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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Sunday, we kiss Mama Glynn’s portrait. One by one, we form a line, hands clasped and lean over to rub our lips on her cheek. The paint is fainter there, where we’d polished off the pigment. I’m still a level one, so I need to drag a stool up the dais and position it below to reach.

The ancient facade of the big house loomed grey and gleaming over the wild verdancy of Cyan’s demesne. The walls whistled, low and long, whenever the wind blew. Cyan had filled the house with imported brocade throws and beautiful rugs, but they did little to tame the toe-biting cold. The Berber carpet in the great room claimed the most space in my memory. It bore vivid saffron linework cutting through a field of oak leaf green, lit by the glowing blue screen of the immaculate console we’d all been forbidden to touch.

As the screen door slammed behind us, Momma called out a warning about swimming in the creek. “You’re likely to fall in and drown,” she said, “or get eat up by a cottonmouth.” She’d worried about snakes since I was six and she’d found me in the backyard hugging a rattler like a doll. “A miracle you didn’t get bit,” she’d told me over and over since. “Snake bites are mean; their poison seeps through your veins to your heart.”

Crone cups her clit,

chamomile tea cooling next to the

cat, in the cottage. Her cottage.

Cinders fill the fireplace and outside

cool air, cool summer, cool vines

climbing the cottage walls she

cultivated in 1692 and

carried into now.

The first rains come to freeze my bones. I wrap my hands around the last soap ball I’ve made--the last one to tide me over for a while. When a bar of soap shrinks down to just a sliver, I crush it and hold it in my palm. If I find a new bar, I use it down to its last sliver as well and add it to the first until I’ve formed a larger ball, all pink and blue and white and green—my last bits since the stores closed down, and the windows blew out, and I cut my work clothes into makeshift curtains to hang.

Cindy didn’t have much, but she had a book. Every night Cindy’s mother would read the book to her and show her the pictures, pictures of stars burning bright, meteors roaring through space, and far away planets where no human had ever been.

My ears fill with the flapping of a bird’s wings. The crow alights on its special perch outside my cell. I open my eyes to a world bathed in darkness, but not for much longer.

The television blares at me from across the room. Judy’s got it cranked up way too high again. It’s like they’re yelling at me. I look around. The remote’s missing.

“Judy, you seen the remote around?” I shout toward the stairway behind my chair. I wait a moment for a response. “Judy?”

A door creaks on its hinges.

crouches in the corner

stares at your internal organs

through a ninety eight cent pair

of comic book x-ray glasses

asks if you’ve taken care of your liver

googles recipes behind its back

That is what I'm told while being ushered behind a velvet rope with an assortment of people, dime-store candies with flesh; moldy and nutty, missing pieces, smelling gross, probably tasting of medicine or bubblegum

Caitlin had been on enough deep-water dives to think of the ocean as she would any other wild place. Unpredictable, sure. Potentially dangerous, of course. But all the more alluring for that.