DEERTOPIA: a horror zine

EERTOPIA

Spring 2024

“None of this explains what you saw in the woods.”

— Rio Janisch, A Guide to True Deer

My Deer Reader,

DEERTOPIA is a limited edition horror zine situated in the woods. In the dark places you reach rarely and reluctantly. The places where things innocent as deer padding across a quiet forest floor might give you pause. Think trees older than men, eldritch gods older than trees. Think about that breath on your neck during a hike at dusk. The rap on your door from what seems to be a gnarled, broken branch.

A companion to ORLANDO , the contents of this zine have been curated by myself and other students at UNC Chapel Hill to remind you of those strange things. Remember? You’ve seen them before. You see them now.

You stand at your kitchen sink one evening. In the black outside the window, you see nothing but those purple streetlamps, those accidents. You wash your dishes and your hands and as you do you both imagine and see something gray and sharp. A deer with white eyes and bared teeth and antlers that reach up to the tops of those trees, those dark pines. You shut off the faucet, listen to the brief splatter of the last few drops. Listen to cicadas and the buzz of the lamps. You listen and sleep with curtains drawn. Reader, listen and dream of nothing.

— Georgia Chapman, editor-in-chief

A Guide to True Deer

Rio Janisch

cervidae

Ayla Rodriguez

The Intruder

Ryan Phillips

For My Little Sister, May She Soundly Sleep

Liam Furlong

Don’t Look Back, Buck

Naomi Ovrutsky

Someone Killed Father Wallace on I-85

Catherine Pabalate

Eyes

Elena Carabeau

The Bargain

Graham Hill

Unmount Me

Maggie Dunn

Nice Things to Leave at a Grave

Liz Vaughan

A Guide to True Deer

GENERAL

Deer are believed to be hoofed mammals from the Cervidae family. There are two subfamilies of the Cervidae family: the Cervinae subfamily (believed to be fallow deer, muntjac, elk, red deer, and perhaps the other things in the woods you see when you look out of the window) and the Capreolinae subfamily (reindeer, white-tailed deer, roe deer, and moose and those white eyes that stare at you from between the trees). Both of these subfamilies are categorized as True deer, which indicates the existence of False deer. Almost all male deer, as well as female reindeer, undergo a process of growing and shedding antlers each year. These antlers spiral up from the skull and are typically used for fighting between male deer to establish dominance. You should hopefully not need to grow any.

SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia (You think.)

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Mammalia (You hope.)

Order: Artiodactyla

Family: Cervidae

Subfamilies: Capreolinae and Cervinae

ETYMOLOGY

The word deer comes from the Old English word dēor and the Middle English word der , which translates to “wild animal of any type.” Branches of the word include the Old High German word tior , the Old Norse word djur , the Gothic dius , the Old Frisian diar , and the Old Saxon word dier . They all roughly translate to “an animal.” The Swedish word djur also means “creature or human being.” None of these words further explain what kind.

DISTRIBUTION

Everyone says that deer can live in a variety of biomes, ranging from the tundra to the tropical rainforest. A majority of deer species prefer to inhabit temperate forests or savannahs. Open areas with access to

RIO JANISCH — NONFICTION

grasses, weeds, and herbs are preferred for the deer diet. Deer will also enjoy your house after it has grown abandoned, taken over by moss and time.

The highest concentration of large deer species in North America is between Alberta and British Columbia. You do not live there, but you have seen too many deer in your friend’s backyard.

DESCRIPTION

Deer are the second most diverse family in the Artiodactyla order. They are identifiable by their seasonally-regrown antlers. In addition, deer are also characterized by their long legs, their pointed, wispy tails, and their long ears. While the largest of them (moose) can reach up to eight and a half feet tall, the smallest (northern pudu) reaches just over a foot. Coat color generally ranges between red and brown. You’re pretty sure that you have seen a deer entirely black when you look out from your friend’s porch and see it looking back. You don’t remember a body. Deer undergo two seasons of molting per year, with a darker, thicker coat in the winter. All male deer have antlers, save for the water deer, which develop long canines that reach out past the lower jaw. Female deer tend not to have antlers, except for female reindeer. They first emerge as soft tissue and then harden into antlers. To ensure antler growth, something

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mineralize. Deer need less calcium for bone growth as they grow older, so the antlers tend to increase in size as they age. At some point, the antlers will be big enough to spear you through.

Deer are excellent jumpers and swimmers due to their body type and evolutionary development. They also have good night vision.

BIOLOGY

Most deer have thirty-two teeth, except for the elk and reindeer, which usually have thirty-four. Several types of deer also have enlarged upper teeth that form large tusk-like canines. Due to the fact that they feed primarily on the foliage of grasses, shrubs, and trees, their teeth have adapted to grind through vegetation.

This has not stopped deer from chewing on human bones before. You do not know how easily the bones go through their four-chambered stomach.

Mating season tends to fall between August and December, although there are cases of mating until March. Deer are known to be uniparental creatures, which means that female deer are the only ones to take care of their fawns. Many fawns are born with white spots on their fur, and they tend to lose them by their first winter. Usually, fawns stay with their mothers for their first year and then leave.

RIO JANISCH — NONFICTION

EVOLUTION

Deer seem to have evolved from antlerless, tusked ancestors. Those ancestors eventually became the first antlered cervids. True deer are believed to have come from an ancestor similar to the modern chevrotains, which had simple antlers and large canine tusks. Over time, as the antlers grew larger and larger, the tusks seemed to have disappeared. But you do not know why some deer still have tusks.

None of this explains what you saw in the woods.

cervidae

my mother used to have a fascination with watching the wildlife in our little backyard in the middle of suburbia.

she bought a trail camera to keep an eye on the critters, used to show me clips of raccoons and stray cats

scampering across our lawn and rooting through our bushes like you’d expect them to be in our yard.

some nights, though, the camera blurs the images. the frames blend, and the dirt packed underneath our pine needles begins to loosen. it’s disrupted by the shaking force of a creature, tawny and familiarly strange at the edge of our yard. he comes only after dusk—i’ve seen him stand on his two hind legs and peer into our window.

i think that’s when he unzips his skin and pulls his own bones and guts out of that shell—i think he must be using our bird bath as a baptismal place for his body. i’ve seen him at night and i’ve seen the way he walks and moves with the other stags as if he were their kin. as if he were not some foul demon created by the absence of a god in derision of the uncanniness we see in his kind. perhaps he is sent from hell to mock our fear of the dark; perhaps he is simply a creation of my broken mind.

i’ve been prescribed seroquel before—does that make me unreliable? or are the strings of fat and tissue in the bird bath part of my mother’s fascination with wildlife? she teaches a biology lab in suburbia.

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

The Intruder

Hey Allison, I wanted to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t being fair earlier. Call me when you want to talk about everything. Love you.

Delivered at 9:46 PM.

I put down my phone again and gripped the wheel until my hands stopped trembling. The LED speedometer displayed a clean “0.” My headlights let me see through the French doors at the mess of dirty clothes on the floors of my house. The violent inventions of the subconscious leapt from the crevasses and gripped me as I tried to shudder away. I blinked once and a scalpel was piercing my skin without anesthesia. I blinked again and a faceless man was sucking the marrow from my bones with a plastic straw. My stomach turned. I put my hand on the transmission and started to back up. It’s all I could ever do to oust the pictures. As the car began to move, I heard my phone buzz and immediately hit the brakes. I braced for impact as I picked up the phone and squinted at the bright screen in search of Allison’s name. It was an email from American Airlines reminding me in the nick of time that it’s not too late to get a flight for the holidays. No Allison. As I backed out of my driveway, I whispered her name to myself in repetition so quietly that the vowels lost all their distinction and the consonants formed a rhythm. I hardly noticed I was doing it. ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n.

