Blind Cartographer

Her fingers stick together where the blood has pooled. Rabia almost counts herself lucky that she cannot see anymore, because the gore of her own enucleation might have made her sick. 

As it is, all she knows is the sound of her own heavy breathing and the tickle of cool, dank air on the wet insides of her eye sockets. 

There is no pain, just as the ritual promised. It is disconcerting, to say the least, but Rabia can't complain. She has felt so much pain since coming down here. So many friends and colleagues taken by impossible doors and cursed reliefs. It feels like a reward that Wahyudi’s final challenge is to sacrifice a sensation, rather than take on more.

Something Outré

“What’s wrong with it?”

Two boys stood in an empty lot between tenements, shielded from street view by evening darkness and a battered chain-link fence. A spindly, barren oak swayed mildly in the wind above them. Eddison, scrawny and little and brown, had a stick the width of his forearm hanging from one loosely clenched fist, just looking for a reason to poke at the twisted, ashen figure before them.

“It’s a she,” Almer said. Broad and short and dark, he squatted even closer to the ground than he normally was to clinically examine the situation. The dirt under the woman was dry and crumbly, almost gravel.

Bridge and Tunnel

Twilight rose above the mouth of the Holland Tunnel and then disappeared behind it as Shari drove. The tile swallowed up her mother’s silver Camry and made the Boyz II Men mixtape so loud that the car sounded like a bachelorette’s party bus, so she turned the stereo all the way down. From the passenger seat, Cristal reached a freshly manicured hand out to turn it back up.

“Calm down, woman!” Shari swatted her sister’s hand away. “We’re not at the club yet!”

Cristal huffed, flamingo-like in her elegant long-ness and bad attitude.

“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘pre-gaming?’” Beltless, she turned in her seat, so that nearly half her skinny body was in the back and facing their little cousin Lindsay. “Linz, you heard of pre-gaming?”

Indigo Fire

A Personal Account of the Events of February 1st, 1972

Written by Professor Kenneth Gamble Ph.D.

To find a man among my colleagues with the same predilection for the occult as myself would be difficult, to say the least. I knew that. I know that now more than ever. But on that late October morning, when Randall Lowry approached me with a Stage 1 archaeological assessment and a spirit of avidity in his manner, I never would have guessed that anyone could be so entirely my opposite.

Lowry was a Professor of Anthropology and the only colored man on the staff of Burghley University. He was incensed by the city’s impending development of this land he’d found. The plot, located in Brooklyn, was the unmarked burial ground of a man named Samuel Laviolette and the twelve slaves in his possession.