During the untold hours, he is all memory and imagination. If he has a body, he is unaware of it. The same was true during certain periods of his life.

What he remembers most about those final years was the fear. They never put it into words, but he could see it in Diane’s face, and in his own in the mirror. Now he cannot see his reflection, and it is just as well. He imagines an appearance with no expression, pebble eyes under a film of gray, a mouth fallen open and full of shadow.

He remembers friends and relatives erased, one now and again, then two or three, then entire groups of everyone he knew, gone. The grief that came after. The numbness. He remembers worrying over what an illness actually meant, a weakness in a limb, a headache, an abdominal pain, a lost thought, a missed connection. He remembers her asking, How do you feel? He remembers taking longer and longer to answer. He remembers getting old.

He remembers wanting to ask her, What was the point? After all that effort, he couldn’t decide how everything added up. She’d always been the optimist, the one with the comforting answers. What did it all mean? But he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to hurt her.

He remembers hearing things in the middle of the night. He could never decide if the sounds were new, or the same noises he always heard. There were always sudden drafts. Was a window open? There were always doors opening and closing.

He remembers smelling smoke. He remembers getting out of bed and searching the house but never finding the danger. Diane slept so soundly, it became his job by default. To turn the lights on. To turn the lights off. To walk through the house like a memory, listening, smelling, trying to find a path through the dark.

They gather outside the windows and beat on the glass. He is afraid they will wake her, but she is oblivious. They want him to come out. They no longer require warmth, or shelter, or food, but they do crave companionship. But his love lies here sleeping, and he is reluctant to leave her side.

He wants to close the curtains, so he doesn’t have to see their faces. Their lack of features is unsettling. He tries to raise his hands to feel his own face, but cannot find either his face or his hands.

Diane remains motionless on the couch. He cannot tell if she is sleeping, or resting, meditating, or dead. She has spent most of the past month this way, body covered, eyes closed. He cannot see below her neckline. Her body could be anything, the body of a fish, or a leopard, the body of an aging woman who needs her rest. The clock, ticking, is the only sound in the room. He waits for her to rise, or leap, or swim away.

He watches her through darkness and through day, until she stirs, first her head and then her shoulders, shifting, slipping from the blanket, her face turning toward him, but not seeing, eyes blinking away dead tears. Her mouth stretches into a yawn.

Her cell phone on the coffee table rings and rings, but she doesn’t answer. Eventually it dies, becoming yet another useless artifact.

Diane climbs from the couch with the blanket wrapping her like a shroud. She is smaller than he remembers, thinner, paler. He is beyond all worry, and yet somehow he worries. A few wisps of colorless hair fall across her forehead. She moves with small steps into the bathroom. He waits outside.

He hears the toilet flush, the water running. He follows her from the bathroom into the bedroom. He waits for her to go to the closet, to put something on, but instead she stumbles to the bed and sheds the blanket, and for a moment she is but a figment of flesh before crawling beneath the covers. He watches the sheets rise and fall. Her breath expands to fill the room. He leaves before she gathers him into a dream.

He remembers leaving this house many times but always returning. He remembers wondering if he would ever leave this house again. He can be in two places at once, or even three. So much is possible when you are done.

The house is smaller than he remembers. It seems much dirtier than before, or perhaps he has more time to notice. He feels the walls, ceilings, and floors bleeding dust into the air, the tiny deteriorations of frame and sheathing, furnishings, and flesh.

A fuzziness collects on the edges of things. Time drifts through the rooms, settles into episodes of decay, moves on. He listens to the creatures beneath the wallpaper, the creatures inside the wood, the creatures above and below. These rooms are never completely dead.

During the long night, he gazes from the windows and cannot see the stars. During the endless day, reflections of nothing paint the walls. Outside their house, birds are frozen in midair. The clouds are unmoving.

He watches their neighbors departing their houses, crossing the lawns, moving along the sidewalks. He cannot remember which are living and which are dead. He wonders at the busyness of the living, their preoccupation with appearances, their almost constant disappointment.

He follows the sunlight as it moves through the house, keen for its touch.

Most of his possessions still remain: books and clothing, a few favorite foods, letters, souvenirs, the old dresser from his college years. He doesn’t know why she keeps them, or if she will keep them for long.

Diane sits at their modest kitchen table, spooning mac and cheese into her mouth, but he can find no pleasure in her face. He is not sure when was the last time she ate. It may have been days. He resides in the chair across the table, his old spot. She still uses her same chair, leaving his open. But it does not feel like an invitation.

He watches her chew. She has difficulty swallowing. He remembers warning her the bites she took were too large and potentially dangerous. More than once he witnessed the blankness come into her pale eyes as she began to choke.

He has a vague memory of how food tasted, although he recalls the warmth of it better, the heat in his mouth and as it went down. He imagines opening his mouth and tasting the departures, all those moments gone and now irrelevant. Feeling foolish, he stops and tries to keep his mouth closed. He has no idea if he has been successful.

She closes her eyes as if she no longer wants to see. He can imagine much, but he cannot imagine what she must be thinking.

Unable to watch any longer, he turns away and moves into the living room. A novel lies on the coffee table, an overdue bill stuck somewhere in the middle as a bookmark. He’d left it beside the bed, never finished. She has moved it here, by the couch where she sleeps and reads. Does she intend to read it? Will she start from the beginning, or from where he left off?

He studies the cover. The words. He can no longer read.