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

All I needed was a few laps around town to clear my head. After two o’clock it was just me, the drunks, and the streetlights. It was icy outside, but I rolled down my window anyway; maybe a slap from the cold would shock some sense into me. A pair of headlights shifted into my lane and stared me down from behind. The backlight was starting to give me a headache, so I turned left. The headlights disappeared from my view and trees surrounded me on the left and right. I turned on my high beams. A lanky, bony deer revealed itself and stepped into the road on the right shoulder, making eye contact with the brights and glaring at my car until I obeyed its order to stop. It stepped right into the spotlight Sinatra-style, strutting across the road without urgency. It never stopped looking in my direction. It crept into the woods on the other side, leaving my car idling all alone. I let it roll ahead hesitantly.

Within seconds, another deer entered from the right. Its body was thick, well-fed, muscular. It walked like a god. Atop its head, two immense antlers threatened me with their spear-like tips. The buck stood in the path of the car, daring me to keep going. I came to a stop. I saw its leg muscles swell with energy as it took a lap around my car, sizing up its sleek grey exterior. There was a silkiness to the control of its confident motion, as threatening as the creature looked. It took another glance at me before it jumped over the guard rail into the darkness. I couldn’t bring myself to lift my foot off the brake pedal. My phone buzzed.

Allison Huff: Thank you for saying that.

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

I waited. Another buzz.

Allison Huff: I think we could both use some space if I’m being honest.

Delivered at 2:38 AM.

I waited again. No buzz. I let the car inch along, my mind occupied only by Allison. ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n. I would text her back when I woke up the next day. She was probably right, after all. I tapped my index finger on the steering wheel and took stock of my surroundings. Fear entered without warning, and I was powerless to evade the visions. I blinked and saw my palm sizzling on a hot stove, the imagined sound enough alone to make me gag. I rapidly shook the thought away. The streetlights were just barely bright enough to see a few feet into the woods, but the view was hardly scenic. I glanced into my rearview. Sinatra stepped back into the light behind me for an encore performance. Without a moment’s notice, it began to run, gaining speed with each step. I realized that it had no intention of stopping, so I stepped on the gas. I had no clue how fast I was going, only that the showman deer was gaining on me. I heard the car shift into high gear as I turned my gaze to the road in front of me. The muscular deer from moments ago marched onto the asphalt and defiantly stood still, facing me. I had no choice but to swerve. I heard my phone buzz again as I whipped the wheel to the right. The buck remained motionless.

I open my eyes in the dark forest and feel no pain. My head is heavier than I remember it feeling. I make

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

my way to a nearby tree to find a place to lean but something forces me back. With an upward glance, I see in my periphery a pair of antlers ornamenting the top of my head with three points each. I hardly notice that I walk with four legs as I approach the smoking hunk ahead. My eyes latch onto the vehicle stopped in the road. Lying in front of it is a strong, fierce buck with its empty eyes wide open. A pool of its blood, once flowing fiercely through its veins, spreads across the pavement, weaving its way through the narrow grooves of the road. Inside the grey car is a man I recognize, but I don’t quite understand why. He slumps over the airbag with the unmistakable stillness of an uninhabited body. My mind fogs with unease as I try to understand why I feel as though I know him intimately. I tiptoe toward the carnage, feeling the crunch of the dead leaves under me as I move. Crossing the threshold of the pavement feels like trespassing. But my discomfort is no match for my curiosity. I stand at the precipice of the violence and wonder what could have brought this man into the forest during the silent hours of the night.

I cannot bear the sight of the still-pooling blood, so I turn around, ambling down the road without purpose or destination. On either side of me, I can see the other deer of the forest looking at me. I wonder if they, too, feel like outsiders among their kind, or if they look at me knowing that I come from another body. I continue to trot, pretending I can’t see the thousand eyes shining in my direction. I look downward, since there’s nowhere else to look. There’s a deep discomfort

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

in inhabiting a body that isn’t mine. It’s not unlike the feeling of wearing a costume, but the sense of selfconsciousness grows from within. For the first time, I’m aware of my ribcage. It hangs low and heavy. My thick fur is gross, dirty. I dig through my fragments of memory to piece together the life I lived before I entered this body, but nothing materializes. The road itself begins to glow. As my eyes shift upward, all I can see is a blinding pair of headlights barreling toward me. The car plows ahead and I stare into the lights as they get so close, I can feel the heat emanating off them. My body freezes, unable to move away from the imminent crushing blow. Part of me doesn’t even want to get out of the way. I hear a screech of brakes activated far too late to make a difference. I hope that when the bumper crushes my bones, the body I travel to will once again be my own. I open my eyes in the dark forest and feel no pain. My ribcage hangs low and heavy. I walk on four legs narrow and bare. I look at the car wreck in front of me with an undefinable fascination. I can hear the driver’s anguished moans from here, the car’s front section compacted and dismantled. But what allures me most is the dead deer in front of the car. I feel an immediate connection with its features, its body, its eyes, empty and blank as they all are. I approach the deer, noticing the three points on each of its antlers. The streetlight above reflects in the darkness of its eyes. That white dot in the dark abyss makes me uneasy. My disquiet only grows the longer I stare into it, but I can’t explain

RYAN PHILLIPS — FICTION

why. In my head, I start to hear the rough outline of a pattern of consonants. It gets more distinct with each rhythmic iteration until I am finally able to make it out. ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n. For the sake of my sanity, I make myself pull away from the deer’s dead eye and walk the other way back into the forest. I no longer see the eye, but the consonants remain. ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n . The rustling of the leaves surges as the wind makes its way through the branches, but all I can hear is the sound that echoes in my mind. ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n, ‘l’s’n.

For My Little Sister, May She Soundly Sleep

Your chances of being hunted by what Granmama used to call an antimal, of being stalked and predicted by one of those ghastly creatures are naturally quite low, but they will never be zero. No, never ever. Granmama never told us where the antimals came from, no, but never mind that , she’d say, they’re out there, and they’re getting closer and closer. She would say it less like a stormy-night tale and more like a prophecy, that from the day you started crawling one of them was crawling closer to the moment when your paths would intersect at some nexus of a personal destiny, a doom. Around any corner in the forest din, you might stumble upon your stalker and that would be it, sure as spit. Dead, done, a meal for the hawks.

How many times did we hear about the antimals, Bernice? In all her wicked wisdom, Granmama loved to scare us with stories of the antimals: snatching mischievous children away at the forest’s edge, all those foolish children straddling the line between the forest and the field right before you reach the houses. Keep away from the field, y’all must never stray towards the forest’s edge, come on back now; I can hear her still. How many nights, when the wind would shriek and the rain would set a tone, did we go to sleep utterly terrified of the secrets that she in a whisper had shared with us? Probably a hundred times, two hundred,

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

maybe. The count doesn’t matter; each time kept us awake as if we had heard them anew, each iteration eroding fresh burns into our eyes and stretching them wide , wide to the point of ripping as we kept watch in the bedtime dark and started at each unnatural tumble that would rumble through the night.

After what I saw, I can’t help now but feel a pang, perhaps a pulling of grim irony back into the nights when Granmama’s monsters were still abstract, something only our imaginations could color in. After what happened, I look back on those nights as being comparatively sweet. The pang that pulls me back syncopates with my heartbeat, which right now is beating faster as I begin to reconnect the morbid mental dots of the subject at hand. Those were the nights when all you could do was feel frightened for yourself: the antimals were out for you, you were the one chosen among the rest. Before they came for Spotter—that insidious summer morning, oh, I can’t bear the thought—let me ask you: did you ever feel frightened for me, Bernice? Equally terrified that before the monster had reached your bed he would have snatched me away from mine just there beside you? What about Granmama, did you ever think that she had reason to be afraid? That the fear shriveling her weaker and weaker could possibly come from something real? Some thing real?

