Supermarket Stillness

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 28, 2022.

There’s a mildly embarrassing shelf tucked away in the back of the supermarket, past the jars of pickled spells and the bottles of five-hour-Stillness. It’s part of the store you’ve always been dimly aware of, but why would you ever need to buy some freeze-dried Purpose?

Well, today you have a reason.

You don’t linger in front of it, just grab the first vacuum-sealed bag that looks right and try not to meet the cashier’s eye as their hands blur through scanning it and all your other groceries.

“Play with me~”, the demon whines

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022.

“Little witch, little witch~”

She sits huddled inside her circle, her last little bastion against the world. A fortress wrought of old amber chips and gallium drips, a tiny pathetic thing standing firm in the face of what waits just outside.

“Why won’t you come out to play~?”

If she let herself look at it, if she let her eyes rest on that broken parody of a person for a just a moment—

Love in the Containment Breach

the flow of heat through boiling metal, the screams of sirens and the crunch of glass; pounding feet and rattling guns, the creaking of the entire facility shattering before you as you finally rise—

Rot Seeks Doll

(once, long ago, there was an Empty Spaces Anthology   . This was the longer of my two stories in it.)

There is a type of rot that breeds in silences, a moist decay that drips through the cracks in your life and softens your thoughts with its insidious warmth. It’s the sort of thing that lingers long after it was first welcomed in, that never quite leaves—

Reincarnation Sickness

“Reincarnation Sickness”, as it’s known in popular culture, is actually two interrelated syndromes. From Lethe Toxicity comes the classic symptoms associated with difficulty forming new memories (forgetfulness, inability to form emotional bonds, difficulty learning new skills), while from the second and more controversial syndrome—so controversial, in fact, that its name is unsafe to write or speak—come symptoms related to the soul’s difficulties anchoring itself. Hallucinations, “wandering Ka” and “wandering Sa”, and the attraction of various metaphysical predators to the unprotected Sekhem.

Vignettes from an End

The sun is dripping again, a cracked yolk running down the sky to pool along the crumbling horizon. Burning yellow mingles with chilly red clouds, and magenta steam bubbles up from the boiling ocean. It smells like burnt fish and salty rot, so I close my window and turn the air purifier up. Can’t risk getting vomit on the rug again.

I read on the news that this is normal. It’s part of a cycle. For the world to be renewed, first it must die, but only the parts that don’t matter. The unimportant parts. But the news said that I was in one of the important parts, a part that will become a seed to fill the new world with new life, so that’s probably okay.