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…)

What Haunts the Newbuild?

by Meagan Kane

If the dead who loved her haunt an old home’s bones, what haunts the newbuild? What makes her creak and moan? Every house is a violence—and a weathered house knows this better than most—but if the trees that once stood on her land form an old home’s dead-spirit frame, what drywall-and-laminate ghosts have lent their souls to the joining of foam and caulk?

The old house asks herself this as she watches her new neighbor assemble herself, fresh foundation and fragile frame tin can telephone line close to her stucco-and-old-growth self. The girl’s paint hasn’t finished drying yet. Her floors teem with gasoline planking; she treasures the feature enough to name herself after it.

“What do you think to eat off of, little one?” asks the old home. “However will you make yourself strong?”

“I am light as air,” says LUXURY VINYL FLOORING. “You are good bones. You sink down heavy and crackle to dust; why will you not strip yourself clean and live as I live, free of wood and worries?”

Life runs through the old home’s halls. Wood windows open on broken sashes, propped up by wood blocks and least favorite books, lead paint atomized into elemental inhalants. An old man coughs upstairs; children play in the yard. There’s a pink plastic slide; a little girl catapults down it over and over, laughing as she hits the mud, the first thaw fresh about her. In three months’ time, the old man will slip down too-steep stairs during a coughing fit, slide down them just as the girl does, the same head-first tilt. His soul will settle in the dappled light coming through the stained-glass window. The girl will spend her whole life fretting over railings, taking steps one at a time, searching for bungalows: in this way, the house will never leave her.

“Come,” says Good Bones. “I will teach you.” (Continue Reading…)

Faith, Hope and Charity

By Irvin S. Cobb

Just outside a sizable New Mexico town the second section of the fast through train coming from the Coast made a short halt. Entering the stretch leading to the yards, the engineer had found the signal set against him; the track ahead was temporarily blocked.

It was a small delay though. Almost at once the semaphore like the finger of a mechanical wizard made the warning red light vanish and a green light appear instead; so, at that, the Limited got under way and rolled on into the station for her regular stop.

But before she started up, four travelers quitted her. They got out on the off side, the side farthest away from the town, and that probably explains why none of the crew and none of the other passengers saw them getting out. It helps also to explain why they were not missed until quite some time later. (Continue Reading…)