HELL HATH ONLY FURY

  Edited by

  S.H. Cooper & Oli A. White

  Hell Hath Only Fury

  Collection and editorial copyright © 2022

  by S.H. Cooper and Oli A. White

  Individual stories copyright © of their respective author(s)

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission.

  Cover Artist: Hanan AlYousif

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  The Life You Spent Dying by Lilyn George

  No Good Man by Elyse Russell

  A Gentle, Soft Boy by Oli A. White

  The Change by Alice Towey

  Imptown by Ann Wuehler

  Life Support by Syn McDonald

  Teaching Professor Rosenburg by Wondra Vanian

  The New Front Line by S.H. Cooper

  Minutes to Midnight by Jessica Peter

  Bloom by Alice Austin

  A Gorgon's Ossuary by Kaitlin Tremblay

  My Husband, My Shield by Cat Voleur

  Selkie Blood by Caitlin Spice

  This Will Only Hurt for a Lifetime by Jamie Perrault

  The Unwanted by Bridget D. Brave

  They Kept Us In Cages by Kristina Orlea

  8W2D by Dana Vickerson

  Valhalla by Tonya Walter

  All His Worldly Goods by Barbara Krasnoff

  Life Begins at Possession by Laurel Hightower

  Good Girl by Jeannie Marschall

  Let Me Go by Laura G. Kaschak

  The Goddess Complex by Sandra Ruttan

  Loopholes by Oli A. White

  Angels in Her Eyes by S.H. Cooper

  Save You From Yourself by Khezu Steak

  June 24th, 2032 by G. Kimball

  Content Warnings

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  2022 has been a devastating year. Being an American—and in particular, an American with a womb—has never been more dangerous. We’re living in unprecedented times, and each and every day when we wake up, we have to face this reality all over again. The reality in which women, trans men, and nonbinary people barely qualify as human in the eyes of the law.

  As I’m writing this, it’s been just over three months since we lost Roe. In that time, we’ve heard horror stories from across the country of women being denied every kind of medical care, from basic medication to life-saving abortions to the sort of decisions in reproductive care that should only ever be between a pregnant person and their doctor. The dystopia is real, and it’s right here and right now.

  In that same amount of time, it feels too often like plenty of people have moved on. While the initial reaction was overwhelming, the news cycle only occasionally mentions it now, and even social media is no longer inundated with posts about the crushing loss of Roe.

  But many of us refuse to forget. We’re still here, and we’ll still fighting against the fascism gripping our country. And we’ll keep battling no matter what happens.

  The authors featured in this book are exactly that type of fighter. They won’t back down, and they won’t forgive and forget. What’s happened in America in 2022—and what’s been happening long before then—is an egregious human rights violation, and these writers are ready to battle back against the forces that don’t respect our autonomy or even our most basic humanity.

  This anthology is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart, but it is for anyone who wants to combat the terrors and injustice ripping our world apart. These are powerful stories, unrelenting with raw emotion. In the table of contents, you’ll find a gamut of intense, overwhelming stories that reflect the lived experiences of this incredibly talented group of writers. There’s loss, there’s rage, but above all, there’s an unwavering devotion to seeing the wrongs of the world corrected. In short, this anthology is everything we need, both in the horror genre and beyond.

  What we do matters. What we write matters. We matter. So wherever you are, please keep fighting. It might be a long war, but we’re going to win this. For us and for all future generations. Together, we’re too strong to be held back for long

  - Gwendolyn Kiste,

  Bram Stoker Award-winning author of

  The Rust Maidens, Boneset & Feathers, and Reluctant Immortals

  The Life You Spent Dying

  Lilyn George

  Each step I take down the white-walled hall adds another lead weight to the collection in my stomach, threatening to bring me to my knees. I’d always laughed at the cliche in horror movies of hallways that get impossibly longer during hospital scenes but now, in this moment, I realize the truth of it. Because it is thirty-three steps from the nurse’s desk to the small NICU room where you’ve been for the whole twelve weeks of your life, and I know I’ve already walked a thousand and three.

  My partner is a few steps ahead of me, but that’s not unexpected. Today we will both lose a child, but we don’t share the same burden. I am the one who must officially make the call. The one who has to find the courage to look a doctor in the eye and say, “It’s time for my baby to die.”

  They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. The thought hits me as the doctor meets me, and a scream rips its way from deep in my soul because I know that yours has been nothing but unending pain and sterile smells. A world without sunshine or song because we know you’re deaf and mostly blind.

  Maybe that’s why my own flashes before mine, rapid jabs to my soul spearing straight through me in time with the ponderous beats of my heart.

  -tha-thump-

  The Sheetrock of the wall impacting beneath my knuckles when the doctor informs me that, even though your dad and I had faithfully used contraceptives, I was pregnant. And from the genetic testing that my partner and I had done after the birth of your sister, hoping to find an answer for what was wrong with her, knowing there was every chance you’d be sick like her. Somehow you weren’t, but it was no miracle—you were sick in a different way.

  -tha-thump-

  A sympathetic voice on the other end of the line: “You need to make a decision about palliative care.”

  -tha-thump-

  Ice coursing through my veins, filling my body with pain when I ask about scheduling a termination only to be told that this was a No Exceptions state. A doctor with hard eyes telling me that you deserved the right to live in the same breath as admitting it’ll probably take a miracle to give you any sort of life.