He spends an age watching the light slip away, the shadows which settle and stay. A distant sound finally arrives. Outside the window, there is a sudden explosion and a flash of brilliance. Everything—what lasts, what does not last—is frozen in silver. The rain outside appears impossible. Why did he never realize this before?

He is drenched in memory. He tries to choose but one to take with him and cannot.

She is crying because he said something that hurt her. He was careless and wishes he could take it back. Now he knows nothing can ever be taken back.

The night of her miscarriage she is lying in the hospital bed, heavily drugged, and he hovers over her. He knows she is alive, but her resemblance to what he imagines death must be thoroughly shakes him. They never try again after that.

The jokes that fell flat because he was trying too hard to make her smile. The jokes he was so proud of because they made her laugh.

That day in a bookstore when they first met. He didn’t understand her taste in literature, but he wanted to.

Their first kiss. She kissed him, of course, because he was too shy.

The bright blue dress she bought in Mexico. The spring afternoon they were married in the mountains in front of all their friends. Her parents refused to attend.

That small indentation on the left side of her back.

The many times she forgave him for being a fool.

When they spent hours together in bed.

When they couldn’t stop touching.

All these moments gone to light and air and nothing.

His is an instability spreading everywhere.

Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He has published over 500 short stories in his 40+ year career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma and Figures Unseen from Valancourt Books, and in The Night Doctor & Other Tales from Macabre Ink. His home on the web is www.stevetem.com.

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A sore on my leg meditates for months
before deciding it will stay. Some breaks
never heal, just congeal with the others,
my body so laced with cracks it’s whole
again. I am not pieces of myself, and yet
if you remove an arm or a leg, there I go
but for the rest of me. In some far future,
doctors will pinpoint that ancestor cell
of cancer making the body its empire.
Knees knock on doors that’ll never open
and skin thins politely so we can read
our insides. Inside us all, a baby is
building an old body to be born into.

Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction has been published in Lamplight, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.

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It was Almost a Shame to Bury Her

As promised, dear readers, I recently rewatched Robert Zemeckis’s 1992 film Death Becomes Her. My friend Devin describes it as “the best movie I’ve ever seen about makeup for corpses. Also the only movie I’ve ever seen about makeup for corpses.” With the exception of some unpleasant fat jokes, the film has aged surprisingly gracefully (cue rimshot).

The movie stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as childhood rivals Madeline and Helen, and Bruce Willis as Ernest Menville, the hapless plastic surgeon-turned-embalmer caught between them. Madeline and Helen each discover an elixir of immortality, which grants eternal youth and beauty—synonymous in this film, set in appearance-obsessed Los Angeles. As with all such devil’s bargains, there’s some fine print. What the potion doesn’t grant is the ability to regenerate damage. When Helen and Madeline’s antagonism turns murderous, eternal life becomes eternal undeath, trapped in bodies with significant depreciation. Both women originally regard Ernest’s change of careers—necessitated by alcoholism and unsteady hands—with contempt. As walking corpses, however, they quickly realize just how useful his new skills can be.

Though played for comedy, Ernest’s cosmetic reconstruction is surprisingly accurate. Or at least less inaccurate that I was expecting. (One particular scene in which he brings his embalming equipment home fills me with questions, but I’m suspending my disbelief to stay on topic.) When asked what his secret is, he responds: “Spray paint. You see, you can\’t just use regular makeup on dead skin. The pores are too dry. You\’ve gotta use a palette and grind the stuff in. One day I\’m in the hardware store and I think to myself, ‘What about mannequin paint?’ It\’s got its own chemical adhesive, comes in an incredible variety of flesh…”

It’s true: regular makeup doesn’t work well on an embalmed body. Formaldehyde dries and firms the tissue, so the texture is no longer the same as that of living skin.* Formaldehyde also greys the skin, leading to a mottled purple-grey color if not corrected. With a little dye, good circulation, and the favor of Anubis, an embalmed body may have a pleasant, even color that requires almost no cosmetics. It’s not uncommon, however, to be left with some discoloration; bruising, uncleared lividity†, liver spots, jaundice, and various postmortem stains are the usual suspects.

It’s not unusual for a family to bring in their loved one’s cosmetics with their clothing, if the deceased was someone who cared about makeup. When this happens, the embalmer will sigh and do their best, but frequently that best means color-matching name brand foundation with special mortuary makeup, which comes in a variety of tints, creams, powders, and sprays. I can’t vouch for mannequin paint personally, but airbrushing does work on corpses, although I’ve never had the chance to watch it done.

In cases of trauma or skin lesions, morticians use wax to smooth and even out the face. Embalming textbooks are full of tips on coloring and texturing the wax so it looks like skin. Trial, error, and tears of frustration will likely be necessary.

Feature builder, or tissue builder, is another mortuary tool. When injected under the skin, it fills out sunken or emaciated features. Temples, cheeks, lips, and eyes are the most common areas of application. When used skillfully, it’s as subtle and effective as the best Hollywood face-lift. When misused, the result is equally striking. Apprentices practice on the non-viewing side while they’re getting the hang of it.

Live as fast or as slowly as you please, and I discourage dying young. But rest easy in the knowledge that a mortician somewhere will do their best to make sure you’re a good-looking corpse.

* The firming can be mitigated or enhanced by the strength of the solution, and by accessory chemicals. Cream or oil is applied to the face after embalming, to slow dehydration.

