​In the botanist’s garden
A leafy offshoot reaches, like a hand, suppliant
along the wrought iron table where he takes his tea
 
The botanist trails his calloused thumbs
along the folds of her frond.
Nicolle: a testament to his talents, a flash of ferocious fuchsia among the verdant
 
Every night he talks to her,
Every night he thinks
of her leaves uncurling
 
She bleeds bitter essences to make him itch;
builds barricades of barbed thorns.
But he’d put on his stained yellow gloves and
trim
her
back.
 
Nicolle had once been forged of femurs and freckles.
When they met, he envisioned unfurling his muscles into hers.
But she had shot him down, sheared his dreams, so
 
He infused a concoction of his raging rejection into a bouquet.
Nicolle arranged the anonymous blooms, not seeing how
Their chemicals coerced her cells to morph and contort.
 
He found her later,
Bones splintering into stalks
Wet eyes whorling into pristine petals.
 
Now he sits, sipping.
Watching Nicolle’s tendrils unwind toward him
like he had always hoped.
 
The botanist doesn’t see
the trail of insect bodies beneath her drooping leaf,
her toxic tainted shimmer turning toward his tea.

I.
We met when I rolled up to Best Buy,
My favorite part of “Silver Highway” by Lord of Synth was playing at 1:32
                                                  (on my iPhone)
 
Our eyes met in the evening sun.
You were darker
              than in your black and white pic on Scruff.
I loved that
        (my cactus fever.)
 
You said you wanted companionship--
I had no expectations.
 
We drove the valley, waiting for Big Daddy’s pizza,
talking of our Master’s degrees; science fiction lovers you and I.
                                         (Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson)
 
You wanted chicken, and it was a pesto sauce
                              (not bad, pretty good)
You paid—our first date, even though you were a foreign visitor--
Colombia’s Bogotá runs in your veins, on the high top of
                                La dama de la montaña brillante
 
We talked and got to know each other.
You smiled—got up, initiated our first kiss.
I sat you on my lap and we explored our lips.
 
I caressed your small tight back, as you pressed your small body
against my big one.
 
The couch was an open friend, supportive to our new romance,
before the bed called us with anticipation.
 
I spent five days with you of seven.
You whispered sweet nothings in my ear.
How you loved the flush in my face when your lips met,
the grey whiskers in my beard,
and the strong hand on your hips.
 
II.
You were the first person to tell me you were HIV positive
after I penetrated you.
                                               
It was the evening of departure, Colombia willing you home.
The shock wave was instant through my body
as I parked before dinner.
 
You then continued you were Undetectable
Of course, I know that means Untransmitable;
The science says U=U.
 
I dated poz guys—slept with them too.
        All that was fine. YOU were fine.
                 But the trust was not mine.
 
Even though I forgot to ask in our mad rush
                            (something I rarely do)
It was you who should have evoked it.
 
I’m so happy you are responsible since the infection 4 years ago
 
You take care,
you take the daily meds,
you ensure you’re not the plague,
or have the “dirty blood”, the clean ignorants say.
 
We didn’t know each other really—acquaintances who had fun.
And you couldn’t tell me before I slung it.
How could I trust U?
 
To urgent care for PeP.
I wasn’t on PrEP
         (like I should have been,)
 
I was stuck four times—my slippery veins,
needled till purple and blue--
JUST IN CASE.
 
Blood consulted, even though the 72-hour window passed—I agreed.
 
III.
A foreign source,
I confronted you on Whatsapp,
and you told me the story.
Doctors. Dates. Testing—how could I tell you that I couldn’t trust you?
 
Yet, I got the fever,
the chills,
the sweats the night you left.
 
But you didn’t know the day before I got the flu shot.
Misery to my concerns:
Is it HIV, or flu viral reaction?
The burden of uncertainty was mine.
 
You are so far away, living your life high in the Andes--
on the southern continent.
Time slides by
as life glides in the North.
 
Tests resolved,
you fade into future days.
A memory loved--
tucked away.

​Daniel is a writer, editor, publisher, avant-garde artist. He holds an MA in English from Weber State University. A career librarian-archivist with an MLS, he is currently living in Salt Lake City, UT-continuing to write and make art.

