Bury My Heart with the Artichokes

By Jonathan Mann

Bury my heart with the artichokes, Grandad says, peeling open his chest so his granddaughter can reach in. Understand that she’s the type of girl who steals her mother’s Sharpies and draws Barbies on boys’ white Nikes when they’re not looking. She’s never been given a more serious request, so she follows Grandad’s orders to a T, cupping the clogged heart in her small hands and planting it by the artichokes and in between the tomatoes and cucumbers in Grandma’s garden. My heart’s only going to get smaller if it remains in me, he explained, which is why you must plant it. 

When she returns to visit Grandad, he asks her to place his eyes atop the oak fireplace mantel next to the family photos in gold dollar store frames. He hands her a silver surgical spoon, and after she scoops out his blue eyes, she places them in perfect view of where the ladies of the family will have tea on Tuesdays and where the grandkids will tear red wrapping paper on Christmas. Before long, the granddaughter realizes Grandad is falling apart, and when she begins to question her actions, he reassures her that she needs to disperse the pieces of him around the house like a pirate’s treasure.  

Walking_Nightmare_WarrenMuzak

Walking Nightmare by Warren Muzak

Next, Grandad proffers her a scalpel for his big hairy ears. Though she finds it a bit odd, she super glues his ears to the bulky black stereo in the garage. So we can listen to Bob Seger and Taylor Swift on cool summer nights, he explains. The more she takes from Grandad, the more he falls apart. But she cannot disappoint him. She sets his mouth by the billiards table so he can talk smack with the guys. She hangs his nose by a wire in the kitchen so he can smell Grandma’s freshly baked coconut cream pies. 

The granddaughter eventually asks her Grandad why he gave her this request instead of her parents, or her cousins, or her Jesus-looking uncle who lives in Utah. You’re smart enough to figure it out, he says. Now here’s a saw for my brain. 

After mounting the slimy pink organ by Grandad’s Dime Westerns, placing his liver behind the shelf of half-drunk bourbon, and his lungs beside ashtrays, the girl visits him for the final time. She asks Grandad if he wants her to take his bones or his kidneys, but he doesn’t respond. Within the silence, it’s obvious he has nothing left to give. 

The granddaughter grows up and moves to a college out east. She’s dead set on trying new things like lobster rolls and mushrooms from the RA across the hall, but these things come and go. Eventually, her family sells the house where she had dispersed Grandad’s pieces. The new owners ditch the garden, sledgehammer the mantel, break down the billiards table and burn the Dime Westerns. When the granddaughter comes back after so long, she hops the fence while the new owners are asleep and silently paws at the spot where she had buried Grandad’s heart. Though, a dense layer of earth has pushed the heart deeper than what she can dig for. But that’s okay. She smiles and thinks about the artichokes—how the heart is always there, just protected within layers of petals.  

About the Author

Jonathan Mann was born and raised in Michigan and is a graduate of Hope College. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Butler University, and his work has been featured in Stoneboat Literary Journal, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, and plain china. He formerly served as the co-fiction editor of Booth and works as an English teacher. You can find him at his website.

About the Artist

Warren Muzak's passion for illustrating started early, captivated by the visual narratives found in comics. He studied Graphic Design in college and from that worked at a few print-shops in pre-press. His abilities creating digital art got him a job as a production artist for a high-end carpet manufacturer where he took beautifully hand-painted gouache artboards and redrew them digitally to be used in manufacturing. In 2016, he met a seasoned UK stop-motion animator while working under contract for a small media production studio. This sparked a new direction—2D animation. Warren embraced it, finding a natural knack and genuine joy in the work and atmosphere in the studio. By 2018, freelancing became his full-time pursuit, honing his craft through persistent bids on online platforms.  

 

Volume 8-Fiction - 12/09/2024

Simulated Cemetery

By Chloe Spencer

“Promise me you’re not going to be dicks and laugh if I puke again.” 

Nina wobbled around in a circle, arms outstretched, her hands clenching the awkward controls. No matter how many times she had used this VR headset, she could never get used to its weight around her head. She felt like she was simultaneously being squeezed and dragged down; like it was a noose dangling her over a precipice, and her unsteady feet were about to give way. Her knee bumped into the corner of her desk and she hissed in pain through clenched teeth. Over her headset, the voice of Scott—affectionately known as Scooter—echoed, thick with phlegm. He was finally getting over a cold. “If you blow chunks, we’re absolutely making fun of you, dude.”  

“Yeah,” Marsh added, laughing. “How are you not used to this by now?” 

“Marsh-all!” Amorie drawled; her whiny Californian accent as pungent as Stilton cheese. It felt like nails on a chalkboard whenever Nina heard it—and unfortunately since she and Marsh had crossed the six-month mark, she was hearing it now more than ever. “Don’t be so mean-uh!” 

forest_michaelkatchan

Forest by Michael Katchan

Nina rolled her eyes. Why Marsh thought she should be invited to their hangouts, she didn’t know. Since they graduated from high school, this had been their thing: no matter where they were in the world, one virtual hangout every Sunday night. Every time Amorie dropped by it felt like a foul desecration of a sacred ritual. Her presence was a sign that they had grown too old, too far apart—even though Scooter and Nina hadn’t moved forty-five minutes from their hometown, and only Marsh was half a world away, on another coastline entirely. The purchase of these VR headsets had been their last chance to salvage a night they had long grown bored with. 

“Maybe I’d get used to it if you guys didn’t pick all those fast-paced games,” Nina retorted, and the boys laughed and cajoled her. Their shit-talk made her smile. It always did. “Pick something fun but not nauseating.” 

“Ooh, she wants something fun, does she?” Scooter chuckled. “Let’s see what I’ve got here…”

Through her visor, Nina could see the VR meeting room, a blue expansive space where thin white lines intersected and loud Nightcore-esque music played. Their three characters, each resembling bowling pins with floating, disjointed limbs, gathered in front of her. Scooter’s character, distinguished by his black hair and cartoonish eye-bags, turned away from the group and reached forward, his hand smacking at nothing. A white menu, comically large like a Rolodex for a god, sprang to life from the nothingness, filled with colorful photos of games and teeny titles underneath. The font was so small on this damn thing that Nina could never tell what she was looking at, but Scooter played this constantly, so she always defaulted to him to select something. She tried to ignore Marsh and Amorie’s characters giggling and grinding against one another. Amorie kept glitching as she bent over to grab her thin ankles while Marsh slammed into her from behind. How they managed to make nonsexual bodies so lewd disgusted Nina on a spiritual level. 

Ugh, another wave of nausea. She lifted her headset ever so briefly to grab a drink from her emotional support water bottle, then resumed the game. Amorie and Marsh had now gathered behind Scooter, looking up at the array of games he was flipping through.  

“Where’s the one where you cut the fruit?” Amorie asked. 

Nina had never seen her in real life, but for some reason, she always pictured Amorie as a mouth breather, lips perpetually parted after every sentence as though talking caused all the oxygen to leave her body and made her brain tingle from numbness. 

“That’s Fruit Ninja,” Marsh said. “Ten years too old for this system.” 

“Ohh.” 

“Didn’t you mention that there was some cottagecore fantasy game you wanted to check out?” That sounded like a pleasant evening. Building houses in the gentle woods, with no fear of monsters. Sitting around a campfire and pretending like she could feel the warmth of the flames against her hands and her friends' bodies beside her shoulders. “I’d be down for that.” 

