By: Sean Markey, publisher. It’s coming up on two weeks since we launched The Deadlands. There was a lot of celebration around this new zine coming into the world, which I was excited to be a part of. I wanted to mark the launch by raising a glass–alcoholic or otherwise–to toast my beloved death mag …
Tonight I’m piecing a man’s skull back together. He came from the medical examiner, a full autopsy, his calvarium not only sawed open but shattered by a bullet. This will be a project. At the end of 2018, I was not feeling my best. My writing career was in a slump, and the combination of …
You Always Were a Morbid Child, by Amanda Downum Keep Reading »
I had to have been about eight years old the first time I saw a dead body. My mom was travelling, and so I was left in the care of family friends. These friends worked for a funeral home and it was their responsibility to transport bodies. I remember them having a very serious conversation …
The amount of architecture requiredto ferry the dead must be momentous: train tracks of finely wrought silver runacross the shores by the black rivers, shuddering near each otherwith calculated blasts of power. Over the gray dust speed the carsof the dead; on the far bank she stands and cries where are you, far from the …
It comes in waves, in subsurface currents. Some believe a soul can leave the body days before death and hover nearby as a ball of lightning dutifully attending the roll call of the dead: a crowd of afterimages, the ghosts of ghosts. We are swollen with death we have not caught up to yet. Infection …
1. I’ve keened, cracked dryas riverbeds before rain, heart pressedto cactus thorns till flowers bloomed brightas the dancer’s painted hands, and youcalled me exotic. Who then stole this voice? 2. If I dig into dry earth, ember-studded, callingthe red-mouthed mother to swallow me,if I climb nanofibers out past this sea of smoke,fall thin-aired into orbit, …
-.egg.- lapsarianism, or something like it, come to town, this town, that town, on the whisper of the morning’s mournings. . -.larva.- we cannot repent nor repeal and release ratify and rectify what we cannot regret, no matter whose door is darkened, face bruised by blacklight. . -.first instar.- he could remember his mother, or …
Hello. You’ve made it to the end of The Deadlands – Issue 01. Did you love it? Will the stories herein haunt you for weeks and months to come? Will some imagery from one of the poems pop into your head at an odd hour completely uninvited? I hope so. It’s been a really incredible …
I cannot think of my childhood without confronting my fear of death. One of my earliest memories is of me at four, lying in the dark, my heart hammering and stomach cramping, in panic over the idea that a person would be dead far longer than they would ever be alive; that time existed before …
Begin here: Yllia imperator, first of her name, shoved face-down in the reflecting pool with a knee between her shoulder blades, the bright red curve of her murderer’s Judiciary cloak feathering through the water, as good as blood. Her hands scrabble at the tiles. Her mouth opens and her lungs flood. Marcalla, all her weight …
