LINDSAY'S EDITS FULL ZINE 2022 (4)

IT'S ALIVE!!!
We are proud to bring you the third edition of
our terrifying baby, Hallowzine. For a project
born of jokes and a mutual love for all things
seasonally spooky, this monster really has
legs (at least eight of them, maybe more).
We’re so grateful for the opportunity this
project has given us to behold some truly
bone-chilling writing, art, and music. Thank
you so much to everyone who shared your
work with us this year. It’s been a privilege to
compile some of our favorites here. We hope
you enjoy them as much as we have.
Happy Halloween to all, and to all a fright
night.
Yours in fear,
Laura and Lindsay (and Axii and Nova)

HELLHOUND by Jonny Black - 6
INDEX
come here my pretty by Eek it's Angelique - 7
Halloween Eve / ERs of All Kinds by Jen Schneider - 8
Best in October by Sophie Kearing - 9
Uninvited by Isabelle Ryan - 10
Plots by Hannah Marshall - 12
Boveda by David Estringel - 13
Unmarked by Katherine Zumpano - 14
Nefarious by Elise and Sara Schneider -15
Threnody in Minor by Caity Scott -16
The Hag by Andrea DeAngelis - 17
Candy Coated Curses by Chloe Coblentz - 18
After the Black Flame Candle is Lit, Mary Sanderson Slips Away
from Her Sisters by Casey Reiland - 19
Halloween Alice 1 by Alice Fitts - 23
Overwhelming a Ghost by Emily Neves - 24
the werewolves by Ron Riekki - 25
To See with Thine Own Eyes by Julie Allyn Johnson - 26
HAUNTOLOGY AS A FISH MARKET OR A SHOWER by Tommy
Blake - 27
Oh, Now I Can Relax by L.M. Cole - 28
Your Daily Horoscope from The Daily Horoscope App by Ellie
Sivins - 29
peekaboo scream by Eek It's Angelique - 32
How To Be a Witch (In 3 Easy Steps) by Alisha Kauten - 33
In midwinter by Marischa Pichette - 35
Cicadas by Lauren Goulette - 36
i am lost in the undergarden by KS Baron - 37
Fulton Street Cemetery by Hannah Marshall - 38
A Twisted Child by Amanda Kooser - 39
Remnant by L.M .Cole - 40
Little Bone Daughter by Joanne Rush - 41

INDEX
Passage by Bethany Browning - 43
lurk within by Eek It's Angelique - 45
Striya of Celenia by Chandra Steele- 49
The Vampire Decree by Meg Smith - 53
When the Lights Flickered by Cecilia Kennedy - 54
The Woman on the Ceiling by Julie Barnett - 56
Insomarach by LM Cole - 61
ULTRA by Nolcha Fox - 62
Haunted House by the Spider Sisterz - 62
The Widow by Larkin Billot - 63
Wild Girl by April Yu - 65
Girl at Night by Jonny Black - 66
cutting out the evil around me by Eek It's Angelique - 67
Maneater by Katherine Zumpano - 68
Anchoress by Joanne Rush - 69
After communion, i question god by Katherine Zumpano - 70
Story Patch by Caity Scott - 71
it is not blood that runs by Eek it's Angelique - 72
Halloween Alice 2 by Alice Fitts - 73
Notes On a Halloween (?) Party by W.C. Perry - 74
Treatment and Trickery by Stephen Kingsnorth - 75
The Mummy Forgot the Chips by Joe Moore's Explodin'
Halloween Garage - 75
That’s the Spirit by Laci Felker - 77
Late Night Creature Feature by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke - 77
Ghost King Allen Joe by Ken Piche - 78
The car, the candy bar, and the crowd: Beware of pigeons by
Jen Schneider - 79
A Free Ghost with Every Cup by James C. Holland - 82
New House, Old Cat by Mikayla Silkman - 84
A Case for Pumpkin Spice by Travis Williams - 85

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FOR NOW!!!
Content Warnings Coming

HELLHOUND
Jonny Black
I like how you scuttle, Prize, you
piece of work. I will
sniff you, hunt you down,
little morsel, fit you
in my mouth and drag you
to where we both belong. You will be my portrait
on fire.

it is not blood that runs

Halloween Eve / ERs of All Kinds
thick green slime oozes
from a scarecrow’s punctured eyes
farmer checks vitals
Jen Schneider

Best in October
Sophie Kearing
Long walks are best in October. Ravens call to you in their secret
language, guardians of the trees. Branches are dressed in finery
of red and orange and gold.
Turning your face up to the sky is best in October. The blue is vast
and the sun is kind, SPF and sunglasses welcome but not required.
Falling down an abandoned well is best in October. Your hands
claw at walls that are soft with the wet roots and fragrant moss of
friendly autumn drizzle.
Landing at the bottom is best in October. The leafy deep is
bouncy under your length and limbs. You can hear yourself think in
that silent stillness. You’ll find random treasures like an old Tootsie
Roll or a piece of pumpkin rind, smooth on one side and a little
moldy on the other.
Dying down there is best in October. It’s not the season for insects,
nor humidity or snow. You can fade away in peace, embers of
distant bonfires floating down to light your way through the thin,
thin veil: a conspiracy of convenience for your departing spirit.

Uninvited
Isabelle Ryan
CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Assault
"The ghost,” he says, “plays hide and seek among the gravestones.” He leads
on, halts at the mouth of a black tunnel. “The ghost,” he says, “is never seen
here. Why might that be?”
“No gravestones,” I say – and his haughty expertise slides away. He
chuckles, says, “Good point,” even the accent gone, then gathers his wits, his
grave demeanour, and proceeds.
Later, I chew the corner of a starchy hotel pillow, feel my back seize and
ripple. My eyes are wide and heavy, hot with exhaustion. Passers-by lob cries
and curses like javelins, expertly aimed; they whistle overhead and lodge in the
headboard. The window opens just an inch – precautionary – but enough to
admit them, and to allow a cold breeze purchase on the thin curtains:
twitching, tugged.
No gravestones, I think, and roll away, shivering.
I should have asked why she haunts there. Her body in an unmarked grave,
or so he said, but not the site of her unexpected death or gruesome murder
(the manner of her passing our ghostly guide did not specify). I always thought
ghosts lingered where they passed. Perhaps the explanation would ruin the
mystery – and, more importantly, his tour. I let it go. He was good in spite or,
perhaps, because of these elisions, these fabrications.
An icy gust irritates my scalp, and I heave the lumpy duvet over my head,
freeing my bare feet.
Ah, I think, and picture the little dead girl – so fond of tricks, or so he said:
especially fond of tugging coattails, which predictably prompted another tourgoer
to yank the back of a stranger’s jacket – curled beneath me, eyes glassy,
hair matted, feet torn to ribbons. Stones and glass concealed in the dark of the
unkempt graveyard, then cobbled streets: no kindness for a ghost’s poor sole.
One thing (perhaps more, if I try to think, which I refuse) retained from
sleepless nights alone in a cold house: tucking the duvet over my feet, lest the
monster, which stole from the wardrobe to the void under the bed, reach.
I waggle my toes in the frosty air. How appetising, really, are little piggies,
market-bound or otherwise? I expect they crunch and stick in the throat. No
gravestones, I think again, and wonder how she can hide, and when she snuck
herself away with me.

The floorboards creak. Slowly (the springs do squeal) I shrink, smaller and
smaller, clutching whatever parts of myself I can find, curled like a fist.
Someone yells in the street. In the hall, there is a thud and a click: someone
back for the night. Beneath me: a rattle, a low hiss, movement.
No one ever told me why a duvet keeps them out. I cling to it now, and to
the dim hope. Long ago, on a sleepless night in a cold house (not quite alone
this time), I curled tight and silent in my eiderdown cocoon. The dim hope
there, too, growing dimmer, snuffed out: suddenly I was exposed, the chrysalis
torn and tossed away. I was sprawled on the bare fitted sheet, unready. My
hands gripped nothing, were gripped: pinned.
A sob aches out of me, but no further protest breaches my lips. My lungs
burn. I bite hard on my tongue.
Another floorboard creaks.
I gather the duvet under me – perfectly ensconced – just as something
depresses the mattress.
No more shouts, no gusts of sepulchral air. In fact, I am burning, melting in
my makeshift shelter. Sleep eluded me, but I could faint away, catch winks that
way.
And then the mattress creaks, tips, my limpet leaning close, dipping with
me in the middle.
I shove a hunk of duvet in my mouth and pray for asphyxiation now the
window’s safety catch scuppered my post-ghost tour plan.
My hitchhiker rests a hand on the tightly-wound lump of me. I picture little
feet, pale and torn, dripping, staining the fitted sheet (easy enough to explain,
especially if they find this room’s guest unresponsive in the morning; easier
than the blood dappled on the fitted sheet in the not-quite-empty house so
long ago: he stripped the bed, scrubbed out reminders). I imagine her little
match girl fingers, stained and ragged, snagging my coattails in the graveyard.
I see her dropping to the floor in the darkened room, slipping like a sigh
beneath the bed. And now here, the hand so light, so far from corporeal it has
no choice but to be gentle, moving, her body moulding to the lump.
I work my jaw, extricate the sodden cotton. Dry-mouthed and fading, I try
to speak. Instead, I weep.
She holds me through the night, bleeding in my place.

Plots
Look at a flourish chiseled in marble,
and count there each hour this woman spent
in childbirth, each time that man ran a hand
over the smooth cherrywood of his dining-room table.
Calculate that this child died at ten in the morning
and once, he prodded a large black ant with a stick
and watched it writhe there in the hard-packed dirt,
and that was the moment he understood regret.
Look into the branches of the biggest sweetgum,
at the crest of the cemetery, and see between its roots
the open earth and all the dead filling it—me and you
eternal as of yet but soon pared down to minerals,
spidering in every direction: stand beside the tombs.
Each slab shines with dull dates,
births and deaths which have nothing
to do with the act of living, the way the rain
hardened to ice on a Tuesday in March,
and this body, the one right below us,
had to step gingerly across the drive,
her weight cast forward, penguin-footed
as she came upon the garden
and the stiffened early lettuces which would thaw limp,
and how she put the hand of her body to each small green thing
that would never become, even as she planned
her reseeding for Saturday:
lettuce, and beets, too, and marigolds.

