~5000 words, approx 30 min
When the ghoul dragged a third man off the boardwalk, the priests of the Marsh City of Nadia rang the bells. That evening, the acolytes fastened pinwheels to the docks and scrubbed the quay, the one at the end of the pier, which no living sailor used. Tailwind’s silver boat arrived with the next tide, cutting effortlessly through the waves from the light of the horizon. A god always answered the bells.
Tailwind found the wretched ghoul in the northern swamps, under the boardwalk. Crouched in the muddy shallows, the muck lapped at her knobby knees, but she was well into her meal. The pieces of the man were scattered around her bent and ragged figure, but as the soul was the real thing that would nourish her, she’d taken her time with it. Tailwind followed its flagging light.
“Halt, oh sinful slur upon this world,” declared Tailwind, his black and grey robes drifted in the winds of his own power. He levelled his spear at her back. This ghoul was a particularly nasty specimen. She must have died in still water, for her hatred warped her halfway to the thick skin and slippery form of a snakehead. Her human arms and legs were spindly and pale grey. Her fingers were stretched unnaturally long, a faint webbing formed between them. “Take another bite and I shall retrieve it from your belly.”
“Oh shove off,” gurgled the ghoul, turning in the marsh water, mud clouded about her feet. “My belly, my business. Since when do you care what’s in it?”
The dead man’s foot had been dangling from her jaws, but it fell and splashed into the muck as the ghoul spoke.
Tailwind hesitated. The battered remains of her mud-stained wrap were knotted high over her waist, meant to give way for an expanding abdomen. She’d been pregnant. She must’ve met a bad end, with no one to guard her body in death, as she was missing the middle two fingers of her right hand. Sure sign of a grave robber.
Tailwind coughed. “Lady, my faithful have called for that soul’s protection. I shall never allow you to feast upon it”
“Feast,” she laughed, straightening in the water. It made her shape more apparent. Only her body was bloated. Her limbs were skinny and pale. Hanks of matted hair hung in her face like marsh weed, and her eyes were wide and cloudy like a dead fish. “Some feast he is. And some faithful. Real quality there.”
She had a point. The soul still clinging to the torn remains was almost as murky as the water lapping at the ghoul’s tattered hem. The young man must’ve spent his few years on this earth in the enthusiastic pursuit of spiritual pollution.
Still, Tailwind shouldered his spear. Ghouls played these games, sometimes. He refused to fall for them.
“Nevertheless,” he said. “There is no soul that may claim perfection, but all may claim my protection.”
“Yeah? And where were you when it was his wife wailin’ for protection, eh?” coughed the ghoul. She gave the dead man’s chest a nudge with one of her dirty, bare feet. The soul cringed and cowered away from her. “You know he spent all her money on dice? You know he smacked her around when she complained about it, right?”
It was an accusation so bald that Tailwind paused and plunged his shining hand into the muddy waters. He dragged the wavering soul out from the pieces of this body.
“Ridiculous,” pronounced the god, with a flash of his light-filled eyes. “Faithful one, is this true?”
The soul cringed and wavered, but it couldn’t lie.
“Heh,” said the ghoul. She did not say, “I told you so” but the rather smug way she popped one of the man’s hair beads into her mouth and crunched down on it said it all.
“How…disappointing,” muttered Tailwind. “But nevertheless. No matter how, erm, unsightly this soul may be, I cannot allow you devour it.”
The soul drooped pathetically under the god’s criticism. The ghoul threw her head back and laughed. “Hell else do you expect me to do? Wait around for a righteous one?”
“Move on. Return to the ocean. Give your name to the winds and sail out to the horizon. You shall be carried out by the tides, fresh and new—”
“Spare me the sermons. I’ve heard ‘em. Sure, I could,” huffed the ghoul, waving her bony hand in the general direction of the mess. “But what about him?”
For the first time, Tailwind noticed the second form shivering around the muck. It was only about the size and hue of a rockfish, equally mottled and horrible, with eyes like glass marbles, rolling in their sockets. The infant ghoul opened its mouth and yowled.
The ghoul took one look at the god’s face. Her rubbery lip curled. “Yeah, that’s about right. You didn’t hear my prayers either, when they did me in. So what’s it going to be? You going to run me through? Smite me? Sew my skin into your sails?”
