the trouble is: behind him,
a crowd of whispers says
you can, it is of worth, you can.

do you not see how sick i am
do you not see what happened
to all the other chances, this body,
this heart. the grass roadside
has gone from green to brown.
do you not see the waste heat
that’s become of me

there’s good shade by the failure tree
the ground cups cool beneath your cheek.

in his brief sleeps, his face braced by the slowly
smoothing rock, they say: this is the land

of ever-resuscitating chances. this is
the land of new-grown skin. they say:
wake up, Sisyphus. we love you.
it is tomorrow. Alleluia.

Leah Bobet’s latest novel, An Inheritance of Ashes, won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Prix Aurora Awards and was an OLA Best Bets book; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, Canthius, and Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct Press), and placed in the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize. She was the Utopia Award-winning guest poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds civic engagement spaces, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at leahbobet.com.

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Genevieve asks: Have you ever dug anyone up?

Surprisingly enough, yes. Or at least, I’ve witnessed a disentombment—removing someone from a mausoleum niche—and bits and pieces of several disinterments, or exhumations—opening a grave. Working at a funeral home attached to a cemetery has its advantages.

All the corpse relocations that I’ve been privy to happened at the request of the families, because they wanted to transfer the remains to a different resting place. In one instance, the remains were cremated after being entombed. In another, the deceased was transferred to a new casket—and a body bag, which was generously filled with powdered formaldehyde and odor neutralizers—and taken to the airport.

I was present for the entirety of the disentombment, and of course I took notes.

The decedent was embalmed, and stayed in a mausoleum niche in a wooden casket for six years before being removed. The casket was wrapped in something like a Tyvek envelope. The niche was dry when opened, but moisture had accumulated in the casket and wrapping. The casket had deteriorated, with the head and foot panels coming loose, but was solid enough to lift. Lots of little spiders had made their home in the wrapping.

When we opened the casket, the most noticeable smell was the mustiness of the damp wood. The corpse was shriveled to the bone, skin black, with hair and mustache still attached. He was wearing sunglasses. (The funeral directors tell me that a surprising number of decedents they’ve exhumed are wearing sunglasses.)

The original casket was deemed unsuitable for cremation, so we transferred the deceased into a new container. His flesh was soft and sloughed at the touch; his suit likewise disintegrated when touched. The corpse remained intact when we lifted him, but the cartilage of his nose collapsed when I touched it. I apologized many times.

The most fascinating detail–besides the sunglasses–was the stain his head had left on the pillow, in which the sutures of his skull were discernible.

Marissa writes: Dear Necromancer, would it be weird for me to write to the mortician who handled a relative\’s body to thank them for their work? The backstory is: I was intimately involved in her care, and I know how much she suffered. Believe me, it was A LOT. I know people in your profession often get “but it didn\’t look like her” and “but she NEVER wore a scarf like THAT” and frankly I want to thank the mortician for making the available choices with scarf, makeup, etc. They gave the family members who weren\’t involved in her care the chance to not know what I know about how she suffered. She was a dignified and gracious lady, but the end of her life visited A LOT of indignities on her…and the mortician who worked on her body made sure that the relatives who weren\’t there at the end didn\’t have to wrestle with that information while they were saying goodbye. Would it be weird to say thank you for that? I mean, would it be the bad kind of weird?

I am the last person in the world to decide what is and isn’t weird, but I can safely say that thanking a mortician is absolutely not bad. In smaller funeral homes, the funeral director who helps the family with services may also perform embalmings, and thus have more opportunities for feedback, be it direct or unspoken. Larger chains, however, often utilize a centralized embalming center, and the embalmer will never meet the family. If something is wrong with the presentation, we’re likely to hear about it, but otherwise we may never know what the family thought. One is unlikely to become a mortician out of a desire for praise, but many of us do in fact want to help families by making a painful event less terrible than it has to be. It means a lot to receive feedback, especially the positive kind. So, yes, if you ever think a mortician did a good job arranging a loved one for a viewing, by all means let them know.

The nights again grow long and cold. As you lie awake in the darkness, turn your thoughts to the grave, and think of questions for the necromancer.

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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The frightening thing about Aunt Tae praying was that she never prayed, not anymore—not since Padilla flooded, she always said. Flooded. An absurd word. Flooded means that water moves, that it has to come from somewhere, and most unbelievably, that our town was once dry land. See, Padilla has been underwater for as long I’ve been alive, so that’s not the strangest thing about it.

The strangest thing is the ghosts.

I think there are more ghosts here than people. Once, I worked up the courage to tell Aunt Tae that I see them all the time.

“You’re imagining things, mija,” she said sharply, and kept grinding spices in the molcajete, her motions muscular even though she’s probably over a hundred years old. She dismissed me from the kitchen after that. I obeyed, because that’s what you do when Aunt Tae tells you to do something, but my cheeks stung with shame.

Abuela Filomena the tyrant is dead and haunting the church where she used to teach Sunday school; sometimes I think Aunt Tae is the tyrant now. Mamá calls her stubborn. Uncle Jesse calls her a rock. I think she’s the strongest person I know. She knows everything in Padilla, from how much salt is missing from Mamá’s calabaza recipe to how to soothe my baby brother Ángel’s colic to whether or not faraway passing hurricanes will disturb Padilla’s waters enough to harm Uncle Jesse’s tomatoes.

That’s why I’m writing everything I know about ghosts down. If I can write enough to make it a book, maybe Aunt Tae will believe me. She won’t banish me from the kitchen if she believes me, and grown-ups believe things they read in books.

Fact One: Not everyone becomes a ghost when they die.

Aunt Tae’s papá died of pneumonia in a mountain cave in Nuevo Leon. Or maybe he was shot by bandits. Or in battle. It was the war, you know, and men everywhere were dying because of revolutionaries with impressive mustaches. That’s what Efrayím says. Either way, he left Aunt Tae and Efrayím orphans. That’s why they came to Padilla to live with Mamá’s grandmother, Abuela Filomena the tyrant, who said Aunt Tae was too dark and made her do the most difficult housework.

But Aunt Tae’s papá is not a ghost. Maybe that’s because he didn’t die in Padilla.

Viejo Jesús died in Padilla. He’s Uncle Jesse’s tocayo, his namesake, and so Uncle Jesse carries his ghost on his back. I’m pretty sure that’s why Uncle Jesse needs a cane. No one else can see Viejo Jesús, so they all think Uncle Jesse’s work in the cotton fields before the flood ruined his back forever. He shows them scars from thorns on his hands and says picking cotton was the worst job he ever had, worse than picking strawberries, definitely worse than his current job of being a cobbler, so people believe it was the cotton.