Boveda
David Estringel
(originally published at Hispanecdotes)
Candle flames speak in sparks and sputters, filling the air with chatter and the
scent of dime store roses. Nine glasses, kissed by fresh rue leaf and cigar smoke,
are filled with cool water, crowning the tabletop, and sparkling—on white linen—to
a playful dance of religion, shadows, and sacred fire. One by one, we place flowers,
reverently, like prayers into an old vase, invoking loved ones with showers of velvet
and petal, paving their ways, smoothly, back to us, back home.
Daisies for happiness. Hyacinth for direction. Lilies to never forget.
Then, we light the palo santo to disperse the shade—for devils, inside and out,
above and below.
Carefully, cracked plates of braised pork, fish head stew, and fried plantains are
lined up on the floor between cups of beer, wine, and cool water—the largest, one
of rum with a lit cigar on top. Nine taps of the opa iku—stick of the dead—calls them
to order, to us, and to their dumb supper: all within the confines of moons and suns
drawn on the floor with powdered eggshell—cascarilla—in the corner of my kitchen
near the pantry door that sticks. Silently, we watch for messages—mensajes—that
tell us the curtain’s been crossed…and wait.
Bubbles going up mean prayers rising to Heaven. Bubbles going down, something
evil’s near.
Hand on my shoulder…they’re here.

unmarked
Katherine J. Zumpano
weeds grow tall, untended, past the iron
gate. the air is too still, noiseless. loss
hangs heavy here. concealed beneath
yellow grass, beneath weeds and leaves,
are squares of stone, two inches wide
and aged by rain. that is all that remains
of patients long dead and long forgotten.
i wonder: can there be dignity in death
when no one wanted you remembered?
the only memory left of you no memory
at all. just a cracked gray stone in a field
of cracked gray stones and autumn debris.
no name, no remnants of life. can there be dignity
in death when a grave is marked not to acknowledge,
but to prevent reburial in the same place? there is no
dignity in this death, but you are not forgotten.

Nefarious
an instrumental piece
Sara & Elise

Threnody in Minor
Caity Scott
Rattle up the bones all crooked like,
Listen softly now to the gravestone songs, the
bell rings in the dark, in the holey night
Where the stars are fang punctures and
the moon is a pearl upon
the locket loop of my neckline
Roll the dark melody, the crinkled pages
of stories long since forgotten
whispered on the autumn wind that tangles
in tree branches, through owl talons and
cat ears, pumpkin vines and withered,
windowpanes with glass like orphaned eyes
Shutter, shutter, the dirge is dire
Let sorrow melt upon your tongue like sarsaparilla,
like the chocolate roots of the dead man’s tree
Your lips are dipped in pomegranate juice,
a kiss from Hades, a ride down Styx where nymphs
grip your boat with webbed fingers, their black hair trailing
like the ink of these words
I tell you
what is a poem but a canary’s song in a coal mine?
The band on the Titanic played until it sank
and here, death is but another key

The Hag
Andrea DeAngelis
You salted and peppered my skin so I wouldn’t find a way back
into my flesh.
I was a good wife to you. I did what you told me to do. I cooked
and cleaned, did more, not less. What does it matter that at night I
slipped out between your snores? You too leave me when you
dream, you drift somewhere, I do not ask what you do. You don’t
leave your skin behind, that’s true, but you leave your mind.
You didn’t know those men I rode. You go to sleep, I go to hunt. I
ride them, they are mine. That is when I feel most alive. Inside this
hide, I am muted, my feelings far and diluted. When I am stripped
and raw, I feel so powerful and more. They are mine, they are all
mine. I perch on their chests, concave, fat or taut. I am the one who
haunts. I swallow their cries.
But now you’ve salted and peppered my skin and I can find no
way back in. I am warm raw meat. You punish me with fists. In every
hit, I feel its echo and its echo of echoes, unrelenting, unforgiving.
All is pain and pain is all.
Give me back my skin, I will wash out the salt with water and
vinegar, the pepper will remain, it will make me tame. Forget this
dissonance, friends tell you what to do but they don’t know you
like I do. You see, I’ve ridden you too but before I licked the stiff
black hairs of your nostrils, I heard you say my name, my name
before I was this way and I knew I could never ride you again. I ride
other men so I can remain yours.

Candy Coated Curses
Chloe Coblentz

After the Black
Flame Candle is Lit,
Mary Sanderson
Slips Away from
Her Sisters
Casey Reiland
She follows the tug of her nose. It’s all she’s been told she’s good for,
after all. Winnifred with the brains, Sarah with the voice, and Mary with
the beak. She trails the south wind that carries the scents of honey soap
and sugar, and when her sinuses tingle, she cackles sharp as shells hitting
the bottom of a cauldron, because as her cruel sisters evade the rain of
death and the rolling dragons on the black road and that wretched
Thackery Binx, Mary is pulled to a place teeming with even more redmouth
children than Salem. A place with glass mountains and
shimmering signs like a thousand fireflies strung together.
The Electrolux clatters to the ground beside a statue of a man on a
horse. Her mouth goes slack a little at the sheer size of it, then a laugh
snakes its way out of her lungs. Even after the hundreds of years that
she’s been half-dead or half-asleep, humans have carried on worshipping
men in waistcoats.
“Is that a fucking vacuum?”
Mary pivots and hisses, ready for the pitchforks and fire. A man stands
behind her with pointed teeth and a cape. A woman, with her face silver
against the moonlight and a peculiar purple dress hugging her body,
wraps a blue hand around the man’s elbow.
“What a riot,” the woman says, giving a grin that suggests she’s had a
merry night of drinking. Mary waits until they leave and then runs the
word “riot” along her tongue like it’s a sweet berry. She’s never heard
that word uttered without a sneer or malice. She still smells the jelly
bones of the children, but there is also the lingering scent of the
woman’s perfume, rosewater and mint, and her grin, warm as coals
crumbling to soot.

Mary trudges along the same path as the woman, littered with
food and overturned cans. On the other side a night bursts with
orange glows and bustling crowds. Mary almost loses her breath
over these humans. They do not look like the ones she remembers:
sorrowful, frightened, praying. These humans are colorful, laughing.
Groups crowd around a person holding a small box and squeal
when it flashes.
People have always feared Mary. Even her sisters have cringed
when touching her, called her disgusting for biting her lip. Here,
she is beckoned by a woman whose face is painted like a
jack-o’-lantern, her hand gripping Mary’s like they have been doing
this all their lives. “We need one more person for trivia,” she says,
leading Mary into a dark room that smells of tobacco. Someone
pushes a bowl of lumpy white soup and a beer across the table.
The jack-o’-lantern girl laughs. “Got a special tonight. Chowder
and a Bud.”
The soup tastes like a warm and delightful ocean. Mary licks
her fingers as a man walks on the stage in front of her. With a club
that makes his voice sound like an ogre, he says, “In what year did
the Salem witch trials begin?”
“Sixteen ninety-two,” Mary says. Two fairies bump her elbow
and say, “Hell yeah.” A giggle rises in Mary’s chest. She rattles off
the next answer to a question about the book of incantations, and
the group pounds their fists on the table. She’s handed another
drink, and another, and the fairies and jack-o’-lantern girl yell
something about bowling and Dunks and drag her by the arm out
into the cold night down several blocks into a hall with shiny
floors.
Jack-o'-lantern girl hands Mary shoes and a heavy, glossy blue
ball. She gently guides Mary’s fingers in the right positions, so
gently Mary could cry. “Strike ‘em out, baby,” the jack-o’-lantern
girl says. Mary has no idea what this means. But she walks slowly
to the edge of the lane, swings the ball back and forth, just like the
girl showed her, and releases it with a rush of air from her lungs.
As the ball rolls down the lane, bumping along the sides like a bat
in a chimney, Mary remembers how before she and her sisters were
hung in the square all those years ago, the townspeople had spit at

them, called them hags, crones, and evil whores, and all she had ever
done was try to survive, try to ignore the souls of the children she
swallowed, the ones that whispered she wasn’t a woman but a chalice
of ghosts.
When the ball clashes against the line of white blocks, they
tumble all at once. Humans swarm Mary, but she is not standing on
a trap door with a noose around her neck, and Winnifred isn’t
screaming curses, and they are not repeating over and over, We’ll be
back, we’ll be back. Mary is here, in a world with women hugging her,
telling her she is amazing, this night is amazing, this song playing
right now is amazing. Mary does not know the song as the women
begin to dance. But she sings anyway. She sings from the pit of her
stomach, her arms waving, her shoulders shimmying. She sings as
though the sun will never shatter her, as though she is already
immortal. A woman made of both blood and stone.

Halloween Alice 1
Alice Fitts and Benny James

Overwhelming a Ghost
Emily Neves
The creeks of a radiator we are sitting on that doesn’t quite work anymore
people walking into other rooms, laughing, chatting
the sound of footsteps upstairs
the snapping of rain outside
scratching pens
a cricket in the void
pens falling to the ground
someone clawing at their head
Jesus looking down at us like a disappointed mother
cars passing on the road, trying to imitate the wind
your heartbeat but something is just slightly off
that ringing we have in our ears
my own steady breathing
the sun setting too quickly
flowers dying but being too indifferent to care
cars passing by, throwing rain onto the sidewalk
my heartbeat but it’s perfectly fine and you can hear it better than yours
the moon rising and screaming at the top of her lungs while doing so
clouds that really, really want to know how dry grass feels
doors closing and opening and closing and
blood vessels expanding
pupils dilating
a sighing wind
coughing
sirens

Ron Riekki
the werewolves
aren’t real, so I’m not afraid of them, except
when they’re in my dreams, because then they
are, in a way, in the center of my head, in fact,
which is the worst place for them to be, and so
many, and everywhere, all of the shadows and
all of the ventricles and all of my vessels filled
with werewolves who, I hope, only there, can
be awake and alive and hangry and everywhere
and my counselor tells me to try to control my
dreams by controlling my thoughts before I fall
asleep, and I stare at him and I wonder if there
are a million werewolves stuffed in his head too,
howling and growling and gripping at the night.

