a response to this prompt. It’s not quite your first day, but she makes it feel like it is. Everywhere you go in the tiny, crowded kitchen you can feel her eyes on you, the heat radiating from her bulk as she slides in next to you (or behind you, with the weight of her arms reaching around your too-slender body) to correct some perceived flaw in what you know is exactly what you were told to do just a few days before. ...
a response to this prompt She first met them in the summer, when their strong arms and broad thighs and sturdy chest were covered with a thick coat of fresh growth—a dozen shades of vibrant green sprouting from the rough bark of their skin, little rivulets of life like spreading moss sheltered beneath delicate leaves and the thorny flowers that adorned their head. They were everywhere, then, always waiting for her to venture out into the forested hills so close behind her home; up and up along the merest hints of hiking paths and deer trails winding between the last traces of decaying industry, up into the fresh-born wilderness blossoming with life— ...
“Just try your best, okay dear? It’s fine if it takes a few tries.” Abigail’s eyes jump between the cleaver Cloth Mother has just wrapped her fingers around and the too-small body spread out on the table. Outside the pool of light, Wire Mother grins and blows smoke into the air. “Don’t waste time, dear.” Wire Mother draws the word out, makes it into an insult as it hisses between its glass-shard teeth. “It needs to die.” ...
Drip. Drip. Drip. There’s been something wrong with the showerhead all week, the valve not quite sealing no matter how tight you turn the knob. Not a big issue, not really, the landlord pays for the water, but … It just keeps on dripping. And dripping. Drip. Drops falling down to splatter on the tile floor, little bursts of watery noise echoing out through the closed door, falling and hitting and falling and hitting and— ...
“Be a dear and fetch my dancing body, will you? I feel like going out tonight.” Cam doesn’t bother to reply to his nameless mxtress, not with his mainspring as deteriorated as it is; he just opens the closet and carefully pulls out the shell they want. Each shell is different, dozens of bodies for every purpose they might possibly need: bodies for strength and speed and stealth, bodies for all the quiet arts of the courtroom and boudoir, bodies they haven’t worn in years and bodies worn thin from overuse. ...
The Witch of Forgotten Sounds (such an unwieldy title! She preferred to go by “Terri, with an i”) woke to find a doll in her bed. An everyday occurrence for many witches, of course, but Terri made a point of not keeping dolls (“they’re always so busy, I can’t stand it!”). She didn’t scream. Witches are made of better stuff than that. Instead she carefully untangled the doll’s limbs from her own, slipped out of bed, and stepped into her screaming room (a converted closet) to scream herself hoarse. ...
Precious little witch-to-be, caught in a trap— Cold iron teeth cling to her ankle, slowly warming in her blood’s heat; she doesn’t have the strength to move, can’t drag herself across the smiling tiles. The door’s right there: those few feet might as well be miles. She can’t think how this happened. Just moments ago she was out on the street, wandering through autumn’s dripping red and yellow, just enjoying the season. Cold, crisp air filling her lungs and the warmth of her oversized caterpillar of a familiar around her neck. ...
(This story is also featured in my collection Joyous/Decay) For the last few months she’s asked you the same question every week. “Are you sure you don’t want it to be a tattoo instead? Something permanent?” Each time you answer more or less the same way. You’re sure, you really are; she doesn’t need to ask. You’d tell her if … You’d tell her. But you won’t need to. You’re more sure of that than you’ve been of anything except the need which first led you to her, back in those dreary days you can hardly remember now; back before you were really a person, just an empty shell pretending. ...
Moonstruck toys staring up at pale silver eyes, lost in wonder as the sky’s thin shell cracks and the void rushes in … Dolls can’t drown in the dark places Between, don’t fade away into dusty memories—but their gears seize up, and their screams find no purchase on the void. Worlds crack like dying bubbles and spill their precious cargo out into cruel emptiness. They do exactly what they were made to do, and the things Outside eagerly drink them up. ...
content warnings: medicalization, institutional xenophobia, genocidal and carceral logic, child abuse, the project of upholding whiteness and the horror implicit within it. It squats spider-like over the building which was meant to contain it, vast legs cutting the sky to pieces as soon as you step within its outermost extents. Only its teeth (its drill? its proboscis? it’s unclear) are hidden from view. Every year it’s easier to find yourself inside it. They keep on having to move the plaque marking its limits and pull back the barricades another few painful blocks. ...