My story The Empyrean Light from Conjunctions:71 A Cabinet of Curiosity is available to read online. Or you can buy the full issue in trade paperback book format at selected bookstores or online here.
Something was lying in the street. Ms. Wronski thought she saw it move, but by the time she had juggled her way up the stairs with her keys and the bag with the milk and the crumple of supermarket flyers and her satchel of ungraded homework, she was no longer certain. Curious, she peered down at it through the brittle curtains. Between the steep angle and the dim light of the street lamp, all Ms. Wronski could make out was a featureless black lump of undecided shape or size. As she watched, it moved, slowly up like a hand raised in hesitant recognition, then uncertainly down again. She stepped back from the window with a vague sense of embarrassment, and went to put the kettle on.
“It’s a bag, one of those green trash bags for the leaves,” she said to the teapot.
But this explanation didn’t sit well in Ms. Wronski’s stomach; something about the motion she’d seen was too deliberate to be the wind, more like the pouring of the milk than the way it swirled afterward in her cup. An image came to her, so vivid and visceral that she spilled her tea, of an infant escaped from one of the houses that lined the other side of the street, its little hands and knees bruised and filthy from the asphalt.