Across my father’s death there is a curtain
past which I can’t write, my own words
can’t carry and I must rely on others’

I believe in the graves of those I’ve buried.
They are the doors I’ve walked through
into greater bravery, into fury.

Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner living with Long Covid. Their writing has recently appeared in Anathema, FIYAH, Strange Horizons, Poem-a-Day, carte blanche, Shade Journal, and Mizna. Their work is anthologized in Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (forthcoming), Halal if You Hear Me, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. Their Elgin Award nominated small poetry book is who is owed springtime.

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content notes

(prelude 3.1)

He wasn’t so
cruel
as to name
the dog.

(first day 1.1)

I live in the same house I grew up in. Each day I walk my dog up and down the same streets and through the same parks. I make the same observations about the same landmarks

—the dilapidated fence by the cycling path behind the supermarket

(nostalgic longing)

—those divots and ditches that always fill up when it rains

(a prayer for floods)

—the rosebush where a white cat once sheltered

(a memory we can never forget)

—Witch House

(I can’t recall who named it, but I know Them well)

the same old friends still live in their old houses, too, and we don’t know one another anymore. I see them sometimes on the streets or in the stores and there are no acknowledgments, no subtle nods or knowing eyes, just an indifference befitting strangers. The same old antagonists from the same old high school inhabit the same deep corners of my mind

—Sharni Hellwig

(her boyfriend is breaking his fist against a brick wall)

—Kyle Monahan

(he’s showing off the slab of beer in his locker)

—Raymond Temme

(he has his hand around my throat)
and today, like every other day, I walk these same streets and make the same observations about those same landmarks, those same friends like old scars, those same antagonists like vile buzzards, the same school and all the parks and fields and the rows of mismatched houses, but

—**** *** *** *** **

(there’s one house that always changes)

I stand before it: Witch House. Its locked door an invitation

—**** ** * ********** *****

(how strange that it helps me remember)

not so aberrant or obvious as to shift on the surface, it always looks the same. But Witch House always changes. And when Witch House changes, it is changing me. Each time I stand before it, old neurons and synapses flicker, and I remember all the things We did

—riding Our bikes through the skate park as children

(cracking my skull against smooth, grey concrete)

—walking home from dead parties on late summer nights

(the tingling on Our lips, the comedown)

—sitting on Your nature strip and watching the climbing vines consume Witch House

(as it slowly sank into ruin, and You into it)

and I know that these are not things I did alone, and that they are new things every time. Those climbing vines crawl deep inside me.

(a memory 0.1)

the Shape speaks in withered tongues. the Shape moves in occluded light, like an unfocused object in the periphery. They inhabit a space, still. It is not negative space, just obscured space

—horror movies in October

(the Shape;)

—a window that faced the beach

(we, seeds)

—the rising tide

(go deeper and deeper and deeper)

and one day, perhaps, with nobody to recall such space, it will simply cease to exist. But for now, to me, They are the Shape, so sadly alive in distracted space that humbly wants to pass

—**** ** ***** *** **** **** ***** *** ******** *******

(a siren)

and as the Shape passes now, through these passages of time and momentarily lost and found space, also pass Isaiah, and Sean, and Abbey, and myself, forever lost in these labyrinthine suburban streets, with meaningless conversations crossing our lips, like Isaiah saying

—What are you, a fag?

(and I tell him, Yes, did he not know?)

and We listen to Isaiah backpedal and watch him float back into himself like he had that time he declared his belief that fellow students and friends Varghese Varma and George Satija were brothers, as though they were any closer to kin than he and I

—forever floating

(he remains unsunken)

we stand before it: Witch House. Its locked door an invitation

and it is the first time we all find it together, much unlike the times in which we’ve found it individually, and we all have different names for it

—Isaiah Crandall, according to what he told me on a deep night, many years later, referred to it privately as Hill House. He said he’d pictured himself playing chess within its heavy walls and gaslighting women in its variously colored chambers, taking up each day the study of its behavioral vicissitudes and architectural disquiet, mulling over its supernatural qualities during breakfast and reading dry literature aloud for all to hear

(and we haven’t spoken since)

—Sean Lindsay, his white-blonde hair hanging in thin strips past his shoulders, he hunches forward with his aching frame and loose-fitting clothes, and he calls it Ron’s House, because he believes it belongs to the local milk bar owner, Ron

(Novacek, his languor smolders behind that counter forevermore)

—Abbey Beckett, she tells us that it’s where her grandmother used to live, that it was Nan’s House, that she used to go there all the time as a very small child, back when Nan was alive, and that she cannot understand all the mystique it has developed, that it’s just a lonely old house with battered weatherboards in an out-of-the-way suburb, and that at least symbolically, if not literally, it holds the corpse and the spirit of the dead grande dame she once knew

(and she, the witch, the witch, the witch)

—the Shape calls it ***** *****

(in love with Abbey’s absent-minded memory)

and with different names comes disparity, and with disparity comes coalescence, like Isaiah saying

—That Great Witch!

