The Dread Literary Review

requisitioned | E. G. Ware

the mirror sits on the floor. placed. chosen. here. there. a refusal of surface, wall to claim it, no nail to hold its purpose. found in the alley: antique, worn, ornate filigree gnawed and time-torn. clouded glass, a face that won’t. won’t. cohere, not reform, left to mildew and weather, to warp, to swarm. too much, he said. surplus. an error. aggressor. something about it: queer-sized, some stranger measure. but i think it’s lovely. i said it softer. (too soft) i said it fresher. full of stories. the grain still exhaling what it hoarded before me, floral ghost of rot, through wild inventory, a sweetness filed in a catalogue of quarry. (i carried it anyway) up the narrow stairs, alone, hip braced to timber, shoulder to weight, bone-to-bone. breath breaking, malformed, syntax snapping mid-tone. a body conjugating: i am still my own. up & up i thought: let it fall, let it fissure, let it bawl its bright refusal into shards along the hall. let it fracture to pieces, less than me, more compliant, more conveniently small to be. but i didn’t. i’ve always done things without asking. before him, before this soft-voiced masking. before permission arrived like a cuffed command at my wrist: language tightening tightening how i should stand. he says it’s trash; someone else’s. left to ferment in the alley, among what dispossesses, peel and plastic and rain: rank little excesses that bloom into the odor he says undresses. but it smelled like honeysuckle to me (you have to get close. you have to lean. you have to un-be. unbe.) ancient oak siphoning sweetness illicitly, through slats beside the dumpsters, botanically, secretly. like it remembered a garden it was never meant to keep, like a rumor of soil that refused to sleep. he was angry again: you shouldn’t: why didn’t you, what were you thinking: who told you what to do. as if i were small enough to be lifted, reset, arranged, as if desire were currency meant to be exchanged. like my hands have forgotten. how to choose. how to lose. how to refuse. i look at it. not in it. that feels too certain, singular, too lit. at it. clouded pane, a surface unwilling to commit, to broker my outline, to ersatz a fit. i wonder if i am inside: edges feathered, unshelved, archivally unsteady. something misplaced. something mis-faced. too large for the room i’ve been portioned to fill, waiting for this man to requisition my will. take me, break me, make me be still. later, when the shoutings thin. thin. thin. into the blueprint of another room, another skin. i kneel (quiet is its own permission. always has been) the floor is cold, my body is not, heat held where it shouldn’t, caught. kneel down, naked now, no fabric to allow. a softening, a laundering, a gentler somehow. skin. flesh. the place i am in. i turn sideways. look: my body in the mirror, blurred but there. my nude flank held in oxidized stare. breast, rib, the hollowed flare and dip. below, the curve beginning to declare. itself. a shape i longed for, asked for, now wear. i am prepared to prepare: future written into my air. looking at my naked body in the mirror, seeing her nearer. in the rounding, the hush-swell under skin, the quiet annex where i end, she begins. i press my hand to the place where she is becoming, and the looking-glass, stubborn, over-scaled thing: keeps us, somehow, from fully succumbing. i wonder if she will learn to hoist what is heavy without seeking return. to keep what is called trash, what others would burn. to stand in a room and let her own wanting turn. to not ask. to not mask. to not lessen for anyone’s task. if she will be allowed, or if allowed is a word said too loud. will she have to learn it the way i did: alone, partway up the stairs, breath splitting knuckles on prayers. refusing to drop what i chose to carry.

Musical Pairing:

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX | PART X | PART XI | PART XII

The solarium stood becalmed, washed in a bloodless light that carried no warmth, a brightness emptied of solace.

The vines along the windows had long since atrophied; their calcined tendrils scribed the glass like veins etched by an unseen hand, a botany of abandonment.

Dust hung in the quiet air, each mote an arrested thought, and the hushfall hummed with the ghost of birdsong, sound refusing erasure.

Acantha entered softly, a tray in her hands. She looked around as the light danced; she had known its kind since: that which comes whenas the will has granted no leave. At which junction the body has outpaced the mind, and the will trails in name alone.

The teapot trembled, spilling a narrow runnel of pink across the saucer, a wound too slight to matter and yet impossible to ignore.

“Rose, my darling,” she uttered. “Your favorite. It shall soothe you,” the promise offered as remedy and charm alike. Acantha felt she clung nearer to the belief that comfort was not given from above. It was manufactured here, in this house, and paid for in unseen places.

Eulalie sat in the window chair, her gown even whiter in contrast to the grey of her skin. She faced toward the waning day, as she might be listening for a call thence beyond the glass. At her temple, the skin had begun to curl, parchment-dry; the black beneath showed through like ink bleeding along a wet page, truth insisting after ornament failed.

Her canary quailed within her: no more, mother… the pain burns through…. you must open the cage…

Acantha flinched at the truth of the words named. Had healing always wounded less than waiting? She set the tray upon the table, hands unsteady, resolve brittle.

“Hush. You must not speak so. You are mending,” the word pressed afresh into service, inward stripped of its mercy.

I perish twice… !

The cry tore through the air, a gale-born wail of anguish that struck the panes and made them rattle. The teacup shattered; the scent of roses turned acrid.

The phrase struck Acantha with a shock of recognition. Once in flesh, she thought. Once in hope. She had been living her own second death for years.

“Eulalie!” Acantha rushed to her. “Do n-not curse yourself, m-my heart. I cannot endure w-without you!” The sentence broke her open as she spoke it, on which memory answered with its own cruelty.

She recalled the nights after Sebastian’s burial whenas she had pressed her face into the pillow and wished the breath would simply stop, then recoiled, seized by the thought that even death might leave her alone.

Nor I without you, mother. But this keeping place you have made, it is fire!

Fire, yes, Acantha thought, but worse was the thought of ash, of drifting apart, of love reduced to distance.

Black tears welled from Eulalie’s eyes, streaking her cheeks in slow, liquid paths, each one a refusal to remain contained. Her face began to unmake itself; skin peeled from bone, delicate as frost-burned petals falling from their stem.

Beneath, a faint golden shimmer pulsed, a trapped dawn, the light of the soul pleading for release therefrom. Acantha’s stomach turned. She had prayed for signs. She had not prayed for this clarity.

“S-stay!” Acantha cried. “S-s-stay with m-me! I have lost all.. all else… your father… my boy... Do n-not… not… leave me to the h-h-hollow!” The word rang like a pit struck with stone.

Wherefore shadows deepened at the far wall, gathering substance, and from them stepped forth the herald. Her skin gleamed like black marble; her hair, red as open flesh, spilled down her white robe in molten waves.

Acantha recoiled, scrambling backward on her knees.

What shape was this? Not that of Heaven, as she had been taught. Not angel, not saint, not comfort. Her breath came sharp and shallow, terror blooming once comprehension could follow.

This is not God, she thought, and faltered. Or is it His work? The uncertainty split her open. If she could question the admittance of lost souls, of the architecture of Heaven itself, could not reimagine the form of an angel? Or other divine guidance?

Beside the herald waited a tall spectral figure. Whom had been, Sebastian, his outline wavering like lamplight through dark trees. In his arms he cradled the swaddled form of Nathaniel, the weight of what was lost made briefly visible.

Eulalie’s body convulsed at the sight. A sound tore from her chest, raw and unguarded, a sob breaking through the cage of bone. Father, she chirred, the sound blazing through her like heat after cold. And…

Her soul-bird surged forward, straining so hard the light beneath her skin flared, as if she might tear herself free by sheer will.

For a wild instant, terror flared within Acantha. She thought of the far hill of the churchyard, of the small graves without names, of the child she had buried knowing he would never be called to the altar, never marked as claimed.

Where have y-you b-been… she thought, and the question nearly broke her. Do y-you come… to take Eulalie from-m m-me… to ferry her across to where you d-dwell… ?

The herald’s voice was music and judgment as one, a chord that resolved and condemned. “Acantha Merrin, thy tally of grief is complete. Come hence and be made clean. In the mercy of the Underdark, all trespass is loosed.”

Not the lifted city of light she had prayed toward since girlhood. Below, not above. Descent, not ascent. The place of roots, of things buried without name. Every catechism she had swallowed rose up in revolt.

This was where the unshriven went. This was where monsters dwelt. This was not where she had labored to belong. Howbeit, though, her mind held on a single word. Absolution. It struck her like a blow delivered wherein no appeal was permitted.

Forgiveness had frightened her more than punishment: for failing Sebastian, for allowing her grief to take the life of their son, for depriving Eulalie of warm halls full up with kin. Her hands clenched in the skirts of her gown. Forgiveness also signaled conclusion; that she would no longer be allowed to bargain.

Her focus shifted to the forms beside the herald, and she was overcome. She collapsed to her knees, voice jumping in a quick, panicked staccato.

“Sebastian! My love… my life!” Her voice shook with a second truth beneath the first: If I follow… perhaps… I shall not be alone… The thought unfurled like a forbidden relief. “And our sweet boy… look, Eulalie… our joy returned!”

Sebastian’s form smiled; a pale crescent, fragile as dawn lifting through fog. The infant stirred in his arms, a movement remembering itself.

Acantha’s breath hitched. Not Heaven, then. Not the narrow gate she had feared. But… together. Her face felt numb, stunned. The child she had buried without the church’s blessing lay in Sebastian’s arms, claimed at last, not by rite, but by love. The doctrine she had feared fell away, brittle as ash.

The herald extended her hand. “Thy sorrow hath fashioned itself a shrine. Unhouse it, and thou shalt know repose. The cage must yield. Mercy is granted. Her soul must take… wing.” the law spoken without anger, without delay.

Acantha bowed her head toward the herald, eyes closing, the spine of her resistance at last bending. She understood: love was not the hoarding, but the unclenching of the hand, the courage to release what one would keep at any cost.

And beneath that understanding lay the thought she had never dared finish heretofore: I have d-desired… this… ending longer t-than I have allowed m-myself to know… an end to t-the counting of-f empty rooms…

She turned to her daughter. “Can you f-forgive me… if I let y-you go?” The question carried more than the act, it carried the stairs, the blade, the cage, the years afore refusing to see.

I forgave you the moment you held me last! the stairs were never your sin. There was no malice in it, nothing besides fear.

Acantha saw it then, not absolution only, but mercy.

This body is not me, Eulalie continued, it is merely the door you broke in your terror. The soul remembers love, not damage, not what you did to flesh. Body cannot follow me where I am going… where we might go…

The body, only the door she had broken. And doors, she recognized now, were meant to be opened, not worshipped, not preserved at the cost of what waited yon. The soul had never been hers to keep.

Release me, and, follow. I beg you. I want to rest, to lay this pain down, to stand beside my father, my brother without… bars betwixt us. Let me be light once more!

Follow. Not the long echoing rooms she had feared in death, but reunion. Her next instinct was terror, a recoiling, animal dread. Not of death, but of choosing it. Of wanting it. As she had for years upon years, shadowed in the recessed of her mind.

The herald’s eyes burned brighter. “Come hence; be clean.”

Acantha lifted her head, fear loosening into something like awe. She had mistaken God’s silence for absence. Herein lay answer.

The room swelled with sound, wings beating, fire singing, a choral rising, as if the walls themselves prepared to lift, as if the house had learned at last how to open.

Odette had been polishing the silver when the scream tore loose.

It cleaved the house from crown timber; one long, shattering note. It rose like a thousand hymns of grief sung upon the same breath, faith torn open at its very throat.

She let the cloth fall and ran. The corridors smelled of smoke and wilted flowers, sweetness scorched into bitterness; her shoes slipped on the marble as she rounded the corner toward the solarium, the house suddenly unhomed beneath her feet.

“Ma’am? Miss Eulalie, ma’am?”

The air there was unnaturally stark, too bare, exposed, as if dawn had forced its way inside and meant to remain. A draft moved through, carrying the scent of rain and extinguished candles. Dust whirled in small, spiraling ghosts.

Two forms flashed ahead of her eyes, quick, glinting, life fleeing ahead of thought; a streak of yellow, next of brown.

A canary, and a wren.

They shot toward the open window, circled, and vanished into the grey, whereupon the room seemed to empty of breath, their flight sudden and irrevocable.

When Odette looked down, the tiles shone black and viscous beneath the light.

What had been Miss Eulalie lay crumpled there, her fine gown soaked in red and black, the colors collapsing into namelessness. The bodice gaped wide; beneath it, her ribs flowered open like a basket torn apart, an offering spent of its purpose. The flesh around had softened to ruin, befouled, sinking inward, the scent thick as spoiled wine.

Odette’s knees buckled. She turned aside and retched violently upon the tiles, the sound rebounding from glass and marble.

For a moment she heard nothing but her own harsh breath; then, faintly, somewhere unseen, a tranquil drip of water, continuous, therein marking time where mercy had failed.

She forced herself upright. Her gaze traveled cautiously across the room, her body shaking in uncontrollable trembling, the will lagging far behind the eyes. Among the dead vines and fallen petals, Acantha Merrin lay upon a patch of soil dark as loam.

The tea tray sat in disarray beside her, a cup overturned, pink liquid slipping across the surface and dripping softly from the table’s edge, a domestic spill elevated to portent.

Acantha’s face was pale as lunar light, her lips parted in a small, serene smile, terrifying in its calm. One white hand curled tenderly around the blackened remnant of her daughter’s, holding even what could no longer answer, whither devotion had outlived its object.

Odette pressed her hand to her mouth. “Ma’am,” she breathed, the word breaking. “What is it you’ve done?”

Her lone answer was the faint settling of a cooling teapot, contracting as warmth departed it, subsequently sealing the hush with sound.

She turned to the window once more. The curtains stirred. For an instant she glimpsed a coil of long red hair whipping across the light, caught by the wind, or by something passing yon, at which the air itself seemed to draw back.

Outside, the trees burned with autumn color, their leaves like embers on the wind, a world lavish with continuance.

FIN.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX | PART X | PART XI

Acantha sat by the window where dawn had not fully cohered, the glass dark with night’s lees. The scent of oils yet clung, turned rank by heat and time.

She rubbed her hands together until they burned, the friction testifying that she remained flesh, that pain could still answer effort. She clung to the sensation as proof. If pain remained intelligible, so might God. What… Acantha? What abides when forgiveness is given, and sin persists? She knew the catechetical answer. She refused it.

