The Killing Sea
The ancestors of mermaids that came to land in human form can never go back to the sea. If they do, they become foam— but we yearn for the water, we that are stranded here, a biological impulse in us to join with our sisters again. We still choose to live by the ocean, unable…
What Became Of My Dear Sister
Justice, my sister, ran away from home when she was eighteen years of age, or so for many years I thought. My parents were vague on the cause of her disappearance, and all matters pertaining to my sibling, come to that. “A saint,” was all my father would say of her. “She was a saint…
ABBESS
It was the tenth child her husband had put in her now, and she would not bring it forth alive. Could not without her mind unspooling like intestine tugged free of a wound; this Angeline had known since the family doctor, with a nervy, congratulative titter, had informed her of its conception. Ethaniel—the father—had wanted…
Our Dear House
For three weeks the children had the smothering dream before I did, as well. The dream, as the twins described it, was of being pressed into a narrow room by a number of dark figures until their shapes were one, a breathless, pulsing shadow, flat against the wall. Nightly this vision came, provoking both boys…
Magdala
From the steps of the railway station she descended from the rain, a woman like quartz, like dusk, and amber. She walked as if without true weight. Her hair, though soaked, floated about as if it, too, were water. Her eyes—so dark—looked through me. They were the holes of stigmata within her face, black and…
The Tower
The dark girl in the black coat walked to a disused railway bridge by night. Her eyes were as her clothes—the sky—were, and her nails were lacquered with the red that they would soon be from other matter. A man awaited her, his white hair blown up into the wind like a waterfall in reverse.…
Trap
The sun beat down like a hammer stroke on the day Angie found her husband’s car in the driveway again. She sunk back under the shaded ledge of the porch, uncertain whether she was about to fall over or to vomit in the trough of flowers under the nearby windowsill. In the end she did…
The Whispers
My sister died when I was nine years old. She has no grave, nor is there any official record of what became of her. Like shallow marks in stone she would have worn away, had I not been left behind to remember. The others that know of her death don’t believe in it, or not…
Of the Island
I was a shepherd on a remote island, once, until something began frightening the sheep. Thirty years ago it came, on an afternoon glazed opaline by November fog, the hills awash in it to such an extent that I saw almost nothing ahead of me but the dogs, their dark heads emerging from its vapour…
The Wall
In my old house, I’d hear screams through my bedroom wall every night. I’d lie awake, sweating through my pastel sheets in clenched-teethed terror, bringing the quilt to my throat in a lumpen knot as the cries went on and on in the darkness. They echoed behind the wallpaper as though the space beyond was…
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The Morgue 