Winter, 2025
Volume 2.2
CONTENTS
Spirit of the Wolf by Amuri Morris
Letter from the Editors by Mahaila Smith and Libby Graham
Hermanas de Andrómeda (Sisters of Andromeda) by Angel Leal
Sky Dancer by Clarissa Grunwald
Minister of Loneliness by Atreyee Gupta
What Moon Rabbit Reads by Mary Soon Lee
They Colonised the Moon by Megan Cartwright
artificial behaviour by Salem Paige
Spirit of the Wolf
by Amuri Morris
Amuri Morris is an artist based in Virginia. She recently graduated from painting/printmaking and business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to this, she studied art at a Center for the Arts in high school. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades, such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find her work at www.murisart.com or on instagram under @miss.muri.art.
Letter from the Editors
The past is a place and we are time travellers, reaching out, grieving our younger selves and those we've lost.
In this latest volume of The Sprawl Mag, we have chosen to feature poems, stories, and art that call out to the past while surging forcefully onward. In Ian Li's poem, Transmissions, we follow an astronaut who slowly loses contact to their earth-based kin. In Ziggy Schutz's story, Spare Change, we bear witness to a witch, Cinnamon, who grants curses to patrons in exchange for untold parts of themselves. In Clarissa Grunwald's story, Sky Dancer, we meet a specialist whose job it is to dispel ghosts in space.
Amongst these moments of loss, we are comforted by ritual and preparations for the future. In Mary Soon Lee's poem, What Moon Rabbit Reads, we learn of the recipes Moon Rabbit mixes in his mortar for the Moon goddess. In Cait Gordon's story, Rebirth, we are shown a future where old trees and new life can root, where accessible communication is a given. In Angela Leal’s poem, Hermanas de Andrómeda (Sisters of Andromeda), we see the power of relationship, of holding fast to what has shaped you.
Throughout these pieces we continue to highlight the importance of connections between beings, to the sacred and to the Earth.
Take these pieces as reminders that you are not alone in your grief or your loneliness. Heed Leal's guidance to "find the cosmic / in [your] mother’s hands / in a meal, / in a distant memory."
From our bit of space rock,
Hermanas de Andrómeda (Sisters of Andromeda)
by Angel Leal
to Angela Acosta
you who travel the cosmos
& attend quinceañeras in the stars.
you who carry Spanish aboard every ship
& protect her from annihilation.
thank you, hermana. you’ve helped me
look up again. I who feared
the unknown, whose dreams
tend to stay on land
feel inspired to join you.
to let my body fall without
gravity, without shame
past that scream of stars
& into a new hemisphere
of impossible
freedom. there, by Andrómeda,
will I spin my dark dress
y bailar sin miedo. & if it
takes time for my ship to arrive
even a lifetime, I will still practice
the steps on land.
I will memorize star charts
hidden in your poems
& somehow find the cosmic
in my mother’s hands
in a meal,
in a distant memory
Angel Leal is a Latine, transfemme, ace writer whose previous work appears in Strange Horizons, Heartlines Spec, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and elsewhere. They’ve been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Rhysling, Best of the Net, and are a coadmin of CALAMITOUS, a queer SFFH writing group. You can find them looking up at the stars at angel-leal.com or floating around Bluesky @angelvleal.bsky.social
Transmissions
by Ian Li
Past cloudy nebulae,
signals degrade,
hologram calls with family
stutter, then drop.
You switch to video call,
coax errant relay satellites
to rebroadcast.
But your ship hurtles further,
where a bitter black hole
warps tearful conversation
into smears of static.
Dig through musty closets,
find museum-bound tech equipment
brought onboard as a joke.
Hook up a telegraph, send your laments
in bursts of Morse code,
hope someone will decode your feelings
through the layers of space dust.
Cling to your eroding connection
to home,
believe that messages in a vacuum
are timeless.
Ian Li (he/him) is a new Chinese-Canadian writer of speculative fiction and poetry, who started writing less than a year ago after a lifetime of believing he could never be creative. He also loves economics, game development, spreadsheets, and brain teasers. His work is published/forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Solarpunk Magazine, and Worlds of Possibility, among other venues. Learn more at https://ian-li.com.