This whole philosophy, of course, only deals with the selfish side of the matter. If that bump in the night is meant for me, it cannot be meant for you. But even still, and even as smart as we are, we all jump at the sound.

LIAM FURLONG —

Oh Bernice, sister dear, don’t get upset. Please don’t believe for a second that I say all these nasty things to confront you because, to be perfectly honest, I was no better. The rustle of leaves, the sharp break of the branch, they were all meant for me and not for you, so I thought, all those many nights ago. Not for Granmama, and certainly not for Spotter.

No, never ever for Spotter, dutiful and strong. That’s the implied magic of having an older brother, after all; the rain can hiss, the wind can cry and claw, but you will always make it through with an older brother to protect you. He was “coming into his own” back then, as Granmama used to put it; that is to say, he had reached a point in his being grown that meant the rest of us were safe, quite secure and even cozy in the den as long as Spotter was there. With our monsters getting closer from beyond the forest’s edge, they would have to go through him first, our natural protector. But being the oldest, there was naturally never anyone there to protect him.

I wish, oh little sister how I wish I wasn’t there to see it. You weren’t there, you can’t possibly understand, but the beast that only lives in your dreams I wish I could contain in my own, if only to prevent it from tainting my every waking move. But I have seen the beast, seen a pair of them rise up on their fleshy haunches to point at Spotter, at me, and in a silence consider just what to do with us. We’d gone too far out on that sticky summer morning. Like the mischievous

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

children in Granmama’s tales we had strayed, had crossed the forbidden threshold and there, gangly and upright on wiry crooked legs, were the antimals that, for all my childhood, had been shambling closer and closer in patient wait for this very moment, as sure as I had been denying its approach with the dull agony of a punishment to come.

They were no more than three fallen oaks away when they saw us— that’s how little of the crossing they had left—and from across the willows recently stomped flat by hooves their hideous appearance beguiled me. They were as hairless as Granmama had said, shorn naked to a sickly nothingness that in the pale sun was blinding. The only color came in their veins, tinted like bruises that protruded from under gossamer thin flesh along the arms and the necks. Next to Spotter’s visible strength, the proportions of the beasts were downright sinister; like a tree uprooted and turned upside down, the stench of their power emanated from the shoulders and above, where with wiggling, tentacular hooks at the ends of their upper paws they each cradled a large, shiny stick as slender as themselves. What the stick was I do not know, but it cannot have a name, for the sounds it made were too terrible for words to even eclipse. Words can only describe, never relate, the terror that’s still stabbing through my ribs from that day. They can outline the claws, the sticks, the eerie silences; but the smile that the smaller one cast my way? That slippery, thinlipped smile from across the universe that was meant only for me? I’ll never have the words.

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

Spotter had words, and in a fearing whisper they were: “On my signal, run. Don’t wait for me and don’t ya dare stop running.”

The taller of the antimals had words: “Aim for the big’un, make sure ya git him and if the little one falls too, well shit, all the better.”

I had no words. I was thinking about my fear, and to do that was to become overpowered by it. To be rendered helpless and stock-still and useless to protect my older brother. He was the frame for all that I wanted to become, yet no one had ever set a frame for him. Even with me beside him he’d be fighting all alone, and in that moment I wanted more than anything to be his partner and not his burden. But there was nothing that I could do.

And then: BANG. It came out of nowhere: an aural slaughter my early days had never prepared me for. I leapt into the air and turned to bolt, and would have, but something held me back, a presence, a power. It was Spotter’s stillness, louder than the blast, and in an instant it commanded my attention and my awe. A thin cloud obscured the antimals, coming closer, their sticks pointed at my brother and at me.

BANG. Again: a cloud, and a chunk of spit earth at my feet. Spotter planted himself firm. One of the antimals invoked something called a god. BANG. Cloud. Dirt. A savage roar let loose from across the field. Two fallen oaks apart now. I couldn’t move; Spotter in his stillness was fighting back, somehow he fought without fear, without thought even, in actively

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

passive defiance. BANG. My brother, my protector, my world, standing in front of me. BANG. They were both shooting now, raining down bursts and bangs in the air all around us with hurricanic fury but like the fairy tales from our youth it was too late—BANG— because they had overpowered him, struck Spotter in the front knee and struck him bad, and with the most unnatural bend he crashed head-first into the earth with an impact that tilled the soil. My brother. BANG. All while the barrage of whatever it was that peppered the sky burst louder still and I knew that the antimals hadn’t slowed at all but that they were coming for me, coming from one oak away, that they had come here for both brothers with one still to catch and that one was me, oh mercy, it was me. They had put Spotter in the ground and, upon sizing up the terror that then made a permanent home in the black of my eyes, they knew there was only one.

They came closer until they were a log’s length away. They were closing in and reeking of odors alien and foul, hovered and watched me quake above my brother’s body, watching quietly and with a curiosity. Lowering their sticks—and this part I’ll never forget— they made this . . . sound . It started low from a recess of darkness in the both of them and then, gathering force and pitching up and down like jagged lightning, grew violently louder and higher, more shrill until they were both shrieking towards the sky while curling forward, shaking their hideous proportions—a little ball climbed and fell in the taller one’s neck, the shorter one’s tongue hung out and moistened his thin

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

lips—as they looked down on two young defenseless bucks and laughed, laughed and laughed and laughed.

Laughed and laughed as a third laughter joined in, coming from the sprawling crumple of hair and crooked limbs that suddenly began to rock, rattle, and heave in rhythm with the ominous laughter growing louder at the antimals’ leathery feet. Their laughter caught in their throats and the furry mass grew louder, physically larger. The spine rose first, arching in ways a spine never should be made to arch as each nugget of bone spiked tightly against my brother’s back, almost through it. The back itself became broader and stronger, stretching his furry coat into thin ratty tufts that ripped through an almost reptilian hunk of muscle, that shrouded visible notches of bone. From the shoulders out snapped two incredibly long arms punctuated by hooves that extended outward until, dragging against the ground with pendulous weight they drew together to push off a hoof to reveal three long, bony claws boasting what I could only call talons. Like a spider’s legs the claws clambered over to the other hoof and tenderly peeled back the stony casing of three more claws, equally savage, that were rivaled only by the black antlers sprouting into the air through the fuzz of his shedding scalp. With the strength of all our ancestors, he sunk his claws into the soil and rolled himself onto his hind legs and, in a frenzy that was more flesh than fur, delivered a crushing blow into the smaller of the antimals. The antimal clutched in my brother’s grasp and rising towards his fanged gaping maw shrieked high, shrieked

higher than he likely ever had shrieked before but did so in vain against my brother’s cackle, a manic roar that fit him tremendously well in the wake of finally coming into his own.

The signal, yes, this had to have been the signal to run back to the den; there, I would wait with Granmama and with you, sister dear, for Spotter to come home to let Granmama tend to his knee. So I ran. I charged from the fray and back under the slender eaves of the forest, hearing the battle recede but still hearing everything: a horrified silence, a gnashing of teeth chewing the meaty tissue, the timbre of primal terror rising through a body, the tinny rattle of the bursting stick, a bellow, a blast, a shrieking that pierced the sky.

So I waited, and we waited; but of course Spotter never came home. I don’t want to know what happened to him. Whether he was shot by the taller antimal or if he left to begin the lifelong hunt that “coming into your own” requires of you, I don’t want to know. Days after the whole affair, I like a fool returned to the forest’s edge and found no evidence that he had ever been in the field. Not even the willows bent down in his memory.

