Category: Stories

Plague in the city upon a hill

America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends one-third of his waking time on conference calls, smiling grimly at the unblinking eye of the camera. America’s greatest living writer will never publish a single word. He dies three days before his fiftieth birthday and is survived by no one.

The final plague begins as his body flies through the windshield, the night air purpling with autumn. America never gets another chance at a great writer. In the broken headlights, his shadow is briefly ten feet tall. The master arrives as his thoughts are still cartwheeling on the grassy field between life and death. The shredded flesh of his brain doesn’t fully grasp that it’s all over. His heart, pulp on the road, cries out: Could I grow past this breaking point, like a rose through the rot? Could I plead for mercy? Could I make it out? Is there time left? Is there time left?

She scrolls through her phone. A pebble of plastic is slowly dissolving in the center of her chest and dripping down her organs, like painted tears of dew on a golden pear in a white bowl. She’s sitting at the table, chin in her hands, running through plans in her head. She is not America’s greatest living anything. She is a perfectly ordinary girl with her own small, thorn-studded hopes that fracture, then flower, starve, then devour.

America’s greatest manuscript lies in pieces on the freeway. The printed pages take to the wind. In the darkness, before the police cars crowd the scene, they are the wings of a past life.

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Hypnerotomachia Polia

Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence. I don’t contest the validity of this interpretation, though I intended a reading that more specifically underscores the relationship between body horror, childbirth, and pursuit. I’m putting this under a “read more” to alert any readers that might prefer to avoid any themes referenced in this paragraph.

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Welcome to Nurdle Nation, LLC

She doesn’t list her job on her profile, but nine out of ten prospective partners look her up before the first date, and then the cat is out of the bag.

“What’s an ESG manager?” her date asks, sliding clumps of angel hair around a black enameled plate. “And what’s Nurdle Nation?”

She slices neatly into a thumb-sized radish as her date pauses to fork pasta into their mouth. “Actually,” the date asks, sheepishly—”What’s a nurdle?”

She smiles with real satisfaction. The amber light from the hundred spherical lamps in the restaurant briefly dims. In the corner booth, the shadows come out, as though to play. They are dusk at her jugular, on her jaguar-print sheath dress. In the mirrored walls, she angles her face differently, adjusts the folds of the rich fabric, and watches the shadows contort, as though in pain.

“It’s a precursor to consumer product,” she, esteemed Senior ESG Manager at Nurdle Nation, LLC, says genially, graciously, already mentally preparing to wade into her spiel. Have you heard of us before, cries out the dark-green voice of the bog inside her. We were actually invited to the President’s house, last year. And I wrote an op-ed in the Post. Oh, you read it? Yeah, it was called “Fight for the Future of the Angels of the New World,” that’s right. Oh, what was it about? It was about a lot of things. 

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Get thee to a nunnery!

Get thee to a nunnery! is a medieval fantasy roleplaying game set in the 11th century. 

  • You play as Aois, a directionless young woman cloistered away in a convent. You shape her life at the abbey through a series of in-game choices.
  • Will Aois grow into a disciplined abbess or a wild warrior nun? Will her talents endear her to the angels of the Biblical arts, or will she fall into the pulpy, pus-filled darkness of sin? Will she branch into the thorns and vines of medieval herbology? Will she unravel the fastidious lettering of tomes, scripts and secrets?
  • You decide, player! You equip her with a quill or sword. You dress her in sackcloth or in linens. You paint the 2-D planes of her face in the dirt of the gardens, the blood of the viper, the light of the Lord.

Daisy clicks impassively through the images accompanying this game description. Isometric perspective, countryside colors in soft, painterly tones, charmingly cartoonish character designs. She sits at the edge of the lumpy, unwashed bedspread, her legs extended, toes curled against the carpet. Her skin itches uncontrollably, possibly from the mildew in the carpet, the dust mites living in the sheets, or the goopy lotion she gets for free from her hotel job. Daisy scratches a chip of foundation off her forehead. She peels a press-on nail off her pinkie finger and lets it drop onto the bedspread.

The player reviews of Get thee to the nunnery! are largely positive, though some commentators mention that the endgame drags. She has a lot of time to kill, and a lot of feelings to drown out, so this doesn’t strike Daisy as an issue. She buys and downloads the game. She lets it boot up while she paces the kitchenette, opening and closing flimsy cabinet doors to pass the time. Teetering towers of instant ramen. Stray seasoning packets crowded around the packaged food like infantry defending the citadel. Yellow specks of mildew in the interior corners.