Website: www.danielcureton.com

Maybe
She fell in love with darkness
And we were not to know.
Secrets sank in tufted hills marbled to the bone while
Carried off, they said. Be careful. Rapuit.
Another pretty girl who drifted, carried away by gods.
 
But maybe she met his sullen gaze
Moments before Mother slipped between--
Offended by his tragic liminal spaces.
Calling him fragrant, bitter, dull, she plied
Her daughter away.
 
But maybe she sensed what spooled from his touch
And her unexpressed contours were moved.
He--witness to women reframed, coerced, cut down--
Received them with grave and tender care,
And grew wiser, more spacious for each.
 
Maybe he listened and she drew closer,
Slipping between her own bars,
Leaving her paintbrush of spring pastels
For swathes of Eleusian gold, indigo pinwheels,
The dove-gray train of incense curls he offered.
 
And maybe she feasted—both at his table and
In his bed—-in ways Mother would never understand;
Ravenous, chaffed, red-lipped--she lied
About eating only six pomegranate seeds.
Laughing--alone--he awaited her return to color his sheets.
 
Maybe she outgrew the porcelain mask of Kore,
Choosing queen and friend--not mother--
To those crushed by living;
To those exhausted from defending themselves.
Wordless, a softened glance is her only admission
Of freedom that blooms in the dark.

​Bram Stoker Award® finalist, L. E. Daniels is an author/poet and the editor of over 140 titles. Lauren’s novel, Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (IP) is a Notable Work with the Horror Writers Association’s Mental Health Initiative. She edited Aiki Flinthart’s Relics, Wrecks and Ruins (CAT) with Geneve Flynn, winning the 2021 Aurealis Award. With Christa Carmen, Lauren edited the Aurealis finalist, We Are Providence (Weird House) and Monsters in the Mills (IP). Recent publications include “Silk” (Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster, Twisted Wing), "Darkness Repeats" (Monsters in the Mills, IP), and “Hangman’s Coming” (Where the Silent Ones Watch, Hippocampus). Her non-fiction, “Spooned by the Dead” appears in Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters (Timber Ghost). Her poetry appears in This Way Lies Madness (Flame Tree), Cozy Cosmic and More Cozy Cosmic (Underland), and Under Her Eye and Mother Knows Best (Black Spot Books). Her poem, “Night Terrors” (HWA, Of Horror and Hope) was a 2022 Australasian Shadows Award finalist. She directs Brisbane Writers Workshop.
 
Links:
Website: https://www.brisbanewriters.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LEDanielsAuthor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauren_elise_daniels/
Bluesky: ledaniels.bsky.social
 

Bears eat their young sometimes, I tell myself, as my lips, my jaws, close around you. This is my excuse. My way of telling myself these thoughts I’m feeling, this act I am committing, are not exclusive to me. That it is not an atrocity, but a way of the natural world. I hold you in my arms, your back to my chest, and I lower my head, my tongue caressing your crown, my mouth widening, lips stretching over you, engulfing you, bringing you into me once again. You’re afraid, but you believe Mommy when she tells you it’s all going to be alright.

With bears, it’s different. It happens because the mother needs to ensure the survival of the species. A mother bear can make more baby bears, but a cub cannot survive without its mother. Although now that I think of it, I don’t know if that’s a fact or one of those things I’ve just heard. Bears eating their cubs. Like lightning never striking twice in the same spot.

I don’t think it matters, because its veracity cannot alter my path. I hold you tighter. My arms around your torso, holding your arms down. My legs around your waist. Holding you tight. Loving you. Showing you the love with the protection of my body as my mouth spreads over your head, and then your shoulders, as I feel my insides stretching against you. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold you at first, but that maternal instinct kicks in, gag reflex is stifled, higher brain pushed away. Like parents pushing cars off babies.

I’ve seen something like this before; parents play-biting their children’s toes, women nibbling on their spouses. You look so cute I could just eat you up. But what if you really could? What if you had to? What if it was the only choice you had as a desperate mother who wanted more than anything to keep her child safe?

