The Ecstasy of the Saints

by J.A.W. McCarthy

I’m six the first time it happens. I’m sitting in the backseat of the family sedan, staring at the rearview mirror so I can see when my father’s big eye peels upward and focuses on me, steely grey and always watching, as he promised when I started doing this. Mom faces straight ahead, shoulders curled forward as if folding herself around the cold jets blasting from the AC. They’re busy talking about traffic or what Grandma will make for dinner or how we’ll have to atone for missing confession this weekend—it’s all the same to me. It means I can slip my pinkie into my mouth, hooking towards my cheek until I feel the silky swollen hole between my tongue and molar. As I nudge into the opening, I think of my cat flexing her paw, how her claws extend smooth and quick as switchblades as her toes curl into her palm. I’m a claw, I’m a dagger. I’m dangerous, I do harm. (Continue Reading…)

The Darkness Carried by the Beasts

by Maria Haskins

Northern Sweden, March 1987, eleven months after Chernobyl

Torsten is dreaming of Gunvor, like he does every night. All these dreams are the same. He is searching for her in the woods, Ricky running ahead on eager paws with his nose to the ground, the elkhound a gray blur in untouched snow. Torsten’s chest aches and the air is hard to breathe, tainted by some unseen poison. A colorless void stretches out above the treetops, a menacing sky that holds no stars, but no matter how Torsten runs, no matter how he searches, he can never find Gunvor. Even there, even in his dreams, she is gone. (Continue Reading…)

Mavka

By A.D. Sui

You pray to forget this. You pray to forget the cold. Even under two wool blankets you’re always cold now. Skin and bones, you. A February moon hangs high in the starless sky when Andriy slips on the boots, soaked through from when you wore them earlier that day to gather firewood, and from when Ira goes to relieve herself at the outhouse earlier than that.

“Where are you going, child?” your mother says, barely whispers.

“To get water,” Andriy says and shuts the hut door.

You curl into yourself, clutch your swollen, so sunken that it swells, stomach. Only in sleep does the burn of hunger disappear. Every night, you dream of bread. All you do is dream of bread. The cellar’s been empty for months. What you can, you hide, but the Bolsheviks, they’re good at looking. Others hide food too, canned turnips and rotten potatoes, but the Bolsheviks they find those, and they find the ones that did the hiding, and then both food and people go missing. Now the dog’s gone and then the cat runs off, sensing its own fate looming. Even the domovyki, the watchful spirits of your home, vanished overnight when milk and bread was no longer left out for them. You watched a long line of them march out into the woods at daybreak, short heads bobbing in the snow. Nothing in the village now to spare it from being hollowed out. First, it’s the people that grow hollow. Then, there won’t be a single memory of their death, of their life, of the man-made famine that was their punishment for daring to exist. (Continue Reading…)

Hemorrhage

by Cyrus Amelia Fisher

It’s a dumb fight to pick, but I only learn that later. By the time they drag me out the back door of the bar, my face feels the way a Picasso painting looks. All rearranged, and probably the wrong colors.

Brit swears like a sneezing fit. Her fingers hover over the swollen mass where my face ought to be, as if she can squeeze the swelling out and find me underneath. They’re the last words she says before leaving me propped against the alley wall to make sure that she isn’t banned for life from the only dyke bar in town. They’ve been banning me from the joint for years. It’s the best place in town to rustle up some skin on skin, whether it’s a girl who doesn’t ask me about my boyfriend or a brisk upper-cut to the jaw. On a good night it might be both. I’m beginning to suspect that tonight is not a good night.

I pluck my last smoke from my breast pocket, leaving bloody streaks on my clothes as I dig out a lighter my swollen fingers can’t even flip open. I sit there for a long time after that, unlit cigarette squeezed between my lips. I’m not thinking or feeling anything in particular when I realize I’m not alone. (Continue Reading…)

Body Heat

By Mirri Glasson-Darling

The river is moving too fast and Cassie knows it, but she crosses anyway. Icy water reaches her waist, a constant push at her knees. She leans into the hiking poles, inching sideways like a crab. Halfway across, her left foot goes into a hole. For a moment, Cassie fights, then—slow-motion—feels the river take her. She falls, flails, gulps, then her left hiking pole hits the bottom, the end of the pole smacking her sternum and pushing her up out of the water and onto the opposite shore with the current’s inertia, torso hissing cold with steam.

Cassie is stunned by her escape, painfully aware of her skeleton with all its small, aching parts rattling against themselves, from the vertebra in her neck to the moth-shaped scapula of her shoulder blades. She sneezes five times, a bright, color-shot mess. Patches of ice surround her, formed from the condensed moisture of the river into white trays of diamonds. As hypothermia sets in, Cassie strips down, gets the sleeping bag out of her dry-evac-sack, climbs in, and waits to get warm. She’s lost one hiking pole, the paper map she’d tucked into an outside pocket of her pack, her phone still has no service, the topo app can’t find itself, and she’s on 24% battery power. Less than an hour to sunset, but she’s still got her compass and eventually there will be a road if she keeps heading east, even if it is another fifteen miles of bushwhacking. She’s on the wrong side of the river to backtrack now either way. She should have known better. Cassie is from Virginia and works as a wilderness guide in Alaska: she knows when it is safe to cross a river and when it is not. This was not safe. One reckless turn here in West Virginia, a fall into icy water, and she’s lost. She feels a bit better, but still cold. (Continue Reading…)

Mummy

by Kelsey Percival Kitchel

I have always prided myself on being a practical man; prosaic, if you will. In the old days the boys used to call me the man from Missouri.

Well, so I was. I had to be shown — and I was shown. Let me tell you. … (Continue Reading…)

Powers Of Darkness

By John Russell

Nickerson, R.M., failed in judgment concerning his guest Dobel. This was the reason of his ordeal that night at Warange Station: a black night and a bitter ordeal. If Dobel had been a cannibal or a headhunter—wandering thief or fugitive murderer—Nickerson would have made no mistake. But himself he was a gentle soul, trained merely in all forms of conceivable wickedness, and although he disliked the gross stranger with the sly and slitted red eyes he had no intimation of the fellow’s real nature. Not until Dobel showed such an utterly brutal manner of disbelief. (Continue Reading…)

The Shout

By Robert Graves

When we arrived with our bags at the asylum cricket ground, the chief medical officer, whom I had met at the particular house where I was staying, came up. I told him that I was only scoring for the Lampton team today (I had broken a finger the week before, keeping wicket on a bumpy pitch). He said: “Oh, then you’ll have an interesting companion.”

“The other scoresman?” I asked.

“Crossley is the most intelligent man in the asylum,” answered the doctor, “a wide reader, a first-class chess-player, and so on. He seems to have travelled all over the world. He’s been sent here for delusions. His most serious delusion is that he’s a murderer, and his story is that he killed two men and a woman at Sydney, Australia. The other delusion, which is more humorous, is that his soul is split in pieces—whatever that means. He edits our monthly magazine, he stage-manages our Christmas theatricals, and he gave a most original conjuring performance the other day. You’ll like him.”

He introduced me. Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty, had a queer, not unpleasant, face. But I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting next to him in the scoring box, his black-whiskered hands so close to mine. I had no fear of physical violence, only the sense of being in the presence of a man of unusual force, even perhaps, it somehow occurred to me, of occult powers.

It was hot in the scoring box in spite of the wide window. “Thunderstorm weather,” said Crossley, who spoke in what country people call a “college voice,” though I could not identify the college. “Thunderstorm weather makes us patients behave even more irregularly than usual.” (Continue Reading…)