She Walks in Shadows(79)
I look at the amulet: The two gods exist as one. I think that everything functions like this: in pairs, in dualities. I paint my face: one half-red, the other black. I dress in a skirt of snakes and a headdress of feathers. I am Cihuacóatl, the serpent woman. But I am also Mictecacíhuatl, lady of the dead.
I hear them come to drag me into the amphitheater where the mist blinds and the wind cuts like a knife: the last step before the arrival at the abode of the gods.
The doors open. The wind slices my cheeks. I half-close my eyes, though I can see nothing. I begin to salivate. I arch my back. My mouth already tastes like vomit, but I manage to pronounce the words that come from most deep, from the mouths of the gods with a thousand tongues who are not of this world.
Everything is blue.
The decapitated body of T’la-yub guards, by night, the door of her ancestors, which leads to Mictlán. Walking in dreams, she presents herself to the ashes of her grandmother. In the eternity of the mound, the time of dreams is not the same as the time of death.
In the principal chamber of Mictlán, time is also different. In the tzompantli of the lords of death, there is eternally a new head. The long black hairs writhe like tentacles. Her red-and-black lips sing to receive the dead, who, at last, have finished their tortuous journey. She kisses them like a mother and makes them rest in the same bed where the sun sleeps.
The head of T’la-yub opens her eyes, which are the stellar eyes of Mictlantecuhtli. They see everything and see themselves in them. The light of the stars is born and extinguished in that same instant.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Laura Blackwell is a writer, editor and journalist. She was raised in North Dakota, where the snow and dirt mingle, and become “snirt.” Her publications include PC World, Strange Horizons, TechHive, and various speculative fiction anthologies. You can follow her on Twitter
@pronouncedlahra and visit her website at www.pronouncedlahra.com.
Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. She is more a fan of Hole than 311. It took her two tries to leave Nebraska, but now she lives in Washington, DC, where she tends her garden of student debt sown by two political science degrees. You can read her other Lovecraftian work in the anthologies Sword and Mythos, Letters to Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s Monsters, and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu — or visit nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.
Selena Chambers writes twenty miles south of the Black Lagoon. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Mungbeing Magazine, New Myths, and Yankee Pot Roast, and in anthologies such as the World Fantasy-nominated Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet Of Curiosities, The New Gothic, Steampunk World, and The Starry Wisdom Library. Her non-fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Bookslut, WeirdFictionReview.com, and Strange Horizons (where she was also the articles senior editor for two years). Her first book, the Hugo and World Fantasy-nominated The Steampunk Bible, was co-authored with the award-winning Jeff VanderMeer. She blogs irregularly at www.selenachambers.com.
Arinn Dembo is a prize-winning author of SF, fantasy and horror. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Magazine of F&SF, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Weird Tales, Lamp Light Quarterly, and various anthologies. Single-author books include a military science fiction novel, The Deacon’s Tale, and a collection called Monsoon and Other Stories. In addition to a long career as a writer in the entertainment industry, she holds degrees in anthropology and classical archaeology, fields which often provide grist for the mill of her horror stories. Follow her on social media or visit her website, www.arinndembo.com, for more information.
Jilly Dreadful completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She’s the founder of The Brainery: Online Speculative Fiction Workshops + Resources. She’s currently an associate editor of NonBinary Review and Unbound Octavo, and her major work includes Light & Power: A Tesla/Edison Story, a chamber opera with music composed by Isaac Schankler. Together with her writing partner, KT Ismael, she will be releasing a serialized fiction podcast that takes the feminist emphasis on friendship from Parks and Recreation, and mixes it with a Lovecraftian strangeness — stay tuned for it at blueprintandengine.com.
Former film critic and teacher-turned-award-winning horror author Gemma Files is probably best-known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). She has also published two collections of short fiction, two chapbooks of speculative poetry, and a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven, CZP). Her next book, Experimental Film — also from CZP — will be released in November 2015.
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is a Mexican writer who just moved to the UK. She lives in South Yorkshire with her husband. There, she misses her cats more than anything in the world. Her stories have appeared in anthologies like Future Lovecraft and The Apex Book of World SF 3. She can be found online at http://www.nellygeraldine.com or tweeting mostly in Spanish @kitsune_ng Amelia Gorman is a computer science student living in Minnesota.
Lyndsey Holder enjoys long walks on the beach, eating too much chocolate, and writing paranoid fiction. She’s currently writing a novel that is part pulp noir, part eldritch horror, and part teen detective.
Pandora Hope has a BA in English and has worked as a copywriter, science writer, editor and runologist when not moonlighting as a volva (a Norse witch). She has recently begun to write fiction and her first short story, “The Ferry Man,” appeared in Interzone (January 2015). She is currently working on a novel set in the same world. Pandora credits Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” as responsible for her first experience of night terrors and, paradoxically, a lifelong affection for rats. She lives in Australia with her partner and what may well be Melbourne’s only rat-friendly Norwegian Forest Cat.