Illustration by Andy Paciorek

HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2024
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY DEIRDRA McAFEE

The tale travels from campfire to campfire; it rides in sideshow caravans, in the fleabitten bedrolls of tramps and beggars, the lonely pockets of runaways, the ragged purses of whores, the lays of troubadours, the beckoning bottles of traveling quacks, the restless hearts of vagabonds, the cold, calculating eyes of brigands. The whole affair, whether legend, rumor, or twisted whisper, scales crooked mountain paths and trudges mired valleys. Cutpurses and rakes claim he stole her but ignore her eager consent. Mountain-roaming Romany swear she ensnared him with spells but believe she needed tricks and traps.

People ask me to tell the tale, and I tell them what happened; I tell them how and when and who. But I never tell them why. I, the solitary, who belongs nowhere, who asks alms in return for blessings, who seeks neither kingdom nor tribe, offer you the authentic tale in all its trouble and splendor.

After they gathered flowers, the harvest’s daughter and her girlfriends drowsed in a meadow full of columbine and bee-song. They dreamed maidens’ white dreams spiked with whiffs of wood-smoke from a nearby shepherd’s hut.

Death, meanwhile, burst in full panoply from a fiery fissure—flaming chariot, shrieking steeds, cloak of starry darkness, body burnt at the edges but touched with brilliance.

The others hid their eyes and fled; mortals who behold him cannot speak of it. But she, the harvest’s daughter, stood her ground. Afraid, but, unwisely, not terrified. Or perhaps simply transfixed by the fire, the brilliance, the shining cloak falling upon her like fate, inescapable. She, so familiar with life, didn’t recognize him. He, far more sophisticated, conversant with costs and consequences, watched himself do what he didn’t expect and couldn’t believe: lean down and curl his iron arm around her. Seize her, almost casually. Swing her up one-handed, submit to her embrace, share the deep kiss of entrancement, and take her down.

They descended to the dark and murky ancient destination. They waded the poisoned river, disdaining the blind boatman. Death clasped this live girl closer, letting her live on, warm breath thawing his icy heart, soft skin tender against his tough hide.

At Death’s dwelling, in his vast and gloomy stone bedchamber at the end of a chill and murky hall, he kissed her awake. It was time, he told her. He’d take care of her. This he meant, but she found reassurance unnecessary. Weary of childhood, she had no plans. She was ripe. Free of light’s harsh distraction, they undressed each other. He, who sees in the dark, knew he’d found his fated bride. He lit a single tall black candle. He gleamed in its glow till she found him.

He insinuated himself here and there, tasted her delicious places, examined her treasures and laid bare his own. The mutual search moved them as they moved. Slow, adroit, sympathetic, attentive, Death was a fabulous lover—even she, so inexperienced, realized that. He knew, since he dwells in all things always, everything there was to know about flesh, and even something about love, though mainly that it decays.

In the moment of consummation, he almost forswore his essence and laughed. (The deepest danger: Death’s necessary attitudes are irony and distance. Delight destroys them.) Thus she became the girl who slept with Death but survived. She loved what they did. So did he, who’d never hitherto taken note of any being in a body. They repeated the enjoyable activity subsequently and often. He couldn’t stifle occasional sepulchral snickers. She didn’t care if she ever saw daylight again.

He didn’t mind that the harvest’s child was green and naïve. He encouraged her curious and tender investigations. What she learned spurred him as it did her. She grasped what older, more experienced lovers sometimes miss: mutuality is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Her body alight, her mind afire, her will aswoon, flushed and swollen everywhere, she knew she should leave. Her mother would wonder. But. She knew he needed her. Knew she wanted him.

They whiled away sunless days in his high black-curtained bed. They touched each other languidly until they burned, watched each other by the guttering glow of that candle, whose light, like their passion, rose and fell but never went out, and, at loud last, when hot propinquity’s pleasures grew unbearable, embraced.

Death had a hearty appetite. He’s well known to be inexhaustible, which appealed to the girl, because his vigor, imagination, and unwearying attention were inexhaustible as well. He’s well known, too, to be insatiable. Every few hours, when their cries ceased echoing through Death’s halls, when the sweat of their exertions dried and languor replaced lust, Death rang the bedside bell.

A sooty servant brought food and drink: always something different, rich rare foods and strange brews. She, however, living on love, never partook. Until one murky midday the servant brought steaming espresso and a chilled ripe pomegranate. Death tossed back the espresso in one black gulp. He ripped open the Tyrian fruit. From the wound, he scooped a fistful of wet, shiny seeds. Grinning, he licked almost all of them down. Grinning wider, he leaned to feed the last one to the girl. She let him, which for some reason inflamed them both anew.

On each of six sweet days, she opened her lovely mouth to a single sweet seed. Parted her ruby lips—the seeds alone were redder and juicier—and plied her saucy tongue. Death pushed a single succulent purple-red pip ever so slowly, ever so gently, from his mouth into hers,. Tenderly. Temptingly. Her white teeth met upon the seed. Its vivid juice dropped from her full lips to stain her chin. After which they fell to, and fell together, again and yet again.

The girl’s mother. as it happened, did not wonder where she was. As all mothers do—they, after all, remember how they got that way—she knew. At least in a general sense. When the girl failed to reappear, the harvest goddess feared, or knew, that darkness disappeared her daughter.

An explosion of violets, lilies, pansies, and dandelions littered the meadow. On a scorched patch of ground, broken half-finished daisy-chains intertwined with dark malodorous earth. The signs spoke: wilted blossoms, trampled grass, the tang of sulfur, the scent of ozone after a storm.

She sank upon this destruction in her golden robes to ponder her daughter’s absence. Fears for her child furrowed her beautiful brow. Mothers know too much about what’s possible. The earth itself, meanwhile, her special care and domain, waited in cool green liveliness, with an indifference almost blasphemous.

The goddess wept with dread. She took the birds’ voices, locked up the wind, shredded the sprouting leaves, beheaded the flowers. She quelled the waves, parched the springs, bent the crops with sadness till they dropped into dust. She stopped the insects’ work and stilled their songs. Winged creatures walked; wingless ones waited, breathless and motionless, for their own surcease or an end to their goddess’s woe. She enervated the animals, who lay panting in fields and woods, too weak to move or eat or mate. She inquired of every being, plant, animal, rock, or rill. Unanswered, she shredded the sky and harrowed the earth.

