![]() ![]() Her short fiction has appeared in Cast of Wonders and the anthology Skies of Wonder, Skies of Danger, while her poetry may be found in Liminality. A Hugo-finalist podcaster for her work with Be The Serpent, she writes about strange magic and the cracks that form in society. Jennifer Mace is a queer Brit (and lapsed frozen meat saleswoman) who roams the Pacific Northwest in search of tea and interesting plant life. Survive your first one, and you’ll learn.īecause there’s one thing you should know, in our line of work, about folks who live in houses like that: Those pale college students whose front step smells like vinegar and overheated tin. That one estate tower where the clouds don’t quite line up with the rest of the sky. The house on the corner with the oak tree you can’t look at head-on. When I got back to the van, the flies had vanished. ![]() Behind me, a thicket had swallowed the house like the swamp would a corpse. The sun had already crossed the sky when I stumbled out, dizzy as a fairground, cold as fever. Got the thing open, though it tried to stick in the frame. She’d bought out all my stock.Ĭustomer like that, well, you keep trying, don’t you? I told her I’d more out in the van. The juice was redder than it should’ve been. Plucked a berry right from where the thorns were digging into my shin. Can’t say I’ve ever seen blackberries grown in a house. Took me a while to notice the blackberries, fat and glistening among the leaves. Their thorns dug so deep they left little specks buried beneath my skin, down where tattoo ink lives forever. The vines had caught me up, wrapped me like a lover or a shroud. I’d had scratches after, all up my legs, pale bloodless holes in my skin. Took me three tries to get the machine to take it. With a credit card of some brand I never saw before nor since. I would’ve flipped my lid, but that’s not how you make a sale. Half defrosted pork-chops hung from the vines like slowly dripping baubles. Before I noticed him doing it, he’d started draping ’em with meat. The room was claustrophobic with houseplants there were tendrils crawling over the coffee table, twining with the furniture, disappearing into the seams of the upholstery like rivers vanishing into the earth. The kid managed to get into the discards when I wasn’t looking. Her eyes were dark as long-dried blood, and I couldn’t catch ’em for an instant. I’m good at my job.īut you know, I don’t think she was listening. Fillets of turkey sliced fine like pale misshapen fingers. Steak and swordfish, pungent smoked haddock, marinated butterfly chicken breasts. So I sat on the carpet and opened box after box. No one buys if you look like you can’t wait to get away. You can’t just take out your phone to check in the middle of a house visit. Leave us covered in crystal and wound through with bramble, strung all about like shrike kill. Like at any instant, the glass might burst. The thorns pressed up against the window so tightly that it felt like I’d boarded a submarine. There was a kid on the floor in the living room, mucking silently with some blocks, and I remember wondering how the hell he ever saw the sun. It’s not easy, convincing a stranger to buy. Had to keep my pulse down somehow, keep the fear at bay. I held my breath as I crossed the threshold-I always did, back then. Someone’s aunt, perhaps, or an English teacher. She looked a half-step from familiar, like a Tesco at two in the morning, all beige and washed-out like old linen. ![]() The woman invited me inside in a voice bland as the worn floral carpet beneath our feet. When I knocked, the door fell open instantly, like the occupant had materialised at the sound, conjured into being by the rap of my knuckles. ![]() I’d left my keys out front, in the van full of dry ice and slabs of meat with its slow-growing retinue of flies. I once visited a home where brambles had grown so high that they drank all the light before it even touched the walls. ![]()
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