I wonder if Uncle Jesse knows about Viejo Jesús on his back. I wonder if he ever looks in the mirror and catches a glimpse of his tocayo out of the corner of his eye, if he feels a ripple of somber recognition through the water.

I’ve heard stories that it was all Aunt Tae’s fault, that when her brother Efrayím died while swimming in the river she never cried. She kept her back rigid and her eyes dry. Instead, it rained. It rained so much that Río Purificación spilled over its banks in the night. When Padilla woke in the morning, the town was at the bottom of a lake.

For the first time and the last, people looked up at the surface, blue like a mirror at dusk. Then they lowered their faces and carried on with their lives.

In Padilla, couples wed, have children, die. Primera Iglesia Bautista fills and empties at regular intervals, gentle tides of worshippers lapping its shore. Armando the butcher still starts every Sunday by pounding on Uncle Jesse’s door, insisting Uncle Jesse owes him money and threatening to break his cane over his knee before ever again letting him darken the door of the grocery store. By the time Aunt Tae and I walk past after church, back to our yellow house at the end of Zaragoza Street, Armando is always sitting with Uncle Jesse on his crooked porch with a beer, talking about wives and cousins and tomato plants as if nothing had happened. Content, glistening ripples through the water punctuate their gossip.

Padilla has been underwater for so many years that the surface, with its sky, clouds, and passing birds, is not something most people care about, or even remember. Sometimes, when Mamá tells me to go outside to play, I go behind the abandoned military school, where soft hills of silt lift into ground higher than the rest of the town. Over there, a lean grove of Texas ebony still stands, though the trees died during the flood. Their pale branches reach through the surface like a skeleton witch plunging her long fingertips into a bright pool. I like to stand apart from the trees and look up at the undisturbed surface, trying to see through it, searching for flickers of wings.

Once, in our own back yard, I showed my baby brother Ángel the surface. Look, I told him, though he’s too young to really talk back, beyond nonsense babbles and asking for food or up. If you look closely, maybe you can see herons. He doesn’t know what herons are. I only know about them from my uncle Efrayím. I’ve never seen one. There are no birds in Padilla, not since the flood.

Ángel reached his arms heavenward, pushed against the silty earth with his bare feet, and began to swim toward the surface.

I cried out, half in surprise, half in fear. I had never seen something like that before. My chest threaded with panic; I seized his ankle and dragged him back down, down so hard he fell against me and we collapsed to the ground.

We stayed there a long moment, silt billowing around us. I hugged Ángel’s heavy head tight to my chest. I didn’t understand what had happened, only that it was wrong. Only that he was in danger, and that I should never let him look at the sky again.

Fact Two: Ghosts aren’t scary.

I can’t remember when I saw my first ghost. It was probably my uncle Efrayím. He’s played with me ever since I was little. When I was a baby, he says he used to gently tap the mobile that hung over my crib to entertain me during nap time and knock over towers of blocks to make me laugh. Now, he sits across the kitchen table from me, his chin cupped in one semitranslucent hand, correcting my spelling as I write. He has curly black hair like mine, so short it looks like it must have been cut two days ago, and thick eyebrows like Aunt Tae’s. The curve of his nose is like a mirror of hers, but there is something about how his face moves when he speaks that is much softer. Maybe it’s because he died so young.

I know from Mama that Efrayím died sometime before the flood. Whenever I ask him about it, he shrugs his lean, silver shoulders and tells me it’s not that interesting. When I beg, he relents (he likes to spoil me). But the tale is different every time. Sometimes he was fourteen, other times seventeen. He got tangled in the weeds while diving in the resaca on a muggy summer day. Or it was November, and there were heavy rains before he went swimming in the river and he lost the fight with the current. It’s always altered, always rewoven.

Maybe he can’t remember at all.

He remembers other things, though. Like what birds lived in Padilla before the flood. He tells me all about the noisy chachalacas shouting from their roosts, about what the skies above Padilla looked like after sunset. Now, the surface of the lake deepens from the silvery, light blue of day into something more metallic, something darker, until night washes over the town like a spill of oil. Efrayím says that he and Aunt Tae used to love to watch sunsets from the back steps of the house on Zaragoza Street. The skies changed to orange, then pink; clouds reclined lazily on the colored horizon like pillows, drinking deepening purple hues into their round white bodies like it was agua de jamaíca.

“In the afternoon,” he says, “the stucco of Primera Iglesia Bautista used to gleam bright white in the sun, so bright you had to do this when you walked up the front steps to Sunday school.” He mimes shading his eyes and squinting up at an invisible sun, the silvery skin of his temples crinkling at the corners of his dark eyes. Now, every building—no matter its original color—has a green film of algae and casts bluish shadows. Maybe it’s because of Efrayím’s stories that I look at the surface so much. 

Efrayím is also the reason I know I’m not the only one who sees ghosts in Padilla. He says that sometimes, when I’m asleep, he sits at the kitchen table thinking in the dark until the early hours of the morning. (Fact Two and a Half: Ghosts don’t sleep.) One night, he noticed that Mamá forgot to turn off the lights before going to bed, so Aunt Tae came into the kitchen very late at night.

She saw him sitting at the table.

They met eyes, Efrayím says. The lazy ceiling fan cast shadows over Aunt Tae’s face. These swooped low with each rotation of the blades, gentle like bats at dusk.

Then she looked away, shut off the lights, and walked right out of the kitchen.

If Aunt Tae has seen him since then, Efrayím says, she doesn’t show it. She keeps her back turned to dark corners and her eyes stubbornly downcast before turning on the lights in the kitchen at dawn. “She’s always been like that, you know,” he says. The gentle shake of his head is like the sway of reeds in a current.

“Like what?” I ask.

“Like she refuses to see the shape of things change,” he says. “She’d rather drown the whole town than let things change.”

Fact Three: Ghosts don’t know everything.

Even when you think they should. Even when you cry until your throat is raw. Sometimes they don’t know.

Sometimes they don’t know why, when you’re in the back yard sitting on a worn dishcloth thrown over lake silt as a picnic blanket, trying to teach your baby brother to play tea party, he starts to choke.

At first you think it’s a teaspoon, or maybe one of the cookies that sit on plastic saucers. But there’s no remnant of cookie crumbs on his pudgy hands. Nothing in his mouth when you take his jaw gently in your own hands and open it. The only thing that was unusual, the only sign that anything could have gone wrong, was that before the choking, he was staring at the sky. Dreamily lost in thought.

