Award-winning author and actor Sonya Walger (Lost, For All Mankind) joins us to discuss her latest novel, Wifehouse—the story of a woman who has always defined herself as a wife and mother, and who, in trying to put her own happiness first, pursues an affair with a much younger French tutor. As Sonya puts it, it's ultimately a novel about "a mother who leaves,” and the questions such a story raises: Why would a woman make that decision? And what happens after?

The passage Sonya reads centers on a real-life story that inspired one of the book's most pivotal scenes—and one of the hardest for her to get right. It’s a great conversation about concision, pacing, metaphor, and how an ordinary podcast anecdote can find it’s way to unlocking the emotional heart of a novel.

Sonya also talks to Cory and Jon about her process of “writing into a question,” how the experience of interrogating a script as an actor lends itself to novel-writing, why more actors should write novels, the art of turning life’s observations into fiction, and what makes airplanes great places to get some work done (hint: it’s the fact that you’re trapped).

Sonya’s passage, from Wifehouse:

She gropes for her phone in the dark, finds a podcast to drown out her thoughts. The host of a news review show tells a story about a group of tourists on a guided tour bus in Iceland who got off at a rest stop to stretch their legs and take in the scenery. One female traveler decided to change her clothes before getting back on the bus. When it was time to leave, the passengers boarded the bus, and one of them alerted the driver that they were missing a passenger—a woman in black who had been sitting by the window. The driver agreed to wait, and they all sat on the bus, patiently awaiting this woman’s return. Eventually, when she did not appear, they decided to get out and search for her. The female traveler joined in the search. Local police were summoned, the fire department deployed, all beginning an increasingly frantic search for a missing woman in a black jacket. It was many, many hours before the female traveler realized that she was, in fact, the person for whom they were searching. She informed the authorities, and the search was called off. The host laughs as he tells the story.

Annie is wide awake now. She pictures this woman, trudging through the tundra, searching for the missing tourist. She wonders how long it took her to realize her mistake. She wonders how long it took her to admit to it. Did she hesitate, Annie wonders, did she for one wild moment wonder what would happen if she never owned her mistake but allowed that other self to vanish into that treeless horizon? Did she, for a moment, hover on the threshold of becoming someone new, someone naked, reborn, free?

Annie stares at the darkness. She, too, is walking in the wrong direction, knowing full well that she is the one who is missing.

John Keene reads from "Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows," a novella at the heart of his 2015 collection Counternarratives. It’s an experimental piece of fiction imagined as a footnote to an obscure history text, centered on an enslaved woman named Carmel and expanding across the early 19th century Americas, starting from the Haitian Revolution and evolving into a gothic, possibly supernatural tale in a Kentucky convent.

John talks to Jon and Cory about:

• How the novella's structural framework, a historical footnote that “swallows” the text it annotates, came out of his early graduate work with E.L. Doctorow linking experimental fiction with history
• His initial worry that the asterisk/footnote idea for the story was nothing but "postmodern hijinks"
• Losing an early version of this story and several others from Counternarratives to a computer crash and spending years away from it, then returning to discover the rewrite was more ambitious than anything he'd lost
• How Carmel's arc emerged late in the process, as he realized her growing power meant she could eventually claim her own voice and narrate her own ending
• His habit, when stuck, of opening any nearby book, and the belief that another writer will always show you the way forward
• The Latin American experimentalists, including Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, José Lezama Lima, who showed him that fiction could be formally radical and historically engaged at once
  

  The opening of John’s passage, from “Gloss”:
  
  GLOSS ON A HISTORY OF ROMAN CATHOLICS IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1790–1825; OR THE STRANGE HISTORY OF OUR LADY OF THE SORROWS

  A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic: 1790–1825, Jos. N. O. de L'Écart-Francis and Ambrose Carroll Meyer (Boston: Flaherty & Smith, 1895)

  The status of the ancient Faith differed on the eastern shores of the Mississippi and its southerly tributaries. A convent and school, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, are referred to indirectly in the records of His Holiness Bishop John Carroll of the Diocese of Baltimore, whose curacy extended at that time to the far western frontiers of the virgin Republic's lands. A specific reference may be found, however, in the personal papers of Fr. Auguste-Marie Malesvaux, a native of Saint-Domingue, whose evangelistic labors encompassed the Spanish and later French territories from Louisiana as far north as the Great Lakes. Malesvaux offers brief notations on the convent and school, which he asserts were the first in this region. Flemish Nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Charity of Our Lady of the Sorrows established both near the village of New Hurttstown, in this frontier region of western Kentucky, in 1800. Because the convent and school suddenly vanished without a trace, and within several years the order itself disappeared as well, and as the nearby non-Catholic settlement suffered through a series of calamities before dwindling to near-extinction until its reestablishment in 1812, no other definitive records of this foundation remain.* It was not until the Reverend Father Charles Nerinckx, the native of Herfe-

  *Carmel was the lone child among the handful of bondspeople remaining at Valdoré, the coffee plantation to which Olivier de L'Écart returned in late July 1803. The estate, over which his elder brother Nicolas had presided for more than two decades, clung like a forget-me-not to the cliffs high above the coastal city of Jérémie, west of the Rivière Grand'Anse, in the southern district of the colony of Saint-Domingue.
  
