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A Circle of Ash

from Symbiogenesis by Michael Bell

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lyrics

When I was eight, nine years old what I loved most was monsters. If I could scrape together 25 cents I’d add another issue to my collection of horror comics, lurid anthologies crawling with risen corpses, bloody fangs, and portals to hell. A punning, sardonic ghoul introduced each story.

I also loved spooky short story collections. My parents laughed at me and said, “get your head out of the coffin!” but still wrote checks to send along with the Scholastic Book Club order forms, my selections carefully X’d. Eventually the box would arrive to the classroom, and the nuns would look on with disgust as I retrieved my books.

One decaying paperback I’ve kept to this day is “Ghosts, Ghouls, and other Horrors.” Beneath a cover replete with a languorous corpse-faced ghoul facing a winged skull grinning under a full yellow moon, I found stories of sadistic prison poltergeists, ceilings that dripped blood, and unquiet family tombs. Reading with a flashlight, the shadows of bedtime came alive, and my nightmares took on a vivid, terrifying clarity.

But the book that haunted me most was “Stranger than Science. Among these purportedly true stories was the tale of David Lang, who stepped out of his carriage one day, walked striding across an empty field to his watching family, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Rushing to the spot where he had vanished, his family found only a burnt circle in the grass.

Later they swore they had heard their father’s voice, calling, as from far away.

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from Symbiogenesis, released August 17, 2023

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Michael Bell Bellingham, Washington

A Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too.

Some of this is music for video games. The rest is a fairly raw document of my ongoing attempt to find something new among the blinking lights in my studio at home.

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