Now his small body spasms against you; his head, always compared to a melon because it is so heavy, cracks against your jaw. You ignore the pain because his dark pupils are rolling back in his head, and he’s shaking, no, convulsing. His pink mouth opens and shuts, like a fish, begging, grasping, gasping. You scream for Mamá. You tighten your arms around his chest as his neck goes slack, as his body lifts off the dish towel and begins to float toward the surface.

Mamá slams the door of Ángel’s nursery shut in my face when the doctor comes. I don’t think she meant to. Her panic filters through the house like ink, spilling down the hall and infecting everyone.

Aunt Tae takes me by the arm and tells me to stay out of Mamá and the doctor’s way. No te preocupes, she says: She is praying that the Lord will take care of Ángel.

A feeling like falling yawns wide in my chest. Mamá’s panic has slipped under my skin; it will split me in two.

Because Aunt Tae doesn’t pray. Not since the flood. Not anymore.

I yank my arm from her grasp and run to the back door. I stumble into the yard, stub my toe on the steps. It bleeds. I keep running.

“I’m sorry, Señora,” the doctor is saying as I reach the window beneath Ángel’s nursery. “There’s nothing I can do. He drowned.”

“But why?” Mamá cries. The pitch of her voice makes my heart feel like someone had squeezed it into a fist and wouldn’t stop, like it was a lime that had no more juice to give. “We’re all underwater, for God’s sake! Why did he drown?”

Whatever the doctor’s answer is, I don’t hear it. My stubbed toe bleeds. Bright red liquid darkens when it hits water; it rises, billowing like a thin plume of smoke.

The screen of the front door creaks open, snaps shut.

From inside the nursery, the sounds of muffled crying.

And nothing else.

No fussing, no baby babble. No Ángel wailing because the slamming door woke him with a start.

He can’t be gone.

All I need to do is find his ghost. I’ll show Mamá, I’ll show Aunt Tae. Who needs facts written down when I’ll have proof that ghosts are real, that everything is going to be okay because Ángel will be with us forever?

I turn the house upside down, shouting his name in all his favorite hiding places. He isn’t in the back yard, but what about the minnow ditch? What about the gap in the fence that leads to the abandoned military school, to the grove of dead Texas ebony piercing the surface?

Mamá’s panic takes root in me and becomes my own. I run barefoot, convinced that if I stop to find my sandals, if I pause at all, he’ll slip out of my grasp. My breath comes in sharp pangs as I retrace my steps home; I keep trying to shake the feeling that it was my fault, for teaching Ángel to look up at the surface. To dream of herons.

I can’t. It clings to me like algae.

The surface above Padilla darkens to indigo when I reach the house. My toe hasn’t stopped bleeding. It leaves dark, wet smudges across the floorboards.

“Of course he’s not here,” Efrayím says when he finds me crying in my room. I’m sitting on the floor, my back against my bed, clutching Ángel’s favorite wooden block in my fist so hard my hand is going numb. Willing it to smell like him, like his downy cheeks and the sweaty creases of his neck. Mamá won’t open the door to the nursery. This is all I have now. “He’s dead.”

“So are you!” I cry. “So why are you here?”

He looks frozen, like a photograph. He says nothing.

He doesn’t know.

Neither do I.

“Who are you talking to?”

A sob catches in my throat as I twist toward the door. Water ripples as Efrayím does the same.

I left the playroom door open. Aunt Tae could hear me shouting. She’s standing in the doorway now, half-shadowed by the dark of the hall.

“No one,” I say. It comes out cracked, unconvincing.

The playroom door creaks on its hinges. Aunt Tae fills the doorway, fills the room, lowers herself slowly to the floor by my side. She smells like cumin and like laundry soap, and laundry smells like baby Ángel, and all of a sudden I’m an upwelling, a current, I’m the Río Purificación and I’m pouring out and I can’t stop.

Aunt Tae leans against the bed at my side. She makes a sharp gesture with her chin at Efrayím. “Shut the door,” she says, so softly it’s almost a whisper.

He rises and does so, eyes wide. I’m so surprised by her speaking to him that my sobbing catches, slows. Then, Aunt Tae beckons Efrayím with a commanding hand. “Sit with us.”

Again, he obeys, because that’s what you do when Aunt Tae tells you to do something. I guess that’s true for ghosts as well. We sit shoulder to shoulder, Efrayím, me, and Aunt Tae. Aunt Tae takes my right hand. Efrayím tries to take the other. His pale fingers slide through my palm, so instead he rests his hand on my knee. Minutes pass in silence. Maybe an hour. The skies over Padilla are changing, shifting. By the time I finally speak, it is to a darkened room.

“Why?” My throat is raw; my voice sticks in all the wrong places.

Aunt Tae lets out a long sigh. “I don’t know.” She squeezes my hand. Hard and firm. Strong like her. “But we’re here.”

“We’re here,” Efrayím repeats.

These are all the things I know about ghosts. I don’t know any more.

Isabel Cañas is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mexican American writer and graduate of the Clarion West and Odyssey Workshops. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Her novels The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte are out now. To find out more, visit isabelcanas.com.

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Día de los Muertos is celebrated throughout Mexico and wherever Mexicans living abroad can be found. Normally falling on November 1 and 2, in some regions such as Oaxaca it can extend for much longer, being traditionally celebrated from October 31 to November 6.

You need that much time if you are going to do it properly in Oaxaca. There are campesúchil flowers to buy, musical bands to hire, graves to clean, ofrendas to set up, pan de muerto to bake and many plates of food to make.

For these Days of the Dead are the moments when the curtain between the living and the dead is lifted. When the dead can visit us, whisper in our thoughts, reach out across the bridge to touch us. When they come to eat the food and drink the mezcal their loving relatives leave for them on the ofrendas.

The days and nights are when the living honor the deceased and confront death and their own mortality.

Los oaxaqueños celebrate three nights. The first is for los niños, who have left this world much too soon. The second is for los difuntos, some of whose departures we were prepared for, others whose partings shocked us and sometimes shocks us even months and years later.

The last night, the third night, is for los antepasados. The ones whose footsteps walked this earth before us, whose steps echo in the air around us todavía, vibrating up from the ground to pierce our souls. Especially in the mountains, where the sounds of footfalls can travel vast distances.