The girl unfound, the goddess withdrew to a ruined temple. The wreck, sacred to an outworn mystery cult, bestrode a cliff. At the back of a tiled courtyard within its cracked walls, stood an immense basalt altar, the work of Titans, or perhaps Northern Giants. Its massive carved-obsidian door opened onto a stone staircase, which descended to a subterranean chamber.

Into this lair at the world’s core, the harvest goddess retreated, restless on a marble bed, wordless in darkness and tears. Twice daily she emerged, gazed upon the useless world, and returned to the cavern’s deep shadows. The musk of her mourning covered the earth. The sun, meanwhile, without her supervision, burned away each day’s clouds and hid itself in a cloak of blood.

Her subjects sought her, of course, almost as devotedly as she sought her daughter. And more desperately. They missed their queen; she was, after all, their mother, too. Crouched silently at the door of her refuge, they offered to share her sorrow, a token of fealty she accepted.

She tossed and turned on her rocky couch, groaning. Her grief for her beautiful child grayed and gaunted her. Tears ran off her rocky resting-place, flowed and fell down the cliff to nourish a sudden forest, loyal trees and shrubs that arose overnight, thirsty for earth’s sole shower. They grew, they lived, indeed, but having drunk of the goddess’s grief, they could never fruit or flower.

People, meanwhile, continued in their heedless way, neither wise as beasts nor patient as plants. Lonely but selfish, hungry and weak, caught in their own petty whims, they went on getting and spending, stealing and robbing, hurting, and hating. Their debt to the harvest goddess was great but unacknowledged. Numb to awe, too proud to kneel, they seized her gifts without respect or gratitude. Depending on her but disbelieving it, they consumed her bounty but remained blind to her beauty.

Unmistakable signs awoke her human subjects to the green world’s distress. They learned of this as they always learn the little they ever do learn. Because it affected them. The cows ran dry. The growing grain faded and fell. The rain came no more.

The men plowed on, planting parched and broken earth, cursing it and all creation. Few of them thought to open themselves to the harrowed world’s wishes or to throw themselves into the goddess’s lap like the children of hers they were, though spoiled and stubborn children. They drank when the moon rose.

The women wept meanwhile, for they watched the children starve. They berated the men, who foolishly urged themselves forward in their scarring, wasteful work. The soil cracked, the furrows crumbled, the new shoots failed.

The women watched and wailed. “Oh, we have done something to anger her. What was her name again? The one with the horn full of good things, fruit and flowers and grain. The one to whom we used to give the boy—or was it a girl?— every spring.”

The men plowed past the women’s plaints. Then, tired of plow and plaint, they dropped their tools in the fields and left for the towns to carouse. Eventually the women, too, silenced because unheard, careless because care was useless, walked away, leaving small unburied corpses, windswept houses, sandy barren fields.

After, like the men, distraction, evasion. Consolation for ruin inconsolable. Forbidden entertainments and strange pleasures. As throughout human history, blood and death alone merited attention. The men would have made war, the ultimate distraction and consolation, but they were too weak and hungry to prosecute such plans.

The memory of true abundance faded, too painful to sustain. People sought ignorance instead. Wore out the body to anesthetize the mind. Sat down to eat, gluttonously consumed their meager stores, and rose up to play. Squandered themselves in profligacy, drunken slumbers, orgies, the varied varieties of sowing in drought that reaped only wind.

Disturbed by their clamor and complaint, so loud it reached her in her cave at the heart of the earth, the goddess concluded they were a mistake. The sickness of the land failed to drive them to seek and propitiate her, the only consolation she would have valued, an effort which might indeed have moved her to mitigation. Instead, it reminded them undeniably that they were temporary.

Knowledge that warped and enraged them. Made them even more wolfish and wasteful. Shallow yet unfillable. Incurably poor because greedy and unsatisfied. They grew tired, they grew old, they grew dead. How rarely they grew wise or good! Before, she had called forth white winds and rain to wash away their coarse profane chatter, but no longer. In disowning her, they disowned themselves. The goddess closed her ears against them, groaned once more, and turned her face to the cold dank cave wall.

Two moon cycles after the goddess’s daughter ate the seeds of love, following which growth of all kinds had fallen off severely, a headless naked creature with a woman’s breasts, big-bellied and bigger-bottomed, lost herself in the woods beneath the cliffside cave. This strange being, a minor Mediterranean deity seeking herbs and edibles, wandered about, grunting and muttering, scratched by brambles and plucking stickle-burrs out of her bushy bush. Perhaps she didn’t know she didn’t belong there. Didn’t realize that these verdant inconveniences were guardians of a sacred space.

The wanderer discovered the last wild blackberry on earth wizening on the vine, and popped it into herself. In those old days, a wild blackberry bore within it thorns as well as seeds, thorns that rasped her unexpectedly in certain tender places. “Great shittin’ sea-cows!” she exclaimed, in a voice hoarse but penetrating. In darkness high above, the goddess opened one eye.

The creature crashed through the bushes, calling on all the dusty crossroads gods of ancient Asia Minor—they were her cousins, some incestuously so—to witness her struggle, and even more, to protect her, if they would but bestir their lazy carcasses. As if in answer, the blackberry bramble snaked around her ankle and took her down.

She lay still a long moment, her nut-brown nipples pressed into the cool loam, a most agreeable sensation even though it left her blind. Her round and burnished belly rested comfortably on a tender tuft of new grass, and her lavishly-proportioned other portions protruded into the air, caressed, again agreeably, by a playing breeze. A stentorian series of imprecations broke the pastoral peace, issuing indeed from her old unspeakable and ascending on the breeze to the invisible portal high above. The goddess opened the other eye.

“By the fecund fur of Ishtar, you indolent milk-faced layabouts!” the creature exclaimed. “Raise me!” The goddess slid from her unyielding divan, crept to the mouth of the cave, and peered out, careful to remain unseen. Far below but quite distinct to the sharp-eyed goddess despite the scarlet-shadowed sun, was some sort of living being, an unknown or at least uncommon sort, in that it was clearly speaking, and speaking clearly, without posessing a head. Through its nether mouth, apparently, although the goddess couldn’t quite make out the details.

