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 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 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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.