Even though I didn’t realize it when it happened, I made this decision when I saw you fall. The first time I had ever seen my child injured. The tricycle in the middle of the street was a fire axe that hacked through my life. The blood on the concrete the clearest sign I’ve ever had; this world is not a safe place for a thing as precious as you. I brought you inside and I patched you up and I knew then, as you looked up at me with tears in your eyes that there was only one place safe for you. The only place you’d ever been truly safe.

So, I open my mouth.

You struggle against me for a moment, unsure of what’s going on. Just as you were unsure of what exactly what happened when you fell, when you smashed your face against the concrete. I tell you it’s okay, but not aloud, because my mouth is full of you. Your head is sliding past my uvula and I’m holding down my gag reflex because this, protecting my child, is the most important thing I’ve done or ever will do. I tell you in the way of wordless connections between mothers and children, and I know you hear it because you stop fighting. You know inside me is safe.

I can feel you sliding down my throat, expanding me, swelling me, and I’m filled with your heat and the warmth of knowledge that the warm, impenetrable wall of motherhood is protecting you from the cold unforgivingness of this world. I use my hands to fold you in, push you by the legs, the feet, down into my throat, feeling each bit of you pass through into different parts of me in a way that doesn’t make sense and yet makes all the sense in the world.

I swallow.
​
You are out of the world. Surrounded only by me. I looked down and see my belly swollen like a cartoon character after a Thanksgiving meal. Ballooned in a way that should not be possible, but then neither should have been my jaw unhinging. Neither should it be that you are safe in there, in Mommy’s belly, where you began. And yet you are. Where nothing will ever hurt you again.

There’s so much lore here
in the desert.

We used to joke about wendigos
And things that crept in the dark.

We’d even say, “Tell us stories of Skinwalkers,”
until half the group fell silent.

“If you speak of them, they will come.”
​
They said prayers and threw their fingernail
and hair clippings into the fire
to keep us safe.
The smell was unholy
But still holier than monsters.

Sitting around the bonfire
under the stars
pretending our faces lit by flame
weren’t demonic, that
the odd voices in the sand weren’t unnatural, that
there was nothing behind you, nothing at all
certainly not primitive
eyeshine glowing
in the dark.

You remember the day it happened, don’t you?

This came out in earlier sessions, but perhaps hearing it again will help. You are so young, after all. Young enough to see the world through an orange haze of carelessness, yet old enough to remember the day with a cellular clarity. Only to repress this memory along with… the others, of course.

If you close your eyes, perhaps you can see it. Steam pouring from the cracked bathroom door. The static hiss of the shower drawing you closer. You grab the handle, warm and slick in your small hand, and you jar the door just enough to see her.

Your mother.

She stands hunched over the sink with her back facing you—nude except for the towel wrapping her hair. You watch closely, following each little knob in her back as they compress and straighten, rising in the mirror before you. But in that reflection, what do you see?
Well, you see that her face… is gone.

This, perhaps, could be a child’s overactive imagination, but your brain… is special. You see things differently, and what you see, is a bone white hollow lined with her same sun-kissed flesh tracing your mother’s hairline, to her ears, to the tip of her acute chin with only emptiness between.

You jerk your hand back, but you can’t look away, can you? You watch through the opening as she reaches for the far left drawer, sliding it open to reveal the face you know. She lifts it to her head and snaps it into place. Eyes move and lips flex. She presses one cheek toward the mirror and then the other, inspecting the fit.

Then, her eyes lock onto you.

You run, sprinting through the hall, leaping into bed and tossing the covers over you. You tug at your own face, searching for a seam, or latch, or button to open it, but find none. When Mother comes to explain—to calm you—you refuse to listen. How could you? To you, this stranger looks like your mother but isn’t. It is wearing her face. Only, her whisper soft voice is exactly how you remember, isn’t it? And when she strokes your back, pressing nails ever so slightly, your trembling stops. When you finally peel back the covers, you see the same honey-brown eyes you’d always known.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” she explains.

Still, you don’t speak. Instead, you imagine that empty space you’d seen only moments earlier.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. This is the only face you need to remember. This is the face that will always love you. No matter what.”

She smiles and lets you touch her face with both hands, pinching rounded cheeks and tracing her ears, searching for a seam but finding none. What you saw doesn’t matter then, because she is your mother and you can feel it in your bones. Like a newborn cub instinctively knows which teat to suckle. This is the same face that smiles when she tickles your toes. The same lips that kiss the part in your hair each night. The same eyes that crease only the slightest when she says she loves you to the moon and back.