Celebrating the ancestors carries a great deal of meaning in a place and with a people who still hold on tight to their Indigenous traditions, their languages, and practices. The colors of their food and vibrancy of their songs.

During this autumnal celebration, families set up their ofrendas. On the altars are placed a variety of different, meaningful things: photographs of the dearly departed; items that once belonged to them, whatever they loved or brought them joy in this life; candies and sugar skulls, money and candles, symbolic representations of both Christian and Indigenous beliefs; plates of chicken in mole negro or whatever else they may want to eat; and of course, the mezcal. You cannot forget the mezcal, for during these nights the dead are not only hungry but also very thirsty from their long journey from Mictlán.

The whole ofrenda is then festooned with the campesúchil and other flowers.

In places like Oaxaca, where the traditions run strong, the family will spend an entire day cleaning the graves of their relatives, placing fresh flowers and other decorations. Sometimes these are large structures made of wood and shiny things, elaborate altars in their own right.

At night, they visit their dead, eating and drinking and listening to the music played by the bands they or another family hired. Candles are everywhere, and the air is perfumed with fragrant and intoxicating smells.

There is some disagreement over the origins of Day of the Dead. Some scholars argue that it is purely European, its traditions having much in common with the Danse Macabre. Others promote an Indigenous origin. Or, at the very least, that the holiday is syncretic, pointing to similar festivals celebrated by the Aztecs, including Quecholli, the fourteenth month of their calendar, which fell around the same time as the modern Day of the Dead.

The truth, like so many social practices and traditions in Mexico, probably lies somewhere in between. After all, the ancient Ben ’Zaa (Zapotec) lived among their dead, burying them beneath the patio floors of their houses. For those of higher status, their tombs would be reopened as often as their descendants needed, the femurs of the most venerated among them removed for use in political and religious ceremonies. Similarly, the bundled, mummified relatives of the Ñuù Savi (Mixtec) elite were consulted frequently for advice, for the wisest wisdom comes from those with experience and hindsight.

In a land where people were corn tortillas to be fed to the gods and amaranth dough statues of the gods were consumed by people, where blood was life and skulls were carved into the stones that decorated temples, what does it truly matter how European, Indigenous, or even invented nationalist propaganda this current celebration of the dance between death and life is?

In the end, when the ofrenda, that decorated altar to the honored dead, is built, and the mezcal is poured and shared while the band plays its songs as we gather around the graves, it truly matters not.

The dead are still going to make their visits.

It was 2017, and I was feverishly working on my dissertation, trying to finish it before the grace period after my comprehensive exams ended that same fall semester. A deadline I had already extended several times—I was fairly sure that another extension would not be granted.

I was ready to shed myself of this liminal stage, emerge as a shattered butterfly at the other end of the tunnel. This meant days stuck inside, glued to table, chair, and laptop. But this year I was down in Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead celebrations for the first time in my life, and the festivities taking place outside my window were a siren’s call, often tempting me to go outside for at least a little while and marinate in all that was going on.

That year Agústin, whose house we were living in, let me place a photo of my grandpa on his family’s ofrenda. I’m an infant on his lap, my neck barely able to hold my head. His hands hold mine, a quiet joy on his face. My birth year is neatly written on the back.

I had been thinking about him a lot lately, my grandpa. As if the closer I got to finishing my dissertation, the more palpable his presence was becoming, the veil between us slowly morphing into a gossamer wisp.

That year, Mexico had been hit by two major earthquakes, one off the coast of Chiapas and the other in Mexico City itself, followed by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of aftershocks. Though not anywhere near the epicenters, many places throughout Oaxaca experienced damage.

One such place was the city’s municipal panteón, where tourists are traditionally allowed to visit and observe Day of the Dead celebrations. The municipal government made the decision to shift tourism to the cemetery in the Xochimilco barrio—one of the oldest in the city, as it was both a pre-Hispanic settlement and one of three towns originally established by the Spanish in the early years of the Colonial period.

But Xochimilco’s cemetery is much smaller, much more personal. The people who live in this barrio have deep roots there. The very soil contains and holds dear their abuelos y abuelas, tíos y tías, children, loved ones. All buried there in that cemetery. The people of this barrio spent the days before the celebrations cleaning the graves, arranging flowers around them. Preparing for those moments that the curtain would be lifted and the dead would reach out to the living.

I think that when the decision came down from on high, that the mayordomo and the church elders must have reluctantly agreed to host the tourists. Having never done so before, it was certainly against their better judgment.

I spent those same days neither living nor dead, but as a shadow. Flitting about the edges, a whisper of a ghost, venturing out here and there to remind myself that there was still life existing beyond a dissertation that needed to be written. I spent those days wringing out as many words as I could, then going over them and somehow pulling out more.

The first night I walked carefully among the graves. I did not take pictures; everything seemed too solemn, too heavy. Instead, I observed the tourists stumble their way about, oohing and aahing at the flower displays, snapping away with camera phones. Not as careful of the dead beneath their feet as they should have been.

The second night I returned to listen to the music, to commune with both the dead and the living. To mourn those that I, too, had recently lost. To experience the rawness of grief among a community of mourners. That night, the tourists trampled among the dead. They spoke too loudly, ignored the sacredness of the proceedings around them. Wrapped too deeply in the selfishness of their own experiences.

That night, I gave a stern lecture to a young American woman with a loud vocal fry and her boisterous friends. Reminded them to respect the dead, that the celebrations happening around them were not for their amusement. Not just mere performances for tourist eyes.

The third night, they closed the cemetery to the tourists.

The people of Xochimilco had had enough.

Perhaps at one point, I was a tourist here. But after so much time spent in Oaxaca, so many years walking the hills and the ridgelines, speaking with the people and eating of the food, drinking the mezcal, brindiando de la vida oaxaqueña, as one might say, I had become something else. Yet another liminal stage for me to float through. A paisana and a foreigner, but never a tourist. I know the secrets of the landscape too well, had wrapped myself like quesillo de doble crema around the culture too much.

Sometimes I think this is why my former field project chief was and is so mad at me, has me permanently blocked at the museum, why I can’t be a research associate even today. Why he’ll never forgive me. Because of how easily I had slipped in, till after only a few weeks the workers, well damn, they were calling me jefa too.

The lilt of my Spanish is just too strong. I speak campesino, my r’s singing no matter where they are placed in a word. I have eaten deer and iguana hunted in the mountains. I have been pierced by maguey needles, my blood and my sweat have dripped onto and into the earth. I have almost died in those mountains, several times over. Sliding along the pine needles and oak leaves, wondering if I would ever reach safe ground.

