They say many things about him. That he has a pale hound with reddish ears, half longdog bitch and half hound from hell. That he himself is that same hound when he wishes it, and then there is no longdog in it. That he built Craig-y-Ddinas, or broke it. Or both. That he slept with the witch Canrig Bwt, who sleeps beneath the great stone above Llanberis, when she was young and beautiful; that they had a child who sailed to Ireland in a glass boat and learnt how to curse up storms from the blue sky. But all I know is this: that he walks over our slate-bled mountains with a dog-lope grace that makes light of the slopes and screes yet hints of the heavy, bloody appetites that drive him; and that his appetites have no end.

Grufydd Treherne once said that he brought only bluetongue and the scab, and wanted to put the farm dogs on him for a caution; but Grufydd is touched, and in any case his flock has always been sickly, and we told him so. Besides, any dog would turn tail and beg for a beating before seeing to that wanderer, and any dog’s man who set them that way would be face-down and toes-up, spine snapped like a rabbit’s leg, before his curs had found their kennels. The Pilgrim brings far more and far worse than the ailments of sheep. I speak of what I know.

Yet I wish now we had let Grufydd do as he pleased and thereby paused the Pilgrim’s walk at Grufydd’s own land, above our town. After all, his daughter is no longer a child, and as for Grufydd, his time is surely near. But we did not, and now the old wanderer—eyes yellow as nettle root, skin grey and mottled as a seal’s—comes down our mountains’ slopes again like some old guilt for which there is no absolution, and walks our little streets with a need that cannot be gainsaid. Yes, I wish we had let Grufydd do and be damned.

But if wishes were coins, beggars would ride horses, and I might as well wish this day had not begun or I had a horse to ride away from it. For this morning, as I opened my curtains to the cold light that had crossed the peaks and fallen on my workshop—my fire not lit, my tools and metals dulled by a grey dawn—I looked up to the wet slopes that seem always as if they are slowly falling onto our streets, a long great toppling to crush our little lives, and saw nothing there but black rocks beneath black clouds and ravens wheeling. Nothing; and yet I felt his tread approaching. So I put aside my poising calipers and watch-keys and mainsprings, and I closed up again the longcase clock that the Reverend had left for me, and I walked about my workshop, setting all the clocks back by eleven hours.

Yes, you heard me right.

Then I looked through the shop window, watching the town awake, for to what end would I work on such a day? I saw the bakery open and Morgwyn pile the warm loaves on their trays, her apron white as Guinevere’s young hands in all the tales. I heard the wooden-toothed tinker who calls himself Cadwallader, though we all know his name is Codner, start his pot-walloping. I saw Grufydd Treherne ride past in a cart, his daughter sat next to him like a golden flower plucked from God’s green meadows.

Later, indeed later by an hour, the Pilgrim entered in a blow of sleet as though the weather followed him, and stood on my workshop floor. The mountain rain ran from him and puddled at his feet, the slate darkening as if he bled wet shadows, which maybe he does. He looked slowly about, left and right, up and down, and the ticking became loud in some clocks and soft in others, and in others still the beats skipped and slowed and then ran ahead, and the Reverend’s longcase made a chime although it had no hand upon any hour that I could see.

“It is time, then,” he said.

“You can see for yourself that it is not,” I replied.

He gave me a long stare, but I held still and stood my ground like they say you should.

“I do not stretch my shanks across Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach for nursemaid games,” he said. “Eleven back may work with some wry-mouthed coblyn fresh-crawled from a tin mine. Not I.”

I shrugged my shoulders only, and gave a half-smile. Eleven back may mean little to him, but words mean less. All know that.

The Pilgrim rocked his head from one side to another, like a man with a stiff neck. “Ah, bach,” he said. “Poor Mab. Poor Mab, now.”

“Save your pity for the next town,” I said. “And nine shames on you if you do not leave us alone and leave us well and leave us in good time. After all we have done.”

“If that debt still stood, Mab, and you believed in it, you would not be playing with your clocks, now would you? And all this talk of we and us, when my appointment is only with you. Eh, bach?” He walked closer and sat at my workbench. He picked up and put down this and that: wire crimpers and wire cutters and swan-necked wire benders; calipers for truing and poising; balance wheels and pinions and oilstones; clamps and mainspring winders. “Little toys for your little games, is it? Look now, Mab. Look well.”

From my box of off-cuts and oddments, screws and wires and wheels and springs and such-like, he took such things as he seemed to need and made a small heap of them. Eyes shut, he began to work them, now pressing together with finger and thumb, now reaching for this tool of mine or that. Pry bars and cup burs, pinion-files and movement holders. How he used these things I do not know, nor how he knew the use of them.

“Look well, bach.”

I looked well, yes, but I looked anywhere except at his bloody machination. I looked through my shop-door window again; the streets of our town are never busy, but that street of a sudden was emptier than ever it should be on a weekday morning. I looked at the bakery; all closed up it was, with neither Morgwyn nor her loaves any more to be seen, as though the day had all at once become a Sunday, if a Sunday ever could dawn in the name of the devil. I looked at the bakery’s terraced neighbors: their curtains drawn, their slate rooves all clothed in rain. I looked at the mountains behind the bakery; all dark they were, darker than they had any right to be in daylight hours. I listened, praying for some sound of man or woman or child; but even Cadwallader had ceased his clanging. An empty, wet, dead day it had become; a day of aborted time and silence; a wandering day; a Pilgrim day.

“Look well, bach. Do you see?”

I could not avoid it then. He had wound it tight, and was holding it up to me: an abomination of mismatched parts that yet made a working whole. The tick and the tock of it were quiet and yet were heard above all other running timepieces in my workshop. Some strange reverberation they made, arising from some regularity of motion that was not made of Man. Some quality they had of inexorable fate and the despair it brings. Something of a funeral march and the slow tramp of many sorry feet.

“You hear it, don’t you? Poor Mab.”

“It is nothing to do with me.”

“Ah.”

In truth, I’d known this day would come, if not for me then for one of the others in the town, though we’d sworn to each other and the listening fairies that the spirit of the Pilgrim’s bargain would count for more than the limit of its words. The Reverend had said that such spirit as it had was worse than the words it was written in, and that we had understood nothing; but then, the Reverend himself understood nothing of why we had done what we had done. Indeed, he is new here, the Reverend, since five years back; the graveyard was already full when he came, and the Pilgrim never once walked the slopes above us nor the streets beside us in four of those five years and some months more. According to our agreement, indeed. A man of God can know nothing of such things.

“You see how I have set it, bach? You see what time it gives? Tell me, then—is it eleven back, or one ahead?”

That yellow-eyed grey-pelt was only waiting; we know that now. The creature—dog-man or diawl or whatever he might be—sticks to us like goosegrass, biding his time, reveling in it, as if all hours and seconds were measured in flowing gold or the passing of human souls and the grief that follows such passings and that gives him such delight.

“Eleven back, Mab, or one ahead? Is it late or is it early? Tell me.”

“There is no need for this. We helped you cease your mountain walking. We gave you rest, for a time and a time, on the flatlands and on the soft and salt waters. We showed you paths that would hold your steps and bring you peace. That you could not stay thus is no concern of ours.”

“Come now. We both know the truth of it. As do your townsfolk friends. Some debts may be deferred, but not forgiven. And there is interest on this debt, bach. Did you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you people directed my steps to Nefyn, to the fishermen there, who were bringing back herring through a storm sent from Ireland—well now. Some of those men were little more than children, and of those that were not, most had children of their own. Where now those orphans? Fodder for the poorhouse and for those who delight in stealing childhoods. Food for grief and early graves. They all want to speak to you, Mab. Man and boy.”

“We told you neither place nor name! We only helped you away from here, to the coast and beyond!”

“And I went there, bach. To the Menai and to Ynys Môn and all around its restless edge. Through swells and shoals and back to the ports; to see fathers and mothers and, yes, their children. So tell your story to the orphans, Mab, when your time comes. They have had no sweet stories since their fathers died. They have a hunger which only you can sate. Now then, I will tell you what I will do. We will make it eleven back, since that is what you seem to want, though you will not say it and it will not help you. There now.”

The Pilgrim placed his instrument, for I will not call it a clock, on my workbench. He got up and showed his teeth at me, like a beast that has been trained to smile but knows not what it means.

“Eleven hours, then,” he said.

My shop door pulled shut behind him, as if by a gust that raced down from the Glyderau. The slate flags were black where his wet feet had walked and stood. Outside, Morgwyn put up another basket of loaves and wiped her hands on her apron, and the tinker hammered at his tin, and a sudden sun made the black mountain steam, and Gruffyd Treherne’s pretty daughter swanned past in a sigh of loveliness.

We do not value these things until we must leave them.

And now, the tick and the tock of the Pilgrim’s seconds echo my pulse, firmer and faster moment by moment. Oh, but his device is adamantine! I have removed the glass from its front—I could not lift up the backplate—and that was the labor of a day. Eight hours, that is. Since then I have tried to interfere directly with its motions, but the hands resist all main force. Two hours I played thus. Then I thought I might stay its wheels with a different approach; with great pains, I drilled a hole through the face—indeed, I thought I had the winning of it then—and inserted a screw, leaving its head proud so that it would stop the hands. Nearly an hour, and such joyous hope I had from it! But as I watched, the minute hand bent aside the brass screw until the screw-head snapped off and scuttered across the table and onto the slate floor. As though the clock’s mechanism were affixed to or levered against some concept far more substantial than the earthly constructions of plate and wire by which we measured our lives; as if the Pilgrim’s clock had eternity meshed with its pinion. Or damnation.

Autumn nights come early, and this night comes early too, and indeed too early. There is rain and wind at the door, and something like the crack of masts in a storm, and surely the stretch and yawn of a dog, or something like a dog, that has all the time in the world. And certainly, certainly the voices of many children.

Chime away, then, damned clock; chime away.

Marc Joan, a biomedical scientist, was raised in South India and now lives in England. His first novel Hangdog Souls, was published in 2022, and his second novel, The Cartoon Life and Loves of a Stupid Man, was published in 2023. Marc has published short stories in anthologies and magazines including Nightscript, Weird Horror, Danse Macabre, This Is Not a Horror Story, The Dread Machine, and others. He can be contacted via www.marc-joan.com.

