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.

The first question everyone asked was why the horses hadn't run. The standing stones held them like a closed fist, like the folding in of a carnivorous flower. It wasn’t just that the stones had toppled; they'd constricted, exerting enough force to embed the luckless animals inches into the earth.

Martin was already on the scene when the other officers arrived. His gaze lingered now on the tapers of bone, impossibly delicate by contrast, curving up from the nearest carcass.

“There’s no blood,” noted Ware beside him, breath coming in clouds.

It was a spring dawn, stingingly cold. Ware shivered. Martin had gotten used to it.

“Better go check up at the Seven Widows, see if there’s anything similar,” he said, and Ware nodded as she broke away from the observers, cinching her jacket tighter with one hand and reaching for her radio with the other.

“I need you to get over there yourself,” he called after her.

#

Martin waited until the birds began to rise, then turned and trudged back alone over the moors. A cloying smell of sodden ash followed. The firefighters had put down the ritual fire left burning into the early hours, charring the clouds the colour of old blood and raising the alarm, but it hardly mattered now.

He made for the village. Above him, tracer lines of crows scattered in all directions. Their unease was deep and rasping.

The first tremors struck before he reached the outlying farms. He knew it’d be quick. Ware had been a good officer.

Starlings lifted from high boughs and wheeled through the sky in ugly overlapping waveforms, mistimed murmurations colliding with force, the fall of broken bodies shocking; at first just a handful but, as Martin made headway, in increasing numbers.

He looked out over surfaces becoming unreliable, fields waylaid by sinkholes like shallow inhalations. Away to his left, strips of dry stone wall began to curl like breakers down the hill, liquid and strange. From a farmyard rose yells and the skirling of dogs, and he suspected old man Cottle had reacted a little too slowly.

Martin entered the village. The leafy lanes gave cover from a gentle spring rain and a sky choked with disarray.

Smoke was billowing across graves and gardens from where the roof of the church had dropped like an inverted bear trap. People in their Sunday best hauled at arms outflung from the rubble. He looked into their eyes, saw them glassy with shock. Distant ambulances burred.

Martin smiled, and didn’t stop.

The day was just beginning.

I was 10 years old the day the grey clouds came. It was rare that the endless blue desert sky saw that much moisture. Typically, the sun shone over 300 days a year; but that was a long time ago.

“Look,” my mother pointed, “The clouds are kissing the mountains.”

My mother thought it was sweet, so near Valentine’s Day.

But the clouds never went away, and it wasn’t moisture that filled them. It was something else.

At first, the clouds were billowy and fluffy, like a child’s stuffed toy lamb, a flock making its way down the mountainside to play. We never suspected what it really was or what we would become. Who knew the clouds were its disguise. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A predator that had caught the scent of its prey.

I can’t remember what the peaks of the mountains look like now. Too many years have passed.

The grey clouds moved in, carried on the wind. We thought the wind would blow the clouds away, but alas, the weather had other plans. Into the valley, the clouds came only to transform. Near the ground, they became an evil grey mist that slithered and gathered and held until everything blurred, lost its shape and then disappeared from view. Everything was still there but the fog had swallowed it. A grey blanket smothered us all.

One day, the sun ceased to shine. We were blind. Unable to see, life stopped; no one could drive. Planes could not fly. Ships could not steer.

Our homes were the only safe place, for a while. Then the grey fog stole in—under  doors, through cracks, clinging to us like a disease. Finally, one morning we woke from a long night, unable to see our hands in front of our faces.

No one knows why the sky fell. Perhaps it was because of our inability to care for our aging Mother Earth or resolve our petty human squabbles, which quickly withered in comparison to the power of the clouds.

Nevertheless, for now, the Grey rules us all. 

DW Milton is a pen name. The author has a day job but would rather be writing speculative fiction. ​

What does it mean to encounter the cosmically horrific? 

I cannot describe it in mere words, for any mortal to look upon it would melt to dust. It is that thing humanity cannot fathom, for it would twist our souls into knots. It would bend our minuscule minds into putty. We would lose ourselves in warped logic and imperceptive chaos, descending into the madness of insurmountable grief. 

That thing immeasurable, incalculable, inconceivable lies in wait. It resides here and there and everywhere. It is behind you, uncaring, merciless, unceasing. Its whims move mountains and destroy galaxies. 