She pressed her hands over her eyes. Behind them, light wavered in the way that she were afloat, unfixed, refusing to settle into shape. She walked back the last days in memory, to the place when she had stepped past reason’s limit. The thoughts slid past. What had happened seemed of so much less import than what was yet to come.

Open the cage, she w-would fly! Keep her, she could b-burn! Open the cage, she may die. Yet… keep her… Her thoughts turned cannibal, denial devouring, logic degrading. Suchlike as body collapses when prayer is mistaken for endurance, wherein suffering apprenticed itself to faith.

The room swayed, the floor rising and falling like a breath she could not catch. The balance was false and she knew it, still she leaned on it all the same, grateful for a logic that excused stillness.

“I could t-tell them she s-sleeps. Tell t-them she has gone visiting. T-tell them she has-s gone to Heaven and that I… I… ” her voice snagged, caught like thread on a nail, “...that I must follow.” The words tasted saccharine, latterly acquiring the shape of devotion. Was martyrdom easier to conceive than solitude? Did she need to tell anyone, anything, at all?

The wind moved through the chimney, soft as through a hollow reed. Her thoughts overthrew the notion of granting permission. Instead holding that her path was one of humility, submission misnamed for grace, through what agency refusal baptized itself obedience.

She rose and went to the mirror. In its argent surface she saw her own mother’s ghost looking back, grey, hollow. Her mouth trembled ‘tween prayer and curse, and a matriline of women bent beneath loss. She wondered whether holiness had ever been asked of them, or merely survival. “Eulalie,” she whispered to the reflection, “what am I w-without you?” The answer came swiftly, ever clear: alone. She fought shy of it.

From the corner came a rustle, another answer; wings brushing dream. The faintest whisper of unrest, a movement so slight it might have been imagined.

You are what remains, mother. You are the cage.

For one ruinous instant she understood, upon which the ground of thought collapsed. The understanding felt like standing upon the edge of a great height, the world suddenly contingent.

Acantha shook her head, the motion sharp “No… n-n-no…I am mercy! I am your keeper!” Words spoken as defense rather than truth. Verily, though, whom did they persuade?

Keep me no longer!

Her knees gave way. She sank to the floor, the fall ungainly, human. This, this collapse, felt nearer to repentance than anything she had done all night. She repudiated the thought headlong.

The light creeping through the shutters was thin and colorless, the hue of old bone weathering beneath a cold sky. A light that revealed without comfort. If God meant to guide her, He could do better than this. Silence was cruelty dressed as wisdom.

She pressed her forehead to the wood, feeling the grain bite into skin. O Lord… show me which l-loss is l-love! The plea opened her like a wound no hand could close, in there fixing the choice she would not name. But even as she begged, she knew which answer she would not bear.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Searching for Litha | E.G. Ware

I go looking where the noon boasts teeth,

where the road sweats tar and gold,

where ditch-grass speaks touch me touch me,

and the sun cries hold.

my bones become Missouri black-eyed Susans,

yellow wrists uncurling from the clay,

each petal a little fever-lantern,

each dark eye fixed,

on what got away.

my flesh becomes the blackest 

blackest 

soil,

loam-rich chthonic slick with root and want.

I press my mouth to the underworld,

and taste the names I cannot haunt.

I search the creekbed for a sign,

a slough of  skin, a bent stem a hair,

one print of you in the mud’s hot word,

one splendid lapse in the air.

my blood boils with cicadas,

red-eyed as they come from the long sleep,

green-dusk as they rise from appetite.

either way they saw through me.

shrill augurs in the sycamores,

only orison, only need,

a thousand throats of summer saying,

find 	find 	feed.

I overturn stones till the worms shine.

I pestle wild bergamot beneath my knees.

I follow gnats through the solar glare,

through milkweed floss and fever trees.

the longest day will not release me,

it hooks its barb behind my lips.

illumination is no kindness,

it shows me everything that lives.

and everything that leaves.

 

I gather abundance as attestation,

seedhead, shell, salt, burr,

my pockets fill with midsummer’s golden atrophy ,

my hands smelling of earth and blur.

at the peak of light the dark begins,

thin as fruit gone to wasp beneath the door.

I know the turn, I know the law,

I want the blaze and want it more.

my bones blush louder.

my flesh goes deep.

my blood keeps singing your hot black name,

from root to rind,

from rind to sleep.

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© E. G. Ware

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pink, pink, tiny pink | E.G. Ware

pink-clear, clear-pink, a seep that will not sleep, weeks of it, wicking into cotton, into sheets, into the soft crease of my fingers when I wake and check again (still), a blush that will not hush, a stain that will not wane, and I keep thinking who would you have been, bone-bean, hush-thing, thumbprint of a maybe, who would you have leaned toward in the light, would you have had his stare, the way he looks and looks and looks as if my body were a window left unshuttered, get your filthy fucking eyeballs on me, go on, catalogue the leak, the streak (ing), the weak pink speak of it, what else am I wasting for, what else is pouring out in this slow unspooling sore, feed me all your woes, pity, shit, ladle it thick, lay it on gritty, I am nothing anymore (don’t trip), I’m at the bottom it’s a long way down the gown the drain the sound of it (don’t slip), I’m on the bend and it’s a long way round the ground won’t hold, the hold won’t ground (I’m sick), of who I am and what I’m talking about, mouth full of doubt, clot-cloud, not-loud-enough shout, so lock me up I cannot take it, lock me up I’ve already lost, the cost is crossed and crossed again, stab my heart and hope to die, why does the body try and try to rinse itself of what it cannot keep, this pink-clear plea that will not end, this almost-child, this almost-friend, lock me up I cannot take it, lock me up I’ve already lost, and still it sticks, smears, repeats, sheet to skin to hand to heart: apart, apart, apart.

Musical Pairing:

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX | PART X

The candles had spent themselves low. Their wicks bent inward, drowning in their own wax, and the chamber was stifled with steam and oils. Beneath the fragrance, a faint animal warmth persisted, unmistakable, the body’s refusal to be sanctified by scent alone.

The air labored, like a sodden lung rising and falling. It seemed the walls themselves partook of grief, absorbing, holding, exuding again.

Within the marble bath lay Eulalie, inert and ashen, trembling in the shimmer of water-light, her body afloat ‘atween service and offering. She was heavy in the water, as if some essential part had already learned the art of leaving, and so the flesh obeyed only habit.

Shadow and form danced along the deepened grey of her skin, the light breaking and rejoining, uncertain what it illuminated. Her chest, its exposed hollow, bared to the world and to Heaven alike, as her mother washed her with slowness.

Where the rag had been gruff, lamellae of grey skin had curled and fallen away, revealing the marbled flesh of rose and bruise beneath. The texture set Acantha’s stomach lurching, slick where it should have been firm, inert where it should have been responsive. She swallowed hard but did not look away.

Acantha knelt steady beside the tub. She poured the water glacially, as though baptizing each limb, in such a way that the act itself might persuade God to look once more. Or perhaps persuade Him to forgive her for what He had already seen. The thought struck and was pushed aside, now practiced.

“She b-bathes her child… she combs her h-hair… she speaks forgiveness to the wa-ater,” the words swaying like a cradle-verse, by what method sense capitulated to rhythm. Her voice faltered on the last syllable, the cadence slipping. She restarted anew, louder, as if volume could restore order.

Eulalie-bird sat fixed and silent at the back of her cage, feathers damp, her shadow trembling through the rising veil of steam.

Each breath she took seemed borrowed, a symbiotic ballet. She held them overlong, overtight, the exchange uneven and beginning to chafe. When she stirred, droplets fell like broken rain through the ossified bars, striking metal, bone, water alike.

Mother, I burn! Every breath is fire; every movement a coal pressed to my heart.

Acantha flinched. She knew, with a clarity that scalded, that this was not healing. The body was rejecting the forced soul. She closed her eyes until the knowing receded.

“Hush, my darling. The heat draws the sickness away. You shall be whole… clean, and I, with you.” The promise was spoken as fact. She nodded as she said it, therein ratifying her own assent.

Acantha dipped the cloth into the basin and passed it gently over the quiet chest, many a time. The water darkened, aged blood unspooling, until its odor deepened, in the way meat turns when heat overstays.

Her throat tightened. She gagged sharply, and steadied herself with a hand on the tub’s rim, knuckles whitening. “S-she b-a-athes her child… she combsss her h-hair… she binds the wound b-betwixt them.” the words tightening as the water clouded.

She felt ill, momentarily unable to banish the nausea, the room listing. For a breath she thought she might retch into the bath itself and ruin everything. She bit down on the inside of her cheek until copper filled her mouth and the urge passed.

I am breaking. The light burns behind my eyes. I am flame and ash as one!

Acantha shook her head, violently. “N-no,” she whispered quickly. “N-n-no… you are my l-light,” the sentence trembled with need. “You m-must not leave. You must f-f-forgive me and remain-n.” The words scraped as they left her, their edges ill-shaped. Forgiveness should not sound like a command. She dismissed that as well.

She reached for a small silver dish and lifted a single mealworm in her fingers, its pale body twisting with dumb insistence. Holding it at the cage’s edge, she waited. The canary flitted upward and took it, beak snapping shut with frenzied precision, the sound sharp enough to make Acantha recoil. She told herself it was hunger, not terror.

In answer, girl-Eulalie parted her lips, the faint click in her throat a plea, the echo of hunger misdirected. Acantha’s hands trembled. She forced them still. This-s is what m-mothers do, she thought wildly. They tend what lives. She placed the next offering upon her daughter’s tongue, with one slipping from her fingers into the water.

Ripples spread outward, catching the candlelight in rings of fragile gold, a transient beauty bred of contamination. She watched the worm drift, entranced tangibly by the thought that absolution itself might leach away by devotion, thin enough to be washed clean.

She felt almost calm, but suddenly her stomach rolled violently, and she turned her head aside just in time to retch onto the stone floor, bitter fluid splashing and steaming. Clean? The water has only redistributed the s-stain. The burdensome honesty of her lucid mind reared again.

Eulalie-bird stirred, restless, and a fine note escaped, a filament of gold: We must end. We must rest.

Acantha stiffened, fury and terror flaring together. End meant void. End meant alone. “N-not so soon!” she commanded. “The Lord watches.” If He watched, she would give Him something worth seeing. “He knows the measure of our penance,” and the sentence braced her like a rail, whereon resolve congealed.

“She bathes her c-child,” she whispered, “and the child f-forgives her,” the lie settling into her mouth again. It burned as it went down, but she welcomed the pain. Pain carried meaning.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Musical Pairing:

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX

The afternoon waned into a lye-grey pall. Eulalie watched Acantha move in unsettled circuits, straightening what was already perfect, stirring cold tea. She whispered into the voided air, acting as her breath alone kept the rooms from collapsing inward.

Each inhalation hurt, a shallow drag that abraded from within. Each moment pressed upon her like a grating closing, slat by patient slat. Beneath the lace, the Eulalie-bird, stirred. Her wings brushed bone. Small. Tight. Still.

Through the window she saw movement. Balor was crossing the gravel path, hat in hand, haloed in the pewter light of the dying day.

Behind him, the garden lay more fully spent, stripped to canes and thorns, beauty reduced to armature. Rain varnished the iron fence until it gleamed like a dark page illuminated. Her pulse, or the ghost of one, beat in her ears, a memory rather than a promise.

Her mother had gone to fetch more perfume; thereby the moment belonged to Eulalie. She rose stiffly, each joint remembering resistance. She had needed much assistance traveling downstairs, and found the path to the door just as burdensome.

She clung to the wall like the snaking vines that circled the poplars behind the garden. Her fingers slid along it, leaving a ghostly line of moisture.

As she edged toward the open door, she knew she had not the strength to walk any distance. Pushing it open, she braced against the frame, fearing her body might at any moment crumble beneath her.

The air outside struck cold along her skin. The garden ahead smelled of earth and ash, of endings mistaken for rest.

“Eulalie!” Balor’s voice caught as he hurried forward, hope fracturing disbelief. “They told me you had mended. My word… you are pale.”

She tried to speak, but her throat moved without sound, a bell rung without a tongue. Within her ribs, her bird gave a low, supplicant note, felt more than heard.

“Miss Copley told my mother of your stolen voice,” he said quickly. “I care not whether you speak. I only came to say… I love you. Always. Voice or no.”

He took her hand. His calor startled her, the shock of animate heat, the flesh remembering pulse, memory, life, even as her bones recoiled.

I love you too. I do. In this life, for what may be, and perhaps in the one that follows. Her mouth trembled. Wind caught her skirts, and rattled the dry canes beyond until they chimed an accidental music. Her canary fluttered inside her chest, a frantic golden heart striking the bars.

“Eulalie?” Balor whispered. “Why do you tremble so?”

She smiled, or tried to, and felt something shift and splinter deep within, a fault line opening wherein her flesh lay rent. A thin utterance escaped her, a glassing chirr that cut the air like crystal.

Balor stared. “Your voice… ”

She turned from him, lace collar shifting like a hinge. Her eyes shone wetly. I am here, beloved. And I am not.

Ahead, the iron gate rattled, sending dew and rain falling like broken beads of a rosary. The sky was long, soiled, and clotted, the color of aubergine, and through it ran a light like bruised jade flesh. It was like a living suture torn across the heavens, whereat the air itself seemed to strain toward antediluvian music, the slim echo of some obscure voice, older than refusal.

Balor’s hand still held hers. “Eulalie, say something. Any words that call to you. Have, have you forgotten me?”

She looked at him, his mouth a small, earnest wound of tenderness. I know you. I do. Yet, the air grows heavy… the light… the light bends awry.

A sound rippled over the lawn, neither bird nor wind, nor wholly disembodied, a disturbance the grass itself seemed to register. When she turned, she saw a figure at the far edge of the garden, where vines clung to the iron spikes.

A woman, if woman she could be called, skin black as pitch and gleaming, hair the color of bright blood spilling over a robe of billowing white. Her eyes were hollows of molten green, depths wherein all looking was unmade.

“Thy breath is lent, not given. Thy suffering yet unclosed,” she called out, though her lips did not stir. “Come hitherto. The gates of the Underdark stand open, and mercy keeps their watch.”

Balor stepped closer, his voice unsteady. “You need not speak. Simply nod, if you know me. Do you love me still, Eulalie?”

I linger for love! For you, and for her. But, what is this world, if not a cage of flesh and bone!

The herald raised one darkened hand. “Each hour thou remainest, the bars draw nearer. Thy wings shall not serve thee if thou takest not flight anon,” the words uttered as law already sealed.

