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I stir. It feels like the opening and closing of a mouth, the sigh of an underground cave. The girls with pierced hearts whisper to the mountain. They desire to keep it calm. I hear them, still. They don’t remember why they whisper, why they desire. But it remembers. It recalls the stench of the […]
Ingredients: Bramblewilde’s honey was famous, not just in their own village, but in every village their village traded with. It was warm and sweet as late summer sunlight, and some said the smallest taste would cause you to forget all your cares and woes. Others said too large a taste would lead you to forget […]
Margery crouched in front of the fireplace, skirts tucked back to avoid the flames, and raked coals out onto the hearth. She’d pushed the shutters open this morning to let a breeze in but even at this hour sweat beaded on her brow and stuck her chemise to her skin. Their gray tabby cat jumped […]
The earliest versions included uglier things: ground up insect eggs and corroded bronze, but the ink you receive is pure, made only from blood of the Cursed. They inject it into your eyes first because that’s the easiest way to tell you’re different. The black ink mixed with blue and red, a purplish nebula pooling […]
If it was the first time I saw a house mourning? No, my dear. Not at all. Yet, it broke my heart to enter House and hear her parquet floor moaning, see the toilet sink weeping, feel her foundations shuddering ever so slightly. I put the plastic bags on the sideboard before opening my arms […]
Ollie’s and my plan was simple enough: we were going to drive our grandfathers’ ashes to Alaska. Theirs had been stationed there for Cold War reasons Ollie never fully understood, and mine had always wanted to go. I had a little red car that, while not new, was sound enough to make it from Boston […]
1. It’s that kind of a moment. Like I’m existing in a sort of in-between space. It’s just a sliver of a moment. A nanosecond. You’re standing on an overpass and thinking about all the wrong turns that you made. The mistakes. The regrets. The big and little things that add up to make your […]
All of this is true as much as anything can be true. It’s the closest thing to autobiography as I will ever get. The ghosts are real. The rest. Well. Imagine you are in a theatre. It’s opening night of a brand-new play written by me. There’s about 130 seats in the place, red […]
During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always been reasonably friendly—people would take their kids around on […]
There are two things you need to get started. First, you have to know how to waltz. When I say “know,” I don’t mean that your sweeping rotations must describe perfect circles or that every subtle lift has to be like the clockwork of the universe. Neither do you have to be dressed up like […]
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