Swamp Song
J.F. Gleeson

IT WAS NOT not so much that there was no child to sing to, nor that the other monitor was lost or that there was no one at the other end to sing; nor was it that the batteries in the monitor were crusted and decades dead, or that the house held no light, and had no electricity; no, it was, mostly, that the house was very empty, and had been so for years, that the stains and hollowed leather were only what remained of the People, that in the nights the crickets cricked and the frogs belched, and that if you were to pass the house, and you never should, you would hear behind these sounds and under the ticking of fishing spider’s wet step and the beat of banded moth, the song come weak and peeling out of an unworking monitor on a sodden chest of drawers in a fallen empty house.

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J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared, or is soon to appear, in Ligeia, ergot., Mandrake, Sublunary Review, Déraciné, Overheard, Weird Horror, Dark Void, Mystery Tribune, Cold Signal, Lamplit Underground, Crow & Cross Keys, the Dark Lane Anthology series, and other places. He has a website.

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