The Spanish Horse

       

The Spanish Horse

by Graham Swanson

NOTE: A SPANISH HORSE WAS A MEDIEVAL TORTURE DEVICE.

        After the war ended, a wild judge from the rubble of what was once the Magnificent City declared the 

death penalty Null and Void and replaced it with the sentence of public torture. His royal interrogators 

built a great sawhorse in the middle of the ruins so that the survivors living in the destruction witnessed 

the operation. It appeared overnight like morning glory, the sharpened wedge gleamed like the sun on a 

smooth beach, fifteen sharp feet in the air, a puddle of blood already left black stains on the grass 

growing underneath its mighty legs. The judge hired the Grand  Inquisitor of Amaymon to oversee the 

process. 

       He entered court wearing a red tie and black cape. Oiled feathers covered his face and arms.

Under the Broken Cross of the Great Crusade, the Inquisitor took on the heavy suede of the red robes under a black hat. Every day he patrolled the prison and looked into each cell with his men. They stopped at the end of the hall, torches in hand, to pull a thin pale man from a flooded hole in the ground. He punched and kicked, bit and spat up mouthfuls of dirty water on their boots. The Inquisitor felt no remorse and smiled at the doomed man. The pit didn’t break his spirit. The “Math” class didn’t either. Nor did the back-breaking labor packing bullet into magazines.

        “I’m innocent. You’re killing an innocent man! A reasonable man! A human being!”

        “You were one of those conspirators who rioted against our great Fortress and spread subversion to our people, yes?”

        “Where is your compassion? Where is your heart?”

        The Inquisitor's men twisted his arms and beat him until he collapsed into their arms.

“Now I tried to help you and get you moved to the deadly disease testing ward, but the judge said he needs it to be dramatic. Perhaps If you went before a painting of His Honor, and confessed to trying to demoralize the good folk of our new order, tell the public you will plead for mercy even though you are trash, maybe we can get you stacking plague bodies in the catacombs under the city.”

        The Prisoner found no words in the bubbles of blood swelling in his mouth. Once a fearless orator known across broadcast towers, he’d been in prison so long without an audience or person to talk to that he forgot how to use words. Without seeing the sun in years, his eyes sunk into the back of his head. He forgo what the wind sounded like, and how the ground warmed up in the morning. Like a sailor prepared to die at sea, he spat on the floor and told them again, and mumbled under his breath. 

“Now, we want peace, and we want to restore all that was damaged. Look at it this way, you are on the brink of a new era. A lot is riding on your shoulders. More than there has ever been in your entire life. You’ll be up there for many days now, so meditate on this woe as you approach your death with dignity. The whole world will follow our testament soon, and you were the first to hear it.”

The Inquisitor’s men dragged the inmate by his feet across the loose stones of the under-dwelling to the platform that rose from the mushrooms and stagnant puddles to the bright pale overworld above. The light blinded the condemned. Once the glare wore away he opened his unswollen eye, he saw clearly the Spanish Horse erected above him with robes and stones ready. Deer lept from a broken wall to untamed bushes. Seabirds built nests in the sills of fractured silohs, and children played naked amid the cannons of wrecked tanks and emptied assault rifles.

The Inquisitor led the procesion. They escorted him to a platform of stairs, each one creaked and bent under his shrunken feet. His thin, atrophied legs trembled. Each creek made a horrible sound that burrowed into his spinal discs like a bad memory. In every blown-over building, he saw candles and cold, furious faces. Sunlight warmed his face. His guts turned to lead. His blood turned to mud. His heartbeat hardened as his feet moved faster. He kept singing lullabies to the rye fields blowing between sections of destroyed city, and to himself, a single spell as the Inquisitor's men ran a sharpener on the wedge of the Spanish Horse. A woman under a fowl mask blessed the blade with sacred well and asked him for last words.

“I'm not the only one bleeding here. The past is never done repeating. You know what I say is true.”

“Talmage the Deceiver, may you be purified and returned to the sacred well.”

    The Inquisitor, the Priestess, and the armed men all prayed out loud together. "Thank you for the strength to crush our enemies. Thank you for sending these heavenly devices down to us."

 The woman under the fowl mask uttered holding the hand of the prisoner. She gave the signal for the men to begin the torture. They tied a bag around his head and placed him on a slide to lower him onto the wedge. Once saddled, they held his legs down and strapped the cuffs to his ankles, and then dropped the stones. Each one weighed fifty pounds, and when they stopped midair, an unmistakable report of pain sent all the animals and children fleeing back into their hiding places.