Curious, she emerged from the cave and picked her way down the gorge. The cliffside’s ancient rock-hewn steps, carved, like those of the temple, by the cult’s votaries, were wider and easier than they looked. Just as the goddess reached the wild and tearstained woods, the creature bounced upright out of the briars. She bobbed into the air like those green glass balls fishermen attach to their nets and toss seaward to mark where they’ve cast. “Thank you, boys,” the headless one said, but the harvest goddess neither saw nor heard anyone else.

“Oh, eh, ah.” The being returned to earth. It clicked its callused bare heels, squared its shoulders, and brought its breasts to attention, so to speak. “My respects to you, madame. Do I not have the honor of the harvest’s lovely presence?”

The goddess nodded. Suddenly she felt too weary to speak.

“Lookin’ peaked.” The creature fished around inside itself somewhere, the goddess could hardly imagine where, and produced a coarsely-woven linen bag. “Simples! They be just the thing. A little jasmine tea with sassafras shreds to give it a kick. Brace ya right up. Won’t take long. Brought m’own water.” It produced a bulging brown-and-white goatskin, again from parts unknown. “Seems to be a drought.”

It built a fire instantaneously. Kindling seemed to leap to hand and jump to flame. Two earthenware cups emerged from the linen bag, one grass-green, the other deepwater blue. The headless one uncorked the goatskin, aimed, and squirted each cup brimful, losing not a drop. It settled the cups directly on the fire and sprinkled upon them musty herbs from a stone flagon.

The creature soon plucked the cups barehanded off the flames. It offered the goddess the green one, cool to the touch though the brew it held simmered visibly. “Drink!” It sat abruptly, scandalously cross-legged at the goddess’s feet, and poured tea into its lower self as if to demonstrate. It seemed to be slurping.

The goddess averted her gaze from the spectacle, sipping tentatively at her own tea for something to do. The potion was irresistible, however; she drained it in a single ungoddesslike draught, as if to indulge in the uncouth ways of the very odd being who’d brewed it. Braced up, as promised, the goddess abandoned ceremony and seated herself across from the creature, still not sure where to look.

“Simples is the thing.” It drained its own cup with satisfaction. “Nothin’ fixes ya up like herbs and roots. Oh, well, I got some eats, too; here.” It rummaged again in the linen bag. “Sweet figs a few days gone, down back o’ Smyrna (ya gotta watch out for the farmers, y’know, but I’m still pretty spry). I come up around here, outta my usual turf, but my geese got tired o’ luggin’ me, went back ta rest near Ephesus. ‘Lemme down early, then,’ I says to Oriel, the lead gander, an’ quit honkin’ about how overworked y’are. G’wan back, rest yaselves. I c’n still get around much as I need to afoot, thank Ahuramazda.’ Let me down easy they did, but their feathers was mighty dusty—no rain, y’know, madame,” the creature said pointedly. “Slim pickin’s till I got here, nowt but frogswort an’ a little orange-yellow slime-mold (that goes good with fingernail-parings in a love-charm, y’know, madame).

“So I was parched, I was. River was down, a wet thread in a mud-flat, bitter as pee, but at least sorta damp. Drank, got up, an’ stumbled acrost this.” The headless one reached into the bag to retrieve a bright-yellow length of silk.

“Hers!” The goddess reached toward it.

“Yeah, I figgered. Stumbled right acrost it like I just done now.” The being handed over the garment. “My nipples is gettin’ short-sighted, I reckon. You heard o’ people with eyes in back of their heads. But I got mine right up front here. ’Cept they droop now, ’stead o’ swingin’ like they use ta. Oh, I was a looker once, b’lieve me, in both senses o’ the word.” The creature pirouetted like a child, the breasts moving with elephantine grace in accompaniment. “But I don’t see far an’ wide like in them days no more.”

The goddess gaped, curious in spite of herself, distracted from her turmoil for a brief moment. “You see through your nipples?”

“Well, yeah, madame. Ain’t got no eyes. Ya noticed that, ain’t ya?”

“How do you hear, then?”

“Belly-button.” The creature came so close the goddess could touch it, had she wished. Clean smells of lavender and rosemary wafted forth. “Go ’head, go on. Whisper something.”

The goddess, on the edge of amusement, whispered a question.

“Aw, madame, what a question! I shit with that one, of course. What do you do with yours?” The headless creature guffawed, a huge sound that careened from the cliff to the forest and back again. “Here I am, complainin’ about my nipples gettin’ nearsighted. But you, madame, you got troubles way beyond that. They’re weighin’ ya down, too. You look like you got a few too many growin’ seasons on ya, if ya don’t mind my sayin’.”

“Where did you find this?” The pale goddess inspected the creature’s find, a narrow delicately-embroidered belt, her own needlework, last winter’s pastime.

“Hangin’ on a leafless tree, the one I stumbled against when I finished drinkin’.”

The goddess spread the garment across her knees, She stared at her companion. “Where is she?”

“Down there, I heard.” The headless one jerked a thumb toward the ground.

“Ah, yes. Of course. He would.” Death was well known to her. They worked together sometimes, in fact. They were relatives, too, of course. Grew up together. The goddess frowned, thinking about him. That he would. What he would.

“Who are you?” The goddess stared at the creature.

“Oh, you know me. You an’ I are far cousins, the removed kind, y’know. Asia Minor; some of us stayed when everyone else colonized the Aegean. My people liked the beach, too, but we went to the Mediterranean. Baubo, they use ta call me. I’m up-to-date, though, I am: I took a futuristic name. You can just call me Old Vee.

“We’ve met before, Cuz. Remember those initiation ceremonies years ago at the shrine of Cybele? Those geometric scarifications?” The creature took the goddess’s hand in its own soft, warm ones. “Lessee the inside o’ yer arm, madame. Aha. Mm-hm. Look here: jus’ like mine. Circle in triangle in square in circle.

“You was in line behind me, but I don’t wonder ya didn’t recognize me. I wore a robe in them days, an’ a wrap besides—couldn’t bear my own beauty yet.” The creature giggled. “Too weak ta face my own power. I had ta cover myself from myself in those days; I had a lot ta learn.