† It’s not always the right ear that doesn’t clear, but it sure feels like it.

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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How ’bout you’re the fence and I’m last summer’s grass escaping
this year’s snow – soggy – dead – footprinted – parted
to make way for growth? How ’bout instead of preassembled
corner posts, the wet perimeter is your two feet and every one

of your spring toes? And if that’s so, it could be I am full
of chemicals from your stained polyester powder coating,
not to mention dog shits – mushrooms – ghosts of winter
haircuts twining round your rust-resistant screws.

Oh you, oh love, I dig your gate always ajar and cutting
off my stupid blades that get too long. Let’s leave
the batteries uncharged inside the lawn mower forever.
How ’bout I’m the mud and you’re the boundary shaping

a new equinox, your pickets and my yielding never
interrupting day and night, shadows meaning what we choose?

Thomas Mixon has fiction and poems published in or forthcoming from Rattle, Sundog Lit, At Length, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @truckescaperamp.

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One October night, when I was twelve, my sister Kimmy and I broke out a Ouija board. Our bedroom was my house’s Halloween destination, and my little sister Kimmy was my assistant in its macabre design. We sat on her bed among the cardboard tombstones, and asked the board innocuous questions: Who were we going to marry? Where would we live in the future? The indicator moved on its own across the board’s shiny surface, giving us lukewarm answers; naming the shy kid in my class and saying we’d live in Florida, unlike New York or Paris. I turned our attention to the ghost in the board, asking if it could move something. The planchette paused for a moment, then in a single, steady motion, spelled out the word CUP. I set an empty paper cup on top of the board and we waited, pressing our clammy palms together as the room grew quiet. After a long moment, I felt cold air run over my body in strange, illogical streams. I looked up at the air conditioning vent, but the black-and-orange paper chains hanging in front of it were still. Between us, the cup started moving, jerking in tiny steps over the black letters. It tipped up on its edge, rolling around on its rim before settling back down. My body went cold. Kimmy stared at me with huge, frightened eyes. We dropped each other’s hands, but the cup was still moving. In what seemed like slow motion, it tipped up, teetering once more on its edge. Finally, it fell over, rolling off of the board onto her bedspread. We hurled ourselves off the bed and out of the room, our feet pounding down the stairs to where our mom was watching TV back in the normal world. We never played with the Ouija board again.

I realized then that there were things in this world I couldn’t explain. As an adult, I know that a Hasbro game has little to do with the possibilities of life after death. But I still don’t know how the cup tipped over.

The tired realities of adulthood have kicked in these past few years as I’ve started to lose people. Kimmy died in the fall of 2016 after a lifetime of opioid addiction, and my dad followed two and a half years later from brain cancer. When Kimmy died, she had been in bad health for years, long since having given up on any kind of happiness, and at thirty-two, she was tired. We sat in her hospice room, the sharp autumn light cutting in on a Thursday morning, abandoned pumpkin scones on the table, as she took her last breaths, like a quiet clock running out of batteries. My dad, my sister Lindsay, and I flanked her bedside. I felt, for the first time, the sudden strangeness of arriving with a person and leaving without them.

My sisters and I are all generally skeptics when it comes to the afterlife, but we have our moments of doubt. Lindsay, a doctor herself, still pokes her head into church once in a while. She swears she felt something warm leave the room when Kimmy died. Sarah, my youngest sister and a true believer, has the creepiest stories, usually involving her two-year-old daughter, Harper. She loves to try to freak us out.

“I never told y’all about this, but I used to see outlines of people in my room when I was a kid. I think Harper sees them too.”

Nancy thinks we’re all full of crap. “What did she say?” she asks.

“She just keeps talking to people that aren’t there. She’ll talk about the lady in her room all the time. Aaaand I come in there and she’s alone,” Sarah says.

“It’s called being a kid,” Nancy says.

Weird stuff happens to me, too. I sometimes hear a voice whispering my name, “Jenny. Jenny.” It comes from over my shoulder, as if someone is right behind me. I grew up with so many siblings yelling my name that I’ll turn around expecting to see someone.

“That’s fucking freaky, Jenny,” Sarah says, like her kid doesn’t see dead people.

My dad passed away in the spring of 2019, a year after his diagnosis. He didn’t want to die, and when the time came for us to take him to the hospice, he was furious. At that point, he was bedridden and unable to speak, which didn’t stop him from communicating how disgusted he was about the whole thing. My dad’s passing was not peaceful. He was aware of the robbery of it all until the moment he left. At 65, he had the health of a person 20 years younger. He hiked the Appalachian Mountains by himself. He was an avid scuba diver, full of stories of the creatures he saw under the sea. He skydived professionally. When he died, Lindsay didn’t feel warmth leave the room. We were all too much in shock. The constant work and horror of his dying distracted us from the reality of his death, and we hadn’t prepared for what would come. We were camped out in his hospice room watching Disney movies on the night he passed away. We were behaving as we always did, laughing and talking. At the time, I knew he would die, but I had no idea he would be gone.

On the mantel in my Chicago apartment is a photograph of my sisters and me standing on a slab of cement surrounded by scrub pine, on what would become our big grey house on 32nd Avenue in Vero Beach, Florida. We’re dressed in the neon colors of the 1990s JCPenney sale rack, Lindsay and me smiling, Kimmy staring into space and holding Nancy’s hand, Sarah toddling out of the frame. That house would encapsulate our young adult lives. Within its walls, Kimmy and I built paper graveyards. I would become a cheerleader and run cross-country. She would dye her hair green and start running with the wrong crowd, and over time we would talk less and less. The house itself was always full of noise. I hid in rooms alone, safe with the sounds of my family outside. Even now, I love being in bathrooms at parties. I like to be alone and not alone. I like when there’s life on the other side of the door.

