Short Fiction

2025

♢"Man of the Tunnels" - coming in 2025 Cosmic Horror Monthly!

Which came first, him or the tunnels? It should be a simple question with a simple
answer, but lately he feels like they were made for him, as if his soul and the tunnels were born at the same time, and as the tunnels grew so did his soul. Thus, he was born into the world at the right time to live beneath the earth, to know his way by touch, to breathe the ancient air exhaled by the depths.

 

♢"Beyond the Sudden Door" - coming in 2025 to Mythaxis Magazine!

They had been seven rats at first, six squirming impatiently inside their mother’s womb, then writhing their helpless pink bodies by her nipple-lined belly. When they had fur and no longer needed milk, the females were separated from the rest and kept in a tank at a pet store. There they met other rats, became a mischief of thirteen, and spent their days roughhousing and squinting under the oppression of fluorescent lights.

 

2024
♢"Fruiting Bodies" - published in Trollbreath Magazine on September 1, 2024
Fish shimmer above her like a rainbow in flux, sipping on the tears that fly up from her face. This house–which she keeps remembering, with horror, is now hers alone–has been as lively as a reef since The Unknown swept across the world, tangling and unspooling and recreating its matter.


2023
♢"Nerves into Circuits" - published in Heartlines Spec, November 30, 2023
Metal arms descend to press skin-soft conductor strips over my shoulders. The Neurasuit has been in warming mode for a few minutes–my overwrought senses accept the lines of heat like a gift. Despite my anxiety for the fight, my trapezius muscles relax, creaking in the silence. Released from the tension, my vertebrae settle into place with small snaps, one or two with each breath.


♢"Irontooth" - published in Twenty-Two, Twenty-Eight, January 27, 2023
By the end of summer my teeth are barely strong enough to crack a peppermint in two. My jaw strains, venomous pain shooting through my molars. My husband glances over with pity. “You need to wait,” he tells me, “It isn’t even September.”


2022
♢"Forbidden Soup" - published in The Fantastic Other, August 14, 2022
Don’t learn it the hard way: never hike alone when you’re going off trail. Don’t be like me and go trotting alone into the woods of Blodgett Peak Open Space, looking for the aircraft crash site without even a whistle as insurance.


♢"Under the Fig Tree" - published in Villains by Cloaked Press, June 21, 2022
Reprinted in The Pink Hydra, July 5, 2024
Finally, with the efforts of their vast and tireless numbers, the skeletons chained down Rrendurra, the lost Great Dragon Queen of the West. She writhed her enormity against the bonds, her blue scales flashing like the ocean’s heave, desperate spurts of flame shooting from her jaws.


♢"Furling" - published in Tree & Stone, Queer as F*, June 20, 2022
"So, what should we do with the body?”
Standing over the mass we’d fished out of the pool, we shared a nervous laugh at my joke. What else to call it?


♢"Faces in the Grain" - published in Cosmic Horror Monthly, June 1, 2022
Our house has wooden ceilings, glossy boards rising to a high peak, swirling and stippled with shades from tawny gold to darkest sepia. On the first night, my husband and I laid in bed and pointed out the shapes in the knots and grain, naming them like clouds...


♢"Small Spirits and Squirrel Leather" - published in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, February 18, 2022
I made myself late to work crouching on the sidewalk in front of the fire station, queasily trying to discern the identity of a baffling object: a cardboard-flat, grey Rorsarch test of possibilities.


2021
♢"To Crave an Empty Chest" - published in This is Not a Horror Story by Night Terror Novels, October 30, 2021
Reprinted with alternate ending in Penumbric Speculative Fiction, December 11, 2023
Ever since I returned from the Valley of the Goddesses, you have come to me in dreams to disturb my sleep. I see you pressed against an obsidian slab--lying on it or upright, I’ll never know. Your head is thrown back, your throat exposed in a gesture of religious ecstasy.