I’ve wasted an inordinate
amount of time
scheduling my own autopsy.
I want to ensure no bone fracture
is overlooked, no molar —
however posteriorly situated —
is ignored, no occipital lobe
left wanting.
Catgut sutures not yet degraded
shall warrant further examination.
Anterior bruises
hovering on the outskirts
of the ROY range of the spectrum
will be particularly suspect.
To See
with
Thine
Own
Eyes
Julie Allyn Johnson
Switchblade incisions, passé.
Methamphetamine overdose, likewise.
Possession within my person
of Agent Orange
or other tactical defoliants:
definite cause for alarm.
The manner of my death
must not persist
in the corrupt decay
of man’s intruding darkness

HAUNTOLOGY AS A FISH MARKET
OR A SHOWER
Tommy Blake
The workers in white gloves broil their fish markets with pressurized water,
The shower boils your white skin to a tinted fishpink, your eyes glasscut and swelling—
Water pools to mirrors mucked up with leftover guts, large eyes scarred and rotten,
Swelling or breathing, your body moves dazed as parts of you slip toward the drain—
Rotten and bloated lips open, swallowing things bodied with brine, sinking in its reflection,
Drain the water, wrap yourself in bonewarmth, and comb through fog in the room—
On some other night, in this realm or a mirrored one, you cup the water swelling in city streets,
pouring it all over yourself. Your ghostskin translucent under a moon stinking of fish, and you’ve
never felt so clean.

Oh, Now I Can Relax
L.M. Cole

Your Daily
Horoscope
from The Daily
Horoscope
App
Sept 25, 2020
Ellie Sivins
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 – Feb 18)
Aquarius, today may be calm, but I foresee a change.
Reflecting on your past will pull you away from the
destiny I have seen for you. There is a café in your
future, and, with mercury in retrograde, I believe the
proximity is local, but new to you. Wear something out
of your comfort zone, red would look great on you.
VIRGO (OCT 1)
Today, Virgo, I sense a new opportunity will bring you
closer to your goal. You may feel hesitant, but I know
this will strengthen your bond to an authority figure. I
advise you to proceed with caution and choose your
actions wisely. A local café is where you will find the
goal wearing red.

Sept 27, 2020
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 – Feb 18)
I have drawn The Fool card for you, Aquarius. I suggest you
approach unexpected encounters with a childlike enthusiasm. A
need to seek something new is symbolised in the butterflies
surrounding the Fool. I believe you are a butterfly, dear Aquarius,
but I fear you have become the obstacle in your way. Make some
time to follow my advice from days gone by. I believe in you
Aquarius.
VIRGO (OCT 1)
I understand your impatience Virgo. It is frustrating, I know.
Today, I have drawn the Judgment card for you. It is a sign you
are looking for the recognition I believe you deserve. There is an
eclipse on the card, creating a period of darkness for you.
Immerse yourself in the darkness. Maybe the nearby woods.
Within it, I have seen your revelation.
Oct 1, 2020
VIRGO (OCT 1)
Today is the day. I am proud of you Virgo. You have found your
calling. I will not receive hesitation well. With the full moon, take
steps to achieve our goal. Follow your instincts. Follow the
reddened star. Leave the world as you found it. Not better. Not
worse. The same. No trace.
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 – Feb 18)
I am proud of you Aquarius. Today, I have drawn The World card
for you. This card signifies a journey coming to an end. Do not
fear, the butterfly you became when I drew The Fool card for you
is merely ready to fly. Do not hesitate. Put all your trust in a new
friend. Embrace the end of your journey.

Oct 2, 2020
VIRGO ( )
VIRGO! You will be rewarded. The energy from the Aquarius moon
has made your light visible to me. I can see your potential.
Burying the goal deep in the woods will lead you closer to me.
Take caution, I predict opposition in the coming days.
Oct 5, 2020
VIRGO ( )
Run.
They found a red scarf. You were not cautious. They know it was
you. Don’t you dare lead them to me. Only YOU deserve this
recognition. THIS IS OVER. DONE.
Oct 6, 2020
VIRGO ( )
Automated Message: I sense your free trial has ended, Virgo.
Oct 10, 2020
VIRGO ( )
Automated Message: I sense your free trial has ended, Virgo.

peekaboo scream
Angelique Owens

How To Be a Witch (In 3 Easy Steps)
Alisha Kauten
If you want to be a witch, here are a few things you should know:
1. Just be.
Acknowledge your existence.
It’s scary, I know.
To know and be known is scary and daunting. Perhaps that’s why witches are
associated with spooks and scares, with curses and superstition, with dark clothing and
even darker nights. To be a witch is to acknowledge it. You may keep it to yourself or you
may shout it to the world, but you can never snuff that part of yourself out once you let
yourself be.
Embrace it.
Embrace yourself.
There is space for you in the world. You just have to take that space and make it your
own. This space will be your metaphorical broomstick.
Let yourself fly in this space. Let yourself be. Let yourself become something.
2. You are going to mess up.
This is part of the process. Don’t feel bad, but no one learns to fly perfectly on their
first try.
Repeat after me. You are going to mess up.
If you don’t mess up, you don’t grow. If you don’t grow, you die.
…
You don’t actually die, but that part of you that wants to be something won’t
blossom, won’t branch out to be more. Be confident in the steps you take. Even if you
find yourself down the wrong path, it doesn't mean you haven’t made progress. Maybe
you find a little seed you can plant in your garden. Maybe you find a stone to put upon
your shelf to gaze at. Maybe you find a blossom to press between the pages of your
favorite book.
This world is full of maybe’s if you let yourself trip when you walk.
Let yourself fall. Let yourself hurt. You will heal.
You will grow.
There is something to be gained in messing up.
3. Listen.
This is an important step, maybe even more important than number 1.
People are going to tell you what is right and what is wrong with full confidence in
themselves.
They are not right.

Not to say they are wrong, but there is no ‘right’ way sometimes. Life is not just about
the grandest or resplendent things you can buy. Life is not just the fixed words on the
page. Life is not just anything.
Life cannot be pinned down. Life is a bird. Watch it fly.
It is the value you place upon the things you care about. It is what your heart and
mind and soul tell you. It is what you hear nature whisper to you when it rains.
Can it be clear quartz and lavender that is polished to gleam and burnt with fervent
devotion?
It could be.
Can it be river stones and four-leaf clovers found off the beaten path? It could be.
Dandelions don’t grow somewhere else because you told them to, but they listen.
They take your words and continue onward on the wind.
That is what you must do. Listen then continue onward.
Peck at the information you wish to keep, gather it like a crow, then fly on.
Exchange it, discard it, keep it. The choice is yours.
This is your space. Make it your own.

in midwinter
Marisca Pichette
and snowmelt running like prey,
filling our veins like springtime—
We drew fire from Our teeth,
gnashing under faded suns
claws drawn,
fingers knotted hot
We melted the walls they built
to block Our defiant dreams.
lightning echoes
when our blood sizzles
steamed sun retreats,
reclaimed by hungry clouds.

Cicadas Lauren Goulette
Lap the bottom of my feet
and rub their wings.
Their hideous bulky body.
Glint at the dribble of brisket-stew
from my chin,
see the dry land behind me,
the dripping of beadery from neck.
There is nothing here,
nothing to eat.
They took the riffle to head,
in the field behind my house.
Where the cicadas twitched,
their eyes like emeralds,
and laughed.
Cicadas, they purse their lips together
and whine.
Amber brine folds into the valley,
the overflow of broth
and cardamom plant on tongue.
The slow droplets hiss the ground
and I wait.
Cicadas, how I wish to grab them
in thumb.
Mottled skin fizzled,
they bloom in.
Cicadas, how we crushed them
beneath the heel.
Cicadas, how we did not forgive
the land.

i am lost in the undergarden
—After Quek’s dimension
K.S. Baron
where glooming gourds grow under mushroom
trees and underbeans wrap around my ribs / scintlings
and rot fiends walk on deep soil, shimmering weeds
coat the grass and it shines the way my bones
scatter themselves in crinkling kelp / where am i? /
my blood sits heavy on the shiverstone and stoneborn
footsteps echo in the depths. the twisty twigs
scratch against the wigglewood trees and i wonder
if i belong here / am i from here? / the gronglegrowths
stir to the east under the dweller’s feet and somehow
a part of me feels whole sitting in the brush stone
under veiled mushrooms. in this place
of darkness, of fungus stems and ditch bulbs
burning bright, i have found the tips of my fingers
and soles of my feet lost to the blisterberries / the guardian
calls / and dungeons i died in long ago.

Fulton Street Cemetery
Fulton Street Cemetary
Hannah Marshall
Mulch-mounded barrow, hollow
of last summer’s bones
where preachers carry clinical crowns
of paper, gravediggers’ lips split,
counting hectares
and the fat mushrooms
at the feet of granite children.
We walk our linear communion
amid daffodil ballet, spring’s shock
of chill cymbals. Coins
in our cold pockets are starships
for our innocence, the synchrony
of water and sky, our hands entangle,
becoming heretics amid this ash.
Beetles unravel skulls. Stars fever gold.
Here, where bodies remember wholeness,
a cat lathers puddles, watches high-flung finches.
We come to see the snow of pear blossoms
blown bone-bright, a glide of light
beside the footpath. What is done for bodies
is the science of hope,
grief stumbling into the yellow promise
of the bee, wakened early to her feast.

