The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that perpetually played about their mouths.

They fell just to splatter on the concrete, some of them small as ice cubes. It was a day without clouds and the man selling fruit from his stand on the corner was nearly concussed as they began to patter against the street with sound like the early drumming of hail.

My mom was sixteen when a band of boys took her out to the woods and bound her to a tree and tortured her to death, like in Jennifer’s Body, so you see her womb was kinda already out of commish by the time she got around to wanting to have me. A year ago, after my thirteenth birthday, she made her first and only concerted effort at explaining it.

In a time when most of us are surrounded by bland, corporate big box buildings and bombarded with thoughtless, empty “content,” our writers are surgically extracting their inner worlds and offering them to you, our readers, so you can have a genuine, powerful experience.

The Faire gates swing wide to the tune of a jester and fairy blowing bubbles the size of beach balls. People laugh. Music drifts from every direction. Kids wave foam swords as the tantalizing smell of turkey legs and garlic mushrooms wafts through the walkway. Laughter echoes from the mud pit; a juggler drops a flaming torch and the crowd cheers as if it were intentional