The Dread Machine

Generation

Dan Peacock — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 05:00:00 +0000

The guard asks me to step forward and put my left hand on the table, fingers splayed as wide as they can go. I know I’ve got nothing to fear, not yet, but I already feel the irrational paranoia that always accompanies a Customs check. He examines my hand: satisfied with the number of fingers, the placement of the knuckles and joints and how far back my fingernails go, he moves to the other one.

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Wandering Womb

Lex Chamberlin — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:58:40 +0000

I swore I’d let the kudzu take me, and I meant it at the time. Laying here in the quarry’s midday sun alone, though, dusty rocks digging into my neck and tailbone, I’m less certain. My heart skips as the smothering foliage three meters off groans closer. But I know my doubt’s just the time of the month talking—my always-fleeting reprieve. Katya’s protests replay in my head while I wait…

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How to Determine if Your Grandmother Has Been Replaced by a Fairy and What to Do About It

Greta Hayer — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 01:00:00 +0000

1. If you show up to your grandmother’s house on a Sunday afternoon for iced tea and bourbon on the front porch and immediately suspect she’s been replaced by a fairy, the easiest thing to do is ask. Fairies can’t lie, so if she says, Of course, I’m your grandmother; are you drunk already?, you can rest easy. But if she says something like, Why wouldn’t I be your grandmother? or Can you not…

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The Interior of the Roomba: An Apotheosis

Nathaniel Lee — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0000

The first thing you find when you come downstairs in the morning is dog feces. The dog, Henrietta, is elderly and has become incontinent, and she left a hot, steaming mess on the carpet. Where the Roomba found it. The Roomba doesn’t know better, of course. It can’t tell the difference between dogshit and cracker crumbs. And so you pull on your thick blue rubber gloves, get out a bucket…

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Under Pressure

R. L. Meza — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:00:00 +0000

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Death is a misplaced pinprick, a hairline crack. Owen hears Death tapping at the exterior, testing the structural integrity of the habitat. Irregular ticking echoes through the lab, as if the light deprivation has thrown an invisible clock off-kilter, altering the nature of time itself. Days pass in a blink. A second stretches to eternity while Owen listens to…

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The Goth Girls’ Gun Gang

Marisca Pichette — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:00:00 +0000

she passed a bullet from her tongue to mine. it tasted like blood— metallic, sweet as the lilies lining our sisters’ desert graves. she placed a pomegranate on my head, shot seeds into bone-dry air and licked the juice from the corners of my bloodshot eyes. I cut her hair into a batea drank whisky under the stars and picked gold flakes from the scars adorning her scalp.

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Old Mother Gnome

Avra Margariti — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

We feed her sorrows: The time the priest’s Hands wandered too Close to our dress collars, Or when our fathers Reminisced bearing witness To the burning of witches; When our school teacher Whipped our bare skin bloody For daring to kiss each Other’s chapped lips. Old Mother Gnome Fractures her jaw wide Enough to encompass Our matchstick bodies. There’s joy in devouring, She says…

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Insectivore

Andrew Kozma — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Murtha Snattleby decided she was going to eat bugs, and that was that. She started with what she found under her bed, a solitary spider surrounded by a few lonely mummified gnats. It didn’t back off as she set out her tongue as an on-ramp, but stepped up instead, its legs tickling as it walked further and further in. As she swallowed the spider, Murtha imagined it setting up shop in her…

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What We Hold On To

Hannah Greer — Fri, 19 May 2023 08:00:00 +0000

I can’t feel my daughter’s hand in my metal one as she pulls me along the roof of a desolate mall nestled in another crumbling suburb. With each empty crate, the pit in my stomach grows. We may not have dinner tonight. It’s not unexpected. This drop is at least a few days old and the support sent by what we once called developing countries is often meager. They do what they can…

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Grams

Nicholas Jay — Fri, 12 May 2023 08:00:00 +0000

After they processed her, I packed what was left of Grams in a box. She’d been stuffed with seeds and peat and wrapped tightly into a pill-shaped duffel of bark-brown biodegradable mesh, somehow no longer than my forearm and no wider than my head. One word, “AfterGrow®,” was emblazoned on the bag in bold, turquoise letters. For a moment I pictured her in there, desiccated and compressed.

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