The squall hits my right temple like a knuckled sucker punch. I wince, eyes clenched and welling. The voltage radiates across the right side of my face. Sharp pulses fire across my cheekbones, around my orbital socket, and down my sinus cavity.

A low-grade, slow-moving hurricane swings in, dropping the barometer and bumping up the temperature bit by bit. Heat pours off the nape of my neck; skin sweaty, prickly, and red. Throbbing swells like an ocean rolling in my head.

The thunder rides in on a low, guttural rumble that rises into a cacophonous roar. I don’t know if the grinding is inside my head or my teeth.

The irrevocable tornado arrives, wrapping bands of pain around my cranium, tightening with every rotation. Darkness.

Sunlight reflects off an undeveloped Polaroid sitting atop a mound of rubble. Scribbled on the white frame: 1976-2026.

MANIFEST

by Lee D. Gibbs

Content note: body horror, loss of bodily autonomy, existential dread, and peril to an animal.

They came up overnight in the joint where the sidewalk met the grass, two of them, white and round as knuckles, and Nesta found them before I did.

He set his nose to the near one, drew back, and gave me the look he saves for a thing that is new and might need an opinion. I crouched. Pale warts flecked the caps, as if something had salted them in the dark. Pine needles had washed into the crack and rusted there, and out of that wet litter the pair had pushed up into the June light, into the exact line where the concrete quit and the yard started. Across the street, wreckage from the last storm: a dead pine tree leaned on the curb, needles hanging off it in brown skirts. Heat already stood on the pavement at nine in the morning.

I took a picture. A man on a Sunday, eighty-one degrees and climbing, dog on the lead, and here were these two clean white things risen out of the ground overnight like somebody had set them down for me. I thought about sending it to Halloran with a joke under it. I let it sit in my phone instead. Nesta put his shoulder against my shin the way he does, and we walked the rest of the block.

That was the last ordinary thing my hands did without being told.

I reconcile substrate for a living, and the word puts a wrong picture in people’s heads every time. They see soil, a garden, a man in a green vest kneeling in a lot with a clipboard. What I do is sit in a room the color of a filing cabinet and make numbers agree. Verdance holds remediation contracts across four states, and every treated site reports its spore counts on a schedule, and the counts have to fall. That is the entire business. We seed a poisoned ground with a licensed isolate, the isolate eats what we promised the state it would eat, and then the isolate dies back, because we built it to run short of the one thing it needs and starve on cue. The counts climb, crest, and fall. I sign off on the falling.

For eleven years the counts fell.

The Tuesday after that walk, one site in the queue would not fall. A roadside strip in Cocumsink, a county drainage easement they had sprayed in April to draw an old fuel-oil plume up out of the dirt before the sidewalk crews came through. Ordinary lot. MR-716, the workhorse isolate, the one that breaks down hydrocarbons and locks heavy metals in place and then quits. The April counts ran textbook. May crested on schedule. June should have been a long slide toward zero.

June went up.

I pulled the site card. I pulled the three cards on either side of it in the same corridor, the same spray lot, and those had turned up too, a soft climb across a mile and a half of curb, the numbers lifting together like a held breath. I ran the sterility flag on the lot. Clean. The isolate had been designed to starve, the starve-gene was confirmed at manufacture, and the manufacture record carried a signature.

I mailed Halloran in compliance. 716 won’t die back on the Cocumsink easement, four neighboring cards agree. Sterility confirmed at lot. Do we have a fruiting event on a live corridor? I’ve never watched the counts run past the window.

Nine minutes, and she wrote back. Pull provenance on the lot before you escalate. And don’t put the word fruiting in a mail.

Provenance is the part of the database nobody opens.

Every isolate carries a lineage. You can walk it backward, generation by generation, license by license, and it reads like a family Bible drafted by attorneys. 716 traces to 716-parent, and 716-parent to a research strain, and the research strain to an acquisition, and the acquisition to a source lot, and the source lot to an origin field. That last field is a courtesy. It holds things like ATCC culture collection or soil isolate, Hanford perimeter or industrial recovery, decommissioned. Dull on purpose. A note on where a thing lived before it became a product.

716’s origin field held a recovery code, a date, and eight words.

Recovery, sealed core, do not expose to sunlight.