The guards sat with their machine guns on top of the walls. If a foot broke off and he rolled over, their orders to shoot on sight earned them accolades among the Inquisitor’s office.

The first day he screamed and screamed and screamed until the sun rose again.

Then he sat there moaning, moaning, moaning.

By the third day, he sat still, and quiet. The children came back out to curiously loom over rooftops to see the shade of the Spanish Horse expand in the clouded sunlight.

On the fourth day, hawks arrived and packed at the mask over his face, and pulled tendons from his shoulders.

By the fifth day, a cloud of flies covered the man and chewed through the holes in his face bag.

By the sixth day, the wedge cut through half his body. The blade stopped at his ribs.

The children dared each other. Go over. Go there. The young girl with red hair kept telling them "no no", but they called her a coward and a witch, until she accepted the gang’s dare, and from the rooftop, she planned her route around the guards.

The girl crawled under fallen roads, jumped over pits full of lice and rotten clothing, climbed up the scaffolding of a windmill leaning from a building to jump over the heads of the armed guards quietly, then she crawled into the gutter pipe and rode it down to the bushes below. The guards heard the snapping of branches and flutter of alarmed cats. They carried their assault rifles around torn chain links and melted beams. The small girl huddled her body as small as she could make it, and crammed herself into a water hole where a brick used to be. They found nothing and went back to monitoring the condemned.

The girl broke free, scratching her knees and elbows, and creating a deep gash above her eye. The blood got in her hair and eyes, but she experienced far worse bruises playing in the foggy towers by the collapsed bridge. She rubbed dirt and sediment into the wound until the bleeding stopped. It burned like a cooking sheet, but she knew that once she found watershed clean it out and wear a proper headwrap and ice. She looked around wondering why the guards failed to notice her, and she realized that her fingers, neck, toes all covered in sheets, soot, and blood like everything else in the playground of ruins.

The man on the Spanish Horse loomed before her, hanging there like a black ribbon caught in the barbed wire. His head down, hands tied behind his back, ankles exposed and drenched in blood. Dogs carried off the slabs of meat from under the Spanish Horse. Flies the size of darts flew out of tears in his hood. Blood trickled to the ground below. Black birds swarmed overhead. Tender blue flowers grew on top of fallen roofs around him. The girl listened to the wind, to the flies, to the smoldering of the guards smoking, to the wheezing of their lungs, and she crawled over glass and broken wheels until she stood under the shadow of the Spanish Horse.

Nightshadows

Nightshadows

By Graham Swanson  

Shadows of windows, ripped awnings, the harvest pole in the middle of the street bent in the collapse of shrieking wind. The shadow stranger lurked in the strained light of midnight welcome. Innocent deaths occurred far away inside the homes beyond the sleeping, beyond the businesses streets, close to slick stones pressed into the ancient ground. Prisoners who rebelled astride war rats once reigned here as mighty kings, but once the storms passed mere stories exist alone.  Remains get dropped here sometimes in garbage bags or in coffins, other times hung from the power lines, even laid out in the middle sidewalk peacefully outstretched in the lamplight and decorated in lashes.  The shadow stranger comes here but never looks into the windows to rob the stores, nor does he drop off love notes to teenage runaways. He just stops and disappears as his shadow does as he enters the brightest part of the pavement.

The humming lamp eats him, and only his shoes are left in the morning found by the pointy-eared children harvesting aluminum to sell. The gray-skinned, yellow-haired kids flee into the alleys but they never get far. The light calls them back at night, and they are struck blind and disfigured. They swear at the sign of the fabulous monster, once the children are gone, the man in the shadow walks back from the same direction in the same clothes, concealed by darkness, never brightening even as he gets nearer. The light is quiet, but like a silent film, some linger around the green paint, touch the wet metal, and let the light warm them from the mist gales. They hear voices within.

The city shut off power after wildfires encroached electrical generators. The lamp still glowed like a platinum island in the darkness. The worms rose from the dirt and squirmed into the light and the dead bodies of the decomposed gathered to eat. The monster of the light growled in pleasure. Its children ate and danced until they joined the vapor.

