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.

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.

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.

“What the hell is a bob-a-thon?” Karl asked, passing beneath the cross-stitched banner as he followed Janine to join the small crowd surrounding the barn. It was the usual set-up, a keg on ice and thudding music, but then he saw it—a water tank large enough for cattle, metal splotchy with pale lichen and blossoms of rust.

“Let me see your face,” I drawled. A hologram projected outward from the glass screen on my desk’s surface. The floating face without its body was the same one my virtual lover displayed yesterday.