Marsh clicked his tongue. “Ehh, I don’t really want to build anything right now.” 

“We’ve been playing too much Stardew Valley,” Amorie said. 

“Maybe next time?” Scooter suggested. “I’ve got something special to check out, anyways.” 

The menu stopped on a photo that was pitch black. Nina squinted to read the title.

SIMULATED_CEMETERY. 

“Spooky!” Amorie giggled. “That sounds perfect!”

“What is this?” Marsh asked. “Did you build it, Scooter?” 

“Yeah! I took some environment files off  Sketchfab to play around with.” 

“Wait,” Nina said, “so this isn’t a game? It’s just a level design?” 

“Yeah, but it’s a massive one. And you’ll like these renders, Nina. They're incredible. I added some bug and bird models to make it feel more alive.” 

“We can try it,” Marsh said. “Maybe it’d be best to keep it short tonight, anyways. Amorie and I were thinking about catching a late-night showing of Hereditary at the art cinema.” 

“You dorks would actually spend money going to see a movie you can stream?” 

“It’s in 4K.” 

“Okay,” Nina interjected, irritation taut in her voice. “Let’s go, then. Start it up, Scooter.” 

Scooter pressed his hand against the black image, and then suddenly they were all immersed in a dark void, with no sense of direction and no music. Amorie and Marsh giggled and chased each other across the virtual environment, effortlessly scaling nonexistent walls and scrolling from side to side. In her own reality, Nina squatted and sat down on her exercise ball, trying to control her breaths. This was always the worst part of this system: no formal loading screens, only infinite darkness. 

Then suddenly they were free falling, their characters spiraling down onto the murky gray map below. Instinctively Nina leaned down, stomach gurgling with frustration, as she watched her character hurtle closer and closer to the earth. A flash frame later and then she was there, feet on cracked concrete, her eyes staring at a few millipedes inching their way to her toes. She grimaced and stomped on them, but they phased right through her feet. 

“Grody,” she said. 

“Nina,” Scooter laughed. “Look over here.” 

She jerked her head up and over, and her eyes widened at the expanse before her. Scooter had shown them his games and level designs before, but this was by far the most detailed environment she had ever experienced. Arrays of mausoleums and tombstones, weathered from age and stained from decades worth of rain, stretched out before her. One small plot of grass remained unoccupied. An iron wrought fence that was probably ten feet high separated the cemetery from the shadowy woods, consisting of a diverse array of firs, elms, and oaks. Looking from left to right, she could see an endless asphalt road stretch into a misty horizon; through the clouds, a charming little red farmhouse sat, probably out of bounds. It was more picturesque and gorgeous than real life could ever be. 

Then again, Nina didn’t know for certain. She had only visited a cemetery once before. 

“Holy shit,” she breathed, and Scooter cackled with excitement. “Holy shit!” 

“This won't fry my computer, right?” Marsh grumbled, taking a few tentative steps into the cemetery. “What engine is this? Unreal?” 

“You think Unity could pull this off?” Scooter traipsed after him, and they wandered between the aisles of graves. “Or Godot, for that matter?” 

“Don’t be a dick. This could totally be CryEngine.” 

“When was the last time anyone used CryEngine?” 

“2017? For Prey?”

“That’s forever ago in game dev years. Unreal all the way, baby.” 

“Nina, tell him that CryEngine isn’t that old.” 

Nina pressed down on her control triggers and slowly pushed her way into the cemetery. She didn’t know how they could move so effortlessly. Operating this thing sometimes felt like driving the forklift at her old Home Depot job: hovering above ground, slowly inching forward, arms outstretched to grasp at things that weren’t there. When playing VR, she felt like a passenger in her own body. 

“Nina?” Marsh prompted again, tense. 

“I don’t know enough about any of the engines.” 

Unlike them, her interest in game development was just a hobby. She only occasionally played around in Naninovel and RPGMaker. Constructing a 3D environment was the kind of arduous task that Scooter was good at. She just wanted to write stories about gorgeous long-haired men smooching on her (and each other) in an isekai world. 

Marsh abruptly turned away from her. She couldn’t see him doing it (their character models simply didn’t have those functions) but she knew he was shaking his head at her in disappointment. Thankfully, she was too distracted to give his childish attitude any thought. The attention to detail here was immaculate. Beneath her feet she could see grains of gravel, each outline clearly visible. It wasn’t some stretched out jpeg texture; everything here had been individually modeled. Even the gravestones had unique names chiseled into them, along with epitaphs and year counts that contrasted one another. Wanda Willows, 1913-1980. Quincy Montgomery, 1935-1967. Miranda Johnson— 

—she stopped dead in her tracks. Miranda Johnson? Miranda Johnson. Clear as day. And the years aligned. Chills ransacked her body. Had Scooter put this in here as some sick little Easter egg? Just before she was about to demand what the hell this was doing here, Amorie interrupted. 

“Can you go inside these?” she asked as she floated over to one of the mausoleum doors. 

“One of them, yeah. I forget which one though.” Scooter approached the other structure beside hers, then pushed on the door. “Nope, not that one.” 

Nina took a deep breath. Miranda Johnson was an extremely common name. The years inscribed below could’ve been coincidental. She didn’t want to spiral into some accusatory rant that would further add to the tension within their already fragile friendship. Instead, she bit her tongue and joined them in going door to door, spamming buttons in an attempt to open a building. The second one that Nina approached creaked open, although she could swear she hadn’t pressed the button yet. 

Scooter cheered. “Keena Nina strikes again!”  

Inside was a descending tunnel lit only by torchlight. Flames twinkled as they passed, echoes of orange embers blending with their shadows on the walls in an effortless watercolor. Rows of circles were etched into the stone walls like scales. Above one landing, an archway stood, a menacing gargoyle head mounted to its center. It bared its teeth at all those who approached, stone eyes forever encased in blistering rage. Unsettling feelings—or perhaps more nausea—bubbled in the pit of Nina’s stomach as she proceeded down the steps after her friends.

“So, someone built this? And posted it to a gallery for free?” Marsh asked. 

“Yeah.” 

“Why?” Marsh stopped to inspect the inscriptions on the walls, written in what Nina could only assume was Latin. “Doesn’t this mean anyone can use it for their games now?” 

“Under the license, you’d have to credit them for their work,” Scooter said. “It’s just something to play around in. People like to show off their art, y’know?” 

“But for free? This had to have taken weeks.” 

“You can’t make people pay for your portfolio. You’re just supposed to have one. How do you work in this industry and not know that?” Scooter grabbed one of the torches off the wall. “Once I add some more things into this environment and get a little story going, I think I'll add it to my itch.io page.” 

“Isn’t that stealing?” 

“Again, not if I give them credit. Is your head up your ass, bro? Why aren’t you listening to me?” 

“You guys-uh, stop arguing,” Amorie whined. “Scott, what’s down here, anyways?” 

“We’re getting to it. Just a little further down.” 

Around and around they went in a hypnotizing spiral. Nina counted each landing they passed. Six, seven, eight… Whoever had designed this place was deeply dedicated to their craft. Most indie developers would stop after the second or third staircase. The further down they went, the louder their footsteps and voices echoed. All the while, Nina had to fight the queasiness that rumbled in her stomach, low like thunder.

