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I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt.

Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into.

And I did, once I’d peeled off my own skin with my pilfered pocketknife. The cicadas’ hypnotic buzz directed me from the surrounding trees. I weighed my skin down with stones until the creek water ran clear of blood and leftover meat. Only then could I crawl into the cicada coat. Soon I, too, screamed unfettered, the way I’d longed for every second of my life.

To the untrained ear, it would sound like a song.

I usually did this during church service, when I slunk away from the villagers clad in their Sunday best. My dress that once belonged to the priest’s daughter chafed like a restraint around me. My sweat, when it seeped into this foreign skin, didn’t ease the slide, only made the gray garment even more oppressive.

Yet the animal skins cradled me. Soon, I moved from hemiptera to herbivores. That butcher-smell of raw meat—that Easter-Sunday reek of offal—never became stifling. Fresh, that smell was, like the grass the animal ate commingling with its natural musk, and mine.

Grandma hated it when pater-Kyriakos noticed me gone from church. You already have the blue witch-eyes of the Saturday-born, she chided, bloodying my legs with her cane. The priest doesn’t need more reasons to withhold charity when he comes by the house on his old donkey.

I was wild that summer. Cackled when the holy water stung my torn shins. When my period came, I slathered my hands with the viscid strings and walked around the village nocturnal, staining scarlet the white-washed walls and sea-blue windows.

The villagers—including my maternal grandmother—already thought me a witch, a changeling. Just like her mother, their judging eyes and hushed whispers seemed to say. The harlot who ran off to the capital when she was sixteen, who had a baby out of wedlock and sang for an enchanted audience each night; the murderess who killed herself dead before they could lock her up in prison for life.

I wondered if my mother had also thought her skin an ill-fitting mantle, like my body felt even when I shed my hand-me-downs and stood naked in the forest, learning to mimic the cicadas’ articulated dance and mystic music.

 

Despite Grandma’s warnings, I was trying to sneak out of the churchyard and into the tree line when someone grabbed me by the wrist.

I whirled around, lips pulled back in an animal snarl, to see pater-Kyriakos’s daughter. She was fifteen like I was. Fani liked to boast about how her period had yet to come. Only the dirty girls bled early. Girls like me, who were only here halfway, always slipping away, the world ready to swallow them up between its fault lines.

“Fani. What do you think you’re doing?” I asked the priest’s daughter.

“Cassandra. Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice dripped contempt, so unlike the honeyed tones she used with the church adults.

“Away.” I had my pocketknife on me. Was wondering what animal I might inhabit today to give my own skin a rest.

“I’ll tell Father. He won’t bring you bread and milk when he makes his rounds to the poor.”

I looked at her, how prim and pretty she was. How, sometimes, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to flay her skin and wear it, or tear it apart, or cover it in kiss marks.

So, I brought our linked hands to my mouth and bit her arm. She yelped, letting go of my wrist. I bolted into the trees, leaping over ferns, fording the creek.

I didn’t search for an animal to wear that day. Only hid behind a tree and rubbed between my legs, picturing the contempt on her face until I shouted the birds away from their perches.

The next morning, Grandma tasked me with collecting the weekly newspaper. I bought myself a cheap comic book instead, damn the consequences, then stood outside the newsagent’s to window-watch television. Grandma didn’t have a “devil’s box,” not like in Athens where one of Mom’s admirers had gotten us an expensive new TV.

That’s how they ambushed me. Fani and her crowd didn’t ride donkeys like pater-Kyriakos did, but shiny bicycles. I was struck with envy seeing the fully inflated tires, the cherry-red paint. In the city, my friends and I roved the streets on stolen motorcycles while our mothers crooned love songs shrouded in nightclub smoke and alcohol fumes. While patrons bathed Mom in carnations and clapped along to the lyra, the wind turned my leather jacket’s coattails into great vulture wings.

Here, I was banished to my own two feet. Was it any wonder I chose to flay and don the skin of owls flying over treetops, flitting squirrels, weasels much fleeter than I was?

I tried to escape the bike-riders, but every time my steps changed direction, wheels would swerve and block my path. The adults bore witness from the nearby store porches but did nothing, not while their priest’s golden daughter overlooked the scene, white-shod feet planted on the ground, eyes trained on me as the village children did her bidding.