(She Left a Wicked House!)

and he tells us all he pictures the old woman puttering around, boiling various dried plants in her cauldron over the fire in the heart of the house, and he tells us all he pictures Abbey on the staircase, clutching the banister and shaking in fear that she, too, will be boiled in that bubbling cauldron.

(last day 2.1)

I try to channel my study’s window, but I can’t feel its sinking pull. The dog lies at my feet. She breathes in metered verse, like the voices I try to channel from my study’s window. The heavy tome lies before me, in all its innumerable forms, in all its scattered oneness. I don’t think what I’ve done is a betrayal of how I feel

—to help others forget

(and be forgotten, too)

and from here I cannot see the rising tide

—I don’t know where to look next

(I don’t know where to look next)

and I still live in the same house I grew up in and I still walk my dog up and down the same streets

—these labyrinthine ******** streets

(and ******, forever lost in)

and the longer it takes to find

—a forgetting place

(***** *****)

and the same old friends idle in their places, too, and we do not know one another, and we never did. And when I think of them, there lives in me a great hatred I wish to see forgotten. And when I think of You, there lives in me a longing, life’s long unfurling, to feel as lost to them as You feel to me. The Shape is heavy space within me. I carry this heavy tome with what feels like Your shape and with every whispered secret I add to it some more.

—a guide

(grimoire)

—a gift

(I swear one day I saw a limb rise from the distant water)

Your Shape.

(interlude 3.2)

They stood beside
the saltdrunk shore
and
he hummed for her
a formless song.

(first day 1.2)

I stand before it: Witch House. Its locked door an invitation

and in the garden, under a decaying trellis, over cracked clay, the dog waits outside as I crawl through

—the backyard window frame dressed with broken glass

(there is no peace)

and inside, its heavy walls are unfamiliar. Painted across them are phrases that feel as though they’re directed at me

—WILL YOU DIE FOR ME

(a call to arms;)

—THIS IS A FORGETTING PLACE

(how strange that it helps me)

—WHAT IF THERE ARE GODS THAT GRANT THE GREATEST MERCIES

(forget)

those words like vanished blood, could it be less that I see them and more that they see me? and up the stairs, and up the ladder, and in the attic

—the western window hums a Wicked tune

(but the Wicked are like the troubled sea)

and in my head I hear Them all: cascading voices speak of limpid form, so soft, so quiet

—the Shape

(obfuscated remnants, so tenderly there, so sadly hanging like an abandoned web)

I can see You, and it hurts.

(a memory 0.2)

We stand before it: Witch House. Its locked door an invitation

and in the garden, the Shape moves first, into that tall grass

—could that grass recall the Shape’s worn form?

(the earth’s indifference far greater than my own)

and under a decaying trellis, over cracked clay, the backyard window holds its shape. Isaiah and Sean and Abbey and myself come next, we follow, to that strong and steady window and look around, tall fences like walls in this warren and no sounds but cars on far-flung streets. And I watch as Isaiah’s fingers find a stone and throw it through that back window

—glass shattering

(the size)

the Sighs of that sound like a hole in the heart. Sighs like Isaiah saying, with distant fondness

—Remember when Dale Kelley threw that brick through Mr. Pollard’s windshield?

(his first legacy)

and we nod with quiet contemplation over the fates of those who didn’t make it through the last school year

—Ronnie Birdwood hanged himself

(they say they found him in his father’s suit)

—Charlotte King died in a dirt-biking accident

(if you have nothing nice to say it’s better to say nothing at all)

—Alysha Williams died of cardiorespiratory failure due to muscular dystrophy

(how she had changed from the age of eight to eighteen)

—Lee Ross stabbed an elderly couple to death in their home

(one of three guys who all worked at a local pizza joint)

—Dale Kelley died of something like heatstroke or suffocation exploring small heating vents or maintenance tunnels beneath the school

(his last legacy)

Isaiah knocks out the remaining glass in the window frame with another rock and Sean lays his jacket down over it and gestures for the Shape and Abbey to pass through, saying

—&Nbsp; &Nbsp;&, Miss Beckett

(and they say chivalry’s the spawn of a dying kind)

and inside, its heavy walls are cold and bare, and the air in here is like breathing broken glass, and up the stairs, and up the ladder, and in the attic the Shape moves like blurred motion, while the rest of us stay in the wider confines of Witch House, with Isaiah looking at Abbey as he says

—Double, double, toil and trouble

(Abbey, do you know anything about…)

and she says

—Shut up, Isaiah

(so desperate to forget)

the Shape makes no sound above us, as if They’ve just disappeared.

