December 2023 – Diabolical Plots

2023 Retrospective and Award Eligibility

written by David Steffen

In 2023 Diabolical Plots published our second guest-edited themed issue, this time for the “Diabolical Thoughts” telepathy theme, guest-edited by assistant editor Ziv Wities.

We have been publishing the annual Long List Anthology since 2015. In 2021 there was a hiccup in the schedule due to WorldCon timing that pushed that year’s Long List Anthology into 2022, meaning there were two volumes of the anthology series in 2022. The entire basis of the anthology is the Hugo Award nomination statistics, so the work to compile the anthology cannot start until those statistics are published, and in 2021 WorldCon (when the statistics are usually published) didn’t happen until December. In 2023, although WorldCon was held in October, they have not published the nomination statistics yet–according to the WSFS constitution they are allowed three months to do so, which means they have until mid-January. This should mean we can get going on the Long List Anthology in January or February, and it will likely be another two-anthology calendar year.

In 2023, we published 23 original stories in Diabolical Plots.

This year we welcomed two new assistant editors to our ranks: Chelle Parker and Hal Y. Zhang (read our staff page for more info on them)

Diabolical Plots opened for general submissions in July. We read more than 1400 submissions and accepted 25 stories from the window. We were running a little behind schedule for publishing stories, so the last few months of 2023 we published one story per month instead of two to stretch the inventory a bit further.

It was a busy year in my personal life as well, including the passing of our dog Mikko who had been a member of the household for fifteen years. This is the second consecutive year that we had to say goodbye to a dog, so I’m hoping we will have a reprieve for a while.

The rest of this post is award eligibility, suggesting categories for major awards, as well as a full link of stories with snippets.

Magazine/Anthology/Editor/Publisher

Diabolical Plots is eligible in the Hugo Best Semiprozine category or the Locus Magazine category with our team of first readers as well as assistant editors Ziv Wities, Kel Coleman, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang.

David Steffen is eligible as editor of Diabolical Plots.

I don’t know exactly how editor catogories are interpreted. But at least for Hugo Award for Editor, Short Form it specifies that they must have been “editor of at least four (…) magazine issues (or their equivalent in other media)”. Ziv Wities edited our special “Diabolical Thoughts” telepathy-themed issue, but has also edited many of our other stories. Even assuming we should interpret “issues” as ALL of the stories for a particular month of Diabolical Plots, Ziv Wities qualifies with the four most recent months being: August 2023, March 2023 (Diabolical Thoughts), January 2023, and March 2022.

I think that Kel Coleman might also qualify based on DP work depending on how an issue is interpreted. They have edited more than 8 stories for us, which is more than 4 issues of the usual size, but those were sometimes not entire months. (I think it’d be fair to count that though).

Diabolical Plots, LLC is eligible for Locus award for Publisher.

Related Work

We published just one nonfiction piece this year: “MOVIE ANALYSIS: Elemental (Pixar), a Movie About the Dangers of Government Incompetence” by David Steffen

The Hugo for Best Related Work has included websites before, The Submission Grinder is theoretically eligible for that.

Short Stories

“Dog Song” by Avi Naftali

So you want to determine whether dogs still exist.

First, our association of dogs with obedience. Is obedience dog-like? Or is it to do with horses now, or children, or hamsters. “Hamster-like obedience.” Dogs have retreated into the bodies of hamsters, maybe. They have a real knack for learning, we’re told, and for evolving themselves. There’s no reason they couldn’t take this extra step. Or maybe they don’t exist, dogs have never existed.

“Tell Me the Meaning of Bees” by Amal Singh

On a sunless morning, in the city of Astor, the word ‘caulk’ vanished.

The word didn’t announce its vanishing with trumpets or a booming clarion call. It faded away slowly in the middle of the night, like the last lyrics of a difficult song. The ones who didn’t use the word ‘caulk’ could not even tell what had gone wrong—the non-engineers, the artists and intellectuals—because for all intents and purposes, they would have spent their entire lifetimes not caulking anything.

“The Monologue of a Moon Goddess in the Palace of Pervasive Cold” by Anja Hendrikse Liu

Two centuries ago, I would’ve built thrones made of mooncakes in every room of my silent palace, would’ve filled hot tubs with the fruit sent up on festival night. Nowadays, storing and preserving and pickling feels like a losing race, like if I let even one persimmon spoil in the cold moon air, there won’t be enough to sustain me and Jade Rabbit for the year.

