Fantasy MagazineFantasy Magazine – From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

On the island of Manhattan, there's a building out of time. I can't tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn't mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont.

Lara is a summer witch born with fruit rich on her tongue, a monkey god's chittering beneath her skin, and a full July sun's worth of love for love. Her ba claims to have read Pasternak, but she knows it was Julie Christie's face he traced when he named her, Julie's yellow-gold hair her ma made fun of him for admiring, bright as an August afternoon.

The chrysanthemums are dying. The yellow flowers face downward, stems wilting at the neck. Their petals curl and brown at the edges like burning paper. You lift one of the ragged blossoms up, as if to try and help it support its own weight. You keep the flowerpot on the kitchen countertop right by the apartment window where it can get the most sunlight, but it doesn't seem to be enough.

In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done.

The forest whispers of my sister's arrival long before I sense her. Birds flutter between pink-girdled maehwa trees, mocking her voice in the tongue only shamans understand. Seonbyeon, Seonbyeon, they repeat mindlessly, and this is how I know my sister is looking for me. But I don't know which sister, not until she finally appears from the forest gloom.

It's so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It echoes off the empty boardwalk, cheerfully macabre.

Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces.

I am haunted by a funeral, a pageantry of mourners and tears that I can only barely remember. I am not certain, but I suspect the funeral may be my own.

Don't feed him, Greta. We can't afford to feed him! There's not enough to eat! We were lost when we found the tower made of sugar that stretched up into the sky in endless red and white spirals. A sea of ants milled at its base. Fat dollops of sugar dripped onto the surrounding trees, candied the leaves, and brought curious bees to hover.

The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl's feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of them, freshly killed. Flies had only just begun to settle over silver flanks, scuttling shyly over tooth marks.

I walk into Old Town. In a curio shop on the promenade, an old man sells paintings, deras, kikois, and ornaments. Tuk-tuks move swiftly along the cabro paving, passing the teapot sculpture at the round-about. Pushcarts lumber beside the street restaurants and past the old buildings covered by vines. A radio plays “Malaika,” the song rising like a wisp of steam. Shouts of children playing football near the sea reach me. I buy a ticket to Fort Jesus and the seller tells me I am lucky because it is the day of secession.

The toe wiggled at Mirella from the compost heap. She let the lid drop with a thud and a cloud of flies. Enough. Time to order an electronic composter.

“Everyone's making bread,” I say, trying to sound casual and not like I'm terrified, because talking about bread is easier than talking about what's going on. My phone balances on my belly as I lie in bed. “It's like the pandemic hit, and everyone's collective delusion went ‘I'll bake bread, that'll solve it.' I just don't get it.”

You hear the door open as if in dreaming. Back when you were a conservatory student, you chewed a third of a melatonin tablet every night—to keep yourself from snapping awake before sunup, chest tight, your head still achy with exhaustion. Now, mornings are difficult: your eyelids weighted, sliding; thick grey wool between your temples. Your body drifting in a warm, slow sea.

In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores.

The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night's rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods.

Shaundra took the small, empty cardboard box and swiveled on her work stool to place it gently on top of her daughter Dineisha's head. Her daughter went cross-eyed trying to look at it and started chewing on the corner of her thumb, smiling at the game.

I'm happy on the road. The land stretches like a languid animal, and I find tranquility in its measured length. Outside the car the earth breathes, the ground rising and sinking. Even though I am the one driving, concentrating on the road and the trucks roaring past, it's like a meditation for me—my mind empties into the open space.

Angie is three months dead before I get her letter. She sent it the week before she died, and I guess that figures; the postal service got fucked in the twenties and never recovered. Maybe she even relied on that delay.

Walking, crossing, moon-kissed streets, black top, blue jeans, unwashed. Her afro is home to a million brown-winged birds, everlastingly chirping. There's a baby boy, eight months old, asleep in her arms, and maybe he dreams of beautiful spinning star-like things because he doesn't know of the hurt in the heart that loves him.

The bee liberation group meets at seven o'clock every other Thursday in the group study rooms on the fourth floor of the Main Library. Hannah tears tabs from the flyers that they post all over campus—outside the big auditoriums in Wells Hall, on the doors of the dorm cafeterias, in the women's bathrooms—and feeds them into her jacket pocket. When she forgets and puts the laden jacket through the laundry, they turn into so much confetti.

The sun draped itself over the left armrest of the couch at dawn, while Zella sat waiting for the typewriter's tapping to commence next door. Even though she'd tossed and turned all night in the summer heat, she still found herself rising early, expectant.

She wasn't at his funeral, so I took the van around to where I knew she was staying while she was in town. He always taught us to stick close to our home. It was her ex's place, a rundown one-story with dead grass and an old plastic playground for some forgotten children.

