I don’t want the things they offer me. Warm blood and broken skulls. Grunting pigs and headless roosters. Bottles of cold milk I can’t drink and hard bread I can’t eat. There’s only one thing I really want, and none of them is likely to give it to me. I’m tired, and I want to …
Their Blood Smells of Love and Terror, by Josh Rountree Keep Reading »
It is festival time in the Narrow City. The air is thick with the sound of rustling paper, as though a whirlwind is loose in a library. The Narrow City is as old as the world on the other side of the Gates, older than the Gates, older than the Guardians. Parts of the City …
Most of the newly dead don’t know what they want anymore, and that’s a good thing. But some sure as hell do. I’m still sore from the soul that yesterday wrapped itself around one last need like a fist. Most souls appear to me like milkweed wisps and bits of packing twine. My friend at …
Death drives a fast car. It’s cream and silver—like a pale horse. When it needs service, she comes here, because we’re the best shop in town. If I could’ve put “Services Death’s BMW” on my signboard and had anyone believe me, I’d’ve done it right off. Fact is, our shop’s looked out for her vehicle …
2023 Ignotus Award as Best Foreign Short Story Ocean’s twelfth therapist isn’t fully licensed in the state of Maine. Her office is an RV parked behind the Hannaford, from which she also sells crystals, blueberry jam, and sex. Her advice is erratic and mystic, largely unhelpful, but Ocean doesn’t mind. She doesn’t want to be …
Nothing says Puerto Rican funeral more than milky coffee, hot chocolate, bread, cheese, and stale pastries. Francisco Oller perfectly captured a snapshot of Puerto Rico in El Velorio, but Oller never painted the afterlife. He’d settled on the living and their celebration. Partying in La Placita captured the essence of life in my island, except …
When you arrive in the Afterlife, you eat and you drink. Pomegranate seeds, the arils like edible jewels, sweet and tart and bitter, garnet beads that burst as you chew. Fungi you know—Porcini; Portobello; Oyster; Straw—and some you don’t—violet Amethyst Deceivers and nubby Dead Man’s Toes—the taste of the things they’ve fed from, the things …
I died in a tropical rain forest, protesting the logging industry. I didn’t want to die, but I was prepared for it. I had left a will, I had talked to my family about the risks, I had meditated and read the right sorts of books. I had many thoughts about the afterlife. None of …
(avec mes remerciements à Jacques Prévert) Winter is sitting on a bench. She is not noticed by the people passing, the children playing, the birds flying from one tree to another. She is ignored, as though she is no more worthy of note than a man with glasses in a gray suit. She seethes with …
L’hiver est assis sur un banc, by Margaret Dunlap Keep Reading »
On a Tuesday afternoon, I was sifted into a terracotta urn hand-painted by my mother. I watched her from the center shelf above the sink, dipping her coarse brush into acrylics called sunshine and tangerine, and wondered if she’d ever known my favorite color was turquoise. I had never been a candle until right then, …