  

Sam Shelstad reads three short chapters from his (very funny) novel, The Cobra and the Key, a fictional creative writing guide penned by an aspiring literary genius who isn’t going to let little things like talent, self-awareness, or a recent break-up hold him back. Sam talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Why he resisted packaging the book as a straight satire of writing guides and found the characterization and story needed for a novel instead
• Starting the book as a collection of one-off comedic writing tips, and how a “silly” riff on Lord of the Rings unlocked what a joke within the book could be
• Taking inspiration for the book's structure from James Wood's How Fiction Works (and then writing the dumbest version of it)
• The challenge of writing a narrator who is stupid enough to be funny, but believable at the same time, and the readings where audiences weren't sure he was joking
• How he writes by building on incidental details and throwaway lines
• Following Hemingway's advice to always leave something unfinished at the end of each writing session
• His love of Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, László Krasznahorkai and other writers whose darkness tips into comedy through repetition and the intense fixation of their characters

Sam’s passage, from The Cobra and The Key:

25.

Watch how Oscar Wilde reveals character in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette.”

Now we know, through Wilde’s clever and efficient use of detail, that the character has eyebrows. And notice how his cigarette is described as “heavy,” which lets the reader know that Lord Henry is incredibly weak. We also learn, because of the blue smoke, that he’s some kind of wizard character.

26.

A character in your story can be a composite of different people you know. You might borrow certain characteristics from one person, and certain characteristics from another. For example, an important character in the novel I’m working on now was created using this technique. The character, Molly, borrows some elements from my ex-lover: her manner of speaking, her sense of humour, her looks. Her name, of course. She’s from the same small town as Molly and had a similar family dynamic growing up. An ex-husband named Charles. Same interests and fears. But this character also wears a red beret, just like one of my neighbors. It’s interesting to mash two different people together like this and see what happens.

29.

People like to read about characters they would want to have a beer with. They should be interesting, amiable, and basically the kind of individual you could imagine sitting down and having a beer with. Take, for example, the wide cast of characters who populate J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings. I would sit down and have a beer with Frodo. Of course, I’d definitely want to have a beer with Gandalf. Samwise Gamgee—I’d have a beer. Merry and Pippin—beer. I’d sit down with Aragorn and have a beer, and I would also want to have a beer with Gimli. I would definitely want to sit down and have a beer with Arwen. I’d have a beer with Elrond. I think we would all want to sit down and have a beer with The Ents. I’d also have a beer with Galadriel. Boromir, beer for sure. Legolas, beer. I’d even want to have a beer with Gollum. That would be interesting. And of course, you can’t forget Bilbo Baggins. I’d want to sit down and have a beer with him too.

Nigerian short story writer and novelist ’Pemi Aguda reads a passage from her latest work, One Leg on Earth, and discusses the challenges–and rewards–of short vs. longform writing, the writers who keep her inspired, and how liberating it can be to scrap your book and start from scratch. 'Pemi’s critically acclaimed work mixes elements of supernatural, speculative fiction, folk horror, and contemporary literature to haunting and mesmeric effect. 

It was fantastic to talk to her about her process and her debut novel, “a richly patterned work of tangled mysteries” (The Guardian).

’Pemi’s passage, from One Leg On Earth: 

"When a man eventually approached her, two-thirds into the green bottle, the night was already set on its path. Of course, he sat without waiting for an answer to “Fine girl, may I join you?” Of course, he said it should be a crime for a pretty girl like her to be sitting all alone at an hour like this in a city like this, and maybe it was destined, yes, destined, that Yosoye would tilt her head until her maroon braids pooled on one shoulder, and ask if he was there to remedy that. 

The lines came unrehearsed to her lips. The script of a worldly woman. She who had always been a hesitant speaker, one who revised her sentences in her head over and over until her conversation partners repeated themselves, assuming she’d never heard them. Was she the same girl? Yosoye from five days ago would have been gobsmacked, would have clapped her hands like a Nollywood village girl and said, “Ehehn? Na you be this? This is you, yeah?” She was heady with unexpected success, so when he rose and took her hand, she didn’t protest. She didn’t think, too-fast-too-fast-too-fast. No. She thought, “Give me, give me.” 

