Get issues of The Deadlands from 2025 + The 2026 Ferryman’s Coin
Issue 37
The Farmer brushes their thumb across the blade and deems it sharp enough. Back onthe ground, amongst the crop, the soft metal reflects a ghostly blue. Ghosts are always blue, aren’t they? In the same way that the plague is black and the whale is white and the Scythe is long and looming. Some type of truth that is not a reality.–The Scythe and Other Simple Mechanisms, T.E.Z. Moore
You keep your tools ready, sharp. You never know when the sport will call for it. The river awaits, the river also requires the blade. How do we sever this life from that life? How do we cut that which we cannot see? Our ancestors tell us: we cannot. The thread is always there, the path is always followed, and you—you linger in every hollow, saturating the air with every sweep of the blade.Issue 38
Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath. She should dissipate. She should waver and dissolve. She should ascend and alight. Instead, she starts gathering her bones.–Highway 1, Past Hope, Maria Haskins
Keep your bones close. Set them in neat lines. The whale bone is connected to the plane bone. The women will not go quietly. The defiant bone is connected to the no bone. The state of things dissolves. A man is remembered by his mountains, not his bones. The lost bone is connected to the memory forest. Are you the rock or are you Sisyphus? The shrimp bone is connected to the bell bone. Make a run—for every border that ensnares you.