“I shall…” And for once in his many years of service to the people, the shining, silver Tailwind found himself at a loss for words. He plunged his spear into the water and lifted his chin, attempting to regain some of his grandeur. “I shall do what must be done. You, wretched soul. If I am to judge you —”
He lifted the tip of his spear and levelled it at her face. The ghoul stared at the point, murky eyes cold and resigned.
“ — tell me your name.”
#
Tailwind found a shrine out in the border marshes, where the ground firmed up just enough to build a little clay hut. A few pinwheels blew raggedly in the weak winds of the hot mid-day, and the streamers hung limp, their colors long ago bleached by the sun. The priest here was a sweet old woman who kept the boards washed and the carpets laundered, despite the muck brought in by farmers who worked in the marsh. She brewed an excellent hot chocolate, melted from well-spiced, dark blocks she made herself.
He didn’t bother to announce himself. His outdated dress and his antiquated way of speech would give her enough of an idea of who he might be—but Tailwind never came for bows or supplication. The old woman kept her silence on the matter, as he hoped she would.
His companion was a bit harder to place, a grey-skinned woman in a sopping cloak, her hood pulled over her matted black hair. She didn’t have the brightness of a god, nor the breath of a living soul.
But still, it never paid to be nosy. Especially with a hungry god.
“I’ll get another pot going,” she said, and toddled out into the yard, leaving all her questions unasked.
“Your good priest threw a bucket at my head last week,” muttered the ghoul. Her name was Atzi and she kept her hands firmly bunched in the borrowed cloak.
“With these offerings to sustain your form, she should not trouble you as long as you are under my auspice,” promised Tailwind.
“Yeah? And how long do I got that?”
The little fish ghoul wriggled out from under her robes. It used its fin-like hands to dump the bowl of chocolate into its wide mouth. Its gurgles morphed into a much happier burble.
Tailwind pushed his own unfinished bowl across the table to join the first. Atzi eyed it warily. “As long as you need. I promise you, this shall fill you better than any faithful’s tarnished soul.”
After the first few mouthfuls she did look a bit brighter. Some of the sallow tint left her grey skin, its original brown luster coming through. A few beaded braids replaced some of her matted hair, dangling against her jaw.
“Well?” asked the god, duly smug.
Atzi glared at him, her eyes notably less bulbous. The webbing on her hands had gone down. She laid her notably shorter fingers on the fish ghoul’s now rounder head. The“S’not bad.”
When seconds came, she drank down that whole bowl, too.
“Will you tell me your story?” asked Tailwind, when the fish ghoul now resembled a little fuzzy peach, curled up on her now dry leg. Its tail thumped happily.
Atzi wiped her mouth and grimaced. “What’s there to tell? I was a rich man’s side piece. He decided two women were too expensive. He dropped me in the marsh to keep me quiet, despite promising to take me on.”
She leaned back and stuck her leg out, showing off open cuts from the ropes around her ankle. He must have weighed her down with stones.
An awful way to die. Tailwind grimaced. “Did this man of bad faith know about the babe?”
“Yeah,” said the ghoul, distantly. She pulled her leg back under her wrap. “Didn’t stop him.”
The table clattered as the god attempted to kneel. Her gills flared in alarm—they hadn’t quite melted back into her neck.
“My lady,” he said, bowing his head. “You should know that if you were to haunt one of my priests, we would deliver you satisfaction—”
“Oh, I got satisfaction,” she said, quickly. “I pulled him in right after me a week later. Tied him up in his own rocks.”
Tailwind looked up.
She smiled, showing her long and still-pointed teeth. “Seemed faster than waiting for him to bribe the magistrates.”
“A just death,” agreed Tailwind. This time, she looked at him. “He forfeited his rights to my protection. But if you have achieved justice, why do you yet linger, lady most aggrieved?”
Her torn hand stopped over the smaller ghoul’s slippery head. “There’s a weight on me yet.”
“What weight is that?”
“If you have to ask, then it ain’t worth answering.”
#
He did not smite the ghoul or her child that day. Instead, he took an extra bar of packed cocoa from the priest and pressed it into the ghoul’s hand.
“Brew it with clean water, if you can find it,” he said, “And seek offerings in the shrines when you feel empty. They shall offer you safety.”
“Safety,” husked Atzi, shaking her head. Her uncovered beads clacked. “As if they wouldn’t drive me away at first glance.”
He touched the shimmering ends of the cloak he’d draped around her. “Wear this and they shall know you have my blessing. Let them try to deny you. I will blow down their doors.”