(last day 2.2)

I stand before it: Witch House. Its locked door an invitation

—how much I forget when I’m away

(these landmarks like breadcrumbs)

—how st***** that ** **lp* me rem*****

(like a flood)

and in the garden, under a decaying trellis, over cracked clay, the dog waits outside as I crawl through the backyard window

—**e ai* ** **** ** l*k* *re**hin* **ok** *l*s*

(for the Wicked)

and inside, its heavy walls are familiar, and up the stairs, and up the ladder, and in the attic I try to channel the round western window, feel its sinking pull. I can see the rising tide and so I raise the heavy tome to it, like a magnifying glass or a microphone

—***ca**** voi*** **e** ** **mp** **rm

(we, sons)

and I know where to look next. I miss my beautiful friend.

(postlude 3.3)

With nothing to
remind her,
she cannot
hurt.

Micah S. Vernon (they/them) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. This story is their first sale.

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When you die
regret becomes permanent
so imagine my surprise when I
saw the stallions there
running as if forever 
were made of switchgrass
and clover
as if eternity 
were grounded in the quartz and silica 
of hoof-marked sands
destined to dance 
with sweat-sweetened necks 
and nudging noses

endlessly
I toss soft reins 
across my own 
bare arms
and suddenly my limbs are
neither ash nor wind-bound (as I had planned)
but powerful
ulna
radius
carpus
cannon
pasterns short and long
all the way to the coffin bone

and I laugh to think hooves are called that
these things of glory
and suddenly I toss my head
and my place is with the herd
that’s all it takes
so undeserved
and how I run
I run my joy
my limbs 
of thunder
their booming grace
like new stars must hear when they are born
like ocean currents that shudder leviathan’s song
in echoes of prehistory
in boundless 
reasonless hearts

oh
eternity
I do not deserve you
how can I
can any of us 
who could not live gently
who forgot the pain of the desert 
the bright river rock
those tender needs
tender as the journeys of the salmon
silvery despite us
until they lost their way because 
we couldn’t accept that our lives were not the most precious
or necessary
or brilliant
and we would not stop

no
even 
as I run 
in wonder
limitless
head-on 
towards the bounteous sun 
my tangling mane
taut with the strain of this glorious herd 
who I will race beside
riderless
forever
my heart is breaking
because
life
could have been this sweet too.

I did not pray in life.
I do now.
I ask for forgiveness
in this paradise
this life after Earth
and yes, oh yes
when you die
regret becomes permanent.

Felicia Martinez is a writer and educator born and raised in eastern New Mexico. Her deep love of non-traditional story structures and points of view in poetry and fiction have inspired her work found in Star*Line, Mermaids Monthly, Space & Time Magazine, and Lovecraftian Microfiction Vol 6. She holds both an M.A. and Ph.D in English from Stanford University and is presently a liberal arts professor in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she’s not leading seminar discussions with her curious undergrads, she can be found writing under the redwood trees, where she shares a home with her partner and a cat named Bat. She tweets as @feliciafm.

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What did you get sprayed with tonight?

My partner has taken to asking me this after a particularly eventful work week. I’ve mentioned aspiration before—when we suck out fluids and gas out of the visceral organs. We use hydro-aspirators at my embalming center, which have the benefit of not making us scrub drains at the end of every shift. The downside of these particular aspirators is, like many types of plumbing, they can clog and back up. In this case, they usually clog with fat, blood clots, or solid waste.

The first and most dramatic clog happened while I was aspirating a gallbladder, and left me splattered from shoulders to knees in bile and other fluids. I staggered glassy-eyed to the door of the prep room to ask my co-worker if she could see any in my hair. Blessedly, the answer was no. I’ve also been sprayed with blood (the best of all my options) and poop (the worst).

Tonight I didn’t use the aspirator, and so was spared those liquids, but I have been liberally splattered with embalming fluid while dealing with an autopsy.

Speaking of things with which I am frequently doused, a writer friend recently asked me about the various types of embalming fluids and their purpose.