This was exactly what she wanted from Lagos: unpredictable turns to a day so that what was up was suddenly sideways, and that 8 p.m. would bring adventure that 6 a.m. never dared to anticipate, and enough courage to stop her from curling back into herself, retreating into the loneliness she was used to, the comfort of its grasping arms.

In the cheap motel that smelled too strongly of air freshener, Yosoye removed her clothes with a determination alien to her, a forthrightness that belied inexperience. A handful of painful times was the extent of her sexual knowledge, cold clutches and dry entries, but she did not remember those discomforts in this moment. All she thought was now, was yes, was give me. She flung off her blouse, impatient for what came next, for her future. Her flesh fed on its own hunger, slicked from her eagerness alone, did not look to this man to generate the wet heat needed. She would not remember the air conditioner giving up with a short bang, or the diamond patterns of the bedsheet, and when his socks dropped to the floor, she could not be sure if it was rat or shadow that darted over them. 

Yosoye would deliberately refuse to remember him complaining about the condom, pulling out, tugging swiftly and efficiently enough to suggest practice, flinging the rubber into the foliage of a fake indoor plant—to be found by a whistling cleaner, or to ferment there forever. What Yosoye did remember was the feeling of being tugged along this Lagos night, lured, pulled, towed. Not the rhythmic smacking of his sweaty paunch against the inside of her thighs, but a grander hypnotic feeling of being swept up in a current, dragged in the surge of a ravenous tide."

Musician, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford reads not one but two passages! The first from the opening of his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and the second from his massive book on the life of Beethoven, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph–9n his words the hardest thing he’s ever written.

He also talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Why a musical biography has to reflect the subject–an Ives book should be Ivesian, a Beethoven book should be Beethovenian.
• His start as a “hack writer” writing Civil War history books for hire and learning how to do research.
• His research process and the value of a solid chronology.
• What you can learn about how people think and talk–from reading–and retyping–letters.
• The temptation to interpret a subject and the risks in doing so.
• Why writing about Beethoven’s process of composing his monumental Eroica symphony was the hardest passage he’s ever worked on.
• The importance of instinct–and of having a good early reader to give you honest feedback.
  
  Jan’s first passage, from Charles Ives: A Life in Music:
  
  In the old Ives house in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar.
  
  The intimate patter of rain, the measureless peeling of thunder, the jingle of sleighs in winter, the sure of spring peepers from springs and ponds, the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories. From the congregational church next door are the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment of this life.
  
  At holidays, the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the fire bell, in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers, inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings, and every night the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands, little orchestras playing in the park, outside in the shed or in the barn playing quick steps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster.
  
  On October 20th, 1874, from the large bedroom over the South Parlor, rose the Keening whale of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them in the intimacies of their timbers and in their deeper human resonances.
  
  Jan’s second passage, from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph:
  
  The dots and quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music.
  
  The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. So now I'm talking about the process and the finished at the same time. For the first movement, he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the Mittelgedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section.
  
  His forms are not molds to be filled with notes, but general guidelines to help organize the conception. This time, the conception is a name, Bonaparte.
  
  Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject. He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook...

Horror and dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud reads a passage from his novella, The Butcher’s Table, originally published in the short fiction collection Wounds (The Atlas of Hell). He talks to Jon and Cory about:

• The story’s origins as a blog serial
• His initial struggles to commit to the significant tonal departure from the stories in his first collection, North American Lake Monsters
• The fear of being taken less seriously by writing pulpy, fantastical fiction
• How Mike Mignola's Hellboy inspired him to commit to something as over-the-top as an angel-possessed squid
• Switching between laptop and pen and paper to unlock looser, more reckless drafting
• Learning to write by mimicking Stephen King and Clive Barker
• Attending Clarion Workshop
• Why he tries to avoid reading reviews (including those on Reddit, Goodreads, and social media)
• His love of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books
  

Nathan’s passage, from The Butcher’s Table:

It spoke a word that fractured the jaw of its host, registering the pain as a curiosity. Upon hearing the word, one of the roosting angels took flight, rearing against the sun in a flare of black feathers, and plummeted into the sea, where it sank from sight like a corpse weighted with stones. The angel descended quickly, a dark-feathered ball, until it passed beyond the reach of sunlight and the water grew cold and black. It fell more deeply yet, oblivious to the atmospheres pressing against its body, its eyes pulling from the lightless fathom darting shapes, shifting mountains of flesh.

