Life for Life
WE BITE BACK hits shelves in glorious color and black and white
After a few hiccups, We Bite Back, is here! This queer horror anthology is available in both black and white and full color, in digital, paperback, and hardcover! This has been such a labor of love and dedication, and all proceeds go toward the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that we desperately need right now. I look forward to you reading all the amazing essays, fiction, and poetry in this collection—including my folk horror short, “The Curse of Seewiif Strand.” So, if you want to do some good in the world and support an amazing project, grab your copy today!
Here’s a small excerpt of my story:
It’s Sjoerd’s spear that brings her down. A whistle as it cuts the salty air then all our lives are irrevocably changed in a burst of sea water and blood. We don’t know yet, of course. He hauls the catch in, hand over cracked, calloused hand. We gather, jostling, joking, around the mess in the bottom of the skiff.
“Wralda,” Sjoerd swears, crouching. “Look at her,” he bids us, as if we can look at anything else.
Gleaming grey-green mottles her back and the writhing length of her eel tail, twice the length of the rest of her narrow, boney body. The white of her breast gleams pearlescent under splashes of bright blood. Sjoerd’s spear juts from her flank, bobbing each time she gasps in our too-thin air. But it’s her eyes I can’t look away from.
Black, overlarge, and fathomless like the frigid depths from which we hauled her. They glisten each time the clear membranes of her inner eyelids blink. Her face isn’t a woman’s, not really, though I see echoes of us in her, faint as the echoes of wolfblood in our scrappy hunt hounds. Gripping the iron nail hung around my throat for protection, I lean closer to peer at her. Sjoerd knocks me back.
“She’s mine.” He lifts the creature up by her kelp-laden hair, enough that he can meet her glare. Hundreds of needle teeth part in a hiss.
Why doesn’t she bite him? It’s a traitorous thought, because he’s the strongest fisherman, and we need to eat, but never has our catch looked at us with hatred. Fear, surely, and desperation as they flop about the bottom of our boat. But hatred is a human weight.
Continue reading at one of the links down below, and I can’t wait to hear what you think! Personally, I can’t wait to see the hardcover on my shelves!
As always, happy reading and take good care.
Congratulations!!!!