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in my language moartea e marea                  death is the sea
and the sea is mare, vastness                         that will swallow us all

in my language moartea e mareea                death is the tide
a shifting of matter                                        that must always return

in my language Maria, marea mea                she, named like the sea
is returned to the vastness,                            and becomes the sea

in my language Maria a murit                       and there is no sadness
in seafoam arms, today                                 she holds me as ever

II

only in English do I crumble,
            cut myself on shards of words:

                         Maria has died in
                                     a hospital bed

                                                  far from the sea
                                                      far from home
                                                                   far from
                                                                                me

III

in no language are there any words
for the the low-growling blackness, the opening of jaws
between waves—niciun cuvânt destul de întunecos

and when the sea swallows your past and your future,
you would say anything but the right word:
passed, departed, stins, adormit

a kindness, how the sea fog of language
fills that terrible hollow, so that you believe
she lingers on, nu încă amintire

but in drifting between languages, it finds you
suddenly, the sharp truth—the wave crest
at the intersection of: death, moarte.

IV

there is a sea beyond all words: golden with sun and memory
and us swimming and the future—the future, as far as we can see.

Diana Dima is a writer and neuroscientist living in Canada. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, khōréō magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.dianadima.com or as @dimafic on Bluesky.

Return to Issue #34 | Support The Deadlands

This is what Vik’s weather map looks like when the smoke comes in: Yellowed blobs of fungus on the framed parchment, drifting over heavily inked topography, stacked in undulating layers of relative density. The map changes continuously, according to the rapid tracing of windwatchers hanging high above the world, who monitor its thin shell at all times, day and night.

Most townsfolk don’t bother paying what’s required to keep a weather map in their own home, but like anybody with dead ones still lingering, he doesn’t have a choice.

It’s been nearly eighteen years since the corpsehead acolytes shoved their bony spades into the sand-eaten soil, and folks are pretty used to the weather by now. Many don’t even care about the forecasts anymore, even though the acolytes who survived long enough for prison keep insisting things will only get worse from here.

Not his neighbor, though. Shela takes a keen interest in the weather, with a map much bigger than his and her own windvane on the roof, even though she has no dead. She’s waiting for him at the front gate today, “coincidentally,” again.

Crispy scrub brush rattles next to her, buttressing the wind-beaten planks of the fence she’s leaning against. “So it’s Vik then hey?” she says, very casual. But there’s a bright spark of anticipation in her eye.

“Shela,” he says, equally casual. A large plume of smoke is crawling their way on the map, due by dinnertime. He figures she’ll tell him that, just to get a conversation going. He steels himself, because he is irritated by weather hobbyists.

“You heard then izzit?” She tilts her face, lips twitching into an eager grin.

He can’t remember seeing her so excited before, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead he shrugs flatly and mutters, “Guess na.” Then he trudges across the animal yard to start closing the home’s shutters. The pens that once gave the yard its purpose are rotted by years of sitting empty under blazing suns, unoccupied since the first days of smoke, when folks realized the livestock had to be kept under shelter in order to survive the dead.

Shela watches Vik work in silence for a few minutes, then blithely remarks, “Guess they caught one then hey?”

He can’t help his head whipping around. “What? Where? The vestry?”

She bites her lip gleefully. “Na then, was the dairy hey? Guess they had a little weather last night.” She actually giggles and claps her hands together, thrilled to have such shocking news on offer.

He suddenly doesn’t begrudge her enthusiasm, not even a little bit.

The dairy. Surely that means the churchfolk had nothing to do with it, even though for years they’ve been trying, and failing, to establish some kind of authority over the dead, to undo the work of the acolytes.

“Did they pray?” He holds his breath, silently begging her not to draw out the suspense, like she tends to do with good yarns.

But she is merciful and already shaking her head, cackling. “Na, na prayers, na useless sanctified, just good calfskein drums and some young butter izzit? Heard down at the depot.”

She keeps talking, but he can’t listen, his ears have closed, and he’s repeating to himself over and again: no prayer, no belief, no prayer, no belief. No useless churchfolk, none at all. And they still caught one.

This probably means he can catch one.

Maybe even his mother.

It’s been more than five years since she went under, and he still can’t stop the anger from boiling in his chest at the very thought of her.

Since the day his mother died, Vik’s life seems to play on repeat in his skull, nearly every waking moment. His bed is tucked against the wall in the kitchen, where the fire is warm and crackling, but still each morning begins with a cold spike of panic in his belly, because the first thing he hears is the churchfolk pounding on the front door, until he reminds himself it’s only a memory.

In these endless recollections, by the time his mother starts taking ill, young Vik is already an avowed enemy of the churchfolk, if only inside his secret mind. Since the day they finished the new vestry he’s felt their influence growing in the town, making the air heavy on his neck, getting harder to ignore with every cycle. He hates it. He can’t stand the way they look at him like an outsider, here on the same stoney roads where he’s lived every day of his life.

But their worst crime is teaching his mother to do it too.

He spends the final years of his childhood wrestling with the agony of her increasing distance, even while they sleep under the same roof each night. By the time he comes into his own age she is fully lost to him, refusing even heartfelt conversation with anybody who isn’t consumed by their own fervor. Refusing to consort with any form of unbelief, even in her own home.

Even in her own blood.

He begs her every day to see the healers, but the healers are not churchfolk, so she refuses, scolding him harshly and admonishing him to seek only the light, above all other considerations. Eventually she can’t eat, and can barely drink even with his help, which she accepts only begrudgingly. She is shriveling away before his eyes, and he can’t stop looking over his shoulder like someone hunted, his skin crawling with the certainty of imminent doom, a disaster lurking in the corners, waiting to spring upon them both.

Desperate, he agrees to join in her morning prayers once—just once—to plead for her body to be made whole again, and for the distance between them to shrink back into the familiar intimacies of his youngest years, when the father left forever. Long before she ever met the churchfolk. Long before the weather had even begun.

Young Vik tends to resent the father, who sleeps under their roof only on rare occasion, even at the best of times. But when the man leaves town with a caravan, never to return, Vik’s mother feels the absence keenly, and weeps openly for days on end. Yet she refuses to discuss the loss with Vik, and never seems to wonder whether he might feel some of the same pain, having suffered the very same loss. Still, before long she is seeking his comfort, as the only piece of the man she has left. She wants his companionship constantly. She holds him in her arms and sings songs. She plays with him without needing to be asked. She throws sudden fetes at the slightest occasion, just to hear his laughter and feed him delicious food.

But that was long ago, and now this prayer is the first time she’s looked directly at him in years.

He sees the bright flicker of flame in her eyes when they conclude the prayer together, so wide and satisfied at this apparent conquest for the light. But he shakes his head and says gently, “Na, mema, never for them hey? I done it for you. Only for you.”

Then the flame dies, and her eyes narrow as she fills the home with chilled silence, and soon they’re pounding on the door until she’s taken away for the daily meeting at the lantern, outside the vestry, and he never sees her alive again.

And now, it’s not her absence that threatens to split his head in two. It’s not her empty bedroom, shut tight and buried in dust. It’s not the pantry doors or the roughly hewn floorboards, whose rattling cacophony fills the home during hard weather.

No. It’s not that she left him here to face it all alone.

It’s that she won’t stop coming back.

By the time he climbs out of his own past again, he’s sitting at the rickety table inside the house, and the morning has aged into afternoon, and Shela is long gone from the garden. She’s familiar with his spells of inner retreat, so she finished closing the shutters for him. That’s good. He’ll need to keep the smoke out while he prepares the capture. He must know how first, though. He hadn’t heard Shela tell him how exactly, or if he had, he doesn’t remember now.

He doesn’t know he’s stood up until he’s bursting through the front door and running for the dairy. It’s all blinking dazzling sunlight out here, and a scorching breeze, except for a shadow in the west, where smoke is already building behind the long horizon, peeked above the needle trees on the ridgeline.

This sight spurs him on, feet pounding dusty road. He guesses three or four more hours, until it’s time to verify the shutters and bar the door.

He wishes he’d remembered to check the map before leaving.

The dairy is just a span and two skips away, over the ridgeline toward the plains, so he’s there within the half hour, hammering heavy double doors at the milking barn. They’ve had gawking visitors all day, so the bottle boy answers immediately. There’re already two other groups inside to see the catch, townsfolk Vik recognizes only in passing.

The air is heavy with animal stink, piled up in the low rafters by endless years of milkers trotting through. Complacent livestock are rustling all around, and he can tell they’re savoring the calm after a storm.

“Had the Headsfolk here all morning izzit,” the bottle boy intones with humble import, while weaving through the gloomy milking stalls. “Said they’re going to prison right now to ask the acolytes what this means hey? Come, come, see. Na cares, it don’t move. He don’t move. He just a smoked shell now izzit. Empty, empty.”

He swings a generous arm, ushers Vik close to the catch. They both wobble their heads in polite farewell as the visiting townsfolk shuffle off into another room, muttering among themselves in tones of deep concern.

The bottle boy says, “His auntie one of our dairy marms, brought him up herself right here. He been coming twice a cycle at least, depending on the weather, since he got caught in the feed grinder years back and went under. Took him a while to find the smoke, but now he ride it every time it come, banging and crying on our roofs, begging to get inside, scaring the milkers awful. His auntie can’t take it, has to hide in the cellars and stuff her ears with fur every storm. Even so, she still living here usually, working the feedbin just the same, near every day.”

The bottle boy looks down at the withered shadow on the ground and shakes his head with sympathy. “But not today izzit. Today she gone to pray for him at the lantern, make sure he stay in the hole from now on, outta the smoke.”

Vik’s head snaps up and he says sharply, “Told me you didn’t have to pray when you caught it.”

The bottle boy looks at him in surprise, then waves a placating hand. “Na worry, na praying here, na more churchfolk in dairy anyway, except for her and a couple others work in the breeding barn. Just me and the milkhands in here last night, plus their drums. We caught him with young butter izzit?”

Vik sees the bowl the boy is pointing at, sitting on the dirt floor, filled with creamy white butter still fresh out the bucket, without even salt yet. The dead one is lying next to it, like the oily silhouette of a shriveled bug.

