Monstroddities

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The following is a work of fiction; names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are fictitious. Any similarities to actual persons living or dead, events, places and locations is purely coincidental.

This edition first published 2022

© 2022 Sliced Up Press.

Web: sliceduppress.com / Twitter: @sliceduppress

A New and Different Hunger © Tiffany Morris, In All Other Respects Resembles a Bull © Sarah Peploe, Laws of Contraction © Joe Koch, My Love, My Love, My Love © Ai Jiang, The Sin Eater's Wife © Avra Margariti, Cabal of the Homunculi © Pedro Iniguez, Sonata for Restless Spirits © Lorenzo Crescentini (translation by Amanda Blee), The Devil's Footprints © Tabatha Wood, Rough Music © Die Booth, Black Hole Castle © Lorraine Schein, Last Meal © Angela Sylvaine, Sticky Sweet © Caitlin Marceau, Cul-de-Sac © Stephanie Rabig, The Loneliness of Malabron © Basile Lebret, In the Woods, Somewhere © Maxx Fidalgo, Mother; Microbes © H.V. Patterson, Regretfully, © Maija Haavisto, Asleep Afire © Sam Lesek, Rapid Inverse Hypertrichosis © Eve Harms, Detachment © Andrés Menéndez, Quick, Think of a Number Between None and Dead © David Sandner, Ceramic Smile © A. Katherine Black

CONTENTS

A New and Different Hunger

by Tiffany Morris

In All Other Respects Resembles a Bull

by Sarah Peploe

Laws of Contraction

by Joe Koch

My Love, My Love, My Love

by Ai Jiang

The Sin Eater's Wife

by Avra Margariti

Cabal of the Homunculi

by Pedro Iniguez

Sonata for Restless Spirits

by Lorenzo Crescentini 

The Devil's Footprints

by Tabatha Wood

Rough Music

by Die Booth

Black Hole Castle

by Lorraine Schein

Last Meal

by Angel Sylvaine

Sticky Sweet

by Caitlin Marceau

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Cul-De-Sac

by Stephanie Rabig

The Loneliness of Malabron

by Basile Lebret

In The Woods, Somewhere

by Maxx Fidalgo

Mother; Microbes

by H.V. Patterson

Regretfully,

by Maija Haavisto

Asleep Afire

by Sam Lesek 

Rapid Inverse Hypertrichosis

by Eve Harms

Detachment

by Andrés Menéndez

Quick, Think of a Number Between None and Dead

by David Sandner

Ceramic Smile

by A. Katherine Black

Author Biographies

Trigger Warnings

A NEW AND DIFFERENT HUNGER

Tiffany Morris

––––––––

There were so many ways to scream. Blood-curdling: deep, immense, primal, rumbling up from the gut. Yelping: fear swallowing itself and spitting back up. A screech: like an eagle, like its prey. A cry: surprise, tears, startled softness.

All of those screams were coming from the field.

A cabin: a mile from the beach. Sighing shoreline. Tall grasses. Plenty of tree cover. If you’d taken a helicopter over it, you’d have seen a jagged, snakelike coast, water coiling and biting at the rocks. The coast eroded and evaporated. Displaced creatures kept moving inland. The homes hadn’t moved—they were safe for the moment.

That’s where she’d first found them. A mile from the beach, her own backyard. A field of silhouettes in the fog. Silhouettes that she knew: graceful, unworldly, powerful.

Horses.

She hadn’t wanted to approach; too much risk of spooking them. She knew that from her childhood, from the summer she’d spent on Aunt Jo’s farm.

She stood, silent, still.

Yes, she knew horses, Aunt Jo had owned five of them: appaloosa, fallabella, breeds with exotic-sounding names. Aunt Jo’s living room was filled with horse-racing trophies and ribbons, gold galloping figurines. It was a world shinier than the bottom of a beer can.

Erin had loved being on that farm, even though it sweltered in the heat and everything stank. It was staggeringly alive: there were wildflowers and bees and hissing barn cats, mean and fat on the bodies of field mice. At night, the barking of coyotes filled the sky.

They’ve made their kill, Aunt Jo would say, a smile spread across her face.