My walks were like this for a while after Spotter left— left , yes, I guess that’s what we’ll have to call it. I made to cross the field more times than Granmama would care to know, were she still with us. I won’t tell

LIAM FURLONG — FICTION

you what I found on these walks, Bernice, but I found what makes me the animal I am today, the beast I need to be to protect you as your older brother. I will only tell you that, while your chances of being hunted by an antimal will never, ever be zero, your antimal’s chance of being hunted himself will also never be nothing, that every day I am still living is a day I will keep coming into my own, one day closer to meeting him at our cosmic rendezvous. Someday soon, perhaps tomorrow even, I will walk to the forest’s edge to cross the open field, and with the diligence of what he calls a god pursuing the damned I will begin my prowl, my hunt, and I will find him. Slowly but surely I will arrive at his street, his yard, his fire-lit stoop to deliver him a smile so tooth-filled and final that he will never find the words to relate his terror to anyone unfortunate enough to be living so close to our forest’s edge.

Don’t Look Back,

Buck

The animal was dead, but I thought it was the coolest thing. Its head was turned around completely, like it was craning its neck to get a last look at something. The deer had black marbles for eyes, and I could feel them staring into me.

“What do you think about this one, Tess?” My father was hunched over the table, cleaning the deer’s back with a wet rag, wiping off blood that had trickled down to its side.

“Can we paint it?”

“Once it’s done, of course.”

My favorite part was the decoration. Once the animal was cleaned and gutted, it could be molded into anything. Back into its skin, or maybe something else altogether. Something even more beautiful. Sometimes I felt a little sad about it, but each time my father would reassure me that the animal wasn’t gone, it was merely in limbo, and then it would get to live on forever. We would make it live on forever.

This deer was a large one, a big win for us. By my logic, big things needed a name. I thought about Harriet, my dead tortoise, and how much I missed her. Maybe something to honor her?

“I’m gonna call her Henrietta.” I wrote the name in big letters in the inventory journal. We’d filled our

NAOMI OVRUTSKY — FICTION

quota for this week, which meant Henrietta might be a keeper. My very own prize.

My father grabbed his gloves. “Go on and help Mom with dinner, I’ll finish up here.”

He was always careful not to let me see the gross parts. I wouldn’t have cared. We had just done a frog dissection at school, and I had been so eager to cut and pull and twist. I loved seeing the organs up close, and the veins intersecting like a game of snakes and ladders.

I wondered how big Henrietta’s brain was, and the heart. Did she feel alone sometimes, like I did?

I took the stairs two at a time. Mom was at the kitchen table. It was one of her favorite spots, and I wondered if she wanted more sunlight today. I tugged on the blinds, letting in the late afternoon light.

“That better?”

I laid down the placemats, and stirred the veal soup that my father had made. It smelled delicious.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Henrietta. I wanted her to be covered in glitter, and I knew I would need pounds and pounds. I could snag some super glue from the garage. Maybe this was our next project. Maybe it could go in a museum someday. The thought of making something beautiful thrilled me. I twisted the ends of my placemat, waiting for my father to finish up, so I could tell him all about my grand plan.

NAOMI OVRUTSKY

He trudged in, wiping dirt and sweat from his chin. He looked exhausted. “I had an idea. For Henrietta.”

He smiled, then assessed the place settings. “Do you wanna put Mom on the couch?” “I think she wants to eat dinner with us,” I said.

“Doesn’t look any different to me,” he said, smirking. Then he gazed at her for a minute. “How bout it, Becca?”

After a moment I shrugged, finally agreeing. He picked up her hollow form and placed her on the couch, with swift, gentle movements. For a man who had just gutted a whole deer, he could be gentle when he wanted to be.

“There. She looks happy there, I think,” he said. “Now tell me about this Henrietta.”

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

Someone Killed

Father Wallace on I-85

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive—”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Jennifer, get off of the ground.”

Jennifer stops, hands still clasped in front of her face, knuckles white. She shifts in the soggy dirt, her woolknit knee-high socks soaking from navy to black. Her nose runs, and she wipes it away with the wrinkled sleeve of her uniform. She clenches her eyes shut.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive me, Fa—”

“Shit, she isn’t going to shut up, is she?”

“Jenny, we need to go.”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive—”

“Can you shut up for a moment and listen?”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have—”

“Jennifer!”

In the moonlight, José’s face is bone-gray, his eyes yellow as marrow. He grabs Jennifer’s forearm and pulls her from the ground, gripping her shoulders in place as her knees wobble. When she proves she can stand on her own, he lets go and begins pacing across the shoulder of the highway, muttering to himself.

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

Adriane watches from the patch of tall grass along the curb, biting her nails to the skin. She sucks the blood from her fingertips as Jennifer clutches her stomach and keels over.

“We need to get out of here,” José coughs out, lungs tight. “Jennifer, I swear to God if you vomit right now, I’ll—”

“Leave her alone, José,” Adriane bites back. She leans over to rake her hand through Jennifer’s hair, shaking off the dirt and grime. “Jenny, we need to find a way to get back home. Can you call your mom for us, please?”

“No way.” With her hair draped over her face, Jennifer looks like seaweed dripping against a wet rock. She’s on all fours, heaving, rabid as a dog. “No way. No way.”

“Well, I’m not calling my mom.” Adriane’s nailbiting resumes. “She’s in Tallahassee right now for her conference, and she said if I bothered her, I could kiss my Heron tickets goodbye.”

“Are you seriously still worried about that fucking concert?” José wipes the sweat from his brow, and when he comes back into the moonlight, Adriane sees the tears in his eyes. “We need to leave. Now, before the police get here.”

“Do you think we’ll go to prison?” Jennifer wails, drool catching on the rosary now gripped between her fists. She bows her head in penance once more. “Forgive me, Father, for—”

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

“Nuh-uh. Listen to me, Jennifer,” José exclaims, grabbing Jennifer’s chin. “We’re going to get out of here, all three of us. We’re going to go into the woods, and we are going to call my sister. She’s going to pick us up, and we’ll go to my house, have some hot chocolate, and forget that this ever happened. We’re not going to tell a soul. You’re not going to go to confession—no, you’re not going to tell Father Thomas. You’re going to show up to class on Monday, and you’re going to avoid the chapel. We’ll take our English test, and we’ll be completely, utterly normal. Okay?”

Jennifer’s voice hitches. “I don’t believe you.”

“Yeah,” José replies, patting her cheek. “Me neither. But that’s not going to stop us.”

He stomps off into the woods, Jennifer and Adriane on his tail. In their toe-pinching penny loafers, the trek is difficult, the roots curling up to taunt them into falling. Without the moon for guidance, the woods morph into an amorphous, tentacled beast—a labyrinth of bloody stakes and all-consuming sludge. Ravenous onyx. José turns on his phone’s flashlight, but the small flicker bounces off of the opaque walls of leaves, leading them blindlyainto the void.

“How is Antonia going to find us out here?” Adriane yells forward, but José doesn’t answer.

They walk until they are certain they can’t be found. When they stop, Jenny sits in a fetal position against the roots of a dogwood tree, knees-to-chest, isopodesque. A few feet away, José paces as a dial tone buzzes

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into the abyss. Antonia doesn’t pick up the first time, so he calls again. A third time. A fourth. She picks up on the fifth, and he lets out a shaky breath and digs his fingers into the dogwood’s bark.