He stares intently for just a moment then looks away, face a mixture of disappointment and disgust. He sighs. He can’t believe this was ever a person. The dairy marm’s boy must not have been like Vik’s mother when he went under. Not at all.

Vik has already seen his mother’s face in the smoke once. Just once, during real bad weather, through a broken shutter that keeps beating itself wide open, few years back. He’s whimpering as he desperately hammers it shut with a sharpened peg, while she wails and bellows in the distance, past the garden gate shaking in the wind, and then suddenly her head is barreling out of the smoke to fling itself at the window in a spray of vile spittle, mouth wide, eyes rolling back, and it looks just like her.

Just like she’d never gone under.

Not this filthy rag crumpled next to the butter. It could’ve been silage kicked aside by a milker.

Not his mother. She won’t look like that, if he catches her tonight.

He doesn’t know he’s leaving until he’s pushing through the barn door, and the bottle boy hollers after, “Gone off then hey? Breathe clean tonight izzit!”

“Breathe clean,” he mutters vaguely, quickly wobbling his head before breaking into a sprint.

Smoke is already spilling over the arid plains.

He should’ve checked the weather map.

He doesn’t need to be told how to catch one anymore. He understood immediately, soon as he saw the pristine bowl sitting on the dirty barn floor.

The dairy marm’s boy loved butter. They’d given it butter. Even though when the smoke is here, every part of you begs and moans to fight against it, to keep it out whatever you do, and don’t give the dead what they ask for, not even a little bit. Because what they ask can’t be given. They serve the smoke now, and the smoke wants you to come back with it, back to the gaping hole the acolytes dug into the high plateau with their sharpened bones.

Back to the smoking pits that spew weather from under the world’s hollow shell.

Back to the pits where the dead learn to ride.

You can feel them, like beacons in the distance, far over the horizon. You can feel the pull of the pits, waiting for you, as if the whole of your life has been lived on a high cliff, and the fall was inevitable this whole time, and you’ve known it all along.

You’ve known it all along.

But them at the dairy had ignored this terror, ignored the pull, and given the shrieking boy a bowl of butter they’d churned in a frenzy only right that moment, while the roof rattled and bucked overhead. Then they’d trapped its gorging body with drums, and waited for morning to blow the smoke away.

That was how to catch your dead.

Izzit.

The gusts are shoving at his heels when he reaches the garden gate, and Shela’s windvane is humming in vibration, deep and low. Vik catches himself wishing she were waiting for him, but he stifles the desire to call out and rushes inside instead. Nobody visits other families during bad weather anyway, lest that household’s dead are tempted to find their own home next time around. He knows this.

Still, imagine the story Shela would have to tell at the depot come morning. Vik’s mouth twitches upward at the thought.

He bars the front door the moment it slams shut. The weather map is a spilling fungal mound, seething on the wall, and the sky is already gone black outside. He is righteous with determination as he marches to his mother’s door and flings it open, but he freezes at the threshold, legs suddenly weak.

He stares into the darkened bedroom much too long. An unsafe amount of time.

The wind is howling against the walls when he’s finally able to drag his feet through the dust dunes covering warped planks, before snatching a candleholder from her bedside shelf and skittering back out with a slam.

The air was so dry in there. Desiccated by absence. He coughs wildly, until his heartbeat is pounding in his ears and his sternum is tight.

Shela’s windvane moans outside, a throbbing susurration that touches his bones. The very walls are trembling all around, and he can feel the pits in his mind, feel the texture of their wounded ground on his skin, along with a cold stab of rage at what it’ll take to silence their call forever.

He brings a skeined drum and sits with crossed legs near the front window, each breath a ragged burst from flaring nostrils. He glances at his mother’s door one last time, then looks down resolutely and focuses on the task at hand.

He lays out a woodbound book, pulled from his mother’s old leather chest, stuffed deep beneath the floorboards in the pantry. She’d given it to him as a gift once, then berated him for days after discovering it tucked under his bed, still tied and untouched. The hollow texture of its wooden cover is unfamiliar to him, even after all these years, but thanks to her constant worship, he still knows exactly which page to open.

Next to the book he carefully arranges a single blue candlestick, lit from the kitchen coals. His bowl of butter.

The flame flickers, and Vik watches shadows bloom all around, filling every surface, dancing with every exhalation, as if the wind were already inside the house. He closes his eyes, holds the drum with trembling hands, and begins to pray for the second time in his life, reading carefully from the page.

A part of himself is emptied of fear, now that the moment is imminent. He’s even a little eager for the possibility of having one more chance to reach his mother face-to-face. Perhaps a chance to share a few words with her.

A chance to be heard.

It is this hope which gives comforting weight to Vik’s body, despite his fluttering heartbeat, when her first hungry scream pierces the wind, already racing toward him from the ridgeline. He rises steadily and unlatches the window with careful deliberation, before resuming his place behind the candle. The shutters shake against their loosened restraint, growing louder with every gust.

Vik hopes he’s ready, but can’t stop thinking about how little he’s prepared for this moment otherwise. Perhaps he should have waited until the next storm, or talked the plan over with someone else. Anyone else.

Maybe he should just—

And then she is here, bursting through the window with a splintered clatter, exactly as he remembered her before.

The face looks just like her. Is her. But behind, only the vague impression of what form followed in life. Only dimly disordered outlines of her forgotten body, pushing against smoke that eddies around her like water.

His heart falls, because her eyes are already fixed on the candle flame, seeing nothing else, and he knows immediately that she will never speak to him again. They said the dairy marm’s boy had begged and pleaded, but Vik’s mother has no words left inside of her. No love. Only guttural sounds. Only the animal yearning of a dead thing.

His throat thickens and his eyes go blurry with tears. She is gone to him. Forever.

Vik grips the drum tightly and continues weaving its beat into the air, determined to put a permanent end to this pain. Finally. He isn’t sure whether the prayer is helping at all, but doesn’t dare stop. Yet he understands the drum’s function intuitively. He can feel how it shapes the air in the room, and sees the smoke gradually turning into stillness around her body as he experiments with tempo and timbre. Sees it tightening. Holding.

The house is so dry.

Vik swallows, the feel of sand in his mouth, and as the trap draws closer a wave of guilt moves through him, flipping his belly upside down.

She doesn’t deserve this. He should let her go.

He closes his eyes, prayer momentarily forgotten, then jumps in surprise, heart pounding, as she snarls at the interruption. He’s broken her fixation, and he regrets it instantly, every nerve in his body screaming with new vigilance.

You are hunted.

Flee.

Now her dead eyes are locked on his. Now they are burning with fury.

Maybe this was a mistake.

He peels his parched lips apart and says with forced hope, “Mema?”

She snarls again and gnashes broken teeth, and a string of thick spittle falls off her purpled tongue to land at his feet, instantly filling his nose with the hot ammonia buzz of withered carrion, baked in endless suns.

Gasping for air, Vik recoils into himself, and becomes smaller in the room, and she advances toward him to fill the space, and now he knows what a mistake this was indeed.

He is barely in control.

If she moves on him again, he won’t be able to stop her. He is certain.

He’s forgotten a key component of the bottle boy’s story. He’s forgotten the milkhands and their drums. Their multiple drums.

His breath moves in ragged bursts. He should have told Shela.

He should have called Shela.

He should scream out her name, right now. Do it.

Do it.

But instead Vik redoubles his efforts with the drum, desperately trying to build a wall between his body and his mother with every beat. It seems to work for just a moment, as she holds still again and her eyes drift back toward the candle’s flame.

He dares to loose a sigh of relief, but is certain he can’t keep this going all night. He considers making up a new prayer to ask for strength, just to see if it’ll help.

Then a low moan rises in the garden.

Vik’s head whips toward the open window, eyes widening in disbelief as a tattered shadow squirms out of the smoke and pulls itself into the house, body scraping across the window frame with a fermented gurgle, before plopping to the floorboards in a sickening thud.

The thing is nearly formless, all ragged edge and glistened moisture, but for just a moment its eyes come into focus, and they catch Vik’s and turn him into a child again.

“..m.Y…..bO.oyy,” his father croaks, rolling toward him like a mudslide.

Home at last.

Vik jumps to his feet and takes a step back, every limb shaking. He glances at the candle, silently begging it to grab their focus again.

His mother beholds the new arrival, then turns to Vik and grins triumphantly.

His stomach sinks.

“Let me alone,” he pleads. “You’re the ones who won’t leave. I have no one else.” He sobs but chokes it off immediately, shaking his head, because there’s no time.

His father joins his mother, and Vik feels the beat of the drum growing diffuse and weak in his hands, and panic stabs at his throat, because there’s no way out, so he lets loose one last prayer inside his secret mind. One final, simple hope.

Don’t let me ruin another life.

Don’t make me Shela’s dead.

Please.

His parents move toward him, flickering shadows dancing around their putrid forms, tracing over walls that once rang with his laughter and bled with her tears.

He stares into their eyes and whimpers helplessly, “But I love—”

They pounce, a bright flash ripping through his skull, a concussive blast of pain behind his nose, then the candle is by itself on the floor, and its flame is rolling under—and the home is empty.

It’s empty.

Smoke floods every room, cascading through the naked window, before disappearing into blackness as the candle topples over and suffocates itself.

The walls buck and rattle, and the weather map cracks free of its mount with a crash, a thumping impact swallowed immediately by the bellowing storm.

Outside, Shela’s windvane howls into the night, bearing witness to cowering townsfolk, until morning breaks at last into stunned silence, and a graying dawn falls like ash upon moldered animal pens.

A breeze jostles the garden fence. The windvane points directly at Vik’s front door, cracked and dangling from one hinge.

On the threshold of his home, the rustling pages of a woodbound book whisper into the shadows.

Stephen M.A. is a gay he/him first-generation tribal descendant originating on a federal reservation in Big Sky country. He now lives and writes in New England. His work has also appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Apex Magazine, and his debut short story collection, plus other novels, can be discovered at smapublishing.com

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We walk through a forest of petrified trees:
poems in an extinct language
memorized by stone.
I love them for their ability to outlive me.

We are scavengers
at the whale fall of prehistory.
The dead things we burn are burning us.

