Harlow spotted its partner in its reflection of the bathroom mirror. Kir@Kira smiled with her diamond-pupil eyes as she stood behind Harlow. Kir@Kira was a VTuber whose name meant cutely glittering or twinkling in Japanese, a poreless avatar with a mane of rainbow hair and pastel outfits mapped onto the movements of some unknown figure behind a camera. Today her lipstick was a deep plum like a bruise upon the mouth.

The little man was dead. Of that, both boys were certain. Some time passed before they came to this assumption, but the conclusion was unanimous. For one thing, the little man hadn't moved since they first came upon it in the forest. Not even after they crept up beside it and shouted. For another, blackish blood had pooled beneath the little man's body. Thin rivulets eked out across the stone on which it lay.

The child was born whispering. I am recycled. I am recycled. No one knew what it meant or why a child fresh from the womb could speak. It arrived with the preformed face of a ghoulish man—a dark receding hairline, deflated cheeks, and two catatonic eyes the color of charcoal. When it smiled, its lips converged forcibly like sewn skin, and the expression fell flat without extending to its eyes. Though technically toothless, its grins left a lingering impression of fangs. The parents weren’t so sure they wanted this anymore.

Scarlet's lover called her a witch the day he ended things, even though that wasn't quite fair—she only knew the one spell. She whispered it to herself as she sharpened the point of her favorite fishhook, scraping it against the strop over and over, until the steel fairly glimmered with its own light.

A worm has chewed an exit through the body to your left’s eye. It slinks up the nose and out through the right nostril, tail only lost for a moment before its pink head reappears.

I used to be the kind of person who didn’t like to run very far or very fast but could when called upon, for emergency situations—if I were being chased. I liked knowing I could create decent distance between myself and my would-be assailant. But I am not that kind of person anymore. In pursuit of reattaining this reluctant racing form, and because the lure of local wild increases as I age, my husband and I have been using our limited time together without our children to walk and bike the trails of the nature center nearest our house.

While pushing my son in his blue toddler swing—the air heavy with humidity and pollen—I remembered the last time I saw you. You were sweaty, flushed, jogging at the park. Josh and I were newly engaged—me in my turquoise dress, him in his button-up shirt—taking smiling photos on a wooden bench. Your brown eyes were bright, hair buzzed short when you stopped to say, “hello,” asked if we still attended the young adult group at church where the three of us met. “No,” we said. “It’s mostly young college kids now. We don’t belong.” You nodded, understanding.

On the night it happened, my son asked me to tuck him in. It did not sound cute or small, it did not contain the faint echo of what his voice as a baby had been. Instead, it twisted into what it would become: I heard its rigid hardness, the rigid hardness of a man. It was like the voice of a twenty-year-old calling his mother to tuck him in, and it unsettled me.

I was fourteen the first time I considered killing my father. Every night, I’d steeple my raw, red fingers and pray for him to die. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. I just wanted to be rid of him. To go just one day without his silver belt-buckle biting into the skin of my back.

A darkness pooled in the pit of my belly that summer, as mean and tarry as a gator pit. Cut me and it could have slid out.

Sun-punished and rain-starved, berries withered on the bush like shrunken heads. They were sour and tough as leather, but young Torsten and his older sister Estrid ate their fill. When the berries disappeared and the creeks ran dry, food became scarce. There were no salmon fat with orange clusters of eggs, nor red squirrels thinning in their summer coats. The siblings grew hungry. Meat melted off their ribs, leaving their bodies feeble. Prayers to the Old Gods went unanswered.

Mother has been sewing near-constantly for weeks, digging out our old shirts and smocks and going at them with her needle. Once they’re in shape she pulls them over our heads, and their cool linen smells like mildew and winter. When we complain she tells us to go outside and run around in them, and soon enough she's right, the sweat and sunlight chase the smell away. Later, when it's time to come back, they ring the bells in our village and all the villages up and down the valley. Without that we'd play half the night, never know when it was time for dinner, the sun still lighting up the treetops on the hills across the valley long past our bedtimes.

i. before

At first, there’s nothing. The world is black and cold, a pulsing throat, and you’re stuck right in its

center.

No operations are conducted to pull you out. No tweezers delve into the universe’s gullet, or try to

drag you out alongside strings of blood and tissue. But you still know when you’re not welcome:

when you try to curl into yourself, the world tries to swallow you down in turn; a burning, breathless

pressure. When you try to stretch, it scrambles to spit you up, spasms like an exposed nerve.

$5 Face Paint. A sign is etched into a rotten framework; the letters are peeling, flaking, in the summer heat. A small business, situated between the ring toss and a donut stand—nestled in the yellowing grass. The days are long; the shifts are longer, but she weathers them all the same.