I met up with Manny Valez at Rocco’s Irish Tavern in Somerville, a bar that had been a hangout for our group of mutual friends back when we were in college, mostly due to the bar’s lax policies on carding. It had been a rancid, skanky dive back then, but it had since gone into […]
With so few schools for uninfected children left, that meant I was out of a job—until the government passed the No Infected Left Behind Act. Teaching a class of forty teenagers who are developmentally-disabled cannibals isn’t as bad as it sounds. Really, they act out less than the average high school student. And the job […]
At first, the calls from the dead helped out a lot—parents decades lost to cancer finally able to cry to their kids, you made me so proud. Sure, closure is mostly a bullshit torture device. But tell that to someone who just got their first night’s sleep in months after a sister who died of […]
When Lyssa the Fair swept into the greenhouse, I knew right away she was bad news. First of all, she’d bypassed my security system at the front of the store which, okay, consisted of a bell on a string and a retired cat-demigod-librarian napping on the job. But the bell should’ve tripped. Instead, the famed […]
1. The Funeral I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close. He slipped in the back during my eulogy in the form of a stranger. I don’t think that any of the various relatives noticed Him. For all they knew, it could have been some old flame of hers […]
This is the story of Akemuz, corn-mother, grave-mother This is the story of her grief and her fury Of her wanderings, on the earth and below the earth The year turns, we wait for the rains O Akemuz! Hear your story, dwell in us Feed us, sustain us, preserve us So. You want a story. […]
Vilma, 1 The samohod drove Vilma half-way up the mountain before its engine began to struggle with the slope, coughing up plumes of soot. When the vehicle heaved its last gasoline breath, she abandoned it by the road and continued to the highlands on foot. By dawn, she reached Slow Eshtyca; the village’s […]
In Syna’s dream, the she-wasp comes to her. In all their hours together, the aging Unfolder has seen the patron god with her own eyes only twice, and not in half a century at that. But there’s no forgetting some things. In every way, Eotrene is exactly as she remembers. “You weep,” the god says, […]
Earth was millions of light years and memories away from this cold, distant corner of the universe where the Leviathans liked to roam and Founder devices floated silent and dark. Melody was even further away, escorting one pregnant Leviathan that had decided to split off from the main herd and was now wandering her merry […]
Over the black sprawl of Dublin, the demons flapped their sore-puckered wings and screamed. Too high to lob a brick at, with nasty talons that’d take a chunk off your face if you tried. Best leave them shriek and gibber across the boiling clouds, swooping and weaving between the pulsating slices in the sky. For […]