I want my daughter to outlive me.
I want to donate my body to paleontology.
I want to set myself on fire for my child,
but the fumes would hurt her little lungs.
I will leave a plastic fossil.

I’ll be ghost in the groundwater, blood
for oil, as in toward the creation of,
not in exchange. When life hands you
an extinction event, make fossil fuel. When life
hands you your own tail, swallow it.

My daughter breathes in dinosaurs.
I hold her in the soft parts of myself,
biodegradable, already forgotten.

Lindsay King-Miller is the author of Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girls (Plume, 2016). Her fiction has appeared in Fireside Fiction, Baffling Magazine, and numerous other publications. Her debut novel, The Z Word, is out now from Quirk Books. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and their two children.

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Whole city came back wrong, an old man says as he buys a lottery ticket at the liquor store window. If I win big, I’m getting out of here.

The resurrection of New York had been the greatest feat of necromantic magic known in the modern age. As usual, no one had wanted the necromancers there at all.

They’d started with witches, back in that winter three years, a million lifetimes ago. Between stockpiling food and hoarding toilet paper, people started buying up good-luck spells. A blue candle, for protection. Spell jars from the back of bodegas, promising to catch and hold evil. The mayor had counsel with three of the city’s wisest crones, who instructed him which runes he could lay at the city’s ports to make sure the disease didn’t take hold.

Within a week, as it did, the witches admitted this was beyond their scope. The wizards at Columbia and NYU and Hunter raided their libraries as classrooms began to close and lectures moved to Zoom. No one, except the wizards themselves, had much hope that some historical magic would turn back the plague. They tried a summoning that had been worked against the Black Death in Hamburg in 544 and a potion of chocolate and gold that had stemmed the tide of smallpox in sixteenth-century Mexico. Perhaps those spells had worked in past centuries. They did not work this time.

Healers came then, from around the world. They laid their wise and steady hands on the straining chests of the dying. They performed careful and subtle magics. Clean white light could be seen in bursts through the windows at Mount Sinai and Harlem Hospital. At 6:30 every night, people would stand on their fire escapes and bang pots and chant, wishing strength, strength, strength upon the healers who had come to save them.

They saved many. They erased pneumonias and rebuilt damaged brain tissue and stemmed infections that had reached the heart. One patient at a time, while numbers continued to climb, while the healers themselves began, slowly, to burn through their reserves of magic, and then to fall ill themselves.

The city started to empty out, after that. Healers went, broken, home to their own families. Those New Yorkers who could afford to fled, to second homes on Long Island or their parents’ houses back in Kansas. The hospitals filled to bursting, and then the morgues. Those who weren’t sick yet hid in their apartments, closed up tight as corpses in their coffins, and those who were sick died alone and their bodies were stacked up in refrigerated trucks because there was nowhere to bury them.

That’s when they called for the necromancers, as a last resort. Necromancers are used to being a last resort, and they don’t take it personally. They came when they were called, just as the healers had, though no one cheered for them.

They wore masks and gloves, for necromancers tend to have delicate constitutions and a strong sense of self-preservation. They stayed in the emptied hotels at the city’s expense, they were flown in on private jets at a cost of millions. But they came.

Not to lay the disease to rest. But to bring the city back to life.

They gathered in Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. They gathered where the crowds were not, where the confetti would not fall and the ball would not drop. They stood hand in hand, and chanted darkly, and summoned dark powers in the darkness.

The schools opened up, and then the theatres. Tourists returned. New restaurants opened. One day, in March, with a tender feeling of joy in the air, it suddenly felt possible to walk down the street just for the pleasure of it, to breathe in the still-cool spring air.

The necromancers did not wait for thanks or censure. They slipped away, back to their labs and cellars and their own apartments. Maybe they saw the signs.

It’s the literal signs people notice first. Protect your neighbor. Stay six feet apart. Or simply Masks required. These signs remain on sidewalks and the doors of businesses, growing tattered with the months and then the years, as people begin to ignore them.

An old woman on a subway car, her eyes sparkling with terror above her mask as the young man next to her coughs, not even bothering to cover his mouth. The returning wealthy getting into bidding wars over Tribeca lofts, while those who’d scrubbed the hospital floors in those darkest days are forced from their homes into the shelters, then the subway system, then the streets.

There are sudden, brutal acts of violence, and there always were, but they’re different now, somehow. Now they carry with them the flavor of a sacrifice. A blood-price paid.

It’s not easy to find necromancers. Normally, they come when they’re called or they don’t. This time, they don’t. A series of ads are run, on Times Square billboards and in the TV screens in the back of taxicabs. Are you one of the New Year’s Necromancers? Call the hotline now—

The city’s cockroaches get bigger. The size of dinner plates. The subways begin to freeze in place, sometimes an hour at a time, sometimes more, stealing cumulative days of life away from the hapless commuters stuck inside.

City employees post on magical subreddits. Does anyone here know a necromancer?

Eventually, the necromancers get sick of it. They prefer to rest in peace. They appoint one of their number to call the city’s hotline. At first, the call-center worker on the other side doesn’t believe what’s happening. Then, the quiet, breathy voice.

“We bring back the dead. We don’t heal the living. That’s up to you.”

The phone goes dead. The city goes on living. A half-life of inequity, of poverty and excess, of untreated disease and addiction and decaying transit and festering garbage. But it lives, and perhaps it could heal, in some feat beyond any magic imaginable.

Anya Leigh Josephs is an author of speculative fiction living and working in New York City. Their previous publications include Fantasy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, tor.com, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and many others. Anya is also the author of Queen of All, a queer fantasy novel for young adult readers.

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Vision and Death

Pam writes: I work in aged care and my facility makes a big deal of making sure glasses are removed once a resident has passed. The reasoning is that they don’t need them when they’re dead and they “look silly.” Personally I think my face looks naked without my glasses. I feel they are a part of me and I wouldn’t want them taken away when I die just because I don’t “need” them anymore. Does a corpse wearing glasses really look especially strange?

Many families have strong feelings about keeping glasses on their loved ones. One of my professors clearly had a lot of deep-seated frustration about this topic. His stance was that people usually don’t wear glasses while they’re sleeping. We never suggest that a decedent in their casket is meant to look like they’re asleep, but they are lying down with their eyes closed.

As someone who wears glasses but doesn’t want to fall asleep in them, my personal preference is to put a decedent’s glasses in their coat pocket if they’re wearing a jacket, or in their hands. Many people prefer to put them on the person’s face, though, and if that makes someone look more like “themself” to their loved ones, I would never discourage them.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint as someone who picks up dead people from nursing homes, however, I appreciate your facility’s removal of glasses. The fewer belongings–especially small, breakable or valuable ones–that we have to take with us on a first call, the better. I would much rather such things be kept by the family and given to the funeral director later. The fewer times they have to ride with us, be logged into a safe, or otherwise change hands, the happier everyone is.

Danielle asks: What is your stance on human composting?

I’m all for it! Composting is a much better alternative to landfill waste, or putting a body down the garbage disposal. Think at the sink!

Err, that is, I’m in favor of any means of disposition that reduces energy, waste, and funeral costs. Composting is still a complicated process–if you want a more peaceful return to the earth, I would suggest green burial. However, the combination of human composting and alkaline hydrolysis opens the possibility of elaborate funeral gardens, and–all joking aside–that sounds like a beautiful way to decompose.

Eden wonders: I keep dreaming of a dead loved one. What does he mean to tell me?

Oneiromancy is not my specialty, I’m afraid. I would need to know more about the signs and symbols present in the dream to have any hope of constructing a meaning. Let us assume that he is not haunting you because of some nefarious deed you committed. Is he trying to warn you of danger? Lead you to a long-lost treasure? Or perhaps he merely suggests that the connections we form in this mortal incarnation are more valuable than any promise of paradise, and to love and be loved is one of the greatest things any person can achieve. We cannot possess those we love, however, and eventually we separate, willingly or no. May your memories bring you joy, and may you see the marks your loved ones leave upon you and their world after they’re gone.

As a wise android once said, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Many things change, but death remains. So too does the necromancer, although the format of our publication has altered. Submit your questions through our portal, or wherever else The Deadlands can be found.

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 social media as @stillsostrange.

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Every day after school I had to pick up the mail. My family rented one of the bigger mailboxes in our small-town Iowa post office, but sometimes there would be a pink slip in the box, meaning I had to go to the counter to pick up a package that was too big to fit. A few times a year, I would hand the pink slip to the clerk and in exchange be handed a 4”x7”x6” box labeled CREMAINS. Cremated remains. I had always assumed this was a tongue-in-cheek term used only by people in the funeral industry, but it is a real word and evidently in the top 12% of searched words in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

Our family didn’t have a crematory—our funeral home business was too small to justify it. When someone opted for cremation, my parents would load the body in the back of our white minivan, drive it 95 miles to the city of Cedar Rapids, and drop it off at Roland Wilber Vault Company and Crematorium. A couple of weeks later, a pink slip would show up in our mailbox. I would get the package from the postmaster, look at who it was—they still printed the identity on the box in the pre-privacy 1980s—and put it in my backpack. I would walk the two blocks home, my steps punctuated by the swish swish coming from my backpack. Arriving home, I would pass by the ramp that led to the casket display room in the front of the funeral home and enter the alley to get to the back. I would pass another ramp, this one leading to the embalming, or “prep” room, and climb up the thirteen steps to the entrance of our apartment. If my parents were downstairs “prepping a body” or “making arrangements” with a family, I’d put the box of cremains on the dining room table with the rest of the mail for them to collect later. It was routine.

One day, a neighborhood friend came over after school, and we cleaned off the cluttered table to set it for supper. She gathered up our homework and put the papers and books on top of the pile of Better Homes and Gardens and The Director magazines stacked on the chair in the corner. I picked up the box leaning against the bouquet of gladioli and chrysanthemums my mom had assembled from a sympathy arrangement left behind after the last funeral. I read the label and smirked.

“Hey, put this on the counter.” I tossed her the box.

She caught it and looked at the label. “Hey! This is my neighbor!” Sure enough, her next-door neighbor’s cremains had arrived earlier that day. She laughed, tossed the box on the counter, and reached up to get the dinner plates from the cabinet. My attempt to freak her out had fallen flat. As the neighbor-friend-cousin to the funeral home family, death had become routine for her, too.