Erin spent her days with Aunt Jo, tending to the horses, marvelling at how her tiny aunt handled the rough work of the farm. Aunt Jo was like no-one Erin had ever seen: ropey muscle and scraggly brown hair flecked with grey. Sunken eyes. Her face was unworldly and beautiful, betraying her unknown origins: Aunt Jo had just turned up beside the river behind the family’s farm, something red and bloodied in the water, her clothes tattered and teeth chattering.

The poor thing couldn’t even speak, her mother had said. We took her in and let the police know, but no-one had ever reported her missing. So, you know, she just became one of us. Things were different then, of course. She would’ve ended up in the system if it happened now.

Erin knew, of course, that that wasn’t the whole story; that Aunt Jo had no memory of where she’d come from, had been prone to night terrors and sleepwalking and disappearing into the inkdark river where the family had found her. She would leave wet and muddied bare footprints from the front step up to her room, scowling as she scrubbed them down when she awakened. Erin, too, was a sleepwalker, though she never seemed to leave the house; she’d wake suddenly, most often at the back door, with no memory of dream or how she had gotten there. The family kept five locks on the door, just in case, armed only before the house went dark with sleep.

After that summer on the farm, leaves sighed and stretched their golden haze over the world and Erin mournfully returned to the city, to school, to a world of homework and bullies and bus routes. Her mother had returned one night from Aunt Jo’s, her voice full of tears and face drawn. Erin sat outside the locked bedroom door and waited for a signal, listened for a return to calm. Her mother’s sobs were interspersed with the croaked snippets of a phone conversation: unidentified, entrails, disappeared. Erin had known what presumed drowned meant. The river had finally taken Jo back.

When they’d gone to the farm to pack up her stuff, most of the traces of Jo had already vanished. Erin went into the barn. The cats had fled. The horses were long gone, the stable silent without them. She peered into one of the stalls. The hay was trampled with hoof prints and matted with pools of dried blood. When she walked down to the river, the sun was slung low on the horizon, and the metallic tang of death writhed in the steady, trickling water.

When Erin stood in that field outside her cabin, the night full of billowing fog and those graceful grazing silhouettes, she wasn’t at all surprised to hear Aunt Jo’s voice.

Look at them, Aunt Jo crooned. Look at those lovely horses.

* * *

Erin hoped the horses would come back in the daylight, where she could be easily seen. She carried a sandwich bag filled with corn kernels, apple slices, anything to coax the horses to her.

There were no farms for miles. How had they gotten there?

She walked along the field, crows circling overhead. She walked through the field and through the trees until she hit the empty shore, where the grey waves broke hard against the large, jagged boulders.

Infinity hummed and sang in the rhythmic crash. Erin sat and chewed on an apple slice, savoring the tart sweetness. The beach stayed empty the whole time she was there, grey on slate on stone. The humid summer air was silver and stinging. She thought again of Aunt Jo, and how similar they’d been: adoptees with somnambulism, odd folks with an intense draw to the water. Missing her aunt was a sharp ache in her side: who knew what kind of person she might have become if she’d grown up with Jo’s company, her influence and empathy. Erin was glad that, like her aunt, she got to live away from the city and its strangling architectures, its alien world of machine noise and crammed bodies; away from those places where she’d never felt she fit.

She left the desolate beach, savoring the dull sunlight as it beat down upon her face.

* * *

Erin drank the last of her glass of wine and placed her dishes in the sink, gazing out the window. Spring peepers sang their chorus. With nightfall, the horses might have returned.

She grabbed the bag of apples and corn from the fridge and enjoyed its coolness against her skin. Taking the flashlight from the counter, she slid the screen door open and walked out into the dark yard. She made her way to the field, where silhouettes bowed and neighed in the deepening haze of night. The spring peepers started and stopped in unison with each step she took. The silence was a breeze breaking through the dark.

Her heart leapt as she moved closer to the horses. The silhouettes stopped and turned to her. The smell of blood carried thick in the humid air. Her stomach clenched. Were they injured?

One silhouette was lying on its side. Erin shone her flashlight over to it. A deep redblack pool soaked into the bleached grass. She moved the light up. The beam was clinical and bright against the wet intestines spilling from the carcass, its splayed-open abdomen.

Erin screamed and stumbled backward. Her hand reached out and hit the side of a horse, its fur sticky and matted with blood. Her hand rolled over its emaciated frame, the jutting bones poking out from under its skin.

This wasn’t right.

Horses