She laughed, but when he vanished like a breath of wind, and the robe was still settled about her shoulders, she had to admit maybe there was something to all that pomp.
#
He found her a month later, holed up beneath a bridge during a stiff summer rain. A wanted serial killer lay dead at her webbed feet. The ghoul child gnawed on one of the dead man’s shoes, and the beautiful woven cloak Tailwind had given her had gone nearly black from mud and blood.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she muttered, giving the uneaten soul an angry flick with her hand. It was sour and shriveled looking. She must have been working up the nerve to eat it.
“I wanted better for you,” said Tailwind.
“Better doesn’t exist for me,” she hissed, gathering the squirming fish ghoul to her sagging breasts.
Tailwind flexed his fingers along his spear, feeling the well-worn grooves of the grip, worn by centuries of divine purpose. Then, sharpened by that purpose, he thrust the spear into the blackened, wicked soul at her feet, banishing it on.
“There is a shrine not far from here,” he said. “Come with me.”
#
If anyone thought to question the ghoul’s appearance, the god’s arm around her shoulders made them think twice.
This shrine was run by a sea captain and his first mate. They’d promised to build one if they survived a particularly powerful storm. They’d kept their promise and, as they’d earned much gold over the course of their careers, the shrine was particularly idyllic, built overlooking the city’s north-most pier.
Tailwind and the ghoul sat at the feet of the shrine’s sizable statue. They drank chocolate and ate candied figs, swapping stories and listening to the rain.
“Doesn’t look much like you,” said Atzi, looking between the shrine icon and its god. “You tell them to add on all those muscles?”
“They see me in dreams as you see me now,” said Tailwind, gesturing. “They are the ones who make their decisions on how to translate that image to stone.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother you.”
“When I walked yet among the living, I did once hope to be tall.”
That earned him a true laugh from the ghoul. It sounded like a boat scraping up against a pier. “What, you didn’t spring into existence ten feet tall with four extra sets of abs?”
“The people of the ocean are mighty in heart, but not, ah, stature.”
“You wasted your breath on your huffery, is what you did.”
“And who were you?” he challenged. “When you yet lived?”
Atzi had been an innkeeper among the border marshes. She’d done reasonably good business, offering rest and solid ground to merchants who’d made their way across the endlessly wet floodlands. Since her inn was clean and the rooms were cool, her clientele had gotten wealthier and wealthier, until she’d met Eztli, her lover and killer. He was a shipping agent. He stayed regularly. He brought her fresh flowers, from the firm lands.
“Guess that makes me easy,” she sighed, but the chocolate worked through her as she spoke. Her hands grew more tanned and lively. Her eyes became brown and deep with memory.
She bounced the small ghoul on her knee, pouring a half cup of chocolate into its gaping jaws. Its fins almost resembled fat infant hands.
“My lady,” interrupted Tailwind, with an earnestness that made her gills raise. “Please know that if you’d like shelter for the night, this house of worship is open to you.”
The ghoul froze with her knee raised. She dropped her dripping heel back to the floor.
“You.” Her eyes went wide and truly fishy in their alarm. “You really think that I…Pah.”
She clutched the little fish ghoul to her chest and slithered over the rail, back into the frothing shallow sea.
#
Tailwind did not return to the horizon. He spent many days idling among the streets of his faithful, spinning pinwheels and stirring banners.
Until the little fish ghoul led him to her, screeching like a seabird. He found her half dried out on a beach, a vestal spear buried in her side–but alive.
He broke off the shaft and carried her to the nearest shrine, a tidal cave hollowed out by an old monk and his students. She was too weak to protest. He wrapped her in one of his spare sails, carrying her and the smaller ghoul close to his chest. Too much time had passed since she’d fed. Her fetid flesh sagged even more. Only after three bowls of spiced pudding did she at last resemble a person again.
“My faithful have shamed you,” whispered Tailwind, holding his hand over her open wound. “Name them, and I shall bring them to heel.”
“Don’t be too hard on your idiot priests,” she said, once her lips were wet enough to speak. The shrine walls were painted with images of the god in his boat. It only kind of looked like him. The priests let him lay a woven blanket over her twisted form. “They were ready to let me in fine. But they saw him—”
She gestured, vaguely, downwards. The fish ghoul blew water out of his newly formed nostrils.