When they had finally reached the bottom, a massive set of wooden doors greeted them, with iron door knockers nearly half the size of their heads. The mahogany that comprised them was so deep and rich they might as well have been made from chocolate. Nina's fingers traced the individual grooves of wood on their surface. Oddly enough, she thought she could feel the little bumps, although she knew her hands were grasping the controllers. 

Scooter pushed open the door, revealing a chamber. There was an ornate red rug, several paintings mounted to the walls, and pieces of Renaissance-era furniture; tufted armchairs and hand carved wooden pieces galore. 

“So, I think that whoever built this wanted it to be like, a secret spooky cave for a boss vampire or something,” he said as he led them inside. “Pretty cool, right?” 

“It’s so pretty,” Amorie murmured. “And very Skyrim.” 

“I was going to say Morrowind,” Nina mumbled. 

Marsh drifted over to a dresser. He pulled open the drawers and peered inside, fumbling through boxes of clothes. “I bet the dude who made this works for Bethesda or something.” 

“Guys, come look at this.” 

Everyone gathered behind Scooter, who stood in front of a wardrobe at the wall opposite from the entrance. His character cracked open the doors and sat inside, closed it, then exited. 

“That’s not going to take you to Narnia, Scoot,” Marsh said, and Amorie giggled. “What’re you doing?” 

“I can’t hear you guys when I go inside the wardrobe,” Scooter said, laughing. “Try it.” 

Marsh stepped inside and closed the doors. “Guys? Hello?” 

Nina was confused. His voice sounded muffled, edited as though it was in-game audio, but when they spoke to each other over the headset, it was normally clear. This wasn’t Phasmophobia; this was just a simple level design. No audio effects should’ve been inputted into these files… unless Scooter had done something and was trying to prank them, but from the excitement in his voice, it seemed like he hadn’t planned this. 

Marsh stumbled out into the open. “Goddamn, it’s like a sensory deprivation chamber in there. I can’t even open the menu.” 

“I think it was supposed to connect to another area, or another map, and that’s why it’s all glitched out like this. Cool, isn’t it?” 

“If by cool, you mean terrifying.” 

“I want to give it a shot!” Amorie declared, propelling herself inside the wardrobe. 

The doors closed behind her. For several moments they waited. 

Scooter nudged Marsh, chuckling. “She’s sick and tired of hearing your voice. That’s why she ain’t leaving.” 

The doors didn’t budge. Marsh attempted to open them, but it only elicited a knocking sound; the telltale sign that something was locked. 

“Amorie?” Marsh tried the doors again. “Aww, shit. She’s stuck. We’re going to have to restart the game.”

A cry, high-pitched and dripping with terror, split through their headsets. Nina’s controller-holding hands flung up to cover her throbbing ears. Distorted audio intercepted Amorie’s voice, which dispersed into shuddering sobs. 

“Amorie!” 

“Dude, why are you yelling? Aren’t you in the same room as her?” 

“No, she’s at her place. Amorie! What’s going on?” 

A loud CRASH-THUMP, like the sound of someone knocking over furniture. Another surprised squeal that accelerated into a scream. Amorie spoke words but all that came out was garbled radio fuzz and more tears. It was like she was on a highway in the middle of nowhere and her cell connection had cut out.

“Fuck,” Marsh said. “Can we pause?” 

They listened to the sounds of Marsh removing his headset, the soft clunk of him setting it on his desk. Faintly, Nina could hear him calling Amorie’s number, murmuring to himself to stay calm while he waited for her to answer. 

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Scooter asked, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “Why the hell would he invite her? She doesn’t even regularly play games like we do.” 

For some reason, Nina felt defensive. “She’s Marsh’s girlfriend. We should be nice.” 

“Yeah, we can be nice, but does she have to come to this? We haven’t needed another girl in the group since Miranda.” 

There it was. The scarcely mentioned fourth friend. Even though she was ostensibly missing from their get-togethers, she was always on their minds. For some reason this whole ordeal reminded Nina of the night they lost her. Marsh mumbling on the phone in the background, trying to talk to the police. Scooter disassociated and yet his voice thick with emotional tension. And Nina, trying to play the peacemaker, trying to keep them all calm, trying to ignore the fact that they had found her swinging from the branches in her backyard fifteen minutes too late. 

She had taken down their tire swing in order to do it. 

“Did you put her into the game?” Nina whispered. 

“What are you talking about? Who?” 

“Miranda.” 

“What?” 

“There’s a gravestone outside that had her name and—” 

The wardrobe door creaked open, but Amorie wasn’t inside. Instead a distorted character figure, completely pitch black and faceless, had taken her place. It sat cross legged in the center. Just the sight of it made the hairs on Nina’s arms stiffen with fright. You couldn’t cross your legs like that in VR. It wasn’t possible.

“What the fuck is that, Scooter?” 

Although it made no effort to move from its resting place, she backed away. Its head hung low between its shoulders, as if it was staring at the ground, as if its neck was broken— 

—no Nina, don’t think about that. 

“Uh, I’m not sure?” Scooter tried to play it off casually, but she detected the fear in his voice regardless. He retreated beside her. “Could be a glitch. Maybe a missing character model?” 

“I thought this was just a level design.” 

“Sometimes random files sneak their way in.” 

“And you didn’t put it here?” 

“No. It took forever just to figure out how to get this to load in VR.” 

A jumpcut. The figure uncrossed its legs, its hands firmly placed on the edge of its seat. Its head was now raised, staring directly at them. No, staring directly at Marsh, whose abandoned character model stiffly stood, completely oblivious to what was going on. 

Nina called his name, but it was useless. Without the VR headset on, he couldn’t hear them. But his microphone continued to pick up sound. His voice was low, droning, like buzzing bees outside a festering hive of honey. The glitch unsteadily lurched forward, moving like a possessed marionette, its arms wide, its neck twisting. 

Nina nudged Scooter. “Close the game. Now.”  

“I can’t open the menu. I think it’s going to crash.” He audibly gulped down a nervous lump in his throat. “Can you relax? You’re freaking me out.” 

Suddenly the figure stood completely erect. Its hand snapped to Marsh’s shoulder. And over the speaker, they could hear the confusion in his voice. “What’s going…” was the most that Nina could make out, before a blood-curdling scream erupted. In front of them Marsh’s character crumpled pixelated brick by brick, his knees snapping and bending under him, his head swiveling in an erratic, fast-moving circle. His mouth melted to the end of his chin and kept stretching until it reached the floor. His pupils bled with the cartoonish corneas of his eyes, spreading outwards, goring the little avatar from the outside-in. All the while, the mysterious glitch kept its hand pressed to Marsh’s disappearing shoulder. 

Nina screamed his name again, but she knew it was too late. Whatever was in the room with them here was in his reality, was in all their realities. The room began to flicker around them, and a blackness, like a virus, slowly began to eat away at this existence. She ran, Scooter following close behind. He dropped the torch as they made their way up the second flight of stairs. It clattered against the floor in an explosion of sparks before being swallowed by the ever-encroaching void. Behind them they could hear the footsteps of the figure, stuttering like clicking noises on a typewriter, horrifically close and disorientingly loud. 

“Why is this happening, Scooter?” 

“I don’t know!”

“Bullshit, Scott! You know!” 

Nina collapsed onto the floor and shrieked in terror, only to realize she hadn’t fallen in the game; she had fallen off the exercise ball in her bedroom. She scrambled to reorient herself, leaping to her feet. He called to her, begging her to stay with him. They sprinted as fast as their virtual bodies would allow. Sweat poured down Nina's forehead, causing the screen to flicker. 