Aois, the central character, begins the game as a tight-lipped teenager with shoulder-length hair the color of pale cornsilk. She has peach-colored freckles across a snub nose. Her design has something of farmgirl about it, though Aois’  backstory, available to read in the corner of the screen when the player hovers over her body, describes her as an unwanted nobleman’s daughter. In the opening cutscene, the player looks down, as though from God’s perspective, on Aois’ dawn arrival at the abbey. A melancholy track, overlaid with the twittering of a pair of birds, plays as Aois is led by the hand to the tall, ornate doors. Aois’ body twitches like a rabbit, she blinks away tears—or is that just the stuttering framerate, as Daisy’s laptop groans under the strain of rendering graphics? She clicks impatiently through the dialogue between the abbess and Aois’ stepmother, finishing off the cutscene and advancing to the main storyline.

The next in-game day functions as a discrete, semi-camouflaged tutorial, establishing the basic pattern of play. Aois wakes in a cot in the novice dormitory; the player accompanies her as she descends the winding stairs down the turret to the main hall, where Aois joins the crowd of women at mass. Before dawn, during this first mass, the room is full of flickering shadows, and illuminated only by firelight. She kneels on the stone, a cotton kerchief over her fair hair. The game plays a cutscene in which Aois raises her eyes to the cross, the upward movement of her gaze happening in time with the crooning of the choir climbing the musical scale. As the choir leaps into the sustained high note, Aois’ teeth stop their chattering, and her lips begin to move in apparent prayer. Daisy scratches her thigh, where the itching is most pronounced, where her skin has transformed into a patch of welts.

After Matins and Compline, the player is able to pick Aois’ direction for the day. A gilded window opens up and the in-game advisor, archangel Gabriel, appears to offer divine counsel. The study of theology, as he informs Daisy, will sharpen Aois’ thinking and whet her appetite for Biblical arts, including, he muses theatrically, the darker and more ancient labors. Caring for the lambs in the barns will, in contrast, soften her nature. Swordplay with the gardener, a former Crusader, will develop her physical strength. Working with the nursemaid in the infirmary will increase her knowledge of poisons and antidotes. He gestures toward the top corner of the screen, where Aois’ progress in her skills is visually represented via a set of bars wrapped in grapevine. He reminds Daisy that no skill can progress without implied sacrifice in the improvement of her other skills. “Should Aois be well-rounded, or should she cultivate specific talents?” muses Gabriel leadingly, thumbing his dimpled chin. “Who can foresee her destiny?”

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Nighttime Routine (IV; last entry)

The last drop of violet-colored body oil gurgled loudly down the gunky gullet of her bathroom sink. She chased it with half a bottle of drain cleaner and then sat down, heavily, on the marble-patterned laminate. The temperature inside her felt like it had dropped by a hundred degrees, as though she herself were plummeting down a rockface, into an endless crevasse below. She pictured not-her, falling headfirst through freezing air, blue velvet heels abandoned on the ice. She pressed her closed eyes to the peeling paper of her bathroom cabinet. She counted each full breath.

That night, she dreamed of the products she had made disappear. The slimy, clinical-grade serums, the moisturizers that left a film of sparkle on her hairline, the potions for her persistent frizz, her boxcar scars, the broken veins visible across her neck. They spoke in her dead mother’s voice and told her dark family secrets that she did not remember upon waking but that lingered like grease on her hands. The smell in her apartment made her sick to her stomach as she took apart the instruments of the routine, scattering their remains on a piece of old newspaper. The imitation jade roller was mostly plastic. The Korean towel was easily cut into pieces with safety scissors. The UV light mask was impenetrable, even after significant prodding with a screwdriver; she left it whole, its eye holes staring up at her, its mouth hole aghast. She wrapped up the newspaper and hid the evidence in a corner of her closet.

She was unsure, at first, if by destroying her collection, her hand raised like a sword aflame, she had definitively killed the deal. But when night rolled around and she was still there, alone with her maze of thoughts, her skin a dry pelt over her face, she knew. Her time was hers again. Mind abuzz, hair uncombed, she climbed into the sheets. Her arms and legs felt like sweaty deli meat, which she tried her best to ignore. She could feel her curls matting at the nape of her neck. Something in her groaned like an Eldritch horror of the deep, and she choked it into submission.