I didn’t know if my city instincts kicked in, or those of the forest and the skins I borrowed. The need to flee in the face of an impossible fight. I took off, comic book falling behind, flimsy pages muddied by wheels.

I dashed into the shade of evergreens I knew would lead me deeper into the woodland, where the bikes couldn’t follow on rough terrain. However, I miscalculated Fani’s stubbornness.

The first stone nicked my arm, drawing a papercut-thin trail of blood. More voices and feet followed. Soon I was tackled onto the forest-floor by skinny bodies. I struggled to break free, remembering the time I was a rabbit attacked by an eagle; how I kicked and screeched with all my berry-small heart. And later, when the following Sunday I climbed a tree, waiting for an eagle to mistake my human musk for animal. How I peeled back feather and beak, then shrank to fill the empty husk while the meat-bird swayed baffled on its branch—no skin left to conceal the eagle’s pulse of fear. I had attacked a rabbit next, just to see what its body felt like between the sharp talons I had stolen.

I rolled on my back, twigs digging in, but the village children followed my momentum. Two held me down by the arms while the rest gripped more stones. They glanced at their leader for direction.

Fani simply smiled at me. From my position among burrs and bramble, I could tell this wasn’t the priest’s-daughter smile, sweet and sure. It was a smile only the ringleader of bored, half-feral kids could wear. And in that grin’s edges pooled greedily an ever-increasing want.

It was a want I recognized.

“Wait!” I called out. “Drop the stones. I have something to show you.”

The kids looked at each other, startled out of their bloodlust. Haris, Fani’s right-hand man, applied more pressure to my arms, as did his twin Menios. I watched Fani, but not her eyes. Only those lips, the nooks where her need hid.

“You will show me at last?” she demanded with staccato spittle. “Where you go every Sunday? Why you’re always leaving me behind?”

Her white dress was green with forest-breath, her braid wild from the chase. There was anger inside her: muzzled in church, ignored by her holy parents and their simpering entourage. Here, I could taste her unbridled rage on my tongue.

Fani hadn’t been trying to stop me from leaving all this time. She only wanted to be brought along. I suspected she and I were the same. Some of the village children were, too.

They let me clamber to my feet. The kids looked lost around me. The twins huddled together, no longer Fani’s enforcers. Vangelio, the oldest, stuck her thumb in her mouth. Everyone looked shorter without their bikes, small and stripped of their bloodlust.

For now, at least. Predator skin had a way of retaining hunger.

“Lead the way,” Fani told me. In her naked excitement, she forgot to feign arrogance.

I traipsed through the forest while everyone followed. The youngest was eleven. The oldest, sixteen. I felt like the Pied Piper leading my peers deeper and darker as the trees screamed with cicada-song and the heat pulsated in wordless crescendo. Fani’s anticipation was a tangible thing, her eyes searing holes into my back over her old, donated dress. Already, it seemed, I was wearing her cast-off skin. There were many sheds ahead of me. Many a metamorphosis before I became real.

Once we reached the clearing I favored for shapeshifting, untouched by lumberjacks or huntsmen, I faced my curious procession.

“City girl,” Haris began.

“Cassandra,” said Eirini, the baker’s only child.

“Prophet girl,” he amended. “What is this? There’re easier ways to trick us into letting you go.”

“No tricks,” I said. “Just watch.”

I dropped on all fours amid yellowed grass. The pack of teens watched with confusion, but also awe. As if they could tell this was more arcane than communion wine and incense smoke.

“If you’re squeamish,” I told them as I searched through dirt with fingers and toes, “you can find a snake-skin or cicada-coat. Something bloodless.” I shed my secondhand dress in the grass, the first ecdysis of many. “Something cowardly.”

Cicadas were how I first learned to shapeshift, early that orphaned summer. But these kids, still hungry for my blood, wouldn’t be satisfied with a coat already discarded from its host. They needed to rip into flesh and pare skin off bone. At last, grass-scratched and triumphant, I caught the field mouse by its fragile neck. I straightened myself as the creature screeched and flailed. They all fought me. That was part of the process, too. The animals bloodying my skin while I bloodied theirs.

“Watch,” I said. This time I addressed only an enraptured Fani.