“The level designer might’ve been dead! That’s all I know!” He stumbled up a step, panting through gritted teeth. “There might have been this black, in-memoriam banner on his page or something—” 

“—You’re stealing a dead person’s work?!” 

“For the third time, this is a Creative Commons license! Attribution required!” 

“Yeah, but are you allowed to fuck with it?! You’ve already changed it!” 

“Oh my God,” he gasped. 

In a split second, he disappeared from her peripheral vision. She whipped around to find him standing tall at the mouth of darkness, calling down to the rushing figure below. 

“Bro! I’m sorry! I won’t remix your shit!” 

Mesmerizingly, the figure snapped in front of him, its hand outstretched. At its touch, Scooter instantaneously collapsed, and he shrieked in agony. Red erupted over his ivory-colored body, eclipsing the clothes he had lovingly equipped and designed so long ago, when they had first started this whole mess. Nina could ignore the gurgling of her stomach no longer. Hot bile, ripe with acid, eviscerated the back of her throat like thousands of little knives, covering her hands, dribbling down the front of her shirt, flooding the spaces between her toes. Too dizzy, she couldn’t hope to turn around and move anymore. Sobbing, she threw the controllers on the ground and removed her headset just before Scooter evaporated from existence. 

Standing across from her was the same figure, her limp head swinging between her shoulders. Without the fuzziness of the in-game vision, her features were slightly more defined. There was that soft ski-slope nose Nina remembered, the braided fishtail that had trailed down the center of her back, and—same as the day they found her—the outline of a polo shirt collar and pleated skirt. Still no eyes or mouth, but she didn’t need them. Her arms stretched outwards, inviting her for an embrace that said everything she needed to. 

Suddenly Nina didn’t feel sick anymore. Tears welled in her eyes as she stumbled forward to meet it. “Nothing’s been the same without you.” 

In the game, all the characters were gone, but the system did not return to the main menu. The camera, now distracted by its lack of participants to lock onto, floated upwards, clipping through the floors and stairs, out of the mausoleum, climbing higher into the sky. In the cemetery’s empty plot, four more tombstones materialized.  

About the Author

Minnesota native Chloe Spencer is an award-winning writer, indie gamedev, and filmmaker. She is the author of multiple sapphic horror novellas, novels, and short stories. In her spare time, she enjoys playing video games, trying her best at Pilates, and cuddling with her cats. She holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Film and Television from SCAD Atlanta.

About the Artist

Michael Katchan is an illustrator in Denmark. He's addicted to coffee.

Volume 8-Fiction - 12/09/2024

Pet

By Justin Johnson

Oreo was so still, patient. Not even his tail wagged at the noise of grain-free freeze-dried meat squares sprinkled onto the thin metal of his new bowl. His head moved, followed my movements as I closed the bag and placed it away in the small cabinet above the kitchen sink. I put the bowl in front of him. He looked down at the bowl, and back at me. I mimed the action of picking up a piece, putting it in my mouth and eating. Still, he waited. I grabbed a smaller square of the expensive pet food, held it to his nose. I didn’t feel that inhale-exhale from him. I ate the piece in an exaggerated way, loudly chewing it with my mouth open. It was fine. He watched this; the two thick black spots that gave him Groucho Marx eyebrows lowered to the bridge of his forehead. He was a beautiful dog. A mix of something and something that mostly drowned in the overbearing genes of his Husky heritage. He was mostly black or white depending on which way you petted through his hair. As he ate crunches cracked through the empty apartment. I told him his new name. Juneau, so he would be closer to his heritage.

That night, I left my bedroom door open. That night, Juneau jumped onto the bed. He lay next to me, and I ran my hands through the whorls of his fur, my fingers gliding along his ribs. 

priest_michaelkatchan

Priest by Michael Katchan

The next morning, he was gone. I called for him, but he did not respond. I found him in the study and sometimes in the spare bedroom when the futon was pulled out. He stared at one of the bookshelves. The one with the jars. I turned on the green rope lights I installed. He turned to me, acknowledged my presence. “You found my collection, Juneau.” He turned back to the jars, focused on one. He stood on his hind legs so that his nose pressed against the dusty glass, leaving a heart shaped mark. The jar scooted slightly back with his touch. It was the eye of a dog, removed due to glaucoma and an infection. I picked it up, and he watched my hand do so. The eye bobbed in the solution of diluted isopropyl and ethanol alcohol. The iris rotated in the movement, settling in my direction. Eyes, even the ones from a dog, are much larger than people think, especially when magnified by the curve of a glass jar. It almost looked like a human eye, or what I would think human eyes outside of the skull would look like. I remember the cloudiness of my grandmother’s eyes, fogged due to both glaucoma and the distance of her fading mind as the dementia ate away at the person she was. The only difference to me was the size of the pupil.

I started collecting wet specimens one day when asked to dispose of a removed cat tooth, yellowed with plaque and hollowed with nerve rot. I asked the lead vet if I could keep it. I thought it would make a neat necklace, like those bleached shark-tooth necklaces from coastal gift shops. But real and with less pooka. Now I had an entire box of canine’s canines. I put the jar back in its place. Juneau’s focus had moved. He looked at one of my favorite pieces, my most liked photo on the wet specimen blog I moderated. A dog’s heart. Its arteries were burst through by heartworms, like spaghetti pushed through the holes of a colander. The worms floated with the heart, reaching toward the outer reaches of the jar. The heart was still swollen from the worms that never made it outside the gray folds. 

I loved Juneau for many months. He never barked or growled. He was a silent dog. A dog of stillness, so antithetical to his nature that it was almost unnerving. It was like watching the subject of a photo move when he walked, a surprise every time. He liked to lick peanut butter off my fingers. He liked to curl up with me at night. But most of all, he liked to watch. I made sure to leave all doors open throughout the apartment so he could follow me. If I closed a door behind me, to shower for example, I would hear his nails scratch at the door, or a disapproving sigh from his nostrils. And he would be distant to me for some time afterward, still watching of course, but from the corner of the room or a hallway. He punished me with his distance. 

And then the fingers began to grow.

I noticed his front paws jutted out further than before and made a note to myself to cut his nails. The next day, his nails had retracted in, mostly on the surface of the nubs, like the fingernails of a newborn. The digits grew in length until Juneau had fingers almost as long as mine. A grayish pink skin covered them, the same color as the skin on his stomach where the fur was thinner and easier to part. I held his hands in mine, the fingers curled around my palm, his thumb flexing in and out like the pinching motions of a crab.

They slapped at my hardwood floors as he walked.

And still I loved him. I told him this. And he would blink once.

One morning, I found him in the kitchen. His legs elongated, muscles swimming under skin like water moccasins in a placid lake. He stood upright, his hands, now longer than mine, had the upper drawer open. He held a jar of peanut butter in his hands, unsure of how to open it with these new appendages. I slid it from him, and he stared at me, those eyebrows lowered. It’s difficult to tell if a dog is happy with you when his mouth is closed, and his ears are up. I worried about this as he now met me at eye level. I opened the jar as he sat down on the floor, his now long legs bowing out like a cartoon frog. Hello, my darling. I scooped a wad of peanut butter onto my finger and held it out to him. He licked it gently off. He pushed his own newly formed fingers into the jar and held a mound of peanut butter out to me.