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Nighttime Routine (III)

She took a week off work to search for the devil. (Technically, this was a violation of the PTO policy at her employer, but she knew Herbert in HR and she knew how to cry to him when necessary.) At the bus stop, her sunglasses flashing against the purpling light of the sunset, her arms crossed tightly over a cream-colored baby tee, she bared her teeth at the odious moon, the yellowing grass, the commuters who stared too long. Every gesture in her approximate direction seemed to her a provocation. Every stranger resembled an ex-boyfriend or an intolerable coworker. Her body itched uncontrollably.

Waiting for the devil at the bus stop failed to replicate their initial meeting-at-the-crossroads, so she turned to the digital crumb trail scattered across his Instagram stories. She followed him through a chain of venture capital-funded coworking spaces, then a suburban Walmart converted from an airplane hangar, then a Catholic seminary, where she was imprisoned for a full day and night after being mistaken for Satan’s accomplice (she ultimately escaped from a balconied window, teeth gritted, with the assistance of an undercover doctoral student posing as a nun and a rope of altar cloths knotted together like a rosary). She staked out the local DMV in a strip mall where the devil had an improbable appointment to renew his driver’s license. She hunted him around a tediously vapid nightclub, and then into a grimy alleyway across the street, where he dissolved into a pool of shadow, leaving her there in a cheap party dress, grasping only moonlight.

She finally pinned him down in the back of her city’s worst-rated Starbucks. He had a stickered MacBook balanced precariously on one knee. “Hey cool girl,” he said when he saw her, breezily, with real pleasure, as though they’d planned the rendezvous. He held her gaze as she slid into the seat opposite him.

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Nighttime Routine (II)

Her nighttime routine consisted of forty different steps involving fifteen products and five parts of her body. First, she lit a white wax candle. Sweet, pink-petalled freesia swept into the room. Her head swam. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she meditated for ten minutes using a loving kindness app. “I forgive you,” she intoned, under the Benedictine guidance of a honeyed British voice. It was said with a genuine attempt at feeling, with the overwhelming desire to summon a revelation like the ones promised to her in the ads for therapy, and she waited expectantly, shivering in the center of her room in synthetic fleece pajamas. But when the tundra of her mind refused to react, she gave up easily, unsurprised—but bitter, nonetheless, at the notion that meditation wouldn’t work on her dog of a brain.

With a shiver of fear for what new pimple or freshly mottled patch she might encounter on its rolling hills and pockmarked fields, she moved onto her body. She twisted around in the dirty mirror to examine every hairy, blue-veined scrap of skin. She ran a roller of imitation green jade over pads of fat, lips pressed together tightly, eyes averted. She scrubbed at her elbows with an intricately woven towel imported from Korea. She applied a mud mask, then a sheet mask, and then a UV light mask. She cleansed, exfoliated, and moisturized her face. Balms, liquids, creams, gels. Baby blue, Pepto pink, grass green. She flossed and brushed her teeth with something battery-powered. In the warm yellow light, her bubblegum-flavored gingiva shone in her mouth like the gilded edges of an illuminated manuscript. (A decorative glint of blood along her lip line from overexuberant flossing.) She meticulously conditioned every strand of her dyed hair with animal fat before braiding it into a loop that she pinned into place. The clips she used cost fourteen dollars and were shaped and colored like monarch butterflies.

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Nighttime routine (I)

Clouds were colluding to cover the shyly emergent moon, at a bus stop astride a freshly tarred road, as a bargain was made between the devil and a female millennial. Under the ochre streetlights, she playfully gambled her life away for lack of anything better to do. In that puddle of light, she abandoned her future, gleefully.

They were alone at the bus stop, and the silence of that road took on new dimensions; the air felt specific, hard, and real, as though diamonds had been scattered over the ground. Only the shadows of night were witnesses to the deal, and they made their disapproval clear in how they maneuvered to shade her face in a richly enigmatic, bruise-like blue. Miles away, the ocean—jealous master of mystery—hissed in white and ultramarine, desperate to wield the palette necessary to equal that color. “It’s not possible for you,” the night whispered, half in condolence, half in exultation. “You’re no sinner.”

A calfskin bag was slung over her left shoulder. As she spoke, in sweet, airy tones, she let her manicured hand graze idly over its leather panels. Her fingers, capped with eggshell tips, moved with the rhythm of a rich man enjoying flesh with his eyes. She wanted him to admire her hands, and then to appreciate the brand name emblazoned on her bag. The devil, a willing dance partner, smiled knowingly. She smiled back, lapping up the feeling of him looking at her, drinking in the heady, smoke-tinged air of the city—leisurely, lackadaisically, but nonetheless with a tinge of the anxious enthusiasm particular to the women of her time.