Eulalie’s lips parted. “Soon.” The sound came forth a broken trill, a lament and a yielding.

Balor recoiled and grabbed her hand. “Eulalie, I beg of you. Do not fade from me. I shall fetch aid! I shall give all that I am.”

Thereupon the herald loomed beside him, though Balor seemed not to see the apparition.

“No aid abides,” she rasped, her gaze passing from Balor to Eulalie. The air trembled beneath her speech, even the ruined roses seemed to bow their heads in heed. “Thou hast strayed beyond the reach of living light. Come.”

Not yet! She shall be left alone. I cannot forsake her to sorrow. I shall come… I shall come… soon…

The herald inclined her head, her voice already retreating. “Bear thy burden tenderly, little bird. When thou growest weary of the cage, I shall return.”

The light dimmed. The sky closed its bruise. When Eulalie looked back, the garden held only Balor’s broken pleas, the cold insistence of his hand clasping hers, and the faint rustle of wings surging within, in which her leased breath held fast.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII

Eulalie sat propped against the pillows.

The fact of it struck Acantha with iteration, like a fist upon the breast. She sits. Sits.

Acantha’s room smelled faintly of iron beneath the powders, a scent Acantha persuaded herself was imagined, some errant remembrance lingering where remembrance had no right to remain.

She had removed Eulalie to the master suite, her daughter’s own chamber presently secured behind a door she kept locked with a key she alone possessed.

She vowed never to set foot there anon.

Guiding a brush through her daughter’s sable hair, she hummed the afterimage of a lullaby, a tune pared down to breath and habit. Each stroke paced to a rhythm only she could hear, coaxing order from what would not return it. Her hand shook; she tightened her grip on the brush until the trembling ceased.

“There now,” she whispered. “All tangles gone. We must look our best. Visitors shall call again soon.” If I fall silent she thought, the lack shall speak in my stead.

The head lolled with the motion. Acantha caught it impossibly quickly, too tightly, and felt the false weight of it in her palm. For a fractional instant, nausea returned abruptly, sharp as teeth. She swallowed it down and smiled, as one might smile at a child startled from sleep. “S-see? Ever graceful.”

Mother. It hurts. Please.

The voice, thin, interior, unbearable, made her breath hitch. Pain reasserts, she told herself. It reminds us we still breathe.

“Too much rouge, do you think?” Acantha dabbed her fingertip into a tiny pot of color and brushed it across the bruised grey of a cheek. The skin resisted, dry and cold beneath the pigment, denying warmth. “No. A t-touch more. You always did fade in the mornings.”

The mirror on the vanity betrayed what the heart refused: the way the body no longer settled but held, arranged rather than inhabited. Powder feathered the edge of a fault no powder could efface. Around the throat, a new high collar of lace rose as a ruff, starched high and immaculate, concealing the broken angle beneath.

From her chest came a furtive cry, a soft fluttering beneath the pin-tucks of fine taffeta, overly scant, contained. Let me rest. This body, must sleep.

Acantha’s stomach clenched. She pinned the final ribbon with needless force. “Perfect,” she proclaimed, breath quickened by something not joy. “My beaut-tiful one. You see how fine you-you look?” The words came fast, as if speed might outrun doubt. “Nothing shall ever p-part us again.”

In the mirror, Eulalie’s painted lips moved soundlessly, yet her eyes, rimmed in shadow, glistened with a trapped, shining wetness, as though something behind them still recalled how to plead.

Acantha turned away hitherto the mirror could finish its accusation. She moved to lift Eulalie, a careful arm around her waist. The body came with her, far too easily. A chill slid down her spine at the ease of it.

In due course they processed from bedroom to hall, mother guiding daughter, each step a delicate masquerade of the living. At the stairs, Acantha paused, heart hammering, memory flaring, the sound of bone on marble, the house’s long intake of breath. Do not look down.

In the parlor, the air smelled of heavy perfumes, sweetness overlaid thickly to mask what could not be named. Sunlight filtered through lace curtains in pale squares, illuminating everything except the figure on the settee, as if light itself drew away.

Eulalie sat straight as a doll. A book rested upon her lap, pages unturned, spine uncreased, a lie placed where hands should have been. The high collar rose to her jaw, and the faint dusting of powder labored to soften what could not be softened.

“Just so, my darling,” Acantha murmured. “Sit straight, and all shall think you well.” If they believe, t shall be true.

Must we sit so long. The light. Burns.

Acantha’s smile tightened. “Hush,” she breathed.

“Ma’am,” Odette called from the threshold. “Mrs. Harland and Miss Copley have called. I said as Miss Eulalie was much improved, ma’am… if I was right to say so…”

“Yes,” Acantha replied quickly. She smoothed her sleeves, felt the tremor return. “Show them in.”

Silk entered. Lavender. Starch. The clean, moving scent of other lives proceeding in normalcy. They spoke in tones of cheerful pity, as women do when faced with sorrow they pray is fleeting, as if goodwill might ward it off.

“My dear Mrs. Merrin,” said Mrs. Harland, pressing her hand, “how glad are we to find Eulalie improved! Though… my dear… she still looks quite… pale.”

Acantha felt a laugh rise in her throat, sharp and hysterical. She swallowed it whole. “The illness was sudden,” she explained smoothly, her trained social voice sliding back into place like armor. “And severe. The fever left her speechless.”

“Speechless?” Miss Copley leaned closer. Her eyes lingered, searching. “How angelic she looks… you look, dear… even in silence.”

Eulalie did not move. Her gloved hands rested upon the book. Her chin inclined obediently. Do you see the cage?

Odette poured the tea, watching the steam coil like white serpents into the air. When she handed Eulalie her cup the fingers were perfectly still, an imitation of grace.

“She grows stronger each day,” Acantha said. The words pressed out, sharpened by need. “Do you not agree, my love?”

From within the bodice came a small, involuntary chirr, subdued, pleading.

Odette looked up sharply, her hand freezing mid-pour.

Acantha’s heart slammed, hard enough to hurt. “She says yes,” she explained, smiling widely. “My dear girl agrees.”

Mrs. Harland blinked. “How very… charming.”

As the tea cooled, a faint odor, sweet, humid as wilted bloom, rose beneath the lavender perfume in the room, a second scent demanding recognition. Odette caught it first but dared not show her confusion, training her face into obedience.

Acantha lifted her cup. Her hand shook so badly the porcelain chimed. They must not know. Must not see. Smile. Breathe. Pray. “More sugar, Mrs. Harland?” she asked lightly.

Outside, a canary sang in the garden, frantic, unrepentant. Inside, Eulalie-bird answered with a single vacuous note, constrained, a sound where no egress remained.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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I wrote this as a gift and fed it to the fan-mail box at the Florence + The Machine Everybody Scream show in Chicago, IL on 4.11.2026. I hope she reads it, but if not, maybe someone else will enjoy.

Musical Pairing:

Torn Into Tenderness | E.G. Ware

O bright-bellied moon, thou mother unmoored,
White-womb’d wanderer, wound, adorned,
We have seen thee newly, truly, newly,
what was mirror, meek and borrowed; 
now as bearer; as brunt; as body that bore.

Scholars cry: look! look!
Their glass-gods sharpen’d, their far-flung vessel flown
further than any flesh hath ever fled, and there,
in the black unbottom’d bellow of heaven,
they beheld thy beaten bloom.

Not broken: no: bruised. bejeweled with batterings.
Pitted, pricked, praiseful with scars.

A rainbow rash across thy skin, each crater a color caught,
caught and kept and kept: O keeper!

What hath thou confined?
What cold, wild stones flung screaming sunward,
what fire-fanged fragments, what ruinous seeds
meant for our meadows, our marrow, our milk.
Thou drew them in, didst draw them down,
didst take them tenderly to thy terrible breast.

And we, below, barely knew.

We named thee maiden, we named thee mirror, we named thee mild.

But thou art mother-massive,
thou art the great gravid guard of the globe,
thy body a basin of blows.

See now how thy surface sings in spectral spill;
violet-veined, ochre-older’d, blue blushing through, 
each mark a memory of meeting, each hollow a held-back harm.

O how like us: how like us, I say: 
the stretch and the splitting, the skin made story,
the soft made strong by the strike.

We too are torn into tenderness,
we too are widened by what we withstand;
our bellies burgeon with the burden and burst,
our hips hymn open, our bones bear witness.

Blood is a bright annunciation: pain, a portal.

And thou, thou vast, veiled vessel of night, didst labor in silence.
No midwife but meteors, no witness but void,
no cry but the quiet collision of centuries, and still, thou held.

Held the hurt. Held the heat. Held the hurling dark things meant for us.

O lunar lady, long-limn’d in lore,
Diana, Selene, Senta Maire of sky,
how we have mistaken thy marks!

We know them now as evidence.
As proof of thy pulling, thy patient, perpetual protection.
As proof thou didst say: here. here instead.
Strike me. Spare them.

And so the poets have risen, ravenous, radiant,
their tongues turned tideward, their ink in a fever.
For what word may hold thee now?

Yet pale. Yet pure. Yet also, pierced and prevailing.
Yet distant, and yet deep with the dent of devotion.

O moon: my mother, my model remade,
I praise thy pocked and patient face, 
each caldera a cradle, each stigma a star that never fell further.

Because thou didst hold first.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII

The house lay in torpor. Even the walls seemed slack with it, beams settling, doors resting in their frames. The clock struck, marking the hollow hours in tinny heartbeats as time itself appeared to stand as witness rather than remedy.

Acantha drifted through its corridors like a wraith recalled from dream, uncertain whether she walked or was merely borne forward by intent. Her shift hung loose, unbound hair spilling in pale strands, like silk drifting on the breeze; a body unfastened from the discipline of day.

She entered Eulalie’s room and closed the door quietly behind her, thus severing the chamber from the common hours of the house. Eulalie lay still within the pillows and ruffled linens, pale and lovely as an effigy laid in snow.

“My lamb,” Acantha whispered, “your little heart beats still and all. I can feel it… I can, I can.” Even so, the vestigial voice at the back of her mind told her this was not so.

Her hands hovered above the unrising chest. Beneath her touch: a dense, padded quiet, as if sound had been pressed flat beneath the skin. No answering life to reassure the flesh. Solely the ghost of shape beneath the linen, the memory of motion. Beauty, yes, but suspended, already in motion toward oblivion.

A body might remain lovely after life, she knew, but it would never sing again, never cant its face instinctively toward the sun. H-how long might I keep this way? Her body mine, her spirit f-floating on yellow wings, she shall fade, shall be dust and I… n-nothing. The thought struck her with a bodily lurch, a sudden drop inside the skull, consequently her breath failed her.

A flutter at her shoulder; the canary had woken. She circled, her wings brushing Acantha’s hair with a tickling insistence that raised gooseflesh, a benediction light enough to be mistaken for grace. The bird did not tire. She did not falter. Each turn followed the last with perfect obedience, motion begetting motion, as if she were wound from within.

As she watched the bird turn, round round round, Acantha’s breath quickened and her eyes widened. Madness unspooled in her mind afresh, the familiar tightening of thought into inevitability. If blood were enough, the body would answer. If breath were the keeper of life, the chest would rise. But something else had gone missing, something that turned flesh toward light, that taught limbs to seek and retreat, that made a body more than weight.

The bird persisted. What if, if this was, the engine, Acantha thought, not breath nor blood, but will, motion rendered holy, the soul not as ornament, as force designed, like all good things… by God. She spun in place, back, thrice again, taking in the room, seeing not objects but signs. Her fingers rose to her mouth; she bit at her nails, the taste of old soap and some other bitterness on her tongue. Her gaze widened, fore narrowing, the world sharpening unto a single point.

When she looked to the side table, one of Sebastian’s scalpels gleamed in the shadowed light beside the wash basin, its presence both ordinary and appointed. The blade faintly filmed by some balminess, though she had no memory of setting it there. “Revelation,” she breathed.

Sebastian’s medical texts rose unbidden in her mind, plates of the opened chest, careful lines naming bone and cartilage, the ribs arched not as barrier but as shelter. Built to guard what must beat. The beating of a heart, the beating of w-wings. What must endure. Could a soul not rest there as well? The body was only earth given a brief shape. She told herself that, and felt the comfort of it. Earth accepts what Heaven refuses.

She took the scalpel up and crossed herself with the same hand. If sin lived anywhere, it lived in the light that watched. Below, there was only hold. The metal leeched heat from her fingers; she welcomed the numbness.

She turned it and pressed it lightly to her own wrist, an intrusive curiosity. A thin line opened immediately, astonished red welling up, obedient, precise. She stared at it, how little pressure it took. How willing the body was. God, she thought, should I-I follow them myself? Risk what waits yon b-breath and doctrine and f-fear? Or… have You shown me another path, k-keeps her here, under the sun, where love yet has weight? Yes. The knife was here for her. The components aligned, each one answering the last, logic closing, whereabout she knew she held choice.

To meet Eulalie where she dwelled, to slide the cool silver deeper into her own flesh and let the carmine pool; or to bring Eulalie home. Acantha cut again, no deeper than afore. It stung, yet did not finish the question. Cowardice rose in her like relief. Not today, then. Not apart.

She felt a sharp sensation as the bird settled on her shoulder, tiny talons biting through fabric. “I have been shown the-the design, guided… all… communion… m-must have its vessel.”

mother, no… what… ?

“Hush,” she snapped, harsher than perhaps she intended, the sound breaking like a whip. Acantha leaned over Eulalie’s rigid form, hands shaking as she parted the front of her nightdress. The fabric resisted for a breathless moment, snagging, ere yielding with a small, traitorous sigh.

Acantha’s gaze flickered to the pale, moonlit rise of Eulalie’s chest and to the thin silver gleam of the blade, a pull of flesh remembered and flesh reimagined. She rolled her shoulders back and drew in a long, steadying breath, thence committing herself to motion.

Even so, she hesitated, and sat on the edge of the bed, her hand lowering with the knife, her thoughts stuttering and inchoate. Do I-I I trust, understand-d, have I the w-warrant. She nodded to the questions as if they had been spoken aloud, and whispered her assent to the empty room.

Standing afresh, she loomed over her daughter, the scalpel lifted again, waiting. Her wrist trembled, time narrowing to the blade’s edge. She lowered until it kissed skin, a deepening pressure. The flesh dimpled, pale and unyielding, refusing the invitation.