“Devil’s Lace” by Julie Le Blanc

The demon and I had been crocheting for hours, in what appeared to be a sliver of space it’d created between Here and There. Around a plush couch floated pale, winter fog that obscured anything more than a few feet past the limits of the cushions.

“Rattenkönig” by Jenova Edenson

Kim was always having bright ideas. In sophomore year, he’d bought an honest to God stink bomb from the Internet and set it off in the math class hallway. A girl had an asthma attack, and Mr. Allen had to call an ambulance. You brought this up when Kim suggested driving up to Canada from San Diego and back in the span of a week. Kim laughed, and kissed your cheek. He told you that you didn’t need to worry so much about stuff that had happened so long ago. Besides, Evelyn had come back from the hospital with a brand new rescue inhaler.

“The Hivemind’s Royal Jelly” by Josh Pearce

The figure seated on the other side of the plain metal table has a blank look on its face, like its creator gave up halfway through forming its features. It is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, white socks, black slippers. The handcuff that secures it to the table cuts deeply into the waxy pale skin of its wrist.

“The Desert’s Voice is Sweet to Hear” by Carolina Valentine

Zazy tugged her hood forward to get a sliver more shade. Not today, my friend, she replied. She spotted the bonecrawler nest the desert wanted to convince her was a bubbling spring. Heat fatigue washed through her. For a moment, her eyes unfocused and the trickle of insects did resemble running water. Zazy closed her eyes. No, thank you.

“A Girl With a Planet In Her Eye” by Ruth Joffre

For the first thirteen years of her life, the planet was silent. No birdsong. No construction. Only the gentle sway of an ocean pushing and pulling against the aqueous humors of her left eye. Late at night, while her parents slept, she often lay awake and listened to the dense water solidify itself, the salts forming crystals, the crystals becoming pillars in a great, cavernous hall populated at first by no one, and then: music. A pure, high note so sudden it woke her from her slumber and conjured the image of a miniature flautist performing deep in the canal of her ear.

“Re: Your Stone” by Guan Un

Hi HR,
Just letting you know: I moved the artwork “Higher, Faster, Boulder” from the ground floor lobby up to the Second Floor Cafeteria as per Asset Movement Request #5340 from Asset Management, could you please let me know why it’s been moved back to the ground floor?
Thanks,
Sisyphus

“Bottled Words” by Carol Scheina

Unbottle a voice and it would vibrate through air, giving you one—just one—chance for your brain to turn those waves into recognizable words. But for me, it’s not like I could stop a bottled voice and ask, “Can you say that again?” There was no listening over and over, trying to see if I could recognize a new word here or there. There was no telling a disembodied voice that yes, I could hear it with hearing aids, but no, the sound wasn’t clear enough, or my brain wasn’t able to piece the sounds into words, or that I’d much prefer to read its voice on paper.

“Six Reasons Why Bots Make the Worst Asteroid Miners” by Matt Bliss

1. They think they know everything. Like your twenty years of mining experience is useless compared to a high-acting neural processing drive. Like you’re nothing but a softer, weaker liability, and the only thing you’re good for is greasing their joints and blowing out their compressors. Just one bot and one human to babysit them.

“Diamondback V. Tunnelrat” by Nick Thomas

All parties agree to the following facts. A skirmish broke out between the Diamondbacks and the dwarves during the Brass-Tree autumnal equinox fete. The fete is a centuries-old tradition, occurring every year and held in the foothills alongside the Cenen river. Brawls are as much a part of the festivities as the paper lanterns, the stewing of chicken heads, and the traditional weasel-peasel dance. Neither party makes complaint about the violence done to them or by them at the skirmish.

“They Were Wonderful, Once” by Lily Watson

Even by the third hot, sticky day into our road trip, the humans in the back of the transportation trucks remain fascinating. Theoretically, we know where our blood comes from. But this is different, seeing the little bits of them, poking through the slots on the sides of their container, pressed against the grates for lack of room.

“Interstate Mohinis” by M.L. Krishnan

Sometimes, I dreamed about flowing water. About where I would be—not here, anywhere but here—if my body had survived the accident. Mushed, but still recognizable. With its vestigial humanness that demanded respect, especially in death. My ashes would have been tossed into an ocean or a river in a coursing procession of night-blooming jasmine garlands, women who keened and thumped their chests, and drunken louts who gyrated around my urn until they foamed at the mouth. Until they collapsed in exhaustion or pleasure.

