first time. It was on the third day, as I was looking for something, anything to drink so I could keep forgetting, I came upon a decanter. It was crystal, with a large amethyst set into the stopper, and the liquid inside was black. I set it on the counter, seeing in the corner of my eye that enigmatic gray lady. I turned to her, and between us passed a silent moment of understanding. Taking a glass down from the cabinet, one of few I had not yet broken, I poured out a toast. A single tear dropped from beneath her veil, and I turned away, walking through the kitchen and into the entrance hall once more. I averted my eyes from the thing on the ground; this was not them. This didn’t count. Outside, past bleached out walls, across long dead grass, I sat down at the edge of the lake. It was so peaceful there, oblivious. Raising my glass, I toasted not to
the sun, not to love, or light, but to them, as I remembered. My friends. There exists, I believe now more than ever, a distinctive penultimate moment of death. One’s soul has just begun to depart this life, and move to the next, but we remain fully conscious. As the minutes’ pass, the hearing is the first to go. The once clear sounds of the birds becoming hollow
Jackson Gierhart
and muted. The eyes soon follow, vignetting to a beautiful shade of tinted purple, aligning blood with the deep blues of the sky. In these moments, death is not sad. Death is not evil, but an artist on the canvas of the senses. Deprived of my senses, I could feel the poison. ~ Ethan Pratt
The Town of Southbridge
Content warning: This piece contains violence, incest, cannibalism, vomiting, and seizures. The town of Southbridge was north of the state line, east of the salt lake, and, ironically, south of nothing but hay fields. Despite its seemingly simple directions, it had taken me and my sister nearly two days to find it. Mother’s diary had not been specific; the descriptions of the town had been detailed but the location was vague and foggy at best. In the end, Clarisse and I found it only by chance. Our car had broken down and our map showed no nearby towns, only a blank dot four miles to the north. So we had set forth until a dingy, dustcovered sign cheerily announced our arrival at our destination. The town was small and quaint, and not nearly as bright as mother had described it. The streets were covered in dust, the pavement cracked, not from snow and cold as we were used to in the east, but by the heat of the sun. I remember Clarisse kicking at a stone and mumbling about how it was old and decrepit. While by no means new, I would hardly call it decrepit, and I was sure to remind Clarisse that while it wasn’t the cities of the east, it was the place our mother had been born. As we ventured nearer to the heart of the town, Clarisse fussed about the heat and fiddled with her fingers declaring that something was ‘off.’ While I wouldn’t exactly disagree, I had to admit that the town was rather empty. Dust-covered cars lined the street, and the air was heavy with the sort of silence only found in the vast farm fields of the midwest. So far, of all the buildings we could see, there were only three for the public, a bar, an inn, and a general store. I gestured towards the store and she nodded. *** I don’t remember much of our mother, simply that she was a paranoid woman with thin black hair and brown eyes so faded and brittle they almost seemed like parchment. My clearest memory of her was of the three of us huddled on Clarisse and my bed, Mother’s eyes roving the darkness as she repeated the words ‘Beds are 59