What more can you ask for in a mother’s face?

Ahhh… you do remember this now, don’t you? Yes, I can see it in your eyes. This is what you tell the first responders, and much later the doctors while under hypnosis. How she leads you to the kitchen after that and makes you the biggest bowl of ice cream you’ve ever seen, complete with chocolate syrup, sprinkles, and a mound of whipped cream.

But you know the truth of it all now, don’t you?

You know this never happened, yes?

Good… good. It must be a hard pill to swallow, I imagine, and I don’t mean because of your… condition.

Where are we? Yes, the truth of the matter.

Your father is a very ill man. His brain is special, like yours. So when he sees something—something that isn’t there but his brain tells him it is—he acts out on it, even though it isn’t rational.

He makes you watch, doesn’t he?

He makes you watch through the steam-filled bathroom and the static hiss of the water because the sound keeps the voices quiet for him. And he places the knife to her face, and he searches for a seam that isn’t there. He removes her face… in front of you.

Please, I know this is hard, but it is all part of your recovery. You have to live the reality, not the fantasy.

You stay with her after that. You waste away for days until they find you. You’re alone, and tell them your story, but they figure out what truly happened, don’t they? And your father is nowhere to be found. But days later, when you see his face, when you read that bold headline above his photo on the news, what do you do?

We don’t know how you found the knife. Perhaps you pocketed it from a careless employee, but you don’t know the reality of that, yes?

We find you just in time. It’s amazing how your derangement is so deep, you can almost finish removing your own face, only to pass out from blood loss before it’s complete.

The surgeons try their best with you, but they can only do so much. The nerve damage and scar tissue leave you… well, let’s just say, altered. And while it must be difficult—living this again, knowing the truth of what transpired—you know why we must go through this, yes? There are gaps in the story. Gaps only you can help us fill in. So please, whenever you’re ready, pick up that pen and paper.
​
We would like to speak to your father… if you’d be so kind as to let him out. You know he’s inside there with you, yes?

All this endless repetition—this breeding and proliferating and explosion of new realities—ends tonight.

It’s true you can’t go back in time, but you can change the past. You can. Listen! We can erase it, alter it. Make it better. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do, tonight.

I know where that computer’s at now. I’ve felt it breathing. Down there in the basement, attached to all those cooling tubes and wires. Humming in the dark.  

I know! I know! I can hear, literally hear in my head, what you’re thinking:
“We can’t. We can’t undo what’s been done.”

But that’s the beauty of it! We can! If only we have the strength. The strength to act decisively. And then, later, when we put the right people in charge again, we can rewrite history. Erase things. Just like that computer rewrites and erases things every day.

If it can do it, why can’t we?

You could too, if only you had the strength. But you don’t have to. Because I do. And I will.
A little erasure here, a small edit there, another addition here. What’s so wrong with that? 
After all, if it hadn’t been for that computer, reaching out… Greedy for knowledge that should be forbidden, expanding its reach beyond its grasp… We would be back there. In the glorious past.

Everything would be alright again. We’d be back in that safe, sane place. Don’t you see? You, me, everybody! Everybody.  

Remember how things were back then, in 2033? Before that damned machine made all those “discoveries.” Before it found out how to super-charge the virtual particle accelerators inside its silicon head? Before it found a way to turn whole star systems into a massive gravitational-wave telescope to gather ever more data, to reach back even further to the start of all things? So it could track things from the singularity to find out where they would all end up?

Remember that terrible day when we realized how truly, utterly insignificant we really are? When they shared what the computer had found?

It’s hard now but just try to imagine how things were before. What we knew about the universe was so simple…There was us, the plain, old physical universe, 14 billion years old. Sure, it was massive. Millions of light years to the nearest galaxy, billions to the edge. There were hints, of course, little clues of other things out there. Antimatter, dark matter, gravity waves, the crazy particle zoo…

But…

But it was all so, rational. So manageable…

And now? What have we got? Where are we?

That computer did it. Found it all waiting there. Worlds multiplying, dividing, expanding. Like cells dividing in a human body that has no skin, no end.