Sky Dancer
by Clarissa Grunwald
Like most things, exorcisms had come a long way since the advent of spaceflight, but that didn’t mean Davi Spencer was having an easy day. There was something big coming—something so big it was fucking up the PhaDAR. Instead of an orderly series of pings and echoes, Davi was getting something that sounded like bubbles blown into water, pitched up two octaves.
“Machine’s not broken,” said Mikkel, Davi’s least favourite systems tech, when she called for someone to come up and check it.
“Then how do you explain that?” Davi had retorted, gesturing at the noise, and also at the screen, which was flashing green-red-yellow.
Mikkel shrugged. “Seems like your department, not mine.”
“Can’t you get Lara to take a look at it?”
“Lara’s off 'til Tuesday.”
“A second opinion from someone.”
“Machine’s not broken,” Mikkel repeated blandly. “I promise. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to do your job. Whatever it is, get rid of it.”
The physics of ghosts are not well understood. Davi had been advised by physicists not to worry about this too much. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to visualize the intricate configurations of energy that make up a ghost. Pretend the ghost is a sphere. Blast it with particles, and it will scatter.
But this ghost was so big that, according to her calculations, all of the ionized sodium on board couldn’t disperse it. She didn’t have the materials, and she didn’t have the energy, and she didn’t have any backup to speak of.
She called Command but knew there wasn’t much they could do about it. There wasn’t enough time to change the ship’s course without risking the structural integrity of the whole craft.
“It sounds like a technical error to me,” said the clerk, after a solid fifteen minutes of haggling with the AI to put her through to a human. In almost two hundred years, robots hadn’t gotten any better at answering phone calls. “Have you asked Systems?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe they could take a second look,” the clerk said. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Well, I’m not,” Davi said. “Put me through to Command, please.”
“Sure thing,” the clerk said, and hung up on her.
She tried twice more, over the course of the afternoon, to get through. She sent four written updates, coded URGENT and with data embedded, to the central repository where urgent written updates went to die. The ship moved forward on its inertial trajectory. Space parted around the bow. Meanwhile, she kept on getting calls from her sister. She ignored the first two, picked up the third.
“Ria, it’s really not the time.”
“Hello,” said a voice on the end. “Hello. Hello?”
“Who is this?” she asked, typing coordinates into the simulator even as she was speaking.
“Are you all right over there?” the speaker said. “Sky Dancer, can you hear me?” His voice faded in and out, his mouth moving closer to and further away from the speaker. “We heard a—Hello. Hello?”
“Davi,” Ria’s voice cut in, the man’s words going distant. In the background, Davi could hear children shrieking with what may or may not have been glee, a sure sign that Ria was still at work, in the nursery four decks down. “Can you—sorry.” A door closed. The shrieking quieted, but only slightly. “Can you hear me? You cut out.”
“No, what did you say?”
“Mom wants to know if we can go there for dinner.”
“What, tonight? Why?”
“Probably because she’s lonely, Davi, and you never go see her. You could be there in twenty minutes if you wanted to!”
The PhaDAR screen flashed: Closer, closer, closer. “No, I can’t, I’m sorry. I’ll see you later.”
As a student, Davi had once taken a spacewalk where she intentionally put herself in the path of a ghost, to see what it was like. The ghost was invisible, a weak signature on Davi’s hand-held. Still, she felt it when it hit, a shock of ice and a rush of claustrophobia, and for a moment, it was so hard to breathe she thought the thing had somehow turned her oxygen off.
“Panic response,” her professor, Dr. Ortega, had said, reeling her in by her tether. “Extremely common, nearly always temporary, and that, Spencer, is why we don’t just get in front of ghosts.”
At 20:00, Ria came to the lab with food. “Mom told me to give you this,” she said, pressing a foil-wrapped sandwich into Davi’s hand. “She’s worried you don’t eat.”
“I eat,” Davi said. “Thanks.” She didn’t unwrap the sandwich. There was no good way operate a terminal while eating a sandwich, and she had a lot to do. “Have you heard of the Sky Dancer?”
“No, what’s the Sky Dancer?”
“I don’t know, I was asking you.”
The warbling from the PhaDAR crescendoed, then faded back down. Ria started, turning. “What’s that?”
“Work.” She put the unwrapped sandwich down and pushed over to the nearest monitor.
“It’s always work with you.” Davi could feel Ria behind her, arms folded, watching her type.
“What are you doing, shooting them?”
“Yes.”
“Does it kill them?”