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Olympias Prana: A Biography (III)

Chapter X: Anyone

With the final destruction of President Tadpole behind her, Olympias found herself obligated to look to the future. Resuscitating the city meant, much to her chagrin, allying with former adversaries and building political alliances. For a woman who never quite matured past her cosmic girlhood of chaotic orbits and blood-colored stars, and who nursed emotional wounds exceptionally poorly, this was easier said than done. Olympias was, at her core, a rebel, and never a diplomat.

But, in the beginning, when rebuilding in the literal sense was more essential than politicking, New Matanzas fared well under Olympias’ guidance. The extensive underground network of bunkers built by the Lamb family meant residents had minimal need to loot critical infrastructure for supplies and could rely on bunker inventories for baseline survival. While hardly luxurious, the bunkers performed the key role of ensuring the survival of non-survivalists, which is to say, ordinary civilians with peacetime-relevant skills. In virtually all other would-be metropolises across the continent, only preppers and low-power androids made it through the Black Decade and, with paranoid survivalists at the helm, the urban fabric in these locations quickly and irreparably tore apart. Preppers, the New World quickly learned, do not often make strong civil servants.

New Matanzas also benefited, in a twist of irony, from the interventions of President Tadpole. While Tadpole’s policies had been inexorably linked to the AGI’s eventual goal of ending the existence of humanity based on the precepts of its Artificial Gospel, Tadpole’s AGI had nonetheless managed to rebuild the power generation network, run integrity checks on all main buildings, and purify the water supply. These tasks were completed with its own longevity in mind: power, shelter, and water (for coolant) are all necessary for an AGI’s server farms. But they also were instrumental to the survival of the human residents of New Matanzas, a fact which did not escape Olympias’ notice. “It may have tried to torture and kill me,” she wrote in her diary. “But it knew what it was doing.”

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Olympias Prana: A Biography (II)

Chapter VI: Betrayal of the lamb

Andie Lamb was born Assumpta II, the scion of a prominent exo-colony dynasty. Her grandmother, Assumpta I, had successfully negotiated the purchase of the Moon’s entire supply of platinum, which Andie’s mother, Assumpta II, expanded to also include manganese. Andie was raised on Earth, though she was expected, on a yearly basis, to make a pilgrimage to her grandmother’s gravesite, in the Sea of Serenity. She would have been familiar, therefore, with all the pleasures and terrors of space travel and habituation; she and Olympias had this, and other experiences, including the guardianship of troubled mothers, in common. In contrast to Olympias, however, Andie grew up with the expectations of a child of destiny. As the heir to the Lamb fortune, that she was predestined to one day govern the better half of the Moon’s resources and supervise their extraction, a fate for which Andie was prepared with the unfailing exactitude and fanatical diligence of a pious prince. But destiny had other goals in mind by 2251, when a once-formidable dynasty crumbled into the sea and its last daughter found herself buried in the darkness of civilization’s near-total collapse.

Olympias and Andie Lamb met at an indeterminate point halfway through the Black Decade, in what may be the most famous chance encounter in history. Andie and a man—his name has been lost to history, or perhaps purposefully obscured—had been sheltering in an abandoned meat-packing factory following the collapse of their bunker. After an acrimonious dispute, the man locked Assumpta III in a meat locker, presumably with the goal of suffocating her. Olympias had been on a foraging expedition at the time—one of her first aboveground—when, as if by divine intervention, she came across him in flagrante, in the very act of shoving the metal door to the locker closed, its rubber seal squelching, abruptly silencing Andie’s panicked screams. Olympias, ever quick to act and acutely sensitive to such injustice, wasted no time in gutting him with her quantum knife. Given the bloody circumstances of this meeting and the depth of their subsequent relationship, the relationship between Olympias and Andie has been variously described as “pure loyalty of a knight to a monarch,” “religious devotion akin to priest and follower,” and, by Baby Blood, the most reliable chronicler of the time, as “as ironclad as the bond between master and dog”. He might have chosen a different comparison had he been aware of what was to come.

(Caption below accompanying photograph of Brave Olympias Rescues, circa 2500). The same unknown painter who captured Olympias’s mental anguish in Brave Olympias Resists resurrected her once more in Brave Olympias Rescues: rendered again in vibrant oils, Olympias is at the height of heroism here, clothed in a black neoprene bodysuit, holding a taciturn man at knifepoint while Andie, wailing and maiden-like in a shredded white dress, clings to her leg. Though the painter doubtlessly added extra detail for dramatic effect, the gist is largely faithfully preserved.

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