“We met, all right. I had the tambourine an’ you got the lyre. My, oh, my—you played like a goddess, madame.” Old Vee laughed. “They give me the tambourine ’cause I sang loud but not pretty. Not always disciplined or ladylike. Nor dainty, not at all.” Another chuckle from deep inside. “Didn’t always pick noble well-mannered partners for the dance. Oh, but those I picked stood up to me, madame. They was hot ones, wasn’t they, now? Remember? We was fourteen the night they made them scars and gave us them ephebes. I talked ya into tradin’, an’ that boy an’ me, we did the dance all night. Set a record, we did. They made him a honorary satyr.

“An’ me, well, that hot boy I traded you for, he was Love himself an’ that night was my interview. Tutored me fer my present position, so ta speak.” Old Vee saluted. “Groomed me young to be his helper out in the country. Ain’t he a relative a yours, too?” The goddess nodded. She stared at the silken sash. She smoothed it repeatedly.

“That right, madame? Ya really didn’t know where yer daughter’d got to? So distracted by Egyptian corn-borers or Babylonian squash-beetles that ya couldn’t figger out it was one a yer brothers or t’other? Knowin’ them two, I bet they made a bet. Or maybe Love was jist feelin’ his oats.”

The harvest goddess hung her head and sniffled, a most un-divine sound. She gathered the hem of her gorgeous but damp and wrinkled robe, white silk shot through with a pattern of sheaves in gold thread, and blew her nose into it.

“Oh, c’mon, madame. Ya gotta snap out of it! She’s gone where the seed goes that you bring to light, to fruit, she’s gone deep, deeper even than she was inside ya, deeper even than you go into the ground. Gone where the fallen leaf goes, the shed skin, the spent flower, the rain.”

The goddess still couldn’t get past the wrong angle of the creature’s hoarse and penetrating voice, issuing from the ground, it almost seemed. She wondered if its lips moved. “Your problem is, all ya understand is life and goodness. Ya don’t know nothin’ about death and darkness. Ya didn’ warn her, and now ya can’t find her ’cause she’s gone into a world ya don’t know nothin’ about.

“Ya haven’t interested yaself in that part, and why should ya? It’s filthy, full of muck and ferment and fungus, decay and dissolution. Disgustin’, too: putrefyin’, melted, moldy, rotten. But it’s half yer domain, madame, the hidden half you have to have. Without which you can’t work, can’t plant or harvest or gleam or glean. You better do some research, mama. You better find a map or talk to somebody’s been there, somebody knows the lay of the land.

“And what’s the big deal, anyhow? He loves her. He married her, didn’t he? Unlike all these other pricks who come down in a shower of gold or chase us all over the woods and leave us with babies they never claim. Ya know what I’m talkin’ about, don’t ya, madame? Huh?” The goddess nodded miserably, her face in her hands. She knew, all right.

“She’s a woman now, Mama, for good or bad, outta your protection even if she’d married a nice little pastoral god an’ spent her life shearin’ sheep and boilin’ mutton and wipin’ the smudged beautiful faces of the curly-haired little sheep-shearin’ godlings he gave her. She’d be outta your reach no matter what, once she did the deed. Remember? Just like feeling swamps knowing, fucking beats thinking every time.”

The goddess moaned. “She would have been out of my reach, but not out of my sight. I miss her so.”

“Ya wouldn’t wanna see her there anyhow. Which is in his hot bed, as you also well know. She’s gotta get dressed an’ get up here an’ see you. Ya can’t go down there, you know that. It’d kill ya, and therefore kill the rest of us. Think of yer responsibilities, madame. Ya gotta go have a chin-wag with her father.” The goddess’s brooding had yielded this same conclusion, and somehow the creature knew it. “That’s the spirit, madame. Resolve yaself upon the journey; the omens in Scythia as I passed through were all to the good.

“Ya better get some lightness in yer demeanor, however. As you’ll recall, brightness and vitality captivate him.” The goddess gestured as if to reply, but the other continued. “You ain’t in no shape to revive the green world, madame. You gotta fix yaself up. Crush some lemon-balm leaves in yer bath, anoint yaself in an incendiary fragrance, slip into that new white chiffon with the gold-threaded Doric motif at collar and hem.

“And—” the creature spoke firmly, as if giving an order—“Look on the bright side, madame. Think positive.”

Surely Old Vee hadn’t ordered a goddess about, that would have been presumptuous. Or surely she had. Although they are indeed not-so-distant cousins, as the creature so boldly claimed, Old Vee possesses certain powers even stronger and more mysterious than those of the harvest goddess.

“Here, madame, lemme help ya.” The creature seized the goddess’s gray veil and playfully wrapped it around her own oddly-shaped self. “You still wonder about me, do you not? Wish to see for yaself what upon yaself you barely see?” Old Vee laughed, shuffled into a complicated dance-step with something beyond grace, and faced away from the goddess. Old Vee bent double and removed the veil to give the goddess a good long look. “See? They do move when I speak.”

The astonished goddess burst into laughter, belly-laughs very like the creature’s own, coming from the same place, the depths, the fecund and mysterious gates of abundance and pleasure. “Look, listen, and obey, my dear madame.” Old Vee laughed at the figure she cut; she knew how to laugh at herself, of course.

Some minutes later, when they’d caught their breaths, the headless one returned the goddess’s veil. “Now surely ya gonna get up there an’ charm him. Now that ya laughed, he’ll hear the lightness in your request and the passion in your speech. The Scythian entrails foretell success; all Abyssinia burns incense an’ cloves to prepare yer way there. Remember yer holy laughter, madame. By this ya can see yer child.”

The girl’s father, the royal and divine emperor of all, resided, like Death, in a distant land, a vast day’s journey from the cave at the core of the earth. The goddess sojourned there once, eons past, hijacked like her daughter, but toward light rather than darkness. Either is terrifying to those who live between. The emperor’s long-ago kiss put the goddess, too, in a dream, though she saw all and forgets nothing, their beating hearts, his burning touch, her fiery astonishing rejoinder. Their beauty in conjunction.