While they of course complied with people’s wishes, my parents have never been fans of cremation. I think a big reason is because, without a crematory, they never made any money from it. No embalming services, no casket sale, no cash. They are also Catholic, and until 1963, when the Vatican begrudgingly accepted cremation, it was forbidden by canon law. In 2016, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known (affectionately, by some) as the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, issued new guidelines in Instruction Ad resurgendum cum Christo (“To rise with Christ,” if my single semester of Latin still serves). Burial is still preferred because it is “above all the most fitting way to express faith and hope in the resurrection of the body.” From my point of view, if I could believe in something like the resurrection of the decomposed body, it does not seem like a big leap to also believe that God could put ashes back together and resurrect a cremated body. If the faithful do opt for cremation, they must follow a few rules: bury the ashes in a cemetery or other sacred place; no displaying on the mantelpiece; no scattering; no separating the ashes (i.e., to scatter in various places or to share among loved ones); no using the ashes in commemorative objects like jewelry. In December 2023, the watchdog eased the rules a tiny bit more, allowing families to keep “a minimal part of the ashes” in a sacred place of “significance for the history of the deceased person.”

My mom may have her Catholic loyalty to shoulder her preference for burial, but she also admits to having watched the cremation process and claims it to be “just horrible.” “I hope you have more respect for my body than that,” she has said on more than one occasion.

The process of embalming is not a gentle one. I grew up seeing bodies on the embalming table, old women with breasts hanging off either side of their torsos, carotid artery opened with a tube sticking out of it. Pink fluid, dubbed “bubble bath” by my siblings and me, flowed from a gurgling tank attached to the wall at the foot of the white ceramic embalming table into the artery while blood gushed out of the jugular vein next to it. The blood flowed along the length of the body and drained into the oversized toilet at the foot of the table. My parents deemed gushing blood appropriate viewing for a child, but I was never witness to gluing or wiring a mouth shut. I never saw my parents wriggle spiky eye caps under eyelids to secure them in place. And I never, ever got to watch my dad “aspirate,” the process in which a large needle called a trocar is placed into the stomach, lungs, intestines, etc. to suck out the fluids, which are then replaced with “cavity fluid.” The hole left by the trocar is closed up with a button that is screwed into place.

Embalming replaces body fluids with chemicals. Cremation combusts, vaporizes, and oxidizes dead bodies into basic chemical compounds. One use of chemistry delays decomposition, and one accelerates it. Neither is gentle.

I do not say this to my family. We are a burying family. Period. We are a family that puts value on giving families the opportunity to say goodbye, preferably to a body that looks exactly like they did when alive and well. Even if someone was not awarded a lot of dignity in their final weeks or moments of life, they get it in spades after it is over.

As we prepared to sign the consent papers to take our newborn daughter Cecilia off of life support, I remembered something and stopped the pen in midair. I straightened up and looked at the ICU nurse who had been with us the whole night.

“Can we donate her organs?”

She inhaled. Exhaled. Her shoulders collapsed just slightly under the military-like epaulets of her Namibian nurse uniform, her brown-eyed gaze never leaving mine.

“That’s very generous of you to offer, but since we don’t know the cause of death, we won’t be able to use her organs. I’m very sorry.” She knew that no matter how kindly she said it, it was adding insult to injury. My mind’s voice asked, “Not even her corneas?” but my body’s voice stayed silent, and my hand signed the paper.

We had to leave her at the hospital; with an unknown cause of death, she was destined for autopsy. We left her wrapped up in a yellow-and-blue striped receiving blanket in the incubator. I found comfort in her face not being covered by a sheet, but at the same time that made it feel like abandonment, leaving my daughter like that. That was my gratifying goodbye, my last image, a swaddled eight-pound baby, alone in the middle of a fluorescent-lit room next to a disconnected ventilator. Maybe they covered her after I left, to make sure no frazzled ICU visitor stumbled upon a dead baby. After they were sure we had left the hospital, attendants would come with a gurney and take her body to the morgue. Sometime after that, her body would be transferred to the Namibia Institute of Pathology, stacked in the back of a truck filled with the weekend’s other casualties destined for the same process.

Though we had said goodbye, my partner and I still had to decide what to do with our daughter’s body once the autopsy was conducted. A few days after her death, I received an email from the HR department at work telling me they could assist me to get her body repatriated, which was covered by insurance. My parents had cemetery plots; should we bury her there? But in my family, a burial plot is a place of obligation—you visit on the person’s birthday, the day they died, Memorial Day, after mass on holidays. You leave bouquets of flowers, maybe a plant in the late spring when the risk of frost has passed. When our family’s miniature schnauzer died, my mother brushed his hair till it shone, laid him in a white baby casket, placed one of his favorite hot-dog shaped treats under his chin, and buried him behind the bushes in the backyard. His grave was marked with one of the temporary grave markers cemeteries use until tombstones arrive. It read: “Chekal Schnapps French 1983-1993.” My mom visited him every time she went to turn on the hose to water her rose garden.

If I buried my daughter in Iowa, I would spend the rest of my life feeling guilty for not visiting her grave enough, abandoning her again. We could bury her in Namibia, but we lived in Angola, so that did not seem right either.

We decided to cremate her.

We bounced around ideas: we could bury parts of her ashes in Namibia and in Iowa, scatter them in a meaningful place. My mom had wanted her baptized before we disconnected the vent to assure her soul’s salvation, but like a good cafeteria Catholic, would not be a stickler on the Vatican no-scattering rule. But Cecilia spent her seventeen days in a cookie-cutter short-term furnished rental apartment, with a few outings to her grandparents’ house. Not a lot of meaningful places. My partner wanted to scatter them at the Angolan beach where he fished for threadfin. But that was not meaningful to me. Plus, the beach was dirty, and that just felt wrong.

Eleven years later, she is at home. The fourth home, to be precise. She is now in our bedroom, on a shelf by my jewelry boxes from Mozambique and India. My partner kind of hates it, but I like it best this way. I don’t have to visit. I am more like my mother than I realized.

My parents used to complain about people who did not come to pick up their wife’s or husband’s or father’s cremains. They would sit on a shelf in the funeral home closet, next to memorial cards and boxes of French Funeral Home pens. I remember one woman left her husband’s ashes for over ten years. He died of cancer, relatively young. Oh, did my parents complain. But I understand. It is hard to make a decision. I never made one about Cecilia’s ashes; I just got used to the circumstances.

Though my partner and I agreed on our decision to cremate our daughter, I dreaded telling my parents. I put it off a couple of days, but I knew they would ask if I did not tell. Of course, they would. One night, no doubt after a couple of whiskeys, I called them and blurted it out. “We have decided to cremate her. We just don’t feel comfortable burying her in the US or Namibia, since we don’t live in either of those places. It doesn’t feel right.” I inhaled; held it.

“We understand in your situation. We thought that’s what you might do,” my dad said.

“I got my wish before she died. That’s your decision.” My mom’s signature phrase: That’s your decision. So many times, in my younger life, had that phrase frustrated me. I wanted my mom to give me her opinion, some tangible advice rather than demurring in this way. This time, the most important time, it was the perfect answer. I exhaled, the weight of thirty-seven years in a burying family lifted from my shoulders.

My partner’s father took care of everything after that. He chose a funeral home, contacted them, paid the bill, picked up the urn and brought it home without me noticing. My sister, who is also a funeral director, emailed me and told me I should keep some locks of her hair. I did not understand, but I asked my father-in-law if there was still time to do it. He most definitely did not understand, but he went to the funeral home and snipped a few pieces of her fine brown hair, which he gave to me in an envelope. I stashed it in an A4 manila envelope filled with sympathy cards. That envelope is now stashed in an orange plastic bin with broken clips that is filled with letters and photos from graduate school, on the top shelf of my office closet. Hair is another thing people make jewelry out of or scatter, but I am happy with the envelope.

We did not do a funeral or memorial service. A funeral would have overtones of heaven and resurrection that my partner and I were not comfortable with. A memorial service seemed wrong for a seventeen-day old child. For a memorial service, you are supposed to have memories; we didn’t have time to make many. I love ritual, but I could not find one that worked. I untaped her tubes and I put a diaper on her. I wrapped her, held her, and cried on her rapidly cooling body. Then I left her.

Caitlin Doughty devotes a section of her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes to online cremation arrangements. She disparages it, compares it to ordering takeout or delivery online. Says the idea “crushed (her) with loneliness.” “A nine-year old girl named Ashley, who had just finished the third grade, died at a hospital, where her parents left her body, went home, typed their credit card into a website, and waited two weeks for her to appear in a box by mail.” She quips about the credit card being denied several times because it was actually a Sears Department store card.

I love that book, but oh did that chapter rankle me. Caitline paints a picture of online cremation arrangements as an escape hatch for people who do not want to face death. And—she might be right in a lot of cases. But I took particular issue with her portrayal of Ashley’s parents as avoidant or callous.

Had I not had my father-in-law, I would have loved the option of ordering cremation online—to avoid having to talk to yet another stranger about my daughter’s body. Like the mother of that nine-year-old, I probably would have pulled out an old university ID and typed in my student number instead of a credit card number, given the fog I walked around in those first days. Maybe Ashley’s parents had been sitting by her for days or weeks. Maybe it was not denial. Maybe it was grief. Oh wait, psychologists say denial is one of the stages of grief. It is well-documented. Joan Didion needed to crawl into bed so she would be there when her husband came back. I am pretty sure denial passed me over, but I really would have loved a little.

I was there for my daughter’s last moments. I wrapped her, I held her; I cried over her.

It is true that my father-in-law suggested, “Why don’t you guys get out of here and let me take care of this”— this being turn off the ventilator, of course. He offered out of love, but I did not consider it even for a moment. For me, that would have been hiding from death. I said to him. “She’s my daughter. This is my job.” For me, being there was duty—duty I learned from a family that makes a living trying to make dead people look not dead. At the age of thirteen, my dad spent Christmas sitting by his father after his third heart attack, hour upon hour, until he finally died. My mother’s mother, at the age of ninety-one, fell and hit her head at the nursing home she had been living in for three years. She was not found immediately. My mother and her siblings did the non-American thing and declined to send her to the hospital for lifesaving treatment, knowing there would be no quality of life after such a brain bleed. They instead sat by her bed for two days, talking to her and holding her hand, listening to the death-rattle breath till she succumbed.