Nimbly I made my way along goat trails that hugged the hillsides, praying that eventually we would reach terra firma. Emerged out of those same mountains just to reach a small pueblo and go inside the nearest store, ask for a Coca-Cola bien frío en vidrio. As if we had appeared out of nowhere, fantasmas that had suddenly manifested there.

And one time, after a temazcal with a curandero where we traveled from birth to death and all the life stages in-between, after our mushrooms had been blessed by his wife, a curandera in her own right, I even saw a god in the clouds. Watched him open his jaws, his feathered, serpentine form winding around the steep sides of the mountains.

I was awed, I was blessed. A veil had been lifted, and I understood the ancestors. I got to peek into their thoughts, know the bent of their minds. How one could envision Quetzalcoatl, witness his being before their eyes. For I saw it too. Magnificent before me.

You can never be a tourist after that.

Not after all that.

I cannot remember his name, only that he wore an impressive sombrero. He was a friend of someone in Xochimilco, had been introduced to us that way. I can remember that one time we chilled in his car though, drinking beer and mezcal and chatting.

By the time Día de los Muertos had rolled around, my partner, Charly, was away in Monterrey. But on that last day, the third night, the man in the sombrero returned. We talked, and I told him that the tourists had been shut out, how funny was that? They had been too rude, I said, too lacking in understanding of the flow of events around them.

But we can go, he had told me. We were conocidos, invitados, we would be fine. He was a friend, and I would be his guest. Besides, didn’t I live in the neighborhood too?

So on the night when all other foreigners had been barred, I was allowed in. The man in the sombrero and I went into the cemetery of Xochimilco, nodded hello at the neighbors. We set ourselves up near some graves. Go ahead. He nodded at one. Sit down. It felt transgressive, but I had his permission and no one said anything. We sat down on some marble graves, passed a bottle of mezcal between us and other compatriots.

At some point the music the band was playing called to us and we danced, there among the graves. Carefully of course, but still our feet flew, hands behind our backs as we twisted and turned around each other following the traditional steps of the village dances I had learned from innumerable fiestas patronales.

The first two nights are serious, appropriate for the grief everyone feels. The third night, ah, but that is for celebrating the lives of our antepasados through the millennia, to celebrate the lives they lived and the roots they established in the earth we trod upon. It was an ecstatic kind of joy, the kind that experiences both life and death all wrapped up together, a bittersweet harmony, and welcomes it.

The veil was gone. Dead and living mingled in dance and music and mezcal. We felt their presence, welcomed their soothing embrace, experienced their happiness that they could have these moments with us. Beautiful liminality, hovering at the edges.

After a few hours, blissfully drunk, I went home. Surrounded by the love of spirits, of my grandpa in particular, whose calm love and quiet joy I had been missing so much.

With that love secure in my heart, I finished my dissertation.

N.K. van Riemsdijk is an anthropologist and archaeologist who has been living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, for over 15 years. Her research focuses on the historical development of the Yautepec region, examining the relationships between individuals, communities, landscapes and place. She often explores these topics, along with other themes such as grief, loss, memory, liminality and liminal phenomena, in her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction pieces.

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When I pole my boat off the shoals I see her:
wavering, rip-step, shadow of arms.
I can pierce her with a thought.
I trail her off my broad back, I drag her body—
slim as it is, made of air and memory as it is—
across the shallows as I turn the craft about.
Her open mouth eats up the depths
of my shadow and my ruthlessness
like they were nothing, her dark teeth
grinding shells and sand under her gums.
Her throat is an anti-shimmer, an ache
in the water, a mine that ends deep
below where light can go. The lighthouse
sends its low moan into the night, and its long-backed shadow
to meet her where she lives. How fear of her
hangs from me, upon me, like tatters of light lost.
When we meet at last in death, she will eat.
But only I will swallow.

Betsy Aoki is a poet, game producer and speculative fiction writer whose work has been published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fireside Magazine and The Deadlands. Her debut poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a National Poetry Series Finalist and winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.

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The girl watches the forest taking over the street and changing buildings, people, and rubbish into trees, bushes, and animals. The world elongates, darkens, and gains shades of green, brown, and burnt orange. The girl is crouching on a heap of quarry stones near her older brother and his best friend, Sammy, who are trading insults in a game of mchogoano. Unaware that they are changing into trees, the boys rub their hands together, each giving the other maniacal grins, each proud of his scathing cleverness: “You are so black, when a stone is thrown at you, it goes back to the thrower to ask for a torch.”

“Only that? You are so ugly, when the devil sees you, he says ‘Jesus.’”

Their foreheads are wet with the sweat of vigorous gesticulation and luminous in the sun drifting down to the land of the dead. The girl watches their heads grow into majestic crowns on thick-barked necks, but they cannot see the old woman sitting on her back, sucking out her spirit.

“Kim,” she begs.

Her brother is too immersed in his game to hear her.

Across the street, Eric from upstairs is counting against the wall of Building Four and growing branches through his ears, and the other children who live on the street are startled antelopes, running in zigzags and trying to find good hiding places.

“Kim,” the girl tries again.

The old woman whispers a stale breath against her cheek. “You have only me now.”

The little girl shakes her head to clear her vision and regains pieces of the world: Kim and Sammy, half a building, a fishmonger sitting on a stool nearby, dropping whole tilapia into the dark, wide mouth of a pan full of sizzling oil.

Then the old woman cackles and spits towards the boys. Suddenly, they are no longer playing: their faces harden, and their bodies bend to war. Kim throws the first punch; they fight like lumps of clay pounding each other into shape, and the old woman laughs and digs her nails into the girl’s shoulders.

“What are you doing?” shouts the tailor from where she sits inside her shop in Ebenezer Shopping Center, her feet spreading roots into the cracked concrete floor. In her hair, yellow weaver birds go in and out of their nests. The little girl shakes her head again.

“Nyinyi,” shouts the tailor as she throws an empty tin at the boys. They stop and consider each other, surprised at their actions. Then Sammy flashes his pink tongue at the siblings and runs off to play hide-and-seek.

“Only me, only me, little girl,” says the old woman, pushing the girl’s head aside to attack her neck again like a calf coming to its mother’s tit for the first time. She is gelatinous in the girl’s head, poisoning her with visions of the forest.

“Kim,” cries the girl.