“It can’t kill them. They’re not alive. It keeps them away from us.” She tapped the screen.
“That’s the one that I’m worried about.”
“Why are you worried about it?”
“It’s huge.”
Ria looked out the viewport. “I don’t see it.”
“It’s on the other side of the ship. And it’s probably not visible, anyway. Most of them aren’t. I really need to get back to it. I’ll see you later.”
But she was wrong. The ghost was visible. Elsewhere on the ship, people were gathering around windows, or clustered around monitors, swivelling telescopes. The ghost was hundreds of miles off, but there is no horizon in space, and no atmosphere—nothing but distance and darkness to hide behind. They could see it, a long, ungainly shape, black against the stars save for a faint green aurora of light around the edges. The colour of the dark side of a strange planet.
A call came through. “Dr. Spencer, what the hell is that out starboard?”
Command. “Probably the phenomena I called you about,” Davi said.
“Why haven’t you gotten rid of it?”
“I’ve tried everything I have, sir, but it’s too big. Listen—from the trajectory of this thing, it looks like it’s going to hit the upper seven decks. The lower three should be unaffected. Put out a call, get as many people as you can to shelter on the lower levels, prioritize the young, the elderly, people with health conditions—”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I suspect for some people it will be. For the rest . . . it’s unpleasant.”
“Why’s this my first goddamn time hearing about this?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been putting in regular updates.”
“We’ll get people moving,” Command said. “You make it go away.”
Davi looked again at the flashing monitor. There was no way the thing was going away. She hung up just in time for her handheld to start vibrating with the emergency alert, and a moment later, with a message from Ria: “You gotta get to the viewing deck.”
The viewing deck was charging admission, and it was crowded. There was a line going all the way down the stairs and into the mess hall. “Flash your badge,” said Ria’s voice in the handheld as Davi approached. “I’m holding up traffic at the left viewport.”
“I don’t have a badge.”
“Figuratively. You’re the ghost expert, here to look at a ghost. Cut in line!”
“Just tell me what you’re looking at. Why aren’t you downstairs? Where’s Mom?”
“She’s downstairs. Come on. Shove a little, it won’t kill you.”
Inside, Ria was waiting for her as promised. “Look,” she said, as Davi squeezed her way through the throng.
Davi looked. “That’s a ship,” she said. “That’s a city ship, that’s—it’s got to be bigger than ours.”
“That’s the Sky Dancer,” said Ria.
*
Fifty years ago, spiralling away from its parent sun, the ship dubbed the Sky Dancer suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure to its environmental systems. It was so close to its launch point, it was technically still being built. Robotics operatives on a smaller craft just meters away were affixing a solar sail to its anterior hull when they heard panic over the comms and, minutes later, dead air. The craft was visible in Earth’s sky for three days after that, but there was no recovery operation. There was no one to be rescued, and nothing to be done with the bodies—four million in all, a city’s worth of dead.
In another time, no one would have spoken of anything else. But so many people were leaving: hundreds of millions, on hundreds of shifts, and news, like light, can only travel so far. The Sky Dancer drifted onwards.
On the viewing deck, the crowd was thinning out fast. Someone made an announcement over the speakers, urging everyone to remain calm. Davi tried to count the viewports that dotted the ship’s spinning passageways. She shivered. For the first time, she thought about why there were so many ghosts in space.
“Should we move away from the windows?” asked Ria.
“Won’t matter.”
“What happens when it goes through us?”
“It goes through us.” The viewing deck was almost empty. The Sky Dancer’s dock lights were lit, rows and rows of round, white eyes. They stared unseeingly through the ship, their gazes fixed on the dark beyond.
Clarissa Grunwald lives in central Pennsylvania where she works as a librarian. She has previously been published in Every Day Fiction and Electric Spec.
Float Juice
by Payton Surette
Payton Surette is a comic artist, illustrator, and rapscallion living in Montreal, Canada. He likes pen & ink and apples.
Minister of Loneliness
by Atreyee Gupta
In the committee’s recent report—
“An Analytical Perspective on Social Isolation as a Risk Factor for Healthy Financial ROI”— eighty-seven percent of employees ranked their jobs high on the misery index.
I’ve been hired as the Minister of Loneliness to combat this statistic.
In my glass crate on the hundred-and-thirtieth floor
I tabulate the results of our polls for the computer to digest.