My mother did her dead mother’s hair and makeup before she and my dad placed her diminished body in a “blue sapphire” 18-gauge steel casket. My embalming family does not hide from death. We hide decomposition—I will give Caitlin that. But never death. Death is omnipresent, witnessed, discussed ad nauseam with nary a detail omitted, with never a euphemistic substitution.

Four years after Cecilia died, a college friend lost his one-year-old son to brain cancer. This boy and a team of Chicago’s best pediatric oncologists battled it for nine months, but the cancer was wily and kept finding ways to come back bigger and deeper. My friend is a theatre technical designer and stage fightmaster; his wife, a stage manager. They have a wide circle of creative friends who put together a stunning memorial service. I confess I was envious of my grieving friends, because they had enough photos and videos to put together a montage for the service. The only video I have of my daughter is of her crying and lifting her knees to her stomach in pain, the one I showed to the vaccination clinic nurse who dismissed the pain as gas—but it was likely an early sign of something more sinister.

My friend and his wife cremated their son and each sprinkled one baby-spoonful of his ashes in seventeen different places across the country, one for each month of his life. The bit that remained is now in necklaces they wear and in a little Tupperware on a table in their living room. As they planned their trip, they learned about all the laws surrounding the transportation of human remains (including cremains) across state lines. They completed all of the paperwork and got all of the permits and certificates.

When they told me this, I felt like an idiot. The funeral director’s daughter, yet I had no clue. I had put my daughter’s remains in my backpack in Namibia and carried them to Angola, like I had as a child. I walked through immigration and customs, unknowingly breaking Namibian and Angolan laws. I should have been carrying her death certificate, cremation certificate, removal order, mortician’s affidavit, and a health certificate. At best, I may have had a death certificate in that manila envelope of sympathy cards and wisps of hair.

I do not remember if I scanned my backpack on arrival; in 2011, Luanda customs was pretty lax, the officials being more interested in rifling through the really big suitcases coming with merchandise from Shanghai and Dubai. Had they noticed it, though, I can tell you how the interrogation would have gone down, in an over-air-conditioned back room with fluorescent lights and no windows, a police officer still too young to have a pot belly looking at me across a small desk.

“If I understand well, officer, you mean to tell me that I cannot bring my daughter’s ashes into your country?”

“Não pode! Not without authorization and appropriate documentation.”

“I am really sorry, officer. I didn’t even think about it. I used to do this as a girl, and never imagined I should not do it today.”

“Yes, but this is Angola, and we have our regulations. It is our responsibility to enforce them, and it is your obligation to comply with them. We will have to confiscate your daughter’s remains, and you will have to pay a multa. Do you know how much the fine is?”

Here, we would begin the negociação.

“No, I don’t know. How much is the multa?”

“It’s a lot. And you cannot have your daughter’s ashes back until you pay it.”

“Well, how much is it, Officer?”

“It’s a lot.”

“Where do I pay it, Officer? Can I pay at the bank in the airport?”

“Não, não pode. You have to go to the bank in the center of town. It’s closed on the weekends. You will have to go on Monday morning. You will have to get there at 5:00 to get in the queue to be attended to that day. Then you will have to go to the customs office and submit the receipt. But first you will have to get the declaration of guilt. Then they will have to examine the ashes to make sure they are not dangerous. That might take a week. Then you can request for them back. If they have not lost them.”

“Where do I get that declaration of guilt?”

“You get that at the office next to the bank. You have to pay for it.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

“How much, Officer?”

“Look, we know that a senhora is tired and sad. We can find an easier solution.”

“I would like that, Officer, very much. Por favor.”

“Yes. What kind of solution can you propose?”

“What kind of solution do you suggest? My abilities are rather limited.”

“Well, what can you propose? I can try to talk to my supervisor and see if he will be understanding given your circumstances. He has given us strict orders to enforce the regulations, but I can try to convince him, for a senhora.”

“I know, I know. Can you explain that I didn’t do it a propósito? It was not on purpose, officer; I just didn’t know. It was due to ignorância; I want to respect the laws.”

“I can see that you are not a senhora who breaks a lot of laws. Tell me what kind of a solution you can propose, and I will ask my supervisor if he can accept it.”

How big a bribe would a seventeen-day old’s ashes warrant?

Some months after my daughter died, I was chatting via iMessage with a friend. Somehow our chat got onto the topic of Cecilia’s ashes. I think she asked me what I had done with them, knowing that decision had caused me stress in the early months.

Oh, most of the time they just sit on the windowsill in my yoga room. Sometimes I pick them up and just give them a little shake. For some reason the swishing sound kind of comforts me.

You shake them?

Yeah.

Pause. Long pause

Like an etch-a-sketch?

Pause.

Oh god Erika. I just dropped my phone. That is the best! (crying laughing emojis)

Oh, good. I was afraid your silence meant it was too much.

No, it was perfect. I am still laughing. A fucking etch-a-sketch. That’s exactly what it’s like.

I imagined making an Etch A Sketch out of someone’s ashes. Etch A Sketches are filled with aluminum powder, not dry calcium phosphates and minerals that make up bone matter and therefore cremains. So, I doubt it would work. I never wanted an ash locket. But I do think an Etch A Sketch is a “commemorative object,” heretical though it may be, that I might actually want.

Stephanie French is a humanitarian worker who has lived in several African countries for the last 20 years. She is writing a memoir exploring how growing up in a funeral home shaped her approach to grief and death. Her work has recently been published by The Keepthings and Hearth & Coffin.

Return to Issue #34 | Support The Deadlands

What Orpheus didn’t know was that I didn’t love anything. That I would stand by the Aegean Sea and ask the gods to send a wave so large it would pull me in. I did not tell him how I envied Persephone for living in the nothingness below. How I would not have asked to return to the fields each spring and summer.

Instead I told him that I understood how he might never love me like he loved his lyre, but I hoped he might like me just a little. To this he smiled, and he began to strum a few chords, chords that sounded like the dark kiss of the ocean, chords like tunnels underground.

Your name, he told me, sounds good to sing.

Eurydice, he said. It ends with a vowel sound. Like Persephone.

Eurydice. Persephone. Beyoncé.

I would be a better artist if I were sadder, he said. The best songs are always the sad ones.

Those days, we would lie out on the blacktop near the school and he would play old songs that his mother taught him. He told me she would read poetry to him and his brother when they could not sleep. That she had ink stains on her fingers from the writing she would do. She wrote, and she gave it to the poets so that they believed it was theirs. This, he said, was love.

In his songs I would forget to think. It happened quickly, but without my notice. He would be playing and then suddenly I would awaken, as if from sleep, and realize he had been playing for hours. In the heavy afternoon sun, he would strum his lyre, and I would lose myself to the world of his songs, distant as islands, long as countries. I was not sure if I was falling in love with Orpheus or his lyre. Now I know there is no difference.

I am in love with you, he said one evening as if he was just realizing it himself. The television was playing in the background, a music video with women with midriffs exposed that I watched out of the corner of my eye. Oh Gods, I am in love with you, he repeated.

I did not need to think about it. I love you, too, I replied. I love you just as much.

I prayed to Hades that night: Dear Lord, I want the feeling of listening to his music forever. What I wanted was to live inside his music and not in my own brain. My brain was busy and strange. It jostled me back and forth and didn’t care what I wanted. My best friend Zoe caught me kneeling outside, and she asked me who I was praying to. I said Apollo. That was someone she would not question, and besides, he was a god of music. Apollo was a handsome god, but I could not understand how women could love someone who was all light. I could only love the beauty that wriggled free from darkness.

Zoe told me that this was good, but that she worried I was spending too much time with this musician Orpheus.

Musicians are all the same, she told me, brushing her auburn hair back with her finger. He will convince you he is sensitive because he has a pretty voice, but once you grow closer, you will see that his heart is only brittle clay.

But I knew this was not Orpheus. Orpheus had told me on the first day of his brittle clay heart, and I had learned that it was wider and larger than he knew.

I thought that way about many men, she said. But as soon as I knew them, I tired of them.

She held my hand in hers. It was soft.

You must learn to value your own life. Your life is just as important as his.

I had already stopped listening.

It was not long before he spoke to me of marriage. It seemed natural, to him, that two people in love would want to marry. But I hated the thought of it. In my mind was my mother, not a person at all but merely a husk, obsessed with grasping onto me as if I were the only thing she had. And yet I loved him. To be alive was to cling to patterns we had no hand in creating. We walked along into the forest, where our sandals bent on top of tree roots and our arms brushed with branches. He did not want to tame me, he said. He knew I could not be owned. I told him I would marry him.

On those hot summer days I would lie back in gym shorts and blast his music from my headphones. I felt calm and still. I couldn’t hear my mother through the wall, I couldn’t hear my own fingers twitch. It was only music, music like a fungus blotting out my brain.

The morning of the wedding, my mother bathed me, and as she did she gave me a cracked smile and said, Your body is so alive. She scrubbed as if she scrubbed hard enough I would change my mind.

She gave me a calf to sacrifice at the temple. It had a spot on its side the shape of a finger, and concave eyes. My mother told me the cleaner I could cut it, the happier my marriage would be. But I slashed it on the tile floor on purpose with an X-Acto knife in many messy slices, and it sobbed as it bled. I didn’t wash the blood off before I put my dress on. I wanted to keep some of the cow on my body.

The wedding was on a tall hill lined with olive trees. I wore a dress whose gray silk reminded me of cobwebs. Orpheus looked me in the eyes and said, I do.

I looked at my mother. I looked at Zoe. I looked at the olive trees around me. I looked at the blood on my arm and I said it back. I do.

The band played old songs from when we were teenagers, throwback songs that everyone gyrated to like animals, with loud beats and thumping bass. Then Orpheus rose from his chair and tapped the microphone.

I have written a song, he said, for my wife.

When he said “wife” there was something new in the way he said it. Like I had become a thing I wasn’t before. Like I was no longer me. I was this thing, this thing called a wife.

