Author: translunartravelerslounge

The calls come from the caves underground and even you could follow it, slithering slowly as the heat scalds your scales. In there, your progenitor hangs, mouth forever forced open, venom falling in a constant drip. Below him, a god lies groaning, naked except for threads—intestines—snaking across his body, crisscrossing around the stone slab.

I can feel it in my fingers, barely gripping onto the crumbling ledge of the cliffside. A rumbling of horse hooves approaches. I know that there’s only one way that today will end.

Every year the mudflats get bigger. I smell Smith and Tangier Islands in the silt, lands slowly pulled apart to our south like confetti in a palm—the currents blow. The elders like the mudflat. It helps them ease their way out of the water when the sun rises, as the bones in their tails writhe and pop and snap back into the shape of legs. I don’t need a mudflat. I drag myself up into the reeds, hands turned inward like club feet. My bones are young. It doesn’t take long to be human again.

Filomena woke to the sound of weeping. Not unusual. The Chapel of Perpetual Decomposition had excellent acoustics, and the mushrooms were always weeping about something: climate change, unrequited fungal love, the ethics of yogurt. But this was not a mushroom cry. It was something wetter.

So now I’m in a cold, dark cellar. I can sense the weight of the stone above me, but I can’t see anything. Up there I know there are undergraduates, professors, all noise and footsteps, but none of that makes it through the thick sandstone. The air is as dry and cold as any midwinter frost, and dark as an Ohio night.

After surviving yet another day of feigning pleasantness for clients and coworkers, the small, pink, pearlescent dragon sitting on Lily’s doorstep felt like one more damn problem.

I'm not sure exactly how long it’s been April 11th. We had a guy in charge of keeping track until we realised he was just making it up whenever someone asked. It’s been April 11th for a very long time.

Being a demigod is very taxing for the psyche. You end up seeing things that aren’t there, killing things that aren’t there. Shh, it’s okay; it wasn’t your fault.