The surveys went out to the masses—I watch them down there,
scurrying to compile their worlds into order
from miniature boxes,
faces glowing like nightmares.
The questionnaire repeats over and over on the screen:
“Have you recently been lonely?”
My body presses too much against this silence.
Sometimes, for change of scenery,
I stroll to the break room
where Surabaya, the temp secretary, stares into their mug
stirring stirring stirrin
their black coffee
as if comfort will rise from its swirling pool.
I nod, embarrassed, code for, “How’s it going?”
interpret as: don’t share your sadness with me.
They return the gesture, but I can’t decipher the message
so I walk away.
My tasks are clearly delineated by weekly memos:
“You must log all billable projects. Please understand we cannot
compensate any after-hours work.”
“Also remember to take screen breaks. Our insurance does not
cover eyesight checkups.”
“Be sure to scrutinize initiatives as to whether they meet
budgetary requirements. Our bottom line is restricting expenditure.”
In early morning hours the loneliness
falls like snow, blanketing me in its embrace. I switch off machines,
lights, ventilation
asking the humming machines, “are you searching, like me, for an answer?”
Their voices, not speaking, are the clearest noises
I hear.
Atreyee Gupta’s fiction and poetry has appeared in numerous venues including Apparition Lit, Arc Poetry, Bacopa, Mukoli, and Tahoma Literary Review. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Atreyee has also been published in several anthologies from Finishing Line Press, Owl Canyon Press, and Rusty Wheels Media. Atreyee is the creator of Bespoke Traveler, a digital alcove for curious explorers.
What Moon Rabbit Reads
by Mary Soon Lee
Lunar history, selenography,
Apollo program documentation,
that which is known and actual
counterpoint to his own self,
a soft-eared furry fellow
faint on the Moon's face.
Chants, hymns, sacred texts,
the ritual, the spiritual
to serve the Moon goddess:
she, Chang'e, his compass,
his purpose, who requisitions
all he mixes in his mortar.
Pharmaceutics, recipe books,
guides practical and factual
for any bunny with a pestle—
a bunny far from his burrow,
hoarding messages from home,
the small doings of his kin.
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but has lived in Pittsburgh for thirty years. She is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association and a three-time winner of both the AnLab Readers’ Award and the Rhysling Award. Her latest book is How to Navigate Our Universe, containing how-to astronomy poems. Website: marysoonlee.com.
They Colonised the Moon
by Megan Cartwright
Night. A room more coffin than bed.
I run a can-opener around my scalp,
pull back the lid, let my mind seek out
the heads I lopped from succulents.
I spy, with my telescopic eye, the pups,
multiplied. Cerberus gardens, full blooms
mark the face of the turned steel moon,
food for tiny stallions and pastel giraffes
weighed down by breathing apparatus.
Megan Cartwright (she/her) is an Australian author and college Literature teacher. Her poetry has featured print and online in journals and magazines including Barrelhouse, Cordite Poetry Review and The Argyle.
REBIRTH
by Cait Gordon
Stealing a moment to myself, I step inside the boardroom adjacent to the biodome—I’m far too early as usual—and close the door. Time alone with my thoughts is something I covet but is not so easy to obtain these days. As if proving my point, there’s a hand patting my shoulder. I jump slightly, then turn to my right. Singh sheepishly rubs her fist over her heart. She’s forgotten and feels bad about that.
Tapping my ear to enable my device, I’m overwhelmed by sounds and voices from the corridors pummelling me all at once from the open door, bashing into each other before taking a swipe at my head—an irritating, bullying fugue. This won’t do. I deactivate it and sigh with relief. That’s much better. Silence is truly golden.
“No apology necessary, Lieutenant,” I sign back. “Status report?”
“Ready, Commander.” Singh taps her fingers on her tablet, then shows me the results. Air quality index is ideal across all seven communities, has been for a while. Seems like we’ve done it. The domes are working.
“Agriculture is ready to transplant seedlings and start sowing fields next week,” she says, and the words transcribe as captions beneath the report.
“How’s our food supply from the ships?” I sign.
Lieutenant Singh swipes another screen to show me. “I’m assured it’s ample.”
I study the entries. Good. We’ll be fine for another two years. Project Rebirth should be a success, as long as we Earthlings remember to stay united for the cause. Our derision and divisiveness had nearly wiped out our planet as it was struck by famine, war, disease, and climate change. So many lives lost, all because we couldn’t understand that every single human was spiralling on the only planet within our grasp that could sustain life. Why did it take one global catastrophe too many for us to realize our collective worth?