For a single, perfidious instant, her mind cleared. What m-motion my hands make! The thought landed whole, unsoftened by symbol or prayer. I c-cannot. Her hand faltered. The scalpel quivered, biting just enough to sting, to announce itself. “Do not…” she whispered, whereupon she pressed harder.

The smell rose sooner than the blood did. A foetid warmth, intimate and unmistakable. Her stomach seized; her throat convulsed in refusal. This is filth, gasped the small, horrified remnant of her. “No,” Acantha breathed. “This is mercy.”

The first deep cut sounded like silk torn wet, followed a heartbeat later by a soft, surprised click, as trapped air slipped free from the chest. There was a delay before ready blood, a pause, during which the blade dragged as if caught in something fibrous, reluctant, resisting consecration.

Her hands steadied as she cut a new line. Dark blood flooded her palms suddenly, slick and shocking, still warm, and her stomach clenched in spite of herself. Her vision tunneled. Her own blood flushed her face under skin, her ears ringing.

She turned tardily, and vomit spilled onto the floorboards in a sour, choking rush, bitter with bile. It splashed her bare feet. The sound obscene in its banality. She gagged fitfully, dry this time, shaking so violently her teeth clicked.

“I am weak,” she whispered hoarsely. “But I… shall not l-leave her.” She could not bear the thought of her child alone in some high, cold distance, where nothingness might prevail. That darkness was unfathomable.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, smearing red and saliva together. If I stop, she thought, freshly lucid, she is already r-ruined, s-shall have done this for n-nothing. She willed her body to steady again, to coax her voice to calm; each motion measured as in prayer. Turn back… already lost… fear that Heaven… may not be as we think… leave her there… she thought with ruthless clarity. Go forward… make this place ready… then… yes… neither do I… face… my own ending… not yet…

The logic settled, and she turned back to the bed. “Bone… of my bone,” she intoned, “flesh… of my f-flesh… what is born of me shall live by m-me again.”

The canary lifted and flew toward the window; she beat herself upon the glass, gold on to grey, the dull thud of her body obscenely soft, hope striking futility. Her wings smeared light as she gave voice through the hush: I fear what you see, know what you plan! Let me be wind! Let me flee!

“Hold no fear,” Acantha said, though her breath came shallower, each inhale edged with iron. “I make for you a p-place… of keeping.” The bed linen darkened. The room filled with the scent of iron, and beneath it something sweet-rot, animal-warm, that made her throat tighten as if to gag over again.

She inhaled deeply, worked carefully, lips moving in a soundless litany, the language of faith emptied into action. Another soft, wet crack followed, muffled, like knuckles pressed into soaked wood. It was not a break so much as a yielding, accompanied by a low, breathy sigh that did not come from any living mouth.

Acantha froze. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Yet, she continued, pushed forward, the sternum yielding unevenly beneath the knife. The ribcage shifted under her hands, a subtle collapse that sent a tremor up her arms as meat and bone gave way.

When she drew back at last, a pale trellis of open ribs gleamed beneath the candlelight like the bars of a votive reliquary. Heat rose from the cavity in faint, quivering waves, fogging the air above it. Eulalie’s chest sat open, dark, glistening in the faint light, a space made ready, after which holiness relinquished pretense and left simply function.

It was uglier than Acantha had imagined. Not a shrine, not a chalice, just meat and heat and a wet, trembling depth that smelled alive in the worst way. Her knees weakened. She gripped the bedframe to keep from falling. This is not holy, whispered a fading scrap of her. “It shall be,” Acantha voiced aloud.

She smiled through tears, wet red running up the white silk of her sleeves, her hands slipping, and tightening to regain their grip. “S-see, the door is open, your p-place awaits.”

The canary clung to the curtain cord, trembling with such force she might burst apart: I am voice, not vessel, I am flight… not… not… flesh undone!

Acantha reached up. Her hand shook, but her grip was sure. The bird’s heart hammered under her fingers, frantic and hot. “You must be one.” She hesitated then, the bird thrashing in her grip, her avian heat frantic, her avian body too real. Open the cage, a voice urged. Let it rise. Let her rise. She closed her eyes, and the moment passed, at which resolve hardened.

Acantha drew the quivering canary to her lips, pressed a kiss to her small, warm head. She felt the rake of claws, reflexive, drawing a bright line across her skin, and guided the bird downward, into the wound’s bright hollow.

The canary resisted her mother, crying out in piercing bursts of pain. Her wings struck bone with a papery sound, beating at the bars. The cavity resisted, too, tight and steaming. Acantha parted flesh, watching runnels of blood fill the space, and pressed the canary flat to the base.

Her wings beat wildly against Acantha’s palm, frantic. Finally exhausted, she slowed, and folded in on herself, until she lay quiet. One last cry escaped her, sharp and brief, as she sat within that pool of red, wings now too sodden to fly regardless.

“Rejoice,” Acantha whispered, though bile burned the back of her throat. The sudden calmness felt like relief. Her stomach unclenched. Her hands stopped shaking. She mistook the absence of resistance for approval. Silence, she had learned, could always be disciplined to signify assent.

From her wrist she drew a fine silver chain, at one time Sebastian’s watch chain, and threaded it through the small aperture of bone. The metal rang softly as it touched bone, a sound fiercely bright for the room. The clasp clicked shut, locked. The key she fastened to her own wrist, added to the charm bracelet Eulalie had given her some birthday past. The relic bound; the work sealed therein.

She kept vigil, her breath rising and falling with apprehension, every nerve strung tight. Within the opened chest, the bird shifted in circuitous motions, a confined rustle that had not anyplace to go.

The room seemed to tilt around her. She closed her eyes, and prayed, intently, patiently, for return. When no sign came, no declaration of God’s grace, merely a cooling, settling quiet, Acantha sank into the chair beside the window. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, the red from her sleeves smeared across her sides, her back. Only then did she become aware of her own fatigue. She rested her head against the table and slipped into sleep, the body exacting what the mind would not grant.

Some hour or more later she roused, her neck stiff, her mouth dry, her stomach knotted anew.

Her eyes took in the disorder she had wrought: the ruined bedclothes, the torn linens, the open flesh of her daughter’s befouled body. Panic rose within her, deep and sweltering. She had committed sin upon sin, defilement laid upon death! Had she lost all faculty? Did she imagine herself still fit for any divine reception, when her days at last were reckoned?

She gathered up the scalpel once more, drawing it lightly along the long curve of her inner arm. Red welled in minute beads, puckering and slipping downward, in the way they seemed strung upon some invisible thread. It stung less than the first time, and she wondered if even the cold cowardice of pain had now taken its leave.

A rustle came from the bed. Acantha arose in haste and stood hovering, her breath held fast, waiting for another sound. Blood slid down the open cut of her arm and fell, unheeded, to the floor. Barely, distantly, did she register the droplets striking the tops of her feet.

Eulalie’s ruined breast stirred; the ribs lifted unevenly, her eyes opened, glassy and unblinking. Her lips parted; a faint sound escaped, sigh and birdsong, whereupon breath and voice failed to agree upon their purpose.

Acantha fell to her knees beside the bed, taking her daughter’s hand in her own, her fingers closing tight, claiming what she had remade. “Praise be,” she wept. “She w-wakes!” Her mouth filled with the memory of bile, even in triumph, she registered the path she had chosen.

The canary, soul, child, captive; beat upon the cage of bone, at prayer, at the breath that named her. Heat built where she struck, nowhere to disperse, nowhere to flee. Her beady black eyes burned into Acantha’s own: I was free! I chose to stay, for you, y-you take even my wings from me: wherein love consummated its trespass.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content note: Serial as a whole contains body horror, violent death, and psychologically intense material.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV

The storage unit smelled of cardboard, recirculated air; a casseroling of stale breath and particulate neglect. Jo worked glacially, sealing boxes in sequence, the rip of tape loud in the compressed space, a petty violence she couldn’t gentlerize. Dust colonized the hairs on her forearms, turning them ashen beneath the fluorescent drone.

The lights drilled straight through her skull, pressure headache peaking and never quite letting go. She’d slept in short, untrustworthy increments the last few weeks, ten minutes, forty, a blank stretch she couldn’t verify, and her eyes kept trying to refocus on things that refused to hold still.

She’d cleaned up. Or close enough to pass inspection. Hair cut shorter, Hale’s green jacket at her waist. The desert had receded from her, had decided she’d taken her allotment; leaving salt tide on her boots and a dull pressure in her right ear whenever the AC dipped too low.

Her stomach cramped, a sour pull she’d learned to ignore. She set the tape gun down, fished a granola bar from her bag, peeled it open with her teeth. One bite. Oats went dry and gluey in her mouth. She chewed because that’s what you did, then swallowed against a sudden wave of nausea. She wrapped the rest back up, missed the trash, corrected, and didn’t look at it again. She tried to reconcile the timing of her last meal and failed.

Most of the files went easily. Evidence tags. Audio transcripts. Orphaned equipment. The difficult things she saved for last, delaying without admitting delay; the items that still felt volatile, where mishandled placement might wake them. Hale’s notebooks. The shattered recorder. A cable coiled stiff from sun exposure. A glass shard she couldn’t throw away, because hell with it, sometimes pain needed a handle. Small enough to pretend it was incidental, real enough to contradict the lie.

Somewhere in the unit a sound skittered, a dry scrape, almost the rasp of pen on paper. Her shoulders tightened before she realized it was just air cycling, the building rehearsing its usual lies.

Time hiccupped and his face overlaid the fluorescent light. Mid-failure. That impossible width. The way the skin had peeled back, so wet, so pink.

She sucked in a breath and felt something slide down her arm. Warm. Viscous. She jerked her sleeve up, heart stuttering, and found only dust, gooseflesh. Nothing there. Nothing now. Her hand shook. She curled it into a fist, went back to work.

On a spectral map of the mission site, she found the same loops, arrows; arachnid script threading his notes. And there again, in the margin: three letters, א מ ש. She traced them with the cap of her pen, pressing hard enough to emboss the page. If she pressed harder, maybe they’d collapse into nothing. Erase the cipher that had coaxed him past his own threshold. Erase the invitation he’d never learned how to decline.

The pen kept moving after the letters, looping in on itself, a circle nesting another, then another, until the page went soft beneath the pressure. She capped it, slid the notebook away.

A photo lay atop the nearest box, his ID badge from the department archive. The glare bleached his face, rendered his eyes even more like weathered glass. She stared for a long count before flipping it facedown. Enough, she told the image. Enough already.

She brushed dust from the box with the side of her hand, leaving behind a series of ghosted rings she didn’t see before she taped over them.

Her phone buzzed, lighting against the cardboard. Another link. Another article. As if the reminders required reinforcement. The headline twisted like salt ground into a fresh cut, gratuitous, mean: Local Paranormal Consultant Presumed Dead in Mission Collapse.

The date already felt counterfeit. Three weeks. She scrolled anyway, hunting the sentences she despised most:

Authorities have found no trace. Cause remains under investigation.

Survived by his sister, Sophie Bishop, of Marietta, Georgia.

No official statement from the Grey Meadows Department of Field Research.

She clicked the screen dark, set the phone atop the box. Her reflection hovered there, thin jaw, light-sick pallor, eyes too clear, cornered-animal wide, then slid away.

On the desk waited a letter, folded and unfolded until it sang with crease lines. The handwriting was careful, each loop deliberate.

Sophie,

Everything not held by the department is in the storage unit. Maybe you can make better sense of what he was looking for. I’m so sorry. He kept chasing the cross-overs. Till the end. I tried to drag him back. I should’ve pulled harder. I should’ve broken something if that’s what it took.

She drew a set of nested circles in the margin, three of them, one tucked cleanly inside the next, and only then signed it Longview, out of habit. She stared at the word, scored it through, wrote instead: Jo Langley. The name looked undersized, shrunk in the wash.

Below it, a final note, almost an afterthought: P.S. You’ll find numbers in his margins, book and verse, I think. He did it more and more these last few years.

She slid the letter into its envelope, tucked it into her back pocket. For a while she stood motionless, listening to the building breathe: pipes ticking, lights buzzing, the vent’s dull shudder like a heart under glass, mechanical, incurious about meaning.

He called it an event. I call it a loss, a tragic fucking loss. Words mattered until they didn’t.

She flicked her lighter before closing each box, a small observance, heat without consequence. On the last one she let the flame linger, watched it gutter, felt the brief insurrection of warmth, then snapped it shut.

Her side pocket felt heavier than the rest. The melted watch rested there, wrapped in a handkerchief. Sometimes, when she drove, it knocked softly with the turns; an impocketed familiar, reminding her it hadn’t gone anywhere. She could almost pretend time still had jurisdiction. That it hadn’t slipped its leash entirely.

Outside, the sun had lowered, striping the parking lot in coppered shadow. The horizon shimmered the way it had that night, heat and mirage collapsing into one another, truth softening at the edges like overheated film.

She dropped the letter into the mailbox at the end of the row, loaded a box into the truck bed, slid the latch down, and lingered longer than necessary. Her reflection wavered in the window, held over the faded Grey Meadows decal. She picked at the sticker’s edge until it peeled free, fluttered to the concrete, weightless, finally unclaimed. Good riddance. Arrogant fucks.

She leaned against the door frame, checked her phone again. Nothing. No plea to reconsider, just the wash of condolences from people who couldn’t understand and didn’t need to perform the fiction that they did. What Hale had been to her. How the cavity in her chest rattled when she moved.

At the bottom of her inbox, a message she’d saved from Hale flickered up. Weeks old. Subject line: Edge. The body: When the signal hums, don’t pull back. Match pitch. Like the universe was a duet, not a motherfucking ambush. That’s how we hear the other side. She deleted it before thought could intervene, before sentiment made its case.

For a while she watched dust funnel off the highway. A storm line was assembling over the western hills, the same ridge that had taken him. The wind dragged cool pulses across her arms, raising gooseflesh with the precision of memory.

She drove east. At first the road was empty, the blacktop still hoarding the day’s heat. Behind her, the sky consolidated into a slow-moving wall of ochre and smoke. The dust storm rolled, sentient, hauling the desert’s remains toward someplace she hoped she’d never have to pursue. Never again.

Her hands found their old rhythm on the wheel, thumbs tapping once at the base of every mile marker. One two. One two. She checked the mirror now and then; the storm followed without gaining. It knew better than to hurry her. Patience was its advantage.

