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We have original short fiction from Kristina Ten (“The Dizzy Room”) and Wen-yi Lee (“Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash piece (“Terms of Service”) from Dominica Phetteplace and a poem (“Alternate Rooms”) from Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a media review from Adam-Troy Castro.
Cover art by Joelee Creative / Adobe Stock
One of winter’s biggest trials was that I got a new laptop and had to find updated versions of all my favorite pieces of software. I had no idea the software landscape had changed so dramatically in ten years! Everything’s based on the subscription model these days, and even basic programs have bells and whistles my Luddite brain can’t fathom. When your first computer experience involved five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, you sometimes find yourself greatly suspicious of programs eager to check your grammar and word choice.
Mom and Dad all but forced the games on me. It’s hard to believe now. All you hear about these days is how kids don’t want to play water balloons anymore, don’t want to do sack race, how every year there’s an increase in reported grass allergies, and how in just a couple generations we as a society are going to forget we ever knew how to climb trees. Everyone has those apps that track screen time. Everyone’s tried that thing where the whole family stacks their phones in the middle of the table for a weekly distraction-free dinner, or “DFD.”
I felt that thing a lot of first-gen kids talk about feeling: neither here nor there, too Russian to be American, too American to be Russian, both and neither at once. I wasn’t embracing the beautiful, complex mess of self back then, either. Different and complicated felt like the last things you wanted to be, and I grasped at every opportunity to smooth my differences and complications away. Part of that was an acute obedience that, thankfully, I’ve mostly shaken off since. Finally, like Uly, I was an only child who early on came to consider our family computer my easiest and most tolerant friend.
Many EULAs take seventeen (or more!) hours to get through. I always feel like I’ve signed away a piece of my soul after agreeing to a super long one. Perhaps I have.
I’ve watched monsters topple cities, scorch the countryside. I’ve explored the caverns they dwell in and swum the depths they arose from. When I existed in a different form, smaller, a bit more eager, I sought these monsters out or, more often, whimpered while I waited for them to slither out of the shadows. Would one appear while I showered? The sound of their squelching webbed steps hiding in the hot hiss of the water’s spray? Would they hover outside my window, backlit by the moon, their claws dragging down the windowpane?
The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry. You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-stained, clogged-up sink, graffiti all over the door that you’ve contributed to, no toilet paper on the roll.
Female sexuality has so often been designated monstrous in and of itself, and women have so much capacity for rage because of the way they’ve been designated. I think the best horror is really taking what’s already simmering under the surface and dialing it up to eleven and using that newly exposed rawness to really get to the meat of it. Horror can sometimes feel cathartic in the way it lets repressed things explode, which is why it tends to be particularly resonant with marginalized perspectives. I also grew up religious, so personally . . . [Gestures vaguely in extra contention.]
“Alternate Rooms” was inspired by the duality of the perception of my being. At the tail end of my struggle begins a parallel eventide of my escape which is mostly a surrealistic beauty that springs out from my ruins.
There exists an intermittent but very real phenomenon of movie critics, mostly male but some female, revealing—sometimes inadvertently and sometimes unabashedly—that they are deeply in love with the actresses they write about. It is always actresses, for some reason, at least in the manifestations I have seen. Examples would be the one well-known TV guy who kept praising one lady as the most fascinating actress of her generation until his partner finally demanded, “Can you name even one memorable movie she’s been in?”
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