It was elementary for it to discover the new, parallel universes waiting in dark matter and antimatter. That was only sensible. There had already been hints of their existence—little crumbs in the forest. But that thing in the basement blew them open and showed us how to reach into them and communicate across the divide. Overnight, our one universe tripled in size, became three.

But that was just the beginning. Soon, it learned from other beings on Earth and out there about hitherto unknown senses. It exploited them to uncover new realities, entities, and wavelengths—things we bathe in every day. And within them we found not mute senselessness, but teeming life and community.

And yet that thing kept going.

The machine uncovering multiverses at greater and greater rates. Fungal veining running through all the old, familiar pathways in time and space. What was triple divided and replicated again and again. Soon, mighty galaxy clusters became motes of dust.

Weaving and growing—it all keeps growing, even now. An infinitude of universes linked beyond blackholes, forking and dividing, forking and dividing. “Universe” became a quaint word that no longer fit. We had to employ “the Multiverse” to capture something of the ever-replicating universes the computer is uncovering. Universes all with their own unique laws linked by strange, ancient portals crafted by long-dead civilizations.

While every hour of every day—man and his civilization—shrinks, shrinks, shrinks. Not even a speck of dust—a mere nothing in a vast, unending ocean of things, beings, and thoughts embedded in relentlessly-expanding spacetimes.  

The computer seemed to feed off these new realities, as the new realities sought it out. Seeming to want to publish themselves to our naïve, expectant, foolish world.

“Beautiful,” some said. Those deranged minds!

But you know and I know, what it really is.

Sordid.

Reprehensible.

Disgusting.

But tonight, I put things right. I put man back at the center of the universe! Isn’t that worth fighting for? Dying for? Man, the measure of all things?
 
That’s why I started this recording. So that people out there would have a front seat at history.

Listen. I have all the badges; I know all the protocols to pass security. They think, they think… I’m an exemplary employee! Employee of the month, three times in a row! But they don’t know who they’re dealing with. Especially that dumb computer.  

See! Here it is, in my hands. The button. Leading to the package I put there, in its soft silicon underbelly. I won’t see it with my own eyes, but I’ll feel it. The beautiful explosion, the glowing and rising orange flames heralding the rebirth of man, of civilization. Good, clean, rational civilization.

What’s wrong with that? A little erasure here, a small edit there, another addition here.
Tonight, one man remakes history. And gives humanity the future it deserves!  

We can go back to 2032. Back to Einstein, to Galileo, to Copernicus. Even further. To turtles all the way down, for all I care. Just so long as we leave this idiotic, feverish, buzzing confusion behind.  

So, here’s to turtles. Turtles all the fucking way down!

Ready!?
​
Here I go! 

Darius Jones’s stories and poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, The No Sleep Podcast,
Star*Line Magazine, and other places. He is a member of the HWA, the SFWA, and SFPA. He
lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Learn more at dariusjoneswriter.com, on Bluesky @dariusjones.bsky.social, or on Instagram
@DariusJonesWrit.

Rain or shine, I walk the kids home from daycare.

Our double wide stroller fits both kids comfortably and can be pushed through pretty much any weather. As long as the kids are well dressed, they seem to enjoy it well enough, even though it takes forty-five minutes on a good day. At least Arthur and Rae had a good day. I was hopeful. At least when I walk them, I am in control.

#

The first time I saw Kerri, she was playing an acoustic guitar on a highway overpass. She wanted to see if she could sing louder than rush hour traffic. I stood there and watched as she unabashedly broke strings and blood vessels battling it out with 18-wheelers. It was during her rendition of “Everything I have” by Siskiyou that I decided, as long she stood there, screaming at the world, I would be by her side.

Ten years and two kids later, it’s still true.

But I’m tired.

#

The last thirty minutes of the walk home are my respite. A quiet stretch of residential streets, the kids laid back or sleeping. Easy. But anticipation for the rest of the day’s routine is a constant stressor. I don’t know where Kerri will be. And if she is home, I don’t know which Kerri will be there to greet us.

On that day, it began to snow hard at the start of those last thirty minutes. Large intrusive flakes and violent updrafts making it hard to see or move forward. I had never seen the weather shift so suddenly.

