The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

by Tori Bovalino

How much can you give to a place before it swallows you whole?

Isn’t birth just another name for destiny? Your family name the border between you and the rest of the world?

They were so afraid of change, so afraid of becoming new people, they’d shackled each other to the corpses of who they’d been before.

And wasn’t that the worst part, every time? How the love and the caring stayed, even as everything around it rotted?

Monsters are made, angry girl. They aren’t born. I was like you once. My anger imprinted on the world, knit me into it once I passed from humanity and into something different.”

Life is too fragile to get attached to. One day you’re there, and the next, you’re not. Summers here have a way of teaching you that. In summer, everything always teeters on that knife’s edge of living and dying.

It was impossible to keep something that never intended to stay. No. It was more than impossible. It was exhausting. Heartbreaking. The kind of thing that tore you to shreds, only to hastily put you back together, with no regard to where the pieces were being placed. It was a painful process. A punishment.