Baubles From Bones: Issue 5
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The Oubliette

Pixie Bruner

Where did the electric lost memories go? I’d feared and despaired I was forgotten. Lost feelings a Sumerian God seized from the roots of your chestnut hair and plucked from the worn riverside cobblestones of your gorgeous head. Is there an oubliette in the sulci of your collarbone or between the cuff of your sleeve that I might crawl into, still exist in? I am recalled as “my dear”, as easy as you ash your cigarette or turn a page, and unsure if it’s a slip of your forked fae tongue from sleeping in the rath you grew up too close to or genuine affection. You are one of my very favorite Devils, you know. All milk white and shadows, (if I ever dared to kiss you) that’s my damn type, though. (I shall bite you “long and hard”) You bring me darkness, not light. (as poets do when they collide) Shroud of ghosts and murder ballads, (so you bear my “ring-moat of tooth marks”) I will need an alibi soon, (and I am branded upon you “for good”) Will a lost cosmic night porter cover for me too? (we would destroy each other with joy) You make me forget myself. I am Damned, damn you. I shower in Holy Water to absolve the Magdalene laundry list of imaginary sins, venial, mortal, literal and literary, I’d commit <insert any preposition here> you. Find me in the bottom of a glass, dear one. Find me in the Lachesis-skein of a telescope web. Morning, noon and night, you are no one I know. Another time, another place, another universe, another world, another timeline/lifeline. We dance with only duende between us, sans chaperone or rouge chapeaux. Oh how I miss you and our minute slips of betrayal of which flame-tongues seethe between the gyres and threaten to raze us to beautiful self-immolations. We’ve a fantastic death abyss. Tell no one, let’s keep the secret, swaddled like velvet changelings. “I look for uncomplicated hymns but love (of any liquorice all-sorts/any sort) has none.”

Baubles From Bones: Issue 5
​Available for purchase:
Physical
Digital
Subscribe

Pixie Bruner

Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Author/Editor of The Body As Haunted (Authortunities Press) and Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature. Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Abyss and Apex, Amazing Stories, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Penumbric, Angry Gable Press, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are all her fault. She is a 2024 SFPA Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2025 Rhysling Award Chair.

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