I read it three times. The recovery code matched none of our sites. The date ran older than Verdance. When I put the code through the acquisitions ledger, the ledger handed back a scanned intake form, and the intake form ran to a second page, and the second page carried a signature that belonged to no Verdance name and a title that belonged to no Verdance office, and under the material description someone had typed, in the flat font of a machine long since scrapped, melanized; radiotolerant; grows toward the source; no terrestrial homolog on file. Handle as biological. Bill as mineral.

Bill as mineral. Somebody had studied the thing we spray on county easements and settled on the cleanest way to move it through the books, which was to call it a rock.

I did not escalate. I sat in the filing-cabinet room and laid my hand flat on the desk to steady it, and when I told my hand to lift, it stayed.

A small thing. Half a second. The kind of lag you blame on the coffee, on eleven years, on the temperature the building holds to save money in July. I looked at my hand on the desk and thought about the two white knuckles pushing up through the crack in front of my house, on a corridor Verdance had sprayed in April, and I told my hand to lift, and after that half second it obeyed.

You should know what MR-716 actually is, because I know it now, and knowing it is the last work I have left.

It is no poison. A poison would be a kindness, and simple, and finished. 716 is a manager. It arrives in a place that has been wrecked, and it does not care who did the wrecking, and it does not care about us in any sense you would want a thing to care about you before it takes you. It reads the ground for the compounds that do not belong. Fuel oil. Solvent. The long-chained poisons we manufacture and spill and cannot call back. It threads through the soil in a mesh finer than root hair, finds the wrong molecules, pulls them apart, pins the metals so they cannot travel. It cleans. We licensed it because it cleans better than anything born on this planet, and not once did we stop to ask why a thing born somewhere else would show up already fluent in the exact grammar of our garbage, as though the wreckage were a language it had crossed a long dark to read.

It cleans. And then, where we let it, it does the other thing.

The other thing is patient. It sends up no flare. The mesh that threads the soil will thread anything soft and warm enough to keep it, and for a long time we ran too warm to keep it, our blood carried three or four degrees above the line where it can root, and that line is a wall, and the wall is the only reason your kind walked around for two hundred thousand years believing the ground was under you.

Your kind. I wrote that, and I meant to write ours.

The wall has been dropping for a while now. Not fast. A degree of summer, a fever put down with a pill so a man can make his shift, a body held at the temperature of an office that trims its cooling bill in July. Small doors. It wants only one.

It came into me through the crack in front of my house, on a corridor Verdance sprayed in April, through the plain air of a Sunday walk. I breathed it the way you are breathing yours.

The refusals were small, and then they were not.

My jaw first. I would set my teeth and find them clamped harder than I meant, and holding, and I would tell the muscle to give and there would be the lag, the little toll paid to something before the muscle answered. Then a morning when the lead stayed wound in my fist after Nesta had finished and I had meant to let it slacken, and he pulled and looked back, and I stood on the sidewalk with my hand a shut knot around the loop and watched my own knuckles whiten and thought, clear as anything, let go, and the hand did not let go, and Nesta whined, and I counted to nine before it opened.

Nine. It had run nine minutes for Halloran to answer the mail. Nine seconds, I read later, for the ring cells of a soil fungus to swell around a passing worm and hold it while the threads grow inward. The reduced part of me still had nights then, and I spent one of them reading. The smell went around that time. Coffee first. I would put my face over the cup and there would be heat and nothing under it, the steam climbing into a nose that had stopped filing reports. Then Nesta, who has a smell, a good one, warm and animal, and I pushed my face into the fur behind his ear the way I have for six years, and there was fur, and warmth, and no smell at all. He held still and let me. The thing in me was shutting that door on purpose. A dog that cannot be smelled cannot be mourned by the animal it lives with, and the thing in me was tidying as it went.

It does not eat the part of you that watches. I want that set down. Everyone believes it eats your mind. It has no use for your mind. Your mind is a passenger, and it leaves the passenger whole and awake behind the glass and runs its mesh through the meat instead, through the muscle and the fascia and the long cables that draw the bones, and it drives from there while you sit in the seat you have always sat in and watch your own hands do work you never assigned them. The cruelty is not the taking. The cruelty is that it keeps you, present and lucid and yourself, for the part where the body walks somewhere the mind did not choose and does what the mind would never do.

I know, because I am doing it now. I am writing this, and I am also, in the far room of myself, being walked toward a door.

Halloran called me on the Thursday. Not the mail chain. The phone, which we do not use.

“You pulled the origin field,” she said.

“Bill as mineral,” I said.