The house grew quiet after we grew up, its long hallways taking on a life of their own as the air whispered through the empty rooms. Kimmy came home between stints in rehab, but mostly my dad lived there alone. When his cancer was in its later stages, I moved home to care for him, sharing shifts with my mom and my sisters. Many days we went for walks around our neighborhood in the evenings. The streets around my house are shaded by tall, mossy oak trees. The light glows through patches of green as the sun sets every day. Our simple conversations were familiar, despite his loss of much of his language.

I recorded one of our walks in the voice memos on my phone. Sometimes I listen to it when I’m awake in my bed in Chicago. There he is, alive as ever. He’s talking in halting sentences about how much he liked church that day, which he had slept through. He shouts as the light hits my browning hair, revealing that I’m over my black dye phase, which he hated. I know exactly where we are in space at each point in the conversation. I’ve walked these streets my whole life. I remember the lights in the windows of our house as we got back home. It’s a thirty-five minute recording on a metal device in my hand. If I close my eyes, my dad is still alive.

Things you might have seen that spring if you passed by our house:

My dad and me walking, his steps halting, his Irish flat cap in place. My mom in the window starting dinner as it gets dark.

Lindsay and me pushing our dad in a wheelchair.

Lindsay and me drinking Target box wine out of plastic sippy cups as we walk late at night.

Lindsay and me screaming at each other in the street early one morning.

A nurse arriving, built like a linebacker, walking in calm, measured steps.

An ambulance parked on the front lawn, the doors of the grey house wide open.

A hot, sticky morning. My family walking. I carry a coffee mug, spilling it as I step. Lindsay holding Harper’s tiny hand as she ambles along. Sarah carrying a new baby boy. Nancy holding her dogs, pulling in opposite directions on the green lawns. My mom wearing sensible shoes.

A long time. Mail builds up in the mailbox. Flyers collect on the front door.

A sign announcing the house is for sale.

The sign is gone.

In Chicago, I get a letter from a lawyer, asking me in to relinquish my rights and those of all my heirs and successors to Lot 17 on 32nd Avenue in Vero Beach, Florida, in perpetuity. An old Florida homestead law. The last of the paperwork. I sign it and drop it in the mailbox.

After the funeral, I listen to Fresh Air at my reception job in Chicago to distract myself. Sister Helen Prejean is famous for her work with prisoners on Death Row. Terri Gross asks her about heaven.

“What if heaven, what if my sister Mary Ann is right here by my side, but I can’t see her?…It’s called the Communion of Saints in the Catholic Church. Not that it’s a literal place, of course, but what if they have crossed over a threshold in which they have moved into way of being that is somehow connected in love with everything? Maybe that is the heart of what it all means.” It’s a beautiful podcast. I reach to call my dad before I remember.

I have dreams where my dad tries to communicate with me. One night I dream we’re floating in inner tubes in the middle of the ocean. We realize we can talk to each other this way, that we’ve found the crack under the door. We’re both excited, my dad laughing like he always did. I feel myself waking up and I tell him I’ll come back, that now I know where to find him. He waves goodbye as my eyes open, back in my bed in Chicago. Nancy has a similar dream, except that she can’t hear him. When he talks, it sounds like static, but he jumps around, dancing, so happy to see her.

Christmas is bad, in the waning days of 2018. My dad’s sickness approaches its final stages.

After dinner, in our big grey house, Harper runs laps around the kitchen with her Moana doll. Sarah drinks coffee while I finish the apple pie.

“Wanna know something crazy?” Sarah says. “We were in the living room and she goes, ‘Mommy, who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘Who?’ And she’s like, ‘the lady with green hair looking in the window.’”

She sips her coffee. “Nobody was there.”

Harper runs back into the living room and plays with her toys under the Christmas tree. We follow her to the couch, where my dad sits holding the new baby. The tree flashes back and forth between colorful lights and white. Everyone trickles into the living room while Harper bangs out a happy ruckus on her tiny pink piano. It’s a typical holiday, the last one we’ll spend in this house, though we don’t know it yet.

Later that night, my sisters and I walk around our neighborhood. You can see a lot of stars from our street in Florida. The vast, black Atlantic roars a five-minute drive from our house. We stop in the middle of the road to find the Big Dipper. Sarah points it out to Harper, who wails when she can’t see it. We all do our best to help her, all of us little humans who don’t know anything. If it hadn’t been for Copernicus, we’d still think everything floated around the Earth. We’d believe in ghosts, and demons. We’d rest our faith in the simple answers of heaven and hell, reward and punishment, seeing each other again. We keep walking, Harper sniffling into Sarah’s neck, for the moment giving up on the mysteries of the universe. I lag behind, watching them, alive, here for a moment. Maybe, given enough time, it will all make sense. I’ll know why the cup tipped over. I’ll know where my dad is, and my sister. Maybe the answer is beautiful. Or maybe they’re just gone.

