The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that perpetually played about their mouths.

They fell just to splatter on the concrete, some of them small as ice cubes. It was a day without clouds and the man selling fruit from his stand on the corner was nearly concussed as they began to patter against the street with sound like the early drumming of hail.

In a time when most of us are surrounded by bland, corporate big box buildings and bombarded with thoughtless, empty “content,” our writers are surgically extracting their inner worlds and offering them to you, our readers, so you can have a genuine, powerful experience.

Johnny Compton is a Stoker Award nominated author whose short stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, The No Sleep Podcast and several other publications. He is the author of The Spite House, Devils Kill Devils, and Dead First, as well as the short story collection Midnight Somewhere.

First,
There is the procession of the snakes.
A wave of speckled heads with their thrilling patterns,
the tangle of their bodies as they weave