“Stop disturbing me. Just go home if you want.” The girl’s brother kicks a rock, sticks his hands in his pockets and longingly watches Sammy, who is now at the center of the hide-and-seek group across the street.

When the sky opens, phosphorescence bounces off the muddy water of a disturbed pothole nearby, and a bush grows. The girl’s eyes blur; she is evaporating. She has been evaporating since Saturday morning, when she saw her Daddy for the first time in almost three years, on the front page of the Nation Newspaper, standing under the headline “Doctors Strike Again!”

That afternoon, her brother stole the newspaper from their mother’s bedroom and brought it out into the street to show off. While the girl crouched at the swamp just past the shops, dropping pebbles into the black waters to scatter tadpoles, the other children who live on the street besieged her brother and gushed, “Waah.”

“I am going to be a doctor too,” he said.

Frog eggs lay like strings of mucus on the swamp’s turfs of grass, sparkling, and the place smelled of rotten egg. The girl reached her hand into the murky waters, caught a tadpole, and squeezed it to death. When a still, small voice called her name, she shot to her feet thinking that a neighbor had caught her red-handed, playing with dirty water, and would tell her mother.

But it was only an old woman, who challenged her to a riddle: “Kitendawili?” she said.

“That little voice. That is the devil. Do not answer it,” her mother has said often.

The girl should have wondered at this stranger knowing her name, but the world was a nauseating color that afternoon, and the girl’s Daddy had missed three of her birthdays and had not bought her any new Christmas dresses. And so, although she noted the woman’s short stature and her shriveled skin and her small head full of thick black hair and her too-white teeth and the sticky-sweet smell wafting off of her, the girl answered, “Tega.”

“When it goes out, it cannot be brought back in,” said the old woman.

The girl was the best riddle-solver of all the children who lived on her street, and this was the easiest of riddles. “A word,” she said, before she saw the trick.

That was all the consent the old woman required. She leapt onto the girl’s back, and before the girl could gasp, she planted her lips on the soft, young neck. The little girl felt the hurt of seeing her Daddy in the newspaper leave her, suctioned away. Such relief. She thought she would not mind being emptied.

“I have given you everything. Please,” the girl says to the old woman now.

“Yes, but you must give me something even better.”

“No.”

The old woman is pointing a thin finger at the girl’s brother, who has just kicked another rock and is now seemingly weighing whether or not to go beg his friend to come back to their insults game. He looks so much like their daddy with the widow’s peak, the broad nose, and the small eyes.

There were other men standing near Daddy in the newspaper, holding placards, and wearing lab coats, but their faces and bodies were turned away. Only Daddy looked straight into the camera, as if knowing the girl and the boy would shove each other to look at him for the first time since their mother moved them from the bungalow in Kahawa West to Building Ten here in Zimmerman. The boy passed his hand over Daddy’s face. The girl cried; their mother thought it was because she missed Daddy.

The old woman fills the girl’s mouth and speaks, “Kim, let’s go see Daddy. I know where our old house is.”

“No, don’t,” the girl tries to say, but she has been relegated to a small person inside herself.

“We can go and come back quickly,” the old woman says. “No one will ever know.”

When her brother leans in, curious, the little girl knows there is only one way to save him. She must take the old woman far away. She runs over the sharp, uneven stones studding the murram road to the market. Past the bare-chested men hammering the stones into the road to fill potholes. The little girl runs as fast as she can with an old woman on her back and even faster when she hears her brother shouting after her.

Coming down the road from the market is the milkman who sells milk in plastic bags to the families on the street. He slows his bicycle and grabs the girl’s arm.

“Where are you going, kaschana?” he asks, standing on one leg to keep his bicycle, and the plastic bucket tied to its carrier, upright.

His fingers are gnarled twigs, his eyes are river-smoothed stones, and from his mouth darts the long, curled tongue of a chameleon. The girl pulls away sharply, almost tripping him and his bicycle over.

“Wait,” he says.

The girl runs past the market, past the vegetable stalls, past the plastic items seller and the madman who lives under a tree near the butchery, past the butcher, and the cassette tape hawker of gospel music, past the mini supermarket that throws out a net of clean new smell to trap her, past the shoe repairman, and a porter pulling a mkokoteni piled high with sacks of potatoes. Someone calls her name, but she must take the cackling old woman far, far away and keep her brother safe.

Only when forest suddenly engulfs her in a rush of trees and undergrowth does she understand that the old woman has tricked her into walking across the divide between worlds. The forest of the underworld grabs the girl into its darkness, and for a long moment there is nothing but her scream. Then there are birds twittering, a stream babbling to itself, insects quarrelling, and the wind shaking down leaves like a cascade of seeds over the dry reed-casing of a kayamba. A wet spider’s web traps and breaks the sunlight. Decay and dampness fill the girl’s nose.

But she is no longer herself. She is shriveled, bent over, and barely able to carry her weight. Her mouth tastes of dirt. She is devoid of some concrete beingness.

“Thank you for bringing me back home, little one.”

The old woman is no longer old. She is taller, smoother, standing on strong legs, and wearing beaded calfskins.

“Give it back,” cries the girl.

“You don’t need it.”

“It’s mine.” The girl does not know what ‘it’ is, but she knows it is important.

The woman lifts her by her neck. “Ungrateful little animal. I have helped you, I have saved you.”

She begins squeezing, and the girl kicks her legs and struggles. Then something catches the woman’s attention, and she stops to listen and scan the trees. She suddenly drops the girl and takes off in a sprint. Something jumps out of the dim and chases after her: a long-toothed beast with bright eyes.

There is a commotion, a cacophony, then deathly silence. The girl backs away until she is against a tree. All is menacing shadow. The trees are the same, their barks ribbed and crisscrossed with termite mud tunnels, their trunks rising far above the girl’s head, where a patchwork of leaves shutters off the sun. The forest is speaking, trees leaning in to whisper to each other about the girl and shake their heads. Oh, she sees them. And she can hear the scratching of insects and the beat of butterfly wings from where she sits in a broken body, so far away from home and joy. Birds startle into noisy flight in the canopy. Monkeys screech, scurry, and leap. But nothing comes near her. Hours or days pass.

“Poor child,” someone says, startling the girl.

An Antelope emerges from the trees, then a Hyena and a giant Tortoise. A Hornbill caws, “Intruder. Trespasser,” as it lands on a nearby branch.

“It is much too late,” says the Tortoise with sympathetic clicks of its tongue.

The girl is full of screaming: She has gone mad.

“What are we to do with her?” asks the Hyena. “She is but an empty shell now.”