Months after, the girl-child emerged, breaking anew her mother’s body, no pleasure this time, instead a painful joy. The waters broke, the goddess roared and shouted as the child burst forth. Flowers sprang into bloom everywhere, the earth’s delicate extravagant congratulations.

The goddess remembers how to go, the way up is much like the way down. Shining, she brushes past the emperor’s guardians and attendants; they fall away, making obeisance as they recognize her. She smiles and curtseys to the emperor’s jealous wife (at least Death is a bachelor). She stops to salute her kin. Love is one, Light another, Change, the emperor’s messenger and magician, another still. She jests with him and makes him laugh. Her mirth and her bright brow cause Change to buckle on his fast shoes. He understands why she came.

He knows before the emperor does that the emperor will grant her wish. Above as well as below, laughter is the music of enchantment, an enchantment that so easily ensnares the emperor, lonely on an unquiet throne beside that powerful sour wife. Change throws on his cape, preparing to descend and deliver the emperor’s command to the dark world beneath the world between.

You know the rest. If you’ve eaten a tangy fall apple or quaffed the rough red from that gurgling jug in your saddle-bag, if you’ve grabbed a hot fistful of fresh bread or let ripe goat-cheese melt on your tongue and release its perfume, you know what happened next and how the tale turned out: change and growth, decay and return.

If not, you poor soul, here’s the news: the girl returned to her mother’s place for six sweet months each year. The world came back to life, and to death: they’re married and inseparable. Here’s the non-news: the humans learned nothing, but the gods looked after them anyway.

Yet, as you must have noticed, my yarn stints one answer. Against the rules of church and state, my tale avers that Death, like us, can be tempted. That life wants to yield. That earth, too, is mortal. That the ever-returning harvest could fail us. That all this unfolds as it must, that every tangled tale, including mine, reveals a larger plan and power speaking through it.

We could say that the Fates meddled, sending a minor but obstreperous goddess, life-giving and unthreatening, to nudge the harvest back to work. That during the goddess’s mourning, because people dared strike no sparks in their tindery groves and fields, neither sacrifice nor incense delighted Those Above. That the stench of carrion, spoiled crops, and corpses wafted upward, rather than the perfume of roast meats, sage, and myrrh that keeps the gods in temper and distracts them from involvement in human affairs.

That three heads are better than one, even among the divine. The Fates had a larger plan, one that eased the harvest goddess’s burden. Even before her daughter’s abduction, she was overworked. She ruled, which meant managed, the two fertile seasons. Hers to oversee, beset by weather, pests, laziness, territorial disputes, bad seed, bad farmers, bad plans, the world’s spring planting and fall reaping.

The Fates invented two more seasons. One, to follow sprouting spring, called summer, days of languid burgeoning, of heat and light, desire and abundance. One more to close gathered fall, called winter, a cool and fallow time of incubation and repose. The harvest goddess wouldn’t welcome this plan. But she would welcome her daughter.

The girl, six pomegranate seeds and one ghostly lover to the bad (leaving aside the issue of subterranean congress with her uncle), herself immured underground so like a seed, would answer the Fates’ summons, rise to rule the new seasons, pleasing her mother but maintaining her own ménage with ardor and rigor.

I told you what happened, as promised. Warmed by your fire, full-bellied with your food, and loquacious from your wine, I told you how and when and who, and one thing more. Rather than disdaining this lone wanderer, your generous good-fellowship subsumed me, the stranger, into your tribe. Tempted me, with my high, lonely knowledge, to unriddle what I never can, to judge as I never may.

Now must I take my leave. Now must you take your own turn in the space I leave open. Explain for what cause each tale unfolds the buried. For what cause love and death, dark and light, drought and famine, flood and surfeit, move you. For what cause life itself enters and spins your own tales thiswise and not otherwise, weaving and embroidering the words into your hearts until the cups fall from your hands, the fire sinks, and you tumble into dreams.

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Deirdra McAfee’s fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Willow Springs, The Diagram, and others. She co-edited and contributed to the literary anthology, Lock & Load: Armed Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

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Illustration by Andy Paciorek

HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2024
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY CAITLIN A. QUINN

On the stretch of beach below the lighthouse, there had been a footprint. The outline of a bare left foot in the sand, not much larger than Anna’s hand. She had seen it that morning, before the sun was up, but when she crossed the beach later to get to the dock, where Ciarán waited in his boat, it was gone.

“There’s a storm coming,” Ciarán said, pointing to the swells of darkness gathering to the west.

“Good thing this island’s got a lighthouse.”

Anna knew she shouldn’t give cheek, but the old boatman’s condescension was tiresome, starting from the first moment she’d met him, when he had ferried her to this remote, rocky isle, so she could take over the lighthouse’s caretaking duties. She remembered the look of challenge in his rheumy eyes when he had asked, “What does a woman want with a place like this? Wandering on a rock, bound to a light, with the nearest soul miles across to the east, and nothing on the other side but the western reaches?”

How long ago had that been? Weeks? Months? It was hard to keep track of time here, one day seeping, thick as treacle, into the next.

And there was the other question he had asked that first day, as he started the boat’s engine, readying to leave—the same question he asked every time he came: “Are you ready to go back?”

Her answer was always “no.” She didn’t want to be anywhere but here, where the lighthouse’s bright gold beacon comforted, granting respite from nightmares in which different lights of another color bore down upon her: the cold burn of the ambulance’s blue flashers and the numbing shroud they cast over Dublin’s wet streets.

She’d spent five years behind that ambulance steering wheel. Racing to heart attacks in Drumcondra. Dodging taxis to reach stabbing victims in Parnell Square. As she drove, she imagined the wheel was Death’s arms pinioned by her tense fingers. That her foot crushed Death’s windpipe underneath the gas pedal. Until the night Death had taken revenge, casting itself first in the form of the pint her boyfriend, Barry, had ordered for her in the pub an hour before she was due on shift, and second in the Audi’s careening sleekness.

The footprint. It had been there on the beach that morning. Anna was sure of it.

“Could there be anyone else on the island besides me?”

Ciarán shook his head. “I’m the only one can navigate these waters, and I’ve brought none here but you.”

“But could they have swum out from the mainland?”

