First Lines
Boxes surround us.
Every night Barry builds more walls, fastens more lids. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I slip down the hall to his workroom and watch. His eyes remain focused on the contents of his bench: the wood, the pulped flowers and all those dying insects—the grasshoppers, the damsel flies, the hissing cockroaches—that will eventually make up the lining of each petal-and-limb box. Little pools of haemolymph, the fluid he collects from his crushed arthropods, rest in jars, waiting to be mixed into the glue.
The Anthology
The thirteenth Tarot card is Death, and the is a symbol not of the end, but of transformation and rebirth. This is the genesis and root of Thirteen: Stories of Transformation. The twenty-eight authors of this collection are voices—new and old—who are not afraid to explore what comes next. Whether it be a life after death, a life without love, a life filled with hunger, or the life shared by a ghost. These are stories of the weird, the mythic, the fantastic, the futuristic, the supernatural, and the horrific.