US by Amelia Gray

         Devil would have at our time of greatest suffering when the town pushed us out and killed the ground behind us and burned it past the fulcrum point and no sooner was when we found the House. From the flames we ran and ran we slowed to a trot. Slowed to a walk and wander. For days we wandered through the woods and lo. The House. On the land at center.

                We five all the same. Name and face all the same. Five boys named Tad. Our hair red our face thick pale and jowl. We stood no dog found one and cut her to five. Best to share we learned. We are legion. We did squirrel and yard bird lay their bones to fester. We kept fat and happy. Devil would have we were alone. A bird came to cross the dale we would quick curse it to drop in our pot. To find our psychic net. We kept a nice fire of trash and tires. Would that the bird knew.

                To make our spelling star round the House we never touched Its walls or lock Its window pane or steps or brick for It was sacred. We slept on boards one eye among us watching the House yellow-gold and whole. We fresh in our power and draped in it. We servile beast. We strong and sure. We listen to the earth to its sound to the south. Being what you don’t know will kill you.

                To say they did come and brought their trucks and tents and cans of beer. Boys and little girls as from school. We did articulate our joy with howls and moaning. They come to discover! Their campsite circle the bending trees the girls their lips the sweet girls cudding to their boys. They make a fire to settle in they open cans of beer and food they watch and wait they far from home.

                Their elders lived to cross us and made it law to never try. NEVER TRY THE LEGION TAD they said. We saw them in our sleep. They knew but not their kids they knew how we were and came to be. The town a mass of good and humble folk the county line a fulcrum the trees and House a weight to keep the balance the five of us crucial. As they say Good needs Tad. But now these boys and little girls have willed off the weight these little boys and baby girls.

                We all of us wait the House thrums a beating heart. It makes to speak we draw near it makes to tell us. We draw near. TOUCH ME it growls we press palms to it TOUCH EACH OTHER we clasp one arm around the other and press the House it makes a Dark Circuit there a razor sense all of them those boys and girls we see to make them TOUCH THEM the House screams ear to ear inside our baby boy brain cross the circuit five. Touch fire to sense we land on our backs laid out like cord wood drymouthed like cord wood our hands palms jagged with broken glass yet unbleeding our hands palms weapons against. A gift from the House! We holler and clap and shards sprinkle like snowfire.

                Run through the woods we screeching to them we to see these guests to TOUCH THEM we good students we boys like the rest we make to know them we hear their noises we smell their good food we see their campfire we hear their singing WE see their bodies WE see their faces WE see their faces WE see their faces THEY DO NOT SEE US.

*"US" first appeared in States of Terror, Volume 3 from Ayahuasca Publishing. Read more about it here. 

Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot.

Amanita Muscaria by Alisa Alering

Alisa Alering was hatched in a secret hollow in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, where she ran around barefoot and talked to the to trees. She now lives in Indiana. Her short fiction has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 4, Podcastle, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. She regularly consumes edible fungus.

The Hi-Point by Meghan Lamb

           When we move into the apartment, I make note of all the buildings on the block, along the walk that feels like ours.
            Four thin homes. Then, the Hi-Point building with its gray slab walls, its gray lawn, and its many tinted rows of mirrored windows.
            Nothing along our street is anything worth looking at, but when you look at its reflection, gleaming, through the Hi-Point, everything takes on a warm-gold, just-beginning sort of glow.
           Although, the parking lot is filled with split brick, crumbled stone, and shards of glass.

  _

           Tall weeds grow through the cracks.
           Some grow as tall as me.
           Some, taller.
           They grow on and up and they grow into their reflections.
           They sway back and forth like pale, pleasant winds, a kind of gentle bobbing bound in movements from some world that I cannot see.
           They bob their heads, like stems sprung, springs of movements made of ether, made of shine, some wave that seems to rise up from the glass.
           A sense of nothingness waves to me through their warm gold-lit reflections.
           Hello, says the nothing.
           Hello, hello, hello.

  _

            I pass the Hi-Point every day on my way to and from the store.
            Hello, hello, hello.
            Hello, hello, hello.
            I go with empty bags, then I return with full ones, and I see this emptiness, then fullness, as reflected in these windows.
            Hello, hello.
            Hello, hello, the nothing bobs and gleams.
            Hello, hello, hello.
            Hello, hello, hello.
            I start to feel I am on the verge of knowing something new.
            I start to feel like I’m part of some strange process.

