"The young man's work would be so much simpler if he were merely desirous his own death. A minute dose from any number of the glass vials or stoppered bottles in his possession, and the matter of his life would be quickly, and, if he so chose, painlessly concluded."
Rappaccini's Dragon
(Murder Ballad No. 5)
"If I sketched her courtyard in sepia or silverpoint, would I remember how to walk there? If I put myself in at her doorstep, would she let me in? Or would she need me only to draw her into the sea, all its names and shapes and voices until she changed them for her own?"
The Mirror of Venus
"I lie in my own grave, dug by my own hands, and listen to hungry black beetles and maggots busy at my corporeal undoing. I am led to the altar on the dais in the sanctuary of the Church of Starry Wisdom, to be bedded and worshipped and bled dry."
Houndwife

Sample Issue

Sirenia Digest #52 Contents

Houndwife
by Caitlin R. Kiernan

"There was a time, I am still reasonably certain, when all this might have been set forth as a mere tale, starting at some more or less arbitrary, but seemingly consequential, moment: the day I first met Isobel Endecott, the evening I boarded a train from Savannah to Boston, or the turning of frail yellowed pages in a black-magician's grimoire and coming upon the graven image of a jade idol."

A Ceiling of Amber, A Pavement of Pearl
by Sonya Taaffe

"Then she understood: she was not looking out into the air, but down through the depths of the ocean, where the abyss should have waited; the light burned colors that had no names above water, a beating heart, the last spiral working of a shell, and a lost schooner as long as her ring finger hove tumbling up against her side. Breathless, her blood unfolding like her name in the wild water around her, she reached for the sun beneath the sea..."

Illustrations
by Vince Locke