I locked my door that night. I listened as his hands hit against the floor on his walk down the dark hallway. He no longer scratched at the door or huffed out in frustration with his breath. Instead, you could hear his hands as they rubbed along the wood, feeling the door beneath their soft pads. The doorknob rattled; they must have found it. He turned it back and forth, testing it in his palms. 

I woke up that night with a hand on my shoulder, a cold nose against my ear. 

Juneau was gone in the morning, the bedroom door open. I heard him in the kitchen, a drawer closed, the sound of kibble pouring into a bowl. I called his name, once. I heard him stop pouring. The drawer closed, and the apartment was silent. I walked down the hallway; the kitchen light was on. One bowl sat on the small, square bistro table. It was filled with dry dog food. I sat on the other side, unsure of what he wanted me to do. He was standing on all fours awkwardly as his back legs were much longer than his arms. He stood acute, at an odd slant. Downward dog. 

He put one hand on the back of the empty chair, the other on the table, and he pulled himself up. His arched dog spine bent concave as he slid into the space. He sat across from me, and I could see myself trapped in his large pupils. He picked up one piece of kibble and pantomimed the action of eating it. The snout opened and closed with a sticking sound as his chops waved with the motion. He dropped it back in the bowl and pushed it toward me. 

I picked up one of the pieces and put it in my mouth. He watched. He listened to the crunch. The dry grittiness, the taste of bacon and tuna and oil, made me want to spit it out. But I didn’t. He opened his mouth at this, a smile. His hand reached toward me, and I pushed it away. He snapped his jaws once.

He reached toward me again, his fingers outstretched. A sound came from his body, I could hear it start somewhere deep within him and build as it climbed in his throat. A low guttural growl, a cough maybe. He tried again, another sound, this one a bark.

His fingers ran through the top of my head, scratched behind my ear.

He opened his mouth, a pink wet cavern with a dark hole in the center. Something white climbed from the depths of it, a small nub. More of them popped into place, like he swallowed a pookah necklace, and it was being pulled out shell by shell. They formed a small oval at the back of his throat, a row of small teeth, newly formed, pink, and slick with saliva and blood. A human mouth within his. It closed a few times, as if testing the density of itself. More quick barks came from its throat as the mouth within the snout formed its first word. 

His hands cupped my face. “Pet.”  

About the Author

Justin Johnson is a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He travels and reads full time.

About the Artist

Michael Katchan is an illustrator in Denmark. He's addicted to coffee.

Volume 8-Fiction - 12/09/2024

Wendover Street

By Lindsay Lennox

The Beast was tired, and he was cranky. 

Most of all, he was hungry, and humans aren’t the only creatures who get a bit moody when they’re hungry. He turned the corner near the playground. 

Yes, wonderful: cobblestones, thought the Beast. He hated cobblestones. The uneven ground made it awfully hard to lurk with any proper spirit, and they also hurt his feet. 

The street went uphill, of course. The Beast had powerful lower limbs that coiled like springs, as if designed especially for leaping upon things. Even sprinting up silently behind things was possible, with concentration. But his body did not lend itself gracefully to this slow, cautious uphill trudge over the stones. 

To_Smell

To Smell by Donald Patten

It was a summer night, a Saturday, and many of the houses were dark. Lifting his face and sniffing, the Beast could pick up traces of morning departures. They were rich with anticipation, pregnant with the snappish arguments of road trips, the disappointing arrivals at places which, after all, weren’t different enough from home to matter. There was, already, the resigned dread of Sunday evenings after a weekend filled with busyness. The Beast could survive on such fumes, like a fruit fly, but he wouldn’t say it was much of a life. 

Walking—trudging—a little further up the street brought the discovery that one of these houses wasn’t empty after all. It was absolutely overflowing with light, and noise: well, with Joy, thought the Beast, wrinkling his muzzle. Ordinarily he’d pass this house by without a thought. Not that there weren’t possibilities—there were always possibilities—but usually there were better options for an evening than braving this stench.  

To_Taste

To Taste by Donald Patten

Even as his body began churning with nausea and anxiety, his hunger brought him closer to the house. Joy wasn’t necessarily dangerous to a healthy, fully-grown adult of his species, but that didn’t stop his nostrils from clamping shut, or his thick, pungent blood from moving faster. He counted to ten, pushing his brain to filter out the distractingly unpleasant smell and instead focus on what else he could detect. 

Back to basics, the Beast coached himself. How many are they, what are their ages, what are their fears?

Commanding his muscles to relax, he took a single deep breath through his nose. The house held both adults and children, six of each. Sniffing again, he decided the adults were married couples, and the children were true children, no teenagers, although a couple of them were on the cusp. Possibilities—yes. 

A geyser of laughter erupted from what seemed to be a small sunroom on one side of the house, pushing the Beast back a few steps and making him stumble on the cobblestones. The adults were all in the sunroom, he realized, playing a card game that seemed to involve quite a bit of good-natured arguing.

The Beast crept closer to the sunroom. It was screened but open to the night air on three sides. A screen door allowed the passage of children between the backyard and the sunroom, door bouncing noisily every time one came inside to seek its parents. He moved up underneath the windows facing the front, where he was concealed by the slightly unkempt shrubbery and could stay well clear of any wandering children. 

Children’s minds were difficult to predict; sometimes they could walk right by him without turning a hair, and sometimes they knew his presence almost before he had arrived and steadfastly refused to go near him, taking no notice of their parents’ threats or cajoleries. The Beast found it humorous how often parents referred to these episodes of flawless, unreasoning insight as tantrums or sulking. 

From his position by the large front windows, now that he’d gotten used to the always-present odor, the Beast began to learn more about the adults. Yes, they were definitely three married couples, and marriage—well, there was no richer source of what the Beast ate. One of the couples owned this house, had purchased it when their first child was expected. The others were visitors, but visitors who had been to this house so many times that their affection clung to it, their knowledge of which stair creaked, which cabinet held their favorite coffee mugs, mugs that had themselves survived multiple kitchen purges on the strength of these visits.

Closing his eyes, he could taste intricate flavors in the humid midwestern air. Love certainly, between the couples tonight, the lines connecting those who were married expanded into a kind of net, painfully bright and humming with power. But love was no use to the Beast, and he focused his senses on the other interesting scents dancing under that glowing surface. Oh yes—there was the memory of arguments, things said that could be both forgiven and forgotten but which stayed there nonetheless, sending out their tendrils of quiet rot. There were worries, of course—the children, the money, the illnesses, the promotion—but these worries were so often products of love and thus were not the Beast’s preferred sustenance.

Deliciously, there were echoes of the future, things awaiting these people that they themselves already guessed at: there was divorce, there was addiction, there was grief for harm that would come to some of the children, and worse, guilt for those harms. If he concentrated, he could even sense tragedies for the children who weren’t even born yet, the ones who would be created by some of the children even now passing him by in the dark as they tracked fireflies.

He could eat all these things, of course. From where he stood now, he could fill his belly and leave behind—well, nothing very dramatic, just a shared feeling that these evenings, once so looked forward to, were somehow not the same anymore.   

But it would be hard. Even with all their private sorrows, tonight these people were sheltered by their gathering together, much more than they knew. What the Beast longed for right now was some nice, simple uncomplicated despair. Surely someone, in one of these houses, was tipping over the edge, was ripe for emptiness, was craving it, even. Maybe even now, he’d be better off just moving along up the street—but he was, still, very hungry. He wavered.

