Author Archives: (Not actually a Lady) Ruthless

She didn’t mean to kill her, that fact I know. Like others before her, she was trying to put something else back, or thought she was, at least. Having worked in the park for a good twenty years, I’ve learned enough about the things that live on and under this land that when I wasContinue reading “A woman buried her daughter alive in the National Park I work at”

In dreams, He sometimes came back. There had been herbs and recitations, that first time, to draw Him; now it seemed to Rosemary that He had never gone away, nor would He, the father of her only child. The boy was seven years old, and had never seen his sire beyond illustrations of His likeness,Continue reading “Rosemary”

I haven’t seen my wife since I moved here, to our new apartment in a building so old that plants have grown through it like death through the bowels of an old tramp, and when it rains at night all the window panes sing with it, as though in the swollen pressure of their poorContinue reading “Lucia”

My brother went missing out by Paris, Texas some years back, and what came home in his skin was something else, though you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that’d believe me. I know how the story would go. Folks would say I was so mad he’d up and left me alone in that house thatContinue reading “The Road And The Hungry Sun”

For a year I thought my sister had an eating disorder. Turns out that I was wrong. This is how is started. Last autumn, my younger sibling just stopped eating. Gradually, at first, so that you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention, which I—three years older, and her brother, at that—decidedly was not. LedaContinue reading “LEDA- original version”

They got to Blood Keep by sundown, which was, as the rumours went, the only time that you could approach the barbed wire fencing without being shot at by the guards hiding grimly along the perimeter. Even then, people were sometimes turned away at the door for reasons only the Keepers knew. They had developedContinue reading “The Red Beginning Of The World”

It was the October of 1921 when I killed my father. I remember the rain, blowing sideways against the farmhouse like God was spitting on all of us foolish enough to be out there in so wretched a climate. I remember the horses screaming over the wind, and how sometimes the wind sounded so likeContinue reading “SWINE”

I shouldn’t have gone home that night.The party would have trailed on for at least another three hours; drinks were still flowing copiously, and as I attempted an Irish exit through the front door half a dozen hands caught me in an attempt to coax me back into their raucous company, all present red-faced withContinue reading “The Deep”

“You wanna hear how I know there’s something after you die?” I didn’t. It was the night after our best friend’s funeral. Anna Tavera. Car flipped on a wet road. Dead instantly, age twenty nine. That was the news report, and forever how I’ll remember it. The service was nice, but the wake was better,Continue reading “After The Wake”

The chrysalis hung as Thomas had left it, quiet and unmoving in the humid darkness of the basement. The room had been a wine cellar back when the farm was still up and running, and on warm days it still smelled thinly of fermented apples, the ghosts of enterprise past. Now the weather was turningContinue reading “THE LEPIDOPTERIST”