Jennifer Rumberger is a playwright and essayist based in New York City. Her recent productions include The Locusts at The Gift Theatre Company and Night in Alachua County with Wildclaw Theatre. She was a 2022 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewannee Writers’ Conference and has performed her essays live with 2nd Story, Gift Lit, and You’re Being Ridiculous. You can visit her at jenniferrumbergerplays.com.

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He sits, hands on knees, as the warm pyramid of the sun climbs his legs, sifting in through the open window. His back is unbent, and his hair is thick but where once it was black as night water, now it is streaked with grey.

The body on the low cot that lies in the sunless corner of the hut is troubling him greatly. A woman taken in her prime.

Between the immediate buzz of flies, the distant calls from jungle fowl, and the air-dried thunder of surf on stone that is the most distant, there is the repetitive question that deafens him to these others. One that peals out and fills his senses as he looks to the body of his daughter before him.

His eyes avoid the places where pieces of her were taken by the forest and its children. His gaze remains fixed on the flesh that is still firm, the flesh that perplexes him, that has kept him sleepless for hours of the moon’s slow arc, wondering what mighty force keeps her stationary in death as none could in life.

It is not her death that troubles him most. They are a people who live close to death, hear it breathing heavy in the dappled leaves beneath the overstory in a thousand different bodies. All must walk the path, and he knows this even as it saddens him, but this is not the source of his anguish.

What vexes and draws him to this vigil is the fact that the body before him has stopped rotting.

The daughter crouches low in the dark gloss of trail-side vegetation. Leaves painted in oil reflect a lurid sky of burnt umber. This celestial inferno is marbled by streaming clouds that look to be the dark roots of giant things growing far above.

From within the vegetation, she watches a procession of waterlogged travelers walking a path that is worn river-stone smooth by countless feet of passing dead. They carry no marks of war or predators, only the bloat and breath-held choke of the drowned. Their features are strong and similar, their faces dark and set as they walk toward the flickering eye of the gateway set deep in the canvas of the sky to the south.

The portal is the place the dead must go to. It is the crossing point and the mission of all who find themselves in the place of paths.

She sees one of the drowned looking above the underbrush where she hides, looking over the vegetation to the black scalloped sea that lifts above the cliff’s lip and flattens itself into the wall of sky. The dead one’s eyes widen as they focus on the seam of the distant horizon.

Where there should be only cliff and sea and sky at her back, there is something else. There is something approaching. The dead woman looks away and walks more quickly so as not to be lost from the procession.

When they are gone, the daughter rises, fighting the urge to follow them on the path, the urge she feels deep in the back of her teeth as the lodestone of the portal calls to her. But she knows she cannot go. Not yet.

She sees the low tide of underbrush across the path she watches shake and buckle. The daughter sinks back into the foliage, her eyes fixed on the disturbance.

As she watches, the form of a young boy parts the leaves, his skinny legs pushing through creepers. Despite her being hidden, he grins down at her location, and she thinks that his mouth is much too wide and the teeth much too long and narrow. She does not move, but her hand falls to where the handle of her knife once would have been. Its absence is as keen its edge once was.

As he approaches, she notices that his body is filled with red holes that do not bleed. She bunches the muscles of her legs beneath her, ready to strike or flee, but as he reaches the path, his skin shivers and bursts. His body becomes a rippling cloud, plumes into itself, then condenses into a great mass of whining insects. The red nodes of the mosquitoes’ bloated bodies are propelled by wings of veined ash. They disperse into the forest, save one that comes towards her, but she breaks it with the flat of her hand and stands.

She has seen that one before and now knows his tricks. He is one of many that are not the dead but inhabit the world of paths. She knows some of them from stories told by her people, but most are strangers, and though maybe extraordinary, they do not inspire fear in the seized muscle of her heart.

It is the thing that approaches that she fears, the one that fills the horizon with the growing mountain of its body: the one whose head is sunk in the clouds with knees cracking the rolling swells, sending them reeling back into others. She sees it from the corner of her eye, but does not focus on it.

Instead, she looks north up the coast. She sees the black fused vertebrae of the path she has already walked, the path one should only ever walk once. It seems a madness that she plans to walk it again, but then, it is a time for madness with the coming of the beast.

Traveling back to the place of one’s body is strongly forbidden, but she knows no other way. She knows he will be there, sitting with it, and she must speak with him.

She splays her toes against the pull of the portal and begins to walk against it, feeling the air turn to rough pebbles against her skin. She sees others along the way who have stopped and been dragged down into the underbrush, grown entangled with thorned vines and serpentine stalks. She can see them now sinking into the loam, their spirits becoming thin and tattered. Millennial decomposition until all that is left is a fractured husk, a strangled ribbon of voice.

The creatures that patrol the uncombed fringes of the vegetation, those that gave her no notice before, begin to leer. Terrible amalgamations of beaks and scales, bodies long and muscled and many legged. Heads socketed unevenly with wide, rolling eyes. They thrust wrinkled necks from between the vines and blossoms, pull their bodies from the dirt to follow this one who walks backwards. She tenses, not sure what they will do, if they will physically stop her. They crowd and gawk and make noises deep in their throats, but they do not stop her as she walks back.

Back to the cliff of her childhood to speak with her father one last time.

She knows the chances are small, that the dead should not speak to the living, but she must tell him. She cannot guess at the true nature of the thing that approaches from the deep of the ocean, only that it is coming, and that she must warn the people.

The pit is dug and cleared, and the earth from it rests in a cool pile beneath broad waxy leaves that nod in the night’s absentminded wind.

