He thought a jumbie would look hunched and desiccated, like the twisted body of a man blackened by fire, something living that should be dead. But as the jumbie emerges from the club, it looks like it could be another queer man in the Village, another of the boys inside on the dance floor; it wears a tailored peacoat and Converse and has a face that would be beautiful if it wasn’t so long, if only its thin-lipped mouth wasn’t quite so wide.
Dendrites stretching through void, dark axons reaching out from soma to soma. Each intersection a galaxy, bright neurons in a network of space. The music of radiation: the acetylcholine passing from cell to cell. The lugubriously expanding universe: a majestic monstrous fetus gestating. When the universe awakes and synapses fire, will we awaken, too? Or will we continue, atoms of organelles of a neuron, unaware of the body? This magnificent leviathan, oblivious to the multitudes it contains: the glory of its cells.
[They are i]nspired by a very effective technique for dealing with anxiety I was taught long ago, which is to let the sensation envelope you without judgement.
We are now accepting fiction submissions for our Southeastern USA Special issue, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas. This will be a special issue of Strange Horizons published at the end of July 2018, and it will focus on the work of writers who are black, indigenous, and/or people of color from the Southeastern USA.