He sang the song, and for the first time, I was not lost in it. Instead I felt terribly, insufferably alive. My brain could hear every conversation at the party, even sounds miles off. I felt every part of my body: my arms, my legs, my toes, and my fingernails. And all the colors were turned up, as if on a scale, to blindingly, horrifyingly bright. I could not hear a word he sang. But I could hear everything else.

I ran from the bustle and the lights, but the farther I ran, the louder and brighter it became. I could hear bears growling in the trees and rivers rushing over faraway hillsides. Every time my sandal touched the ground, I could feel each pebble, each particle of dirt below. I could taste the air in my mouth, and it was so bitter I felt like I would gag.

A green snake the color of a broken bottle was sliding next to me. In another state of mind, I would not have noticed it. But as it was, I heard its every slither, felt the grass move as it parted it. And so I did what I had wanted to do for so long. I took my sandal off and placed it beside me. Then I brought my foot hard down on the snake’s face.

I clasped my ears to stop the sound of its hissing. When I brought my foot up, its fangs pierced deep into the arch. The pain was so great I could no longer hear or taste or see. Cool relief spilled over me.

How to describe what it is like not to be alive? It is like describing the rainbow to someone who is colorblind. All you know, everything in your life, is alive. The way your toes feel chilled outside with no shoes on a winter’s night. Your first teacher’s smile. Potato chips. These are all alive things. What I felt like was nothing like that. What I felt was like another color in the rainbow.

I lay on the ground until I observed a pair of sandals, bright blue and green, with Velcro straps and wings on either side of them, in the ground beside me.

GET UP.

Hermes had a weather-beaten face and bushy eyebrows. He spoke as if he had to chew each word to get it out properly.

I HAVE NO PATIENCE FOR THOSE WHO COME HERE WILLINGLY, he continued. IF YOU MUST COME, GET UP.

But I liked lying in the grass. I told him I would stay.

YOU HAVE ALREADY CHOSEN.

I tried to close my eyes so I could not see him. But instead he lifted me without using his hands, and I began to float beside him. We floated over the ocean, and I tried to dip my toes in as we glided, but I could feel nothing. How strange, to miss that feeling when I had no memory of ever feeling it before.

He left me on the bank of a river, and he placed a cool coin in my mouth.

KEEP IT UNDER YOUR TONGUE, he told me. OR YOU WILL NEVER GET TO WHERE YOU ARE GOING.

I rolled the metal with my tongue, the copper acidic in my mouth. Somewhere in the air I thought I heard a voice crying, Eurydice! It was a voice I knew, but I could not name it.

A teal paddleboat approached with Charon at the front, his night-black cloak covering his face. I walked closer to let him pull the penny out from my mouth, but he shook his head.

ONE MORE, he growled.

I told him this was the only coin I had.

ONE MORE, he repeated.

I could see cracked yellow teeth under his hood when he spoke. From behind me came footsteps. I turned and there was a woman with red hair walking down the beach. She came close and hugged me.

Eurydice, she whispered. My best friend, Eurydice.

Zoe.

COINS, Charon huffed.

We opened our mouths for him, and he placed a twiggy finger under our tongues. His nail scraped the meaty bottom of my mouth as he dragged it out.

I followed you, Zoe said as we stepped onto the back of the boat.

I did not know how much I wanted her there until she was.

I worried I would not catch you, she continued.

I looked at her.

Thank you, I said.

We passed Cerberus, barking from all three heads.

Do you remember the labradoodle that almost bit you when we were in sixth grade? she asked.

I remembered. It was the first time I laughed in the afterlife.

Charon pedaled us to another bank, this time muddy and putrid. There was a brick archway there, crumbling on either side, with nothing behind. Down the beach were creatures like animals, but they were hazy as if made of smoke and darted back and forth like characters in a video game.

It smells awful, doesn’t it? Zoe said.

GET OUT.

Maybe we’ll see our old teacher, Miss Gray, Zoe continued as she helped me out of the boat. She was so lovely. Remember how we used to talk about her?

PLEASE STOP TALKING, Charon said. AND WAIT YOUR TURN.

Zoe blushed.

The beach was full of black mud, and it sent a chill up my left foot. I was still wearing only one sandal. So I sat down, dirtying my dress, and I unfastened the other. It was eerie; this place I had dreamed of was right in front of me, and yet I had no desire to keep walking. I figured it must be fatigue. I had just died, after all. And gotten married. That made it the busiest day of my life.

Three old men in crowns walked out of the archway. They had cottony beards and prune-like faces. One of them said:

MEADOWS.

The others nodded.

I turned to see Charon, but he had disappeared. When I turned back, Zoe and I were in endless, chalky fields. It had been getting dimmer and dimmer, and now it seemed there were no longer colors. I tried very hard to remember the color of Orpheus’s hair. Was it dark or light? It was . . . one or the other.

There was a man sitting in the corner with a hole in his stomach the size of a knot of rope. He was fighting with a woman with veiny arms. Further down, a young boy was bobbing an action figure up and down. No one looked sad exactly, but there was no joy anywhere.

Are you happy? Zoe asked. Does this make you happy?

I took in a long breath of air.

It makes me happy that you are here.

I tried to remember some of Orpheus’s songs but I couldn’t. I kept humming, and muttering, Baby, oh, baby oh, as if that were a song, but it didn’t sound like anything. Zoe began chatting with the other people in the meadows. The young man, she learned, had died in a war, and the woman had taken her own life to be with him. Now they fought constantly. There were women who liked the same TV shows as Zoe. The boy with the action figure had been obsessed with math, wanted to be an engineer like his father. I sat by myself and dreamed of talking to Orpheus again.

It was not long before a woman with short hair noticed me humming to myself.

Are you trying to sing? she asked, and I nodded. You can’t sing here. There’s no music.

She must have seen my face, because she continued, I do a little thing where I repeat a word. Like: Artichoke. Artichoke. Artichoke. I say it over and over again and it becomes like a song.

I walked away from her. She muttered something under her breath.

You could try to be kind, now that it doesn’t matter, said Zoe.

I turned. She was watching me, as always.

I kept walking. I muttered, artichoke, artichoke, artichoke, thinking maybe if I could make a song Orpheus would hear it and bring me back. I tried tapping on trees to a beat, but it was impossible to make a pattern. Artichoke, artichoke, artichoke, I muttered. He would hear me if I kept at it. If I made him a song.

I don’t think you love him, said Zoe. Not really. I think his pull on you is strong, but I don’t think you love him, in your heart. He doesn’t even know you. Not like I do.

I kept banging on the trees, now with a stick. And I repeated, I love him I love him I love him, hoping it would make a song.

The young boy with the action figure screamed, Make her stop!

The lovers screeched, It’s unbearable!

And still I hit and repeated, I love him artichoke I love him artichoke I love him artichoke.

The woman with short hair held her hands to her ears. I sang for hours until it must have been another day, though of course nothing had changed.

Finally Persephone herself appeared. Her hair was filled with dried flowers, her dress seemed to lift her off the ground. She smelled like a scented candle.

I AM TIRED, she said. WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

I told her I was in love. That I had made a mistake. That I wanted back in the living.

NO, she replied. THAT IS NOT IT.

I miss his music, I can’t remember his face when I try to picture it, I—

YOU ARE SO TERRIBLY YOUNG, she replied. BUT I WILL BRING HIM TO YOU, ONLY SO YOU WILL SEE YOU DO NOT MISS HIM.

And she disappeared.

Zoe sat with me as I waited. She stroked my hair with her fingers.

We are here together. Isn’t that enough? Come, let us sit together.

We began to talk, about our childhood together, the shows we’d watch on TV, watching murder mysteries under her heated blanket, writing plays and performing them for our parents. With Zoe there, the underworld felt familiar. It was the home I had dreamed of. But still I felt guilty, because I felt it was not right to Orpheus not to miss him.

I almost did not hear Orpheus behind me when he approached. There was a humming behind me and I turned. And as he grew closer, I heard it. Music. A song made of a tattered life. Weak in his throat, like he was grasping for water. He sang it in short breaths.

Yooooorrre

Iddddddd

Uhhhhhhh

Seeeeeee

Yooooorrre

Iddddddd

Uhhhhhhh

Seeeeeee

Yooooorrre

Iddddddd

Uhhhhhhh

Seeeeeee

Eurydice

Eurydice

Eurydice

That was the whole song. Just my name over and over again. To music. And his lyre.

His hair was brown. He was not so handsome now that he was here.

Persephone appeared. She smiled.

DO YOU LOVE HIM? DO YOU HONESTLY LOVE HIM?

No! Zoe pleaded. He does not want to be here. He does not care. They made him come, and now he claims he came on his own.

If anyone knew my mind, it was her. She knew me inside out.

But it was Orpheus who responded:

I have come back for her. I have sung my song to get back to her. We shall grow old by the fire, we shall have children and animals, we shall do the things that people do, all the time, for the rest of our lives.

It sounded terrible. I could not bear it. But what could I do? I had not been happy in life. I had not been happy in death. I had gotten what I wanted every time, and still I felt the clawing on my skin of restless need. Zoe was staring at me, in her eyes the knowledge of my dissatisfaction. I screamed.

I want I want I want, I yelled. I want I want I want.

But nothing changed.

Come, said Orpheus. We shall be happy.

I looked at Zoe.

Must I leave her?

Persephone smiled.

YOU COULD STAY.

Zoe’s lips parted as if she were about to speak a word. She stood there, her auburn hair on her shoulders, the person who had followed me, the only person who would have.

But she was a friend. Orpheus was my husband.

I turned to follow him.

We walked through the meadows until we came to a door. He opened the door and left it ajar for me, and I followed.

Eurydice, he called. Are you there?

Yes.

The door brought us to a swampy cave where creatures with wings like bats but skinny bodies like snakes flew back and forth. And as we walked, I could see him listening for my footsteps behind him. At the end of the cave there was a light into a gray wilderness as cold as winter, but without snow. There were black pools that we scooted around.

Eurydice, he called, are you still there?

Yes.

At the end of the wilderness there was a lake made of muddy, chalky sea. On our side was a plastic canoe, and he sat down, looking forward. I sat behind him, looking back, and he heard me sit. We rode to the other side with tall and orange cliffs. He walked out, and I followed him.