It is life, death, chaos, order, and the majesty of the indifferent universe. It is cold, undulating, indescribably indiscernible. Where does it start and infinity end? It exists behind time, above all, below the depths. 

What is it to be observed by the crescent of totality, reflected upon the glossy globule of the all-seeing oculus? The abysmal abyss stares back unblinking. It knows us and soon will swat our reality as a dragon bats a gnat.

The truth eternal has plucked the last wet tear from my dry eye. It has struck its fatal blow upon my frail personage. I wither before the dark light of soul-splitting reality revealed.
The fear engulfed my mind in totality and trepidation consumed my physical vitality from the inside out. After this grave confrontation, I endure but briefly, long enough to warn the world, condemned by my hubris.

I burned my research. I destroyed my cosmometer, the sole apparatus constructed for observing existence beyond the dark veil. And yet the image of its dizzying sovereignty is seared into my retinas; even after the optical display was splintered into ten thousand tiny shards, it cannot escape my maddening mind’s eye.

This astrological knowledge has cost me my sanity, my virtue, my last living hope. I can no longer contain myself within this feeble mortal form. My shivering bones are splinters and dough.

Even now, as I scribble this cautionary address with trembling fingers, my eyes are bleeding out of their sockets, and I can feel my brain dissolving into gray sludge. In a matter of minutes, I will be reduced to a puddle of former matter.
​
Do not seek out the master of masters. All is vanity under its eye. I employ you, seek not the forbidden sight!

​Jonathan Reddoch is co-owner of Collective Tales Publishing. He is a father, writer, editor, and publisher. He writes sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and especially horror. He’s a prolific flash fiction author, but also writes poetry and short stories. He has been working on his enormous sci-fi novel for over a decade and would like to finish it in this lifetime if possible. He’s from southern California, but lives in Salt Lake City. Notable works included in Deluxe Darkness, Darkness 101: Lessons Were Learned, and This Isn’t the Place.
 
Find him on Instagram @JonathanReddochAuthor or CTPfiction.com

Greeta’s hollow eyes scraped across the darkening horizon until Jekobe nudged her aside so he could put the board back on the bathroom window.

“Wind is picking up,” he said.

She wilted to the floor and squeezed the clover-shaped locket around her neck. Greeta then pressed it to her lips to stifle a sob at the memory of what it once took from them and what it now wanted again.

Her little squeak drew Jekobe’s gaze down to his wife, on the floor curled around the base of their toilet. Husband and wife listened to silted winds drawing closer and to the radio choir on the other side of the bathroom door.

“You must get up.” His tone, as beaten as the bathroom with all its rust and dust and dirt, always the dirt.

She fought a dangerous impulse to toss the locket into the toilet and pretend it never lit up, never chose them. Chose her.

Jekobe extended a sooty hand. “It falls to you.”

She unfurled sloth-slow and set her hand in his—filth in filth, bones in bones. They worked in dirt, breathed in dirt, scrubbed it off their hands, washed it from their clothes. Some nights Jekobe shuddered awake to tell her of his nightmares about the dirt raining on their bed until it buried them. Greeta often imagined mud cakes filling her lungs.

“Blessings to the remainders,” she murmured as he pulled her to standing, eyes averted from the shiny aluminum locket and the pink glow spilling from its interior. Such a lovely color in a world devoid of colors, she’d thought when first it lit up, when she didn’t understand the significance of its glow. The Landlords encouraged mothers to place photos inside, but Greeta feared they might increase their odds of being chosen, so left it empty.

It chose them anyway.

“If I could take your burden, Greeta—”

A soft knock on the door startled them both.

“Obie needs to wee,” came the voice of Judeeth, their eldest.

Greeta yanked her arm free from Jekobe. “Just a moment.” The draw of her thin shoulders laid bare her misery, but her face settled into a neutral expression. She tucked stray hairs behind pins and tucked the locket into the bodice of her housedress.

“I will not choose,” she said.

Quick as a bog ghoul, Jekobe seized her shoulders. “We are not so proud we don’t obey.”

She slapped his face, leaving a handprint in the grime. “Understood.”

Greeta opened the door and entered the living area, a space without embellishment. A table for eating, chairs for sitting, the Text for learning, and radio for music and worship. Her children had gathered around the radio. Five-year-old Obie, aiming his glorious dimples at her, danced from foot to foot. “‘‘mergency, momma! ‘mergency!”