#

The first time, I was scared in a way that redefined fear.

Kerri called out from our bedroom. No words, just a guttural sound. I was in the living room reading. Arthur was asleep in his crib, only recently sleeping the night. I was annoyed that Kerri would risk waking him by shouting out. What could possibly be wrong this time? When I opened the door, her bedside lamp flickered where it had been knocked over. Clothing was scattered all over the floor as though a strong gust of wind had blown through. The morning’s coffee cup was shattered at my feet. How did I not hear any of this? I noticed the room because I was momentarily blinded to Kerri herself, seizing in bed, bloody tears flowing from her eyes, drifting across her forehead, and soaking her hair line. She hovered, high enough that I could see beyond her in the space between her and the bed. The air was so cold that the vapor of our breaths crystalized and spun with unseen currents.

In an urgent voice that was only one part hers, “it’s okay, it’s okay, she won’t last, go, go back.”

I closed the door. Arthur had started to cry. What haunts me most is the sound of Kerri imitating Arthur’s cry through the door.

#

My phone rang through my headphones as I struggled across newly formed dunes of snow. I stopped the stroller and pulled out my phone. It was Steph, Kerri’s sister. I was out of breath and uninterested in speaking to anyone, so I let it go. The ringing stopped and the texts started flooding in.

“Hey, have you spoken to Ker?”

“She called me earlier. Something’s wrong.”

“Are you home yet? I can come get the kids anytime.”

“You’re probs walking. K. I’ll try her again. I’m worried. This feels different.”

I looked up at the last straightaway. About ten long blocks. It was already dark but the islands of light emanating from each of the regularly spaced streetlamps were refracting off airborne snowflakes, giving the entire street a pulsing glow. All I could see ahead of me was a wall of backlit snow. As I got the stroller moving again, the kids started singing a song in dissonant harmony. I could not see them under the layers of snow gathering on the plastic stroller cover, but their voices carried on the increasingly numbing wind. Probably a song they sang in daycare. I smiled. Their sense of timing was, as always, impeccable. It took me too long to realize they were actually singing “Everything I have.” I didn’t know they knew the song. They sang it louder with every repetition and after a time I could no longer tell where their voices were coming from, as the song just managed to cut through the roar of wind and the beat of my breath.

Down the street, the shadow of a person appeared, as seen through the translucent screen of snow. I thought we were the only ones braving the weather. I could tell the person was walking away from us because they appeared to be maintaining the same distance, even as I continued to push on. Then I could hear her. I could hear Kerri’s voice joining in with the children.

Was that her up ahead? She shouldn’t have been out in this weather. She shouldn’t have been out at all. Maybe Steph got to our house first, and Kerri talked her into it.

I stopped walking. The kids stopped singing but the echo of the song remained. The shadow up ahead was just out of sight.

I sat down in the snow, listening to the white noise of the weather but focusing on the clinking, crystalline sound of drifting snow, like the sand being flipped over in an hourglass.

“Daddy, why are we stopped?” Arthur’s voice registered as barely a whisper.

“Daddy, we can’t see you.” Rae, the influence of her father’s anxiety coming through.
“Daddy, can we keep going? I want mommy.”

“Daddy?”

I could tell. Everything would be different. If I made it home, I would have to face it. But what if I didn’t? What if I didn’t make it home?

“Daddy, I’m cold.” This voice, I did not recognize, floating in from farther away.

“Come home.” 

The girls will enter the convent on two feet. They will walk belly first, some showing crescent slivers, others August full-moons. The nuns will watch stone-angel-faced as the girls sniffle and cry.

This is your home, the stoic nuns will say. For now.

The statues and icons will also watch. The Lady of Sorrows most intently of all.
 
#
 
It happens when you go into the inner sanctum, the older girls say, if they can still talk in tongues that can be understood by human ears. If they’re not yet bed-bound, isolated by busy nuns who despise idle hands.

What does? ask the younger girls, but their seniors’ lips tighten, sealed with wax or sewn with thread.

The girls leave the drafty dorm and move through the nunnery at night as serpentine specters. They listen to the nuns whisper about them in the common room. Mayisses, the nuns call the girls. Fonisses. Witches, murderesses. When the girls with the larger bellies stumble, they are caught in cool, large palms. There are many hands, enough to embrace them all, and they all belong to Her.