Just then, the bushes separating him from the front yard shook violently. They parted to let a child through. It was a girl, one of those who was almost, but not quite, past childhood. She didn’t seem to be aware of his presence, although she was standing nearly on top of him. 

To_See

To See by Donald Patten

The girl child held her breath as several other younger children dashed in front of the bushes, their erratic flashlights and noisy chatter fading as they turned the corner toward the back of house. The Beast assumed she would leave the way she’d arrived, now that the front of the house was quiet and dark again. Instead, she sat down on the mulch that surrounded the base of the bushes. The Beast had to back up quickly to prevent her from actually sitting on his hoof-like feet. 

He was accustomed to being ignored by children, but he’d never been quite this close to one without getting some kind of reaction, if only in the form of a sudden impulse on the part of the child to be somewhere else. The girl child, however, gave every sign of staying put right here. In fact, she pulled out a small book, flipped through the pages until she found her place, then began to read in the bright light that spilled from the sunroom windows. 

Now what?

He was still uncertain about the adults inside, and he also wasn’t completely sure he could get out of the shrubbery without alerting the girl. The girl who, he belatedly realized, he was a bit afraid of; his pulse had quickened again, and that rolling nausea had returned, making it impossible to decide what to do. 

The problem with the girl was that she was terribly, terribly happy. 

She didn’t live in this house, the Beast knew. She was visiting with her parents, and as he hunched awkwardly above her, he was assaulted by the joys — they were many, and recent — that this place held for her.  

To_Feel

To Feel by Donald Patten

Standing this close, her pleasures were vivid: there was the family’s arrival two days ago, leaping from the station wagon (filled with the debris of eight hours of driving) to scale the low wall that bordered the driveway. Yes, there it was, the semi-wild backyard, the evergreen tree with branches hanging all the way to the ground, a natural haven for a quiet, bookish child. Then there was carrying her suitcase up, up, up, past the bedrooms on the second floor, the younger children’s rooms filled with bright, educational toys. 

Up to the third floor, which was really an attic, tall enough in the middle to stand up, but with a roof that sloped down to meet the walls, which were covered in books. Nearly every surface in the single large attic room was packed with books. The smell of the attic library was the single most powerful sense memory the girl had of the house, and the Beast reeled from its intensity, barely noticing that the same scent rose from the book the girl held open as she read by the window light.  

She was terribly happy, but she was also eleven years old, and that was an age rich in loss, the Beast knew. Already, she was just a little too old for the game unfolding around her, a shifting amalgam of hide-and-seek tag Marco Polo that would keep going for hours still. Already she was feeling the blind safety of childhood slipping away, even here, in the house of the people who’d been there when she was born, a magic she couldn’t have articulated, much less understood.

It wouldn’t take much, he knew. He knew how to find those tiny negative spaces of loss, how to breathe on one with great gentleness until it became an uncrossable missingness that was the end of childhood with its savage birthrights and protections, the beginning of despair. 

Time passed.

The Beast waffled. He shifted his weight.

Time passed.

Jennifer stood, closing her book after committing the page number to memory. She brushed off the backs of her thighs where bits of mulch had stuck to them. Using one arm as a shield, she pushed through the wall of bushes that had hidden her from the younger kids. The parents had spilled out of the sunroom onto the front lawn now, calling to their offspring with great noise and hilarity. 

She passed the hiding spot of the two kids whose parents were ready to leave: the two brothers were shushing each other underneath the huge tree whose branches came down all the way to the ground. Jennifer herself was staying here tonight and was more than ready to settle into her sleeping spot on the sofa in the family room.

She missed sleeping in the attic with her parents, in a sleeping bag with her face turned toward the low shelves packed with books arranged first vertically, then stacked horizontally on top of the tightly packed spines wherever space permitted. The books were varied; there were textbooks, mysteries, nonfiction hardcovers, dog-eared romance novels. 

But as the older sibling she had been displaced to the living room several years ago, and the living room had its own treasures. The built-in bookcase held books more prestigious than those stored upstairs—large-format art books, academic works authored by colleagues of these friends of her parents — but arranged in much the same way. The shelves also held a fascinating selection of other objects: sculptures, small paintings, framed numbered prints which were continued onto the walls in larger pieces. 

Jennifer loved the living room, so different from the neatly ordered living room in her own house, as she loved the attic and the dining room with its heavy, formal dining set covered in perilously high stacks of papers (guarded by a cat with the dark gray fur that adults insisted was called blue). As she loved the sunroom where the floor vibrated when you ran through it on the way to the backyard, making the card table sway so that the parents grabbed up their glasses, slick with condensation from the humid evening, and shouted laughing reminders not to let the door slam (reminders which no child ever heard, what with the door slamming all the time). 

Sometimes she stayed up late after her parents tucked her into her sofa spot, watching the lights from occasional cars pass over the room, listening to the muted quarter-hour chimes from the cuckoo clock in the entryway. Jennifer liked sleeping, especially now as she was approaching adolescence, but the feeling of this house was always strongest at night, and it was nice to fall asleep slowly, letting her gangling limbs melt into its warmth, its books and clutter, its fullness. 

This evening, though, she’d been up very late already, alternately playing with and evading the younger children, and she wasn’t awake long enough to hear even one of the clock’s chimes.  

As she sank into sleep she heard, for a moment, an odd clopping sound. She thought it sounded like hooves, fumbling unevenly over the cobblestones, but that didn’t make sense; Jennifer didn’t always pay close attention to everything around her, but she had certainly never heard of horses being on Wendover Street. 

The sound, seeming to make up its mind at last, moved further and further away, in the direction of the dark houses further up the road. As the sound faded Jennifer drifted into one of those golden, twilit dreams that only children really have, and by morning she didn’t remember hearing it at all.  

To_Hear

To Hear by Donald Patten

About the Author

Lindsay Lennox is a queer, non-binary writer living in Colorado. In addition to a few (more mainstream) published pieces, they are currently revising a novel using sci-fi themes to explore gender identity, as well as working on a magical realist retelling of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

About the Artist

Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He produces oil paintings, illustrations, ceramic pieces and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries across Maine. His online portfolio can be found here. 

Volume 8-Fiction - 12/09/2024

The Bats of Wat Pho

By Kimberly Gibson-Tran

It was noon and scorching, but my sister wouldn’t budge from the pleather backseat of the white Mitsubishi. This was the first time we’d been back to the temple since childhood, but this fact didn’t move her. And she was supposed to be our eyes with her expensive journalism school camera. Trying to recall her lesson to me on shutter speed, I took the strap from her shoulder, tracked the dusty trail to Wat Pho. In the archway emerald with Bodhi leaves, I snap a photo of two young monks—nejns—shoulder-toe in the orange robes of their order. Their shaved heads bend together. The backs of their sandals slap the packed dirt. I do not approach them. As I am a woman, they shouldn’t talk to me, and, as I am a Christian, I have no cause to bother them. I’ve come, like everyone who comes here, to be enlightened by the dark things, so I look up. 

Khangkhao Mae Kai, Pteropus lylei, Lyle’s flying fox. They are big for bats—the biggest, in fact—wingspans of a full meter. Faces puff out of their black rubber arms in tufts of orange-brown. Suckling their little pups upside down, the colony, which can also be called a cloud, chitters and cackles like a village at market. 

