A gallop through the forest without stopping under the moon, but you don’t know how you know such a thing. You angle your neck and groan and scratch your budding antlers on the tree. They grew from your head in moments like a handshake at a stockholder meeting, in the second it takes to snatch a champagne glass from a waiter and what is a stockholder?

The air stagnated in the streets. No, it rotted, like so many leaves in a compost pile. Siran grabbed her oxygen mask off her bedside table and clapped it over her mouth.

The chip salesman lurks in the dark corner of the superstore, handing out three and a half of the Product at a time.

Four-year-old Selka tipped her chair back and fell for a half-second. Half of her soul poured out before she caught herself. 

Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

You’ve scribbled, “Not at this address” on the supermarket advertisements and set them back in the mailbox to send them back. You’ve even waved the mailman down to explain. He is apologetic and says it won’t happen again. It does.

Victim One: 56-year-old male Gary Beary. Balding, supervisor. Assaulted with a desk on the fourth floor of the insurance building on 10th street.

Every autumn, the billions of maple trees turned the entire surface of the 27^th moon a vibrant red. It had happened every year since the settlers of New Earth had landed 362 years ago. Except, this year, Tiradel’s trees had no leaves.

Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Marilka went on so many walks her arms disappeared /
regressing inside her clavicle like two large ropes /

The wind prowled the world, restless, until it skulked through a maple grove on a hill and its memory returned.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

The face in the window /
Much like a small moon /
Pitted and reflecting /
The light from my lamp /

They named me Diana /
they vilify me on their news reports /
they say that I’m insane, a category five /

Something prehistoric, a vast predatory thing, it poses as a tree with root-like talons, and feathers that pass as leaves.

There’s a swing that appears /
on overcast days—not when it rains /
no, and not when it sprinkles, but when the /
geese honk overhead in giant arrows in the sky /

My skin crawled off me onto the washing room’s tile floor, then skittered up the wall.

Nimia pulled her body along the underground tunnel with her muscled arms, one grip at a time. She passed the pods where other Pullers, like herself, worked, their hands plugged into the company interface.