I retrieved my pocketknife from my borrowed dress. Still holding the field mouse, I plunged the blade into my own chest. I cut down with surgical strokes along the seams of my breastbone. Squeezed my fingers through the jagged crevice and pulled.

What people don’t tell you is that, sometimes, skin wants to be flayed. Peeled back, sloughed off. The process was neither pretty nor painless. Yet the discomfort was lesser than the itch of staying in your ill-fitted skin. Yes, it hurt every time. And every time it was a Revelation.

I pushed and crawled my way free of myself. Through it all, the excised skin, though flimsy, stayed intact. I knew enough not to tear it asunder. Although my skin sometimes begged to be made nothing of value—no home I could return to—I learned to harness that urge. I might need it, one day, this useless suit of mine.

Before the fear-wide eyes of the village children, who only moments ago wielded stones and insults, I draped my skin over a low branch. Then, dressed only in my red muscles and yellow ligaments—quick before the brain grew sluggish and the body lost function without the skin to hold it together—I brought the scared little mouse to my mouth. My fleshy fingers couldn’t handle the knife in this in-between transformation. Yet my teeth were trusty blades. They split open the mouse’s hide, an echo of my previous, self-administered vivisection.

While the bare mouse plopped gently in the grass, I lay its hide over my skinless body like an ever-expanding cloak of gray. Meanwhile, I felt myself shrink until mismatched skin and flesh met in the middle. They merged while the children yelped, and Fani demanded: “Show me! Don’t you dare run away.”

My new mouse-coat was small but fast. I could have vanished in the underbrush, but I wanted Fani and the children to join me. Prey animals knew by primordial instinct to avoid me in this hybrid form. Predators didn’t always heed the uncanny signs of my metamorphosis. Encounters with them often hurt.

I wanted to be met by my equals.

I perched on the low branch next to my loose human skin. The skinless mouse, red and dazed, sat discarded down below. The creature resembled a sculpture of textured clay. Cleverer animals had tried to wear my skin in turn, though few managed to walk far with it. Too complex a mechanism to pilot.

I sat back on my branch and watched the clearing through my borrowed rodent-eyes. I wanted the children to figure this out by themselves. Fani especially. If she truly craved this, she would have to learn the way the cicadas taught me: by showing me once, then letting me unveil the metamorphosis myself.

Fani picked up the discarded pocketknife.

“Maybe we should leave.” Menios’s voice shuddered, though his grip hadn’t wavered when he’d held me down.

His twin shushed him while Fani acknowledged neither.

“You’re all free to leave. I’m not going anywhere. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for something—anything—to happen?”

A magpie flew overhead, swooping down to peck at the skinless mouse in the grass. Fani snatched the bird without hesitation. Her knife worked fast: first on her own body, then the bird’s. “Body and blood of Christ,” she giggled, seconds before she became the magpie.

She alighted on my branch, exultant heat emanating from her body. She didn’t peck or claw at me. Just nestled near, magpie feathers meeting mouse tail. Our skins flapped together in the slight breeze; the poor, skinned animals below were wrapped only in cicada-song.

Together, we watched the rest of the petrified children spring into action as they, too, searched for an animal to inhabit. Some worked the blade clumsily, their cuts too crude, grip too lax. Others didn’t wait for their turn with my pocketknife. They tore at themselves with their own fracturing fingernails.

Eventually, the entire clearing echoed with sounds of pain, but also victory.

I had never run with another shapeshifter. Yet I rejected caution, despite what these children had been about to do to me. I scurried down the tree, and the magpie that was Fani followed me. Our animal instincts were already taking over. We all danced through the woods as snakes, weasels, rabbits, and other wildling things. Us once-children nipped playfully at each other, twisted in the grass, chirruped, and hissed and yawped while the red-muscled creatures we had flayed sat docile under the tree canopy. Waiting for the return of their borrowed skins.

The predators among us caught scent of new animals to hunt. But even those who inhabited herbivores found it hard to resist the howling hunger. The feral relief.

It had to end eventually. Church service wouldn’t last forever. I always timed my transformations to the tolls of the bell, afraid to lose myself in the animal-skin. I didn’t know what would happen then, and it was too soon to find out.