“Anyone going into that water wouldn’t make it twenty feet before it finished them.” Ciarán scratched at grey chin stubble. Anna noted that his usual morose temperament seemed tinged with impatience today. He glanced up at the dark clouds hanging over the western sky then gave Anna a look she didn’t like. Different from his usual deprecating frown. This one smacked of pity. “The storm will be bad.” Then: “Are you ready to go back?”

Something in his voice unnerved Anna, and she felt her defenses loosen, like a spool of fishing line unwinding. “I’m all right here.”

The old boatman shrugged. “I’m off then.”

After Ciarán left, Anna returned to the beach, to where she had seen the footprint. She searched again, but no trace of it remained. The inside of her mouth felt chalky, and it was hard to swallow. She stared at the darkening sky. As she watched, a bolt of lightning, its edges flashing blue, sparked inside a storm cloud.

She found another footprint. This one in the mud outside the light-keeper’s cottage. Anna saw it when she went outside in the gloaming to turn her face up to the lighthouse lantern’s soothing glow.

The leaden clouds had reached the island. The air they brought tingled Anna’s forearms, pebbling her flesh. There was a scent—heavy, metallic—as though the sky were breathing through a mouthful of pennies.

“I know you’re there!” she called out. “I see your footprint!”

Anna threw on a yellow rain slicker and walked around the side of the cottage. She started down the steep path to the beach but was stopped by a brilliant flash of lightning that left a jagged blue line imprinted behind her eyes. Her throat felt tight and ached.

The rain came down, unassailable and insistent. It slapped against the hood and shoulders of the slicker and blurred Anna’s vision as though it were a veil of gauze. She’d go back inside the cottage. If someone were out here, they would seek its shelter.

Anna dried her hair and wrapped herself in a blanket. She added wood to the stove and sat down on the couch, listening for any tentative knock on the cottage door, any creak of its hinges.

Flames rose behind the stove’s glass, and Anna sat before them, shivering, unable to get warm. She thought about eating something but couldn’t decide if she were hungry. Had she eaten anything today? Was there even any food in the cottage? She couldn’t recall. The rhythmic, golden crawl of the lighthouse beacon across the cottage floor lulled her to sleep.

When Anna opened her eyes, the beacon’s reaching light was gone, replaced by the brutal gash of steel that had been the Audi. Had she not seen the car in time? Had her reflexes not been quick enough to avoid hitting it?

Through ears still ringing from the crush of glass and metal, she heard Michael, the AP, moan from the passenger seat beside her, his face bloodied.

Anna, groggy, her head aching, stared at the Audi through the ambulance’s broken windscreen. She couldn’t see anyone stirring inside the car.

Then a small boy looked out from its back window.

Anna fought to unbuckle her seatbelt. That’s when she heard the whoosh of flames.

The Audi’s crumpled bonnet was on fire. Smoke filled the car’s interior. The boy pounded on the window.

Frantic, Anna pushed at the ambulance door, but it wouldn’t open. It was only then she realized the vehicle was lying on its side.

She kicked a hole in the windscreen, clawed her way through it, glass-bitten hands slick with blood. Tumbled to the street. Stood. Staggered forward on legs of dead weight.

Anna fell against the Audi’s backseat door, tugged at its handle. The door wouldn’t open. The boy’s face was no longer in the window. Anna pulled harder. The door flew wide.

Smoke billowed out of the car and into Anna’s face, stinging her eyes. She reached blindly inside the backseat for the boy. Her hand fell on something. A foot! She pulled and something came off in her hand. A small running shoe. She threw it away and reached back in. Her fingers closed on fabric. A trouser leg.

Anna dragged the boy from the car, cradled him against her chest as she hurried away. She laid him on the sidewalk. Looked at his blackened, still face. Lifted a lid to reveal an iris of dizzying blue. The blue found along the edge of a lightning bolt.

She felt his throat for a pulse. Nothing. She put her hands on his chest, counted out thirty compressions. Checked his pulse again. Nothing.

Anna put her mouth over his, pushed two breaths of air into his lungs. Put her head to his chest. Heard nothing.

Went back to compressions. Then breaths. Over and over, until Michael, hovering unsteadily above her, his voice ragged, pronounced, “He’s gone.”

Anna cried out.

The boy was still there, but now he was standing in the cottage, alight in the beacon’s glow. His face was streaked with black residue. His eyes were blue stars. His clothes stank of smoke. His left foot was bare.

Anna sat forward on the couch. “I’m sorry,” she said, and started to cry. “I had a drink. That pint, before I—”

“It’s not your fault,” the boy said. “Mam was on her phone, fighting with Da. She didn’t see the light change.”

Something flooded Anna’s chest. She sucked in a breath, tasted smoke and bile in her throat. Every part of her shook.

“You need to go back,” he said.

“To Dublin?”

The boy looked past Anna, out the window, toward the lighthouse.

“It’s fading.”

Anna shook her head, but then she saw it: the beacon’s pulsing gold had dwindled to a sallow yellow. “I don’t understand. I tried so hard.”

“You took pills,” the boy said. “Because you felt bad. About me. But you shouldn’t.” The boy turned his head toward the open door of the cottage behind him. “He’s here to take you back. Though he doesn’t like to go that way.”

The boy’s hand was cold in Anna’s as he led her to the dock, where Ciarán was waiting in his boat, his face hidden beneath the dark hood of a rain slicker. She squinted through the slanting rain at the beacon’s slowing, waning pulse of light.

“I’m ready to go back,” she said.

The old boatman said nothing, just started the motor while the boy untied the mooring lines.

The storm was subsiding, its turbulence having faded to a soft mizzle. Anna felt a warmth in her limbs she had forgotten to miss. And the boy on the dock grew smaller, and the lighthouse beacon behind him became brighter, as the boat made its way out to sea, across the western reaches.
___________________________________________________________

Caitlin A. Quinn’s short fiction has appeared or is upcoming in Electric Spec, Tales To Terrify, Identity Theory, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and Fiction On The Web, among others. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association and lives in Northern California with her partner and two badly behaved Airedale terriers. Website: caitlinaquinnwriter.com.

