Attending at Theal
Three documents describe the same night in a coastal English village: a woman's body-haunted testimony, a folklorist's impossible measurements, and a community's warm collective voice. None of them agree on what happened in the pool.
Arranged Lovely
Two sisters live alone in a house the village won't enter. The younger one keeps the rituals. The older one keeps the silence. When the pattern in the wallpaper begins to skip, only one of them notices — and the house has opinions about noticing.
Supplemental Procedures
A records coordinator finds a procedural manual for a department that doesn't exist. It is exhaustively thorough. Her colleagues begin referencing it in meetings. She begins following its procedures. They work.
Inventory of a Body Returned
After her wife returns from an Antarctic research station changed, Dr. Lena Kowalski catalogs the impossible alterations — an inventory that reveals something vast, ancient, and indifferent to human love.
Every Seventh House
You arrive in a depopulating Spanish village for its annual festival. The welcome is genuine. The chalk marks on the doors are not explained. By the time you understand what the festival requires, you have already been participating.
Substrate and Signal
A former environmental consultant documents moisture rising through her basement walls with professional rigor. When her daughter begins seeing the same patterns, the family's gentle, therapeutic response may be worse than whatever is climbing.
Every Number in the Green
Told in reverse over twelve years, a data analyst vanishes from a small Oregon town where every metric has only ever improved. Moving backward, her body heals, the town grows warmer, and the numbers grow more perfect. The horror is that nothing was ever wrong.
Capillary Trespass
An architectural surveyor returns to her dead great-aunt's hacienda in Yucatan. Her legal deposition describes three days inside a house built on debt peonage — where the walls draw moisture in patterns she cannot explain, and the floor plan keeps changing.
Settled Air
A woman recovers from a loss in a room she cannot leave. A couple visits daily, bringing trays and conversation. Their kindness is flawless. Their knowledge of her is impossible. The tea is always the right temperature.
Giving Graciously
A biotech employee's body transforms after joining her company's tissue-sharing program. The horror isn't the mutation — it's that her honest reaction is relief.
Congregation of One
A medical transcriptionist fleeing her mother's death takes shelter in a Louisiana roadside church where the congregation confesses other people's sins. Her narration to the reader gradually reveals itself as the church's practice extended to an audience of one.
Still Growing
A woman cares for her sister's slow botanical transformation in a house where the electricity bill is overdue. The fragments arrive out of order. The reader assembles the timeline. The growing doesn't stop.
Reserve Army
A delivery driver discovers the algorithm keeps routing her to the same suburban house every night. The orders escalate. Other drivers deny the address exists. She cannot afford to stop.
The Extra Step
A woman moves into a cheap Buenos Aires apartment where the stairwell has one too many steps and the hallway angles refuse to add up — but her neighbors treat the wrongness as normal, the way you treat poverty when it's all you know.
Custody of the Sealed Ground
A retired librarian returns to a dying Maine coast town to catalogue a dead historian's papers. Among them she finds evidence that something was buried on the bluffs to hold back an ancient evil — and that someone dug it up. Now the town is going quiet, house by house.
Rooms That Do Not Agree
A solicitor drives to a fen property to complete a routine estate settlement. The conveyancing files contain annotations in an unidentified hand. As he reads, his own prose begins to change.
Salinity and Forgetting
A marine biologist's field notes from New England salt marshes fracture across time as the dead zones she catalogs form a geometry that predates cartography — and that has always included her observations.
Kindling Night
A folklorist takes a summer position cataloguing a Vermont town's archive and finds himself welcomed with unsettling warmth — until the old documents and the living community begin to say the same thing about what the valley requires.
Confession Requires a Reader
A restorer arrives at a remote estate to catalogue its paintings for the reclusive woman who inherited it. The house is wrong in ways he can describe and ways he cannot. The woman never explains. The paintings do.