A Prancing Light | K.C. Mead-Brewer

If you came here looking for a good time, you’re going to be disappointed. There’s a wolf-man in the trees and, I grant you, that sounds promising. But his teeth hurt and all he does is growl wetly from the darkness. There are two women arguing not far from him, holding their hair against the high wind, and at first you wonder if they’ll be all right, what if they get lost or murdered or take a fall, but when the lightning flashes and you glimpse their faces—yes, it’s better to go back inside. Stay home and lock the doors. There’s a darkness here, too, yet it’s easier to see things somehow. The kind of darkness that comes from turning on a bedside lamp. You’ll need to plug that lamp in, though; the cats keep jumping on the cord and pulling it loose from the outlet. But be careful when you reach down for it behind the nightstand; you never know. The world is a seething place. Spiders. Ghosts. Men under the bed. And under the men under the bed: a writhing carpet of silverfish. Quietly, the world belongs to them, and it’s a world that smells like bones and salt; if you look deep enough into its fog, you’ll see a prancing light. But don’t follow it. Whatever you do, don’t follow it—promise me now that you won’t. No matter how dark it gets.

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, MD. She is a graduate of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. For more info, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.