I climbed my tree again, showed the animal-children how I bit and clawed the mouse-skin off. The little rodent would heed the call of its gray hide and return to it in time. I crawled back into my own skin like an oversized quilt that shrunk to accommodate my expanding form. Then I dropped to the ground after the skin had finished knitting itself back together, not a seam remaining open.

The remaking hurt, but endorphins rendered the pain almost sweet. A promise of another Sunday in the woods, and the next skin I would wear as my own.

The forest was filled once more with teenagers, as lanky and brittle as reeds.

Vangelio couldn’t stop sucking on her fingers. But while earlier in the forest-fringes, she’d done so to self-soothe, now she gleefully licked gore and intestines clean from her limbs. Menios and Haris faced each other, mirror-image eyes glazed like marbles. Around the clearing, kids sat confused on their haunches, meat puppets forced to conform back to human shape and limitations. Some held their skinless animal in their lap as they re-dressed it in its hide. The gesture would have appeared tender, had their fingers not roughened with envy.

Some of the noises the children made could be giggles, or whimpers.

And Fani … she just gazed at me. There was blood pooling in that wide smile, and meat caught between straight, white teeth. More blood ran between her legs. Her first menstruation was here, another howling metamorphosis. It reminded me of my own first blood after I learned what my mother had done, when the words murder suicide had hung between me and the social worker like a veil of crimsoned lace.

I gathered soft leaves and cleaned the length of Fani’s legs.

She reached for me afterward, our hands slippery against each other. Holding on.

“You and I,” Fani’s breath caressed my ear, “are now siblings in skin.”

Just like that, she was no longer the priest’s daughter. She and I were the same.

 


 

Later, I would remember that shapeshifting summer in flashes of shiny beak and sharpened claw; bifurcated tongue and truncated tail. One time, my new friends and I—a wild and motley pack—refused to give the borrowed hides back. The animals, skinless and confused, wandered into the village, meat agleam under the punishing sun. Pater-Kyriakos prayed on his knees all day and night to exorcise them. Another time, Vangelio gave her skin to a deer as a prank. We watched it walk on hind legs, spine contorted, moans of anguish falling from the slack human lips, the lolling animal tongue. Once, Fani and I slipped away from the others. We removed our skins and let them tango together like moonlit cobwebs while we merged our red-raw flesh, shivering at the spark of electricity. Wasn’t that, after all, what we were? Just meat and electric currents and ghost skins entwined.

That was also the summer when the village adults got what was coming to them.

Late in July, Haris and Menios’s eldest sister returned from Italy with her fiancé, a traveling salesman. She brought back vintage designer clothes she claimed had graced the bodies of singers like Patty Pravo and Milva. “Don’t you wish you could wear those stars’ glittering skin?” she told the women at the marketplace as she invited them to view the garments for themselves.

When I visited the twins’ house, I found Menios lingering by the garden gate. “They won’t let me in,” he whined. “Katerina said it’s wrong for a boy to want to look at the pretty dresses. She called me names.”

I thought he might ask me to trade skins so he could try on the Milanese dresses while pretending to be me. He and I had exchanged skins before in the safety of the tree cover. I liked the way he sashayed in mine. The way I stalked around in his. However, his mouth remained adamantly shut even as his eyes misted with yearning.

I grabbed a pigeon roosting on the gate. Flensed its skin all quick and efficient, then shoved the hide in my pocket while I handed the naked bird to Menios. “Hold this for me while I’m inside.”

Before I headed up the garden path, I saw him cradle the skinned bird to his cheek and whisper to it fervent, hungry secrets.

“You’re the murderess’s daughter,” Katerina told me at the door. It appeared her cruelty was not limited to her siblings.

“Cassandra,” I said, clutching the bird skin in my pocket.

“Not even an Orthodox name.” She shook her head even as she let me into the kitchen. I had no delusion I’d be allowed to take any article of clothing home, no matter how unwanted.

The village women were gathered round the table and its pile of clothes like an army of cicada skins. I spotted Fani across the room. The priest’s wife—in her sensible shoes and dark wool skirt despite the summer heat—saw me too. She narrowed her prayer-bead eyes. This was a woman who would never have parted from her skin, holding it close like armor against the world. An exoskeleton.

