A place strange

The process requires an offering of hand-picked apples and hand-made candy.

Six black cats spill through the open window into my living room.

A disturbed man flips my car. The 911 operator refuses to take my report seriously, so I call my mother for help instead. After I explain the situation, there is a pause. I notice strange, eerie music playing on her end. 'I'm afraid I have some bad news,' she says, and the line goes dead.

My lover acts calm and gentle, but I still sense within him a cold, hard centre, an emptiness. He has plans for me: he leaves an envelope of documents on the bed that I must read before he will join me at 2:30 a.m.

He tells me why he is distraught. As I listen, his left eye grows huge, turns up toward the sky, and then becomes line-drawn: wiggly, animated.

Completing the song requires a piece of flesh. I remove a thin strip from just under my knee.

A deep, snug dream.

The black tarantula is in the room for medicinal purposes. It’s meant to tap the shoulder of the patient, just lightly. Then the tarantula splits, into four lighter-coloured spiders. When I irritate one of them, it pursues me around the room, biting at me.

The answer to the murder is in the cards. I’ll know the card when I see it. I can sense it—dark, feminine. As I sift through the deck, it’s like I’m peeling away her layers. Yet when I finally get to the centre where she should be, there is only an absence.

My husband's pupils are so black they are more like voids.

'I've been seeing B,' I tell B, who is also B—the same, but different. 'That's not going to change anytime soon, so.'

- Gyrðir Elíasson, Stone Tree

I live alone on a ranch, which involves locking and unlocking many doors. Other ranchers steal across my property at night—but are they people, or ghosts? I must keep my animals alive, as well as my love, and my car doors locked.

We have to complete the process.

We've been held captive for years and years. They treat us well. They serve us dinner at the table like everyone else. It's been twenty years.

They turn me away from the fashion event because I’m not dressed properly. For the rest of the night I hang out under some bleachers, alone, pissed off.

The room gets dark. We share in the small piece of fading light cast on the table as if it's a meal: proof of our intimacy.