“And started ringing those bells. I told them he wouldn’t hurt anyone if I said not to, but they kept ringing ‘em and ringing ‘em. Got chased out of three shrines before I was just, ah, well. These places smell too good for me anyway. Last one just managed to nick me, is all.”
Then, more quietly, she added: “Tried to stick to eating just the real rotten souls, anyway. Thought that’d be less hassle for you.”
Tailwind sighed. A disappointed breeze tore through the cavern. A few acolytes lost their papers. “You deserve a far better meal. When you are turned away again, call upon my aid. I will fly to your side.”
“Oh, god.”
“Exactly!” cried Tailwind, grinning with all the wildness of a sailor with a full gale against his back. “Exactly, that is what I am, and that is what I shall be for you. Pray to me. Pray, and I shall protect you. Sail with me. I shall take you to the horizon. You and your son will be welcome among us.”
Atzi looked over her shoulder. The fish ghoul puffed his body out, spines shivering. “You’d really take us,” she realized. She turned to face him, holding up the little monstrous creature in her arms. “But would the rest of you godly types be able to stand us as we are? There’s more than just you beyond the horizon, isn’t there?”
She smiled bitterly, so he could see her stained, needle-like teeth. She held out her maimed hand, slippery and webbed. Everyone knew tidal deities were spun from the silver of the moon.
Tailwind was not a god capable of lying. He froze in place.
“Go help the living,” sighed Atzi. “I’m tired of promises no one can keep.”
#
The tides had cycled three times, and Tailwind’s boat remained moored at the pier. He paced restlessly along the deck, but made no move to raise his sail.
No doubt the wicked thing and her monstrous son would soon fade to nothingness for lack of soul or faith to sustain them. There were only so many truly wicked people in the world, and their shriveled souls provided little sustenance.
When that happened, the priests would be satisfied with their god’s work. Atzi and her child’s end would perhaps not be a glorious smiting of the wicked—but a ghoul would no longer stalk the boardwalk. Who would mourn? Weren’t ghouls creatures of hate and vengeance in violation of natural law? If their souls refused to leave on the tide, shouldn’t they accept the point of a spear or fade away?
“But it’s simply abominable,” cried Tailwind, who now knew better. He was a god, was he not? It was his duty to challenge the world’s injustices.
He drove away the heinous thought with enough divine ire that the temple bells rang on their own all through the city. The people held their ears for an hour afterwards.
Boats rocked in the night. Roofs rattled. Tailwind blew into the dreams of the priests. He arrived in an explosion of light, as big and as broad as the icons they built of them.
He blew through the cavern on the beach, where the acolytes slept in their neat little lines. He stood towering over them, allowing the silver of his sails to flap behind him, majestic as a sailboat in a full run.
“My good faithful,” he bellowed, like a great flap of canvas in a gale. “Rejoice. For I, the mighty Tailwind, have a commandment.”
The next morning, all the clergy of Nadia woke bewildered. For once, they shared a common revelation:
- Their ears were ringing.
- This meant their dreams were an actual visitation and not the result of too much incense.
- They ought to do what their god said.
- They didn’t want to know how loud he’d get if they didn’t.
#
For Atzi the water ghoul, the world soon became a very different place.
The first faithful to find her was a wader picking snails from the tidal pools, near the inner marshes. Not Tailwind, but a mortal beachcomber, the kind who searched beneath docks for dropped treasures.
“Oh,” she said, lifting her straw hat. “Darling, do you need somewhere to go?”
The next of the faithful found her after she’d failed to drown a cowardly fisherman who’d tried to leave his wife. She’d almost had him, but the feckless man had taken one look at the grinning ghoul and running home shrieking, begging the woman to take him back. Good for the wife, if she really wanted the snail of a man, but it left Atzi with only a mouthful of cloth and an empty, wavering belly.
She slouched in the shallows. A priest offered her his oar.
“Going to rain soon,” he said, with a glance at the darkening skies. “Got a place to stay?”
She spent the afternoon in his raft. It rocked with the rising waters, but it didn’t sink. He spiced his melted chocolate with cinnamon.
“Oh, don’t smother him,” he said, when he caught sight of the child, worming around beneath her cloak. Atzi expected a scene when she set the little thing loose, but the priest offered him a ball with a bell in it. His sons were all grown, he explained. They wouldn’t be back for it.
“You’re taking this well,” said Atzi.
