Brief Stories

Time Should Heal

Every night your restless dreams lead you back there again, and every night the wound is renewed. It’s been decades since your body walked in that hallowed place, the labyrinth carved and filled; decades since your skin felt the dripping heat and your stomach clenched at the smell of the dead saints and the stars wheeled above.

Time should heal wounds. The therapists certainly think so; they think you’re unhealthily obsessed, unwilling to let go, unwilling to let yourself grow beyond the memory. They blame you. They don’t understand. Each night the memory is made anew, each night you are once again the things which were done to you and the things which you did—the things you were made to do, they’d say. A small rephrasing. A lie.

Dedicate Your Death To Me

“Dedicate your death to me,” the necromancer whispers. “Be mine to move and use, now and forever.”

She pauses to listen for an answer. Corpses don’t speak, of course, but she hears their answer in the slow flux of fungal rot and the chewing maggots, and so her army grows.

Thick, slimy marrow drips down from spongy calcium. The corpse is long past needing it, and the dirt is always hungry, and so it must be purged of life’s unnecessary remains.

Next Deal

This is the deal that you will make with the endless void in the moment of your death: you will fill it with the fruit of your soul, and when you have nothing more to give you will be part of it.

The void is as large as the world and as small as a teaspoon, and at first it does not seem like such a hard thing to fill it. Perhaps you will last longer than your predecessor.

Nothing Awaits Beyond

When the generation ship Seeker arrived at the galaxy’s edge, it found a marble stela half-buried in the void’s velvety fabric. The ship’s crystal-mind anchored itself there while it began to wake the carbon-minds who formed its crew: the technicians and choice-makers and void-watchers and reconcilers who did all the things which it could not, and who were set to be awakened anyway to celebrate the start of the ship’s true voyage—to look out upon the radiation-scoured emptiness which divided them from the Sculptor’s luminous beacon, twelve million light years away and nearly as ancient.

Demons on My Mind

originally posted to Twitter on September 8, 2021.

The liquid roils within its flask, fighting against the thick rubber stopper. Pink and purple and green glimmer on its surface, fleeting highlights against its deep reflective black.

It’s trying so hard to get out—but it doesn’t stand a chance. Spell-etched glass and a binding circle burned into your countertop make sure of that—even if it broke the stopper, it would be trapped.

To Kill the Sunset

Lave is walking through the market when someone fails to kill her.

Beatrice’s Eyes

Originally posted to Twitter on August 17, 2022   .

Beatrice sniffs the air uneasily, unsure of herself in a way that she once vowed she would never be. Something has changed, something has shifted within her home’s generous confines, and she hasn’t the slightest idea what. An absence in the air; a lack of smell and noise.

“Cinnamon,” she calls, “I need your eyes.”

The doll doesn’t answer her. Its warm, welcoming scent doesn’t swell in the air around her as it pads towards her waiting hands.