“Toni, gracias a Dios , hi. Listen, I need you to come he—No, I promise, I’m okay. No...No, don’t tell Abuela, please, Toni! Shh. Listen to me. I need your help, Toni.” He pulls at the hair on the back of his scalp. “Please, just check FamilyFinder and pick me up at my location—no, don’t tell Abuela! Don’t tell her anything! Toni, pl—”

The phone clicks. José drops it from his ear and curses.

“We’re going to Hell.” Jennifer rocks back and forth, a cradle to a festering spawn of panic. “We’re going to suffer a fiery eternity in Hell.”

“We’re not going to Hell,” José snaps, but his voice softens. “We’re not going to Hell, Jennifer, I promise. God will know it was an accident.”

“God doesn’t care!” Jennifer sobs, pressing her nails into the skin of her shoulders, breaking red crescents into her flesh. “There is no way our souls will ever recover from this. We’re doomed. We might as well forget any dreams of Heaven.”

“God may forgive us,” Adriane whispers, her gaze unfocused, “but the police won’t. Jenny’s right. We can’t go back.”

They simmer in the entrails of guilt, avoiding eye contact with one another. The crackling of the wind

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

through the tree branches reminds them of the sand slipping through the narrow eye of an hourglass, a gradual avalanche. Something caws in the distance, like the strike of a gong—a final farewell before they plunge into the cold, thrashing waters of punishment. Adriane lifts her head to the sky. All of time and space feels pressed into a thin line, so narrow and linear that there is nowhere to go but forward. At least, for now, time has lent them this expanse of empty tidings, a place so barren that sin can’t find its roots.

Adriane didn’t believe in sin until she first spoke to the priests in her freshman year. She had seen it as an adult’s problem, something she’d eventually grow into, like a pair of shoes. She now knows, however, that sin is something woven into her skin, so intimate and indelible that she couldn’t pick the threads away even if she tried. She presses her limp fingernail to her front teeth, gnawing softly. She feels trapped within herself.

“We should have checked to see if he was still alive.”

“And risk getting our fingerprints on the crime scene?” José asks.

“They’ll find Jenny’s car there. They’ll trace it back to us regardless.”

José slumps down next to Jennifer. “There’s no way he could have survived that. I saw...I saw his blood on the windshield. His guts strewn across the dash. He was done for the moment we made impact. I...I don’t need to look at him to know that he is dead.”

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

Something shuffles beside him. In the opal moonlight, Jennifer runs her fingers along the beads of her rosary, her brows scrunched but her eyes defeated. José feels like he’s been plunged into cold water, as if he’d thrown himself from a cliff and shattered the surface beneath. He wants to cry. He focuses, tries to let the tears fall, but it’s painful trying to gather something that isn’t there. Instead, he holds out his hand to Jennifer, who gives him the rosary. He grabs the cross, squeezes it, and lets the heat of his hands dissipate into the metal. The pit in his throat, now the size of a walnut, scratches the sore flesh of his esophagus.

“We should turn ourselves in.”

José whips his head to face Jennifer. “What? Are you serious?”

“This is the sin of all sins. He was a good man, José, don’t you understand? God won’t forgive us if we run from this.”

“God won’t forgive us no matter what we do!” José’s words tear at his throat further, and he massages the skin there, trying not to choke. “But if we go back, all of our futures are going to be screwed! Do you know how hard I’ve worked, Jennifer? If I go back now, that will all be washed away, but if...if I never return, I won’t have to face that reality. I won’t have to lose what I’ve already built.”

“José...”

“No, save it. Your empty pity is the last thing I need right now.”

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

He can’t tell them about the game last week, where they had watched, cheering from the bleachers with a bag of cheap buttered popcorn propped between their knees. The game where the man with the black clipboard—the Man—pulled him aside after the team’s victory, before Gabriel and Shaun could pour the tub of orange Gatorade over his head. He knows they waited for him as he and the Man circled the turf, but he can’t bring himself to tell them about the offer, with all its decimal places and promises. He can’t tell them that he cried in front of his mother, hugging her for the first time since he’d hit puberty

He isn’t supposed to be the martyr.

“What if I took the blame?” Jennifer whispers, her breath shaky, as if it’s trying to balance on the thin string of cold air. “Maybe . . . maybe this is what God intended for me. Maybe this is my test. I need . . . I need to tell the police, right now.”

“No!” Adriane shrieks, grabbing her. She whips around toward José, phantom-fast, moving with the shadows. “Tell her she can’t do that!”

José stays silent.

“José!” Adriane barks, eyes narrow, plum with anger. “José, tell her she can’t do that! Tell her we won’t let her!”

The words scrape against José’s throat, so he knows he’s supposed to say something. He’s supposed to protect her, he knows. She’s his friend, after all—she and Adriane come to all of his games. The truth of it is

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settled high in his sternum, waiting to be announced, but he bites it back, swallowing it like bile. He’s supposed to protect her, but who will protect him when he shields her from the sirens? When he keeps her company in their prison cells? He isn’t supposed to be the martyr.

“Adriane,” he murmurs, turning his head away, his eyes downcast. The words barely eke by his tongue. “You and I weren’t behind the driver’s seat. We don’t have to be guilty.”

A hand thrusts out of the darkness, grabbing him by its bloody fingertips. He gags, falling to his knees, as Adriane glowers over him, wrath reflected in the panes of her thick glasses.

“How dare you?” she hisses, and he feels her thumbnail, bitten-down and craggy, breach the skin of his neck. “What did Jennifer do to deserve this? She is just as innocent as you and me, so how dare you desert her to suffer all alone?”

“What...the hell?” he gasps, latching onto her wrist. Despite her small stature, Adriane’s grip on his throat is tighter than he expected, and he digs his loafers into the dirt to push away. His eyes water against his will.

“Let...me go.”

“Who said that you would be the one to decide? If we are going to face the wrath of God, we are going to do it together.” The pit in his stomach drops, and he lurches, feeling the forest floor fall out from under him. It caves, unfurling like a waking eye, waiting to

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embrace him below. If he falls long enough, maybe he’ll end up in Hell regardless, and he’ll be saved the torture of telling his mom about the broken deal. He won’t have to see the beaming white optimism fizzle in her soft eyes.

But Adriane’s grip slips for a moment. Her pressure wanes, and he takes the opportunity to wrench from her grip, leaping to his feet and crashing through the underbrush. She howls behind him, so he grabs the trunk of the nearest tree and launches himself forward, his feet nearly giving out from the momentum. Her footsteps creep up behind him like spiders, scattering across the ground to surround him. She screams, “You can’t run from God! None of us can!”

Another set of footsteps follows: Jennifer’s. Hers sound more desperate than ravenous. He hears her cries from afar. “It was an accident! It was an accident, you said so!”

José arms himself with the fear of what will become of him if he’s caught. In his blinding-white fear, he pretends that they aren’t his friends—they are wolves, fangs drenched in the sinew of their prey, here to inflict God’s wrath. It’s easy to imagine this when he can’t see them, when they’ve been reduced to the sounds of their heels crunching the leaves. Their screams barely register as human.

José can’t decide which terrifies him more: his friends, or God, who peers down at him through His seraphic eyes, witnessing the mess that he’s making of his life. How is it possible, when he’s been doing

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everything right up until now? His toe cracks against a gnarled root, and he grimaces, his ankle bending under his weight. The pain morphs into anger at his watcher, something steel and sharp that, in the back of his mind, he knows is unforgivable. How is it so easy to fall, when the climb has been so arduous?

José takes a sharp left turn, hoping to wrench Adriane and Jennifer from his trail. He can still hear Adriane’s footsteps crackling in the underbrush, but they grow distant. Jennifer’s cries, however, intensify in volume, encroaching from every angle like the wails of a banshee, ricocheting off of the gelatinous, rainweighted air. He tries to avoid them, but no matter the direction in which he runs, she grows inevitably closer.