Banshee_Jennifer_Weigel

Banshee by Jennifer Weigel

When we moved away from Bang Khla, we almost never saw bats, not in their night swarms anyway, those thousand bodies outdoing the birds as they spewed from the trees in the Halloween purple of dusk. How did Katie get to be so afraid of them? 

Who isn’t afraid of the dark, even without ghosts, even with prayers lodged in the throat and brain? Children of missionaries were trained back then to deal in the spiritual shadows. It was called warfare. In church, in America, when I was fourteen and newly moved from the tropical latitude of Thailand to the unenriched clay of Texas, the other kids laughed off the parts of the New Testament about demonic possession. God didn’t work in those ways here. If only, I thought, these worshippers under the spotlights of their basketball-court-convertible sanctuary could sense the incense infused air of the goldleaf and glass kaleidoscopic temples. There is a voice that calls us from the open and into the corners, recesses, bushes, far fields. What do they call it here?

In 2007, when I was a teenager in College Station, Texas, the vampire craze hit. For my birthday, a pretty, red-headed classmate gave me a thick paperback of Twilight. I didn’t read it—I admit, I don’t read books gifted to me. But I read her note inside the cover—a cursive rendering of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Maybe my sister read the book, which, I learned from the Robert Pattinson movie, demystifies the lust-sick vampire into simply another kind of wounded human. 

I trace my vampiric trauma to the source of most of my nightmares—The Animal Planet, whose educational programs in the 90s included, between filler material of seal and walrus footage set to Beach Boys soundtracks, the dangerous conservation adventures of Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, and straight nature documentary—harrowing animal tales narrated by the likes of Leonard Nimoy or other fringe celebrities. These nature documentaries would cover a region—the Kenyan Great Rift Valley or the South American Amazon—and toggle between footage of different species. The narrative was always a variation on the big theme: survival, aka death, aka predation. There I learned about the vampire bat, which pierces the warm hide of a cow before licking the wound in little laps of pink triangle tongue, not unlike the little impish dagger my sister carried when she would cut in to report one of my wrongs. 

Through the TV box I saw the moonlight catching in the wrinkles of the squished, piggish faces, nothing like the friendly dog-snouts of the flying foxes of Wat Pho, wolfish as they were. The worst the foxes would do is steal from the orchards, copper fur matted with banana mash or mango, though, my doctor dad reminds me, they do spread rabies through urine on occasion. 

One time, after we’d moved from central to northern Thailand, to a valley surrounded by green mountains, I was riding my bike around the compound. It was night and the air was still suspended with rain. It was quiet and very dark, and away from the lights left on at my parents’ clinic, I could hardly see in front of me. I had to look down for what little light escaped the concrete when suddenly out of the infinite nowhere something big and black flew into me, shocking me alive. It felt like the slap of a furry umbrella. Everything was fine. I didn’t fall. I peddled home. 

Prayer_Jennifer_Weigel

Prayer by Jennifer Weigel

Why couldn’t Katie get out of the car? At the root of this inquiry is the fact that I have never understood my sister. She, my only sibling, does not see memory like I do. She asked me sometime last year or the year before if I would go with her and her husband on a vacation to Thailand—play guide and interpreter for them. I, who can only ever go back. She, who can only ever go forward. I said yes, but we never bought any tickets.

She seemed to adapt more easily to America. Top grades, top social circle, pretty. Not that I wasn’t those things, just in different ways. We used to fight with kicks, fly at each other like bats out of hell, someone in Texas might say. What was it she never got? What have I always been trying to get out of her?

A chance discovery home from a college break: her diary. I expected the usual mourning over a crush, but it was over me: “Kimberly is so perfect with her long golden-brown hair, the way it tumbles down in waves. She walks so tall and smooth with her shoulders back. She’s so popular and beautiful. I want to be just like her. I want to look like her, talk like her, walk like her.” It was the first time I read myself as a character of hers. I felt more than ever that we had missed each other at some crucial juncture. 

But then there are the things we’ll always know. The data we could present, and sometimes have presented, on each other, ripples in the fond reflections. The things I know she fears irrationally. This dark knowledge a sort of intimacy beyond words.

One night, when I was twelve and Katie was ten, and we were sleeping in my room, she got up and went down the stairs grumbling. My mother, working late at the dining room table, saw first my sister’s flushed, chubby cheeks—what everyone noticed—then the bulge of black armor, the stinger bobbing from the six inches of scorpion on her chest. 

The summer after my high school graduation in Texas, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight dominated the box office. I went to the midnight show with my dad. He liked the action. I liked the symbolism, the moral quandaries Batman’s enemies always seemed so intent on placing him in. Batman, hoard of one, no matter his intent, is a dark agent. Chaos and order both, like the spiral cloud of bats which so traumatized him in childhood, impressing upon him the need to become the fear rather than overcome it. 

Sometimes you look inside and want to find the animal. This thing of pure instinct that we cannot but tame into symbol. What did it mean when I tore at the flesh of my sister’s scalp? Was I, as the Buddhist might say, shackled by desire? Or was it jealousy old as Cain and Able? When the scorpion stung my sister, it left a mark. All the while I was in my bed, dreaming on the top bunk, cocooned in my own arms.  

They call them “loners” or “lone wolves” in the news coverage. Unable to find the darkness in their skin, we summon other powers of assumption. We scrutinize the details, lay blame at the door of the parent, therapist, or dumping girlfriend. He’d dyed his hair red-orange, a joker. Armor cloaked him like a Batman fan, fooling the audience that he was part of the midnight premier act. Then he lit up the place. During his flight, we almost took him for a police officer. 

When my family drove by Aurora, Colorado in 2012, it was only a place. Another land to contrast with the mountains and fields in our memories. My sister was working at the big YMCA in Colorado that summer. She was changing, growing, my parents and I remarked, trying to know who she was. 

On a recent return to my childhood home in Bang Khla, I brought my Texan roommate. One of my parents’ old friends, a missionary I’d known as a child, played host to us, driving us around town in her mission-donated white Mitsubishi. Some things stay the same, like the bat temple. Same rusty dirt, same Buddhas in the shrine, what look to be the same young monks, the Bodhi tree canopy, and the gibbering cloud bespeckling the noon light. How at once they allow you to believe in them and their vibrant reverse world. A mother with her pups hidden under an umbrella wing. Another bat, blackened utterly, hangs electrified from the telephone line. My friend is awed, snaps dozens of photos that can never get close enough. Then she’s done and, looking around again, finds the place creepy, says she’s ready to go when I am. 

Maybe my sister, unlike me, knows how to leave a scab alone. Maybe she knows something I don’t about wounding. She is, after all, a nurse now, like our mother before her, our mother who shouted over and over for our father to bring the surgical Kelly clamps from the bathroom, which he did, swiftly locking down on the monster’s spike. In the memory that is not my own, it bucks and writhes like a nightmare fiend, like a strip of purest nerve, a live wire, a struck patch of blackness I would do best to leave alone. 

About the Author

Kimberly Gibson-Tran studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor and the University of North Texas. She's written critically about poems with "Lines by Someone Else" and has recent writing in Anodyne Magazine, Passengers Journal, Elysium Review, and The Common Language Project. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.

About the Artist

Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards.