“Glass Moon Water” by Linda Niehoff

The afternoons are sprinklers in the backyard and ice-pops while our sisters and mothers watch flickering soap operas in cold, tomb-like rooms, cold from the AC cranked so low. The nights are sleeping out in the backyard in a tent or a sleeping bag unrolled on porches and decks or even in the grass and looking up at the stars. Listening to the AC click on and hum its silver song through the night.

“The Dryad and the Carpenter” by Samara Auman

Mortals slice us dryads open to count the layers of our lives; it is easier than listening to our stories. They slide their fingers over our rings, thinking that our texture, our shifts in coloration would bring them understanding of their own lives. In their minds, we exist to bring poetry to their sighs and serve as metaphors for longevity.

“On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

The transformation. The wind under the airplane’s wings buckles as the wings buckle, shake, separate into a beating of hundreds of wings. Out of the fog we come. This time, this first time, we are geese: black-brown wings and furious hearts. We fly awkwardly, at odds with the turbulence; we are newborn, but already the flock is forming as our instincts awaken in the air and we orient ourselves not against the ground or the stars but against each other.

“Shalom Aleichem” by Y.M. Resnik

Every Friday night the angels came, and every Friday night they freaked me the fuck out. Which is probably why I didn’t get a million-eyed, one-footed guardian of my own like the rest of my family. This was totally fine with me. I was in no way jealous that my siblings had angels to accompany them to college while I was stuck sitting alone in an empty dorm room. Who needed a creep-tastic companion whose face consisted of a bizarro series of interlocking cogs and wheels forever whirring?

“Every Me Is Someone Else” by Andy Dibble

I’m a medical assistant coming down the hall in polka dot scrubs. I’m walking on the other side, glancing at me.

No, she. But a different she than my mother. It’s hard to keep track. Each is like an organ, involuntary functions only. My therapist says thinking like that is egotistical, but how am I supposed to care about others, when others is just something I tell myself?

“Requiem” by P.H. Low

This is dawn: fields shading from black to grey, flicker-fading starlight, our voices raised against the wind and the red scarves whipping our faces. Our song levitates us ten feet in the air, above dirt roads packed down by wagon wheels and chariots: Carl Lang’s Canter, an ode to unseen horses and sunrise and longing. When we sing—as long as we sing—our feet do not touch the ground.

“Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots In Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke

Someone began sending hand-written spellcrafted postcards out of DC in July of 2024. Those postcards made the rounds for a good nine months, under the radar, scarcely observed. That was, until the rash of good health, the proliferation of wealth, and the sudden uptick in good living coupled with a grand downtick in big socioeconomic issues the mayor was quick to claim as her own—such as suicides and unemployment—brought the situation to the attention of the East US Coven.

“In the Shelter of Ghosts” by Risa Wolf

They approach the house frame I’ve erected, set up where Dad’s old house once stood. They place the machine on a slate slab I’ve set up by what I hope will be the front door. I uncap my electrical source as one of the mediums puts on ceramic-weave gloves to connect to the leads. I tamp down a flare of worry, reminding myself that I’d just recharged the lead-acid battery at the solar station and redid its plant latex cover a few days ago.

“It Clings” by Hammond Diehl

Of course a dybbuk is flat. Flat as a blini. All the easier for that damn ghost to slip under your collar.

Of course a dybbuk is colorless. That’s why, when you say you’ve got a dybbuk, most people say, no you don’t. Go see Dr. Weiner. Spend a few days in Florida.

MOVIE ANALYSIS: Elemental (Pixar), a Movie About the Dangers of Government Incompetence

written by David Steffen

Elemental is a CG animated film published in general release in June 2023 by Pixar. It takes place in Element City, which is populated entirely by people who each are elementals: creatures of the four classical elements of air, earth, water, and fire. It is, broadly speaking, a star-crossed romance story of two people from apparently incompatible cultures falling in love against the odds.

Note that this review contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know major plot events, stop reading now.

The reason I feel compelled to write up a review for this movie is because, although I generally enjoyed the movie, it didn’t feel to me like the movie was really about what the movie and the marketing for the movie seemed to think that it was about and I wanted to post my opinions on the matter.

Bernie and Cinder Lumen, fire elements, move to Element City where they face distrust and xenophobia from the other elements who consider fire elementals dangerous. They settle in and make a life for themselves despite constant microaggressions from the other elementals as well as the challenges of living in a city that was clearly not designed with fire elementals in mind.

Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) start a store (the Fireplace) and they have a baby, Ember (Leah Lewis), who grows up to be a hot-tempered woman. Bernie dreams of passing the store on to her but has put it off for years because her temper gets in the way. She tends to lose her patience when staffing the store and when her temper gets out of control her temper literally stokes her flames and she starts things around her on fire.

One day, Bernie decides to leave Ember in charge of the store. She becomes overwhelmed with frustration and rushes to the basement so she doesn’t explode in front of the customers. Pipes start bursting and flooding the basement with water and though Ember tries to fix it by fusing the pipes with her fire, it’s not enough a water elemental named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) gets flushed into the basement with the water.

Wade is a city inspector and he immediately starts writing down code violations in the pipes. Ember tries to reason with him but although he seems to feel very conflicted judging by his constant flood of tears, but despite this he apparently feels compelled to submit the reports anyway, which will likely result in the city forcing the Fireplace to shut down.

This is supposed to be the meetcute, I guess, but it’s also where the narrative they seemed to be trying to convey and the narrative that I took from the story sharply diverged. We learn that Wade was on assignment from the city to investigate a leak in the city’s canals when he got sucked into the city plumbing. He was literally trapped in the pipes until a bit of jostling from Ember letting her temper loose in the basement which released him and he burst through the pipes.

So, even from this initial scene:

1. The city has sent a lone employee to investigate a major water leak that relates to a district of fire elementals for which water leaks can literally be lethal.

2. The city apparently has no way to monitor their own waterways. Waterways that could trap water elementals, or extinguish fire elementals.

3. The city has not apparently even considered the safety of their own employee, who can get sucked into and trapped in pipes. Why not send an earth elemental? Or at least send a pair of employees so that a second employee could call for help.

4. The fire district doesn’t need water. No one in the fire district pays for water. Why would they pay for what they have no use for and which could kill them or their neighbors. It was the city’s failure that there was any water in the pipes to leak in the first place.

5. Why does the fire district need to have their pipes up to code, for the water that isn’t supposed to be in their pipes in the first place? City bureaucracy can be an important force for good when it saves people from living in dangerous homes, reduces fire danger, or that kind of thing. But enforcing plumbing codes on a district where water in the plumbing already means that the city has failed in a major way that disregards the safety of its citizens is not a force for good. That’s government bloat for no good reason.

6. The movie doesn’t explicitly say this, but from the way that the events unfold, my interpretation is that the amount of water coming through the pipes was not what caused the catastrophic problem–it was Wade getting washed down the pipes by the water. The water that was a manifestation of the city’s failure to keep the pipes dry, washing their inspector who should never have been in the pipes, only through a combination of his own incompetence combined with the city’s lack of safety measures. Wade writing up citations for plumbing faults after his ass busted through the pipes is like the Kool-Aid Man writing citations for structural damage after he busts through a wall to spread the good word of sugary drinks. The city has caused this problem multiple times over.

7. The movie tries to convey that this is Ember’s fault, and that’ s the interpretation that is stuck to for most of the movie, but there is no reasonable justification for this interpretation. By losing her temper, she exposed the city’s incompetence and saved Wade’s life from starving to death in a city plumbing accident. The movie never admits Wade’s fault in the accident, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that she saved his life. The only thing that is the Lumen family’s fault at all is not following city building codes that represent senseless government bloat.

8. Does Wade even have the authority to perform an inspection when he was only in the business in the first place because of his own incompetence causing an accident? Is this like police kicking a door down and saying they found the door open to enter without a warrant?

9. If plumbing inspections are required… how have they never happened before on this premises? Is the city supposed to be performing periodic inspections? Is there any attempt to educate residents of the fire district of the requirement for plumbing inspections and what those requirements are? The city has abdicated all responsibility, apparently.

I don’t know about anyone else but I did not find any of this endearing.

After all of this happens, Wade actually starts to listen to Ember and seems surprised that she has extenuating circumstances despite her clearly trying to explain those circumstances to him before he submitted his citiations. Wade was too busy being feeling sorry for himself to listen to the needs of the person whose life he was contributing to ruining.

So at this point Wade decides to bring Ember to his boss, Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey), to plead a case for leniency to save the Fireplace from closure. They discuss how Wade had been sent to look for the leak in the canals and that’s why he was where he was, and they arrive at an arrangement where if Wade and Ember are able to find the source of the leak then the code violations will be forgiven.

Sigh. Okay, this has gotten even worse.

10. Although the representative of the city inspections has admitted that they have a problem that they haven’t been able to figure out how to solve, and that their inspector’s incompetence contributed to the incident, and that there shouldn’t have been water in those pipes in the first place, they continue to blame Ember.