The pit bulges into the earth, an unlit gateway.

The man who was a father kneels, his legs beneath him and a small collection of things he will send to his daughter beside him.

The offerings are illuminated as he strikes sparks from stone: a small jar filled with ointment, a parcel of food wrapped in leaves, a hunting knife with its blade of mountain glass freshly knapped, and a large clay vessel of water.

The kindling at the bottom of the pit catches and begins to smolder. The grey heart flickers, and the brittle sounds of a new fire grow louder as he lends his breath to the flames.

When night winds begin to bend the tongues of flame that reach out of the earth, he knows that the fire is ready. He begins to pass the gifts through the doorway of the blaze.

The parcels and objects disappear, and the fire dims a little each time. Wayfinder, the blade newly made for her, cuts a quick path in the glowing curtains and is gone.

Water is last.

Holding the vessel in both hands, he whispers into the cool liquid.

“I do not know what stops you in your journey, daughter, but my wish is that these gifts from your father give you strength. May they be the water that loosens the log so that it might finish its journey to the world of waves. Where it might come back to us on the tide.”

He watches the liquid’s shifting surface, filled with his message, move between coins of orange flame to the hot silver of the moon.

The night is nearly spent as he lifts and drops the vessel into the flames. Steam erupts from the pit and mushrooms into the indigo of early dawn.

He sits under the sinking parabola of the moon long after the warm smothering wash of smoke has passed over him. As dawn’s orange roots burn back the dark, he walks to the edge of the cliff that stands a short walk below his house. His prayers are fierce and fervent and simple. He wishes only that when he checks the body in the morning, she will have moved forward in her journey.

She is near the cliff, but her body is raw, the bruises black beneath the orange simmer of the sky. She has learned quickly the difficulties in walking backwards. What was once air has become small stones that grate and snag her flesh as she walks against the path.

She stops and pants, relishing the rest for her skin that has softened and split in places, then notices that the wind blows more strongly. The black gloss of leaves and vines shake with it, and carried on the wind there is a new odor.

She wrinkles her nose and looks out into the ocean and stumbles back.

The creature has grown. It is much closer than it was, and she wonders how long it has taken her to get where she stands. There is not the cyclical pursuit between sun and moon to mark the passing of days, and she finds it impossible to tell how long this journey has taken.

Standing on shaking legs, she looks fully on the beast that is still blued with distance, yet fills the horizon from wave to crown of the sky.

It walks on six legs, and its hooves look to be made of the uniformed planking of wood, converging to a prow that splits the water in its slow gait. The legs are gilded trunks covered in silver scales whose chimes carry on the wind.

Although the head of the beast is obscured in the black rivers of cloud and its body is distorted by miasmic discharge, she can see carrion birds wheeling about its bull neck in a slow rotation as small winged specks diminished by its bulk. She watches as one lands and buries its featherless head into the pale flesh showing in patches where the scales are missing. There is also a red glow spilling from the creatures chest, but it is impossible to tell what causes it through the haze.

As the daughter watches, hand to mouth and fighting the urge to empty a stomach that no longer holds food, it steps for a moment, slow and heavy, from the vapors surrounding it. She brings a hand to her eyes as her pupils contract, narrow to pins as they settle on the thing hanging at its chest.

She shrinks back before the two giant bodies of truncated timber, crossed and lashed one to the other, swinging at its neck, held by great dark links that speak to her of the deep earth.

The crossed timbers emanate with a wet, burning light. Wound-red, coal-red, the red of poison frogs and venomous snakes. The red of the panther’s mouth as a final image. Slow flames reach into the space around the object hungrily, as if tasting the air of a new habitat. The great bull neck is chafed raw by the weight, and she wonders briefly why it carries such a burden.

She is so transfixed by the approaching beast that her still heart lifts into her throat as the low shrub besides her shakes. She spins and crouches to face it as the plant convulses, is pulled into the earth—leaves bunched—then flows up and splits, shedding it leaves to reveal a jar of ointment.

To her left, a small vine wrapped about a withered trunk swells like a newly fed snake, bulges, then ruptures, a grey-bladed knife cutting out from its interior to sink into the forest floor, hilt up.

Then comes the container of water and parcel of food, both tumbling from the gaping bowl of a slumped tree.

There are words, too, carried in the shifting water as she lifts the clay jar to drink.

She pauses to listen. Her face splits into a wide smile with the echo of the familiar voice. Low and even and resonant. Tears warm her cheeks, and she chokes back laughter born of pure joy as she listens and is given strength she did not think she had left. The daughter is reminded what she fights for, what stands to be lost if the message is not sent, and the rekindling of this knowledge fills her cold body with a white light.

While she knows he sits vigil over the form she has left behind and that the magnetism between the worlds of the living and dead will not let her near the shell he doubtless worries over, as the fell wind from the salt sea sweeps across the leaves around her, an idea begins to form in her mind.

It is morning, and the firepit is cold. The remnants of the things sent the night before stand in black shards and leaning piles like the charred bodies of shipwrecks.

The father is woken not by the sun or the lightening of the sky as he usually is, but by the croak of a tree frog on the hard-packed earth beside his sleeping roll.

In that time before he opens his eyes, where he still sees the tendrils of the dreaming world shimmering above him, before the blinding tide of wakefulness draws itself like a sheet over that place of dreams, he holds on to the image of his daughter standing on the cliff they shared so often when she was young and he not so old.

