Clicky

issue 36

Gravediggers, by Nat Nguyen

You wandered through the muted grasses of a misty dreamscape, where tombstones marked the way forward. Your feet sank into millennia-old earth refreshed by yesterday’s rain.

Hiatus, by River

biddy bye byebought and soldand when we cry cry crawling coldand if we dye dyeour blues gone oldwe say my mythe table’s toldbiddy bye byefrightened fawnand if we fly flythe…

The Last Great Beautiful Leap, by Haden Cross

The long and thin of her stretches past the calculations. She ran the numbers ten times and she may not have a tape measure out here to drape across the space-curve bounding her legs—but eyeballing it, she spots at least four variables needing another century of physics to pin down.

The Feast Night of Vengeful Ghosts, by Lavie Tidhar

On the Feast Night of Vengeful Ghosts, the thin atmosphere above the dome of Yaniv Town filled with floating lights. It was wintertime, when frost formed on the Martian sand and made fantastical shapes on the surface, all spiderlike webs and fairy circles. The snow, similarly made of carbon dioxide, often fell on Feast Night, also called Saints’ Night by some of the older residents.

Ask a Necromancer, by Amanda Downum

Every sort of mix-up that could happen to a body almost certainly has happened. Cremation in particular is the fussiest form of disposition, because it’s permanent. If someone buries your grandmother in the wrong casket—or in the wrong grave—that is still fixable. There’s no coming back from the retort.

Liturgy of the Hours, by Soni Brown

My father died on a hot day in the cold season, a heavy day in February. He died on a Saturday when flocks of North American tourists beach their bodies, bloated from beer on the white sand, and in the clear, shallow waters of Jamaica. His death seemed an expression of divine transcendence, if you believe these things. I believe.

On the Existence of Ghosts, As If, by James Van Pelt

I saw Sad Tommy the ghost in line at Starbucks behind a woman runner whose blonde hair in a ponytail hung to the middle of her back. The runner ordered, moved aside, and there was an instant, just a blink, when Sad Tommy stepped to the counter, facing the barista, as if to erase the gulf between the living and dead.