A woman rolled her stroller by one night and bumped into the shadow stranger. At first, she acted embarrassed and cast a blanket over the half-empty whiskey bottle and plastic bags containing her possessions. He didn’t stare, he didn’t even try to talk, all he did was raise both hands to his face, and emitted a shallow howl as he pulled them away, and she beheld the smooth flesh and red cheeks of a smiling child. She hurried away as he tightened his color and put both hands on his shoulders to slump back into the lamplight. That night her godmother heard all about the encounter, and she advised her not to worry about the spirits of the city. All the lost souls find their way to that lamp corner, and the dark shadow who is only revealed when he wants to be, guides them to black castles in the afterlife. 

Touch of Death

 Touch of Death

written by Graham Swanson

Travis balanced a pool cue on the groove on his forearm where the flesh healed into a thick cuff hanging off the smooth scabs of his wrist stub. He still felt painful spams of a phantom hand 6 months after the accident and he still smelled his own blood searing against the hot blade of the spinning torch machine at the factory. Losing his hand made it hard to rest a pool cue, but the bridge of bone and scar tissue formed a convenient slot. He slid the cue into the fleshy slot, set his stub on the table, and took aim at the shots he needed to take. He nestled the cue deeper into the groove, and used the hanging layer of scab and scar tissue as a guide, and like a magic hand helped him, his shot tapped the cue ball into his target, and it nearly fell into the corner pocket but it clacked against another ball by just a sliver.

Travis’s friends surrounded him and told him how close he came to winning the game. Beautiful women dressed in their best kept looking over at him from across the sticky floor, and he hid his gnarled stub behind his friends as he stood behind them in fear of being noticed. He wanted them to notice his eyes, how young he looked despite his age, flesh never scarred by acne, almost graduated with a degree in laser engineering, volunteered on weekends to clean litter from the park, but all people notice is the gnarled joint bone sticking out from purple layers of soft foamy crust. He still felt his hand crawling at their necks. The machine didn’t make a clean cut on his hand, it grabbed his hand and spun it around the center of a drill.

The girls at the bar laughed at him as the machine clamped around his hand twisted the wrist joint and tore veins from his arm until it left a string of blue and pink nerves coiled on the open safety guard. The tag lock hung on the ring splattered in blood. The engineer shouted at the supervisor, “I just drained its power!” As emergency whistles flashed and the machine shot out pieces of bone and sprays of blood at the people getting near. His blood covered the walls, the lights, the neighboring machines, and the entire workload nearby. The entire shop closed for calibration and cleaning, but that day never came because anyone who tried to get close to that machine or any other lost something or fell ill of a fatal disease.

At night he woke up from nightmares of his severed hand crawling up the bedside still beaten and bruised but dragging along tangles of vein and nerves in a tight blue rope. The pains in his missing hand shot up his arm and pulsed in his shoulder. He felt pockets of soreness throb in his neck and lungs. The factory blamed him for the accident. He never worked again because any time he stood before an appliance or piece of machinery, he felt his marrow exposed to the cold air, and the deep shame shadowing his sunken, marbled face.

The pretty girls knew it too. When they smiled and laughed with their friends, it was because they pondered about his condition, they called him a loser behind his back. Lots of people did. In Travis’s time, if you didn't get married at 18 or right out of college, you never got married. They wanted millionaires, lawyers, athletes, not amputees. Those available had hundreds of men available on their phones and dismissed anyone who couldn’t hold their attention every six seconds.

So Travis lived alone in an empty apartment in the run-down slums of town in the shadow of the abandoned factory that took his hand. The landlord lived in Florida, and let the apartment building fall into disrepair. Water didn’t run in the bathroom at all and only ran in the kitchen for two hours a day. Only the hall had a light. The smells of every bathroom in the building rose up into his sink. The stovetop melted when he lit the propane. He paid two thousand dollars a month for this pace. Rent rose again, beetles covered the windows, the heat didn’t come on and only one room had a window.

It took so much out of him that he bought a gun and tried to shoot himself with it in the bathtub but just before he pulled the trigger someone knocked at his door. He swung the door open. A little kid stood there. He held open a sack and asked for candy. He forgot that it was Halloween. He almost told the kid he didn’t have any candy when three men pushed their way through the door and backed each other up with pistols.

They demanded his car keys.

For the first time in his life, he used the phantasms to his advantage. He still felt his missing hand, but now on the cold steel grip of his own pistol. He told the invaders that he’d get the keys for them because he just changed after a shower. He put his hands up, they pressed their guns into his face.

