Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, scifi, and horror fiction unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Flash Fiction Online, Dark Matter Magazine, and LampLight Magazine. You can find them on Twitter as @LowryFerretly or at their website: lowrypoletti.wordpress.com
In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done.
The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night’s rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods.