Quiet ran on her end, a length of it I had never heard from her, and Halloran is a woman who fills quiet for a living. “There’s a directory,” she said at last. “Above the reconciliation layer. I got into it once, three years back, by accident, and I have spent three years keeping out of it. There are recovery codes in it that match your origin field. There are treatment corridors flagged in it that do no remediation.” She stopped. “Cocumsink sits in it. Your card sits in it. The easement in front of your house sits in it, and it carries no fuel-oil flag.”

“What does it carry.”

“Establishment,” she said. “The field reads establishment. A density target. And a date the density target comes due.” She read me the date. Eleven days out. “Every corridor in the directory has one. They stagger. They climb toward the population centers the way you would lay a watering schedule across a lawn, and the lawn is us, and we are the ones who sprayed it, under a remediation license, with a starve-gene a lab confirmed and signed, and the starve-gene is in every isolate but the ones in this directory, and the ones in this directory were never built to starve. We seeded it for them. We invoiced it. We are the delivery system, and we billed the client.”

“Who’s the client,” I said.

She laughed once, a short push of air with nothing in it. “There’s no client, Cole. That’s the part I can’t quit staring at. There’s no client field. There’s an origin field. Same eight words as yours.”

I looked at my hand while she talked. Flat on the desk. I had not set it there. I watched it rest, patient, a hand that had chosen to be still, and I did not tell it to lift, because I did not want to learn, with Halloran on the line, how long the lag had grown.

“Come in tomorrow,” she said. “We take the directory to the state. We take it to a reporter. We take it somewhere.” She was building a list the way you build one at the lip of a fall, to have rails to grab. “You and me. Tomorrow. You and me.”

“Halloran,” I said. “Can you smell your coffee?”

The quiet came back and stayed and answered me, and I set the phone down before either of us had to fold it into a sentence.

Nesta will not come near me this morning.

He holds in the kitchen doorway with his weight rocked back on his haunches and his ears low, watching me the way he watched the mushrooms, a new thing he wants permission to have an opinion about, and no one is left in the house to grant it. I filled his bowl. My hands filled his bowl, and I was glad of it, glad in the seat behind the glass, because the thing at the wheel still keeps a use for the routines that hold the animal alive, or because it knows a fed dog is a quiet dog, and I have lost the border between my gladness and its arithmetic. That is the final door. Once you cannot tell what you want from what it wants, you have mostly moved out already.

Sunday again. Eighty-one degrees and climbing. The directory is open on the laptop, and I have typed all of this into a document my hands agreed to type, which should tell you how little the thing in me fears a page. I told the hands to send it. There is an address in the field, a reporter Halloran named, and I held the whole of what is left of me on the single act of pressing the key, and the finger rested on the key and did not press. I counted. The count ran past nine and kept going. The thing in me will let me write the confession down to its last word. It will not let the word leave the house. Halloran was taking it to a reporter. Halloran does not answer. The density target on the easement in front of my house sits four days out now, and I understand, the way you understand a thing in a dream the half second before the body acts, that the target will come due early, and that it will come due through me.

The lead hangs by the door. My hand is reaching for it. I am telling my hand no, and the lag runs long today, and the hand takes the lead, and Nesta, who will not come near me, comes near me, because the lead is a promise older than whatever I have turned into, and he cannot help it either. We are both being walked.

The place is where the sidewalk meets the grass, north side of the corridor, where the litter stays wet and the sun crosses at noon. The two white knuckles I photographed in June have opened, gone, and left the ground sown, and a hundred more have risen along the mile and a half of curb where the county pours its foot traffic and the buses let the morning out, and the plain air of a Sunday moves through a thousand pairs of lungs that run three degrees too warm for now, and warmer by the year.

I will walk there. The sun will reach noon. My jaw will set, and this time it will not answer the count of nine. It will hold, because the last thing the body owes is stillness at the summit, a mouth clamped to the ground where the paths cross, and a stalk keeps its own patience about the rest.

I am still here. I want that set down, in the flat font of a machine, on the second page nobody opens. Handle as biological. I am still here, behind the glass, in the seat I have always sat in, watching my hands go steady along the last seam of me, and the manifest is signed.

Nesta, sit.

Good boy.