_

            I leave with empty bags, then full.
            Empty, then full.
            Hello.
            The sky turns blue, then gray, but always warm-gold through the Hi-Point windows.
            You take another business trip.
            Another business trip.
            I buy a little less.
            My bags return less and less full.

_

            In the morning, I watch as you sleep, as you wake, as you breathe through the space between sleeping and waking. You breathe deep, then light, as the sun starts to rise, to come in through the curtain.
            A few small flakes of skin push through your chin, your cheeks.
            Small spears of hair through which your frail skin shines like broken glass.

_

            I fill my bags with oranges and apples, green and red.
            When I bite into them, my teeth begin to bleed.
            I fill my bags with bottles of wine, red and white.
            I line the empty bottles in a clumsy, green, black barricade against the door.
            You take a business trip.
            You take another business trip.
            I buy new nylons, dangle them above my head before the light.
            Imagine walking through the world on these strange, flat, legless legs.
            I pass the Hi-Point, watch my gold legs shimmer.
            Sad, flat, pointless gleam.

_

            You take a business trip.
            You take another business trip.
            I take my time to get whichever ways I do not need to go.
            I take my time selecting things I do not need, then buy.
            Then, take them home.
            I buy a new, bright blue umbrella.
            Then, the sky begins to rain.

_

            It rains and rains and rains. Your coffee cup sits still, now, as my finger stirs the emptiness around in it. The dregs. I feel a gentle vapidness amid these unsipped fragments, like the soils from some plant that wouldn’t grow.
            I wash my hands. The soap is filled with strands of hair, both mine and yours, like fine black fractures set in cool white bars of bone.
            I feel my own bones, hard beneath the vagueness of their movement.
            Crack the window, now, to smell the bits that rise up with the rain.

_

            While you are gone—another business trip—they tear the Hi-Point down.
            Day one: they break the windows into shards of glass and long, gray slabs.
            Day two: they clear the innards, tubes and wire, tangled sheets and strands, soft tufts of snowy, pastel piles of insulation.       
            Day three: they slam into the building’s metal skeleton, completing their destruction, their construction of an empty space.
            I leave with empty bags.
            Then full.
            I stop.
            I glance.
            I look into the space.
            My bones feel brittle and my bags feel heavy.

_

            The rain clears.
            You return.
            The empty lot remains.
            I pass the lot.
            Empty, then full.
            Empty, then full.
            Empty, then full.
            I glance at what remains, now crumbled dust.
            No weeds.
            No warm-lit nothing.
            Bright skies.
            Bigger, now.
            An unreflected blue.

Meghan Lamb lives with her partner in St. Louis, where she studies and teaches at Washington University. her novella Sacramento was recently released on Solar Luxuriance. Her book Silk Flowers is forthcoming soon from Birds of Lace. Her work can also be found in Necessary Fiction, Spork, wigleaf, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and other places. 

Kindling by Kodiak Julian

He knew what I was. He found me in the woods, let me wrestle him against gold oak leaves until our hearts smacked against our bones, struggling to leap from our separate bodies.

He whispered human words, words I'd heard women murmur to babies many winters ago, before men had chased me from the village. He dampened my ear with his hot breath. My heart slowed. We scurried into the darkness of my cave's mouth. His wolf dog sat guard outside. "They say a happy man shouldn't come within ten miles of a witch." He bit my breast. Bats dropped from the ceiling, their wings skimming our bare skin. "But what's happy?"

I awoke on cold rocks, alone, with his dried blood beneath my fingernails. I would find him and be his wife. I tracked his ferric scent through the forest to his timber frame cabin and clawed at the door. When he opened it, he did not fight, but thrust his lips against mine. I wrapped my tongue over my teeth to keep from biting him. What did I love more: kissing him, or the relief of puncturing my own tongue? I swallowed my blood to keep him from tasting it. Later, we lay beneath quilts in the shadow-light, his damp body stilled. My fists uncoiled and went limp as river grass. I would remain with him.

This taming planted an ache in my toes, and the pain sent shoots upward, through my stomach and chest, to my ears and crown.

He placed his warm hands over mine to show me how to set kindling in the stove. The pain twitched my fingers until they jerked against him. "Something is hurting you," he said. His wolf dog lapped slime onto my ankles. I would not answer.