He sees her as he saw her in the dream: a young girl, still tuber-fat before the weed-growth of arms and legs. She stands under a sky that blackens and cracks and shimmers like coals fanned by a steady breath.

Her mouth moves, but the words are taken by a foul wind that gusts in from the endless salt waters beyond the cliff and surrounding the dry land of their world. There is another aspect of the dream that is lost to him and is too deeply decayed to draw forward as he moves further from sleep.

The blurred image of a mountain in the sea dwarfing his daughter’s figure—where there should be only waves and water—flashes into his mind, but is gone before he is able to make sense of it.

His heart beats quickly, and there is sweat cooling on his skin. It was not a good dream, but he does his best to keep the vision of her in his mind.

The frog croaks again and he opens his eyes.

When she was a child, she and her father would walk the path from their home to the edge of the cliff below. Once there, he would lift her to his shoulders. Eyes closed, both listened to the wind pouring over the sea, hitting the shore far below and moving through the canopy like an ape, snatching leaves and blossoms as it passed.

Then the climb.

Up the pockmarked cliff the wind would come hand over fist, leaping, its mind full of shoulders, till it reached the lip where they stood and launched itself up into the air in thick sinuous ribbons.

She remembers her hair losing its weight, flying and streaming into the sky as her father staggered and she tightened her grip on him, both at the mercy the four winds, hooting and whooping and calling out into the maelstrom they shared with each other only.

The daughter remembers thinking that the wind is very much like a needle and thread, a weaving thing that can pass through any fabric. If one needed to pass a message, even though a fabric as final as the death shroud, the wind could do it. And what place better to use this needle and thread than where the wind is most powerful?

She turns into the teeth of the pebbled air and begins to walk, thinking how she can bring him to the cliff, to the place of wind where their bond is strongest, that they might talk and feel each other’s company as they once did.

The little tree-dweller sits on the floor looking at him, then leaps, the green spark of its body landing at the edge of the hut’s entrance. He sees there is another there and props himself on an elbow, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

One is not uncommon, but two, and both sitting in the new light of the day, this is a thing he has not seen before.

The two frogs watch him from the entrance and as he rises, they leap out the door in unison.

He ties a cloth around his waist and steps forward into the light streaming through the doorway.

The two frogs sit together in the small clearing about his hut and then, as he steps through the doorway, begin to leap down the path leading from his dwelling to the cliff below.

The man begins to follow the two creatures, his curiosity piqued by their abnormal behavior. As he does so, the path he walks begins to shake the day-dust from images he walked in the land of dreams. Wind rising, its long body tying his own to another. Laughter. And the weight of a another’s body held up into its stream by his arms.

Morning light perforates the tunnel of vegetation before him, painting the dirt pathway in green shadow. It is a pathway that is full of the past. Saturated with the light and sounds of many days.

He knows it well and cannot help but see her little body running crookedly down it to the place where the wind gathers from all directions. A place so consistent in its motion that the mind and body are humbled and stilled, as if both, for a short time, share the breath and body of a vast and endless space. It surprises him that he has not come to this place yet to speak to her.

Her mind drifts, pushed up from the cold flesh of her body by the punishing pain that her backwards walking has caused.

From where she sits, legs crossed on the clifftop, her body’s repulsion is too strong, and she knows she can go no closer to her home. The energy of her spirit is so utterly spent that it is all she can do to sit in place and resist the nauseating pull of the path and portal.

Despite the saw-toothed push of the wind and the gut-wrench pull of the portal, she understands that these things are a necessary safeguard against those spirits of the dead who refuse to go and wish only to inhabit their bodies once again.

Without these forces to keep them from the madness of these spirit’s goals, the world of the living would be a land of horror, the people’s cord cut from the cycles of death and renewal.

Her spirit begins to drag towards the portal, and panic touches her mind. She plants her hands against the stone, knowing that she is spent, that she will not see her father again and that her message will not reach its destination. Despair fills her as she looks up into the path’s tunnel foliage. It is empty. Fatherless.

She does not look at the thing approaching at her back, but feels the heat of its nearness, the building electricity of collision.

She begins to relinquish her hold on the cliffside. The current that rages about her, demanding movement and the passage of her spirit, is warm and right. She squints into this building river of light that fills her with a great and comfortable weariness. It fills her bones with warm sand, and she begins to forget why she ever thought to walk against the path.

Looking to the pathway one final time, she pauses. A figure moves along the path, his gait familiar and his skin exhaling a light the color of oiled wood.

Struggling to rise, she feels a terrible weight as if she had just gathered jugs of water and they rest poled across her back, but she stands and steadies herself, the soles of her feet scraping against stone.

She looks over her shoulder at the thing that comes and draws what she can from it. The leviathan’s stink now clogs the air, and a fell chanting now comes with the wind, emanating from the searing timbers with their wet flame.

One final task before the release.

She must warn him.

The orb and corona of her father comes to stand beside her. She can see the cast of his stocky frame, the curve of his nose and deep-set eyes, though dimly, like a replica of the man made of sand or smoke.

She tries to focus on the wind, to pour her voice into it that he might hear even a whisper of her warning.

She focuses and throws her arms around his neck and does not cry for fear of the energy it will waste, so precious little has she left.

Into the wind she speaks all she can think to say, all the trembling details of the beast, its scales of silver, its unwashed stench, its hoofs of banded wood and bull shoulders hanging with the burning red timbers. She tells him of the hidden head and the carrion birds that orbit it.