Volume 8-Nonfiction - 12/09/2024

Vampire Finds Out You’re Low on Blood Sugar

By Eric Brown

It’s the slight retraction of the fangs, 
just inked with crimson stains,  
that signals that first impression 
of disappointment.  It’s not that the neck 
wasn’t bare or taut enough,  
the lace choker too limply woven,  
the bodice too homespun for ripping.   
(Though what sad labor went into so much 
restitching.)  But disappointment 
all the same.  Perhaps if you’d supped 
on chocolate, or hydrated more,  
or swallowed freely that second bite 
of bagel, or if you’d stretched your 
intermittent fasting a little less severely,   
then those puncture wounds with black 
and scabrous crust might have been yours. 
The draining of all that sweet corpuscular 
flamboyance.  Instead, another bat-faced boy 
in the night feeling sorry for you, 
turning to mist, gone before sunrise. 

Bigfoot_Saw_Us_But_No_Oner_Belived_Him_23x31

Bigfoot Saw Us But No One Believed Him by Daniel Wood Adams

About the Author

Eric Brown is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maine Farmington and Executive Director of the Maine Irish Heritage Center. His books include Milton on Film, Insect Poetics, and Shakespeare in Performance, and his work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Enchanted Living, Rust & Moth, The Ekphrastic Review, Mississippi Review (first prize, Hamlet issue), Carmina Magazine, The Galway Review, Sublunary Review, Constellations, Eternal Haunted Summer, Star*Line, The Frogmore Papers (shortlisted for the 2023 Frogmore Poetry Prize), and elsewhere.

About the Artist

Based in Austin, Texas, Daniel Wood Adams is a multifaceted creative with a passion for blending visual aesthetics and craftsmanship. As a graphic designer, illustrator, and woodworker, Daniel’s work reflects a unique intersection of artistry and skill. Daniel’s creative journey began with degrees in illustration and graphic design from Pratt Institute in 2012. Those formative years were a thrilling rollercoaster of art, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and caffeine-fueled all-nighters, setting the stage for what would become a dynamic career. In addition to his professional work, Daniel enjoys contributing to the local creative community and collaborating with fellow artists. His diverse skill set allows him to approach projects from unique angles, continually presenting new opportunities to grow and refine his craft. Daniel is excited to see where this journey will lead him next.

Volume 8-Poetry - 12/09/2024

Texas Chainsaw-esque

By John Sara

Shoe_Tree_WarrenMuzak

Shoe Tree by Warren Muzak

Hollow_Screams_WarrenMuzak

Hollow Screams by Warren Muzak

Madness hides in the backseat of a pickup, 
feet blistered from running.  
In the hot sun, blood  
can be mistaken for sweat. 
The bones of roadkill  
can be fashioned  
into a home. 
 
Madness is a family, starved 
at the dinner table; meat 
stuck between teeth. 
 
Your family tree is 
made of skin. From 
afar it looks like leather; 
a dance in the orange dawn, 
blades whirring, 
laughing, 
still alive  
but barely. 

About the Author

John Sara is a writer from Parma, Ohio. He received his BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and is currently pursuing his MFA at Ashland University.

About the Artist

Warren Muzak's passion for illustrating started early, captivated by the visual narratives found in comics. He studied Graphic Design in college and from that worked at a few print-shops in pre-press. His abilities creating digital art got him a job as a production artist for a high-end carpet manufacturer where he took beautifully hand-painted gouache artboards and redrew them digitally to be used in manufacturing. In 2016, he met a seasoned UK stop-motion animator while working under contract for a small media production studio. This sparked a new direction—2D animation. Warren embraced it, finding a natural knack and genuine joy in the work and atmosphere in the studio. By 2018, freelancing became his full-time pursuit, honing his craft through persistent bids on online platforms. 

Volume 8-Poetry - 12/09/2024

Summon Forth

By Jennifer Rodrigues

Love Potion No. Whatever by Bec Sommer

Like Love, We Wait in Ambush by Bec Sommer

I'm Skittish by Bec Sommer

Hooks Are Here for Me by Bec Sommer

About the Author

Jennifer Rodrigues currently lives on the sacred Powhatan land of Fairfax, VA. She is trained as a certified yoga therapist & trauma informed yoga teacher, is a queer & neurodivergent military spouse, & mom. She has been featured in many lovely literary journals, anthologies, and has been nominated for Best of the Net with her photography. Find her on Insta @gmoneyfunklove.

About the Artist

Bec Sommer is a painter and interdisciplinary artist from Saint Louis. He received his BFA in Painting from Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA in Visual Arts from Cornell University. His work tends to gravitate toward ideas of taboo, transgression, dysphoria, and infatuation, with an emphasis on collage and fandom-born methods, to create and deconstruct narrative scenes.

Volume 8-Poetry - 12/09/2024

Carnival of Souls – Release

By Allison Goldstein

Hunched at the edges  
of the swirling gray water, 
 
the men can only shake  
their heads in quiet disappointment 
as the car full of dead girls  
is dredged from the river. 
 
Silent faces young and perfect— 
lipstick unsmudged,  
not an eyelash 
out of place. 
 
A low groan escaping the tow truck  
as it drags the sedan past  
the cross-armed men  
straddling the shoreline,  
 
tires clawing into the mud 
like the fingernails  
of someone buried alive.   

This_Limestone_Doom_-_Mixed_Media_Collage

This Limestone Doom by Brett Stout

About the Author

Allison Goldstein received her MFA in Poetry from California College of the Arts. She has been published in a variety of literary and cultural publications including Not Very Quiet: The Anthology, Burnt Pine, Molecule, Gyroscope Review, and Maximum Rocknroll. Allison currently lives and writes in South Florida. You can learn more about her work by visiting her website. 

About the Artist

Brett Stout is an artist and writer originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a high school dropout and former construction worker turned college graduate and paramedic. He creates mostly controversial artwork usually while breathing toxic paint fumes from a cramped apartment known as “The Nerd Lab.” His work has appeared in a vast range of diverse media, such as art and literature publications by NYU and Brown University.

Volume 8-Poetry - 12/09/2024

Isle

By Eleanor Levine 

I want pumpkin pie 
and luscious small talk,
not opera breaking a glass;
martinis splattering;
everyone in flight while I
remain alone; blinking
stares: the way it is with
boys taking meat cleavers
to my feet so they turn
inward. 

About the Author

Eleanor Levine’s writing has appeared in more than 130 publications, including New World Writing Quarterly, the Evergreen Review, The Hollins Critic, Gertrude, and the Maryland Literary Review. Her poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, Oregon). Her short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, was published by Guernica Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

Untitled_Dark_Abstract_shaemeyer smaller

Untitled by Shae Meyer

About the Artist

Shae Meyer was born in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, CO. He studied at the University of Colorado, where he received his BFA in Printmaking. He moved to New York City and began working in studios producing large scale paintings in the Hudson River style, while developing his own processes. His work engages questions concerning objectivity, subjectivity, and individuality within the context of environment. Incorporating materials discarded and overlooked, he examines whether these have intrinsic value, or prescribed value based on their use. By pulverizing these objects, they often lose their natural form, and become hidden in the depths of a painting, becoming a part of the larger whole, an element within a larger context. For Meyer, these materials become an allegory for the value of an individual person, examining if somebody is more than merely the sum of their parts, or perhaps; are all these parts the same. Wondering constantly whether he is a big part of something small, or a small part of something big, or perhaps nothing at all. 

Volume 8-Poetry - 12/09/2024

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