You said truth and understanding come only when we accept, that what we can’t fully see or touch can be as dangerous… or more… than what’s right in front of us. She never knew whether he’d meant that as comfort or caution. Probably both. He’d liked it that way.

Her new job was in Mississippi. Vampires this time. Thank God. Easy work, comparatively; corporeal, predictable. She liked those words now. Containable… killable…

She turned on the radio. Static. She let it run, the dull white hiss kneading the cab. Faintly, it began to pulse, rising and falling like breath. Her jaw set. She eased into the next lane, let the sound settle. Just rhythm. Just the old habit of him surfacing through noise. A ghost composed entirely of timing. Inhale, swell, exhale.

She lit a cigarette. Her hands shook just enough to irritate her. The flame jumped, small, steady despite the wind slipping through the cracked window. The radio hissed as the signal died and the desert unspooled ahead of her. She let it run.

Her pocket knife lay open on the passenger seat, forgotten. The dashboard above it was scarred, not random, not wear. Circles. Scored deep enough to hold shadow. One inside another, tight and deliberate, the plastic curled up pale along the cuts.

Her heart kicked hard enough to steal her breath. She couldn’t remember doing it. She reached over and grabbed the handle, closed the knife, without taking her eyes off the road.

In the static, the habit of Hale lingered, breath in, breath out, his private liturgy reduced to a pulse. Eyes on the horizon, Longview.

FIN.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI

Light cleaved the drapes into slender bars of grey, falling across the bed and floorboards like a quiet enclosure, a cell made of morning. On the rug sat a tray of pink tea and little white cakes, untouched, their careful symmetry already beginning to slacken; steam long dispersed into the chill, leaving nothing save the barest specter of rose on the air.

Acantha sat near the pillow’s edge, one hand lifted, held steady with exacting care. Upon it perched the canary, her feathers catching the parsimonious allowance of dawn. Each plume turned a dull gold, and so grey again as the light shifted, whither even color seemed uncertain of its allegiance. “Shall we dine a little, my heart?” Acantha asked. “I had Odette bring your accustomed tea; rose, as you favor.”

The bird tilted her head: No hunger do I feel.

Acantha’s mouth softened into a smile. “No, no; your appetite was never strong. A lady must be delicate.”

From the corridor came a knock. “Ma’am?” Odette’s voice, cautious, scrupulously weighted with deference. “The morning tray, ma’am. Shall I…”

“You shall leave it,” Acantha called. “She sleeps still… the fever runs high,” the words delivered with habitual authority, thereupon ending the matter as one bars a door.

A pause, followed by the careful retreat of steps, the sound thinning as it went.

Acantha leaned toward the bird, voice lowered to a secretive tone. “Odette must not behold you… she lacks the faculty to… un-nderstand… would interpose bb-etwixt us.”

The bird hopped from one foot to the other: We are joined. We shall endure. Be unafraid.

The clock in the hall struck eleven. Acantha started; the sound felt extra loud, grossly temporal, as if the hour itself protested her trespass, and so she pressed her lips together in contained defiance.

Another knock. “Ma’am… ” Odette inquired, more tentatively. “Sir Balor’s come to call, asking after Miss Eulalie. Shall I say she’s resting, or… ?”

Acantha rose swiftly, nearly upsetting the tray, the porcelain rattling in quiet alarm. “No one must come in. I… I come p-presently.”

She crossed to the door, smoothing her hair with reflexive vanity, stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her, thereby becoming threshold and guard.

Odette stood waiting, pale with worry, hands wringing the side of her apron, gaze flicking toward the closed door, and away.

Light as mist upon the fields, Acantha descended the stair, moving toward the foyer where the would-be suitor waited, each step a careful descent back into the syntax of the living; Odette trailing like a shadow behind, obedient, uneasy.

“Good day to you, gentle sir.”

“And to you, madam.” The tall man, scarcely older than the object of his affection, bowed with earnest upset. His eyes flicked over the wan, disorderly lady of the house, lingering where her composure slipped. “I hear Miss Eulalie has taken ill. Is there cause for much concern?”

Acantha smoothed her bare hands together, a habitual phantom-gesture toward gloves forgotten upstairs, toward propriety misplaced. “No, no, no. In any event…leave… I beg,” she uttered, her grey eyes burning with a semblance of triumph, “lest you… catch the fever that has b-befallen my poor Eulalie.”

Balor stated his regret, bowed again, and promised to return soon, whereupon Acantha’s voice held its fragile music as she bid him farewell and turned the lock behind him, the click sounding terminal, decisive.

She climbed the stair with haste, breath quickening, drawn upward by a cord pulled tight, and slipped back into the room yet engulfed in grey light. “Do you see, my love?” she whispered. “They shall not wrest you from me,” the promise settling like a sworn charge fore an unseen altar, hallowed by fear.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content note: Serial as a whole contains body horror, violent death, and psychologically intense material.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III

The sound arrived a second late, and her vision went with it; a concussive efflorescence that slugged the breath out of her, jackknifed her to the ground. Her molars shrieked like she’d bitten foil. Son of a bitch, she thought dimly, or maybe she said it.

She clapped her hands over her ears. When she pulled them away, her palms came back slick. Blood made four crooked fingerprints along her wrist where she’d gripped her own arm. For several misfiring moments she couldn’t tell if she was shaking, or falling through the earth, or if the earth had simply rescinded its interest in holding her.

She folded and vomited into the dust, bitter; stomach emptying until there was nothing left but spit and a painful heave that bent her double. The smell rose immediately, intimate, layering itself over copper and meat.

She wiped her mouth, smeared blood she didn’t recognize. Hers. His. It no longer sorted cleanly. She crawled, teeth gritted, and bullied herself upright. The world rang bright and incorrect.

Light gone.

Face gone.

Hale… gone.

The inner circle held nothing living. The coil plate had slumped into an oval of cooled metal, ridged, tallowy, like candle fat mid-drip. The tuner disk lay partway sunk, its chalk lines vesicated to a blistered scar. The recorder’s glass had warped, milked over, and for an instant her reflection ghosted there; eyes rimmed raw, hair salt-stiff, runnels of blood dried from ear to chin, bisecting her face. A mask she didn’t remember donning. Jesus fuck, she looked like evidence. Behind that ghost: nothing.

Her water bottle lay on its side by the outer ring, throat open to the sky. A slow outflow darkened the sand beneath it. The stain widened like an iris until it reached the shallow lip of the circle, hesitated, as if the line still possessed authority. As if it still meant something.

She forced her hand to lift the phone. To take the picture. The tremor was so violent she had to brace one wrist with the other just to steady the shot. Muscle memory outmuscled grief, outpaced the part of her mind chanting stop, stop, stop, like it could still intervene.

The watch found her next. Or she found it. Same thing now, discovery had become reciprocal, and she hated it. The sand around it had glassed: a plate of bubbled, greenish vitrification, grains sealed inside like insects in amber. His watch sat fused to the surface, leather strap swallowed to the second loop, the face tilted toward her. Both hands welded to the same instant. Time arrested mid-breath, choked on itself.

Beside it, where the glassed edge surrendered to unburned grit, someone, he, had written J 38:4 with a fingertip. Grit smeared into sweat, oil. Tell me, if you have understanding. She pressed her thumb over the numbers until they blurred. “Fuck you,” she said quietly. To the verse. To him.

She lifted the watch out by degrees. The glass bit the palm of her hand, deep enough to draw a clean red line. There was an obscene resistance, then a slip, the bite traveling slantways as she adjusted her grip, edge sawing through meat that should have screamed. Blood welled immediately, flooding the crease of her hands, spilling over her wrist, slicking the metal until it wanted to fall.

She barely felt it. Only pressure. Only the strange warmth, the wet certainty of something important being parted. She closed her fingers reflexively, the cut gaped wider, skin pulling back on itself, white inside before red swallowed it.

Without looking at the face again, she pocketed the watch. The motion felt like theft and inventory both, triage performed on a memory that refused anesthesia.

burnt sage… motor oil… white light… my scream… his hum… the hole where a person should be… fuck… the taste of pennies… the little coil popping like a blown bulb… wind gone still as a held plate… the part of the sky that blinked… my name in his mouth… the first year under a tin roof… oh my god… god… oh my god… his hand on my wrist… apology… his eyes wrong, right catching a light we don’t have… dust lifting not up… down… down… sideways… the meter needle forgetting how to be a needle… the smell of wet rock behind my teeth… my hands over my ears… too late… the water bottle tipping… the sand deciding… everything deciding… still waiting for the second blink… you arrogant…

The wind sat quiet on the mesquite, on the ribbed back of the ridge. The screaming in the air had ended so completely the silence felt canted, like a table one leg short of level. Was it done? Or was this only the pause where the universe caught its breath?

Was this what a bleed through wanted, a trade? Had something been satisfied, gone still? Or had something only just arrived, settled in to watch the small ring where a man had stood and called it near?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t make the data say it. The part of her that worshiped clean lines and obedient columns hated that she couldn’t even name the column, hated the blank more than any bad number.

Her pocket felt heavy. She touched the battery pack like a talisman, found only plastic, heatless now. Obediently dead. Of course you are.

She looked at the melted plate. At the recorder’s warped face. Her reflection rose again in the convex sheen, blood, dust, prey-wide set of her eyes, furious.

She thought proof, and the word repelled her like the pole of a magnet, shoved her back into her body. She dropped the recorder. It struck the sand, sank a finger’s depth into the loosened grain, as though the ground had been unstitched and left slack.

Sirens bled in from the highway, so faint they could have been tinnitus, or something she’d authored into the air to save herself from the sound of nothing. She had called for backup. Someone else had too, she guessed. The sound edged closer, stalled. Distance felt like a lie told gently, with a hand on your shoulder.

She circled the ring, slow. In one arc she found a fine spray of blood, radiating; a painter had shaken a brush and then reconsidered, walking away before finishing the picture. Inside the arc, a darker crescent gouged into the sand where the first drop had struck and sunk.

Three more shots. One wide. One on the spray. One on the absence.

Her throat hurt. Get it together, she told herself. Get your shit together. She realized she was breathing like she’d run, though she hadn’t moved more than twenty feet. “Echo,” she said. “Everything leaves an echo.”

For one foolish second she thought that if she stood exactly where he had stood, said his name in the tone he’d used when he said here, something would answer. That was the only superstition she still allowed herself. She didn’t say his name.

She knelt by the glassed sand again, by the empty, was it empty? place, and looked up. The same star-map. The same deep cold. She stared until her eyes watered, forced their own blink. She hated that too, that the body did what it needed whether or not the person inside consented.

She walked the outer ring, found the brass coin he could never stop worrying with. It had baked hot, cooled, and now sat ordinary in her hand, disappointingly solid. No miracle. No answer. Just metal performing as designed. She slipped it into the pocket with the watch. The metals struck against each other, sound precise as a tick. Time pretending again.

She wiped the blood from her ear, left a red crescent on the back of her arm. The streak on her jaw had dried to a lacquer that pulled when she opened her mouth.

She kept wiping. Jacket sleeve. Forearm. Throat. Little efficient strokes, the same way she’d cleaned herself after other scenes, other partners who had burst or burned or come apart wrong. The motions were automatic, memory running the cleanup while her mind stayed elsewhere.

That scared her more than the gore. He wasn’t a body. He wasn’t a report. He wasn’t another name logged under field fatality, anomalous. He was Bishop. Friend. Best friend. Partner. And she was already cataloguing, moving through the steps like this was survivable by procedure alone.

The anger came late. Not at the thing that took him. At herself. For how cleanly the habit fit. For how easy it was to keep going.

At the truck, she would radio in again. She would say the words their work knew how to say. She would not say the others. Maybe, in the transcript, she’d leave a time-stamp gap, a slim white absence, like a breath the tape could never release.

As she stood, she touched the watch through the fabric, a hard certainty. Proof, failure fused in one pocket. Warm from her skin. Heavy enough to keep her upright. Heavy enough to keep her from fucking collapsing.

Where are you now Bishop? Did you find what you needed to? Was it fucking worth it?

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V

Acantha sat beside the bed. Her hands lay folded over Eulalie’s, pale upon paler, calor ebbing beneath her touch. The last vestige of heat loosened from the fingers she refused to release.

The candles quavered at every breath, their light livid and uneven. “So fair, so right,” she mumbled quietly. “Fairer than I deserved to have kept.”

The bath was finished, the devotions made to her quiet child. Reality hastily set upon her, held at bay only so long as her mind and hands had remained in motion.

The words rang false even as she spoke them. Her chest drew violently in upon itself, a sudden, creaturely constriction. Her lungs felt as if the room itself had decided she should no longer hold breath.

This was it, the end of the line, no one left to witness her, no one left to stay her hand or soften her mind.

She was the house’s last answering sound. And echoes, she knew dimly, were not meant to persist. They dispersed. They ceased. The house had been bereft of its office, and so, accordingly, had she.

Eulalie slept the fixed sleep. Her hair, black as wetted jet, spilled across the pillow in a languid river-curve. Her lips, erst flushed, had taken on the violet cast of a summer sloe. Her face; doll-fine, narrow at the chin, nose tipped heavenward, cheeks ever round with youth, seemed carved from wax lit by faint veins of marble.

Acantha felt the panic rising once more; she was bereft of all purpose, her heart a shattered thing. She wondered if it had fallen from her chest, leaping over the rail the moment Eulalie’s feet had lost purchase. Her panic came more so for the lack of sensation, for the numbness she felt looking upon her daughter’s form.

Eulalie was beauty honed by its own brevity. Death had sweetened her fragility, made it too exquisite, too friable.

Do you see Heaven now? she asked inwardly, yet unspoken Behind those closed eyes, do you wake already in the arms of the Host? I pray, there is something. Acantha’s breath hitched, sharp and uneven. Heaven. The word felt like mockery.

If Heaven had eyes, it had looked upon her and turned away. If Heaven kept books, her name would be entered there in scarlet, a mother who had fallen short at every gate set before her. Wife. Bearer. Keeper. She had outlived them all. Each additional breath now felt drawn on sufferance, a debt quietly capitalized, one she could no longer pay.

A thought crept in, unwelcome and exact: how simple it would be to end her own breathing to match that quiet. No spectacle. Merely a settling into symmetry. The bed was wide enough, the sheets clean. It would look, nearly decorous.