“Obie, you may go now.” Greeta tousled his unruly hair as he zipped by, bare feet slapping the floorboards until he slammed the bathroom door closed behind him.

Her gaze fell on her older children. Sixteen-year-old Judeeth, a beauty with raven hair and hazel eyes—they kept her hidden from the carnal attentions of the Landlords. Tomash had grown tall and strong enough to work alongside his poppa. Luzzi, a miraculously plump mischief-maker who read the Texts with fluency at eight years old, finished winding her yarn ball and set it in the basket.

“Momma, are you sick?” Judeeth asked.

“She’s better now,” Jekobe answered. “Right, Momma?”

Greeta put on a smile. But her womb pulsed rhythmically as memories of the children’s first steps, first words, the joy and mess of their arrivals—even poor Kellan’s—flew through her head like a picture show.

Then the gate outside squeaked open.

“Who wants to play a game?” Jekobe asked the kids. His face beamed with theatrical enthusiasm.

“Let’s wait for Obie,” Judeeth said.

Not my baby, thought Greeta.

Porch stairs whined under a great weight followed by a dragging noise advancing to the door. The family stood rooted to their floor. Waiting.

Every creek brought Greeta visions of Kellan, poor Kellan—eyes dark with terror and betrayal, the shriek that never escaped his mouth...

Jekobe clapped his hands. “The game has begun! Isn’t it thrilling?”

Each child cast a suspicious glare at the door.

“Exciting, yes, Momma?” Jekobe’s eyes bored into Greeta’s until she nodded.

Tomash switched off the radio. Its silence amplified the thrum of blustering wind, and worse: a host of sharp objects raking back and forth across the door.

Winds circled the house, rattled the walls. Tomash and Luzzi clung together. Judeeth rose from her chair, head pivoting between the flush of the toilet and pounding so forceful the front door bulged inward.

Greeta’s sternum grew hot as the locket came more fully alive.

Jekobe’s lips pressed into Greeta’s ear. “Let us be clean, Greeta.”

Another reel whirred to life, this one showing the times when the children were proud or disobedient. Judeeth’s defiance. Luzzi’s mischief. Tomash bullying his sisters. Obie’s—no. She refused to see Obie.

“Momma,” Jekobe prompted in a cheerful voice. “The children wish to play the game.”

“We do not, Father.” Judeeth’s voice rose an octave.

Judeeth always questions our authority.

Greeta pressed the burning locket against her chest until her wound reopened. “Judeeth, will you open the door, my love?”

“No, Momma.”

“Open the door, Judeeth.”

Her eldest stamped her boots, eyes ablaze with defiance. “I do not wish to play. Luzzi does not wish to play, Tomash does not—”

“I do! I do!” Obie toddled to the door, and before Greeta or Jekobe could react, his grubby little hand swung it open.

In a great roar of weather, of hunger, of violent extinction, of a feeble little scream muted by the churning dirt, Greeta’s heart broke and her chest erupted in flame.

Night breeds a certain animal, made more beast than man. One made with eyes glued to a television screen. One made with a long pointy nose and jagged teeth.

He stalks the night, never once seeing his prey, blind as he is from anything outside his screen. He uses his nose to sniff out perfumed vanilla, cinnamon, and his favorite of all, lavender.

His victims never hear him approach as they are deaf from everything outside their headphones, nor do they feel his touch until it's too late—until they’re dragged through the night, and he’s feasted once more.

But there is one small creature who sees all and hears most. It is the darkness that lives within the walls, the life that breathes through the dirt. It is the all-seeing thing of the world, hidden within plain sight.
​
It knows our secrets but never speaks. It sees our pain but never helps. Its actions aren’t of malice, yet when the weak cry out in the night, it stays still, watching the beast in the shadows. Watching and waiting for a new day to come. For a day where screens break and delicate women become fierce. 

The rain slashes down. She’s cold, adrift amongst it. At least it is night, she thinks, the blanket of which hides more than my sadness. Standing there, naked, drained, she’s relieved she left her front door off the latch, ever hopeful he’ll return. The amber-dandelion glow of a streetlamp helps her locate the handle. She pushes the door open, runs upstairs.