I often use formaldehyde as a shorthand for embalming fluid, because this was the term I was most familiar with before becoming a mortician. Technically—and as my long-suffering copy editor points out—this is incorrect. Formaldehyde is a gas. Formalin is formaldehyde mixed with water, which is the basis for embalming fluids.

The most important of these is arterial fluid. This is what goes into the tank and is injected into the lucky decedent. Arterial fluids are classified by strength of the solution—or index—as well as whatever additional properties they possess. Oil-based fluids, for example, limit the amount of dehydration in the tissue. My personal favorite, Triton 28, is an oil-based fluid designed to combat tissue gas. In cases with excessive edema, however, dehydration is a plus.

Supplemental fluids not containing formalin are added to the tank to treat various conditions. Humectants, anticoagulants, edema reducers, and firming agents are the ones I use most frequently. Sporicides, mold inhibitors, and deodorizers can also be used against decomposition. (There’s only so much they can do: decay always wins.) Some of these supplements make a noticeable difference when used. I can’t honestly tell whether or not the anticoagulants help with drainage and distribution as they claim, but I feel better having them on hand just in case.

Cavity fluids are injected into the visceral organs after the arterial injection and subsequent aspiration. Some of them are scented “to make the working area more pleasant,” according to the manufacturer. “Pleasant” may not be the right word, but I am fond of the cinnamon-scented variety. The cucumber-melon scent is vile. Cavity fluid is especially pungent—it’s very important to suture all your incisions before cavity treatment. Many baby embalmers have forgotten this order of operations to their immediate, sinus-searing chagrin.

A supplement that doesn’t get enough love, in my experience, is dye. Many arterial fluids contain active dyes (to color tissue, as opposed to inactive dyes that just make them pretty in the bottle), but their coloring action isn’t particularly strong. Formaldehyde causes a marked greying of the tissues as it fixes them. A splash of dye in the tank can make a striking difference to the finished corpse. I want to be pale and tragic in my casket, but not grey.

In addition to the aesthetic value, I find dye extremely helpful in marking the distribution of fluid through the circulatory system. Factors such as time between death and treatment and the temperature at which the body was stored affect how tissues firm during embalming. Without an obvious change in texture, the change in color lets you know if fluid has reached the extremities.

Gee, Amanda, why did you challenge your county’s medical examiner to a fist fight in the parking lot?

Okay, nobody’s asked me that yet, but someone will after it happens. And the answer is, because they keep hacking up perfectly good arteries! I need those, dammit! And lately someone keeps sawing through people’s ears while making the cranial incisions. Whiskey tango foxtrot, my friend? I had to sew a woman’s ear together with dental floss this week. On the viewing side! Autopsies take long enough to deal with under optimal conditions; I don’t need extra practice with my needlework, thanks.

If you have questions for the necromancer, submit them through the dark portal on our website, or cast them into the darker void of Twitter.

Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.

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You wash ashore,
    cheeks sun-bleached,
half-obscured
              by a burst
    of barnacles
                 as brine rushes in
           the gash
             of your neck, and out. Unbodied
must feel like living anew. If I pry
                 the shells open, is there anything
beneath the undulations
           on your eye? But there is nothing
to worry about; ugliness
    is not a fault—to exist,
            undesired,
                 unbothered. Within,
         let go of your need
to squelch
            through folds among folds
        for the algae bloom.
How many nights
       have you longed for a body
              of land never claimed, once
the wasting flesh of the old had drowned?
                                       Was it ever
            a dream that you
would be
                                    a muse,
sprawled over a beach towel;
                                    a beloved,
bikini untied in the heat of summer;
                                    an image,
couched between horizon and shore.
You would have been
        unharbored elsewhere.
   Of course, let us
     be honest, you are regurgitated
by the ocean herself,
         a skull of what remains
of a siren’s call. Here
       you are, and here I am, lured
                   by how appalling you are.

Rayji de Guia is a fictionist, poet, and illustrator. Her work can be found in Asian Cha, harana poetry, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She was a poet resident at Sangam House in 2019 and a fellow for fiction in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2021. Later this year, she will be a writer resident at Rimbun Dahan, where she hopes to complete her first collection of short stories. Currently, she is based in Metro Manila. Find her at rayjideguia.com.