Acantha smoothed the dark hair from her daughter’s brow, touching carefully, as if the slightest pressure might unmake her, whence even tenderness felt dangerous. Her fingers curled suddenly, convulsively, digging into the sheets as though she might anchor herself to the bed and not be carried off by the thought roaring up her spine: I have done this. Have finished us; the hand that closed the door on every life I loved.

The sentence neither accused nor absolved; it instructed. If you closed the door, thereon you must follow what you shut away. Suchlike was the ordinance of houses, of graves.

“Lord,” she whispered, tears falling in hot streams, salt gathering at her lips, the tang of brine where she was drowning, “forgive me. I have erred through sorrow. I have lost the daughter You left me… taken her from myself.” She swallowed, words faltering. “When Sebastian left… I-I would not, could n-not rise from the bed… heavy with our son, my grief struck me like my own fever. You took them both, and yet I would not learn. Is there no penance sufficient… must I bear… all in… d-death?”

A place that rose in her mind like forbidden chamber, cracked open. She saw herself slipping beneath it, efficiently. Her body laid out beside her daughter’s, symmetry restored. The image seduced her for a breath, and duly terror flooded in, cold and absolute. What if there truly was nothing? What if she went alone, unclaimed, and God did not follow? What if her family did not wait?

She pressed her mouth shut hard enough to feel her lips roll under, betwixt her teeth. Better the certainty of breath, even poisoned by guilt, than the risk of an afterlife that might be empty of both punishment and mercy.

Dying meant transit. Meant crossing uncharted and unescorted. Meant the possibility, unspeakable, that she would arrive nowhere at all. That God, having watched, would now withhold reception. As He had done for her son.

From somewhere in the rafters came a soft, tentative stir. She lifted her gaze to find a canary, small, bright per the dark, perched upon the dressing-table, a speck of improbable color. Her wings quivered, folded tight against her body, and the room seemed to hold. The bird regarded her with a motionlessness that held some unsettling attentiveness.

“Did you come from the garden?” Acantha asked softly. “You poor lost thing.”

The bird tipped its head. A sound followed; not quite song, more a shape of breath muffled, meaning without true voice, a syllable gathering toward form: Mother.

Acantha’s knees nearly buckled. The name was a blade turned inward. Mother, still. Even now. Even after what she had done. A notion that felt obscene. She clutched at the bedpost, seized by the sick certainty that this voice too might be taken, if she moved too quickly. She rose slowly, each step uncertain, the world tilting beneath her feet, thereupon reordering itself around that single word. “What… name… is that you make?”

At intervals, the trill, higher, plaintive, stretching the sound until it trembled: Mother. Do not weep.

Did she believe her eyes, her ears? Was this minute creature speaking with the voice of Eulalie? Sent to her not in the form of an angel, but still on golden wings. Her hand came to her throat, heart a wild animal battering its cage. “Merciful God.”

She laughed brokenly, the sound scraping out of her like bark torn from a tree. Merciful. If this was mercy, she had misunderstood it all her life. Perhaps this was punishment dressed in light, God’s cruelest trick, to give her back a semblance and call it grace. Mercy, she had been taught, followed obedience, and she had obeyed nothing but grief.

For a treacherous instant, the thought arose: if this were truly her child returned, perhaps death had already proven survivable in some fashion. The idea terrified her more than it comforted her.

What had she obeyed? Dolefulness. Fear. Love sharpened into possession. If this was God’s answer, it was an answer she could not yet abide.

The canary hopped closer, leaving no mark upon the dust where she touched. Candlelight rippled over her feathers; each plume like soft fire taken form, thereby casting off shadow.

“I prayed for an angel,” Acantha whispered. “And You send me m-my… my… child. How can this be?”

The bird hopped as afore: I was lost, in the grey. But no longer. Found you, never again lost. So long as I remain, with you.

“Oh...” Acantha fell to her knees beside the bed, the floor cold and unyielding beneath her. “Even in my sin, You let her speak. Eulalie, sweet Eulalie… my heart… my own voice.”

Her prayers unraveled into babble then, malformed petitions and frantic bargains spilling over one another. Take me instead. Take wh-hat remains. I am finished, Lord. I am nothing but harm! Let me lie do-own beside her and be d-done. The words piled up and went no place, striking the ceiling and falling back upon her like ash. They shamed her even as she spoke them.

Wanting to be finished was not repentance but escape, the wish to stop choosing, because every choice now felt like harm.

The bird sang; a thin thread of sound. To Acantha it was language: each note a syllable, each tremor a thought, the music threading itself directly into her blood: Be at peace, mother mine. I shan’t leave you to sorrow alone, within this mausoleum that was… a home.

The promise cut two ways. If the child stayed, in any form, Acantha must remain as well. She would have to endure waking, breath, consequence. The notion filled her with panic. To live on, now, felt like a sentence without end. To die felt like a door locked from the other side. And even so she found herself tallying means, nearly to recoil each time at the same thought.

Acantha wept until her breath tore ragged from her, until anguish loosened its hold just enough to wound her anew. It was ludicrous, impossible, insane, perhaps some infernal trick, nevertheless somehow she knew. Eulalie’s form had returned in the shape of this songbird, distilled, made small enough to be held, therein remade by grace or madness.

“You forgive me? Your murderer, your undoing; the one who should have protected you, always… and forever? I know no transgression greater than a mother’s hand against her child!” She tasted the words, metallic and broad. No priest had spoken it. No judge had named it. She had done this alone, quietly, with love as her alibi. The house knew. The bed knew. God surely knew.

The floor seemed suddenly very far below her, the ceiling unbearably high. She felt caught, punished by verticality itself. Yet within that held place, the song flowed around her: There is no death betwixt us, only waking.

If you go, Acantha thought wildly, there is nn-othing left of me. If she were left alone to greater degree, the house would teach her what to do. Walls had memories. Staircases remembered weight. Windows offered suggestions in light.

The canary lifted into the air, turning, a wheel of brightness. She brushed Acantha’s cheek as she passed, impossibly tender. She alighted upon the bedpost near to the quiet hand of the girl she mirrored, whereupon the room blushed, as if remembering color.

Acantha bowed her head. What is to be done? If this tiny beacon of her soul f-flies without Heaven, without body. How can we be hand in hand before the Lord? Not yet, she told herself. Not until she knew. Not until God made the terms unmistakable. Delay masqueraded as devotion. No sign came. Merely the waiting, immense, pitiless, it closed in around her. She understood that this, forbye, was a kind punishment.

The canary’s song thinned. Acantha’s thoughts spiraled in cruel circles along with the waning melody. Rise, and live the ruin I have made; lie down… risk the terror of what waits. “I see you in light,” she breathed. “Even at my own act, you seek to ease me. Oh, Eulalie-bird… what wonder are you.”

Yes, in light, so fear not the dark, mother. We are not parted.

Acantha’s eyes shone wide, fixed upon the small golden body, pupils blown with devotion and terror. “So stay. Stay a while… and sing.”

The candles burned low, each flame bent inward, poised to learn whether she would rise or remain. And Acantha, caught amidst the impulse to vanish and the terror of being no place at all, chose stasis.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Musical Pairing:

arion | E. G. Ware

they come without hinge or evensong,

no carapace to confess them, no shrine to hold their name,

only a wet rudiment, a glossolalia of muscle and sheen,

written in the low vowels of loam.

            they advance: slow/sole/soul,

           a rhyme that fattens as it moves,

           a mouth unmoored from any face

in the garden’s margin, where measure should keep its border,

they make of boundary a hearsay: blush becomes blemish,

leaf becomes leaving, the green script of rows dissolves to cursive excess.

not one, not two, but a quorum of soft insistence,

each body a question the soil keeps rejoining: more, more:

            mòr/amor/umor

the tongue slips, the word dilates,

and appetite outpaces its own etymon.

they are difficult to tell apart, as grief, as rain,

color unfastened from essence, hue a consequence of what has been

taken in. eat to become / become to erase.

see how they write themselves along the stems: a silvered estimation,

viscous, continuous, a theorem of trespass proved in increments,

not breach but seep, not rupture but revision.

the beds once held their lines like arias,

now every outline murmurs, over, over, over

            overrun/overripe/overtaken

the rhyme refuses closure, refuses the mercy of end.

where a seed dreamed upward, a mouth arrives to prefigure

bloom’s undoing, to eat the future in its syllabic husk.

do you hear: even the stones grow fluent in damp, even the fence

forgets its function. a crossing occurs without event,

no gate unlatched, no hinge confessed: only the slow annulment of between.

they leave a script the morning can’t quite read,

lucent as breath on glass, a residue that says: we were here, we are still,

we will be after the naming fails.

          and they move

          slew/slow/slough

shedding no skin but the idea of limit, unhoused, unbounded,

a congregation of need made tender and terrible.

once rendered down to grease, bodies a balm for the axle’s complaint,

motion fed by what would not stop moving.

the wheel learned their lesson: friction is only hunger with a harder name.

so the field remembers them as accidence:

a way of saying without, a way of crossing without,

a way of taking that feels like becoming.

until nothing stands apart long enough to be spared, and the earth,

overfull,

begins to speak in their dialect:

          mire/more/never-enough

a chorus without consonant, a feast without finish.

© E. G. Ware

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Content note: Serial as a whole contains body horror, violent death, and psychologically intense material.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II

Jo pivoted toward the ridge. The younger man was already in full flight, headlights stuttering across the flats, panic punching Morse code into the dark.

“Yeah, run,” Jo exhaled. “That’s a smart boy.”

Hale straightened, dusted his hands again. He scanned the hillside as the screams looped around them, like the land couldn’t decide where to put the sound. “Call it in. See if the locals can post a unit down-road.”

“And you?” Jo shot back. “You gonna quit sketching sigils like a fucking boy scout summoning demons?” She stalled on that half-beat where gut and arithmetic refused to reconcile. “You… think we’re in over our heads?”

“I think we’re at an edge,” he said. “A terminal limen.” No smile this time, just that terrible stillness he got when he mistook quiet for permission. “Keep me from myself,” he added, almost kindly, and began inscribing a broader circle over the first. The sand hissed where he drug his boot through it, avid as gossip.

There it was again. His favorite suicide hymn, laundered into reverence. Revelation. He always meant revelation.

“And when something shows through?” Jo’s voice went filament-thin. “We aren’t priests, Bishop,” the words snapped sharp enough to cut awe. “We’re janitors. We mop the blood, we shovel the shit.”

The dark deepened, dropping like a lid. The horizon went attenuated, then cold. Mesquite resolved into obsidian silhouettes, flat and vigilant. Hale checked the meter, pressed the brass coin to his brow, and panned the new black.

Jo’s thighs burned from the crouch. She smeared sweat from her cheek, only embedded the dust further, salt and grit drafting a nervous-system atlas across her skin.

They set the tripod at the margin of Hale’s rings. She snapped the external battery, his spare, into her chest pocket and tapped it twice, a superstition camouflaged as muscle memory.

Down the slope, the ranch road had gone blind. All that remained was the cupped dark of the hills and, behind them, the squared, yawning, mouth of the library

“If the wind reverses,” Hale said, flattening his voice into that catechetical register he used when he wanted compliance without consent, “you breathe on ingress protocol. If it answers… we mirror. Don’t panic and fuck the rhythm.”

Not now, not the sermon voice. Don’t do this to me now, you sanctimonious bastard.

He traced a small cross in the dirt by reflex, muscle firing without clearance, then obliterated it, embarrassed by the unscience in his hand. The night seemed to notice. Or maybe he felt her eyes digging into his back. Either way, something logged it. He wouldn’t meet her eye.

What are you afraid of? You who hunts God and His intermediaries… yet you flinch when the dark looks back.

The radio hiss ratcheted up a notch. The EMF needle jittered, too structured for interference, too intentional to dismiss. His pupils looked strange in the headlamp glow. Glittering grey blown wide like a spill, catching light where light shouldn’t collect.

“Hale,” Jo said, clipped. “Your eyes are fucked. Look at me.”

The scream came again, fractured now. It plaited and unplaited itself, returned in tatters. Speech inverted, chewed through tin, spat back from every direction at once.

“Auxiliary channel,” Hale said.

“No,” Jo said. Too fast. Too loud. “No, no, no… we are not escalating this shit.”

“Bandpass at eight hundred. Lock it.” He rolled the dial. “Listen… hear the superposition? Two time signatures nested.” His voice shook, exultant, terrified. “It’s not spooks, Jo! It’s something else… the model finally fits. Something bigger. Bleeding through!”

“Fuck your bigger,” she barked. “Bigger gets people killed, gets names carved into plaques. You want that? You want to be a fucking plaque?”

He snatched her notebook, scrawled 1 Cor 13:12 in the margin, circled it. “Now we see through a glass, darkly,” he breathed, verse syncing with his pulse.

“Don’t you fucking write that shit in my book,” she snapped, grabbing for it.

The watch meter ticked like an insect. Hale raised his wrist to check the time, froze. The leather band had thinned, stretched like warm gum. Time itself seemed to lose tensile strength. Light slid along it like pooling mercury, retreating, a river reconsidering midcourse.

“Okay,” Jo said, voice breaking despite herself. “Okay, that’s it.”

He laughed with awe, honed, dangerous. Revelation’s edge nicking the tongue. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” he whispered to the basin of night, as if the question were new to it.

Jo rolled her shoulders, forced herself to name what she could, because if she stopped talking she was going to scream or beg, and both felt fucking useless. “Temp drop, two degrees in twenty seconds,” she said, loud enough for the recorder. “Wind shift north to south. Battery one: fifty-eight percent. External… eighty-seven.” She touched the pack in her pocket again, a superstition she refused to own.

Keep the light. Keep the power. Keep the light. Keep the power.

Jo turned in tight circles; voices tangling in her hair, under her skin, learning her shape. Her mind turned slantways. How my feet, move on their own? heart scrambles… up my throat? Seeing my shadow… step first… stand still… name the parts… hold the line…

The sound split into filaments, high and tinny, low and occluded; like speech through a wall.

Hale’s hair had come loose, a black corona. Dust webbed his lashes, turning his eyes to cut glass. He stepped into the inner ring. “You wanted proof,” he said, triumphant. “Ecce ostium.”

She seized his arm. “Get the fuck out of the ring. Right now. I swear to God, I will drag you if I have to.” Her grip tightened. “We don’t even know what it is!”

“That’s why it matters.”

“No,” she said, voice cracking. “That’s why it fucking doesn’t… Hale, please,” she pleaded now, hating the nakedness of it. “Please… don’t do this.”

