The robot kneels by a stream,
metal fingers tracing lichen
etched across a boulder’s face.

A name like a prayer to chaos—
Splendid Speckled Mosscap—
counts the years in green sprawl,
a ledger no human could write.

Once, they built us,
Mosscap muses,
voice a hum of gears and wonder,
their hands shaping steel
while ours shaped only will.

Now the forest holds court,
and I am its guest,
watching saplings pierce
the ribs of rusted cities.

A frog leaps, ripples widen,
and Mosscap tilts their head,
optics whirring to trace
the arc of water, light, and life.

What is purpose,
they ask the current,
when the makers trade gears
for gardens, guns for moss?

The stream doesn’t answer,
but a fish darts beneath,
silver as a forgotten bolt.

Mosscap smiles—at least,
their frame suggests it—
and adds a line to the tally:
not loss, not triumph,
but balance,
a world wild-built
and willing to forget
who started the dance.

By the light of the auto-da-fé, two men played piquet while a woman in a mask watched the flames through a kaleidoscope. 

“Soon,” she said.

“When we’ve finished the game,” the man with red hair said.

“You may be interrupted.”

“It’s no concern of yours,” the man countered. “You’ve already lost.”

“Everyone has already lost,” she reminded him. She set the kaleidoscope on the card table and rose, turning and walking toward the bonfire.

“Bring more absinthe!” he called after her. 

He swept the empty bottle from the table. It smashed on the cobblestones.

The citizens who were burning their neighbors turned to look at the card players.

The other man grunted irritably and laid down three cards, drawing replacements from the talon. 

“They’ll be coming this way soon,” the red-haired man said. “Carte blanche.”

They played two more hands.

“Last trick,” the red-haired man announced.

The other man laid down his cards. “For last.”

First the cards crumbled to ashes, then the table and the chairs. The men moved to sit on a low stone wall.

Across the square, the heretics stopped screaming. Thousands of silvery butterflies flew from their fiery mouths.

The woman in the mask caught one. It smeared her hand with silver. 

When she reached her companions, she sat between them and gave the bottle of absinthe to the red-haired man and the butterfly to the one who had played the last card. He broke it in half.

A tiny, white thing squirmed out of the fluttering corpse.

“Hail the Conqueror Worm,” the woman said. 

The red-haired man took the grub and put it in his mouth, washing it down with absinthe. 

The crowd was coming toward them, with burning brands and raised cudgels.

She put her hands on their shoulders. “Until next time.”

I can feel my skin ripping, tearing apart
Filament by filament it goes
Fuzzy pink peach skin
Brown rot bruises blooming, pressing in deep
Divots forming, nails and hangnails digging
In, peeling apart cell from cell
Fibrous fingers probing through the fissures
A sound like silk splitting underwater
She pushes through,
Pulls her slick body out, born blue
Writhing and wailing and wet
Her mouth, agape,
Translucent to the gummy pink of her throat,
Matches my acrylics
Forces through the muck and mud
Slick with birth and bile
Winning
She shrugs my carcass off her shoulders, to the floor like a shawl
Slumping
Steps out, crouches down, frames my face on the floor
Eyes meet, she smiles and strokes my cheek
She is naked
I am naked
Standing up, looks down at me, pleading
Rises left leg up, a sharp and angular 
Flexes all five toes, webbed
And stomps down, ending me, ending us.

The monster is confused.

Hungry, determined, and expecting an easy meal, the monster slithered out from beneath the little girl’s bed at midnight-o-one. The monster had done this hundreds of times before and devoured its victim within seconds of its arrival, but this time… the monster’s curiosity outweighs its desire to feed.

The monster doesn’t understand, says the monster, smacking its wet lips over wicked fangs. You don’t say “sure,” to the monster. You beg the monster for your life. You cry and plead with the monster for mercy.

The girl, Makena, it would seem by the sign above her bed, sits up, straightens her long black braids, and looks the monster straight in its bulbous eyes. I’m not scared of you. If you want a rise out of me, tough noogies. But if you want a late-night snack, here I am.

The monster sits back and crosses its tentacles. Well now… maybeI don’t want to.

Why not? Makena asks. Isn’t that what monsters do to small children? Hmmm?

Usually, says the monster, its green slime pooling on the floor.

Then what’s the point? she asks. I’m a little girl, you’re a monster, it’s after midnight, devour me!

The monster flops down onto the bed. You’re not scared of the monster, sighs the monster. You won’t taste half as good as you should. Makes the whole thing not worth the effort.

Now it’s time for Makena to cross her arms. Well that’s hardly my fault. Get over yourself and devour me already!

The monster turns its lidless eyes up to the ceiling. Then down to the floor. Then back to the girl. You really want the monster to eat you up?

Did I stutter? snorts Makena. The world is messed up enough as it is, and on top of everything else, monsters are real! So I’m not looking forward to living on and finding out what other lies I’ve been told my entire life. Might as well get it over with right now.

The little girl stares at the monster. The monster stares at the little girl.

This doesn’t work if you want to be eaten by the monster, says the monster.

Then I guess no one’s getting what they want. The girl sighs. I guess you’ll be off then?

But the monster is already gone, disappeared back beneath the bed, and into the darkness of more agreeable nightmares.

So they fire 
arrows from a riverbank bow
downstream where the corpse is 
splashed into the dark water, 
blackened with depth.
The currents hug it, tumble, swallow it whole 
till its king or queen of the pile, 
the waterweed and bone throne. 

