Fiction
Automaton Boy
I wrote this story while reading Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar, and with some songs on repeat from an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog.
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Fiction
Grottmata
The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. We smoke cigarettes and stand in a line against the remnants of a brick wall that used to be a bakery, facing the sheer black of the mountains above the town as muted light spills across the fog and folds of the ridgeline. One girl wearing four layers of coats asks if we’re still getting paid, and everyone has a good laugh.
Fiction
Fiction
The Dark Devices
As so many pieces of this length do—and I’m not the only writer who will report this—the idea and storyline for “The Dark Devices” came to me in a very visceral, very disturbing (wait for it) flash. The writing itself? A little research on Pieter’s period and country before that could happen.
Fiction
Fiction
like blood on the mouths of death
I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. My eyes fizzing with dreams, I found Mama cradled on the sofa, hugging herself. She wore that faded floral top she loved so much.
Fiction
Solve This One, Mrs. Miller
Math has never been my strong suit. Still, I’ve always rather enjoyed logic puzzles (particularly ones like Einstein’s Riddle), and after falling in love with Return of the Obra Dinn last year, I got really into the idea of using puzzles like these to build a narrative—especially a mystery.
Fiction
An Offering from the Void
There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find.
Poetry
Ensabled Night
The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. The foxfur wings I feel come from Well’s “In the Avu Observatory,” a surrealistic short story where an astronomer in the islands of Indonesia is attacked by a large flying bat-creature.
Fiction
Backseat Kiss
CW: violence, blood, death. It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. You could feel it in the air: a static, something pushing […]
