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The most interesting thing about ghost stories is that almost everyone has one. The other really interesting thing, to me, is that they’re nearly all terrible stories if you try to take them as stories. A good story has a beginning, some buildup, and then a resolution or a twist or something at the end. […]
There was a land of elven halls and hollows, of fairy mounds and great cathedrals underground. Hapless mortals went in and danced until their feet gave out, and sometimes they came out again. But far beyond the merriment and the music and the trapped mortals, there was a campfire, and around it sat a half-dozen […]
“I want to know the fires your hands bring—” “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores” by Barbara Jane Reyes Tonight, as in every night, she smiles when the door opens. Her arms loop over your neck; she leans in and rests her head against your cheek. She looks down at the basket between you. “Is this […]
As a young disabled person with a combination of learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, and a spinal injury, I looked out on my world and saw that it was a place that couldn’t fit me in—there were barriers to access everywhere and disability was seen as a problem, a fundamental lack of belonging rooted in the […]
Once upon a time, long, long, long, long, long, long, ago, there were three raptor sisters, hatched beneath a lucky star. They lived in a wood together, they stole sheep and cattle together, and all in all, there was no tighter-knit hunting pride of matriarchal dromaeosauridae between the mountains and the sea. The oldest was […]
My best friend NPW has been collecting dogs from the side of the highway. He drives miles and miles each day with one eye to the shoulder, on the lookout for heaps of dark fur. Into black trash bags the blood-matted bodies go, and into the big plastic cooler he “liberated” from a summer hunting […]
Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet. Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip of paint is exactly as you remember it. Time seems to have ricocheted off this place. Except not […]
The Hydraulic Emperor is nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds long. It was filmed on an eighteen-quadcopter neocamera rig back when neocameras were the only way to make immersive film: an early effort by Aglaé Skemety, whose Bellfalling Ascension is still the critical darling of the immersion-culture literati. The Hydraulic Emperor falls sometime between her earliest […]
Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” […]
Entrance There’s a ticket booth on my tongue. Don’t look in my eyes, don’t plead curiosity, you won’t get anywhere with that. Try it and you’ll see your reflection in my sea-green gaze: your shadow sprinting through the heavy glass doors. You’ll smell a whiff of brine, perhaps something more volatile. You’ll be caught and […]
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