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The Incident at Ong’s Hat, Jill Hand
“What’s in Ong’s Hat? On the surface, not much. It’s located deep in the Pine Barrens, the heavily forested, largely uninhabited area that is the stomping grounds of the legendary Jersey Devil. There are a few ramshackle houses and a squalid little convenience store out on Route 72 where you can buy lottery tickets and the kind of food that you eat only if you’re desperate. [. . .] There’s also a secret underground government base staffed by scientists who monitor the periodic strangeness that occurs in Ong’s Hat.”

Yoel the Chickenkeeper, Michael Díaz Feito
“Yoel the Chickenkeeper jostled cherry-red canisters into the coop. His sick chickens jigged suspiciously. In a cone of their patinated eyes, UV rays flecked like epilepsy.”

Transition, Taylor Putorti
“When you die, you will open your eyes with your bare feet resting on ground they’ve never touched before. You will feel the grass between your toes, softer than strips of terry cloth. At first, there is nothing but thick grey fog. But then, a ray of light, not sunlight but perhaps the gleam of some distant, foreign moon, shines down, and you will start to see.”

Spawn, Susan Kaempfer
“She wanted to be fertilized―coated with warm jelly and kept close. Some laughed at her love’s feet, but the skin stretching between his toes didn’t repulse her. Together they lay on his island’s tiny beach, at the foot of the old lighthouse. He held one foot up to the sky. For her and her alone, he spread his toes against the sun, and she read the capillaries like an illuminated roadmap of her life.”

Scorpion Midnight, Allina Nunley
“The scorpion had seen these displays of bravery before. His sting had been the terror of the west back when you could still call it wild. He had relished the days of fighting with cattle rustlers and bad hombres, but he could feel the age in his stinger and knew that it was time to settle down.”

Western Dark, William Ables
“Ghosts need to commute, unfinished business travel is the top vocation for a deceased person. The dead need to, have to, get where they are going.“

Cover art: An Open Mind: frog with exposed brain in formaldehyde, Samuel Snoek-Brown