Author Archive: Eric San Juan

read part 1 – read part 5 A bottle of whiskey lay half-open on a counter somewhere, the counter in a void of gray mist. In the next room, a body swollen with gas, three days dead. Bruises kissed its waist. More bottles lay nearby. Further into the void, a hole in the Earth, endless, covered with rotting wood boards. One false step … A garbage bag filled with chemicals. Pine needles on fire. A kick in the night followed by tears. A groped breast in the back of an old car. A night in a basement filled with vomit. All of these things were true. He shook his head, willed the void away, willed the truth away, but the room and the stool and…
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read part 1 – read part 4 Air sucked back into the room. Sound returned. He could see; he could breath; he could speak. Where once sat the woman of skin and shadow was now a void, a cavern of flesh where the couch had been, its walls glistening with wetness. When he was two, his mother fell down the steps with him in her arms. Or maybe she threw him. The opening seemed to cast light and dark at once, the light easing his mind, the dark both drawing him in and repulsing him. He stepped forward. Forward again. Its walls quivered as he neared. He could hear the rush of blood within. When he was six, he was stung in the face by…
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read part 1 – read part 3 Four gardens surrounding a pool of starlight. Three ancient stone benches, a fourth crumbling. A streak across the night, moon to moon. Then, a flower of gold and red blooming on the nearest satellite. She carves. Glances up, pauses, returns to work. Rough wood, pulled from the floor of the nature sanctuary. A small piece of something greater. She seeks what is hidden within. The hidden thing. The hidden memory. Beyond the gardens and pools, harsh lights. A naked night on a naked world. Over the stone paths through the sanctuary to the gates, and then into those piercing stabs of blinding white, onto bare streets and bare homes filled with bare faces, watched over by the men…
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read part 1 – read part 2 I’ve never been a woman. “I’ve never been a woman.” He’s not sure which of them said this. I’m not sure which of them said this. Someone said this. Or maybe no one. Voices have a way of slithering into the ether, worming into the air and floating about, just being, just existing, until the moment they need to be heard. Sometimes at night, when his body froze in place and the shadows grew eyes, he’d hear the voices outside the window or just outside the bedroom door, murmuring in a language just beyond understanding, like some ancient and forgotten cant from the slums of now dead Sumerian cities, impossible voices from an impossible past when old gods…
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read part 1 Sometimes when he slept, he would half wake. A menace would hang in the air. Something would be in the room with him, just on the edges of his vision, smeared into the shadows and watching him with burning eyes. He’d try to scream but couldn’t. He first saw one when he was 11 or 12. His eyes eased opening after a night awake wondering why it felt so strange to lay on your stomach. Just outside his bedroom door, a skeleton. Not a collection of bones strung together like you’d find in a classroom. No, this was a being. A thing. A malevolent entity. It watched him sleep. Observed him. Waited for its moment to do … what? He tried to…
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