Eurydice, he called, did you make it?

I paused. I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to know I was there. I thought I heard Zoe calling me again, but it was just the wind. I wanted to be back there. I did not want to go with him.

As I waited, Orpheus turned.

I saw for a second the brown hair, the look of concern on his face. The way his mouth hung agape in horror of what he had done. And then I was back in the fields with Zoe, her thin dress hanging off her body, her red hair, and her smile. To be known by her, in life and in death. I took her soft arms in mine, like velvet in my hands.

I want I want I want.

Anna-Claire McGrath (she/her) is a 2022 Clarion Workshop grad and has an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Blood Orange Review, and New Delta Review, among others. You can find more of her work at annaclairemcgrath.com. She lives in Virginia where she spends most of her time watching TV shows about vampires.

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I. Skeleton

Well, the Curse fell down like a Sword
the feet fell down with a thunder-Sound
It was a technique, a Style
a Crying Out against what happened there
an insistence of living against.

                                                all contact is numerical
            manipulation     —   
                                    insistently, we resort to recursion
            do you concur?

blurry universe
green o green o green o green o
                                    -dor of cuts dol
                                                    -or all around all screaming all surround no

                                                                        — silence — all — sound —

               take then, the god as emergent phenomena.
                       what                                                                        ardor
                       emerges from what?
               take then, my skin:   glowing and raw.
                        yearning and
                                                stretched.

               what emerges from the circumstance of emerging?
               wailing on whaling on
                                                   reason upon
                                                   reason rising out of
                                                   reasoning
                                                   sea.

II. Organ

cuts through                 my eye                                                                                                                                                                              severed from it
by        imagination     film,
becoming        ,                       only camera
similarly       eye.                                fizz fountains up                the trees so bare so
autumn                                    bare
            surely there is wood here,       surely.
our world aflame. and yours? the sh
                                                ra
                                                            pn
                                                      el

of the explosion is designed to create a perfect armageddon of blades, whirling.
your mouth is
red and violent
a gash              in
            maple sweet
eye
repeating in
            three parts
                        again, you say, again

III. Mind

perhaps the dog experiences a sort of teleportation, awakening into a quiet room from a dream of chase and rabbit and field and felt and blood and food-pound nose-prick wound-ache sound-flake

alternately: last night torching a field of wheat. a war crime, but it was fun, and i remember thinking of starvation while the gold burned.

again we hallucinate. above the killing field, a group of crows is a murder a group of heuristics is a justice.

poetry is a disease for which the poem is the cure or something or other.

through machine learning the strip is divided into blast radii in order to streamline the butchery of human bodies, with optimization modules focusing on poets, journalists, and, of course, children, in ascending order of primacy.

morale is always too fucking low. i am either talking about capitalism, war, or FIFA Ultimate Team. e microtransactions unum.

IV. Soul

given god’s infinite grace and wisdom,

all drone strikes were glorious, felicitous, good

we must imagine ; impaled by shards of time.

that the world loved exploding

we are haunted by a haunting

some recursion of a curse

this sentence is the blister and the burst.

Dylan Haston is a “vocateur” reader, writer, and reviewer of SFF fiction and poetry from North Carolina, currently residing in New York City. A recent graduate, they have worked as a bookseller, a literary agency intern, and an observer of lemur behavior. You can find them at nearby poetry readings or immersed in the world of their most recent favorite book.

Return to Issue #34 | Support The Deadlands

It’s 3:00 a.m. and the doorbell rings, because that’s always when the doorbell rings, if it’s going to. I don’t have to go to the door; I can pull up the video on my phone, always overexposed, too white and also too dark, Blair Witch found footage, despite how good the camera is supposed to be. Beyond the porch, the street just black and unending, my neighbor’s lights disappearing. No cars ever pass. There is no other noise, birds or bullfrogs or those night bugs I don’t know the names of. Pale, pale moths orbit the porch light.

They don’t just ring the bell, though. They knock. Frantically. Pounding the sides of their fists on the solid wooden door, because they used to do it on the cheap maybe-aluminum door and I couldn’t stand seeing the dents in the morning, the flaked paint, the edges rusting and then weeping like a statue with stigmata. The wooden door is oak and cost a lot of money on Etsy, the guy driving it here from two states over to hang it with iron hinges and locks and handles. He didn’t ask why I wanted iron and I didn’t really know if the iron would matter. It seems to have. The door isn’t burned, scraped, dented. Doesn’t jump in its frame when the banging starts.

They also talk. Well, they more than talk. They beg, they plead, they dissolve into wailing tears, their voices fraying at the edges like an old ribbon. By the time they’re wailing, pleading, I’ll have crept out of bed and up the long hallway, the too-long hallway, to the door. I’ll have pressed my face against the door, my hands. I’ll have put my back against it and slid down to sit, arms wrapped around myself. The oak and the iron keeps the chill from flooding into the hallway, a small comfort where no other is forthcoming. 

I cry too, then, hot tears running down my face and dripping off and I don’t know where they go after that. I must be careful to never open the door when they come. No matter how they beg, no matter what they say. No matter when they say my name in that plaintive tone, their faces pressed together close to the camera, their eyes dark wells that glint in the light, their features whited-out and indistinct. Because they are not who they say they are, they are not who they look like, who they sound like. They died five years ago, driving back from a metal show in the middle of the night.

The first time they came to my door at 3:00 a.m., and I saw their faces on the camera, I stumbled out of bed and ran up the hall. The days, weeks, since the funerals were a nightmare. The funerals felt like a mistake, no bodies, set up in urns already. The accident was just that bad. Death is already an unreality, but that one last step of removal just made it impossible, like it was a mistake, like they’d come through the doors like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, laughing at attending their own funerals. 

They did not do that.

They came to my door at 3:00 a.m. or things that looked like them did and they rang my bell and I ran to the door and tore it open and I was already sobbing, I was already saying “oh my god I knew it couldn’t be real” and I think that’s what saved me, my salty tears that they recoiled from, giving me time to see, to feel, that it was not them, they were wrong, they felt wrong, there was something wrong, and I slammed my metal door shut as they recovered and reached out with their pale, long-fingered hands and they keened at their weakness, at their missed opportunity. They beat on the door until dawn and I sat huddled in the hallway, freezing, listening to them. Bearing witness, even though it isn’t them. 

I don’t know what they are. Ghosts, or worse. The kind of thing that gives people that deep-seated fear of the uncanny valley. The kind of thing that vampire stories came from. Anything but people, they are not people. I don’t know what they are, but they can’t come in unless I let them, accidentally or on purpose, and since that night I have been so careful to not do that. I don’t know if it has to be a door, but they always only come to the front door, never the back. They never scratch at windows, they never rattle the pipe for the garden hose that leads back into the house, they never wail through the dryer vent. I don’t know what I would do, if they did any of those things. What could I do? There are so many tiny ways in and out of a house, and then there are the big important ones. 

If I’m not home at 3:00 a.m. they don’t ring the bell, but they do come like moths to my front porch. They still whisper to the camera that they know is there, their voices indistinct or too loud, and I can’t understand what they’re saying, just their need. Listening to them makes me want to panic, always, throw the door open, wherever I am. 

What would happen, if I opened the door?

What do they want?

I have no way to find out, nobody to ask, nowhere to read about it. There isn’t somebody making TikTok videos about what happens when things wearing dead people’s faces come to your door, that the camera sees and hears, that are physically there. There’s no YouTube deep dive from the Reddit thread of somebody who was going through this. There’s just me. Me, and them. And I can’t tell anybody, I can just imagine the range of emotions that would cross a person’s face as they struggle to maintain a neutral or sympathetic social mask. I’m losing it, they would think. I just haven’t been the same after the accident, they would think. 

Even without things on my porch at 3:00 a.m., I don’t know how I would be the same after the accident. Grief is not something you visit on vacation, grief is climate change. It is disaster at your doorway that people would rather not confront, address, consider. 

Is it because I was supposed to be at that concert too? I was supposed to be in the car too, die in that car too? Do these pale things with dark eyes and too-big mouths know that and count me among what should be theirs? Would they put my face on and what, go to our parents’ houses next? Where does it stop? Where did it start?

Eventually, maybe it’s stupid that I didn’t think of it sooner, I sell the house. I bury a Saint Joseph in the front yard and I hunt for another house in the meantime and somehow pull off that Hail Mary of closing on both and moving smoothly in a precise dance that I’m not sure anybody but me really appreciates. My parents don’t understand why I’m moving, why I want to leave, and it’s the best time for me to have told them about the doorbell. The faces. Their eyes. And I just can’t do that. I tell them it’s a job, it’s the weather, I got a great offer and the people who buy my house will probably just make it all gray inside and flip it.

I bring my door, though. It’s weird, the real estate agents say so, try to convince me otherwise, but I bring my door. And the iron hinges. It’s a beautiful door, it makes my new house instantly look like home, even though they’ve never been there. Never saw it, never laughed with me in it, tipsy on hard seltzer and watching the game, whatever game, it didn’t matter because we didn’t really care. It was a house for me, where maybe I could move on. Whatever that means.

But that’s what I told my parents. That I knew it was time to move on. And that, finally, was the right thing to say. They’d been so worried.

They helped me move, and we ate pizza off paper plates in my echoing new dining room, nothing up on the walls yet, windows bare, dark mirrors framing us as we ate and laughed and talked, like we were our own TV show. We drank soda from a two-liter, in red Solo cups, and then finally they said “we have to get going” and kissed me goodnight and left. They planned to stop in a motel halfway home, get an early start in the morning. And I went to bed.

It’s 3:00 a.m. and the doorbell rings, because that’s always when the doorbell rings, if it’s going to. They press their pale faces to the doorbell camera and they whisper to me, cajole, beg.

My parents are with them.

Jennifer R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and their Dobermans. A member of the SFWA, she works at her local public library where she also facilitates a writing workshop. She is the author of the Run With the Hunted novella series, and her debut novel, Exit Ghost, released in 2023. Her work has otherwise appeared in Apex Magazine, Escape Pod, Fusion Fragment, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Exit Ghost, is available now.

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