The priest laughed. “Children come in all shapes, don’t they?” He nodded to the wall hanging. “It’s the winds’ will, isn’t it?”
“You all keep saying that,” said Atzi, the third time it happened. This time, she sat in a lighthouse temple, the kind that kept streamers outside. The bell remained suspiciously unrung. The head priest even dared offer the little ghoul a cake with her own hands. “What’s that mean, will of the winds?”
The priest shrugged. “Well, the Tailwind mainly.”
Atzi groaned. “Gah, that does sound like him,” she muttered as the priest peered at her. “But I thought those winds blew for Nadia? The sailors and the lighthouse keepers and the like? The ones that stay on the boardwalks.
“You forgot lost mothers on the marsh,” said the priest, her expression warm. “And their children. It’s a new one, true, but I can’t say it’s a bad one. Perhaps, like all of us, parenthood gives even gods new perspectives.”
“What gives them the who now?” asked Atzi. She chanced a glance over at the icons, laid out on a table across from her. They were a pair of dolls, sewn out of sail canvas. One of the figures she recognized as Tailwind.
The other was new: a hooded woman in grey, its driftwood arms wrapped around a dried hazelnut. The hazelnut had two big eyes carved into it.
Atzi looked between it and the cooing ball in her lap. She could almost see a resemblance.
#
Even the minor shrines told similar stories. Atzi traveled between them to check. She loitered on the boardwalks and the stilted temples, dangling her feet in the muddy water. The webbed claws became toes four dinners ago. She couldn’t summon her tail at all.
Word rang out like the morning bells. Tailwind had made a proclamation. Tailwind had become a family god.
“Oh, yes. The mighty Tailwind’s found a bride,” said the acolyte in the tidal cavern, asmug youth with a shaved head.
She vaguely remembered scaring the light out of him when she’d fled to the sea.
“Know a lot about your god’s private life, do you?” asked Atzi.
The young acolyte flushed. “Well—I mean—why else would she be in his temple?”
Atzi eyed the mural on the wall. This one depicted Tailwind on his boat, a newly sketched-in voluptuous mermaid by his side. Atzi couldn’t help but poke one of her own breasts in comparison. They were a little more plush than the last time she’d checked, but she hadn’t been quite that busty even when alive. These acolytes had way too much free time.
“What’s the name of the babe?” Atzi pointed to the little blob on the bow of the ship. It didn’t look much like her own, who’d grown arms and legs just that morning. She was very proud of him.
“Gust,” said the acolyte, with the confidence of a total liar.
“Gust,” mused Atzi. “Eh, it’ll do.”
#
The old sea captain and his first mate unveiled a new statue in Nadia proper. Atzi scowled when she saw it. The woman looked ready to brain a sea serpent to death, all bulging muscles, with one leg propped up on the head of some kind of unholy amalgam of horse and fish.
At least the infant in her arms looked fairly cute, even if it had visible triceps and a confusing amount of teeth.
“What, you couldn’t find a woman to model for it?” she asked the sea captain. The woman’s physique bore a suspicious resemblance to the captain himself, minus the beard.
His first mate came to his defense. “She’s Lady Rain. The mighty consort to the mighty Tailwind! She should look strong. It takes muscle to hoist a sail.”
The captain smiled under his bristly beard. “Indeed it does. Did I ever tell you…”
Atzi watched the gathered faithful, an even split of those who looked forward in interest and those who yawned and wandered away.
She picked up one of the bowls of figs from the feet of Tailwind’s mighty consort and fed it to the little gusty thing chewing on her wrap. If a few of the other faithful shot her dirty looks, she flashed them a pointy smile. They moved on right quick after that.
“Hey, now,” she asked the sea captain, who’d just finished with his latest tale of woe. “Since when does Tailwind have a consort, anyway?”
A smile rippled the sea captain’s salt-encrusted beard. “Tailwind requested we make a place in his house for a rain-soaked woman and her child. Well, who else belongs in the wind’s house but the wind’s wife? Not every sailor’s married to the sea”
“Some marry other sailors,” said the first mate, archly.
“You people,” said Atzi. “All these assumptions.”
Atzi’s feet left no wet tracks on the boardwalk as she left. As she marched down the hill, no one stopped her. Her wrap was a little dark for daywear, black with only a few silver threads dangling from the sleeves.. One or two travelers stopped to eye the bundle in her arms, but there wasn’t a spine or flipper in sight. She’d wrapped him up in a nice little woven blanket she’d nicked out of the tidal shrine. She’d bled into it. That made it hers, right?
