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dream. It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in your own subconscious; any place you think you know is different after dark.
So Graveyard Shift took shape, borrowing from a number of literary traditions as well as my own life experience. My academic research sits squarely in the medical humanities;
Nobody wanted to huddle in a moldering churchyard after midnight because there was nowhere else to smoke. But huddle they did. Misery loved company and made strange bedfellows.
knew enough dirty secrets to blackmail every department chair on campus and half the city council besides. Every night Edie barely resisted the temptation to pump him for information. It wouldn’t have worked anyway; he treated the brass rail like a confessional, any admissions made there somehow sacrosanct. “Never knew him to have more than two drinks. Never even saw him drunk.”
Salva veritate. With truth intact. But the truth was never simple, seldom whole.
Unlike the rest of them, he had nowhere to be and nowhere to go and was justifiably protective of the building.
Hostile Incidents.”
She wrinkled her nose, squinting suspiciously at him. “Why do you know so much about it, anyway?” He didn’t have a good answer for that. He got tongue-tied between unlikely excuses, and she took advantage of his silence to push past him and heave the door open, DANGER be damned. The hinges groaned, and a shaft of watery moonlight threw itself down the aisle like a silver carpet. “Coming?” Edie asked. He saw no way around it, silently cursing her for being so curious and himself for being such a bad liar.
“Yeah. Ignis sacer.” “Ignis what?” “Saint Anthony’s Fire. It was a sort of medieval epidemic. Caused gangrene and hallucinations and made people feel like they were being burned alive.”
Edie lowered her flashlight, looked away from the saint and back at Tuck instead. “Why do you know so much about this?” she asked again. He hadn’t come up with a good answer since the first time she asked.
“I try not to be a dickhead, but I’m not trying to be a hero either,” he told her. “I wouldn’t say anything.”
Let her take the lead. Let her handle it. He wasn’t a dickhead, wasn’t a hero, and didn’t care if he was a coward.
Theo said, again. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said, again.
No
C. burranicum is an endemic species—it doesn’t grow anywhere else,’ according to sophomore biology major Wes Tucker, who was forced to leave his room on the fourth floor of Coblin Hall. ‘Killing it would be like, mycological genocide.’”
She learned to live in the permanent twilight of sleep-deprivation psychosis. Life, if you could call it that, was a never-ending out-of-body experience.
imbroglio
.
Hannah had no doubts he was up to his eyeballs in something illegal. Took one to know one, perhaps. Then again, she knew more about poor Tom than any of the rest of them—even Tamar. Not that anyone needed to know that. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew more.
“So that’s what Kinnan’s doing, then,” Tamar suggested. “Trying to turn it into an exact science.” “Right. It’s a thing in pharmacology, mining traditional medicine for kernels of truth that can be bottled and labeled and sold to the Sacklers for a cool billion dollars. Then sold to all of us with a name like Xanotrax or Ziphoquil or whatever.” “Like biomedical cultural appropriation.” “Right.”
“mesearch” into different forms of psychedelic therapy. “I’m still my own guinea pig, sometimes, sure. In science and medicine we like to pretend it’s all very impersonal, but the truth is it’s rare you find anyone with a purely academic interest in this stuff. You get interested because it’s personal, and once you turn it into a profession, you have to pretend it isn’t personal anymore. That never felt right to me. Who better to do the work than someone with a vested interest in the outcome?” She laughed off the interviewer’s next question about administrative red tape. “Well, to be an
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Hannah always drank like she was trying to die.
“Why do you think I’m not at the newspaper office with the rest of them?” “Because your only people skills are seduction and sadism.” She licked her lips. “What’s the difference?”
Hannah liked old buildings. Lots to listen to at night, a never-ending game of “What’s that sound?” which gave her something to do in the rare dark hours she didn’t spend driving around looking for lost souls with a penny for the ferryman. So to speak.
Delayed Gratification,
.
Hannah closed her eyes on the harsh, unwelcome sunshine. Rubbing her thumbs into her temples until they throbbed. Her memory of the night was mosaic, chimerical, distorted by that unparalleled intoxicant, retaliation. And what else? How could she know? Kinnan’s strangled words echoed in her head. Aggression. Hostility. Blindness. Had he really said cannibalism, or was that just a figment of her demented fever dreams? She shoved the thought aside. That was a rat. That was different.
chimerical,
stowage
Hannah popped the top off and was surprised again. Not pills or weed or even her old wedding ring, but a tiny blue eggshell, intact except for a hole in one end, like whatever was in there got one look at the world and decided not to come out. Oddly chastised by it—that delicate, innocent thing, boxed up like a secret—she put it back where she’d found it and closed the cabinet again.
Sleep in her eyes.