Something collides with his left shoulder. José yelps as he, entangled with this large mound, slides four feet along the dirt, the skin of his cheeks scratching raw with the impact. He cries as the thing mounts him, socking him in the jaw. Utterly blind, he grabs it by the wrists and flings it as far as he can to his right, where it tumbles into a tree stump before stubbornly clambering back. When it howls, he realizes who he’s fighting.

“Jennifer, get off of me!” he screams, shoving at her skull while pressing the tender wound on his mandible.

“No!” she screeches back, tearing into the skin of his forearm. “This isn’t fair! This isn’t fair! You don’t get to run off without me!”

CATHERINE PABALATE — FICTION

“Stop it!” Frustrated tears rumble under his lashes. “Let me go!”

With shaking hands, he reaches for Jennifer’s open jaw, gripping her between her chin and her lower row of teeth, her spittle coating his fingers. One manic shove, and she’s gone, and José is tumbling through the underbrush, hands first. The forest emerges around him like an unwelcome embrace, dark and stifling as a crashing wave. Where is he even heading? To the light, he realizes. To the light, to the light.

The forest breaks away, leaving behind a single streetlight, glowing violet. A car speeds by a few feet in front of him, and he doubles back, crawling as if wounded. When he turns, the hull of Jennifer’s car lies a hundred feet away, large and jagged and behemoth. He dashes towards it, because the only thing that will keep Jennifer and Adriane away is a glimpse of the truth.

As he rounds the wreckage, distress squeezes his heart so violently he isn’t sure if his guts are traveling up his throat or are exploding within him. A deer’s head locks eyes with him from the car’s grill, its head lodged in the metal, entrails spilling across the windshield. Its marble-smooth eyes don’t blink. José swears there is blood leaking from behind its retinas.

“José!” Adriane barks behind him. He turns to watch the two things—his friends —barrel out into the open, hands and ankles caked in dirt. Adriane’s glasses are fogged up and crusted over, and Jennifer’s hair is matted, a nest of leaves and sweat. They’re heaving,

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glistening with fury, and he’s suddenly struck with the earnest truth that they could have done it. They could have torn him to pieces for God.

But then they turn to the car, and Jennifer doubles over, gagging. Adriane stands, ramrod, hands clenched at her sides. The world heaves around them, expanding, becoming something so lucid and dimensional that José feels like the smallest being in the world. He wants to tell them something— or accuse them, maybe—but he forgets to open his mouth.

“I’ll . . . I’ll call my mom,” Adriane whispers, and, with the tap of her phone, the rest of the world buzzes into being.

ELENA CARABEAU — NONFICTION

Eyes

Midnight. He’s driving and I am watching. Snow piles up at the sides of the road—we leave tire tracks slashed behind us. The car growls in second gear, but it is the only sound.

Watch for their eyes, is what he told me. They reflect light. That’s the only thing you’ll be able to see.

I wonder if they tell the same thing to their young about our headlights. Watch for their eyes.

I can feel the tires treading rocks beneath us. We are later than we expected, and it is so silent here. Now and again we pass a landmark that he knows but that I have never seen, that I cannot see under the blanket of the snow.

Eyes. Several pairs, peering at us from the trees, reflecting our own glow. They are tinted green, little orbs floating in the darkness.

Deer, there, I say, breathless, but we have already passed them.

GRAHAM HILL — FICTION

The Bargain

If I were given the chance to do it all over again, I hope I would have the wisdom to do it differently. Even knowing what I do now, however, I fear I ask too much. This story starts, as all good ones must, with love. Her name was Mary McLeod, and from the moment we first spoke, I was in love. If I spent every day of the rest of my life writing about her beauty, her grace, her kindness, her intelligence, I would scarcely scratch the surface. No matter what troubles might come upon me, I knew that with her by my side, I could withstand them all.

The problem, of course, was me. No great charmer by nature, nor distinguished in any of the qualities that might bring romantic attention upon me, I dreaded her reaction if I had tried to make my feelings known. At the same time, I was a fool, and believed that there existed an easy path to all things. If all of the details of this affair are one day revealed, as I fear they may be, I know this will confound people. I come from a good family and never in my life has there been any indication of strangeness or darkness around any of us, least of all me. However, since arriving at university, I’d become enamored with the oddities of the world. It began as a passing fancy with mysteries and curious artifacts, but before long, I had made acquaintance with like-minded students, and together we mutually encouraged ourselves to dive deeper into the world of the unknown. This was where the trouble truly began.

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One night, the group of us was exploring a part of the university’s archive. The institution possessed far too many texts to reasonably store in a library, and some were so precious and rare that it was thought best to keep them off display and in storage. One of my friends had somehow been granted access to the building and so we merrily made our way through. We split up among the maze-like corridors of that dark, underground room that seemed to sprawl off endlessly in all directions.

As I walked among dreary rows of old documents, the air thick with a musty scent, my eyes fell upon one particularly gripping book. Its cover was thick red leather, covered in an intricate set of designs. They were looping swirls, elegant curves that seamlessly fed into one another in some mesmerizing but unreadable pattern. Lines circled themselves endlessly before twisting and weaving back and forth across the cover. Unable to resist the temptation, I opened it, and in doing so, damned myself.

It took a moment to comprehend what I was looking at as I scanned the pages. Each one seemed to have the same format: a grotesque illustration taking up the entire left page, often surrounded by various sigils and glyphs that were unknown to me. They had a grasp on me, something that compelled me to look deeper and deeper, my eyes tracing each wandering path. It was compelling, in a fundamental sense; I couldn’t look away. Only with great effort was I able to shift my gaze and focus on the bizarre image that dominated

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the left page. It was some kind of hideous creature out of the depths of ancient myth, a hateful monster that I dreaded to even look at. The head was that of a deer, but the antlers were gnarled, unsightly things that twisted and bent in unnatural formations. The face of the poor animal was contorted into something like a sneer, an expression I had not thought possible on such a creature. Its eyes were deep black pools with no life, no character, just a blank emptiness. The rest of the body trailed off into shapes and forms I couldn’t even place. One moment it looked like the chest of a man, then from another angle it was a rooster’s breast, then a lion’s torso. I stepped away for a moment just to be sure that my vision was straight and my eyes weren’t playing tricks. I abandoned any attempt to understand the image and instead glanced to the writing, a small paragraph on the right-hand page.

It began with an impressive title: Furruf, the Great Demon. I had thought. F urruf may be called with the blood of the summoner and the following sigil. If bound within the triangle, he will obey the summoner and speak truthfully. There was more, which delved into even more specifics on the summoning process, what order to draw the shape in, how one had to leave a side of the sigil open for the demon to enter, but then cut it off before it could escape. But it was the final sentence that truly drew my attention. Furruf has the power to compel creatures into love with one another. If only I had never read those words. Perhaps my mind was weak with the late hour, but deep down I

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know the truth. I took the book because I wanted to. Because it seemed to be a solution. As I mentioned, I’d always had a curiosity for the strange. When I grabbed the book and hid it away in my jacket so none of my friends would notice, I’m not sure if I truly believed in its power. But I must have. Because I took the book, and the very next night, I journeyed out to the woods away from town and prepared to perform a ritual.

I approached the edge of the tree line and set down my materials. I had a bucket of paint and a brush to draw the appropriate sigil on the grass, along with the book to use as a reference. And, laid gently on top of the text, was a knife. I’d left the car lights on to illuminate the scene and allow me to see what I was doing. The yellow beams pierced through the low mist that hung heavy in the air. Doing my best to ignore the almost otherworldly atmosphere, I began my work.