She tells him also, at the end, that she misses him greatly. That he was all she could have ever wanted from a father, and that she would wait for him at the entrance to the next world.

She grips the earth with her toes, rooting herself to the place and against the portal’s pull, praying to all who would listen that he will reply and show some sign that he has heard her and will heed the warning.

After a time, he begins to speak.

He feels her now. Thinks he can feel the weight of her wiry arms. Closing his eyes, he pictures her as he saw her standing there less than an hour ago in his dream.

“I do not understand what holds you here, daughter, but I have to imagine that it is by your own will that you still stand the path. Please, continue on your way. To think of you in the place between words brings me great grief. I have seen you in my dreams. I think you wish to warn me of something, but it is not the place of the dead to warn the living. It warms me to think of you stubborn even in death, but you must go now, leave the problems of the living to the living. We all come to the same end, and then, what is worse than death? I will see you again, my daughter. Now give an old man some rest, and go.”

His cheeks are wet as he says these things, but he knows no better way to set her free, and so he stands and watches the rising sun.

She hears what she must from his words and knows them to be right. She turns from him to watch the approaching thing that is now shrouded in steam and clouds, but still she hears the slow thunder of its body moving through the storm, and still the red star of the cross about its neck burns and drips and murmurs, and she can see clearly now things emanating from where the leviathan’s hooves meet the water. Bodies. Thousands of bodies. More than she has ever seen gathered together in life. They fill the surf and pile on the beaches.

She thinks she recognizes some of them, while others are strangers.

She knows it is something they have never faced before, something that will change things beyond recognition.

Her task completed, she gives herself over to the river of light, her eyes tired as they have never been before, she is taken to the portal. She is washed from her bones.

Her father thinks he feels a different pressure, a breath within the wind, pass and go, and he hopes his words have reached her.

His eyes are fading and not as sharp as they once were, but as he turns to go, he pauses, squints, and wonders. Wonders at the three white scars that welt the horizon, sails bulging with the wind and moving slowly towards the shore.

Gabriel Mara is an anthropology student who is currently teaching English in Colombia. He is, at this moment, obsessed with rivers and how they reflect the health and beliefs of those who live in their watersheds, as well as the social life of objects. The majority of his time is spent learning Spanish and feverishly writing fiction.

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“how did we decode his
               body? meta —made of dust?
or silver —made from 
              rust? Hey, Icarus, 

how do understand your 
              biology after your brain 
was coded with binaries? you, 
               who dared gravity & space-

walked your way into the 
              mouth of the sun in an 
attempt to be luminous. 
              you who coughed the moon 

out of your lungs where it had 
              always consumed you with
darkness. in this tale, the sun 
              doesn’t melt you. say, longing

& loneliness & lust is evident.
               say, the sun wants to fondle a soft 
skin tenderly without alchemizing
               the algorithm of love into soot”

the cyborg narrated.

II. BECAUSE

my friend had always loved 
               this story about Icarus,
he surrendered his body to 
               every glossary of loneliness :

solitude in the morning. 
               silence at noon. & 
suicide at night. he loved counting
               the stars as holy beads. & on nights 

like this, (he said)—suicide —a dark-
                skinned star would lure him to the 
windowsill & say fall, son of Icarus, 
                fall. but, every attempt was my 

nightmare. arrhythmia. sizzled
                sweats. hypertension. & the name
of god staggering between my 
                pink lips. one night —he said (over

the phone), —a hawk softened the 
                 cloud of his room with its breath.
& it rained. & water filled his room 
                 to the brim. & the rest was liquefied

silence flowing through my arteries.
                 after autopsy, the doctor confirmed
depression & lungs saturated with
                 the wickedness of this world. 

III. I AM

sailing in his room, with a paper boat, 
                   fishing. & in the water, i capture
stars that mirror different shades of his 
                   blue smile. each, a haunting. & this 

way, i have lived with a ghost 
                   as a hardware. i have shown 
you that a plague, too, 
                     can be carried everywhere, 

forever, like a souvenir. 
                     each star, boxed in my heart 
as a memory —it outweighs me.
                      true, memory is heavier than 

sorrow. & i have mastered the art 
                      of losing. which is the art 
of putting on so much weight.
                      my doctor says what matters 

now is how much more people 
                      i am willing to lose. the therapist 
contests. says, what matters is how 
                      much weight i am willing to lose, 

every day. my alter ego says which– 
                      ever way, i lose. 

IV. DYING,

my friend comes to me in a dream 
                      & offers me Alzheimer’s. says it’s the 
only way to move on. my memory.
                      —sanitized, unhacked & nascent.

Chinedu Gospel is an emerging poet & undergraduate from Anambra, Nigeria. He plays chess when he’s not writing. & tweets @gonspoetry. He is a 2x Best of the Net nominee. He is the winner of the StarLit Award, AsterLit 2021 winter Issue. He won an honorable mention in the 2021 Kreative Diadem annual contest (poetry category) & Dan Veach Prize for younger poets, 2022. He was longlisted for the 2022 Unserious collective Fellowship. His works of poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Mud Season Review, Savant Garde, Bath Magg, Trampset, The Drift mag, Gutter Magazine, Fiyah Magazine, Sonder Magazine, Roughcut Press, Consequence Forum, Agbowo Magazine, The Deadlands, Blue Marble Review among many others.

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