“Imagine that,” she said to the little thing in her arms. “Just ‘cause he says to let a lady in, they all decide she’s his consort. Little bit of misplaced faith can go a long way. How about that statue, huh?”
The only answer she got was a garbled mewl as the creature pressed his face against her front.
“Hungry again?” sighed Atzi. “What, those figs weren’t enough? Careful, there, or I really will name you tit-biter, no matter what those idiot priests have decided to name you.”
The quay at the end of the pier was made from fresh white wood, newly washed, freshly patched, not a single board left a snag or splinter on her bare feet. Pinwheels were posted along the sides, fluttering freely as she passed. The guards at the docks uncrossed their spears at the sight of her. They hurriedly stepped aside.
“What’s all this?” But every time Atzi tried to look one of the guards in the eyes, they dropped to their knees and began to pray. They were temple guards, the kind that manned the lighthouse itself. They really liked their prayer. Atzi thought about nudging one of them with her foot, but she’d felt one of those spears in her side once before and didn’t care to again. She gathered the babe to her breast, lifted her chin like a queen, and stepped around them.
A silver dinghy rocked at the end of the pier. A one-man dinghy, hardly fit for open sea, but its pointed prow shone like a knife against the deep green waves. Shrouded in silver, Tailwind was hard at work rigging his boat. He fixed his spear back into a boom, and fastened it to the mast. She watched him work.
“You know.” At least when she cleared her throat, it still sounded a little like a croak. “They’re saying I’m your wife.”
Tailwind knocked his mighty head against the boom as he looked up at her.
“Ah, lady,” he said, the delight in his eyes completely inappropriate, but when he streamed from the deck of the boat to the pier beside her, there was a nearly bashful tilt in his shining gaze. “I thought perhaps if they thought the babe mine—well, no one can question the child of a god, now can they?”
“You tell me,” said Atzi, and she pulled the woven blanket out of the creature’s face.
The baby was on the small side, but his eyes blazed with the sort of soupy life you found in the marshlands. The bare thatch of hair on its head was prickly, like a spinefish, but his cheeks were fat and full, glowing from fresh cocoa, figs, and milk. He looked, perhaps, a bit like those sketches in the sea cave. He looked a lot like that statue up on the hill. It must’ve given him some ideas, she thought, as he crossed his feet and wriggled his toes.
When Tailwind reached to tap him on the cheek, the boy bit him. The god pulled back with a laugh and shook out his hand.
“Gust, hm,” said Atzi. “Was that your idea?”
“Not at all. I thought Typhoon would be grander.”
“You would,” sighed Atzi. “What about the Lady Rain? That one you?”
Tailwind froze. He really couldn’t lie. Atzi wondered if that was a god thing, or something unique to this particular god.
“Atzi means rain,” he said, with a sheepish sort of pride.
At the mention of the name, the guards on the dock bowed even lower, if that was possible.
“That boat’s awful small,” said the Lady Rain, a tall broad woman in a black and silver cloak. “Could it really fit two more?”
She held out her hand like a queen and waited. There was neither fin nor film in her upturned palm. Her beaded hair hung nearly to the small of her back, and her brown eyes were fierce but warm. Her deep brown skin brimmed with all the earthy life of the shore. How mighty this goddess looked, standing there beside her slender, windy consort.
The bracelets were a little much.
Ah, well. She supposed it came with the job. She had planned to be a goddess of vengeance, after all.
Tailwind laid his hand in hers. It felt cold, like a stiff breeze. She was still missing her two middle fingers, but from the way he folded his fingers over hers and held it tight, he didn’t mind.
“My lady,” he promised. “You gaze upon the mightiest sailor upon the horizon.”
“Prove it,” said Lady Rain.
She climbed aboard.
Alexandra Singer lives on coastal Connecticut with her wife, two cats, and too many fantasy novels to count. She is the author of indie titles MINOTAUR, SONG OF THE BULLRIDER, the graphic novella SMALL TOWN WITCH, and the ongoing webcomic SFEER THEORY. Her short stories have appeared in Crossed Genres Magazine, Utopia Science Fiction, and Sledgehammer Literature. For more, visit her website at littlefoolery.com or on twitter @sfeertheorist.
Photo by Philipp Apler on Unsplash