Drawing the sigil was easy enough, copying the design from the text and painting it onto the grass in a rough white paint. The basic shape was a triangle with various embellishments coming off the sides, especially around the points. My progress was slow, painstakingly replicating the design from the book’s ancient pages and translating them to the damp grass. In this moment, I found a strange sense of peace overcome me. It was odd. Here, on a misty night, far away from town and alone, drawing a sigil to summon a demon, I was calm. It almost felt as though I wasn’t

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in total control of my body. It was like some other force, some greater thing , was pulling me this way and that. Maybe I only say that now as some way to avoid taking full responsibility for what I did. Maybe.

Before long, the sigil was complete, save for the final line that would close the triangle. The open side was that closest to the woods, and I stood at the point of the triangle farthest away from it. A fleeting thought ran through my mind that this was almost like an arrow pointed straight at me, but I pushed it away. It was time to begin. Taking a deep breath, I gripped the knife in my hand and pressed it against my palm. I winced for just a moment and then slashed down. The cut was shallow, but blood instantly started to ooze out. Following the instructions in the text, I reached down and smeared the blood onto the point of the triangle. The crisp white was now dotted with a red that stood out all the more due to the contrast.

With that done, I waited. The night sky went on turning above me, blank and unknowable, and as the minutes passed I felt more and more like a fool. To draw glyphs out of an ancient text to summon some greater power felt like something only a child inclined towards the fantastical would believe in, but here I was. Of course nothing would meet me here. All I’d managed to do was deface some grass and give myself a wound on the hand. I was preparing to give up and return to my car when I heard something in woods. A faint rustling. While I admit that my heart jumped at the noise––more out of surprise than anticipation––I still couldn’t believe it was anything out of the ordinary.

GRAHAM HILL — FICTION

That was until the creature came through the tree line. At first glance, it was a deer like any other, but as it emerged from the trees and stepped into the light provided by my car’s headlights, I realized something was wrong. The deer had two heads and no rear. One head stretched back into a torso that became another head. The stench hit me as the deer got ever closer, something like roadkill and rot, but with something else. Some sweet scent hidden away in there, almost imperceptible among the stink of death, but undeniably present. The creature walked awkwardly, and as my attention turned to its legs, I saw that there were eight of them and came to be repulsed by this creature even more. It was as if two deer had been fused at the back. The back four legs were struggling with the motion of walking in reverse, and I heard snaps and cracks that sent shudders down my spine.

The sight was so disturbing that I momentarily forgot the last responsibility of the ritual. The thing was getting close, entering the bounds of the triangle. Closer now, its blank, dead eyes a horrible pale, milky white that saw, yet did not see. I swept up the paintbrush from the ground and in a mad dash crossed to the other side of the triangle while never entering it myself. As the creature was now fully inside it, I painted the line across the grass to seal it in. I moved so fast that, as I completed it, I stumbled and fell to the ground.

When I rolled over and looked up, I was staring straight into the thing’s rear head. Something critical

GRAHAM HILL — FICTION

had escaped my notice at first glance. The two halves of the creature, though connected, were distinct. The one I had first seen, coming out of the woods towards me, the front head, had shining, glossy fur that caught the light. In the glow of the headlights, its fur appeared almost more red than brown. It would’ve been a handsome animal, fit for inclusion in one of the works of the old great landscape painters. But the rear was far different. This deer seemed dead, or at least decaying. The fur was a mottled gray-green that gave the impression of sickness. Large black sores were scattered across the skin, thick and crusty around the edges.

But it was the mouth that was the worst. Here, some flesh had fully rotted away, leaving half of the deer’s mouth visible even with its jaw shut. A few wispy remnants of tendon and muscle moved in the breeze, each exhale pushing them out and each inhale bringing them back in. The loose flaps of skin seemed ready to fall off at any moment, as if this creature was a dead thing walking. And it was there, with its glossy white eyes peering through me, that I first heard its voice.

It was like an ice pick hammering away at my skull, as if icicles were being forced through my ears. The words were not heard so much as they were felt, drilling in and barreling through, overwhelming all of my senses.

What do you desire? The voice was frozen and coarse, and the grit of it rubbed against my ears. My whole

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body protested even being in the presence of this thing, every urge I had told me to run. At this point, I know that I should have. I wish I could say I did. But instead, I said her name.

“Mary McLeod.”

By the time we had finished and I was back in the car, the sun was coming up. My heart raced inside my chest, trying to recover from the tension. I don’t know how long I ended up spending out there in the dark with the thing, but it was too long for me. Even thinking back on it now, it’s all hazy. I struggle to put things in order, to recall specifics, but I know that driving away from that field I felt true relief. The bargain was done, and when I returned home, it would be alright. Mary and I would end up settling in, somehow, somewhere. And in time, everything would fade into distant memory.

But it wasn’t to be. News reached me later that day from a friend that Mary had fallen seriously ill, apparently a fever like the doctors had never seen before. It burned right through her, and before sundown, she was dead. I attended her funeral, of course, consoling her mother and father as best I could, but I knew then as I still know now that I am a doomed man.

I have reckoned with things I should not have, and I must bear that burden the rest of my days. Many a time I’ve thought of ending it prematurely, but I never could. Not with knowing what could come

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after. I don’t think heaven has a place for people like me, and I don’t think Furruf would let them get their hands on me anyway. The sensation of that voice still haunts me sometimes, and occasionally I’ll wake with my head pounding, like someone is hammering away at it from the inside, with icy cold pangs shooting through my body. The voice isn’t the same one I heard though. It’s not coarse or rough as it was. It’s soft, sweet, and I recognize it. Every morning I wake to the voice of Mary McLeod cursing me, damning me for what I did, for killing her. I didn’t know what the result of my pact would be, but I had never dreamed of this possibility. In hindsight, I should’ve known only blood would come from blood. However, I fear that my wish may eventually be granted and that we shall be together forever, in the grasp of this being I’ve inflicted upon us both.

Until then, I walk around as a living ghost, tormented by the consequences of what I’ve done, cognizant of the darkness out there, the things that lurk in the shadows, the things that one day undoubtedly will come to take me away.

Unmount Me

I’m hanging from the floral wallpaper. I have to watch them in the basement, playing pool.

The wife comes down after a while. She’s carrying a bowl of bean dip. She stops and stares at me, like she always does. The husband and his friends take the bowl without so much as a “thank you.” They had stared at me, too, before they had done more to me.

“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” he’d said.

“Never seen a white one like that before,” said one of his friends.

The husband and his friends play a game involving red cups on the pool table. Their balance becomes staggered. They come onto me in the middle of the night. After the wife has gone to bed, the chip bags are littered with crumbs and grease. They poke at my eyes and stretch my teeth. They slur their words together: “a white stag” and “gotta be rarer than my wife putting out” and “nice one.”

They touch my antler and I think of the bullet as it ricocheted from the bone and dived into my skin. The husband had held me as I bled out on the forest floor.

“There you go,” he’d said. “There you go.”

In Arthurian legend, we’re said to be able to avoid capture. We can be young for a few years more. We’re scarce, especially in these parts. We’re limber. My mother told me this when I was young. When you live life believing you’re worthy of legend, you end up among the wallflowers.

MAGGIE DUNN — FICTION

In that moment, grubby fingers around my neck, I imagine that I am magical. I visit the wife in her dream. I pretend I am corporeal. I am flesh and blood and minerals. And yet, I am but a dream.

Hello , she says. She is sitting on a porch, but it is not the one in her home. Would you like some bean dip?

