Author: M Van Vleet

Your call is important to us. We teach our children about your call… their imaginations light up, thinking about its possible content, about the vast stretches of quiet waiting that precede it. They chirp and bark in imitation of a call that has yet to happen, with no way of knowing if their little animal cries are accurate.

The millionaire pushed another shell into the side of his shotgun and used the barrel to indicate the open meadow in front of us. “And now it is time to hunt… the most dangerous game.”

Me: “Like what, like a frisbee with razor blades on the side, or like… football but the ball is a grenade? Which game?”

Apparently I was supposed to be running, I dunno, they don’t make things clear here.

It’s Wednesday and we all know what that means! We collect the bloody iron spikes scattered along the road and once again mourn the escape of the Hammered Man who every week pulls itself free from its many restraints and attempts to rejoin the forest.

But there’s only one tree as big as you, eh, Hammered Man? Can’t hide at all in our meager wood. It takes a few days, but pretty soon you’ll be back in the road where we put you. Until next week, most likely.

Legislators have pushed forward a measure calling for all “little men in the garden” to stop “softly singing in the silver moonlight, calling to our bones, calling for them to come home.”

“Let’s get back to having a country where we wake up in the morning without finding our teeth in little rows on the window sill, lined up like they’re in a parade, like they were only stopped by the glass and otherwise they would have been done to the garden,” says Senator Finkle.

I put my last words on a cassette and rigged it into a loop so it could keep playing

cause I wasn’t sure when I was going to die

but it’s been running so long, the tape is flaking, there’s this hiss

My Knife is a Love Letter
Murder is a Greenhouse and You Are the Flowerbed
Black Cat’s Regret
All the Colors Are Black
What the Rabbit Saw in Hell

COME ON DOWN, it’s halfway to harvest and our show lot is OVERFLOWING with wicker men priced to MOVE

We’ve got towering ones, we’ve got ivy-covered ones… we’ve even got one made from IMPORTED SILK

it’s never too early to start stuffing sacrifices inside, but you don’t have to take MY word for it… tell ’em, John Barleycorn:

F̴҇͢E̵҇͜E̴͜͝D̴̕͢ Ţ̷̕H̶͢͞E҈̡͝ S҈̡͡O̴҇͜I̵̧͡L̷͢͡

We didn’t want to bother the aliens, so we peppered their planet with little translation drones designed to learn a single word of their language. Not a big burden, we thought, if a l’il bot asks you for one word, and we’d use AI compilers to build the translation engine later.

But all we got was the word “What?” over and over and over again.