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WE: bird-hipped, yes, bird-fierce, mottle-fleshed, streaks on strips of whirling rubber that are the million treadmills that power this place, a place they thread the words “end-of-life care” through

WE, who run for those above, with the hope that they open their eyes again

WE, who care with every thundering footfall of our herd

WE, life-full, for whom “end-of-life” is now a happy impossibility

WE: the power source and the engine

WE: the remedy for an exhausted planet and the succor for those exhausted with the exhaustion

WE, who are treated kindly, who are given holographic vistas that spin before our camera-eyes (plains, grasslands and, for the human-minded still, cities, farms), who enjoy swift repairs should the fiberglass bones of our limbs give way, or the synthetic fibers that make up our muscles shred

WE: battery-runners, uncomplaining

WE, keepers of the soon-to-die and the not-yet-dead, the ones who do open their eyes after days or months or years of deathless sleep and unwire themselves from the machines that kept their organs moving and that kept the life inside them for all this time

WE, the bioelectric breaths of ventilators

WE, the delicate atmospheres of iron lungs

WE, the motors that keep hearts beating when the body has stopped trying

WE, the lights that light the lamps of loved ones by the beds of the deathless as they read, or perhaps doze a little, or perhaps pass the time crooning little lullabies to “wake up, open your eyes baby, please just open your eyes”

WE, the mourners of the machines that stop, and the bodies that stop with them

WE, the weeping

WE, the always-running

WE, who have chosen this

WE, who are herd, countless, the ones who did not go on ahead but who run for the living, run in these bodies that are made to run faster than death itself

WE, who are infinity and

WE, who are about to be one more:

WE snap our heads up as one, and the lenses in our eyes focus on the bars of lights above as they flicker, as our neural networks receive the image like a collective miracle

WE witness the man dying

WE witness his lover hold his hand (both are old, beautiful, the bodies aching still for one another but the strength of one failing and failing fast)

WE, who trill sadness at the sight of the machines that we power letting him slip away

WE, who have a saurian body waiting for him, because he has chosen to run, and not the other, the great mystery

WE, who know euphoria and sadness in one shattering moment

WE, who see him die, and the mind extracted with wires that, electric, our limbs power

WE, who crow in chorus as the new body, empty and unmoving yet, swings out on a crane as delicate as it is monstrous

WE, the welcoming

WE, the glorifiers of the chip interpolated, of the eyes lighting, of the questing legs pawing the ground and the spirit finding home in a strong body, our body, and making its way out amongst us

WE, Ornithischia, bird-hipped still, minds in metal, the steps of this new one about to join the endless run

WE, the encouraging!

WE, the kind!

WE, the running-together!

WE, the triumphant-in-kind as he takes hatchling-steps, tottering a little, trying a little, and then the muscles remember, and he is running!

WE, who ask his name, chattering greetings

WE, who, yes, are named, and whose names break the natural laws of this universe

WE:         Leaellynasaura, the girl who would christen a dinosaur, and who lay awake
               at night smiling at the brilliance of her parents, dreaming of what she
               would do with her own life

               Indirasaura, the woman who would be a physicist but died too early,
               polypped with cancer, but who is not really dead, not here

              Michaelosaurus, the man who smiled often and started every day with a
              song, strumming strings of a guitar he had gone hungry for weeks to afford

WE, who welcome now Adedayosaura, the joyful, a man who found love late but who lived every second of it without fear

WE, who run

WE

WE

WE, who hope you will join us someday, here in this shining realm in the basement of a building that lets life linger

WE, who smile at the sunfall of your life, when the ionic line wavers on that screen and your breaths grow difficult, and who wait for you to say yes, I will, and for the jewels of your mind to be taken and transferred into a body like ours, one that will never break, that will never grow old

WE, who invite you to run the rubber roads

WE, who invite you to sprint on tireless legs with anything and everything you could possibly want to see unfurled before you like God Itself

WE, the unafraid

WE, the runners

WE, who now, here, add a stroke of streaking life to the tally of infinity.

Phoenix Alexander is a queer, Greek-Cypriot writer and scholar of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He is a librarian in his current incarnation; before that he was an academic, and before that, he was a fashion designer. Anything earlier than that is mercifully hazy. He shares a home with his muses: the two feline brothers Purrince William the Furred and Ridley Scott. Phoenix’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Black Static, among others. More information and links to all of his work can be found at www.phoenixalexanderauthor.com, and you can find him on Twitter @dracopoullos.

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Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery at Ospital ng Muntinlupa in the Philippines. Her poems have been shortlisted in the Bridport Poetry Prize and Manchester Poetry Prize. They have been published in several print and online publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, ANMLY, High Chair, Stone Telling Magazine, Philippines Free Press, and Kritika Kultura. You can find her online via wordpress (@alyzataguilastorm), instagram (@ventral), and twitter (@lalalalalalyza).

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