11. They offer a “deal” for Ember to work uncompensated for the city, bypassing any semblance of a proper hiring process even for a freelancer, under threat of closing her family’s business if she doesn’t succeed in the task that the city has failed to do itself even though it has put in (admittedly meager) effort in the hands of the (admittedly incompetent) city inspector. That… sounds like extortion.

12. Despite this being supposedly important, the two resources they are sending on the job are Wade: their employee who has proven himself incompetent at performing the exact task he is being sent to perform yet again with no additional resources or training to make him better at the task then he was and who last time might have died in the pipes if not for Ember’s temper flareup, and someone who has no employment relationship with them and is certainly not covered by their insurance and WILL BE VERY LIKELY BE KILLED BY WATER WHILE THEY INVESTIGATE A WATER LEAK.

OK. So they go and find the leak, in surprisingly short time for something the city claims to have been looking into for a while. It is a crack in one of the supporting walls for the city canals which constantly have wake overflow from big boats passing through them.

They make an interim fix for the issue by plugging the gap with sandbags. They spend some time together enjoying each other’s company. But: Surprise surprise, the sandbags are not a sufficient fix for the wall and they soon give out as well. Ember uses her fire power to make a sturdier fix by transforming the sand in the sandbags into a structure of tempered glass to plug the game. Once again, Ember saves the city’s ass by fixing what they don’t seem inclined or capable of fixing.

Ember ends up breaking up with Wade after deciding that her family will never accept him. During a party where Bernie will retire and hand over the Fireplace to Ember, Wade arrives and declares his love for her and also incidentally mentions that Ember was to blame for the leak in the basement.

The city then comes and (surprisingly) performs its civic duty and inspects the tempered glass fix and deems it safe. But within about a day the tempered glass breaks. This causes the final major action of the movie as our heroes rush to save the fire district from the flood.

13. Seeing the canals as they investigate everything underlines a significant source of the problems: the city is designed to favor water people in every way. The canals are a terrible civic design with their uncontrolled wake splashover. In our own world, there are no-wake rules in many boat areas to prevent destruction of structures. Why aren’t the walls higher? Why aren’t there no-wake rules?

14. Wade, a specialist in city water inspections should have realized that the sandbags were only a temporary measure against the leak and instead of spending that time socializing he should have spent that time getting on the horn trying to get a proper fix in place to prevent major accident when the sandbags inevitably gave out.

15. The city almost showed a glimmer of competence when they actually inspected the tempered glass wall patch within a very short period of time of it being enacted. Which might have been a redeeming moment for them, if it hadn’t then failed within about a day of the inspection. What exactly are they inspecting for? Most inspections would require building materials to come from a specific approved list, and I gather that the tempered glass concept was novel enough that it wouldn’t have been on an approved list–and for good reason because they clearly had no concept of the long-term permanence of such a structure.

16. Wade “accidentally” revealing that Ember was the one who caused the leak in the basement during Bernie’s retirement party would have been a shitty thing to do, even if it were true. Which it wasn’t.

Up until his “accidental” revealing, I had thought Wade might be redeemable if he ever owned up to his own responsibility, accepted fault for the things that are his fault instead of hiding behind his tears and laying all the blame on those who don’t deserve it. But he never at any point in the narrative does any of this. When he revealed the false information that the leak was Ember’s fault in front of her family despite the fact that the leak was really the city’s fault (and their continued danger continues to be the city’s fault), and which was certainly more Wade’s fault than Ember’s fault, that he chose this junction to declare this false information is, in my opinion, irredeemable.

The city’s greatest failure in the movie is revealed when the patch in the wall breaks and they all have to fight to keep everyone in the fire district from being killed by the flood and Wade does a big heroic thing to help their family. For which I agree they should be grateful, but I wish they had not ended up together, or at least that Wade would have at the very least taken some basic responsibility instead of throwing Ember under the bus at the worst possible moment.

Of course, Ember and Wade ending up in a romantic relationship at the end of the movie is probably reasonably assumed to be a foregone conclusion because the movie is marketed and presented as a romance instead of (IMO) what it really is: a drama about the importance of the role of city government to keep its people safe, and the lives in peril that can be caused by that city government’s incompetence.

DP FICTION #106: “It Clings” by Hammond Diehl

edited by David Steffen

Of course a dybbuk is flat. Flat as a blini. All the easier for that damn ghost to slip under your collar.