“don't you scream, just tell us where the keys are, and we’ll be gone.” All three of them looked like teenagers, the oldest and biggest one did the talking while the other watched the hall and the third watched the door. Travis felt his phantom hand squeeze the handle, he left it in the bathroom.

“It’s on the sink, near the bathroom, in my jeans pocket.”

The older trespasser told his two accomplices to stay put, and he pounced into the hall and entered the bathroom. He saw no dirty clothes or wet towels, nor did he feel the humidity of trapped steam in the ventless bathroom, but Travis felt his finger clip the trigger. He flexed the muscles in his invisible hand, and gunshots exploded in the bathroom. The oldest trespasser fall against the hall wall under the only light bleeding from several wounds in his chest, neck, thigh, and jaw.

The teenagers panicked and started shooting at Travis who hurried into his bedroom. He pushed his dresser against the door, but it didn’t hold them for long. Hands pried open the door and reached inside. Travis took the mobile radiator that heated his bedroom and slammed it against one of the hands. Two fingers bent backward. The last land reached inside with a gun. Travis hid on the other side of the dresser as fiery shots lit up the room and shattered the TV. He forced his hips into the dresser and pinned the kid’s arm to the doorway with the door. He screamed in pain, but Travis went through his pillows searching for the knife he kept sheathed in bear leather. With the spearhead-shaped blade he sliced at the hand until fingers dropped of, and then he impaled it to the doorway, and let it there with the boy still crying for help.

Travis kicked out the screen and jumped out the only window and escaped to the neighboring building where he hid away for the night. As he dozed waiting for the police, he felt the phantom hand crawling up his chest, onto his shoulder, and against his mouth and eyes. In the morning no police arrived, but bloody handprints covered his face. The right stars aligned in the sky, and the fortune-tellers with rotten faces living in the gutter told him as much. The worlds far away, much different and obscure, gave him their light and turned the machines against him, but in turn, gave him the phantom hand. He still felt it when pains shook his arm.

After the attack, he left the city to live in his hometown. The phantom hand followed him on the bus ride back. He wandered the foggy streets after a heavy rain shook the leaves from the trees until he found a narrow path open up in the forest where there was no path before. There, trees there turned white among black misshapen branches. He smelled hot food and bells and followed the path until he lost sight of the town, crossed a bridge, and come across a red cottage surrounded by hay and brambles. An old man with yellow eyes and a long white beard opened the front door and beckoned him inside with a plate of cabbage and fish fried in vinegar. He also had only one hand.

Travis went inside. Candles lit the rooms, and a coal furnace burned. Red sparks fluttered onto the dusty floor. The old man sat before an open book etched full of graphic scenes of ritual and sacrifice. Naked women kneeling before a two-legged behemoth with wings for arms and 9 appendages leaking from its stomach. Arms and legs hanging from racks cut off by tiny people with giant cleavers in an ancient city.

As the walls reddened with blood, the old man looked up at the Christmas tree in the corner and spoke as if wishing back on dear memories. The imagination he showed Travis depicted a crimson hand holding a candle over the moon as packs of hungry wolves drew near the halo of its light. “The stars will be up high for you. No matter how dark, they will find you through the clouds. There is no escape.” The pages flipped and turned carefully without the old man touching the book. The next page illustrated a hooded man with a crimson hand raising the dead from their catacombs.

In the news that night the town sighed in relief. The serial killer that stalked the town finally got buried, but to their shock, in the same cemetery as the town's founders. They all spat on the floor and felt sick knowing what he did, but no one spoke of it. The partially devoured victims still lived somewhere in town, and he swore vengeance on them all when the needles injected him with poison. Everyone wanted to forget, but too many still remembered him tapping on their windows late at night and asking for a phone to call help.

The killer murdered one entire family with four young kids, and 2 women living alone. Before the police arrested him, he tried to get into 12 other houses. He carried the bodies into the woods, butchered them on a stump in the middle of an ivy grove, and devoured the bones. He made sure to cut off each of his victim's hands and feet before he killed them.

Travis found work in a diner kitchen but thought about quitting every day. Some people he knew in High School came in one morning, with their spouses. These kids beat up on him back then while their girlfriends encouraged them. They moved away to the city once they graduated but still owned homes in the small town but only came back to collect on rent and deposit the money in the bank.

“Still living in town, Travis?” one asked in mock pity and they all pretended to care.