I learned to bake his morning biscuits and boil his coffee. My hands cramped and trembled, splashing liquid from his tin cup. After I’d scalded my skin, my hands no longer shook.

After breakfast, he went to hammer iron in his shop, and I scrambled through the birch wood to the graying meadow. I crouched still between the boulders. Sparrows lit on a low branch tangle. I pounced, clapping them between my palms. Their hearts pulsed with trust before I snapped their necks. No pain after that. No pain for whole minutes at a time. I licked sparrow blood from between my fingers and walked back to his cabin to peel potatoes and chop onions.

The day came when I returned to find him already sitting at the pinewood table. "Where have you been?"

I cast my eyes down to the knotted table leg. Mouse pellets traced the wall.

He took my wrists to check my hands for blood, but I was faster and made fists. He kissed my knuckles. "Where do you go?" he whispered. I twisted from his grasp and ran outside to pump cooking water.

After that, I spent winter days inside his house. So long as his hammer clanged, he was not on the path home. The ache flexed itself inside me, so I dripped it out in bits. I loosened my dress to pull my arm free and held a paring knife to my armpit's soft, hidden flesh. The moment I sliced, the pain melted like butter in a pan. He would never think to look there. His wolf dog licked blood from the floor.

It was not enough. When he returned, I hid my hands behind my back so he would not see them quiver against the pain. When he finally slept, I crept from bed, dodging the creaking floorboards and the corner where dryrot turned the planks to sawdust.

Outside, stars burned over the melting snowdrifts. I scratched against softening earth, widening a foxhole. I tunneled beneath matted leaves and loam, into bramble root and soil, to the burrow where a skulk of gray foxes huddled. I snatched a wailing mother, holding back her claws and chomping at her belly. Her punctured intestines tasted like the world's death and rebirth. It was not enough. The kits cowed between the roots, squealing. I seized one and bit his neck. Not enough. Another: I bit off each paw one by one as she writhed.  I washed my hands in the snow. When I returned home, I traced my fingertips against his moonlit cheeks. I kissed his eyelashes and nuzzled his throat.

Each night, I promised myself it would be the last time. Still, I woke nightly, my hands coiled into themselves, burning.

Then, I became pregnant.

I led the wolf dog behind the garden beds. He thought we were playing and scuffled, woofing, still thunking his tail when I bit through fur to his throat. The pain lingered and throbbed like a heart. The dog yelped. I bit harder. The tail dropped and did not move again. In the rush of falling pain, the air silenced. No hammer echoed through the woods.

My husband clawed at me, weeping, swinging his hammer. "I thought it wouldn't tempt you." He pinned me against the ground, his hammer biting at my temple. "I thought I'd tamed you. I thought you would be strong enough."

I was strong. I had grown stronger in his house. I thrust my knee. His jaw cracked like kindling. The hammer thudded on the ground. I slammed my beloved's head against the garden stones.

Then: relief. It rose in little bubbles from my toes, all the way to the top of my head. I spasmed against the body of my love. It was the worst thing. It would be the last thing.

It was not the last thing.

In his shop, he had drawn wire for wool cards. I took a long piece, one he had not yet cut into needles. My hands quaked from the pain, but then, oh then, I fit the wire in, and it scraped inside me.

Pierced.

I fell against the anvil. My head rang on the metal.

Each convulsion reverberated, a chime.

Even this was not enough.

I killed the foxes, I killed the wolves, I killed his horse, I chased bears over hills and crags. It was never enough, never enough, never enough. I stacked twigs beside the wood pile, lit them with a torch, and watched the flames grow with the wind. Fire chewed at the forest, and the buzzing hive of pain shrank to a tingle on my skin. Even if the blaze took the whole woods, took the town, took the town in the next valley and the next, it would never be enough, not even if I let it burn me alive, it would not put me out, it would not put out the hunger, not until I had grown as big as the sky, not until I had swallowed all the stars, not until there was nothing but nothing. 

Kodiak Julian's work appears in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Writers of the Future, Volume 29, and in the anthology, Witches, Stitches, and Bitches. She is a co-host of the podcast, Spirit of the Endeavor and attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop in 2013. She lives with her husband and son in Yakima, Washington, where she is a teacher and really quite nice in real life.