Of course a dybbuk is colorless. That’s why, when you say you’ve got a dybbuk, most people say, no you don’t. Go see Dr. Weiner. Spend a few days in Florida.

And of course a dybbuk can stretch like a goddamn balloon animal. So it can stick. Sometimes to fridges. More often to living people, to their familiar messes and warm smells, but not always. Some folks insist that dybbuks full-on possess people, make them fly around, screeching, like giant fruit bats dressed in their funerary finest. Those people are yutzes.

So. We come to the first day of Louie’s shiva. All the expected mourners show up. Larry. Bekah. And look at this: Some kid. Marla. Bekah assumes she’s Larry’s torah student. Larry assumes she’s Bekah’s second cousin once removed. But let’s be honest: nobody cares. Nobody asks. After an hour or so of being thus ignored, Marla drifts into the kitchen and makes herself useful scrubbing dishes.

And that’s when Louie’s widow, Dory, spots a dybbuk. Happens just as she’s adjusting a sheet hanging over a dining-room mirror. There it is, inching along the wall toward the sideboard. Well, if you’re raised right, you don’t care whether that ghost is Louie’s or not. You stab it with a pickle fork and throw it out the window before it can stick to a full-on person, and that’s what Dory does.

Marla stares out the window, watching the dybbuk coast like a frisbee into a riot of neglected crabgrass.

“Good for him,” Marla says. “He loved green things.”

She’s just put her egg salad on the sideboard. It’s festooned with fresh dill and parsley and chives from her kitchen garden, and everyone hates it. Not because they’ve tried it, but because Dory asked what was in it, and who doesn’t bother to put Miracle Whip in an egg salad?

Marla goes back into the kitchen.

We come to the second day of the shiva. Larry comes out of the bathroom. It’s the one — and this is important — decorated in tans and golds. Larry announces that somebody’s kid needs to be sent to his room, because one of Bekah’s latkes is stuck to the bathroom wall next to the towels. The only reason Larry even spotted it is because he almost touched it. Could’ve gotten his hands all greasy.

Bekah hears this and says, “I didn’t bring any latkes.”

The whole shiva races to the bathroom. Bekah has the pickle fork this time.

The dybbuk goes sailing out the bathroom window, landing on a dirt smear that once featured a fennel plant taller than your teenager.

Marla says, “He did love that garden.”

Dory rolls her eyes.

“He was on oxygen,” she says. “Bedridden. Did you even know him?”

“Oh yes. We met on Reddit. In a group about container gardening.”

The whole room looks at Marla like she just landed in a pod.

Later, of course, they go home for the night. All of them except Dory, who is stuck living there, with her stinking, choking grief, and her utter certainty about everything. There’s also Marla, who, if we’re being honest, doesn’t have much else to do.

Marla goes outside. She finds the dirt smear. Now she has the pickle fork.

She brings the dybbuk inside. Dory’s eyes are swollen like golf balls and her nose looks like a sour cherry, but she manages to say, “He couldn’t grow anything anymore. The chives. The fennel. In the end. Couldn’t eat much of anything either.”

“I know,” Marla says.

Marla puts the dybbuk on the counter and opens the refrigerator. No one has touched her egg salad, but the constellation of herbs still shines up from under the plastic wrap, green and good.

She removes the salad from the fridge, peels the plastic wrap from the top of the bowl, balls it up, throws it away. Marla lays a hand on the dybbuk, feels its cool, shivering skin.

She picks it up.

“Louie liked it with Miracle Whip,” Dory says.

Marla says nothing.

Gently, like the pizza guy down on the corner, she stretches the edges of the dybbuk. She lays it across the top of the salad bowl, sticky side down.

It clings.

Then it sags in the middle, just a little, just enough to touch what’s beneath. There is no eating for Louie, not anymore, but there’s this, and I will not pretend to know whether any of it, in the end, did the poor bastard any good.

Dory can’t help it. She chuckles. Then goes into her room and pops two Ambien.

Marla rummages around in a corner and finds her tote bag. She lowers the bowl inside.

Tomorrow will be day three of the shiva. Marla will be gone this time.

And so, if Larry and Bekah bother to look, will be the egg salad.

829 words

Author’s Note: I may have had a dream about a pancake with teeth, or a ghost that was shaped like a pancake. I think it was the latter, because I remember being stricken by how completely pathetic the thing looked, and thinking poor bastard. What if this is as good as it gets?

Hamm’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope and more. Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes under the protective blankie of a pseudonym.

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