Back To The Story Page

Illustration by Andy Paciorek

WINNER, Fall 2024
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY EMILY VER STEEG

They want me to explain why I stopped burning the bodies. My lawyer says it’ll give people peace and then maybe they’ll go easy on me. But I can’t say what I did was wrong so if that’s what you’re after probably just stop reading.

And it’s not burning. People kept saying that on the news and at the trial and that’s not what it is and it bothers me that people keep saying it. We don’t set people on fire. They just go in a real hot oven and then all that’s left is bone fragments. So don’t call it “ashes” either.

So I’m explaining why I stopped cremating them because I never burned them to begin with.

The first day it happened, the day that started it all, was just like a normal day until it wasn’t. It was maybe six months after Dad died, which they made a big deal about during the trial but I don’t think it really has much to do with his death. Although it’s true what they said on the news. I did cremate him myself, and I don’t like to talk about it because now I know I shouldn’t have. But I was just like you then, trying to do something nice for someone I loved who died, and it turned out that the nice thing I did wasn’t really nice at all. God showed me that. He opened my eyes, and now I’m trying to show you and open your eyes. Maybe if you read this, and other people read it, the next person you know who dies can be buried instead.

Well anyway I turned on the retorts—that’s what we call the ovens. I don’t know why the ovens need an official name but that’s what it is. Maybe so no one thinks we bake bodies, although I guess we kind of do. Really it’s more like vaporizing. Bodies vaporize at 1,800 degrees, and that’s the temperature the retorts need to reach, but we had these older models that took two or three hours to get that hot. So while I waited I did like administrative things. I looked at The List, which is just a spreadsheet. It says what bodies we have and where they came from and when they needed to get cremated, and yes, it’s a little old fashioned to have a printed list but Dad always insisted on it. He said working with the dead was sacred and we should be as intimately involved as possible. Even marking through someone’s name with a ballpoint pen, he’d say, is a way to honor their life. But a click? To turn someone into a click of the mouse? And he’d shake his head. That’s why I’m pretty sure God forgave him because for Dad it was still about being respectful, as respectful as possible. I guess you all were trying to be respectful too now that I think about it. I’ll ask God to forgive you. Dad would say that about the click of a mouse whenever I talked about how a computer software system would streamline things, help us get the backlog down. But really all crematories have backlogs. It’s just too many people wanting to be cremated and not enough crematories to do it. So if you wanna get cremated you’re gonna have to wait about three weeks. Or your family is at least. But that might be good. It’ll give them more time to change their mind.

So I was waiting on the retorts to get hot enough. I swept the floors and a delivery guy brought a body from a mortuary somewhere in Atlanta. I started sweating, the retorts were close but not quite ready. I opened some windows. We have AC but it doesn’t really stand a chance against the heat of the retorts. I figured while I wait I’d send a shipment of remains out so I drove to UPS. It’s okay to leave the retorts unattended for a while. Like I said, it’s not really an oven. There are safety mechanisms built in.

You know I hate going to that UPS. They’ve got this guy working there, Greg, and he always says just dumb stuff to me like do I ever get nightmares? One time he was like, Cold weather affect anything?
And I said, like what?

Like with burnin um, he says. He’s holding people’s remains in his hands when he goes and says something like that.

And I’m like, It’s not burning.

And he goes, The ovens still get hot in winter?

I work all year don’t I?

I hear more people die at Christmas, he says.

You know, like that. It wasn’t even winter when he said it. People just don’t understand. I mean, they understand cremation mostly. What people don’t understand is why someone would want to work around dead bodies, but someone’s gotta do it. It’s a perfectly respectable career. Dad always said it was an honor. And sure, I disagree about the whole cremating thing now, but Dad had his convictions and I have mine. He was a good man. I think God knows that.

Well I guess I haven’t even gotten to the whole point of this letter yet. I’ll skip to the part where I heard the knocking. I remember my shoulder hurt, the right shoulder. My doctor had said I was messing up my rotator cuff, but it’s real physical labor I was doing, and no time for a break. Anyway, I’d just got some bodies into the retorts—we can do five people at a time—and I heard someone knock at the front door. I thought it was weird because I wasn’t expecting anymore shipments that day.

But when I walked to the front door I saw it standing open. I’d forgotten I left it that way to help circulate some air. Sometimes I’d get woozy if I didn’t do that. People’s surgical implants and dental fillings and stuff vaporize too, it’s no telling what all I breathed in. I think that’s ultimately what got Dad sick was just the air quality. Another reason not to cremate people is that it’s hazardous. Sometimes the Lord does stuff like that to warn us. Sin’s bad for your body and your spirit. We gotta start listening to our bodies, they’re telling us something about the spiritual world. But instead of listening to them we try to get rid of them.

Okay, well the back door was open too. It was a nice fall day, good breeze. Then I heard the knocking again. Sometimes the retorts make a sound as they adjust to the heat. It’s usually as they’re warming up though but I thought maybe one of them was about to fail on me. They were pretty old, like I said.

But that wasn’t it either, because I heard the knocking again when I stood there in front of all the retorts and the sound didn’t come from that room. It was coming from the morgue.

So I stood in front of the closed door to the morgue and that was it. Something inside was knocking about. My heart’s racing, I figured a creature of some kind, squirrel or raccoon, had gotten trapped in there. Out back of the crematory is just all pine trees—or it used to be before they started developing it. So I thought maybe something crawled inside. I inched the door open and flipped on the light but didn’t see anything.

Then the knocking happened again, and it was coming from one of the refrigerators, an occupied refrigerator. Now I’m thinking I really blew it. Dad would be furious. A critter had gotten inside with a body. What if it gnawed on it? Or shat on it? Technically no one would ever know, but I felt like I’d let Dad down. I gripped the shiny metal handle with my sweaty palm—our morgue looks just like the ones on TV, by the way. Just so you can picture it in your mind. A room with a bunch of drawer-like refrigerators, and when you open one the body is there on a metal rack that rolls out.

So I open the door and roll out the body, expecting to see something bad. I won’t describe what I thought it’d look like because an animal eating a dead body is too gruesome for some people to think about. But nothing was in there, except the body of course. A lady named Monique from the Golden Oaks mortuary in Knoxville. I peered inside the chamber where her body’d been, the cold air drying the sweat off my forehead. I didn’t have anything to catch the critter with, so I don’t know what my plan would’ve been if I saw it.
And then she started talking to me. Monique. The dead lady.