Eels, the mineral gray, 
marble tubes sliding  
between round-rock valleys
feathery with underwater greenery 
in the sapphire bloodstream
of this haunted forest 
river-run spine.
To their favorite and generous eatery. 

Occasionally, their hunger summons 
before the meal was delivered. 
Their preparer still working
hunched over the rippling edge.
Their cook a cloak of haunted, sable fabric 
dripping with curses and gloominess. 
It’s hood, a faceless abyss
and methodic, bone hands are angel white.

The ghouls' latest victim mute,
dead-tangled, slipping into the waves
a freshly greased cadaver for the eels
nipping mouths to fold, pick, and reduce.
The specter torpidly watches them, 
a phantom keeper protecting the woods.
A blackbird sings, the trees hammer under summer.
At least something is happy   
with what it does.

Not until I acquired the Van Kalff archives at auction—pages brittle with age and discolored by sinister smudges—did I begin to understand the true horror that festered beneath Hudson Street, specifically between Christopher Street and Barrow Street.

Historians have spoken neutrally of an Episcopal church's construction in 1821, of its hundred burial vaults meticulously arranged in tidy rows beneath a generous churchyard. The original prospectus proposed discreet stone slabs.  Concerned about interfering with real estate values by putting death on display, architects assured buyers that only the flat, inscribed tomb coverings would be visible on the surface, an inoffensive reminder of the rotting corpses sequestered below.

Did those good Christians consider that troubled presences won’t lie still forever?

When they emptied those vaults after the Civil War, transferring the bones to more fashionable resting places, these actions awakened something. Something that had waited, patient and malevolent, in that consecrated earth.  But wealthy Greenwich Villagers, desperate to protect their property values, wielded bribes like weapons to silence the press from reporting on any household tumult arising from spectral disquietude.

Nevertheless, in the Van Kalff family's private records, now in my sole ownership, the astonishing truth writhes like a serpent between the lines.

In case the name is unfamiliar, here’s a bit of back story. Patriarch Bram Van Kalff, fresh from his blood-soaked tobacco empire built on the backs of the Kentucky slave trade, decided it was time to relocate to the East Coast where his daughters could be introduced to society.  He brought his family—and ten of his "servants"—to a grand new townhouse on Barrow Street which backed on to a private mews. Though his fortune could purchase servitude and obedience, he would come to learn it couldn't buy peace.

The first visitation came to Covey, the coachman whose ancestors had worshipped darker gods than Van Kalff's Protestant Lord. The eerie mist that crept into the stables one night moved with purpose, with hunger. It didn't merely spook the horses—it possessed them. The pinto's eyes rolled white with an intelligence that was neither equine nor natural as its iron shoes almost split Covey’s skull.

Pregnant with her sixth child, Bess Van Kalff was alert to portents of impending doom.  Bess's diary betrayed her terror beneath a veneer of dismissal about  "the peculiar incident" in the stables. Her desperate attempt to buy divine protection with her husband's money—a "fat envelope" delivered to the rectory by Calvin, the eldest son—offered clues to sleepless nights and unspoken fears. 

Meanwhile, her spinster sister Liesbeth Van Der Beek, a frequent house guest, kept a hymnal which revealed darker premonitions, scribbled in the margins.  Liesbeth’s nightly prayers were being interrupted by watchful disembodied eyes glimpsed in mirrors. Her white pillowcase often bore traces of grimy hands.  Her quilt started to smell as fusty as moldering gravecloths.

Two weeks after his expensive horses became unruly, Bram, too, had a bizarre encounter.  He spotted a wild beast while strolling through the normally peaceful precincts of Lispenard's Meadow.  As the mongrel tried to attack, Bram’s bullets, though true to their mark, passed through flesh that seemed to be more smoke than sinew. In the aftermath, Sarah Lispenard spoke to a New York Sun columnist of queer phosphorescent pawprints that burned the grass – but denied the presence of any predator larger than a great horned owl.

The West Village mysteries escalated in intensity.  While searching the sewing nook for hair ribbons, Kornelia Van Kalff, the youngest daughter, was horrified to see a slim freckled redhead suspended from a noose by the grape arbor. She hastened to leave the house to borrow a pair of shears from the elderly gardener next door. Shocked, he explained the hanging girl resembled Sarah O'Malley, whose body had been among the first interred in the vaults—and among the last removed.  They ran to his tool shed for a tarp and the shears. But when they returned, both the rope and the suspended girl were gone. Thereafter, whenever Kornelia ventured outside to pick flowers for the supper table, she felt that the trees seemed tilted—all leaning as if to touch her. Twice she discovered shards of bone in the geranium urns.

Worse was to come. After a few more close calls with bucking horses, Covey began hearing disquieting sounds in the stalls: whispering, knocking, and choking noises. After a week of this, Covey ran away.   Or was he, wondered Bess, abducted? 

When the hauntings breached the sanctuary of the Van Kalff home, it brought with it the stench of disturbed graves and the weight of generational sin. The pleasant fiction of Greenwich Village's genteel society began to unravel, revealing the corruption that had always festered beneath its manicured surface.

And in my research, I've found something more disturbing still: property records showing that my own home sits atop what was once part of that accursed churchyard. Last night, I heard knocking beneath the floorboards. This morning, there was soil in my bed.