He touched her wrist with three fingers, benediction, apology, and went further in.

As she pulled back, the air inside the ring congealed, clinging like treacle. Pressure bloomed in her sinuses, the final stretch of a descent. Hale exhaled as if he’d been saving that breath all day.

“Grounding tool,” Jo resigned, as she knelt by the case that housed the compact rig; because protocol had to keep moving even when the terrain rippled.

She pulled out the rig Hale had juried: a tight coil around a shallow plate, fist of braided copper leading to the spike he’d driven earlier. A tuner disk perched on top, chalked with symbols echoing his rings. Field harmonizer. Language to launder madness into method. She despised it. It worked just often enough to be dangerous.

Hale cupped the plate like a man blessing bread, turned the tuner a quarter-click. The coil sang, a frequency that jumped her molars.

“Schumann lock,” he whispered. “Give me Earth. Give me Heaven.”

The wind reversed. The kit’s LED flared, then dimmed, as if a colossal thumb had brushed a porch light. Sand lifted in a veil, fell slantways. Gravity took notes, revised itself.

She read numbers, each a rung. “EMF at three point nine milligauss and climbing. Audio channels one and two live. Spectral spike at… hold… five-twenty hertz, second at ten-forty. Temp sixty-one. Pressure steady.” Her calm was surgical. That was how she recognized fear.

His voice thinned to wire. “Aleph. Mem. Shin.” He stood inside the tri-seal, letting the hum conduct through his bones. “If it answers, we match pitch. If it pushes, we absorb. If it induces… ”

“...we back out,” she said. “Hale… we back out.”

He didn’t respond. His gaze fixed on a point to his left, as if something waited there, something once beloved, now being reintroduced with exquisite care. And Jo understood, too late, that he’d already chosen who to listen to. It wasn’t her. And oh, God. Oh, fuck. She was losing him.

The screams boiled up into a true crescendo. The voices braided sound until it almost resolved into language, phonemes snagging, tearing like meat caught in a thornbush.

Her recorder choked, kicked back alive at a higher gain without her touching it. The strap gnawed into her shoulder. Downslope, a coyote yipped and then aborted the sound, as if it knew better than to draw more attention.

Cold sheeted under Jo’s jacket. The fine hairs along her neck lifted, electrified. She pressed her palm to the chest pocket again, touched the battery pack, counted to three, let go. Numbers were ballast. Numbers were something you could stand on when fear went fluid.

“Backup’s coming,” she said. Because she had called it in. Because even if no one came, the words deserved air. Deserved record.

“Good,” Hale said, smiling, cold. “They shall bear witness.”

“Bishop.”

He turned. In the headlamp’s wash his eyes still held that gloss that didn’t belong to biology. Dust freckled his lashes, each grain lit by a private catechism.

“Don’t make me drag you,” she warned.

He heard the truth in it. His smile gentled, fond. “Keep me from myself,” gratitude threading the words. Then he crouched, reset the tuner disk to a new cant; the coil’s hum slipped into a second register and held there, like two hands finding each other in the dark, sound woven into intent.

The pitch climbed. The radio climbed with it until it cut to void, and the void was louder.

Silence can have shape. This one folded inward, like someone taking in a sheet and the air going with it. Jo swore she saw depth open where there had only been absence, space inventing a new trick. She looked up too fast, the world smeared.

A face as broad as weather crossed the bowl of night. Something beyond human, beyond animal: without mercy, without malice. Two immense shadows slid over the star-field of the pitched sky, closing, opening like palpebrae. The afterimage burned behind her eyes, refused to fade.

“Hale,” she said, and it came out like it had years ago: over rain on a tin roof, when they barely knew how to do this. “Hale. Out.”

He lifted his hand, half an inch, the way a child might show you a cupped firefly. Light ran along his skin, fractured into beads that did not fall. “Proof,” he said. “There. Holy shit… Audi. Responde… ”

You want the cross-over. I want boundaries. Turns out they’re the same line when the sky gives way.

She reached across the ring before she could veto herself, caught his sleeve. The instant her fingers crossed the line of א, heat surged up her arm, the subsonic thrum of standing too close to a speaker when the bass hits. Sound rewritten as bone. Her eyes flooded. A taste of old pennies, wet stone coated her tongue.

He let her haul him back a step, then set his feet. Because the coil shuddered. Because the air changed its mind. Because his life had been vectoring toward this moment and he knew it. She knew it. His pupils were enormous, his hair a black halo lifted by the not-wind.

“I’m here,” he told the dark. “I’m here,” as if presence were payment.

The voices severed, ribbon snapped under tension. The world inhaled, held. Sand hung, awaiting instruction. In that vacuum Jo realized she could hear Hale breathing, illogically loud. She could hear her own blood shove through her veins, viscous and insistent.

The coil popped like a blown bulb. The radio’s hiss collapsed to a single dead line. Her phone flared red, OVERHEAT. SHUTDOWN, died in her grip. The external battery in her pocket pulsed, a counterfeit heart, and went slack.

Hale stood ramrod straight inside the ring. “We answer back,” he intoned “We answer… quod apertum est… ”

The air convulsed.

He folded in on himself, hands braced on his knees, breath sawing. The coil lay inert at his feet, wire limp, but the air around him still buzzed, sated. He looked up, for a blink she saw the resonance field mirrored in his eyes, silver and precise; recorder-dial silver. The grey had gone quick, alchemical, as if he had finally found the thing he’d been chasing his whole life and it had recognized him in return.

“Everything leaves an echo, Jo.” His mouth formed it without breath. Then, to the dark, almost tender: “Keep me… ”

His boots lifted from the dust. An inch. Then three.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, Hale… ”

The rings he’d drawn puckered inward, earth swallowing a mouthful and holding it. The ground didn’t collapse so much as purse, like skin sucking in after a needle.

His body bowed, corrected, bowed again, anatomy revising its own bylaws in a slow unspooling and reweave. Right shoulder hitched too high.

The watch slid down its loosened strap, ticking loud as a knuckle on glass. Light pooled along the metal, fractured into silver beads that refused gravity. They clung, trembling, like sweat that couldn’t remember how to fall.

Something shifted in his throat, a red line rose across his cheekbone, etched from the inside out. The skin there dimpled, then whitened, then went wet. His jaw tremored. Teeth clicked, a scraping sound, like china grinding.

He didn’t cry out. He opened his mouth, and the shape of it was strange. Too wide. Hinges overstressed. In the tearing absence where sound should have lived, she saw the last words he never voiced, the gratitude rising unsheltered in his eyes.

Thank you.

His face failed. It split like overripe fruit wrenched apart by hand. Skin tore with a wet gurgle. The seam ran crooked from cheek to mouth, kept going, ambition outpacing design.

Something hot struck her cheek, her throat. A wet patter against her collarbone. She flinched too late. Fine spray stippled her lips, her eyelashes, slid into the lines of her mouth. A heavier piece hit her jacket and stuck there, warm enough that her body reacted before her mind did, a stupid reflexive swallow she would hate herself for later.

Flesh sagged, peeled, pink turning slick, ruined as it opened. The nose dragged sideways, still attached, a useless fixture. His left eye bulged, tethered, sank back as something silver flooded past it.

Jo retched. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Her stomach turned over hard, saliva flooding her mouth as if it could rinse her brain clean.

She stumbled back, heels skidding, and for one vertiginous second she looked up, not at him, not at the ruin of him, but at the sky. The stars had gone askew, arranged out of time.

Constellations she half-knew seemed to lean toward each other, edges touching. Negative space knitting into a curve. She squinted, blinked hard, told herself it was shock, oxygen debt, the headlamp flare catching vapor. But the dark between the stars deepened, bowed inward. A crescent. No… an opening. A mouth.

A great black hinge yawning across the firmament, slow, cathedral-wide. Inside it, not night but motion, something pale and roiling; a cloud of luminous gas turning over itself, gravid, patient. It pulsed, subtle as a throat swallow.

“Don’t,” she whispered, to herself, to the sky, to whatever part of her brain had decided to start editorializing. She blinked again and it was only sky. Only indifferent, pricked dark. Only the Milky Way smeared thin as spilt chalk.

A viscid sucking sound pulled her attention back to Hale.

Silver poured from his eyes as they collapsed inward, liquid reflection that was both substance and light. It spilled down his cheeks, mixing with red and clear ichor, pooling in the hollows his face no longer owned. His teeth looked inverted in the wet cavity of his mouth. Blackened at the roots, gums sloughing; too pink, too red.

His tongue writhed in adjustment, hanging from his mouth: flattening, going oddly translucent. Breath hissed through him like an array of freshly woken cicadas. His chest stuttered, shirt torn open, ribs flexing again, then locking; the whole structure deciding it had served its purpose, before his chest burst.

The air reeked of burnt copper and wet meat, a density you could almost chew. It packed itself into her mouth, her sinuses, the back of her skull. A smell that didn’t just offend, but accused. Wafting with a promise to follow her home, settle into fabric and memory.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV

Odette halted upon the threshold’s lip, her cap stippled with fine mist that had crept in from the night and lingered into morning. Each droplet netted the lamplight like a small, unaverted eye.

The lights had burned low, the air carried a keen smoke, unsettled and spare. A hush lay sovereign in the corridor, dense enough that breath itself felt impertinent, at what pace even caution seemed audible.

“Madam?” Her voice fell flat. “Miss Eulalie, ma’am?”

She crossed the marble of the front hall, her skirts whispering into the quiet, a sound swallowed almost instantly.

Near the foot of the staircase a damp patch blotted the shine of the floor, as though something had recently been wiped away, an erasure attempted in haste. The ragged outline lingered, irregular, its edges curling where moisture exhaled toward air, resisting effacement.

She knelt and touched the surface. Cold beneath her fingers.

Best not to say aught. Odette pondered, her ladyship’s hand shakes of a’mornin’. Always has, likely tea again, or water slopped from the jug. I’ll have it right in a moment.

Beside the lowest step lay a fallen book, its spine wrenched, one page torn clean through its center. The gilt title caught the lamplight: Of Earnest Love and Devotion: Verses of Those Adored.

Odette closed the cover and held it against her apron, uncertain whether she bore scripture or trespass. Or perhaps the text was something that had slipped betwixt and by twain, thereby eluding a proper name. Poetry’s none of my affair.

A sound above, water running, faint and rhythmic.

She climbed slowly, one hand tracing the rail, the wood burnished by generations of similar ascents. Each step was damp beneath her soles; something else wiped away from the treads. The evidence left mere implication behind, whereupon the lack itself grew disquieting, more than any stain.

There’s no call for all that water. Not at this hour.

The upper hall smelled of wood polish and brass, and beneath that, Acantha’s lilac soured by heat. It was sweetness overhandled, importunate in its cloying, that which pressed itself forward, demanding notice.

From behind the door to Miss Eulalie’s rooms came the rush of a bath being drawn, water striking porcelain with purpose.

Odette hesitated, and in time knocked lightly. “Ma’am? Shall I fetch fresh towels for you?”

A pause, long enough to acquire gravity. Followed by Acantha’s voice, thin and peremptory. “No. Eulalie has taken ill. The fever must be drawn out. I am tending her. Go.”

“Shall I… shall I run for the doctor, ma’am?” The words hurried over one another. “Only if you’d wish it.”

“Go.” The word split the quiet like a pane struck by stone, thereby forestalling reply.

Odette stepped back. The water kept running. Beneath it, something else gathered, a muted cantillation, almost a lullaby stripped of melody.

The notes drifted through the door and grazed her cheek; they circled her head like the stir of unfelt wings, impossible to grasp.

Best not linger, best not hear. I’m no one to listen at doors, a lady’s maid keeps her eyes down, and her thoughts to herself. But Eulalie… The name lodged in her chest, refusing to move thence.

A prickle of gooseflesh rose along her neck, as though eyes had settled along her shoulders, taking the measure of her pause.

Turning from the door, she kept her gaze lowered, as if eye contact might summon whatever breathed in the grey behind her, might license its presence.

The poetry book pressed close in the pocket of her apron, and the house felt somewhat like it released a long breath, whether in relief or disappointment, wherein her retreat hardened into decision.

Suddenly, a flutter. Odette startled.

A flare of yellow cut the hall: a canary, bright as new dawn, trembling as if freshly hatched from dream. It skimmed the molding, brushed the ceiling, thence circled back. Its wings set the stale air astir, like paper charms.

“Well now,” she breathed. “How did you come loose, then?”

The bird chirped, a sharp aureate note that seemed to ask a question she knew not how to answer.

She followed its path toward the solarium. Light there was thinly varnished. It filtered through great panes filmed with condensation, the world yon reduced to smear and pallor.

Acantha’s plants: palms, ferns, the small lemon tree, drooped heavy, their leaves jeweled and sweating under the mid-morning dim.

The canary perched on a branch, quivering, a pulse of brightness atop the sagging green.

Odette unlatched the nearest window “Out now! It’s no place for such as you in here.” The cold air crept inside, nipping her knuckles pink.

The bird turned toward the opening, wings half-spread, but did not move. Fool thing, same as the rest o’ us.

It hopped fitfully, and by and by settled its feathers, head canted at an angle much knowing, as though it had already chosen its keeping.

“You’ll not last,” she sighed. “Catch your death, you may, stayin’ on.”

The bird sang; needling, strange, and the sound seemed to come not from its throat at all. The melody hung as if just beneath the ceiling, carried upon the room’s respiration.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content note: Serial as a whole contains body horror, violent death, and psychologically intense material.

COLLECTION | PART I

The mission rose out of the scrub, a white whale run aground: stucco the yellow-white of old bone, sun-cooked, chalky, picked clean and left to bleach.

Rooflines peaked, uneven as bad teeth. A small forest of wooden crosses splintered across the yard, most tipped or fallen. The sun, exhausted by its own descent, slid down the western shoulder of the sky, poured itself through a tear in the clouds. Light struck the crosses, ran along them like a signal, some transmission caught from elsewhere, passed hand to hand. A code Jo didn’t speak and didn’t trust.

She let out a low whistle. “Well. Ain’t she a big dumb ghost-barn.”

Hale didn’t look at her. “It’s a mission.”

“Yeah. A mission to give me the creeps. Ten outta ten.”

She slowed. The brakes stretched the distance like taffy, as if the truck itself wanted time to reconsider. “Same,” Jo muttered. “Same.”