A Twisted Child
Amanda Kooser
I grew my demon from a seed, as a trial. First, I picked an albino
pumpkin at midnight under a full moon as the farmer slept. Then, I
carved the gourd, white as a grub, with a blade I had forged myself
from a rusted crowfoot wrench and railroad nails. Of all the seeds I
pulled out from the pulpy flesh, I found the one most curled and tiny. I
fed it on dew collected from a Victorian graveyard on a foggy
morning and watched as it sprouted, all limbs and brown fur. My
demon isn’t mischievous. It isn’t loud. It just lingers inside the jack-olantern
and wags its silky tail into the night, feasting on the flame of
the candle.
I suppose I had expected something different, but it’s not bad for
my first try.
I just wish it would stay out of my dreams. I wake every morning to
the acrid smell of my own eyebrows, singed by licks of fire slim as a
snake’s tongue.

Remnant
L.M. Cole

Little Bone Daughter
Joanne Rush
It was a hungry winter. By the solstice we were starving. My daughter
ate the sky with her eyes. Her eyes shot the wild ducks that flew past
too high to kill. The quernstone lay unused – there was no longer
enough grain to crush into flour, only the parched handfuls I added to
the stock each night.
For a while it seemed laughter could fill her. The shadows from the
fire dancing on the wall. She with her hands making birds fly and deer
shake their antlers. But our hunger defines us. Soon she lay quietly on
the floor by the hearth, watching the flames lick the pot and the smoke
stain the wall. In her chest a butterfly beat its wings, and she coughed
and coughed. My little daughter, so thin already, coughing up blood.
By the time the deer came, there was nothing left of her face but
eyes. The deer was also starving, its ribs like striated light between a
row of trees. It hesitated at the opening of the hut, then bent its head to
lick the spot where my husband used to put down salt for the cattle –
before the cattle died. My hands reached for his bow, and the arrow
beside it, but my daughter looked at me sternly. ‘The deer is not food,’
she said. ‘The deer is a guest.’
And truly, that skeletal creature looked like the spirit a shaman
invokes by dancing and screaming, by waving bone and horn.
When my husband came home, he saw the tracks leading up to and
away from the hut. He is a hunter, a crow-feeder. He picked up his bow
and held it tightly for a long time, angry about the meat our daughter
could have eaten.
The deer came to take her. I know that now. It stood in the forest on
its thin legs, bending its head forwards in salutation. She was tired of
winter. She loved sunlight and flowers, but spring came too late for her.
She had already shut her eyes.

We laid her naked body on a bier made of hazel poles, and carried it
to the top of the hill, where we covered her with thyme and yellow
saxifrage, and then with stones to hold her down and stop the wild
animals from taking her. We left her body to decay, her bones to show
through.
We are field people, patient for the seeds in the ground and the calf
in the cow’s belly. We know the rhythms and seasons of things. But we
are water people too. I wept when I left her – salt tears that the wind
licked.
My husband and I outwitted that winter. For his sake, I learnt to live
around her loss. I planted emmer and rye, parsnip and lentils. Shoots
pricked through the soil, obedient to light and their own mysterious
timing. The fruit on elder and rowan trees ripened, then on brambles.
The pattern of seedtime and harvest drew me into it – pruning,
tending, picking – as it does every summer. But for the first time I felt
old. Sometimes I felt thousands of years old.
Every morning I went down into the valley to fetch water. The river
is the place of the dead. They prowl its edges, waiting to cross. When
our tribe fights, this is where we put the ones who die violently – their
sides pierced by spears, their lungs by arrows, their heads by dreams
and stones. Their spirits are more restive than most.
Crouching on the bank, I saw myself as if I was already gone: an
unsteady face, which broke apart and remade itself on the ripples of
the water. Sometimes I thought I also saw my daughter’s face, but
when I looked behind me, no one was there. On other days, she crept
up and laid her head softly against my shoulder. Her breath stirred my
hair, her furtive arms embraced me. But when I turned round, she
slipped from my hands like silt.
Vole daughter, hare daughter, deer daughter. While she lay on the
bier, her spirit stayed near us. But over time her body unwove. When
we went back to her, my husband used his axe to cut apart the bones
that were still joined together. I picked up each one, and wrapped
them in a woollen blanket for the journey.

The house of the dead is a half day’s walk from the cairns. It is not a
real house, but a long mound with an entrance flanked by upright
stones. Wood is for the living, stone for the dead. This is because stone
is cold and lasts forever. But the mound recalls the shape of our
wooden houses, because death echoes life, and also echoes through
it.
Inside are eight chambers, with bones laid out on the floor in rows.
The spirits that used to wear them have crossed to the other side of
the river. When they first get there, they cluster together on the bank,
squeaking and whispering. During this time, their bones are kept at the
entrance of the mound – close to the light, and close to us. Further
back, dark and cold, are the chambers of the long dead. We cannot
hear them. They have forgotten about us.
In the first chamber I unfolded my wool blanket, and arranged my
daughter on the earth, curled as if asleep. I placed what was left of her
hand beneath her cheekbone. On her skull I smeared red ochre. Then I
laid out her last supper. Berries and hazelnuts, burdock and wild
honey. Venison roasted with mint and thyme.
The earth’s best gifts could not fatten her again. But the time for grief
was past. It was time for her to go.

Passage
Bethany Browning
I couldn’t ask her to leave. She wasn’t ready. Like me, she was
tethered here still, to this land where I lived and grieved. No feeling
was more familiar to me than being forced to let go before you’re
ready. I’d never force a child to endure it.
She wasn’t a bother. Sat at my creaky old kitchen table—the one
my own daughter nearly ruined with permanent markers two
decades ago—and placidly observed as I went about my day. Never
asked my name, and I didn’t have to ask hers. I knew who she was.
Flyers with her kindergarten photo, details about what she was
wearing and where she was last seen were posted on every
lamppost between here and Billings.
Avira Evans. Last seen wearing a Rihanna hoodie and a pair of
hot-pink Skechers.
I didn’t know what most of that meant. What I witnessed was a
whisper of molecules.
Her edges were feather-soft and blurry, making her more a feeling
than a being, a liminality. After I was done assembling my small
meals-for-one and cleaning the plates, when the floor was swept
and the flies swatted, I’d sip my nightly matcha at the table and
we’d consider each other, silently bouncing feelings back and forth,
back and forth. I allowed her to excavate my life, to pick apart the
pieces she could understand at her age. I felt her seeking something
in my energy and my manner to give her the answers to questions
she hadn’t fully formed yet. As she started to accept her experience
as real and immutable, she grew lighter, her form transparent, as if
she’d been rinsed and squeezed out. She wondered about what

happens next—a signal to me that she was being pulled to leave. I
did my best to be useful to her in ways I couldn’t for my own
daughter who’d been snatched away from me so quickly and
violently, right here on this property. They’d both been too young
to read the warning signs I’d put up. They’d both happened to be
the perfect size to stumble down and get stuck. Mine never came
back—went straight to her reward without so much as waving at
me from the front porch. But I had the chance to prepare this
one. To make her feel cared for. Loved, if that was even possible
now.
On the few occasions I was forced to leave her alone to fetch
groceries, banish a wasp nest from the barn eaves or any one or
another of country life’s infinite chores, her form would appear
dark and heavy like the churning sea during a squall. I found my
dishes in shattered piles on the floor. Wallpaper ripped from the
wall. Lightbulbs exploded. Furniture relocated.
I wasn’t angry about any of it. I would sit with her until she
was clearer, a light fog rather than a thundercloud. I’d clean up
the mess, put things back where they belonged, and tell her not
to trouble herself about it in the slightest. I respected her grief.
And I could sense that she was learning from mine, infusing her
being with what it might feel like to be the one left behind. After
she’d sorted out that her next step was safe and natural, she
wanted to understand her grieving family would feel.
She was only a child, but an empathetic one. The kind that
puts baby birds back in their nest or leaves food out for the
neighborhood strays. The tiny kid who stands up to the big bully.
The one in class who always stays late to pick up after the others.
She didn’t like what she saw in my past and present, and I didn’t
like having to reckon with it. I hadn’t moved on, I explained. This
was my failure, my choice, my cross to bear. But she needed to, I
told her. It’s not hers to worry about the ones still here. She was
on her path; they were on theirs. They’d meet again, I said, but for
now the great yawning power has invited her home, and she had
no business refusing the call.

The voices drifted through my window on a warm summer
morning, like a song playing far away. I’d expected they’d show up
here sooner or later. They didn’t ask permission to search my
property and I’m glad. I didn’t have to hide what I already knew.
I peeked through the sun-worn curtains to discover that her
momma and her daddy were in the search party. Her older
brother, too. I said a silent prayer for them. There was no coming
back from what they were about to find.
I hurried down the stairs, hopeful I’d catch her before she saw
them, but I was too late. She’d shifted to the kitchen door,
opened it, and was witnessing her family searching for her, calling
her name. I tried to read her face and found nothing but pulsing
light.
A peace like a heavy blanket settled over me as I watched her
dissolve into the morning sunbeams that lit my front porch aglow.
She turned and waved, her tiny hand a curling wisp of birthdaycandle
smoke. I wiped a tear as she evaporated, becoming one
with the dust motes, the insects, the sky, the clouds, the gravel,
the riverbed, the pine needles and grass.
I stood still as a stone, my mind a deep and tranquil pond for
the first time since my own daughter left me.
There was nothing more for me to do. And when I finally heard
her mother’s sorrowful cries echo through the canyon, my heart
cracked into a thousand irreparable pieces, a plate smashed by a
grieving ghost.

lurk within

Striya of Celenia
Chandra Steele
A note from the author;
The story behind Striya of Celenia is one that haunts me
personally. Because of the Holocaust, the history of the
Jewish side of my family was largely unknown to me but I
stumbled across some pages of an autobiography by a great
uncle that were preserved online. I learned that some of my
family came from a shtetl in Romania, specifically
Transylvania, and that my great great grandfather had been
murdered in a pogrom. It made me think of the blood libel
claims against Jews and the way that the area is synonymous
with vampires and so I wrote this horror tale/revenge story
using my great-great grandfather as the protagonist.
השם יקום דמו
Louis Polansky found his sheep brutalized behind the barn. The
structure sagged from an unrelenting Transylvania winter in the shtetl
of Celenia. In its shadow was an even darker spot; a sad, lank lump.
It was one of his sheep, a sweet one he hadn’t been keen to have killed.
Now it looked oddly flat, drained of fluid, gashes in its neck deep
enough to expose muscle. He had seen countless sheep slaughtered at
the shochet but something strange emanated from this one, a whiff of
menace that was strong enough to linger in the light.