The phantom hand pulsed against their necks as they ate. Travis flexed it softly as if holding a little girl’s hand until it itched the back of a throat. He grabbed hard and raised his stub into the air, and one of them vomited all over the booth. He kept his hand raised and squeezed until they convulsed on the floor, grabbing at their neck blood and vomit oozed from their nose.

The others called for an ambulance but it never came. The snotty brat died on the diner floor covered in omelet, blood, and bile. The others ran outside but didn’t get too far. Large hounds guarded their cars and chased them out into the street with the other meat-eaters of the forest.

Travis spent the night watching young lovers kiss in the park, his hand tickling the back of their necks, and lifting each other's shirts. They giggled and acted innocent. They never knew Travis watched them and guided his phantom hand around their bodies. He felt the girl’s breasts and squeezed so hard that she slapped her boyfriend and stormed off. He felt sorry for them but decided to be more subtle next time.

Travis visited the graveyard and spent all night moving from grave to grave. They didn’t make it easy to find, but the stars shined for him, and the north wind blew, and there amid fluttering cloaks and ghost fog, glowed a halo around the grave of the infamous serial killer. The old man’s voice chanted with a coven of witches beneath underground tunnels. They rose their hands into the smoke of a thousand melting candles, as Travis rose his wrist into the waxy halo of light, and a new bone grew from the melting stub. A red flame burned where his hand once was as a new claw grew out from the newly formed flesh. The ground ripped open.  

Love Potion

 Love Potion

Graham Swanson 

4 of Wands

 Bring the exchange of ideas to ensure a universal need of approval and support. Seldom do the final wands turn on the heads of the illiterate against the unlearned. Too soon will the millennial find themselves widowed with the insufficient burden, as the oldest creep away to quiet catacombs. All will find the wash of fire turning the shiniest pink path to balms of bloody flowers where deer come to eat.

In these rings of destruction, after a hundred years or more, a special herb will grow from the charred ruins of temples of giants. The skeletons of iron towers bend towards the floodwaters, their shadows keep away the giant birds, and the pools created by silent stars nurture silver roots of a plant that hums in the night and fills the air with a narcotic haze. It’s a prize in the land of charcoal craters and giant cats. Burglars come from many villages and castles away to explore the haunted beds where the pedals erode. The rocks are coated in a fine dust of dead Lust Plant.

Regulators from insurance companies kept tabs on the collection and export of extract Lust plant and raw beds where it flourished. Eliza came from the islands of white beaches and open windows to investigate fraud in one of the offices in trembling black boxes in the middle of the New Capitol. She worked with former athletes in steel-colored suits, inexperienced yuppies straight out of college who collect music records from the 60s, and women from all over the world. The managers and people who ran the place averaged age 100. All of them former lawyers reached their substantial ages by a diet of red meat from endangered cows treated with enriched GMOs.

Eliza only liked a few of the people and felt that she had the most depressing life since she found the New Capitol unlike her home in the sunny islands. The streets turned white with frost in the morning and torrential downpours flooded the streets at night. Strange villages of weird folk of the fields surrounded the city and its cluster of counties. She would’ve stayed in the islands but the doctors told her that her body rejected the vitamin D from the sunlight, that her organs failed to digest seafood and rice, and that the problem is exacerbated by salty climates like ocean adjacent shores.

In the New Capitol, the sun seldom shined and night lasted for days. She took five-mile walks every night in costumes she created. She carried food prepared at home with her. The strange folk provoked her suspicions because they didn’t make as much money as her and they mostly worked what she saw as shitty jobs in food, cleaning, manufacturing, writing. However, the wealthy lawmakers of the ancient fields offered her a job in one of the most important offices in the New Capitol. She hated the entire place and wished she lived back on the islands. Her mission there was to monitor the insurance claims on the Lust Plant beds of the "Charming".

On the night of the grand musical Eliza went on a date with a young wealthy lawyer and met with her co-workers who traveled the world a little. They all agreed that the poor peasants are moot because most people are shit anyhow, and since the pandemic already killed off millions of people, what's the point of helping them? In other words, it’s as imperative as a medicine cocktail for the clinically ill, that they show no mercy for anyone trying to steal the Lust Plant, especially among the fields of strange folk surrounding the New Capital. Anything they create, music, literature, art, is inherently inferior to the comics parched together back in her beloved islands. She wanted no lovers. She didn’t like having her handheld in the snow. She didn’t want children, and couldn’t have them anyhow. She pursued a career instead and loved catching frauds and thieves.