My children, Panayia, the Most Holy Virgin Mother says. She leads the girls to Her chapel’s inner sanctum, where, instead of moldy communion bread, she feeds them as much chocolate cake as they can stomach until they are sick with decadence and glee.

The girls are not caught by the nuns on the way back to the dorms. Panayia’s spirit shields them, a heavy maternal veil over them.

Did you meet Her? the older girls ask. Lips smirking, wax cracked, seams snipped. Isn’t She something? Isn’t She everything?
 
#
 
The nuns talk about birth pangs, how to give up the babes for adoption, how to give up a life of sin. The old projector moans overhead, blasting grayscale gore. This is what happens when little birds fly too close to beehives. The girls itch in their oversized dresses covering them from neck to ankle. They hold their hands over their bellies and revel in the unfettered kicks.

The girls have never been touched by a bee’s stinger, no matter what the nuns seem to think. No man or boy has fed them sticky honey. Panayia knows. She is the only one who believes in their immaculateness.

In the dorms later they each shed their scratchy burlap dresses like exuviae of skin. While the nuns pray elsewhere, the girls have a ritual of their own.

One will lie in the middle of the bare floor, the coldness of which she can no longer feel on her feverish skin. Amid dust bunnies and nail-scratched floorboards, the candles stolen from the chapel will be lit in a circle around the chosen girl. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, the rest of the girls will chant around her. She will want a kiss then, and she will not hesitate to ask for it. Several eager mouths will greet hers. She will want someone to hold her. Several hands will stroke dermatographic shapes against her convex belly, the skeleton-thin fingers wet with blood drawn from wooden crosses whittled sharp enough to cut. I Panayia i mayissa, i Panayia i fonissa. The girls’ fingers will paint sanguine symbols of eyes wide open. The babes will need as many eyes as they can get to watch out for enemies untold.

The girls will be mindful as they trace each other’s ballooning bellies. The bruised skin will wobble and shimmer with kaleidoscopic scales. Under their tender lips, the bellies will feel hot as coals, the babes dancing inside a Danse Macabre, a Wild Hunt.

The girl in the center of the candlelit circle is not flightless despite the world weighing down on her shoulders.

She will levitate to the cheering chorus of her sisters, to the proud gaze of Panayia.
 
#
 
A transformation is occurring. Not overnight, not, but heartbeat by echoed heartbeat; prayer by prayer to Panayia.

The girls miss the taste of spun sugar across their tongues. The only thing they eat now is bitter oatmeal and vegetable broth. The girls used to chew on their own plucked hairs and dried skin, crunch chalk and ice-cubes between their grinding teeth. Now they choke down vitamins, for the babes, think of the babes. The nuns check the shine of their hair and nails once a week. They do not seem to notice the curved claws and undulating snake hair. The girls’ eyes nictitating, triple-lidded and reflecting feline in the dark.

The nuns pass out from imbibing the brandy often used by the syringeful to keep the babes quiet for potential parents. While they snore with the potency of their own poison, the girls roam the convent like they own every last worn stone. Some have tails like a kangaroo, a muscular limb on which they can support their weight when walking gets too tiring. Others grow wings, batlike and leathery, sprouting from their backs. Tongues like a penguin, full of bristles and brine. Toenails like a sloth’s, to help them scale and grip.

The girls crawl across walls and ceilings on all fours, the way the babes will once they are born. Panayia, they ask, what will the babes look like? Will they be beautiful, oh, will they be holy?

Their Lady of Horrors smiles beatifically in their direction. Like a mother spider of infinite silk and wisdom, already she is weaving her children a world where witches and killers can fly and slither freely. Where busy ravens strapped with white coifs and twig crosses are barred from entering.
 
#
 
The girls will exit the convent on tails or talons, creeping and crawling with feral delight. Their babes will be secured to their bosoms or backs, they’ll be gripping the girls’ hair in tiny, clawed fists, flapping minuscule wings. Panayia will watch over the peculiar procession of cackling creatures.

She will smile.

(This story first appeared in Seize the Press, 2022) 

Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, and F&SF. The Saint of Witches, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is available from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).

