The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

Why is it, he wondered, that you only learn the specifics of the conflicts within your own family when you are grown and it is too late to avoid having been influenced by them unawares? Why only after you have metabolized them and made them part of your whole way of looking at the world?

Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.

The world is a hell because we have made it so—I have always thought so, even before.