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Fiction

Fiction

Twelve Facts About the Dermestid Beetle

1. There is no better friend than the dermestid. I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than any household sponge or brush.

Fiction

Rest Stop

They were on their way to El Paso when Yolanda asked Bernard to pull over. He choked the steering wheel until his fingers turned white. “Are you fucking serious?” “It’s okay,” she said shrinking into her seat, her hands rubbing together nervously between her thighs. “I can hold it.”

Fiction

The Ghost in Apartment 5K

Nena came to consciousness little by little. She was ever present in the air of apartment 5K in the seventy-unit building in Brooklyn, like the wafting scent of sewer gas coming from old drain pipes: it’s easily ignored but still makes you a little sick. Sofia, the old woman who lived in apartment 5K, believed in Nena.

Fiction

Jennifer’s Daughter

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.

Fiction

Dregs

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.

Fiction

The Tailors

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.

Fiction

Shahmeran

Up on the hill, past the wrought iron gates, sat the house where twin sisters Sayeh and Roshan lived. As imposing as it looked, the house, like the gate, was kept in elegantly stellar condition. There were no loose shutters banging on windy nights.

Fiction

Review: When the Baby Sleeps

The initial spark for this story was a writing prompt I saw online about writing a review for a horror movie that doesn’t exist. It led me to think about my personal relationship with horror movies. Since having children, my tolerance for some of them has diminished, though my love has not.

Fiction

The Short History of a Long-Forgotten, Ill-Fated Telenovela

The last copy of Senhora (1972–1973) lies, with no identification tag, on the shelves of Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest audiovisual archive in Latin America. If anyone ever opened the tin cans, they would see that its quadruplex tapes are flaky, almost falling apart.

Fiction

Bleed for Me, Bro

Watching Jules claw his way back to life was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. This was the kind of scene artists immortalized with gold and lapis lazuli illumination, the kind of scene that soared, heaven-seeking, up cathedral vaults, buoyed by choirs of castrati. One moment, Jules was twitching in a pool of his own blood, and the next, he shuddered back into himself, lips opening like a crescent moon.

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