Gravel snapped under the wheels, little brittle knuckles popping in the hush. She slipped off her glasses so she could squint without glare, and the world sharpened into that hard, unadorned truth that comes just before dark.

“The pantry used to serve two hundred,” she stated. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe because facts had edges, you could brace against them like rebar when everything else went soft. “Hostel ran full every winter.”

“Then we’d better figure out how to clear it and get it open again,” Hale replied. “Before it sours beyond remediation.” He adjusted the recorder strap across his chest, a slow metronome tapping against the silence, keeping score.

Jo followed his gaze where it lingered on the yard, on the warped posts. Their shadows were long, yearning, as if they wanted to spin loose and dance across the dunes. Perhaps they were bored of standing still, waiting for people to notice them. Make it dull again, bring the people home to sleep. Don’t let him make a church outta the noise. Don’t let him baptize the fucking static.

Hale drew a long breath, for an instant his expression looked almost like gratitude, unguarded; the look of a man who thought he was being invited inside. He whispered something. Latin, maybe. Scripture digested slantways. A quiet, indecent sort of thanks. Maybe not a word at all. Or maybe an answer he’d decided to hear.

Jo kept her face neutral. Great, he’s tonguing the air again.

She parked on the shoulder where the hill flattened into hardpan. The engine ticked as it cooled, metallic sounds counting down, relieved of duty. The horizon wavered, heat still lifting off the land. A moment as if the world was deciding whether to hold together or split cleanly, be done with it.

“Every hysteria’s a doorway,” he said again, almost cheerful, like he admired the architecture. Then, quieter, “Shall we proceed?”

“Every hysteria’s a doorway,” Jo echoed. “Cool. And every doorway’s got shit on the knob. Let’s glove up.”

Hale smiled at that, approving, as if she’d named a variable he’d already accounted for.

She thumbed the lighter in her pocket, looked down at the map, at the arrow tugging them uphill, and the bead of ink that seemed to stare back. “Ready,” she confirmed, because readiness was a discipline, not a feeling; and feelings were a luxury you hemorrhaged early.

She set the emergency brake, rolled the ignition all the way off. The radio static climbed a note, took a preparatory breath, cut out.

They stepped out into it. The quiet did not move to make room for them.

Rocks snapped beneath boots as they crossed the fence line and took the narrow track, each step loud enough to feel declarative. Not noise so much as notice. Hale carried the EMF meter like a dowser’s rod, wrist loose, head canted, eyes half-lidded: already halfway gone to a place that didn’t require Jo’s consent.

Jo balanced her phone on her notebook, cycling through camera settings while batting at the midges that rose whenever the wind stalled. Little airborne creditors. They went straight for the eyes, relentless, intimate. “Christ,” she hissed, swiping at her face. “Arizona really said: here. Enjoy your flying tax.”

The mission library waited to the left of the ridge, its stone bones half-sunk in mesquite and caliche. The hotspot. The place with the stories. Which meant the place everyone else had learned to walk around. Its windows were hollowed out, sockets without the courtesy of lids. The cross had been torn down, leaving only its negative burned into the façade. Absence as iconography.

Inside, the air was viscous with heat, as if something enormous had exhaled, then abandoned the job. Dust motes waltzed through their flashlight beams, drunk on attention. A shelf had collapsed across the entry like a failed fortification. Books lay splayed on the floor: pages curled and desiccated, paper-skin flayed back, abandoned mid-torture.

Hale stopped, adjusted the recorder strap, tapped the mic. The sound landed like knuckles on wood. “Primary channel engaged.” he said softly, the way some people said grace.

“Copy,” Jo answered on reflex. Her voice went out, came back attenuated.

Hale moved down the center aisle with his eyes closed, tracing the air; a blind man counting walls, or a medic feeling for pulse. “Ambient carrier hum, point three,” he said, taking the room’s temperature. Then, quieter: “Aleph, initial state.”

Jo frowned at her phone’s waveform. “What was that?”

“Air. Sound check.” Like that explained the taste it left.

“Bullshit,” Jo hissed. “That’s you doing your weird alphabet prayer.”

He turned, hand hovering near the floor. “Mem. Fluid band.” The words sloshed, wet and tidal. “Shin. Fricative band.” This one cracked dry, flint on flint, a match struck somewhere in the throat. The EMF flickered, jittered, obediently settled back to green.

Jo crouched beside a dark stain on the stone floor. A blood shadow long cured, rimmed in salt bloom. Panic fossilized. “You think this is the original scene?”

“Original layer,” Hale said. “Different kind of trace signature.” He lifted the meter. The needle trembled, then stilled. “Nothing live.” Then, after a beat: “Nothing in situ, either. Clean as a goddamn lie.”

Nothing living, Jo thought. Same old loophole. The kind that let a report read clean while the room stayed filthy. She wrote no active charge detected.

They worked the space another ten minutes. Photographs. Temperatures. Coordinates. Until the moon found its angle through the broken clerestory and dropped a scatter of pale coins into the dust where Hale had been standing. He bent, dragged his boot through them, smearing the light. “Baseline captured. We’ll cross-log again outside.”

The warm amber of early evening had leeched out to the grey hush of full nightfall, that crooked hour when sound traveled wrong and distance lied.

Across the scrub, a young man came toward them. Long black braids. Eyes green as bottle glass, the kind that caught whatever light was left, bent it. His truck idled far down the track, engine coughing like an embarrassed thought.

Jo turned. “You looking for something,” she called, “or just wandering into active creepy-business recreationally?”

“Not ‘specially.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “Got a place down a ways. Heard you folks were pokin’ around up here.”

Hale let Jo take it. He’d already dropped into a crouch, fingers worrying the dust beside the path, drawing idle circles the way some people chewed cuticles. Thinking with his hands.

The man rubbed the back of his neck, eyes sliding past them to the dark doorway yawning behind.

“Ever since everyone cleared out. I hear screamin’ on the wind. Thought it was coyotes back on the calves again. But… those screams ain’t like my herd.” His voice dipped at the end, like saying it louder might invite correction.

Jo nodded, steady. “You hear it when… nighttime? Same direction each time?”

He pointed north. “Up that cut.”

While she took notes, Hale sank lower, drew another ring inside the first, a nesting doll of intention. On the rim he pressed three marks, then traced Ps 19:1 with his finger in the rust-colored grit.

Jo saw the movement, pretended not to. If I call it out, he’ll get precious. If I let him do it, he’ll get confident… Jesus. For him, this was private math. Breadcrumb logic. A reassurance ritual that only functioned if nobody said the words aloud.

When she finished her questions, the man shook her hand, lingered a moment, pacing the edge of the site as though debating whether to say more. His gaze kept snagging on Hale’s circles, on the patch of ground that suddenly looked claimed.

Jo clicked her recorder off, checked the battery: eighty-six percent.

Hale’s analog popped, chewing the silence, testing it for flavor. “Transient amplitude spike,” he called out. “Likely radiowave interference.”

“Probably,” Jo echoed. “Probably my ass.”

The static surged, metallic, abrupt, like a machine jolting awake in bed, cut dead. Both of them looked up. The air had gone so still it felt padded. Jo swallowed. “Okay. Nope. This is the part I hate.”

Hale’s jaw worked. His thumb worried the brass coin. “Not a haunting,” he said, soft with conviction. “A pressure seam.” As if geology and tailoring shared a trade. “A liminal shear. Two drafts of reality fretting holes in each other.”

“Making creepy sound slutty again, Hale.”

He shot her a look sharp enough to cauterize.

Jo crouched to re-photograph the circle. “If that’s your pressure seam, it’s closing. Wind’s erasing it.”

Hale shook his head. “If the letters retain integrity, it closes. If they enter sympathetic resonance…” He left it open, baited. He knelt again, scored characters into the dirt: א מ ש. “Air, water, fire,” like he was calling weather fronts. “Foundational triad.”

The letters caught the thin moonlight. Shapes of breath, damp, heat. He flicked his lighter near the last one until the grit smoked, dust nerves sizzling.

He stayed kneeling, the meter ticking faintly beside him. “I’ve encountered this configuration before.”

Jo glanced up. “Yeah?”

“Three years back. Orchard town near Elgin. Thought it was gas buildup in the silos. Same readings. Same voices on tape.”

“What happened?”

“The field crew disappeared.” He said it clinically, vacuum-packed. “Three of them. No trace. Air turned white, like milk spilled into night. All the glass in their equipment… melted.” His eyes stayed on the dust. “The recording registered… something.” A pause. “I was assigned verification. I heard it.”

Jo glanced at him. “You’ve heard a lot… and now every haunted mile seems to recognize you.” She snorted. “Still you keep waving your hat like you want the ghouls to follow.” She snapped another photo. “Ever think these markers look like targets? Or is that the idea?”

“Not targets.” He stood, brushing dust from his palms. “Topologies. Patterns meant to be the actuator… to twist the lock, let what’s pressing come through. It’s a shitty design, but it’s effective.” He added Jn 1:5 beneath the last line. Then he blew, the grit scuttled, but the mark held. A gust moved through the trees, a long exhale. The EMF chirped, then settled.

Every map needs someone willing to get lost. Jo just wished it wasn’t always him.

The sound reached them seconds later. A scream, glassy, threading the air like wire through meat.

“Fuck,” Jo said low, the word pinched small between her teeth.

It climbed until it ricocheted off the library’s stone walls, a thrown nail ringing as it circled, hunting purchase. Her phone spasmed an overheat warning.

Hale stood motionless in the moonlight, rapt, like he was waiting to be named.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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Content Note: Serial as a whole explores themes of grief, death, resurrection, maternal obsession, and symbolic body horror. It is repetitive by design, claustrophobic in perspective, and morally severe. Proceed gently.

COLLECTION | PART I | PART II | PART III

Eulalie’s slippers raised a subdued cadence along the carpet as she moved along the upper gallery. An open book lay slight in her hands, almost insubstantial.

Below, the house lay somnolent in lamplight, suspended in dusk’s afterglow. The corridors subsided into that hour wherein walls seem rather to listen than to reflect.

She read aloud amongst footfalls, her voice no louder than a penitential aside, sound measured to the interval of breath.

“Though death divide, the heart remembers so…” Her delivery hesitated; she smiled at her own tender excess and turned the page. The paper stirred like pinions, a small lilt that felt unseemly loud in the hush.

He would laugh to hear me reading so. Balor, my gentle poet, would you think me foolish? Reciting to specters, filling the house with borrowed words therein?

A door struck open. The reverberation rent the corridor like a cry loosed beneath vaulting, violent enough to make the book jerk in her hands.

At the far end, the double doors of the salon had flung wide, and thereupon Acantha dwelled in a shard of quavering light. Her gown lay lax at her throat, hair unseated from its pins.

The candle she held threw errant halos across the walls, light breaking and reforming with each ungoverned breath.

“Where is he? Where is my son? He sleeps not in my arms… not in his cradle! I must hold him to my breast!”

“Mother?” Eulalie lowered the book, the words falling from her mouth unfinished, as though speech itself had been struck askew.

“Please… you have had another vision. Come back to your room.”

Acantha advanced, the flame jouncing as she moved, casting their shadows long and distorted, mother and daughter stretched into something unrecognizable.

“I cannot… cannot bear it… that hollow where my loves are not! All the house is his cradle… hush… hush… you shall wake him.” Her eyes, grey, glittering, deranged by grief, fastened on Eulalie’s face.

“You would hide him from me… would… y-you not?”

“Mother… no… ”

Wax spattered the carpet like tears, hot, sudden, irrevocable. Acantha seized her daughter’s shoulders, fingers clawing through the silk, finding bone, heat, proof.

Smoke and lilac rose across, contending scents of devotion and ruin, the room filling with the smell of prayer deracinated, thereupon stripped of mercy.

“Bring him to me!” she screamed. “He calls for me… he calls… !”

“Stop!” Eulalie gasped, struggling. “You hurt me! Mother… please… ” She would… shall not… see me…

Acantha shook her, wild. “You lie! You stole him… you and that… man… with his cold fingers… inside… you stole him from my womb!”

“Mother, I beg of you… let me go… ”

But Acantha’s hands starkly tightened.

Eulalie stumbled backward, her heel finding the edge of the stair. The world canting, compressing, becoming suddenly vertical; whereupon balance failed and consequence manifested.

The book slipped from her fingers and struck the carpet with a muted, recessive thud, thereafter slid over the first step and vanished down the curved staircase, its pages fluttering once-only.

“Mother!”

For the nonce, they clung to one another, balance suspending their bodies, breath shared, weight uncertain.

All the same, Eulalie slipped.

Her gown caught the banister. A scream tore free, duly sheared short, cut by the sharp, sickening crack of bone on marble; once, twice, over again.

The echo spiraled down the stairwell and vanished into a silence by virtue of what the house itself seemed to draw nearer, listening more deeply.

Acantha remained at the landing, frozen. Thin lines of smoke curled at her feet, tracing aimless patterns she could not follow.

Slowly, waking upon the false side of dream, she looked down. It was not Heaven she imagined when the silence came. It was the long dark under things, where sound goes when it can no longer bear itself.

At the turn of the stairs, Eulalie lay thrown into ruin upon the floor, hair unbound, limbs fallen into angles denied to the living.

Her book of tender incantations rested just beyond reach of her sprawled hand, open, abandoned, unfinished.

“Eulalie?” No answer came, none other than the clock’s obstinate ticking, solemn as a heartbeat keeping time inward.

Acantha descended, step by step, rushing too hastily. Her final footfalls landed with an unsettling crack, knees failing beneath her. She crawled forward and collected the shattered body close. Blood seeped into her robe, darkening it as ink blooms on paper, warm, undeniable.

“My beloved,” she whispered.

Her breathing intensified into fragmented inhalations.

“My bright one… the silence of the Lord takes shape as chaos!“

Do I dream? Her thoughts spiraled, tangled, and she lost hold of what was thought and what was spoken aloud. When I lose my boy, to find him at-at times. When I f-feel my lawful love’s kiss upon my brow, to wake alone-alone. Do I dream of a broken child, to see her walking in the garden come m-morning?

But the head lolled, and the eyes, those warm brown eyes, stared at nothing, vacated of recognition.

Upon which from Acantha’s throat rose a scream, high and raw, ringing through every corridor of Calver Hall. A scream not of madness, but of catastrophic knowing.

TO BE CONT.

© E. G. Ware

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