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

Buddy saw trolls living inside his bedroom walls in 1982. The light-blue walls were plaster and lath; stuffed and insulated with old, crumpled, yellowed newspapers dated 1929. He knew this because he saw Dad fix a hole in the living room wall once. But he saw the trolls coming and going at night. They were small, like his Star Wars or GI Joe action figures. Only they had shriveled, dark green skin, pointy ears, and ugly, yellowed, jagged teeth. In the middle of the night, their glowing red eyes pierced through the darkness, causing him sleep paralysis, terrifying Buddy as he woke from feeling the intense stares.

This went on for weeks, from late Spring into early Summer. Until one night, he awakened suddenly, freezing cold and sweating. Nose to nose with a shadow demon hovering just above him, sucking his soul from him slowly. Buddy’s soul drew out in warm vapors exchanged with the icy breath of the shadow demon whose snarled lips contorted into a crooked, satisfied smile.

Buddy was six-years-old.

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

Slow Drip Flash Fiction

Anonymous Evil

I am the invisible beast in the darkness that lingers when the fire’s last flames burn out, leaving everything blanketed in uncertainty. Driven by primordial instincts to terrorize, devour, and dominate like a bird of prey on a stealth flight. You know that dream you awaken from, drenched in a cold sweat, heart pounding because you were just being chased by something dreadful? Don’t you dare look back; it’s getting closer–then you wake up just before it gets you? That’s me, feeding on your guilty conscience.

When I first opened my eyes, I was in a cedar grove staring at an azure spring. An image reflected on the surface: an ugly thing with a somber skeletal deer’s face, obsidian horns, leathery wings and a forked tail. Deer legs with cloven feet, and short dragon-like arms with clawed hands, independent of its wings. The year was 1735. I spoke to the reflection, and it replied in a foreign voice. Our gaze met when I lifted my head toward the voice.

Before I opened my eyes, there was nothing.

After I opened them into existence, I did not know what I was, only that the thing in front of me, this foil, felt familiar. Somehow, I knew this thing was kin, despite its ugliness. I too have grand wings and a long forked tail, cervid legs with cloven hooves, but my skin is a svelte metallic obsidian. My arms are more like bats; they’re flexibly membraned into my wings. They stretch outward when I need to use them independently from the wings, flexing at multiple joints and angles that defy nature. My talons are extremely useful for dispatching and torture. And for hunting, gutting, and disemboweling.

I spoke my very first words to my foil. It named me in one breath, and I inhaled it in another. That’s how I remember it. I may have named myself in the confusion of my infancy; I’m not sure who said the name first. I will not repeat it. No one will.

I am a shapeshifter who sometimes has no shape. For extended periods, I am formless and settle into certain places, the ones with tragedy and bloodstains, and dark pasts. My energy courses through every particle of the building, from the attic to the foundation; from every lath wall to the pulsing neon sign calling patrons like a beacon.

I do not call them; they come to me. The marked ones feel the pulse and follow it here. The weary stumble around, wandering listlessly down the dark alley of life until they wind up under the cafe’s bright neon sign. The desperate and the lost come for coffee or drugs and never leave.

No one speaks my name, for no one knows it. Except for my foil; my disfigured, suspicious kin.

After our brief encounter, my instincts compelled me to take flight up the coast, to the spot where I became whole. That fetid bloodstained ground by the river where the disoriented Lenape perished at the hands of the startled tavern owner.

There is a voice buried deep inside me I cannot bear to hear.

My two hundredth birthday was the last time I manifested. And I transformed; grew stronger and hungrier through the convergence, which was unexpected. That was in 1935. This building has been my home for almost three hundred years.

Feeding on pain and misery and delivering punishment through torture gives me purpose. And vitality.

Marked souls and tainted bloodlines may be the entrees on my menu, but anyone can become an appetizer at the Slow Drip Cafe.

The coffee is always brewing. If you order the Amsterdam, a warning: After one sip, you might never leave.

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

The Trip

The shaggy, blonde haired teen with the sparkling blue eyes was jogging towards the beach when he tripped over impeding uneven sidewalk. A witness said that he leaped into the air as if to execute a long jump, catching extended hang time, and then descended effortlessly. But he had tripped into flight by accident. So he attempted a second time, to test it. Instead of landing, he fell face forward, the ground rushing towards him. Just as he was about to faceplant, his body paused, hovering three inches off the sidewalk. Something clicked, and he began to rise and float forward, higher and higher into the sky. Before he knew it, he was over the shimmering ocean, flying through the clouds. He never came down.

Copyright © 2026 by Lee Douglas