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Fiction

My reasons were selfish, but I hoped the dinner guest would succeed. She had made an effort to be presentable, even though that only amounted to plaiting her hair into a few coarse braids and shaking some of the filth from her clothes before she stepped out of the lightless passageway and into our home. But small actions carry great weight in the Mine. Husband didn’t agree. “You won’t survive this,” he said. “I can tell.” The dinner guest’s determined expression didn’t waver.

In Apr. 2021 (Issue 103)

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- Narrated by:
  
  Nan MacNamara
- Duration:
  
  28:44
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Poetry

Modern Promethea

by Meg Elison

I was thinking about the power of Frankenstein not to raise the dead and become like god, but to redress the unjust nature of death (femicide in particular) to make god irrelevant. I was thinking about how not all women bear children, and some of us make people in other ways. How we all make each other. How we’re all riding the lightning, just staying alive. And then there was a poem.

In Mar. 2021 (Issue 102)

Fiction

It Accumulates

by Joanna Parypinski

Author spotlight

It is a frequent yet mild aggravation to return to one’s car in a public parking structure and find stuck beneath the windshield wiper or in the door handle a postcard peddling Chinese delivery or Jesus, which is then folded angrily and left in the pocket of the driver’s side door until you remember to clean it out—but it is a sight more unsettling to find, instead, a black postcard advertising in bold red letters: “Exorcisms.” In the greenish fluorescent light of the cement structure, surrounded by empty spots, you might pause over the ad, might even chuckle.

In Mar. 2021 (Issue 102)

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- Narrated by:
  
  Gabrielle de Cuir
- Duration:
  
  25:35
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Fiction

That Which Crawls from Dark Soil

by Michael Kelly

On a barren hiking trail this past summer, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a young person just off the path, half-hiding, peering quizzically at me. The sun was blinding. I blinked and the person was no longer there. I followed the trail, and circling back to the same spot I saw, or imagined I saw, a blur of a face peeking from behind a tree. There, then gone. Did I see someone? Who? What were they doing? And why? I chalked it up to the heat. But the questions remained.

In Mar. 2021 (Issue 102)

Fiction

A Cast of Liches

by Woody Dismukes

Author spotlight

“For how long must we keep doing this?” the first lich asked the second. His dreadlocks were dry and had faded near to white, a smell not of fragrant oils, but of something long past due permeating the air around him. His eyes were tired and sucked back into his skull. “As long as it takes,” the second answered. Bent forth on his crooked staff, he observed the cauldron’s brew. “Keep churning.” A third lich stood by silently, as if deep in meditation. After a time, he too leaned his wicked bones over the pot and spit. “That should do,” he said.

In Mar. 2021 (Issue 102)

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- Narrated by:
  
  Stefan Rudnicki
- Duration:
  
  35:28
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Fiction

And Lucy Fell

by Erica Ruppert

This is actually the second time I wrote this—I threw away the first, unsatisfactory version years ago. But this is one of those ideas that doesn’t give up easily, and the final lines haunted me until I wrote it again.

In Feb. 2021 (Issue 101)

Fiction

Hairy Legs and All

by Stephen Graham Jones

Author spotlight

Like the time you put the shoes on you hadn’t worn for maybe two years but you just saw there in the corner of the closet and you wondered why you’d stopped wearing them since you kind of liked who you were that summer or at least you remember that summer favorably, and these shoes were definitely part of it, so, trying to maybe live a little bit of that time again, you hauled them out, stepped both feet into them, right first then left, like always, only what you didn’t realize but should have considered was that maybe a dark forgotten shoe-cave like that in the way back of the closet might be the perfect cool musty place for a tarantula to sleep one off for a month or two…

In Feb. 2021 (Issue 101)

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- Narrated by:
  
  Stefan Rudnicki
- Duration:
  
  12:21
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Poetry

The Girl with the Voice Made of Stone

by Anuel Rodriguez

This poem came about after reading more of Aileen Wuornos’ story and thinking of the ways society makes monsters out of victims. It is my first attempt at a dark fairy tale in verse. —AR I. climbed out of an abandoned car deep in a forest in Michigan after sleeping through another cold night alone. […]

In Feb. 2021 (Issue 101)

Fiction

We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It

by E.A. Petricone

Author spotlight

We are not where we are buried. We are where they kept us. We float now, and see the low building in the woods from above, the long plates of rusted metal, the desiccated grass bundling against the sides like a pyre, the orb spider poised over a corroded edge. But when we were alive, we only knew the inside of the basement, where we had all the usual things girls have when they are being held and killed. There are thirteen of us girls. You might be thinking, oh, but can you really call yourselves girls?

2021 Shirley Jackson Award finalist 2021 Shirley Jackson Award winner Shirley Jackson Award finalist

In Feb. 2021 (Issue 101)

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- Narrated by:
  
  Justine Eyre
- Duration:
  
  50:52
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Fiction

I Let You Out

by Desirina Boskovich

Author spotlight

I watch the closet door. I watch around them as they pray above me, their eyes closed and their hands clasped in ecstasy. Their voices drown out all other sounds—like, for instance, the creak of a slowly opening door. So I can’t close my eyes, though my head is aching. I have to watch the door. Their prayers rise and fall and bleed into one other, a nonsense incantation of sacred gibberish. They’re crying and sweating. There is no air conditioning in the old farmhouse, and the humid bedroom is fragrant with their body odors.

In Jan. 2021 (Issue 100)