His sheep wasn’t the first victim of whatever this was. Moshe Graur
had three cows attacked. Ivan Wechsler’s chickens were turned into a
pile of bones and feathers shortly after. The loaves of challah of those
he sold eggs to were still pale.
Louis suspected other livestock had been killed but no one wanted to
speak of it because of what happened four years ago. It was this time
of year, the dangerous days leading up to Easter, when a four-year-old
boy had gone missing. He was last spotted wandering near the woods
behind his home. The area was thick with wolves but they were
thought of as a benign entity in the village, a part of nature, unlike the
Jews who lived closer than anyone was comfortable with.
The whole shtetl was too busy preparing for Passover to notice the
growing suspicion around them until a mob rained down days of
brutality. Twenty-six died. His wife Sara fled with their children for
New York, the real promised land she called it. But Louis remained.. It
had taken him so long to purchase this land and even longer to acquire
the animals and he wanted to sell them before he joined his family.
And now this. Louis dragged the sheep into the barn, sheared it,
chopped it into pieces, and mixed it into the feed. He would tell his
friend Jules Liebowitz. Louis went to his house that evening.
“You know what happened to Moshe’s cows and Ivan’s chickens?”
Jules leaned forward.
“I think whatever it was got one of my sheep.”
“You know what I think.”
The night before the gentile child disappeared, Jules had been in the
woods looking for mushrooms. He did his hunting in the dark so he
wouldn’t be accused of stealing. On that night, he heard voices and
hid. Three well-dressed goyishe women struggled with a sack the size
and heft of a small child. Jules insisted they were fighting about who
would be the first to drink the blood of whatever they had captured.
“They killed that child and now they’re after us.”

Louis felt more unsettled than before but thanked his friend and
walked home. As he rounded his field, there was the shimmer of silk
and a woman hurried past him. He called out to reassure her and she
stumbled. As she fell, he could see her mouth was filled with blood. A
rat, with two gashes in its neck, bloodless as his sheep, fell at his feet.
Now Louis ran. He bolted himself inside until the sun rose. When it did,
he went straight to Rabbi Yitzhak Auerbach.
“I’ve come about a matter that’s been plaguing us,” he said. He told
him about his sheep and how alike it was to what happened to Moshe’s
cows and Ivan’s chickens but when he thought he was ready to broach
the subject of what he saw in the night, he went quiet.
The rabbi waited. Louis shifted. He shook. “Last night I visited Jules
and on my walk home I think I saw what is responsible for such things.
It was a woman with eyes like a blaze and a mouth of blood.” Louis
looked to the rabbi for his reaction and did not see surprise.
The rabbi held up one finger and left the room. He came back with a
volume. “This is from a friend in Prussia. A curious text. The Sefer
Hasidim.”
He leafed through its pages, settled on one, and looked at Louis. “This
tells of a creature called a striya. It is similar to what you spoke of. It
can live for an indefinite amount of time but the exchange is that it
must drink blood from the living. I have worried that there are several
such monsters in this area.”
Louis felt the same sensation he had the night before. He thanked the
rabbi and took his leave. Monsters. More than one. He thought back to
four years ago. Louis decided he would seek out the source of his
disquiet, put an end to it before it brought more death.
At sunset he set off with a pitchfork. He’d never been near the village
at night. There was a pub at the outskirts where some men were
lingering over good-byes after beers. They saw him. “A dirty Jew!” one
said as he shoved him. “Did you come to kill us with this?” another

grabbed his pitchfork. Louis struggled for the Romanian words to
explain that he was searching for a creature that was a threat to them
all.
“Let’s do to him what he was going to do to us.” Those were the words
they had been waiting for. The men tore at his limbs as if to separate
them from him. His own pitchfork pierced his chest. There was a shriek
but it was not his. One of the men was beset by a billowing figure, one
Louis recognized. The striya. She hovered off the ground as she
drained his blood.
She had others with her and they satiated themselves on the other
men. They ignored Louis and that’s when he knew he was closer to the
dead than the living. What did the goyim’s holy book say about life
after death? Louis knew he would never reach his promised land now
and his last thought was hoping that those on the ground around him
wouldn’t reach theirs.

The Vampire Decree
Meg Smith
We'll have no more of this --
turning over soil in graves,
measuring blood, opening
earthen boxes, interment of stakes.
The empress has issued her edict,
and night will never turn gray.
But it's not enough.
Somewhere, in a room without lanterns,
blood quickens still, devotion
without measure.

When the Lights
Flickered
By: Cecilia Kennedy
When the lights flickered, we turned them off. When the elevator
stopped working, we took the stairs. A dent in the wall grew, where
someone left a doll in a chair. Moving in the dark, against a blueish
glow that lit up ceiling tiles, Marguerite showed me the doll. She
took her flashlight and aimed it at a swivel chair, where the doll sat,
her hair on end, her face smudged.
“It shocks people,” she said. “It’s the electrician’s doll.”
The last electrician walked off the job and gifted it to the office.
When I suggested a blessing, we smelled smoke, and the fire alarm
rang. When we raced outside, lights strobed, sirens shrieked.
Back inside, the lights were on, and the doll had moved to a space
where the aisles crisscross between rows of cubicles. Every time her
chair swiveled, her body pointed toward Marguerite’s desk, and I
could see Marguerite’s hand shaking.
At lunch, the lights went out again, and Marguerite looked defiant.
“Enough!” she said, moving towards the doll, whose eyes glowed
blue.
Marguerite took a knife from her bag, along with a container of
peanut butter, which she slathered over the doll. Electric charges
sparked; flesh burned.
We watched as Marguerite picked apart the doll and ate her,
covered in peanut butter. A final jolt sent Marguerite to the ceiling,
wedged between the tiles.
When the sprinklers kicked on, Marguerite lit up the room, and
everything worked—as long as Marguerite hung from the ceiling.

The Woman on the Ceiling
Julie Barnett
She’s here. The woman on the ceiling. Writhing around up there like some
terrible spider. Black hole eyes. Voice like old books. She’s climbing down the
wall. She’s here. Oh god. Please help me…
DAY ONE
I’ve caught it. I’d been so careful too. I swear it was that old guy on the x13
bus who sneezed on my neck. Thanks for that (!) Ten days stuck at home,
twiddling my thumbs. Great. Other half has taken Tom to the Mother in
Laws. Now it’s just me and you, house. Finally, we are alone. Do you know I
haven’t been alone in this house for ten years? Always being followed from
room to room. Always someone there. Watching.
DAY TWO
My throat feels scratchy like tiny fingernails have raked up and down my
windpipe. My skin prickles, tiny hairs stand on end. I make a mental note to
shave my pits when I feel better. I take to my bed. One minute, shivering like
ice water has been poured down my back and the next moment, kicking off
the duvet as heat rises from every pore, my body slick with sweat. I feel
hungover. Exhausted. An open window caused my bedroom door to slam
repeatedly overnight. I check all the windows, finding them closed. Odd.
DAY THREE
2.22am.
I try hard to move. The seconds stretched into infinity. My mind is awake yet
my body is asleep. I am paralyzed. A buzzing sound grows louder and louder
in my ears until it fills my whole head. I hear heavy footsteps coming up the
stairs. Thump, thump, thump. Something is in the room. I am not alone.
Something is breathing in my ear. Fuck.
DAY FOUR
2.22am.
Why does everything look so different at night? My bedroom is normal. Bland
even. At night the energy shifts and changes. Becomes sinister. Why does my
dressing gown look like a fucking person is standing in the doorway? Why do
I feel like I’m being watched?

DAY FIVE
They say a child born at midnight will never see a ghost. I wish I could say the
same for my son. Tom saw them EVERYWHERE. It’s normal, right? Kids say
freaky stuff all the time. They find it hard to distinguish between what’s real
and what’s in their imagination. It’s all TOTALLY NORMAL and definitely no
reason to call an exorcist and burn down the entire house. He’s nine now. Too
many video games I suppose.
We bought a new-build. No ghosts here! This is a spook free zone. No
Victorian lady in the attic. No creepy basements. No bodies in the walls. Ours.
You, me and a third. A secret I'd held within me. A stranger, yet I have known
you forever. You were born as the Christmas lights twinkled. I screamed you
into existence. Cold metal stirrups. Blood. A perfect baby boy.
On the third night it began.
A gentle tugging of the blankets.
Tug, tug, tug.
Like a small child trying to get my attention. It appeared that I had brought
more than one guest home with me that night.
DAY SIX
My fever peaks. The walls bend. The ceiling ripples like water. I can’t do this.
I can’t. A face appears at the top of the door frame. A white oval in a black
void. It stares and in a second is gone again. There’s someone else here.
DAY SEVEN
You were two weeks old when I was in the grips of sleep deprivation. Almost
hallucinating through lack of sleep. I began seeing things. Hearing things.
Voices. Murmurs. Mutterings. Whispers in my ear. At night I was poked in
the back. Always three pokes.
Poke
Poke
Poke.
I slept with the light on. What little sleep I had was filled with nightmares.
The woman in the walls. Mouth open, in a silent scream. Hands around my
neck. Choking me. I told no one. Afraid that you would be taken away. That I
would be seen as mad.

