Words

He kneels before the throne, red dripping from his splayed hands. The dagger lies before him—close enough that a simple lunge would bring it back into his hand, if not for the swords laced around his throat. A traitor is always a dangerous thing, and this one came closer than most. He raises his head towards the throne, and his eyes are red too, stained by tears and madness. Flecks of foam dot his cracked lips as he parts them, promising to speak, but there is no place for words within him. Once he was a poet, an orator of some renown; now there is only red spilling out to stain the memory of who he was. His lips move like a split heart’s final beats, red, red, red— ...

I like when objects feel magical—when they’re heavy with significance, when they’re part of someone’s body map, when triggers or headspaces are tied to them.

God and Babalon have lunch at a cafe, and get to know an eggy surfer.

Edith is a connoisseur of the flesh. She was trained for it, first voluntarily and then not, but it has always enraptured her—she would not be suitable for her work otherwise. Once it was her first love, when she had not yet learned self-control or how to make herself useful, though she was never any good at cleaning up after herself.

Anne does not like the subway. It is not that it is crowded and noisy and dirty (although it is), because her politics do not allow her to dislike things on such fundamentally bourgeois grounds, and she would be affronted by the suggestion that the variety of people who ride the subway play any role in her aversion. She would never feel uneasy because of a group of black men standing near her, an immigrant loudly talking in an unknown language, or an unhoused person sitting with their entire life in a pile of dirty bags. Anne has done the work to unravel all of the forms of implicit bias that her upbringing taught her, and any suggestion otherwise is probably simple transphobia. ...

She was a girl of flawed and low character, suitable for little more than feedstock.

Miranda “Dove” Tuesday, Janitor First Class, really doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to her.

Two vignettes about Callista Hayes, followed by descriptions of her and her superior officer.

Alexander’s stomach rebels. It cramps and spasms as his body struggles to contain the wrongness inside him. Sweat beads on his smooth skin; his muscles ache and his mouth forces itself open. The bathroom’s tiled floor is cool and peaceful, and he desperately wishes that he could let himself collapse onto it, to curl up and dissociate until it’s all over, but he can’t, he really, truly can’t. He is here and this is now and everything is happening so much. ...

The story of Afterbirth, North Dakota first came to my attention through back issues of the Bismarck Daily Sentinel, which I was reading for my own private purposes. This was before the Great War, of course, and many of its pages were concerned with the tensions that anticipated it, but the paper still made space for local occurrences. Many of these were of little import: the winners of local contests, the highlights of a fair, a new building being erected to house the blighted state’s government, and … a stray mention of Afterbirth, found abandoned at high summer.