Paris Opera Ballet, 1841 / You're enjoying your reprieve here at the opéra, m'sieur, are you not? All the wealthiest gentlemen do. Here in the exclusive foyer de la danse, wives are forbidden and young girls lightly clad. Champagne obtained, you complain of your tiresome wife—how she will never replicate a young girl's bloom, no matter how much rouge she rubs on her cheeks!

Step One: You Wait - You are patient and your love, true. There is nothing you cannot withstand.

Elizabeth is the first person to notice I'm inside her. “Tell me how to do it,” she whispers. It's a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I'm nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I'm less than a breath. I should be undetectable, but somehow, I'm not. It might have been a relief—to be acknowledged, to be known—except that Elizabeth clings to me with her bony fingers and won't let me go. I struggle to escape her, but no matter how hard I push, she's got me trapped inside her body.

Once upon a time, in the dark ages before the singularity, there was a fox who, while walking its way along a riverbank, saw a great big bevy of catfish fleeing in a panic this way and that. Curious, the fox called out to the fishes, saying, “Good fishes of the stream, I see you fleeing in a panic this way and that. I do not wish to interrupt your suffering, but I am curious and as a fox I must follow my curiosity: Surely, there must be some great evil from which you are fleeing?”

Ninth - It is a few days before your suspicions are confirmed. Perhaps it is the baggy trousers your daughter has started to wear, or that she picks at her food. She will lie if you ask her outright, this you know. You throw her bedroom door open without warning, the damp towel clutched around her chest after the shower the only barrier between you. Her mouth hangs open, shrieking like brakes in protest.

The year was 1999. Tupac's Brenda's Got a Baby was the anthem in Old Creek ghetto. Yes, I wasn't born. But the first time, in a beat-up, metal-scrunched blue taxi, on her way back home, when the song came on, Mother felt my first kick coincide with the blistering bass beat. It's a wonder how I knew that feet were made for dancing.

We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts. - Dr. Michelle Francl / In the beginning / In the beginning was the trigger warning: / Prepare for insects. Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish. Prepare for science and other species of the supernatural. Prepare for losses that rewire the chemistry of the brain. Prepare for aging and the way it flays you back to the first cell. Prepare for ghosts.

There are always three: the father, the unfather, and the child. That's why Vriskiaab threw my unfather off his back after she bore my baby sister, or so Vriskiaab tells me when he stops in the shade of a dune, his massive scales warm under my calves and the tail of him stretching behind me for leagues. My baby sister is soft and crimson-tacky in the crook of my arm.

My mother tells me all the wrong stories. In our hut beneath the cypress trees, my mother opens up at story time. She steps away from her apron and her broom, her heaps of marjoram and pennyroyal, her pestle and her mortar, and her ingredients for medicinal soups. She throws off her scarf, and oils our hair with fragrant sedr oil. We keep company with her stories as the wolves outside howl their song to the moon. Just as their ancestors have and as their descendants always will.

“Tell me again about the night I was born.” Li Shing drags the comb through her daughter's oil black hair. Impermeable, like a starless sky reflected against a dense sea. Or a fish's opaque cloudy eye as it gasps at the bottom of a boat. Li Shing's fist accidentally brushes the creature's clammy gray neck, and she tries not to shudder.

The clatter of rain against the window draws Lesley close. “Hey,” she hisses from across the kitchen. She calls me by my old name and I don't even flinch. It's morning, and I'm trying to get breakfast done before Mom comes down, because a perfectly fried egg makes her more likely to say yes to what I'm about to ask. The light was coming through the windows over the sink all yellow and golden, but the storm blew in fast, and now there's electricity prickling in the air and everything smells damp. I left the window open, hoping she'd show, despite the water pushing through the screen into Mom's flowerboxes above the sink.

In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn't yet decided that separating them into parts like this—June's left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another—is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are. Which, at least in the beginning, is best friends, living together on the outskirts of town, sharing a dresser full of secondhand band tees, squeezing lemon juice onto one another's hair in the summer, then sitting together on the blacktop to wait.

Zayyan meets Cecilia on the first day of freshman year. He does not believe in love at first sight, but he does believe in the scientific method, and what is this moment if not empirical evidence of the former? She is like no one he has met before. Black hair pulled into a messy bun, bare arms laden with books, brown eyes ardent as a summer storm.

I am not an illness. I'm a soul with a goal. Everyone on this floor is here for intrusive thoughts, ideations, risk of harm to themselves or others. What society used to call possession, they now call neurotransmitter imbalance or schizophrenia or obsessive compulsion.

This is the dead thing becoming the body. This is the dead thing opening the body's eyes. This is the dead thing rising from the grave. This is the dead thing saying “What the hell—I didn't ask to be summoned. I was having a great time being dead and dreaming about nothing.”

