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ONE: I told them it was stupid to rent the same cabin in the woods where that other slaughter took place, twenty years ago. I said I knew of a perfectly good bed and breakfast where nobody had ever been slaughtered, not even once.
Kachi stroked the yellow python-eye hidden between the cheeks of his buttocks with a distracted finger. The familiar round smoothness of the hard orb calmed his mind as he stared dispassionately at the mangled corpse sprawled at his tiny, blood-coated feet.
I wouldn’t describe it as waking up. If you’ve been in a car accident, you know the violence. One moment, your life feels the size of your body, muscular years of loves and hurts wrapped around a thousand calcified tasks, a routine that bears you up even on the mornings when nothing makes sense. Then your days break open with the sound of rupturing metal. You splinter like a windshield. It’s an awakening, of sorts, but it’s not like waking up.
This story came from a writing prompt about how “kitchen spirits are the friendliest ghosts,” which of course made me think about the other, nastier spirits lurking within the household. I love writing about haunted places, and have always been interested in the parasitic nature of hungry spirits and their victims. After all, what’s the point of a haunted house if there’s no one within to be haunted?
When you get to the body, it’s still warm. Maybe because you’re exhausted, because your joints are feverish and your chest feels like it’s scraped dry, for a second, the face in front of you morphs and you see Ru splayed out inside the bathtub instead. Her wrists are splotched with welts, her eyes milked over with a knot of veins, but it’s the head that makes you rigid: Ru’s skull hangs to her chest, like something impossibly heavy is squatting on her neck.
The first draft of this came out of my head in November 2016, for obvious contemporaneous reasons. As is often the way of stories, though, it took a while before I realised what I was really telling myself in the writing. I’ve been on a journey of self-acceptance for my neurodivergence these last couple of years, and part of that is trying to break myself of the cringing need for everyone to love and understand me: to learn, instead, that if I am to love myself, my true self, I have to accept that I will never be able to prove myself to some people.
Centuries of war, conquest, and foreign invasion have drawn and redrawn the map of Argia countless times, leaving the country’s boundaries ambiguous and ill-defined. It was in the summer of his fortieth year that Franz Sieber found himself in that contested region, escorted by a small team of mercenaries, guides, and translators. He had come in search of flowers. According to local legend, the outskirts of Argia were home to the Hyacinthus mercedes—a rare breed whose pollen plays a crucial role in the manufacture of certain microchips.
The drums sound at first light but you are already awake. Today is the day you will finally meet the Goddess. She’ll either embrace you, ripping you apart and reforming you into a being of magic and flame, as mercurial as the sea, or She’ll withhold her blessing and never again will you walk upon land. You take a breath and hold the humid, tropical air deep in your lungs before releasing it and dressing in your ceremonial leathers. You knot the leather straps around your chest, replicating the geometric patterns favored by your beloved cousin, Sindr. The one who disappeared.
The call comes when Kaitlyn is at Little Star—the cafe on the corner of Third and Main—picking up lunch for the marketing team: two Caesar salads and a cream cheese avocado bagel sandwich. She answers her phone as it’s her turn to step up to the counter. The voice on the other end of the line says, This is Father Lawrence, chaplain from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. She already knows what he’s going to say next.
This started with a prompt in a weekend flash writing contest: “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” That weekend, my teenage daughter and a couple of her friends were talking about sidekicks in books that are more interesting than the main “chosen” one character—and it brought up my own conflicted feelings about the show Supernatural, which is littered with the bodies of the Winchester brothers’ female sidekicks.
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