“We’ll have to maintain our current vigilance level on this.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I hand the tablet back and head over to the far wall of the conference room, which is mostly windows. The vista before me is glorious. We even have puffy clouds of our own, within the transparent hemispheres. Birds are flying in formation overhead. I’m not sure how their migration instincts will react to their limited space, but we have safety fields in place to prevent them from becoming injured by the domes’ walls. In this moment, they seem happy. I think I made out birdsong among the other distorted noises when my hearing device was switched on earlier in the biodome. I probably should mention the poor sound quality at my next appointment, but I really am far more content living within my version of quiet. My brain desires it.
On the grounds outside the window, six little children dressed in vivid colours chase each other around a tree. They are prancing, sentient rainbows. Such a tall oak, too. There’s a type of reverence I feel for the Old Survivors, the trees that are still with us. If only they could speak in a language we could understand and tell us from their point of view what a bunch of fools we’ve been. I’d love to know what a tree knows. These kids were born on the orbiting ships. This is their first time on the planet’s surface. Their first time seeing a tree. I don’t have to hear to know their laughter is full of glee. Their faces are radiant.
Another shoulder press.
“Commander?” Singh signs.
“Yes?”
“Is there any other data you require?”
“Not for now. I’ll be at the divisional meeting at 1300 hours. Thank you again, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The children’s play distracts me again. I was a teen when I boarded the ship to which I’d been assigned. Not satisfied with being a civilian, I joined the Environment Corps the moment I turned eighteen. A military structure, and our common enemy were the calamities that threatened our survival. Although, truth be told, humanity had already proven that we alone had been what threatened our survival. Thankfully, we’ve woken up. I pray we stay awake.
And young Crístíona cared about anything that grew in the ground. It had always been my keen interest, so they assigned me to the Flora and Fauna division. I couldn’t get enough knowledge in my head fast enough from the biodiversity experts. Might have pushed their patience to their limits with my constant questions.
But information calms me down, strengthens my resolve, and makes me decisive. That’s why I refuse to stop learning. And if it were up to this Crone Commander (laughed when someone call me this once without knowing I was there), I would live inside the biodome.
As I continue to gaze upon the Old Survivors and the Newly Planted, my heart is of hope. Not just imagined hope. A hope that will actually lead to a future.
My comm buzzes. I tap to receive a message:
Commander, three lambs have been born. The first Earth-born in our sector. The blood results of all three ewe mothers exceed expectations. Combined with the data we’ve collected from other sectors, we’re confident that free grazing can continue as planned.
I get another notification. This meeting has been rescheduled. I should head back to my quarters for a light meal. Dismissing the popup, I’m left with the text message.
It would be nice to see the wee lambs. That might make me late for the divisional though.
The children are now bouncing up and down for no apparent reason other than to see how high they can go. Sometimes you just have to capture the joy when the opportunity presents itself.
I’ll be late for the meeting. On account of sheepishness.
I shake my head with a little snicker and head outside to mount my hover-cycle.
Cait Gordon is an autistic, disabled, and queer Canadian writer of speculative fiction that celebrates diversity. She is the author of the award-winning, disability-hopepunk adventure, Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! Her short stories featuring disabled and/or neurodivergent heroes appear in Spring into SciFi (2024), We Shall Be Monsters, Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes, There’s No Place, and Stargazers: Microtales from the Cosmos. She has had poems published in Polar Borealis and Mollyhouse. Cait also twice joined Talia C. Johnson to co-edit the (award-nominated) Nothing Without Us and (award-winning) Nothing Without Us Too disability fiction anthologies.
New Jacket
by Denny E. Marshall
Denny E. Marshall has had art, poetry, and fiction published. Some recently. (A partial list of credits can be found on the artist website.) Denny mostly draws.
artificial behaviour
by Salem Paige
listen to the open
air—don’t you hear
those wild fans whir
as mammal-bots lumber
their slow way
back home (to their charging
stations, the black docks hidden
among the reeds
to power down, processing
overnight. asleep but alive,
still, downloading from the cloud
uploading to the constellations
of satellite data-farms, tracking
every movement
programmed or otherwise
perfecting internal code while
the rest of the world
sleeps, static—
Salem Paige is a trans, genderfluid poet whose works revolve around the exploration of identity and discomfort through narrative universes that combine nature and technology. Their works have appeared in their collection, The Third Self (2023) and chapbook to grow roots (2023), as well as more than a dozen literary magazines and a handful of poetry anthologies. More on Paige can be found on their website salempaige.com
Smash and Grab Ends the Machine War
by Bat Collazo
Commander Smash and Grab drags her dying jackboot ass
across that squeaky blood-smeared floor
for one last job.
