THE GREATER REALITY AREA - SPRING 2026 OVERVIEW
AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
"The bicephalous jackalope leads a complex and short existence due to only one of its heads being materially real. Though it may at first seem cumbersome, this grants it an evolutionary advantage over its better known cousin, the common jackalope, as the second head allows it perceive threats both mythical and extinct."
AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
"Bestiary writers from Pliny on through DaVinci wrote of the legendary battles between elephants and dragons; two titanic beasts, evenly matched, their corpses found entangled throughout Africa and Asia. We can presume the surviving species of Proboscidea eventually won their war, for there are no true dragons left, and contemporary accounts of their existence ceased several centuries ago. Some extremists have taken their absence to its epistemological limits, arguing that there were never any dragons at all, maintaining a highly anthropocentric concept of extinction."
LONG, LEAN, HUNGRY ONES
"In 1245, Pope Innocent IV composed a letter to Güyük Khan, requesting that the Mongols cease attacking Christian lands in Eastern Europe. This letter was carried all the way from Lyon to Karakorum, where it was read to the Khagan himself in his imperial court."
THREE COCKTAILS FOR BREAKING CURSES (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
"The recipes featured below are excerpts from the “The Lamentations of Arthur Anne Bunting,” an enigmatic cookbook believed to have been written in 1977 by a pseudonymous folklorist who claimed to have worked as a cook "in the floating kitchens of the Golden Sky Lodge." It is unclear if this refers to some occult institution, or a hunting lodge in Montana of the same name which burned down not long before its publication."
WINGS ON WALLS
"These wings belong to a subspecies of pigeon whose pseudogenetic information is stored in cultural memory, then projected into the world as two-dimensional, lichenesque splatters simulating the wings of its ancestors. Researchers cite the eyeless pigeons of the Lower Wacker in Chicago as a form of synanthropy whereby the species has foregone important adaptations in trust of humanity’s fostering of artificial cave networks in urban areas; when taken to its extreme, it is perhaps possible that a species could continue to propagate as a conceptual form long after its material extinction, in a state where every last vital organ is rendered vestigial. The compulsion of human artists, then, serves as its cycle of reproduction."
LIFE IN THE VAST LANE
Upon birth, the North American cumulonimbus cloud rolls down from the Rocky Mountains, and from there, ever eastward into its notorious adult form, scraping along the troposphere with its anvil-like plumage. Cloudforms throughout its abdomen whorl into temporary organs and heatsinks, which can sometimes be seen through the rotational tears in its purpled underbelly. Lightning traverses ion pumps all across the thunderhead's structure, generating a nervous system which is sometimes as complex as that of a cricket, with rudimentary thoughts entangled with what might be called a sense of touch. A metabolic urge to consume warmer waters drives it ever eastward unto death in the Atlantic, leaving behind trails of hailstones as its dung.
THE TROUBLE WITH SAN FRANCISCO
It looms over the city like the abandoned lance of some dead Cold War god; perhaps the hills beneath it were formed from his irradiated corpse. It is the only civic landmark as obviously visible as the bridge to its north.
A WELL PRESERVED SECRET
The vegetable lamb of Tartary did not bleat when bound by its hind legs, nor when verdant blood spilled from its neck into wineskins and jars. More fruit than beast, its flesh, ground with peppercorn and mandrake root, was stuffed into casings of dried artichoke intestine. From there, it was hung to ferment near shaded fires, then cured with salts in Ural mountain caves. These medicinal sausages were said to be able to heal ulcers, and otherwise lethal wounds of the gut, though no record remains of their actual culinary quality and flavor.
ON MOUNT CHIXCULUB AND MARS MINOR (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
The Moon is the world’s tallest mountain, but, in turn, its only mountain without a base. Throughout its phases, its peak faces away from Earth, taunting astronauts and mountaineers alike to take the final climb. It cannot be a holy mountain like Olympus or Meru, for it does not join Heaven and Earth at some sacred juncture. It severs any possibility of such a bond through its sheer mass, maintaining a void between it and the planet to which it is invisibly chained. This allows for its parallel divinity to the sun, and the separate laws of the world it enforces by night and tide.
LIVING LANDSLIDES
According to legends written down in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, the slide-rock bolter is a species of alpine whale that anchors itself high in the Rocky Mountains by its tail flukes, only to luge down the slope with an open maw, consuming everything in the path of the landslide that forms around its torpedo-like body. After such a feast, it sleeps for whole seasons on end, slowly digesting whatever it devoured beneath a tangle of stone and spruce. Outdoorsmen unfamiliar with the horrors of Colorado's interior are encouraged to keep their eyes high, lest they find their trail's end in something else's sunless stomach.
DOWNWARD SPIRAL
“I mean, I think I’m remembering why I shouldn’t be dating right now.” Her fork had run out of bucatini to coil around itself. “I think Suzie was right, though, we should talk about these things. And your story about the ball pit, well. It rhymes with what I remember about the slide.”
“I'd love to hear it, if you're willing to tell me.”
“Well.” Dara froze for a moment before continuing. “There was this waterpark in my hometown, they just called it ‘Waterworld.’ A truly disgusting place. It had that reek of rotting chlorine, filthy locker rooms with bent tiles, the constant wet sound of slapping feet. And one waterslide, a two-hundred foot worm that was deeply unsafe. While you were on it, you always felt like you were about to go over the edge, and it eventually closed down because someone did.”
THE DEVIL AND PAUL BUNYAN
One evening, Paul Bunyan was crossing south into Texas from the Oklahoma panhandle, when Elkanah Halfwright and his men rode out to meet him, clad in blue-painted leathers to warn the giant of their severity. To his followers, Halfwright was a prophet who’d been ordained by a Wandering Bishop of the Lost True Church. The spirit of Pontius Pilate had personally bestowed upon him a key to Hell, that he might show the Lord’s enemies the price of their sins while they yet lived, and cast them forth early lest they failed to repent. As for Paul, well, he was just looking for a place to make camp for the night.
THE TOMB OF THE LAST PRESIDENT (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
North Dakota’s strangest landmark is a six billion dollar concrete pyramid which was operated by the United States Air Force for a mere three days in 1975. The Mickelson Safeguard Complex was conceived as a frontline base for what was at the time seen as inevitable: total nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union above cold, Canadian clouds. It was intended to protect the missiles that would destroy the world's other hemisphere, in the event that the hemisphere in which it existed was also about to be destroyed.
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I remain committed to producing beautiful, weird, and strange fiction that is fully novel and unique. Whatever I've made, you won't find anything like it anywhere else. As always, thank you for reading.