It found a host, made a bloody gash and wriggled into it, and filled the beast with its holy spirit. Skin split in fissures along the length of its form, and it jetted forward with fresh purpose, its tentacles trailing in a tight formation behind it, its red saucer-shaped eyes incandescent with hunger.

[...skips about 10 pages…]

It was a squid, a deep-sea monstrosity with tentacles nearly as long as the ship itself, and it was inverted in the sky. Its arms pulled the sails from their masts, yanked yardarms free of their moorings. People slid from the deck and into the churning water. The squid hovered in the air, its skin split lengthwise, revealing the white flesh of its interior, as though something within itself did not fit. Ragged black feathers jutted from the wounds. Its tentacles splayed in the air around it, a corona of horrors. Its glaring eyes smoked in the beating rain.

The great Russian translator Michael Katz reads a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and discusses the painstaking process, many challenges, and hard limitations of translation, which he considers a “recreative” act vs. a purely creative one. He also talks to us about what keeps readers coming back to Dostoevsky’s strange, often difficult books, and why a good translation is only good for about 20 or 30 years.

Michael’s passage, from his translation of The Brother’s Karamazov:

He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the time and place. He was somewhere out on the steppe, where he’d been stationed a long time ago, and a peasant was driving him through the slush in a cart with a pair of horses. Mitya felt cold; it was early November and snow was falling in large, wet flakes; it melted immediately, as soon as it hit the ground. The peasant drove along swiftly, boldly snapping his whip; he had a long fair beard. The driver wasn’t an old man, perhaps fifty, wearing a gray peasant’s homespun coat.

There was a village not far off. He could pick out the very black huts; half of them had burned down, and there were only a few charred beams sticking up. Standing along the road leading out of the village were lots of peasant women, a whole row of them, all thin and wan, with brownish faces. There was one in particular at the edge, such a bony woman, tall, looking about forty, but perhaps only twenty, with a long, thin face; in her arms she held a little child who was crying; her breasts must have dried up, with no milk left in them. The baby was crying, crying, holding out his bare little arms, his little fists blue from the cold.

“Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” he asks, briskly flying by.

“It’s the babe,” the driver replies. “It’s the babe crying.” And Mitya’s struck by the fact that he says it in his own way, the peasant way, “babe,” and not “baby.” He likes the peasant’s calling it a “babe”; it seems as if there’s more pity in it.

“But why is he crying?” Mitya persists like a fool. “Why are his little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap him up?”

“The babe’s chilled to the bone; his little clothes are frozen and don’t warm him.”

“But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya persists.

“They’re poor people, burned out; they haven’t a crust of bread; they’re begging because they’re burned out.”

“No, no.” Mitya still seems not to understand. “Tell me: why are these poor mothers standing there? Why are the people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they all embrace and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?”

He feels that although his questions are unreasonable and senseless, he still wants to ask them and he has to pose them in just that way. He also feels that an emotion of sweet tenderness is rising up in his heart, one he’s never experienced before, and that he wants to weep, he wants to do something for everyone so that the babe won’t cry anymore, and so that the dark, dried-up mother of the baby will no longer cry, so that no one will shed any more tears from this moment forth, and he wants to do all this at once, at once, without delay, in spite of all obstacles, with all of the Karamazov recklessness.

Science fiction writer Tom Toner reads a passage from his latest novel, The Immeasurable Heaven, published under the pen name Caspar Geon. He talks to Jon and Cory about his many notebooks full of longhand worldbuilding ideas, finding inspiration for alien species in David Attenborough nature documentaries, writing under contract vs. writing on spec, and a unique drafting process built more around addition than subtraction.

Tom’s Passage, from The Immeasurable Heaven (slightly abbreviated for space):

In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair.

The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.  

The receiver pulsed with flowing light as the Translator cycled through a wealth of options, sorting the signal vaults. Trillions of rising transmissions had been collected from the fissure in the realities as if with a giant net and left to stew, their caches of interference filtered and stored in separate branches of Obaneo station for further analysis. Today it was moving downwards through the datastores, so to speak, into a vault that had been left unopened for millennia. 

The Translator clenched and relaxed one of the hundreds of muscles in its tongue in rapid succession, exploring a chronological sensochart and discovering that the signals in today’s vault were pre-Throlken, over five hundred million years old, the deepest it had ever gone. It made itself comfortable, suckling a jet of Jatsotl milk from the reservoir below the receiver while a population of Tickler species went to work massaging its ancient, scaly body, and dialled the pressure volume to medium, looking forward to the stimulating glut of undiscovered languages it was about to sense for the very first time.