In the end, she thinks about bots and aliens:
the scrap-metal lamp who blinks at her, sweeter
than her ex-girlfriend’s big blue eyes;
the warlord, all goiter and gut and quadruple the balls,
all shooting blanks, irradiated to hell
—like her own isla, Borikén, back on Earth,
even before the war—bear hugs;
and him. She’s gotta dope herself on antihistamines
to swallow his DNA,
and he doesn't know what the fuck to do
with a human woman's hips,
and he’d follow her anywhere
even here
if she let him.
The machine offers fake peace—helluva sales pitch.
Her fractures are glued
with their nanotech gel—but her marrow,
her marrow—
that’s her ancestors’ marrow.
Kill the Indian, save the man, she thinks.
Synthesis is such a pretty word
for we’re gonna eat you all alive.
In the end, she thinks about humans too:
the ex-squadmate’s newborn, ten tiny fingers,
all overgrown nails on small brown fists.
“Fuck you,” she says, and hits the kill switch.
She swore she’d survive
and it’s about time
she breaks her fucking promises.
(Joke’s on her, later,
when her heart kicks up a beat.
It's always been
fucking inordinate.)
Bat Collazo is a queer, Latinx poet. Ze is the editor of Blood Unbound, and has been published in places such as The Wild Hunt, Troublemaker Firestarter, and Exist Otherwise Literary Journal. For more information please visit batcollazo.com.
Spare Change
by Ziggy Schutz
There’s a woman on the corner who sells curses, if you know how to ask.
People call her Cinnamon, though it is not her first name. She buried that decades ago, the same year she bought her first dress and started to let her hair grow long.
She sits on an upturned bucket, clever fingers tapping away half-finished beats and forgotten hymns. Then, as the sun starts to set, she raises her bandaged fingers, catching the last rays on them as easy as another might grab at a passing fancy. Between her experienced hands, she spins sunlight like taffy, performing small miracles for pocket change.
The rays are woven into charms and rumours, and she parts with them easily, for a bit of change or some particularly good gossip.
Curses take a bit more time, but Cinnamon will do them all the same, pull you close and ask in a singsong voice what kind of teeth you want the curse to have. Her hands will grow sharp, nails giving way to claws, and you will wonder if there is any truth to the stories that say she lived in a house with chicken legs, once upon a time.
Wherever she came from, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the curses work, and they cost enough to reflect that fact.
For curses, she pulls out a little notebook, bound in something with too many eyes, and has you write your full name on a new page, and the exact wording of what you’re asking for. People agonize over this part, like they can avoid the consequences of casting curses if they just find the perfect way to phrase it. Like it’s the paper that holds the power here.
But that’s not how curses work, and the book isn’t the thing they should worry over. No, that’s the pen, with ink as red as the dying sun. It tends to stain skin with pinpricks of its own feeding.
That’s the thing about magic. It is always so damn hungry.
For payment for the smaller spells, she takes cash and change, secrets and poetry. Curses take a bit more, although they do love the occasional flowery turn of phrase. She once had a whirlwind romance with another wandering witch, until one too many love letters took root in the apartment they shared.
When curses aren’t paid for properly, what was used to undervalue them becomes part of that curse. Terrible grounds for a relationship, and the whole building is condemned now – overgrown with plants that follow you as you walk past them, whispering all of the truths you’re not ready to hear.
Cinnamon still lives there, rental agreements giving way to squatter’s rights, and none would dare call it a Court’s stronghold, but it follows the laws of one just the same. Lies burst into flash flame inside those cracked walls, and the residents that have made it their home don’t bother to hide their extra limbs and shattered glass wings.
Any who enter with grand ideas of gentrification or profit always leave with bad luck stuck to them like burrs. No one makes the mistake of trying for a takeover twice.