This is how adults talk about the girl sometimes, as if she were too small to hear them. She lets out her scream. The Hornbill jumps and spews curses.

“I am full of things,” she says.

The Hyena looks about to laugh. “But no heart,” he says.

“No heart, no heart, no heart, empty.”

The girl’s hand goes to her chest. True, there is no ndu ndu ndu there, nothing to mark her as alive.

“Where is it? Where is my heart?”

The Hyena barks laughter. “You gave it to the Trickster.” The pity in his voice makes the girl want to curl into a ball.

“No, no, no,” she refuses his words, waving her hands, then out of the trees jumps a Leopard to silence her shouts.

Resplendent in the majesty of a spotted coat, his golden, slitted eyes shine even in the forest’s dimness. His muscles stretch and tense under his fur, and the bones of his shoulders articulate in their sockets as he steps forward.

“The Trickster escaped,” he says.

“You would not have caught her anyway,” says the Antelope, stripping a young sapling of its bark with tongue and teeth.

The Leopard growls, setting the girl aquiver.

“We must kill her,” he says. “She is an evil, emptied thing. If she remains here, she will infect the whole forest with her emptiness.”

“Evil. Evil. Evil,” caws the Hornbill.

The girl comes to her knees. “Please. Please, take me home. I will go away.”

“It is a mercy, little one. You will die cruelly otherwise,” says the Tortoise.

The Hyena laughs again. He has found an old bone on which to gnaw. The girl searches her whole landscape for an escape. She is painful joints. She is a heavy head full of thoughts. She is a hungry stomach.

“Help… help me get back my heart, please. Help me kill the Trickster.”

“The Trickster does not die. We banished her, but you helped her return,” says the Antelope around a mouthful of bark.

“Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.”

“I will make it right. Please.”

“Impossible!” yells the Leopard.

“Please,” she says, although even she knows she is too tired. If she could only lie down and sleep for a while. But a strange thought comes to the girl, alighting upon her mind as indifferently as the leaf that touches her shoulder before slipping to the forest floor to be one among very many. She considers the five animals more carefully.

“I know you,” she whispers. The animals all fall silent. The Hyena drops his bone, the Tortoise’s neck shrinks towards its shell, the Leopard’s eyes burn, the Hornbill knocks his bill against a tree.

“I know you,” the girl says with the force of certainty.

“But how…” whispers the Antelope.

The little girl is the best riddle-solver on her street, after all, and here is a riddle. The answers come to her fast.

To the Antelope, slender and long-horned with a wet nose, she says, “In the hadithi our teacher tells us at school, the animals always mean something.” She cocks her head, feeling very clever. “Antelope, you are Hope. Because of you, I will search for the Trickster everywhere.”

“Liar, cheat, imposter,” screams the Hornbill.

The girl points at him. “I know you too. You are Confusion and Doubt. I will have to kill you to win.”

“Murderer. Murderer. Murderer,” caws the bird.

“Enough, Hornbill,” says the Tortoise.

“You, you are Wisdom. You know how to find the Trickster.”

“Ke ke ke,” laughs the Hyena.

“You are Cunning. You know how to kill the Trickster.”

“It does not matter what you know. We will not help you,” protests the Leopard.

“You are Strength. You will help me run faster and fight her.”

The trees of the forest shake their branches in clapping. The air thickens with an excitement of insects. The girl smiles up at them to thank them for the leaf of inspiration.

“Help me find my heart,” says the girl, feeling stronger. “Help me, and I will take the Trickster away from the forest.”

“The Trickster does not give back what she has taken,” mutters the Hyena.

“But she has solved the riddle. She is clever. She can trick the Trickster,” argues the Antelope.

The Leopard growls and leaps up onto a branch and stretches out his body. “If I cannot kill the Trickster, how can this child? Going there is only another way to die.”

“Dead. Dead. Dead girl.”

“Not if we help her,” says the Tortoise. “Not if we show her the way.”

The Leopard swings his tail. The Hyena smiles greedily. The Hornbill pulls a worm out of the wood of a tree. The Antelope nods her head as the Tortoise explains: Long ago, the Trickster poisoned part of the forest so that only she could enter it. There, she traps and feeds on the spirits of those who seek stories to hide away from their troubles.

“But she was foolish to leave you alive,” says the Hyena, “because she left a little of herself in you, and you can enter her part of the forest.”

The Tortoise plucks out her eye, which is a lurid marble of colors. “It will help you see the truth.”

The Antelope pulls out one of its horns. “Hold it in your strong hand and stab.”

The Hyena hacks out a necklace of bones. “They won’t protect you from the Trickster’s power for long. You must be clever and fast,” he says.

The Leopard jumps from the branch and slashes his leg with a long claw. “Drink,” he says.

The girl drinks his blood and feels her young body return, her bones grow strong, her skin renew.

“This will not last. You have little time to take back what the Trickster has stolen. You will fail, and I will kill you,” says the Leopard, then he stalks away.

The girl and the other animals look up at the Hornbill.

“I must kill you. You are going to tell her I’m coming,” says the girl.

“Catch me. Catch me. If you can,” he caws, taking flight.

The girl is fast. She launches the Tortoise’s eye and strikes the Hornbill in the head. It falls with a thud.

“Madness,” coughs the Hornbill, before the girl breaks its neck.

How much time passes before she finds the river?

Bringing trembling lips to the cold water, she feels she has walked longer than she has lived. A large forest pig and her piglets watch her. Baboons emerge from the trees to gawk at her and whisper, “She is the one.” Curious eyes follow her, but only the elephants further down the river bank trumpet when she begins wading through the water.

“Don’t go,” they warn.

She is being called to the opposite bank by a scent she knows too well: of the Mwea Pishori rice they eat at home.

Seeing the bungalow again, even with a tree growing through one of its walls, brings a lump to the girl’s throat. The tiles on the roof of her old home are of black clay and overgrown with moss, and the metal door has axe marks from when thieves tried to break in. Her Daddy’s old Peugeot 504, inherited from his own father, is parked outside the house. Its white and blue paint is peeling.

The little girl now understands. They left—her mother, her brother and her—they left, and everything died.

Daddy went for Mass that Sunday morning and returned to find men loading furniture onto the back of a pickup Toyota. The girl sees his face now more clearly than she did then. He spoke calmly to the pickup men, and supervised the loading, but his eyes were small behind his spectacles.

“Daddy,” the girl says, breaking through the sheer curtain at the door.