The bathroom light does not click on. It is forever broken. So, in habit, she sets a-glow a corner candle. Familiarity guides her, fits her like a glove. She is not one for change. The shower above the bathtub however, does click on. The thrum of hissing water softens her sobs. Tears, fuggy air, soupy mist. She steps into the bath, under the hot water, closes her eyes, rests her back against the tiled wall. Warmth embraces her. Hot jets, the only arms around her since he left. Impossible, yet infinite drive propels her on, keeps her head above the ever-rising water. There’s the possibility one day he might return, is why she always leaves the door off the latch: he might push the door open and run upstairs, save her from the darkness.

Under the rushing water, her gold band is loose enough for her to free her finger, but she is not ready for her finger and the ring to become two separate entities, never will be. She holds her ring on, closes her eyes, cries, fights off the lick of jaded thoughts, despite knowing her situation won’t change. In dreams, she feels the same, although she’s no longer sure if waking time is waking time or if all of her time is part of a dream, even in this account of it all, written by the woman as if she is not the woman. She and I remain unsure.
He’d placed his wedding band on the kitchen counter the day he ended things, left without a goodbye. Left a note with his ring. Her heart had flooded with midnight pain. The dark note still sits under his ring. Will stay there forever. She knows though, through his actions, he’d ended things much earlier than that day. His path had split off, a tangent, some time before. He’d not wanted to spend a moment longer with her despite, in vows, promising eternity.

She opens her eyes and the ghosts of the darkness loom. She reaches for the blade to cut free the darkness. No need. Oestrogen surge. Gushing water once transparent, clouds. Vermillion tongues trickle down her thigh. She tilts her head back. Relief. Wet heat pounds her face, drags her cheek flesh down. Sadness and red rinse away.

The ceiling light flickers on-off. In that moment, she sees the screw which has become loose, which anchors the light fitting to the ceiling above the shower in which she’ll forever try to wash away. Could it be the loose screw why she wets her red self clean? Why she leaves the door off the latch, hopeful he might return?

She steps out. Rust-water drip-drops from her body. Pitter-patter, across the landing, she retrieves the ladder which he’d said was only for the loft.

Drags the ladder, props it up, ascends. She reaches up, touches the fitting, tries to fix it. It comes away in her hand. New hope whispers from the space left behind. She stretches down, balances the fitting on the basin, then, gripping the ladder, climbs further up.

With hands and arms and bones and muscles that feel every inch of tiredness from her endless, circular toil, she pulls herself up into the future space which calls to her, behind the fitting, below the roof.

One, two, three candle-lit steps below become smaller. She lugs herself up into the vent, the vent in the loft which he had said the ladder was for, the ladder with infinite rungs, rungs of a journey never to conclude.

She squeezes herself through the dark channel, a liminal freedom between ceiling and loft she did not know existed yet, at the back of her mind, always knew existed. She bends forward, over, moves. On hands and knees, in the absence of light, she crawls along the vent until she sees a dim glow ahead, senses it with her pineal. A gold sphere, a noise of almost-light calls to her, speaks promises of eternity, shines at the end of the tunnel in the vent. She lowers herself down and through this wet ring of gold to discover the ring is the glow of a dim streetlamp. Feet shirk on wet grass. She finds herself outside of her house, not too far from her front door, which she has left unbolted in the hope that one day, he might come home.

The rain slashes down. She’s cold, adrift amongst it. At least it is night, she thinks, the blanket of which hides more than my sadness. Standing there, naked, drained, she’s relieved she left her front door off the latch, ever hopeful he’ll return. The amber-dandelion glow of a streetlamp helps her locate the handle. She pushes the door open, runs upstairs.
The bathroom light does not click on. It is forever broken. So, in habit, she sets a-glow a corner candle. Familiarity guides her, fits her like a glove. She is not one for change. The shower above the bathtub however, does click on. The thrum of hissing water softens her sobs. Tears, fuggy air, soupy mist. She steps into the bath, under the hot water, closes her eyes, rests her back against the tiled wall. Warmth embraces her. Hot jets, the only arms around her since he left. Impossible, yet infinite drive propels her on, keeps her head above the ever-rising water. There’s the possibility one day he might return, is why she always leaves the door off the latch: he might push the door open and run upstairs, save her from the darkness. 

SJ Townend, an author of dark fiction, has stories published with Vastarien, Ghost Orchid Press, Gravely Unusual Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, and Timber Ghost Press. Her first horror collection, Sick Girl Screams, is out Winter, 2024 (Brigid’s Gate Press) and her second horror collection, Your Final Sunset, is coming in 2025 (Sley House Press). Twitter:@SJTownend

www.sjtownend.com