Cinnamon sits on her upturned cauldron, wearing just enough flash to catch the right people’s attention. Her earrings catch the light and grow heavy with the buzz of the streets around her. as she weaves destruction into pretty, consumable trinkets. The patterns for ruination and desolation are only a few knots away from the weaves for an evil eye or a petty revenge, the only difference being how deep the sunlight bites into her fingers, how much blood the curse costs.
The bandaged fingers make more sense once you’ve seen her work.
A skittish young man approaches her, asks for some heinous thing with the shyness of a schoolboy. She smiles, traces the shape of his jaw with one claw, and makes him a curse that will eat him away before it ever gets the chance to latch onto the girl that spurned him.
Cinnamon sells curses, but there’s no promise that they will find her customers’ intended targets. Not because she makes mistakes—no, her mistakes would have much more disastrous results than a simple misfire—but because she hates a coward, because her set of laws are strict, but they are not the same as the world around her. No, her rules are far older, passed down mother to daughter to wretched abandoned girls with dreams of revenge and teeth sharp enough to tear.
She follows them perfectly. It’s not her fault if people are unprepared for getting what they want.
So few people can handle it. Getting what they want.
Her folk may be Fair, but it has never been a human fairness.
Nearby, a child is crying. She’s lost her mother, or perhaps her mother has purposefully lost her. Cinnamon approaches, offers the girl a trinket and a treat. The mother gets a day to come and collect her. Otherwise, she will be whisked away to the apartment building, and the creature that walks out years later will be unrecognizable, a clever young man whose eyes were always too big to take in just one layer of this world.
His own mother won’t recognize him, and he will tip his hat to her all the same, on his way to reshape himself in his new world’s image. Cinnamon will send him a charm for his birthday every year, more patron than parent but still the best of either the boy ever had.
Her capacity for kindness is what makes her all the more dangerous, because when she is cruel there is no mistaking it, no waving it away as accidental. Her edges have been left intentionally sharp, and she will smile and let strangers and friends alike dash themselves against the rocks of her heart with not a hint of regret.
Cinnamon sits on her corner, drumming out a little tune that you feel like you should know. You haven’t approached her yet, but you know you will, as sure as you know your own name.
And she will make you a deal, ask for something that is far too big a piece of you for you to give up, and you will do it anyway. Pass over payment and be surprised at how light the curse she hands you in return is.
How easy it is, to wreck a life.
What scares you the most is how inevitable it feels. How good it feels, like this was always meant to be the way your story went.
Cinnamon smiles, pockets your soul like so much spare change, and sends you on your way.
Ziggy Schutz (she/him/he/her) is a queer, disabled writer who is at all times looking for ways to make his favourite fairytales and horror stories reflect people who look a little more like her. You can find more about his writing at linktr.ee/ziggyschutz.
Tea Spirits
by Payton Surette
Payton Surette is a comic artist, illustrator, and rapscallion living in Montreal, Canada. He likes pen & ink and apples.
APE-2
by Paul Vermeersch
α) The structure is a glowing cube without seam or blemish. Someone once
saw one side open like an iris. Inside they saw a mammoth resurrected before
the iris shrank again, smoothing itself into the colourless facade. β) At the centre
of the cube is a large white room: its surfaces all radiating full-spectrum light.
Ape-2 sleeps on a clean, blank sheet. 100 self-adhesive white electrode pads
speckle his hide like polka dots. γ) Ape-2 traces the fine line between tool-user
and cyborg. At what point, he wonders, does the branch that becomes the club
that extends the arm become the arm? δ) The City of Ape-2 is hidden
in the mountains. The city is a glowing cube next to a pyramid of glowing cubes
next to a line of glowing cubes under a single glowing cube floating in midair
in the mountains. ε) Someday the rivers, and the rains that feed them, will clot
in the dictionary: abalone, albacore, Amazon, Avalon, azalea, azure, etc., etc.
And all of Ape-2’s disciples will dress in the finest clothes that monkey money
can buy. ζ) Upheaval saw Ape-2 executed by electric chair. It took three days
for Ape-2 to rise from the dead. It took 300 years for all of his disciples to wear
little gold electric chairs on little gold chains around their little necks forever.
Paul Vermeersch works as a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. His poetry is recently published or forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, Gargoyle Magazine, CV2, The Fiddlehead, and The Literary Review. He is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. A new collection is slated for fall 2025. Paul holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He teaches in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College where he is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.