You grew into a pale, serious, three-year-old. Eyes like deep pools. Milky
white skin. You were thoughtful and sensitive. I’d hear you chatter happily
alone in your room. I asked you who you were talking to. The lady, you said.
I was making you breakfast one morning, stacks upon stacks of chocolate
pancakes. Your favourite. We were chatting. You telling me about a bug you
had found. A fat, pink worm. When your gaze shifted to just above my
shoulder.
‘Lady.’ You pointed.
I stared at the empty doorway. The black rectangle.
‘What lady, darling?’ I asked.
‘Lady.’ You repeated. Pointing at nothing.
‘What’s the lady doing?’ I asked you.
‘Screaming.’
Fantastic.
Why does she have to be screaming? Why can’t she be a nice little old lady
holding a tray of warm chocolate chip cookies? Why are kids such creepy
bastards?!
You feared going upstairs alone. You were scared of the dark. The people on
the landing. You said. You didn’t like them.
Day seven, day seven, day fucking seven.
I thought you had gone. She’s back. SHE’S BACK.
DAY EIGHT
2.22am.
She laughs at me now. She’s mocking me. Leave me alone. I scream into the
empty house. LEAVE ME ALONE.
DAY NINE
She’s here. Oh god. Oh god. Help me. Someone, help me. The smell, oh god,
the smell. Damp leaves and something rotten. Something decaying.
Something dead. I reach out for my phone and my hands are shaking. It’s just
out of my reach. My fingers grasp air. Desperate. It falls. It’s over.

She’s here.
She’s climbing down the fucking wall.
I can’t breathe. The air is thick, pungent. The smell of her. Oh god. I’m
choking. Her hands claw at me. Filthy hands. Dead, cold, clammy hands.
She’s in my bed. Her weight is crushing. The breath leaves my body. Her
matted greasy hair is on my face. In my mouth. Down my throat. Please. No.
Please. Stop.
STOP.
She’s screaming now.
A terrible, terrible sound.
The room spins, sways and tips. The walls disappear and I am falling, falling
and all I can hear is those terrible screams ringing in my ears and everything
goes black.
DAY TEN
An awareness. Light dancing outside my closed eyelids. Warmth. Sunlight. A
vague memory stirs beneath my consciousness. HER. Screaming. Blackness.
My thoughts jumbled. Tangled. I hear birds singing. A gentle shuffling from
downstairs. The smell of bacon frying. Of toast. The rattling of pots and pans.
Life. My family. My home. I am awake. I am alive. I am safe. I hear light,
quick footsteps climbing the stairs. My boy. He’s here. Oh, thank god. Thank
god.
I open my eyes.
Somethings wrong. Something is very wrong.
I am sat up in bed. But that’s not me.
THAT’S NOT ME.
I am looking down on the imposter. The changeling. The doppelganger.
I am on the fucking ceiling.
Plaster, paint, dust, brick. The walls distort and bend. I am being swallowed. I
am being fucking buried alive.
I scream my sons name.
That’s not me. That’s not me. Someone, help me. He can’t hear me. He can’t
fucking hear me.

My son is in the room now. She’s calling him. Beckoning. She sounds like me.
He hesitates. He knows.
‘What’s wrong mate?’ Ted is in the room now, he ruffles Tom’s hair affectionately.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Says the other me, looking up to the ceiling.
‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’
END

Insomarach
L.M. Cole

ultra
Nolcha Fox
You look for a home
or something
much worse.
Your violet eyes
are violent,
ultraviolet.
You tiptoe through
the dust of abundance,
hoping to slip
between the lines
of this poem.
Your mind
is a snowflake,
melting in the sun.
HAUNTED HOUSE
Spider Sisterz

The Widow
Larkin Billot

Wild Girl
April Yu
Glitter suffocates the single strap of my throat exposed to the autumn
night air. A twin to the ruby lipstick kissing my lips, the blush swelling my
cheeks—party girl, it says. Fun girl. Beautiful girl. When Princeton first welcomed
me into its arms in a roll of orange confetti, I imagined a night like this, black
heels crunching through moonlit foliage as I hung drunkenly from someone’s
shoulder. Wild girl.
Except I hang onto no one’s shoulders. Instead, a tote bag bursting with
neuroscience textbooks haunts me in the darkness. I have spewed leachate
over my glossy heels for six days in a row, coughing into the icy air, watching
Princeton watching. Trees embrace above my head, a gangly confession before
winter shatters love open. Some truths look better frozen.
My legs nearly collapse as the craving for caffeine shocks my body. I could
excuse myself if it were a drunken buzz, but in reality, a week of 1 AM lattes in
a stuffy seat at the Murray-Dodge Café has taken its toll. My mind yawns
yawns yawns—the dry mouth of a river—I have nothing left to give, I know it,
yet I walk walk walk like I am a party girl yet.
Among my friends, it’s a rite of passage to study at the Café, inhale the
scent of roasting coffee and dying things. Among my loved ones, it’s my rite of
passage to bury myself in neuroscience, learn to understand others before I
understand myself. We are not like the elite trash in this school, my friend Mina
croaked through 4 AM drool. I never understood the fierce look in her dark
eyes more than at that moment. We can afford nothing less than this.
I wish it was my rite and my right to throw a day away—sharpen myself
like a blade against the New Jersey nightlife, taste Princeton through the
dressing of euphoria. Then I would know whether the feeling I have slaved
twenty years away will ever return. The feeling of finally. The feeling of I made
it. The feeling I am not so very behind. The feeling of cracking my heart in two
and letting the weight fly away.
I adjust my bag higher up my shoulder and smear my eyes repeatedly
with angry palms. I’m tired. It’s late. I am delirious. I feel so, so small in my
gauche party outfit. A ridiculous stab at impossible wish fulfillment. A painful
attempt to staunch the bile that rises once I roll my textbook open on the Café
table. Mina will be worried and not at all party-obsessed, one earbud filtering in
lo-fi music and one earbud abandoned on the table as she waits for me.

Perhaps there will always be someone waiting for me. Perhaps myself
most of all.
But because it no longer matters, because this outfit is gauche but it made
me love myself ten minutes ago, because only the moon and I will ever know: I
whisper my face toward the halo of stars, smooth a finger over my jawbone to
paint my hands pink, let my body glitter wink at the moon before the winter
shatters, and for just one second, I am a wild girl.
Girl at Night
Jonny Black
You have never seen me like this, wild
in the mucky pine and weeds.
I smell
your sharp shock.
Surprise
Yes— I am a God. I do not
fear. Not your weapon, or the night,
or the trees I slip
quiet through like black silk.
Nothing. But
in this dark, I can see your eyes
blown wide, hungry. Makes even my soft lumbering
toward you, closer,
pleasant, shift
of muscle against skin
and fur. Put down your gun, come
and press your pelt
up, up
against mine.

cutting out the evil around me
Angelique Owens

maneater
Katherine J. Zumpano
you do not feel it, not at first.
teeth slice through flesh slowly, gently,
a ghastly caress. you feel so warm
on my tongue. blood: thick and red
and unending. you have my heart,
you whisper. i take much more
than that. i take your life, so fragile
in my hands. when you finally notice,
it is too late. you cannot fight,
cannot save yourself. drained, you wither.

Anchoress
Joanne Rush
Christine of Shere, the carpenter’s daughter, petitioned to become
an anchoress in 1329. The word comes from the ancient Greek
anachorein: to withdraw. At the ceremony of enclosure, the rector of
her parish chanted psalms from the Office of the Dead. Then he marked
Christine’s forehead with ashes, and led her to the anchorhold: a small
cell on the sunless north wall of the church.
That first night must have felt like being underwater. Cold shadows
and damp stone.
Her life fell into its own rhythms. On holy days she received the
host, yeast-fragrant, from the altar. She pored over psalms and
sermons. But she was not moved in the ways she had envisaged. An
anchoress leaves the world “to be the brighter … as swift as the
sunbeam.” So writes the author of the Ancrene Riwle. Yet Christine lived
in darkness, a pale ghost. Small wonder if she missed her former life: the
friends she used to laugh with, the man she may have loved.
To punish herself she was allowed to keep fasts and vigils, or dig
her own grave. The Riwle warns only that no anchoress may wear
“hedgehog skins … nor draw blood from herself with holly or brambles.”
But such homely scourges might well have tempted a village girl. The
prickled skins, taken into the anchorhold to mortify her flesh, would
have recalled the world and its reaches. The brambles would have been
sweet smelling, redolent of field and rain.
After more than three years in her cell, Christine determined to
escape. She clawed a hole in the outer wall, her fingers white and
spindly, like needles made of bone. Or she wormed under the
foundations and fled up the lanes to the carpenter’s house, a bruised
and muddy prodigal. Her sisters would have marvelled at her frail,
unsunlit skin. Like uterine vellum. Like something born amiss.

But the sacred cannot become unsacred. It’s not that simple. Her
bishop, archdeacon, and rector, and even her own craftsman father,
ordered her to return to her cell. Did she accept her vocation? Or did
she plot to escape again? We only know that Christine Carpenter was
reimprisoned in the anchorhold in 1332. Outside the church her body
was whipped or beaten. Then she was walled up in her cell, to transform
herself, as best she could, into a beam of light. A scintillation.
Katherine J. Zumpano
after communion, i question god
after ‘' Midnight Mass ’
the blood of christ – wine, warm and rust-colored,
coats my tongue and fills my throat with promises
of salvation. amen – i reply, find my place in the pews and kneel
while parishioners sing. i do not join. the hymns have no meaning
to me. empty words to a god i’ve long lost faith in.
a large bird flew past my window last night.
can i ascend, too? catholic guilt weighs heavy
on my soul, sins laid bare. i wonder
who could consume their savior. these purgatorial thoughts consume me.
my lips are stained with cheap communion wine
as the choir cries out to their god, baring their teeth
in prayer. i don’t belong with the devout. i belong with the devil.
take this, all of you, and drink from it. this is my blood;
the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.