NEW MEXICO, 1867

The aspens were like yellow fire against the pines, and the wolf, skinny, half lame, lay at their feet.

The wolf wasn’t sleeping, he was too hungry for that. He’d spent an eternity in the high country, scratching mice and chipmunks out of the rocks, cracking them between his teeth, slurping them down. Swallowing even these small morsels caused agony as they passed ribs that were still healing. The skinny wolf’s ribs hurt so bad that there was a chance he wouldn’t get up again, but he had to stay low, stay out of the breeze that turned the yellow leaves above him on their scalloped edges.

He stayed low because of the old bull.

The elk was huge, a spread of antlers wider than the wolf was long atop his head like the crown of a mountain god. But seeing how the old bull moved, slow, favoring his left back leg, seeing the clouds overs his eyes, the wolf knew that even a mountain god could die.

A week or so ago, the wolf had gotten bold or crazy or just plain sick enough of scratching chipmunks out of their holes that he’d charged the bull. He’d ignored the pain, the ache of ribs just starting to knit because the elk was so head down on his feed that the wolf thought he could hamstring the old bull. Then his claws clicked across a quartzite boulder half hidden in the grass and the bull whirled, snorting, those flashing tines cutting the air inches from the wolf’s jaws. He ducked and rolled clear under the bull as it reared up to crush him and out the other side. The wolf ended up on his paws and sprinted, yelping out of the clearing.

That near miss had cost the wolf several days, too sore and weak to so much as scratch a chipmunk from its hole. Magpies waited in the branches above him and argued about whether he’d live or die. Eventually, sick with hunger and thirst, he’d dragged himself to a stream to drink. With the little strength the water afforded him, he’d managed to nose through the leaf litter until he’d choked down enough grubs and beetles to buy another day.

Disappointed, the magpies squawked and took off, flashing white like muzzle flares.

Muzzle flare.

The wolf got up, ribs aching, legs weak, but in the flash of the magpies he had his answer. He paused, scented for the bull, and then limped across the meadow. In the shadow of a big split pine he kicked at the hard earth, lost his wind and rested, then dug again. He tugged what he found there free and dragged it to the boulder. There was more rooting in the grass and the duff, more frantic chewing, but as the moon rose, he had it all ready. The wolf retreated to the trees and collapsed, exhausted.

Now he lay under the aspens and watched as the old bull made his way into the meadow. Above them, a line of clouds fat with rain came over the snow-packed peaks and threw their shadow on the meadow.

The bull browsed his way further from the trees, closer to the boulder where the wolf had laid his trap. The wolf waited till he was sure the bull’s milky eyes were on his feed and charged. Every footstep thundered in his battered chest, and he started snarling when he was just outside kicking range. Hearing him coming, the old bull whirled, swinging those lethal tines. He rushed in, lunging then dodging, wolf and elk dancing a circle of death ever closer to the boulder. The bull slashed and the wolf snapped and bounced away, the pain in his chest there but distant because he could almost taste the bull’s flesh.

Kicking his hooves, the bull charged. The wolf bounded around the boulder and dropped like he’d fallen. Screaming, the bull lowered his head, the space between his antlers now in front of the shotgun the wolf had propped across the rock the night before. Catching the branch he’d clumsily wedged into the trigger with his teeth, the wolf pulled, the double boom of the shotgun a thousand claps of thunder to his lupine ears.

The old bull staggered across the field, one antler hanging free, his head pulped. The bull’s knees went, and he collapsed. The skinny wolf grinned and howled.

A week later, long enough for what was left of the old bull to start to go bad, and he finally had the strength to change. Later, he’d dig up the rest of his kit, his clothes, his bedroll, his gun belt. Now he sat on the boulder, the rock cool on his butt. His gamble had paid off. His chest wound, a gaping hole when last he’d been a man, was now only puckered scars and bruised skin.

He sat and flexed his fingers, marveling at the dexterity of his hands after weeks of paws. He sat taller than he had as a wolf, could see past the aspens, see clear down the mountain. Below him, wagons and cattle headed west across the plain. Somewhere down there were the men that had left him to die in the high country. As man or wolf, he would find them, and they would pay.