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It started with the music, just one piece, jarring and experimental, played on the radio one summer afternoon by a pair of disc jockeys with little better to do. An unknown artist had composed it, an eccentric living in some basement apartment in Paris. It was easy to imagine them crouched before their computer, wild-haired,Continue reading “Zoanthropy”

The witch in the well would take your life for a coin, or so everyone in the village used to say. As a boy Jack hadn’t believed it, filing the story away with Bloody Mary and Jenny Greenteeth, and every other urban legend he could think of. But now he was twenty-eight years old andContinue reading “Lucky Penny”

we’re all looking for someone in our livesgrasping at the wrong shoulder in the darkand holding on with grim-jawed stubbornnessas the one we want observes us and sighsand opens a newspaper for the waitlong and white and as clinically coldas a hospice corridor; its lights blinkand the water in the cooler is stale,and swims withContinue reading “Knucklebone”

I wake with a skull-biting migraine around midday, as always, forever too tired to greet the morning. My mouth is as thick as linen, and I wouldn’t get up at all if the wardrobe weren’t so eager to dress me, which she does, in blue and white, like the habit of a nun I onceContinue reading “The Beauty In The Bell Jar”

where did I walk before I knew of you?a haggard Earth, black soil, frost-eaten planes?some other nameless planet just as bluea moon with love nor colour in its wanes?what ash did I consume when you weren’t mine?few bites I took sustained that did not cloyfruit was but pulp, and water naught but brineand yet aContinue reading “His Sonnet”

The trees by the Great River had already lost most of their leaves by now, but Prince Sybll sat gazing at them from the bank as if they were still as laden as they had been at the beginning of Autumn. To her right stood her three elder brothers, filling skins with water for theirContinue reading “The Taunt of the Pale Wyrme”

It was there each day, that monster, each day and every night, an old thing that had felt the pitted hole in me and settled there, like rot in the hollow of a old tree. At once it had fed off my veins, drinking the fat and the liquor until I couldn’t stand upright withoutContinue reading “Stiltskin”

it was a bare and barren nobody,that afternoon, wet air and sodden earth the razed umber of a firebird’s huetrod in by wading footfalls, and the sunbored through the trees a red and dripping holelike a gunshot, bruising the sky yellowand the moist clouds, dragging their crumbling tails,drew words and features long-condemned to fadebefore theyContinue reading “That Afternoon”

my old clothes don’t fit anymore I try them on again, sometimes, to seeif they flatter me still- there are daysthat they do, jarring as a flowerin the dregs of a nuclear ruin, and days that they don’t- I feel like oil on a blackroad, all thin-film and refraction:this dress I hoard, another given awaymakingContinue reading “Old Clothes”

their threat was a tubeand a starch white bedas if I was some suffragettein a cell that I had chosen as if I was thin-fingered malicewith a scheme on the skinof my kneeswhen I shrieked in the mouthof the box they clapped shut but a rat can slipthrough a hole like a dimeand a TomContinue reading “Tubes”