“Many times candles and small fires appeare in the night, and seem to runne vp and downe…” – Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night
Go to the road, my little helpers, bring me flesh and bones. Go to the lake and sit among the slippery stones. Outside my pasture you are but sprites and sylphs, burning and pulsing in the dead of the swamp. But go, go still, I will not let you stop. Drink of the methane from the shallow well, before you carry out this dark task. Who gave me your souls, I dare not ask, but I stitch them small and smaller until the fire of your soul could fit in a mere thimble. I’ve read the book of dreams and asked the flowering ferns, I’ve sought the symbols in the flames, but nothing else will suffice to fill her hungry belly—and I can hear it rumble with such uncanny and deadly sounds. So go! Go! Go!
Step between the lengths of wave with breath like burnished fog. Dance on the fluorescence of frogs, set your hair ablaze in the bog. Take this dead man’s hand with each fingernail lit aflame, carry the lamp and fuel it with a thousand clots. Everything you have to gain, for nothing you have left to lose—you’ve already played your part, already received the final sacrament, baptism by resplendent shores, your little lives cut short.
Do I feel sorry for them? The souls you go to drown? No. Their lives are lived, and they have long since deprived themselves among the thistledown.
And yet, and yet—Perhaps I do feel a twinge of sympathy. They did not expect you, my dears. They did not expect such villanry.
So go, go, go to the shores. Make your light revolve. Hide among the weeds. Call the sailors to false hopes dissolved among the waves and bash the merchants brains upon the rocks. Go, go—
We have the light to feed.
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Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Analog, and Flash Fiction Online. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Glimmerglass Girl (2018), The Smallest of Bones (2021), and Numinous Stones (2023). She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. |