The Ejection of Anima

Open Casket

Did she just wink?
Something about her beauty was…off.
The beryl of her eyes?
The barest invitation of a pout?

That wasn’t it.
Nor was it the chatoyancy of her skin.
The hair, perhaps? Ethereal waves that might carry you off without an anchor.
No.
The tilt of the nose, then?
Just a nose…
But, sixteen eyelashes twitch, release themselves and crawl down her cheek.
Ah yes, the spiders; that’s it.

To Everything, Turn, Fail, Fall

Ketaris battled upwards, through the undine horde. Escaping the stony shoals and grizzled shallows once was a miracle; this was her third visit to her birthplace.

Paws, nets and hooks were thrown, she avoided all — she didn’t even eat. The males bumped her flanks, spiraled round her; still she swam. Where once the final obstacle lay, there now squatted a dam.

Sick with rotting spawn she returned to the Pacific.

Failed, extinct, to darkness, all.

Christopher Bean

My first published work is the story ‘Jumbled-up Jack’ in The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel (Woodbridge Press, 2016) anthology (See Cemetery Dance review here). Since then I’ve had several flash fiction pieces published by Haringey Unchained, some of which are included here. My first long-form, Victorian horror novel The Pegge and the Pendrel is finished and looking for a home. I’m working on companion books set in the same universe, designed to be read in any order. I started writing in 2009 focusing on shorts and awkward, wretched little things that were too long to be short and too short to be novellas. On Bluesky, not Twitter.