When Fani, swallowed by an oversized sequined dress, made to approach me, her mother’s grip tightened around her arm. Fani sat back obediently, but I could tell she was furious enough to tear apart several hides with her bare hands. For all that running free in different animal skins soothed her undercurrent of anger, it always bubbled back stronger after every transformation’s end. Subcutaneous.

I moved to the clothing pile, and the women parted in disgust of me. They clutched their daughters close even as Vangelio and the other animal-skin girls shot me conspiratorial smirks. Murderess’ s daughter, Katerina had called me. I didn’t know how much these women knew about my mother, fact or fiction. Not even I possessed enough of the truth to challenge them.

For all that we shared our darkest thoughts, Fani and I hadn’t discussed my former life in the city. As far as she was concerned, our families no longer existed, even when Grandma threatened to send me off to boarding school come autumn, or her parents forbade her from seeing me, the bad influence tainting their cherubic daughter.

Siblings in skin, Fani liked to call us. One Sunday, after her father had assigned her church chores so she couldn’t join in our woods wanderings, she told me she fantasized about wearing the skin of pater-Kyriakos’s donkey. In her reverie, she had kicked her hind legs and thrown him off her saddle. He’s old, I’d warned her. One fall and he’s dead-dead. She had laughed and said, Then we’d be orphans together. Would that be so sad?

I retrieved the pigeon-skin from my pocket and shoved it between smooth and sparkling fabrics. Replaced it with a silk scarf from the pile—sleight of hand. I gave the scarf to Menios on my way out, hoping he would enjoy the gift, as well as the adults’ screams when they discovered the pigeon-skin.

I went home, thinking about Fani not being allowed near me. The look of resentment in her eyes that used to be directed at me. Now, the whole world but myself was subject to her rage.

There was no stew slow-cooking in Grandma’s kitchen, no shuffling of hole-riddled slippers. I stayed starving like a creature in my room, and when I slept, I dreamed the adults had herded every teenager into the village square. They made us watch them incinerate all animals in a funerary pyre, so that there was no skin left for us to slip into. Nothing but the prisons they birthed us into.

I woke in darkness, cicadas screaming outside my window—less mating than mourning song. I crept predator-stealthy into Grandma’s bedroom. It was a habit I’d developed whenever she threatened to let the nuns at the boarding school fix me, or raved about having always known my mother was a bad apple. After such incidents, I would hold my pocketknife above her shallow-breathing chest as she slept, and I’d imagine the slash of my blade. See what secrets the comic-book-paper-thin skin would reveal about our family. My mother. Myself.

Yet when I entered Grandma’s room, I gagged despite being so used to meat and entrails. This scent was of decay. I walked to her bed and touched her clawed fingers, her rigid eyelids. She was cold, and she was dead.

I heaved her closet’s doors open, seeking old sheets in which to wrap her corpse. Cold logic won over panic. I would borrow Fani’s bike and buy some lye from the next village over. Cover Grandma with it so nobody would know what had happened. I wouldn’t move to the orphanage away from the village, my animal pack, my Fani.

Because, what if shapeshifting didn’t work the same in the city? What if I lost my sibling in skin, or my last flimsy connection to my mother?

What I found in Grandma’s closet rattled something primal inside me. Skins hung from a row of hooks. It was like she had kept every hide she wore in her youth. Some were male skins, too. I wondered if they’d once belonged to her lovers, or if she ever wore them herself.

What I’d suspected about our family was finally unveiled. The talent was innate. Generational. I watched the skins sway in Grandma’s drafty closet. Remembered how Katerina had called me the murderess’s daughter. Did my mother dress a second corpse—a body other than the dead man she’d killed—in her false suicider’s skin? Or did she stuff her skin with fabric like a scarecrow while her meat-self fled into the night?

My pulse swelled with all the new and stretching possibilities. The papers called what she did at the nightclub a murder-suicide. I never saw my mother in death; her funeral was closed-casket, a private affair so as not to alert the press. Who could tell me she hadn’t found a way to manipulate skin and flesh, fake her own death, escape punishment unnoticed?

Escape me.

I didn’t want to think myself abandoned, on top of orphaned. Another layer of trauma I had to learn to excise.

I flayed the skin from Grandma’s flesh without unnecessary flair and hung it in her closet. When pater-Kyriakos next knocked on our door to give his charity, I would wear Grandma’s cicada-coat and pretend to be her.