But there is no Daddy, only an empty sitting room and the switched-off Great Wall TV reflecting the little girl’s face. Daddy’s slippers are standing at the foot of his favorite sofa, and some of the pages of his newspaper have fallen to the floor. The cushions of the sofa have taken the shape of his body. Has he been here all along, waiting for their return? The girl’s head aches. She must find him and ask all her whys.

But the Tortoise speaks in her mind: “Is this the truth?”

Her heart kicks when she sees footprints through the marble eye. They cross the dusty floor toward the inner rooms of the house. They are too large to be Daddy’s. The girl knows that the Trickster is here too.

She puts on the Hyena’s bones and creeps along the walls and into the kitchen, holding out the Antelope’s horn. There is a pot of rice bubbling and jumping on the stove, and the food in the store is rotting. Onions and potatoes in a makuti tray have grown into a small garden. Flies are hopping here and there, stopping to drink juices off the rotting pawpaws, oranges, and tomatoes, then rubbing their feet together with glee.

The girl continues her search in the bathroom that is also a toilet. Then she checks the room where their house girl slept and where she left behind an old bra hanging in the otherwise empty wardrobe. The girl checks under the bed that is mysteriously still here and made, although also in the new house in Zimmerman. She does the same in the room she once shared with her brother. Their small beds stand side by side, and the room smells faintly of urine from all the times they wet their bedding. When they moved, their mother took nothing that Daddy had bought but said they could take their toys, that he was still their Daddy. The girl left the teddy bear Daddy had bought her. It is still here.

And now the last room. The room she hates most: her parents’ bedroom, into which she often snuck in the afternoons to play with her mother’s malachite necklace, a green snake among the bottles and jars on the dresser. This is where the girl stole and spritzed her mother’s perfume. This is where she wore her mother’s clip-on earrings and looked at herself in the dressing table mirrors. This is also where her mother told her and her brother the truth one night, three years ago: “Your Daddy has another Maami and another Kim and another Kendi,” she said.

They were sitting on either side of her, and she had her arms around their shoulders, hugging them to herself, just the same way Daddy is now holding her brother. The girl watches them through the crack between the door and its frame. Daddy’s laugh and the softness of his eyes behind his spectacles makes the girl ache to fly to his side. She discovers she has never hated him. Missing him has worn a hole through the middle of her. But the Tortoise eye shows her the truth: Daddy never looked back, never missed them, never wanted them back. Here sits the Trickster, feeding on her brother’s spirit, and so much more powerful, she does not need to bite his neck.

Her brother is crystal-eyed in the curve of the Trickster’s arm. Even hidden from them, the girl can smell his happiness: Daddy’s mixture of sharp Lifebuoy soap and gentle aftershave. The sound of his happiness is Daddy’s even, lulling voice. But it is the texture of his happiness that terrifies the girl most: its neediness and vulnerability.

She pushes the door open and points the Antelope’s horn at the Trickster.

“Give him back, and my heart too.”

The Trickster smiles Daddy’s smile and says, “Your brother loves you. He followed you here, to save you. Look what love did to him.”

The girl’s brother does not seem to see her. He continues his languid drawl: “Dad, will you take me to Uhuru Park to ride the boats on the water and to eat ice cream and drink Fanta?”

The Trickster pats him on the head. He is two years older than the girl but now is so shrunken that his clothes hang on him.

“Will Kendi and Maami come to live with us and all of us be happy again?” he asks.

The girl pleads with him to wake up.

“Run, little girl, run,” the Trickster says. “When I am done with him, I will correct the mistake of letting you live. Those Hyena bones will not save you. There is nothing you can do.”

This is true. The girl makes herself sore from pleading with her brother. He only looks up for a moment then leans back into the Trickster’s embrace. Finally, she rushes forward and stabs the Trickster in the heart. She does not expect the Antelope’s blunt horn to actually sink into flesh and burn a hole. She does not expect her brother to scream and the Trickster to laugh. The girl drops the horn and stares at her hands. Has she killed her brother?

“Poor child. They did not tell you the cost, did they? They did not tell you who you would have to kill?” says the Trickster, brushing a hand over the girl’s wet cheek.

“Kim, please.”

“Shuush, little one. This is his peace. Let him be. He does not want the truth, he never will,” says the Trickster.

But the girl must try. She wraps her body around her brother. She pours remembrance into him. She calls him, “Kim. Kimathi.” She whispers about things they have done together: moments of disobedience, the cat they stoned a few months ago, games of mchogoano and banoo, the times they have ganged up against some of the other children on their street. But her brother does not break from his stupor.

Days or years pass. The Trickster laughs and laughs and mocks and feeds on brother and sister. And the house continues to decay around them all.

Makena Onjerika won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing and was shortlisted for the 2020 Bristol Prize and the 2022 NOMMO Award for Short Fiction. Her speculative fiction has appeared in Fireside Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Year’s Best in African Speculative Fiction, Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, Isele Magazine and others. This story belongs to a same-titled novel-in-short-stories that blends the real and the speculative. An ADHDer, Makena lives, works, and engages in too many side hustles in Nairobi, Kenya.

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thistle

she’s a princess who romances thorns
wears necklaces of needle-sharp pearls
         plucked from her father’s brow
         strung on mother’s graying hair
      if you try to steal a kiss she will give
      you her lips plucked fresh from the stem
twin pink shells of flesh sitting soft in your palm
whispering hallelujah notes to your shame
                                                  her shame
is colorblind // ravens are her only friends
for fear of her turning against them too

hemlock

we get married on the breast of night

how slow she breathes when we dip our heels
how weak her cries for release when we kneel
upon the broken eaves of her sternum

i have nothing for you to suckle at, she says
no stars to milk from my nipples

/oh!/ foolish woman of constellations

we have no need of nourishment
we have buried all vestiges of mother
father too resides in earthen slumber

we are here in boundless yearning
to rip off the band-aid of the moon
exposing our love to the cowardly sun

rue

you miss
     his smell // his touch
the rot of him
     between your legs

in dark fields
     lambs dream
of kissing
     wolves’ teeth

,,,carrion cannot reshape his joy,,,

let termites wait upon your beloved
let uneaten marrow serve your court
      for what love has crowned

let nothing as petty as life abdicate

Elena Sichrovsky is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. She’s passionate about exploring queer and feminine themes through the lens of horror. Her work has been published in Nightmare, Sublunary Review, Mythaxis, Ninth Letter, ergot press, and others. You can follow her on Twitter @ESichr or read more on her website.

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