The rites have been described as highly uncomfortable.
Watch for Falling Body Parts
After we signed, the realtor handed us a list of chimney sweeps and a pamphlet on fireplace safety, said “Watch for falling body parts,” and turned over the keys.
We’re Being Eaten
J– is studying at the kitchen table, pencil scribbling, lamp-lit, while the things slide in from the back yard, out from holes we never noticed before (or…… Read more “We’re Being Eaten”
The Pieces she Kept
She plucked the shards out one by one and stashed them in a box under her bedroom floor.
It Only Played Piano
It didn’t even weep ceaselessly. The ghost didn’t throw knives or stomp or bang on the walls. No one’s toes were nibbled.
We Got on the Wrong Bus
A skeletal hand was left on the seat Charise wanted. When she poked it, it scrambled under her feet.
Come be an alligator
Grasp our babies /gently, between
massive jaws / teach them / to chomp minnows / and toes
I might be a dungeon
Peering inside, I saw
what might have been gray cobblestones,
rough-hewn stairs, old pitch torches
We Bought a Box of Organs
It sat on the front door stoop: one large, seeping box, addressed to both of us, and we did not, of course, remember buying such a thing.…… Read more “We Bought a Box of Organs”
A Letter from Your Love Interest (who is not an Embalmer)
When you leave I’ll preserve you (your memory, I mean). I’ll tuck my dreams of you away in a bed of Egyptian sand for centuries and centuries,…… Read more “A Letter from Your Love Interest (who is not an Embalmer)”
This Old Hellhouse
Maalphegor came with it’s own door-to-door salesmen; at the beginning, they looked a little like Bela Lugosi clones, but as the years wore on, the shadows in the salesmen’s faces deepened, a bit like Pazuzu from the Exorcist; then increasingly they began to look like Slender Men once Ralph and Edna’s children came of age.
A Note on Cosmic Horror
Rather than xenophobia, I think, good cosmic horror and weird fiction practice something closer to exophobia–this fear of things outside human perception or outside what it means to be intrinsically people.