Last week, in a tangerine raincoat that did not suit her pallid skin tone, Phylicia Wimby smiled through her lies. There is an 87% chance of rain for tomorrow. Due to the high probability of unpleasant weather for the entire week, we predict the Cousins won't be arriving until next week at the earliest, once the rain dries up. Her and all the other meteorologists in shiny citrus-colored vulcanized rubber swore to us that Cousins Season wasn't coming for a while, that in Virginia we had more than a week to prepare.

Darla Revere was born to live her whole life as part of a conversation, the outcome of which she would never know. She was raised to be certain of three things: 1. The leviathan will come for you. She will come suddenly and without warning. 2. You will feel great joy and pain at the moment she contacts you. Be prepared. You may only ask her one question. 3. If you change yourself too much—if you do not bear resemblance to your mother, your grandmother, the long line of women the leviathan has touched—she may not be able to find you when it is your time.

The coffin lies at the curb, tilted aslant on the strip of grass next to the sidewalk. Old Mr. Byerly spies it on an evening walk through his suburban neighborhood. It's been put out alongside a pile of other discards—an old-fashioned lawn mower, a chrome-legged kitchen table, a bookcase with only one shelf. The stuff is from a house that's under renovation after sitting vacant for many months.

In the folds of banyan trees, between the treeish world and ours, are markets. Real markets, not the pale human sort that happen every week, as if things that are worth buying happen every week. A banyan market occurs one day a year, which is as often as trees are willing to entertain on such a lavish scale. And once a year is just barely enough time to make the stuff that trees dream of. - Revathi Kumar, ‘Markets: A Beginner's Guide'

“When in doubt—” I catch Thomas's eyes and hold up a jar of sparkle lip gloss. “—add more glitter.” The mirror we face is cracked and wreathed in vanity lights that flicker in time with the strained chugging of the ancient generator outside. The smells of old perfume, road dust, and hush puppies fill the painted wooden wagon that serves triple duty as my transportation, home, and dressing room. I blame the generator for that last odour. We restocked on biodiesel at our last stop, and now everything smells like frying corn.

Rain soaks through my hair, stretching my coils to wavy locks streaming down my face. A cold gaze follows me through dark windows, reminding me of Lisa's face. I complained about my parents, once.

When Madison S. didn't show up to school, and word got around that it was because her boyfriend threw his phone at her mouth and knocked out four of her teeth, the junior girls of Clark High turned into monsters. Taloned, screaming things driven by rage and revenge. We swarmed her boyfriend, Josh C., by his car after school, and though he tried to beat us off with his lacrosse stick, our numbers were too great, our sisterhood too mighty.

I was twenty years old when Hamida Bano, the Padshah Begum, supreme wife of the Emperor, entrusted her infant prince to my arms before fleeing across the Thar desert. Her opium-addled husband, steeped in the luxury of his harem, had no defense against Sher Shah Suri's advancing armies, which squeezed Agra like a coal between tongs. The Sur Empire then settled its traitorous haunches on North India, and Hamida Bano, trailing her husband's camel, trekked across the blistering desert, while I, still a young concubine, nursed the boy who would inherit the throne.

Nellie kept moving, expecting to blend into the ridgeline, but the hiking guide spotted her. He called out in Italian first, then English. “I don't think you belong out there.” His group, tourists with brimmed hats and walking sticks, stopped and stared with dull curiosity. The steep slope under her feet was loose gray rock, treacherous for amateurs perhaps, but she'd been wandering terrain like this almost forever.

I'm excited about this new apartment, its shining glass windows overlooking Harlem, until I see her peeing in the park one morning, shortly after we move in. Insulated glass dampens the screech of taxi honks and sirens below and gives us a great view of the nearby park: a huge swath of hilly green in the middle of the city, where evergreens reach up like pining lovers and silent figures walk along its paths. And yet one morning, while sipping my cinnamon coffee, I see her.

I have spent a lifetime in front of this window, mortality seeping out in waves of nausea and lost weight. There she is, just beyond the grime-cornered glass, in the yard, playing like all children should. I almost tap to get her attention, to give a weak wave of longing and vanished time, but I only watch her move through the grass and tree trunks, hair blown by the breeze.

Nanda hauls the bucket from the depths of the well, her palms aflame with red blisters from clutching the frayed rope too tight. The thick rope, screeching against the pulley, trembling under the weight of the water, becomes heavier by the minute. The minute she goes weak, the bucket will plunge, crashing into the sweet water below, and she'll have to start the charade for the fourth time.

Clouds rolled across the evening sky, dark and low, dragging rain behind them. Desert washes ran dirt-red, and rocky mesas shone wet when lightning flashed. Rainwater frothed down the narrow slot of Sheep Drop Ravine, a chasm with overgrown edges that had claimed the lives of countless sheep and antelope, and of the entire “Handsome Jake” Jubles Gang as it had fled, on a similar night, from a posse of enraged Winslow, Arizona citizens.