Story Patch
Caity Scott
All I wanted was a ghost story.
Shovel in hand, I drift across the cobblestone bridge—the one
above the milk-drunk stream without a name where black tentacles
ebb like smoke through stars.
I do not make eye contact with the stone lions at the iron gate,
but I leave whole cucumbers at the feet of the gargoyles; rub their
claws and kiss their foreheads. The gargoyles are always your
friends.
Crows chatter overhead in their proud, blatty language as my
shovel cracks the soil clean as the shell on a hard-boiled egg.
It’s like chocolate cake crumble—the overturned dirt, that is—
the way it smells, steams, and tumbles charm over the belly of the
cemetery. The earthworms are jellied green. Against the dirt, they are
the glowing plastic stars on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom.
Weaving, they guide me left, then down, right, then down, until my
shovel’s strike is a brass church bell.
Autumn stories: even though there are so many this time of
year, so few are ready to be picked. These old soul tales need to age;
need to fester, for years, years, years, until they really come into their
own with notes of clove and tragedy, cinnamon revulsion, allspice,
nutmeg, and terror most foul. True putridity takes time, and store
bought just doesn’t cut it.
I find the ripest story bottled, corked, and cradled in the clenched
fingerbones of a skeleton. Under scratched glass, ink ripples in the
color of primordial nothing: not black, but close to the oil sheen on a
crow’s feathers, or something like the swirling bruise tone behind
your closed eyelids. Either of those, almost.

When I ask the skeleton if I could borrow the story for just a
night, she is all too happy to share, (because aren’t we all when we
find just the right story?), and I can’t tell you who came up with the
idea, but we both decide to read together right there, right then.
So this dear skeleton and I, we sit in her grave with our backs
against the eon-striped dirt. We don’t even notice the twig roots
prodding our shoulders, or the nightcrawlers oozing from their
sediment subways. I give her my scarf because her clothes rotted
away a century ago or so, and her voice is the skip-scratch of leaves
across abandoned dirt roads.
And yes, we pretend not to see the crows nestling overhead (and
we certainly don’t comment on how quiet they’ve become). They
always tell us reading isn’t cool anymore. We don’t want to
embarrass them for borrowing a listen.
When we finish, I cover the skeleton in the softest dirt and sing
her a lullaby about forgotten shipwrecks and knife-teethed mermaids.
I pat the ground with my palms, listening through them for the
heartbeat of the earth, and like always, it rings up along my vertebrae
in crescendoing glass puffs: we tell stories because we are.

it is not blood that runs
Eek it's Angelique

Alice Fitts & Benny James Halloween Alice 2

Notes On a Halloween (?) Party
W.C. Perry
with leaves blown over our sidewalk: your body is an assemblage
of savory orange, apple green, our October creek, cheeks full
of circumcised dimes, rusted bolts, fresh, festive blood
doing skip-and-roll across chili powder staining the kitchen floor
bits of sea glass and unearthed hagstones
I think, last year, you were so drunk you couldn’t climb
out of the bathtub installed (I think)
about the time I was seven,
pasting stickers of Frankenstein’s monster
into a composition notebook.
He says he finds it offensive:
⎯ When will you find yourself a monster?
a witch with spiderweb hair concealed behind the door,
allowing yourself to belong after dawn, a cackling crone
planting creeping phlox and Autumn aster
along unmarked graves swallowed up in the young November
on which hallowed night will you store the broom away?
on which damned day will you terrify the children?
I’ve tried soaring from rooftops on my broomstick
hitching the breeze on a rolling seaside only to split my anklebones,
shivering like candles afraid of the green depiction, ergo:
⎯ Please, don’t take advice from me.
My apologies: I suppose I should clarify:
It’s a painting, in a hospice center, of Spring.

It is the week we kill the lights -
as when the carol singers come,
hum out of tune what they don’t know -
for this tradition’s weak in Wales
where coal seams dark, shrouded enough,
with ghoules and ghosties, unemployed.
Treatment and Trickery
Stephen Kingsnorth
For treats we kept a biscuit tin,
but callers mocked, rejected them -
or chalked the path as vagrants do -
their sign of tick or no welcome.
We’re scared that neighbours take offence,
beyond the pale, their kids’ treatment.
So still, we dread that knocking door,
the volume low on news events,
and whisper, crouching, curtains closed,
from upstairs, scare, fence leaping shapes.
And soon fireworks, thatch rocket drops,
and jumping jacks through letter box.
It covers weeks our mother died -
her at rest, we wraiths inside -
that wreath we choose, three spinsters’ care,
gravely laid this time of year.
For now masked terrors on the step.
It feels like lockdown come again.
The Mummy Forgot the Chips
Joe Moore's Explodin' Halloween Garage

Laci Felker
The first chill of autumn cut through the air, carrying the smell of the
oncoming night and the sound of falling leaves. Every year, the scent was the
same. It was the subtle message that the nights would grow longer, and
everything that goes bump in the night would show its claws.
I always loved fall and everything it brought. Skeletons, witches, ghosts,
vampires, grimoires, and the feeling of the veil dropping between worlds. It
was the most wonderful time of the year.
As I walked down the street, it was easy to see that the leaves had gotten the
message. Their green leaves turned yellow, orange, and brown, and they would
soon litter the ground, crunching under my feet. The buildings that lined the
road slowly put their decorations out. Orange and black garlands hung in
windows, and fake spiderwebs inhabited every large corner. There was
something about the world turning spooky that made me excited.
“Oh, it’s closed,” a woman said, frowning at the door of the old movie store.
“Hm.” The man beside her nodded solemnly.
Jethro’s Movie Stop had been a staple in the town for decades, but after
Jethro Senior passed away, his son didn’t seem inclined to keep it going. He
loved his father’s shop, but he knew that its time had run out. After all, with
how many streaming platforms there were, who really wanted to rent physical
movies from a store only to have to come back and return them?
Like everything else in the world at the time, the movie store was dying.
“I wonder what it’ll be,” the guy said as he lead his companion away.
“Maybe it’ll be a café.”
I looked at the old, boarded windows as I walked past. I had spent a lot of
time there when I was younger, and while a café would have been lovely, that
was not what it was going to be. That would have never been what it became.

Everyone knew the building’s fate, but no one dared to say it. Perhaps if none of
us spoke it out into the world, it wouldn’t become a reality. At least, we hoped. I
caught my reflection in some of the dusty glass. My cheeks were pink, and my dark
hair flew wildly with the wind. The scene around me was normal.
But I could feel it.
I could feel the creature that lurked in the background–in the shadows of the
other buildings. A predator. A disease. A horror that terrified everyone who came
across it. It was a monster that pulled you in with promises and a beautiful face, but
I knew what it truly was.
A shiver ran down my spine as I turned and kept walking, ducking my head, and
looking steadily at the ground. If I didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t see me. That was
what I told myself anyway. It had seen me, though. It had smelled my fear and
stared into my soul–just as it had seen the poor, boarded-up building sitting lonely
on the street.
I walked home and didn’t take any detours, and when I got there I deadbolted the
door. I lit my favorite candle and poured a glass of wine into my skull chalice I got
on sale for $4.99. I tried not to think about the shadow that loomed over the city.
Spirit Halloween had been biding its time until it could strike. It would get the
movie store just as it had gotten the hardware store and the thrift store. It didn’t
rest until it claimed all downtown, and it didn’t stop there.
A year later, I huddled in the corner of my bed as I raised a glass to my lips and
tried not to think about the Spirit sticker on the bottom of it. If I don’t think about it,
it will go away, I repeated silently to myself. Everyone left the town in droves and
only a handful of buildings remained. My apartment complex was one of them, but
any time I stepped outside I could feel the cold, creeping shadow of Spirit
Halloween watching.
Waiting.
Ready to claim another victim.

Late Night Creature Feature
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Strength comes in numbers—pick 1985,
the summer of New Coke and the death of Supergirl
when your needs consisted of
puffy stickers and microwaved corn dogs.
When you went out at night
afraid only of vampires, werewolves
and the legend of Bloody Mary,
repeating the rosary
on your way home.
Keep to those simple worries,
let them shadow large.
Cling to that impossible unknown,
its rules changing to your will.
Vampires won't bite if you sing
"Come on Eileen; the louder the better.
Can't attack anyone wearing pink—
when you are wearing pink.
Other days underwear labeled
with the day of the week are your talisman.
The werewolves know you stole your best friend's
glitter pencil, the only acceptable atonement
thirteen paint-by-numbers of
St. Hubert blessing the deer.
But what to do with Mary
when she only comes if you ask?
Just you in a darkened bathroom
fixing on the medicine chest mirror,
waiting to see what appears.
This poem originally appeared in
Vol 6 of
Vinyl Poetry in July of 2012.

