breath stirred by jets of blood spurting from his amputated limbs. He was just a newborn, but he already knew the greatest wonders of existence.

“Now the head,” the anesthetist said gently, “but only the right half, or he’ll lose the link with the Emperor. Make sure not to decapitate him; he still has a few minutes to live.”

Even with the bioengineering that enabled his existence, the homunculus couldn’t escape the limitations of the flesh or prevent the loss of his few milliliters of blood from his severed femoral vein.

I bit carefully into his skull. In my mouth, his blood and his spongy brain seemed to melt. Even with only half a brain, the homunculus and the Emperor himself must have felt a joy infinitely greater than the sum of all human pleasures. I was deeply grateful to be a part of this transcendent moment.

The torso was difficult to chew. His internal organs went down my throat uncomfortably. I was disgusted. The drugs in my system were starting to lose their effect. I stared at the doctors, seeking reassurance that what I was experiencing was normal.

I could see his heart beating through his severed torso. He closed his eyes and appeared to have passed out.

“Get this thing away from me!” I yelled as I tossed the homunculus to the other side of the bed.

I looked around for my husband, but he’d already left.

The doctors restrained me and gave me what I thought was a sedative, but I soon realized it was a synthesized version of the substances released by the homunculus during pregnancy and childbirth.

As the drugs took effect, I felt a renewed affection for the creature, for my baby. I caressed him and told him how fortunate I was to swallow him alive. He regained consciousness gradually, and his wide smile indicated that he was ready to return to me.

With overwhelming ecstasy, I tore the homunculus’s head off with a bite. His skull crunched against my teeth. I savored his blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and the crushed marrow from his spine. I chewed on his heart just as it was about to stop beating.

The homunculus’s final scream mixed with my own pleasure cries inside my mouth. After experiencing the delight of being devoured, the remaining grace belonged fully to me.

* * *

I awoke a few hours later, drenched in sweat and surrounded by bloodstained sheets.

The doctors praised me for my bravery. They handed me a message from the Emperor, congratulating me on completing my service and stating that no one among all the volunteers who had given birth to and devoured his homunculi had done it better than me.

Now that I had fulfilled the imperial requirement for procreation, my brain was no longer affected by the drugs. But still, I fantasized about the day when, after nine months of insatiable anticipation, I could finally devour my own baby.

* * *

Ⓒ Damián Neri

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Final Harvest

by Christine Lucas

October 29, 2024

Content Warning: grief & loss, dysfunctional family


I cannot believe you’re dead, Mother. I cannot believe you’re not sitting up from your deathbed to count the crinkles on my tunic and the unplucked hair on my chin. I still brace for impact as I roll out my harvesting knives and lay out my jars and pouches, expecting to hear how I’m doing everything wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Never mind that you knew nothing about my trade or my life after I left.

What was I thinking, returning home to perform your harvest? Every corner of this room, of this house, screams of the life you had without me: the tapestries and throws from every corner of the continent, the knick knacks from faraway beaches and mountain slopes, kaftans and shawls and beaded necklaces, mementos of your solitary adventures. Well, you’ve left for your final adventure now, and I’m here waiting for your corpse to bloom.

What kind of nekrophyta will appear first, I wonder? Every body has its own unique harvest. Will it be a patch of thoughtnettles on your forehead? Coppertraps on your fingertips? You were headstrong and stingy, but one can never really tell until the blooming begins.

Huh.

A silverbell? I wasn’t expecting that. Like miniature daisies with silver petals, those delicate little flowers spurt from the vocal cords of people who loved to sing. I’ve never heard you sing. I don’t even recall you raising your voice; poison is better delivered in slow, cautious motions, and you used your words with the skill of a Master Poisoner. But it’s still a silverbell. If dried and powdered correctly, it can bring good coin.

Let’s begin, then.

Wait a minute. There’s something more here. I should have looked closer, but keeping a safe distance from you has become my second nature. Now I spot the parasite curling around the silverbell: a bloombane. A corrosive little fungus that plagues many nekrophyta, but has a preference for silverbells. Yes indeed, that’s fungus on the flower. I see its grey streaks marring the surface of the silver petals. And I can almost hear your voice in my head, Mother.

See? It wasn’t my fault I never sang to you. It was the parasite.

But that’s not how the necrophyta work, Mother. Their spores exist all around us: in the breeze, on the ground, on every surface, caught in our hair and in the fabric of our clothes.  They lie waiting for the moment of death to spurt, but won’t bloom on barren ground. Silverbells won’t grow on those who hated to sing, and folicacti won’t grow on the feet of those who didn’t enjoy traveling. Nothing cannot create something.

The parasite chose you for a reason. Its spores wouldn’t thrive after death unless you’ve watered them often while still alive. Even after I’ve cut it off from your throat, it grows delicate, translucent pseudopods seeking moisture—seeking my tears. It likes what it likes. You have watered it often—spoiled it, even—with enough of my tears to grow such a splendid specimen. This bloombane alone can pay for six months of my daily expenses.

I don’t care.

I-don’t-care-I-don’t-care-I-don’t-care.

Well.

I don’t think I can do this.

The Harvesters’ Guild invites its members of good standing to perform the harvest of their departed relatives as a courtesy. But stomping on a rare specimen, hurling the nearest breakable item against the farthest wall while ugly-crying is not how reputable harvesters carry themselves. Perhaps this would be a good time to call on one of my colleagues to take over, before the nekrophyta wilt on the corpse. They are good people, all of them. Friends. Family, even. Perhaps they’ll find it in their heart to lie and tell me that something—anything—bloomed on your body that indicated you loved me, even for a little while.

Of course you’d quit half-way.

And of course you’d say that.

No, Mother. I won’t quit. Not this time. I might not excel in many things, but I’ve learned how to cut. How to sever. So, I’ll do just that. First, I’ll cut your voice from my thoughts. Then, I will weep, I will bruise the nekrophyta, I will ruin a few of them—or a lot—but I will finish this. I will harvest the sticky coppertraps from your fingertips—tight with your purse, tight with your heart—and reminiscence of everything you’ve made me earn during my childhood: scraps of allowance and pittance of affection. I will cut the folicacti from the soles of your feet and allow myself the luxury of jealousy, one last time, for all the adventures you had without me.

And once everything is stored as neatly as I can manage, I’ll roll up the tools of my trade, pick up the harvest, and arrange for the cremation. And then, dear Mother, I’ll walk out of my childhood home for the last time and thrive in all the lives you never thought me worthy of living.

* * *

Ⓒ Christine Lucas

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