Smoke stacks pumped purple fumes as tubes ad machines processed Lust Plant into potions. In the times after the Great Summer reduced crops to ashes, spread disease, incited the Balkanization of the content, and killed millions, the Lust Plant potion skyrocketed in demand. For men, it gave them both sexual vigor and incredible enthusiasm. Not only did it engorge their love flesh with blood, keeping their veins strong and stiff for hours, but it also prevented other sexual dysfunctions like premature ejaculation, STDS, and post coital anxiety. With that, it also made the moment of passion incredibly powerful, like teenagers or soap opera actors. For women, it made the most frigid person orgasm several times in one night only after a few minutes and made the most infertile three times more breedable, so that even one-time contact resulted in pregnancy. The average family consisted of eleven children. The refineries refined more and more Lust Potion to repopulate the humanity lost in the Great Summer. The Lust Plant was seen as vital. The most important substance in the land, and it only grew out of these beds of the most destroyed places.

The beds of destruction nurture the roots, and entire fields of these flowers grow where once towns and forests stood. These heavy vintages grow together to assemble a jungle of forbidden purple flowers. The wind carries their haze into the land and intoxicates wildlife with its effects. However, anything caught in the violet fog of the Lust Plant will not only be infatuated by its potent effects, but the haze will be so strong that someone will shortly fall into a coma that lasts for five days, and then kills them. As the plants die, they break apart and blow away, spreading seeds and haze as new ones grew on top.

Trailer villages popped up around these untamed masses of fuming flowers. People wore masks and kept thermometers on their phones that read the Lust Plant content in the air. Businesses arose that drove trucks, fixed tools, and sold parts for machines. Huge twelve-house silos rose to the sky. Banks and insurance companies arose to track the flowers and the trucks. Legends spread of gems hidden among the fatal coils of purple flowers.

The peasants of these villages survived the heavy haze. Some even ventured into the thickets to explore the flowery volcanoes of musk and came back out alive. They relished the extreme effects rumored to cause secret openings to appear behind the thorns and dead plants that unleashed their inner desires. Forbidden was the way, as the flowers nurtured moss that coated the ruins of the old world, so did the commissioners of its dearest earnings.

Eliza heard of the villages of strange peasants living among and worshiping the Lust Flower in her criminal profile orientation. One of the men who wandered into the flowers and returned. He immediately burst into flames. The peasants then watched in horror as he survived the fire with precious stones glowing in his hands.

The company sent their detective to the village to investigate and find out what they had in the flowers that they didn’t report on their insurance. She tightened a gas mask over her face and walked only in the moonlit roads because the sun hurt her skin. She found the village deserted, but bells rang in the flowers and staffs pounded the ground. Despite her investigation, she found no people, only empty buildings and trailer homes with food still on the table.

The flowers grew over the roofs and out of the well. Jewel encrusted skeletons littered the ground. Midnight drew near, so Eliza moved to her car to sleep for the night. She typed up her report and looked forward to escaping back to the New Capitol when she realized the moon grew larger under the haze drifting in the wind. A tap came at her window, and she put her work down to see one of the skeletons walking by his one hand guiding along the window as it knocked off the mirror.

Eliza stayed shocked in her seat, caught in disbelief as the dead walked out of their trailers, sat up from their seats, covered in moss, grass, and purple flowers. They wandered into the border of Lust Flower. She left her car and followed after them with her gas mask tight, and stockings high. Her boots mashed mud and snail shells. Fog obscured her lenses and the plant debris filled her respirator.

Bony hands took her by the skirt and tried to guide her along, but she twisted around to run back. She tasted the Lust dander on her tongue. It burned her throat and made her rest against the single wall of a fallen tower. The pain in her stomach went away, and the scars left by the sun went away.

The skeletons sank into the mud, but something else rose from the vines on the ground. The high plants blocked the moon and the stars, and she saw the shadow of a stone casket arise. The markings, the picture, all tonsured by plant slurry and erosion of time. She pushed open the lid. Beneath the bed of spiders and fungus, she found a skull attached to a spinal cord with no ribs, hips, or arms.

The tops of the flowers parted and the moonlight flooded through several arches to shine on her. She lifted the head up to see it closer and brought it into the light. Slowly it grew moist flesh and became soggy with warmth in her palms. Blood trickled down her arms as eyeballs rolled in its sockets and a tongue lashed against its teeth. Its muscles tightened as lymph nodes and sinuses sank into rivets. Blue lips appeared and eyelids slid over.