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My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?” “You know he hasn’t.” The tremor she had before she died is gone. A tube runs from the oxygen unit, through her laced fingers, and up into her nostrils.
On an unmarked road somewhere in the Appalachians, a midnight blue Cadillac rolled to a stop, gravel popping under tires, headlights peering out into the discord of dusk. Outside the car, in the shadowy thicket, cicadas and crickets hollered.
by Ally Wilkes
Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . . The first time she sees the stranger, he’s coming up the stairs. The estate agent grimaces at the “UNDER MAINTENANCE” sign, assures them the lift will soon be in full working order. “What’s down there?”
If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. Three hooded figures sit cross-legged on the floor of a candle-lit warehouse. There’s something strange about the middle one: its torso somehow both too long and too hunched. The figure flickers, like a transcription error in crimson candlelight.
2024 Shirley Jackson Award finalist Shirley Jackson Award finalist
The Man had come and gone, other Someones too, and all the lessers, but Barley still guarded the House. He still patrolled, passing right through the gate instead of getting caught under the slats, still lifted his nose and trotted the fence line every morning, though he could no longer smell the asphalt baking in the heat or rabbits in the hedges. At sundown he returned to his grave and lifted his leg even though he hadn’t urinated since the Man put his body in a cardboard box and dropped it into foot-deep earth.
by A.C. Wise
We saw the first billboard while driving along Lake Road. We’d driven the road a hundred times before, because it was the only road out of town that went anywhere worth going, and there was fuck-all to do in town except get drunk, get stoned, and get in trouble. Lake Road let us go ice fishing in the winter. Lake Road let us go camping in the summer. Lake Road let us drive and pretend like we would keep going, like one day we would get out for good.
by Kiera Lesley
Congratulations on the purchase of your new home! I’m sorry to inform you I was not very upfront with the terms of sale and would feel guilty if I didn’t leave at least this letter in forewarning. You might have wondered why it was listed so cheaply or why, beyond a lawyer’s details, there wasn’t a name on the seller’s side of the contract. You might have dismissed these anomalies because the patio is so nice (the jasmine over the pergola smells lovely in spring).
She remembered the day Sophie’s grandmother told her about the gold coin. The gold coin existed only if you were paying attention. It existed only during certain times of the day. Above all, it existed only in Mrs. Meecham’s living room, next to the sofa covered with quilts, near the stairs that would lead you to the rooms above. On one of the walls in the living room, there was a small stained-glass window forming the image of a benevolent lady sitting by a garden.
I take the hammer in my right hand and raise it up over my head to bring down, screaming, against the left hand I have placed flat on the tabletop. My knuckles do not break. My skin does not tear. I do not scream in agony. Instead, my left hand flattens like soft rubber, the imprint of the hammer’s head clearly visible in what is supposed to be human flesh. The sight is worse than any pain could possibly be.
We came down to Independence in the afternoon. The sky as we descended was white, gray, pink smeared on a dirty canvas. I had the sense—because that morning we had been very high, above 13,000 feet, and everything had been very still as we balanced on hard, flat, brown rocks—that we were walking through the sky, and that we might come down from the sky painted white, and gray, and pink, ourselves.
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