We’d later learn Katerina and her fiancé found another surprise, this time between their bedsheets. It was a skinned piglet, red and moist. But to the nearlyweds, it resembled a dead baby. Katerina claimed the village was cursed as she fled with her fiancé in the night, sparkly dresses abandoned for Menios to play with.

The adults were receiving a taste of their own poison.

My grandmother, the twins’ sister. Fani’s father, most of all.

 


 

Pater-Kyriakos was too proud to drive a car. Too resistant to progress. Instead, he had used his parish’s donations to buy and keep a donkey. He liked to parade it around the village every weekend, waving from its saddle like a movie star as he delivered moldy bread and milk gone sour to the poor. I snickered from my hiding spot behind the fountain by the square, but Fani watched her father with an intensity that scared me. He’d forbidden her from seeing me, for good this time. Today, she was tucked into my breast pocket in sparrow-form while her skin stayed home, a feather-stuffed decoy staining the white bedsheets of her dowry with russet leakage.

Fani’s bird eyes flashed in avian glee.

The next day, before the entire village, the donkey that I knew was Fani kicked its hind legs, toppling the priest. She stomped on his frail tailbone with a sickening crunch resounding across each of the square’s cobblestones.

I found Fani later, while the innocent donkey was taken away, soon to be put down.

“You’re going to get us discovered,” I told her.

“Father said he knows there’s something wrong with me. That it’s always been there, slumbering inside me, but you coming to the village unlocked it.” Fani’s voice quivered lower, into the secret frequencies we often occupied. “Like a metamorphosis, he said.”

I wondered if it’d been a mistake, teaching her what the cicadas taught me. Then, I thought about my mother. How she’d killed the nightclub owner, who might have been my father; how she never told me a word about our family’s shapeshifting. Perhaps my mother wasn’t like me, but like Fani.

I wondered if Fani wanted to escape me, too.

That night, I used Grandma’s sewing supplies to practice on my own flesh—needle and thread. I sewed my lips shut and unshut. Yet I was never good with a needle the way I was with a knife.

I didn’t know how to staple Fani’s skin to her bones.

When she next slipped into my bed, wet with dew-like blood, I knew what had happened even before I heard the church bells tolling their woeful tune.

“He said he’d marry me off to a farmer,” she hiccupped against me. “Didn’t matter I’m too young for it, the law didn’t apply here as long as he was in charge. He’d make me regret ever running into the forest with you that first time.”

“What skin did you wear?” I asked.

“My own.”

I knew what I had to do. I turned to face Fani. Placed my lips against her forehead, tasting the salt of her sweat, the copper of her father’s demise. Body and blood of Christ, I muttered, a manic giggle escaping me.

Yet I felt grounded in the moment as I retrieved my familiar pocketknife. We unraveled each other slow, reverent, despite the urgency of daylight approaching. Layer by layer of cloth, of epidermis. Cicada coats, shed on the floor in our exchange of skins.

I gave her my face: queer little orphan, murderess’s daughter. Like my mother before, Fani would run away to the city, safe in the smoke and mirrors of the crowd. She would be free, and I would be rid of the skin-suit weighing me down. I bore no delusion she would keep my skin for long after she’d reached the capital. And yet, it was a loss I wouldn’t mourn.

She hadn’t asked me to go with her, to run away together like in the movies. So, I would let Fani go. I would do it because I loved her, but also because I wasn’t ready to abandon this village and its cicada secrets of skin and family. The children left behind would need a leader, too.

I let Fani tenderly wrap my bones in her skin like her cast-off dresses I used to wear. I didn’t hate the dresses anymore. Not because they were dresses, but because they were hers.

No one would suspect the village sweetheart of the priest’s murder, especially if the rumored changeling had fled the crime scene under cover of darkness. I would wear Fani’s skin—her privilege and prestige—while I researched my family history, exploring our gift of shapeshifting.

It felt right, this exchange. Then, when the song of change called for me, I would don one of the skins in Grandma’s closet and leave again. Perhaps find my mother out in the smog-veiled city.

Fani and I might meet again, in the wilderness of the world.


Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Shoshana Groom

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors



Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, and F&SF. The Saint of Witches, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is available from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).
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