Things get fuzzy here so I can’t remember all the details. It was the scaredest I’ve ever been. My pants ended up wet somehow, my chest hurt and I couldn’t get a breath, I was all shaky.

But basically she said, Please don’t burn me.

And I don’t think I said anything back at first.

It’s bodily, she said.

Then I’m wondering if she’d been alive this whole time, like you know how sometimes people have such weak pulses that they’re declared dead and then they wake up? It’s happened before.

So I said, was there a mistake?

But she said she was dead. And she kept laying there saying she couldn’t be burned.

I backed out of the morgue and ran to the office. The List agreed she was dead. Been that way a week. I pinched myself, bit my tongue, smacked my face, anything to try and wake myself up, but I was awake already. And my jeans were getting stiff. Luckily I sweated through my clothes so often that I always had extras so I pulled on a clean pair.

I thought I was just tired or something, so I went back to the morgue and cracked open the door, just peeking through. Monique blinked up at the ceiling.

She said it was bodily again, and she never looked at me the whole time. For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, she said.

I knew it was from the bible somewhere but at the time I didn’t know where. I know I talk a lot about God and stuff now, but at the time I’d backslid. Didn’t believe in it anymore. But Mama kept making me go to church. And when I was a kid I had wanted to be a preacher, you know. I guess I kind of am now, if you think of a preacher as someone who tells what the real truth is. But I stopped believing when everyone else could speak in tongues and I still couldn’t. I was thirteen or so, and I had got baptized with water but apparently not the Spirit, and I figured none of it was true and everyone else was faking. My Spirit baptism just took longer I guess. He’s got His own timing.

But back to what I was saying. I was still scared but I managed to push her back into the refrigerator and close the door. She kept knocking and I just ran out of there. The morgue, the crematory. I got in my truck and drove home.

I was home early so Mama thought I was sick, and I must’ve looked sick because I could tell from her face. She told me to go lay down. I tried closing my eyes but every time I did I heard Monique’s voice and saw her blinking. After a while I sneaked into Mama’s room and grabbed Dad’s old King James from where it still sat on his side table. I looked in the concordance under TRUMPET and found the verse: Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. Then I flipped to the familiar passage, the one everyone read in church. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions. And I knew it had finally happened. I’d got my Spirit baptism.

If you haven’t been baptized by the Spirit you don’t know what it’s like. Everyone was all wondering if maybe I had made it up, or my mind played tricks on me, but when you know, you know. And I knew God was telling me something. Monique had said it was bodily, the resurrection, and me and Dad had spent our whole careers destroying bodies. I asked Mama about it and she said Jesus could do anything—he was Jesus. He could take the remains and make them into a body again. And then there’s all the people who died so long ago they were all decomposed now, so they might as well’ve been cremated. Jesus can give them a new body too.

But it’s about respect. Just cause Jesus can redo something we messed up doesn’t mean we should keep messing it up. It’s his, he made it, and it’s not our job to decide to unmake it. I was in a real big funk for a while after this, thinking about all those people I’d cremated. And you know Dad had just died and he’d cremated even more people than me. But he didn’t know better, and God forgives us if we don’t know better. Now though I did know better, and it would’ve been a sin to keep doing something God showed me was wrong. I know you’re thinking that dead bodies can’t talk but we are talking about God here. He does miracles. And he’s made things talk that don’t normally talk all the time. The donkey taking Balaam to go curse the Israelites, Samuel’s ghost with Saul. I mean the whole idea of speaking in tongues is saying things you don’t normally say.

You didn’t know better either when you asked me to cremate your loved ones, but that’s why I did it—or didn’t do it, really. To help you not sin without knowing it. But now, if you read this far, you do know better. One day the trumpet will sound, just like the verse, and the ground will bust open with all the people dead coming back to life, and this time they won’t get sick and die anymore. That’s what it means when it says “incorruptible,” and just because it’s corrupted now you think you should get rid of it? Vaporize it all away? We are a temple for the Holy Ghost. “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” He was talking about the temple of his body but if our bodies are temples too, then Jesus will raise us up just like he raised himself up. And it was a bad outcome for the people who destroyed the temple of his body. And they didn’t even cremate him.

Anyway, I went back the next day and Monique was still blinking and begging, and I wasn’t about to cremate someone who didn’t want to be. What if she screamed when I put her in? I opened up all the other refrigerators and asked those people did they want to be cremated, and all of them said no. Every body I got after that said no. I asked every one of them just to make sure. I don’t know what I would’ve done if someone had said yes, please cremate me, because I still wouldn’t have wanted to. But no one wants to be cremated.

And I mean you all know what happened next. I buried everyone in the pines. They all got their own small funeral ceremony, just me praying over them. Monique stopped begging soon as I laid her in her grave, and everyone else closed their eyes to rest and wait to be resurrected. I ran out of places to bury them after a while, and my shoulder really couldn’t take the digging anymore. On the news they talked about the pine tree woods like it was some sort of horror movie scene, but even the people I covered up with just sticks and leaves and pine needles were thankful. They told me so. I did it respectfully.

Nobody believed the prophets when God sent them to Israel, and they were put in jail too, and even killed, which I guess I won’t be. But all I’m saying is it’s God’s work I’m doing. Or I was doing. If I’d have closed the crematory those people would’ve got sent somewhere else and then still cremated, so I had to stay open and help them. My lawyer wanted me to see a psychiatrist, said if I got some diagnosis with a bunch of consonants in it then I could maybe get out of the jail time. But that would be a lie, and lying’s a sin.

So I can’t really apologize for what I did, but I am sorry you didn’t have your loved one’s remains with you the whole time when you thought you had. I guess that was a lie, to send you crushed up gravel instead. So I’m sorry about that. But when God calls you, you just can’t say no. So I am sorry that you feel like your loved one’s bodies were disrespected, but really I respected them. I respected them more than anyone else.

Sincerely,
Dean Sanders

___________________________________________________________

Emily Ver Steeg grew up outside Atlanta, GA, but now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches writing to immigrant and international students. She received her MFA from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University, and her work has appeared in Vita Poetica and Solum Journal.

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