Ding dong the door bells ringing ,
tic tac but there's nobody there. Who's
that the winds keep calling? Could it be
a ghost from the past?
Could it be Ghost King Allen Joe ? coming
back from the past to haunt you so -o-o -o
Click clack someone's walking big footprints
on a creepy floor, I look around and I don't
see nothing the lights keep flickering off and on.
Could it be Ghost King Allen? coming back from the
past to haunt you so-o-o -o
Chorus :
Witches flying round over my head , ghosts
are coming out of the floor , blood is
dripping down from the ceiling and Ghost
King Allen Joe is back again you better run for your
life.
The squeaky doors keep opening and
closing , spirits and demons keep coming
in and looking up at the top of the staircase
is a King and his army .
Could it be Ghost King Allen Joe ? coming
back from the past to haunt you so -o-o -o
Witches flying round over my head , ghosts
are coming out of the floor , blood is
dripping down from the ceiling and Ghost
King Allen Joe is back again you better run for your
life.
GHOST KING ALLEN JOE
Ken Piche

The car,
the candy bar,
and the crowd:
Beware of pigeons
Jen Schneider
A mid-sized white car turns left. Grease dots the sedan’s doors. Stickers - Springsteen, Jovi, Roses - hug its
trunk. Black exhaust runs as antennae draw scales through grey sky. Long wrinkled fingers draw long loops.
Concentric circles match wheel rotations. Puffs of smoke push and pull. Bells toll and the duo begins. Orion
meets Aquarius. Pegasus meets Pisces. Child in costume – Halloween Eve -- asks for water.
What’s that stink?, yells Sun.
Stink you, says Pigeon.
I’m thirsty, says Child.
Thirsty? What’s that? I’m tired, asks Sun.
The white car’s rubber wheels roll then flatten a discarded candy bar wrapper. Chocolate, peanuts, and
caramel mix and mingle. Peanuts crumble. Chocolate melts. Traffics haunts Halloween Eve festivities.
Hey, yells Bar, and then cites PA Statute. Article 75, Section § 3362 - Maximum speed limits, as a violation.
Both velocity and signaling.
This is no urban district. This is not a numbered traffic route. This path is not functionally classified by the
department as a local highway.
Twenty-five miles per hour in a residential district, reminds the Bar as its flight slows and gravity responds.
All souls starving for more – time. The silver wrapper glistens, then rolls. The wind picks up and tunes
carry.
Music plays through the Car’s front and back windows. Not Bruce. Neither Springsteen nor Jovi. Roses.
Roses are not red, shouts the Man on the corner. Also in costume. His daily attire.
Noise violations, too, mumbles the Bar (still, neither consumed nor consuming), cites Chapter 10-400, and
declares that the effective control and elimination of noise and excessive vibration is essential to the
furtherance of the health and welfare of the City's inhabitants and to the conduct of the normal pursuits of
life, recreation, commerce, and industrial activity.
Don’t forget the decibels! A unit for measuring the volume of sound equal to 20 times the logarithm to the
base 10 of the ratio of the pressure of the sound measured to the reference pressure which is 20
micropascals (20 micronewtons per square meter), continues the Bar.
What’s with all the numbers?, yells the Pigeon. Both unclothed and without constume. Neither calories nor
noise conflations of much curiosities. Consumption a more pressing concern.

Fourth floor walk-up windows rise. Eyes wander. Voices rise.
Reach for the roses - red, pink, yellow, a Woman sings as she prunes her wicker flower boxes.
Trick or Treat – time can’t be beat, cautions a man in a white tank on a yellow porch rocker.
Background sound levels, the measured sound level in the area, exclusive of extraneous sounds
and the sound contribution of the specific source in question, continue to rise.
Everything out of reach. Clouds consume chocolate. Peanuts and nougat, too.
I’m hungry, shouts Child. In need of something sweet.
Hush, yells Driver and grabs for a new wrapper.
Pigeon punctures Left Side Tire.
That’s an assault, shrieks Front Right Tire.
Am I flat?, asks Back Left.
I’m no person, offers Pigeon and cites a statute.
“Person. Any individual, natural person, syndicate, association, partnership, firm, corporation,
institution, agency, authority, department, bureau or instrumentality of federal, state or local
government or other entity recognized by law as a subject of rights and duties”
Mind your manners. Mind the rules, continues Pigeon.
Air hisses. Multiple wrappers float, then fall.
Tiny souls in rubber soles seize the timely haul.
What’s that sound?, asks Back Left and cites another statute.
Sound. An oscillation in pressure, particle displacement, particle velocity or other physical
parameter in a medium with internal forces that causes compression and rarefaction of that
medium.”
Are we in trouble?, Front and Back ask at once.
Wind whips and antenna bends.
All kinds of trouble, ventures Engine. Big Three kind of trouble.

Like Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, offers Pigeon.
Sirens roar. Someone dial 911, shrieks Woman.
Not I, yell Tire, Pigeon, and Man.
A man on the sidewalk reaches down. Fingers reach for the candy bar wrapper.
Pigeon runs. Faster. Reaches concrete. Faster.
What’s that smell and why is the car dirty?, asks Back Left Tire.
Are you flat?, asks Back Right Tire.
Flat, no? Do you float?, asks Front Left.
No, drive.
I can’t drive.
Do you see water?
I crave something smarter. A roll of Smarties. A Chunky block of chocolate.
The No. 5 bus pauses. Driver calls to the woman on the corner
Don’t cross!
I’m not cross, the woman responds. I’m late.
Your necklace, is that real?, asks Pigeon.
A mid-sized white car turns right.
I can’t see, yells Pigeon.
All views are blocked. Costume parades rain.
Cars stall. Sirens cease. Time stops.
I can’t see, repeats Pigeon. I’m hungry.
Just in time. Trick or Treat. All things sweet.
Pigeon pokes then pecks -- Mounds of nougat. Can’t be beat.

A Free
'ghost'
with Every Cup
James C. Holland
I raised the coffee to my lips and heard a ghostly moan.
“Wooooooah!”
It was not night; I was not in a spooky castle; and I hadn’t lost my way in
a thunderstorm. It was just after eight in the morning and I was in a new hip
coffee shop that had recently opened near my flat. To be fair, it was
Halloween so there were “spooky” cardboard ghosts and pumpkins hanging
everywhere and I had to refuse a “pumpkin spiced” version of my latte, but
other than that it was a perfectly nice place. My awful landlord was kicking
me out next month after inflating the rent beyond my means, so I’d popped
into the café that morning to read the rental listings over a quiet cup of
coffee, not one that groaned, whined or whimpered.
I set down the cup and looked at the blob of froth on my cappuccino. It
had been shaped into a ghostly form with two waving arms by the barista
who, doing his best Edvard Munch, had added staring eyes and a screaming
mouth with three stokes of a swizzle stick. As spooky as it was, I was fairly
certain it was not capable of making a sound.
I rubbed my eyes. I must have been imagining things. It was early, I was
still tired and worried about finding somewhere to live. Maybe I’d yawned
unconsciously as I opened my mouth to drink. Or maybe it was part of the
Halloween promotion, like a card which beeps the tune to “Happy Birthday”
when opened, only this was a cup that moaned.
Carefully, I raised the full cup of coffee above my head and bent down to
look underneath. There was no little circuit or speaker - nothing unusual
about it.
A man sat at the next table looked at me like I was odd.
I smiled and shrugged, then lowered the cup so I could take a sip. The
smoky aroma hit my nose as I pursed my lips to the porcelain rim.
“Geeeet ooooout,” said a ghostly voice, “of my cup.”
I clanged the cup down on its saucer. The coffee slopped back and forth.
“Careful,” said the coffee foam ghost. It definitely spoke. I saw its frothy
lips move. It was using its arms to brace itself against the sloshing.

“What are you?” I shrieked.
The man at the other table downed his drink.
“I am a spirit from the other world,” said the ghost, waving its frothy
arms, “an occult visitation from the nether dimension, a being beyond your
understanding of such supernatural power that…”
“…that you can haunt a cup?” I said incredulously. It was hard to be
scared of such a tiny caffeinated ghost. It was rather cute.
“I’m warning you. I have amazing powers and will visit a terrifying
vengeance upon you.”
“Why? Are you the ghost of some coffee beans that were ground down
before their time? Are you the lost soul of a bean picker who fell into farm
machinery? Because I deliberately asked for Fair Trade coffee and they
shouldn’t allow that sort of thing.”
The man at the other table left hurriedly.
“It was the year 1755,” said the ghost, “I was drinking from this very
cup when I was… poisoned!”
“Get out of it! First of all, there’s no way this cup is nearly 300 years
old. Secondly, this coffee shop has only just opened!”
“It was a different coffee shop,” said the ghost defensively, “Anyway,
I’m warning you that…”
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
I drank it.
“You’ll regret thiiiiiisss,” it wailed, as it disappeared down my throat.
I’m always tetchy before I’ve had my morning coffee.
I returned to my flat in a much better mood after drinking it but,
ultimately, I wish I’d heeded the ghost’s ominous warning. I won’t go into
details because its unseemly, but suffice it to say the ghost has moved on
from one porcelain bowl to another. It’s not easy to live in a flat with a
haunted bathroom. But I’ll be moving out soon, so my terrible landlord can
deal with it.

New House, Old Cat
Mikayla Silkman
The first time you hear the noise in the night, it is reassuring. Oh good, you
think, the cat's finally gotten used to the house. It's a new house—old cat—
and everyone is still settling in, unused to the sound of the ice machine in
the middle of the night, not yet familiar with how many stairs it takes to get
downstairs, how many shuffling footsteps into the kitchen. You still turn
the light on, and you still have the shutters closed at night.
But the cat's used to the house now. You hear the rattling sound of a toy
skittering down the hall, the patter of footsteps chasing after it. You smile,
roll over, and adjust the pillow beneath your head.
The noise continues, nightly, for months. The cat loves it here. Sometimes,
after he's done playing, he'll jump up on your bed and knead himself a spot
on the comforter, lay down, and purr until the first early dawn light slants
through your curtains—you've stopped closing them at night now. You
know there are seven stairs down to the landing, another six after that to the
living room. Fourteen footsteps to the kitchen, fifteen or sixteen if you're
really tired and shuffling. The ice maker doesn't wake you up anymore.
Tonight, you roll over, back turned to the door. The cat's toy rattles down
the hallway, the gentle thump-thump-thump of padded furry feet following
shortly after. The toy skitters again, in the opposite direction, but this time
the cat doesn't follow after it. You pull the blanket up higher over your
shoulder but there's a weight holding it down by your feet. You tug, hard,
and a sleepy noise of alarm sounds from the foot of the bed. Your cat,
curled up in a little ball on top of the covers, lifts his head, fixes you with
two soft eyes, and blinks.
Then, the sudden pit-pat-pit of little feet in the hallway.

A Case for Pumpkin Spice
Travis Williams
Wrapped in quilts, I sip my cauldron’s brew,
flavored with that self-same gourd
grinning from my front porch stoop.
Cinnamon tingles through my cheeks. Autumn
breezes send leaves waltzing landing at my feet
on the front porch stoop.
Woody nutmeg grounds me as a flight of fancy
turns sputtering candlelight into a sly wink; Jack
playing tricks on my front porch stoop.
I sit and sip and sink into the
Pumpkin Spice Fall of it all
Me and Old Jack on my front porch stoop.

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