Grandifolia

By Elliott Gish

The first time I do everything the way I’m supposed to. I wait for the new moon and walk into the woods at midnight. I carry a jar of pig’s blood and wear a wreath of nettles, ignoring as best I can the stinging on my scalp. I tread silently, carefully, one bare foot settling deep into the dirt before I lift the other, until I find what I am looking for.

The tree sprawls lasciviously across the hollow that shelters it, its branches spread wide and low. An American beech, its pale bark gleaming silver in the dark. Fagus grandifolia. That’s the scientific name, Fagus grandifolia, big leaf beech. I looked it up before I came. I don’t know why.

No—that’s a lie. I looked it up to gird my loins with trivia, to guard against the utter foolishness of what I have come here to do.

I pour the blood in a careful circle around the trunk, careful to duck the lowest branches so I don’t dislodge my nettle crown. There’s barely enough. By the time I close the circle only a few stubborn drops slide down the glass.

I back a few feet away and kneel, my knees sinking into damp earth. Closing my eyes, crossing my fingers, I say the words, and I wait. (Continue Reading…)

All the Good You Did Not Do

by Jolie Toomajan

When the doors slide open, the screams escape. Saul is summoned from his security podium by the researchers’ howls, and he slides in his formal uniform shoes until he finds them caged in an elevator open to the atrium-style lobby. A young man hauls a woman from the back of the elevator and slams her to the floor. Oh no, she has lost her shoes. The young man tears into the raw meat expanse of her neck with his teeth, ripping strips of flesh and spitting them next to her. He plunges his hands through her body, digging into her guts, and then he snaps his head and he sees Saul and he runs so fast How could anything run that fast and Saul fires his gun When did I reach for my gun and the head collapses in on itself until nothing remains. Is that supposed to happen? What’s left of the man drops to its knees, where it wobbles in an eerie circle as if choosing where to land. It finally tumbles backward. (Continue Reading…)

Bad Doors

By John Wiswell

The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office. They were everywhere. Walls of recyclable cans dominated his room. Just beside his bookshelf, out of the view from where he taught his Zoom classes, he’d constructed a veritable castle of empty Coke Zeroes.

“If you spread your arms wide, that is roughly the distance you want to be away from others,” the doctor explained. “That prevents your breath and expectorate from coming into contact with others.”

Kosmo tried spreading his arms that wide—he’d always been gangly—and promptly knocked over a three-stack of cans balanced on top of his Riverside Chaucer. The cans clanked to the ground and rolled into the hall. Kosmo chased them, hunched over, like cartoon dinosaur in pursuit.

Nearing the hall, he called out for his cousin. “Jesse? Got any empty seltzers? I’m doing a recycling run.”

That’s when he saw the new door. It was equidistant on the wall between the entrances to his room and Jesse’s. Its deep burgundy color stood out against the plaster white of the walls. It was perfectly flat, without any veins or grain, like it was liquid that had merely cooled to look like wood. It had a square knob, made of polished ebony that shone against the redness. (Continue Reading…)

Walking Tour of Scarborough in Nuclear Winter

by Stewart C Baker

1. Scarborough Spa

The tour starts the same way they all do—in the Spa’s outdoor suncourt, as the bloated, swollen sun tries its best to pierce the eternal grey clouds and reach the ashen waves below.

Kat’s been doing this once a week for longer than she’d like to remember, ever since she moved up here and the world ended. She’s found it’s best to give her super-wealthy tourists a while to orient themselves and take in the ruins of the grand old Victorian building. While they file through the rotting beach chairs and superfluous sun umbrellas, she stands beneath the gold-capped rotunda with her robed back to the sun and her arms raised to the sky as if in supplication. As if she were a statue. As if she were more than human.

But today’s group takes their sweet time poking about the place, and by the end of half an hour, Kat’s arms ache like hell and she’s shivering, full-body cold. Sometimes, she wonders if she should go back to starting the tours in the lobby, which she managed to rig with a working heater. But her patrons like a touch of theatre. A sense of the otherworldly.

Besides, considering how the tour will end for some of them, it seems only right to Kat that she suffer a little as well. That she engages in some form of penance. (Continue Reading…)

Superstition

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The strangest gig I ever had was fetish destruction. In July of 1995 I answered an ad in a newspaper asking for a reliable messenger and administrative assistant. My interview took place in a minuscule office above a deli, with the smell of burnt toast wafting through the window. Even though there was a fan spinning above our heads, it felt as hot as an oven in there.

The interviewer was a middle-aged man dressed in a black suit and tie who was sweating buckets and periodically dabbed a handkerchief across his forehead.

His name was Mr. Gaffey and the name of the business I’d walked into was the rather generic Useful Endings. Mr. Gaffey began by asking me the typical battery of questions: work experience, education, and the like, before moving into more esoteric territory.

“Are you superstitious?” (Continue Reading…)

The Polyamorous Heart of Death

by M. Lopes Da Silva

You took her story like an organ removed in the night by a stranger she thought she knew. Victorian mummy unwrapping parties move in parallel to the kind of destruction you casually did. Your colonizing fingers made ghosts weep. Some of them are still weeping. You put roses in her eyes and plucked them out again. The petals fall on me every night as I hold him close. I blame you for that. I always will. (Continue Reading…)