I sit and lick the bean dip from her palms. In the dream, I can talk to her as I did my own mother. Thank you, I say. Please unmount me.

She chuckles. Why would a myth such as yourself need my help?

I’m real, I tell her. They are touching me over the pool table.

She nods and I think she knows what that is like. She cannot help me. She cannot help herself. I want to screech, I am yelling, in dreams I cannot be felt. In legends, I cannot be touched.

The wife bids me goodbye, and I am left alone in front of the strange porch. I turn around and I find myself back in the basement, facing the yellowing wallpaper.

When the wife comes down in the morning to clean the empty beer cans, she will notice that my stuffed head has moved. She will drop the mop and it will clatter on the cement floor. And she will scream in all the ways that I cannot. Her eyes look like my mother’s as she recites a myth: wild and disbelieving.

Nice Things to Leave at a Grave

I watch my daughter get ready for the funeral. She smears on white foundation and black lipstick, the way her friend taught her to. Every time that girl came over, she’d be dolled up in lacy dresses and ghostly face paint. I don’t know if it’s called Goth anymore. Mariam laughs every time I ask. Now, she gazes into the bathroom mirror. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Even when she was little, I would never know she was upset until she started bawling.

She turns to face me, and I can’t help but flinch at the dour, corpselike mask she’s painted over her features. It’s uncanny enough when she wears it to school. “Sweetie, that’s not appropriate,” I say gently. Mariam’s eyes are static, frozen as a stained-glass window.

“Lilith

liked it, though.”

I am helpless. I say nothing. Not then, not in the car, and not really when I shake the parents’ hands and whisper condolences. The mother’s wearing a simple cross and the father’s paired his suit with hunting boots. He looks twice at my daughter, but he must see past the makeup and black clothes to the face underneath, because he crumbles again.

The service drags. Mariam stares at her hands. I mouth along with the prayers extra fervently, for both of us.

LIZ VAUGHAN — FICTION

Outside the soft meadow-grass of the graveyard and chapel, the forest looms and observes. After the burial, the girl’s family hovers around the grave. I draw Mariam to the outskirts of the plot to give them some privacy. The mother shoots us a vicious glance, as if my daughter was the bad influence. An aunt says how nice it is that their Kylie never got to dye her hair like she wanted; at least she died pretty and blonde. I didn’t look in the casket. I wonder if she was buried in her own clothes, or if they borrowed some cousin’s sundress.

As dusk thickens, the McCalls drift away to grieve in their own homes. I should take Mariam away from the cemetery, too. But she’s placid, and I can’t move. We are monuments just as much as the tombs surrounding us.

“Do you want to lay the flowers down?” I ask once we’re alone. I bought roses from the grocery store this morning while Mariam was still in a state of insensate, half-asleep mourning. They seemed Gothic enough for her friend’s tastes, even though I selected the soft pink ones instead of blood-red. For the family’s sake.

“They wrote the wrong name,” she answers. “It’s Lilith McCall. Kylie sounds like she plays sports.”

How do I explain that this girl’s family wasn’t going to inscribe a demon queen’s name on her headstone? When I was thirteen, I insisted on being called Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Although I grew out of it after enough of my brothers’ mockery and my youth pastor’s pointed sermons on the sin of paganism, my

LIZ

conviction ran deep. It’s difficult to tell strange little girls that they’re doing something wrong. It’s easier to brush their interests off entirely.

No one likes to admit it, but strange little girls die the same as everyone else. Some of them never get a chance to grow out of it. Her best friend is in a coffin, but my daughter’s the one on the other side of a veil. I’m bunching fabric in my hands, but I can’t get through to her. “The flowers?” I prompt, but she shakes her head.

“I know what to give her.”

Mariam opens her purse. There’s a flash of bonewhite, and then a deer skull is cupped reverently in her hands.

“Jesus Christ ,” I say. Then I slap my hand over my mouth, because we were just in a church. “Sweetie, where did you get that?”

“The woods. We found it.”

It looks ancient, bereft of flesh, its hollow eye sockets gaping like windows into an abyss. It looks like a disease waiting to be caught. And in the early moonlight, my daughter is ethereal. Ideas I abandoned long ago rise tao my mind: an immortal goddess, and the deer she hunts. A child dreaming of being something otherworldly. Her hands tremble on the awful skull, and for the first time today, Mariam starts to cry.

“We were going to cast a spell with it,” she admits.

LIZ VAUGHAN — FICTION

“I don’t know what it would’ve done. Lilith said she’d tell me when she figured it out.”

I rub the heels of my hands across my tired eyes. “If you do this, her family is going to think it’s witchcraft. This is not normal.”

She sniffles. “Lilith hated flowers.” The girl I used to be remembers, and aches. But she was taught. She grew. It’s my daughter’s time now. There is nothing I can do for her but tell her what I’ve learned.

“No,” I say, finally. Firmly. “I’ll leave the roses. We can’t scare the McCalls.” I’m sorry, I almost add, but instead, “Lilith would understand if she’d been older. Graves are for the people who are still here to see them.”

Mariam stays silent. She looks at the headstone with those wide, glassy eyes. On the car ride back, she holds the deer skull in her lap. As she washes off her spectral makeup, she places it by the sink. At midnight, I rest my head against her bedroom door and watch her sleep with her arms around it, pressing into the crook of her neck like a stuffed animal. Like a best friend.

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

Elena Carabeau is a senior English major. Her last name is pronounced the same as “caribou.” She does not fail to see the irony in this.

Maggie Dunn (she/her) is a senior who enjoys baking, reading, and long walks in the deep, dark woods.

Liam Furlong is, well . . . that’s for you to decide. Send him a message over Instagram at @liamtfurlong if you want to get to know him.

Graham Hill is a senior at UNC, soon to graduate and move onto greener pastures not haunted by ghostly deer. He has spent much of his UNC career writing about medieval history, but finally has had a chance to engage in his true love of weird horror stories.

Rio Janisch is a third-year at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They study English and Comparative Literature, and they enjoy exploring the boundaries with experimental nonfiction and fiction.

Naomi Ovrutsky is a poet and astrophysics researcher from Charlotte, NC. Her work can be seen in Cellar Door, Peregrine Magazine, and Idiosyncrazy.

Catherine Pabalate is a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill studying English, biology, and medical anthropology. She is the incoming treasurer for Back Page for the 2024-2025 school year. She loves gothic fiction, making Spotify playlists, and writing her works-in-progress in coffee shops.

Ryan Phillips is a senior from Fairfax, Virginia studying Music and English.

Ayla Rodriguez is a sophomore Creative Writing minor here at UNC, and she’s super excited to share her first published poem with you all. Her love of horror is attributed to her mother, and her fear of deer is attributed to her unfenced backyard.

Liz Vaughan grew up in Asheville, N.C. They are currently a student at UNC Chapel Hill, where they study English, creative writing, and linguistics. In their free time, they are a fiction reader for Cellar Door, a member of Back Page, and a creator with Student-Made.

A huge and heart-felt thank you to everyone who had a hand in this project. To everyone over at Back Page, thank you for your constant support and community. To the authors, thank you for working with this spooky little prompt. Delaney, Sheridan, Katie: thank you all for your help editing. Matt, thanks for the photo on the back cover. And to all who lived through this short moment at UNC, thanks for being there. It’s been fun.

Vyshu Sabbi

editorial team

Sheridan Barry Katie Creel

Delaney Phelps

Georgia Chapman EIC, head of design contributors

Elena Carabeau

Maggie Dunn

Liam Furlong

Graham Hill

Rio Janisch

Naomi Ovrutsky

Catherine Pabalate

Ryan Phillips

Ayla Rodriguez

Liz Vaughan