An exploration of the natural and unnatural factors that shape consumer tastes (and why banana candies taste like that) for Cake Zine’s Summer 2024 issue, Volume 5: “Candy Land.”

The hospital is full of women. Mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends all caring and giving to parents, children, siblings, spouses, strangers. It reminds Lindy of what Sister Therese told her in the fourth grade: “Women have a special gift for showing God’s love.” Lindy feels lucky to count herself among these loving women.

Collected in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Edited Anthology and the Brave New Weird Award for Best Anthology. Edited by Jolie Toomajan, presented by Cosmic Horror Monthly and benefitting the Chicago Abortion Fund. Available digitally or in print.

Whisk together buttermilk, spittle, salt, and pepper. Add in chicken pieces and let marinate for an hour. Use this time to chew your High John and perhaps say a prayer.

Read over at Deathcap & Hemlock.

The angel’s son plucks the feathers from his back, his arms. It’s bloody work, each downy pinion pried free, slow and agonizing, leaving crimson stains on the tile, but he’s used to it.

Read over at Dark Moments.

AI-assisted writing (via predictive keyboard) with Botnik Studios, including this piece in The Guardian.

The history of cats in Europe and North America is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Really, no history is. The story of the cat is one of violence, black magic, fire, and cruelty.

Read over at The Toast.

For most of my life I thought it was normal that Vladimir Nabokov’s name was always ink-blue and ivory, that A is a lipstick-scarlet letter, that the word opium is the color of a pomegranate and N was the same brown as the word November. That a song could smell like tobacco and vetiver and bitter orange, a taste so thick that you could feel it smeared across your tongue. I thought that everyone saw the alphabet laid out in front of them in a wild array of hues, with the more vivid colors at the beginning and the deepest colors living in the middle, then finally fading out towards blacks and grays. After all, if other people didn’t see the letters like that, then why did they make refrigerator magnets all those different colors? I thought it was such a common thing that nobody ever bothered to talk about it.

Read over at The Toast.

My wife was a mermaid first, before she was a woman. We met at a friend’s concert in a dingy bar with a sticky floor. She was in a wheelchair, a blanket over her legs despite the weather. “I’ve been saving up for the operation,” she announced over the clanging music, flinging back the plaid blanket. Underneath was her scaly tail, blue-green and iridescent, wrapped in a black miniskirt.

Read over at In Bantam.