The Translator opened the vault, recoiling a moment later as the waters of its nest clouded with dark, sulphuric blood.

It shut the receiver off, yanking its tongue free and nursing it inside its mouth, every nerve howling in pain.

It could only think of one sufficient word for what it was: a scream of a strength never recorded before. The older transmissions were always diluted and weak; nothing even a tenth that antiquated had ever come through so potent, so painful. Converted into sound it would surely deafen—perhaps even kill—anything unlucky enough to be born with ears. 

The Translator gingerly reinserted, probing carefully through the data to check the signal strengths—something it really ought to have done beforehand. There. Nine thousand one hundred on the scale. No wonder its poor tongue had almost split in half. 

It labelled the vault as unsafe and coiled into a knot on the floor of its cavern, thinking, the nest’s filtration systems already dispersing the blood. Such a signal would take colossal amounts of power to produce, whole star systems’ worth, the output of a widespread and successful interstellar civilisation. All that power, channelled straight into its mouth.

Food writer and memoirist Anya Von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, reads from the epilogue of her latest bestseller, National Dish, and discusses what happens when world-historical events dictate last-minute rewrites—and a project becomes personal.

Anya’s passage, excerpted from National Dish:

On February 25, 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock, bouts of crying, and adrenalized doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realized that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch—a beet soup that both Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.

I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch—борщ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end (that’s a Yiddish addition)—at least twice a week. For better or worse, it always signified for me the despotic, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, a big pot my mother had just made sat in my fridge. But who had the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally, searingly personal.

Back in Moscow, at the height of Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish.” It was just there—a piece of our shared Soviet reality, like the brown winter snow, the buses filled with hangover breath, or my scratchy wool school uniform.

Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch, with its reek of stale cabbage, was to be endured indistinguishably at kindergartens, hospitals, and workers’ canteens across the eleven time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s quiet ingenuity—although to me, it all tasted kind of the same in the end.

My mom was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding carrots, cabbage, and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel family pot. It was her recipe, she always insisted—a miracle of a shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root vegetables.

Author Gabby Squailia reads a passage from her debut fantasy novel Dead Boys, a macabre, rollicking story set in the afterlife. She takes us through the unconventional road from idea to published book, and explains how her writing process continues to evolve.

Gabby’s passage, excerpted from Dead Boys:

Just beyond the edge of the path, an upended water tower was half-buried in a mound of debris, and beyond its rusted curve lay a view of the River Lethe unparalleled in the city proper. Jacob, despite his unmoving lungs, gasped.

Its purplish waters were wide and slow-moving. The motionless corpses that floated on its surface were surrounded by glittering shoals of refuse and roiling rainbows of oil. There, past the bobbing shape of a claw-footed bathtub, was the stretch of river-bend where he’d thrashed out of the mud and onto his newly lifeless feet nearly a decade ago. With this unexpected glimpse of his point of deathly origin, it all came rushing back: how, after days of toil, he’d propped his numb body up on one palm, then another, only to lose his purchase in the slippery mud and splash face-first into those amniotic waters, where the whole humiliating process began anew. 

Giving his full attention to his footsteps, Jacob was surprised at how well-tended the interrupted path became as it led to the seer’s door. Someone had packed it down, forcibly and recently. Stepping lightly now, he rubbed his reupholstered palms together, the high-pitched scrunch of their leather soothing his mind. 

“Greetings!” he cried, jerking one hand over his head, but as soon as he’d had a good look into the murk of her chamber, he choked on his prepared speech. From the roof to the rust-bitten curve of the floor, the room was packed with filth-encrusted children’s toys. Quilts and blankets spewed moldy down onto jacks-in-the-box with broken springs. Board games missing their pieces served as tables for eyeless dolls. In the center of the candy-colored sprawl sat the seer known as Ma Kicks, her body so thoroughly ravaged by time that Jacob felt a professional ache at the sight. From forehead to foot, her skin was full of holes, flashing elbows, cheekbones, and knuckles alike. Her face was a soiled handkerchief askew on her skull, incapable of expression.

“My name is Jacob Campbell,” he said, steadying himself enough to bow. “I come with a gift — and an uncommon question.”

Ma Kicks still hadn’t moved, but at the sound of his voice, something within her did. Startled, he staggered backward, fixing his attention on her belly.

She must have been near her ninth month of pregnancy when she’d died. Since then, her womb had given way, and from its dark cavity two tiny, skeletal feet emerged, dangling over the edge, kicking into the open air.