  -tha-thump-

  A weary note on my voicemail: “We’ve had to put her back on the ventilator. I’m sorry. I know you were hoping to bring her home today.”

  -tha-thump-

  My body screaming—I wasn’t getting enough air even though I wasn’t choking and I wasn’t sick. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been perfectly fine. Forcing myself upright on the bed to try to get more air in because you needed it. You needed it because even though my body was healthy, yours was not and you were having your first stroke, cradled inside of me.

  -tha-thump-

  The bright-colored print of the nurse’s uniform warring with the tearful headshake in answer to my heartbroken question: “Is there anybody in there?”

  -tha-thump-

  The hours I spent looking at possible diagnoses to explain why you were so very sick when the doctors kept acting like they’d find something that would be an easy fix. (If it had a fix at all, you’d live past today.)

  -tha-thump-

  The resignation that seeped through the phone and into my soul when the doctor called me an hour ago to say that you were no longer reactive to stimuli.

  -tha-thump-

  The doctor looking at me now, eyes filled with understanding and sympathetic pain, telling me that I truly am doing the right thing. Reassuring me that whether it happened tonight or two weeks from now, your system wouldn’t be able to fight for much longer. It’s amazing how hearing something that once would have crushed my soul can suddenly be reassuring.

  I love you. I tried not to because even though I knew there was a slim chance you might live and be as healthy as your sister (not that that’s saying much), something deep within me knew having you would lead to some version of today.

  I love you, and that’s why I’m doing this today. Because you might be alive, but you don’t have any life. Because life is about more than your heart beating and your lungs filling. It’s about your nows, your tomorrows, your hopes and your fears. It’s about making choices and memories. What you’re experiencing isn’t life; it’s barely grasping at existing. And I love you more than that.

  I watch as they slowly disconnect you from the machines except your monitors, then wrap you up one last time to put you in my arms. You are an impossible weight and a fading dream as I hold you and cry and say my goodbyes as the lines on the screen I try not to see tell me that you are already on that downward slide.

  It hurts, not only because
I’m holding you as you gasp for your last breaths, but because I could have spared you all of this. Twelve weeks of being poked and prodded with tubes down your throat while you circled the drain. Even if you had never drawn a breath, I would have loved you. I did love you, from the moment I found out about you. And I would have spared you every single second of the life you spent dying if I could have.

  But I couldn’t, because people in power, from their positions of privilege, said that it didn’t matter what your quality of life was or how much of your life (all of it) would be spent in pain and suffering. You ‘deserved’ to live. That sparing you suffering months before you had that first stroke within me was wrong.

  They made us both suffer, and beneath the grief that swamps me, resolution and fury begin to breed, and a new life is conceived. One that will fight with whatever means necessary to try to spare others from this.

  Life begins at conception? Fine. Then watch as I bear the seed of a Mother’s Apocalypse and give birth to the beginning of the end of this time of selfishness and cruelty. For I am Legion, because my heart does not break alone.

  *Author’s Note: The decision to take a child off life support is an extremely personal one. This story only reflects this mother's view, no other.

  No Good Man

  Elyse Russell

  Amy used to have beautiful, tulip-pink hair. It fell around her face in graceful, lustrous waves.

  There were times when she truly hated it.

  She was well aware that an unmarried girl was nothing without her hair. Whenever they saw a bald girl without a wedding scarf over her head in the market, Amy’s mother would be sure to point her out.

  “What a disgrace. Such a slut.”

  Amy would wonder as she watched the bald girl, whoever she was, walk away. What color had her hair been? Did she miss it? Did her head feel much lighter, or was she cold and lonely now? What did she see in the mirror?

  Who took her hair?

  Her own mother was bald of course, under the scarf. All married women were. But she had that piece of cloth on her head, and she knew where her hair was; daddy kept it displayed proudly in a glass case. There were shining, pure golden ribbons braided all through the crimson.

  When Amy won a place to go away to a school, she expected her family to be happy for her. “Congratulations,” they would say. “All of your hard work is going to pay off!”

  That was the fantasy, anyway.

  Those people had, after all, watched her grow up. They had always heard her talking about her dreams.

  Instead, when she announced at a family gathering that she had been selected to attend her dream school, everyone and their grandma (literally) had rushed to give her advice. Not about education, mind you, but about... her hair.

  “Don’t ever let anyone touch your hair!”

  “Never let a boy into your room. If he even sees you with your hair down, he won’t be able to control himself, and you’ll only have yourself to blame.”

  “Check under porch steps before you go up them. A boy could be underneath, waiting to slit your tendons. Then he’ll be on top of you and cutting off your hair before you have time to scream.”

  “Don’t go to parties. Girls are always losing their hair in the back rooms.”

  “Be careful how you wear your hair. Don’t tempt them.”

  “Remember, giving up your hair before you’re married is a sin. You give away a piece of your soul that you can never get back. Then no good man will want you.”

  Amy was overwhelmed, to say the least. It all culminated in her parents telling her that they would withdraw all financial support from her education if they found out that she had let a boy cut her hair. Amy was stunned. She didn’t remember her brother getting a talk like this when he went off to school. Then again, she had never heard of a woman collecting hair from men.

  That night, Amy let her hair down and stared at it in the mirror.

  This is me, she thought. If I were bald, would I still look like me? Would I still BE me?

  It didn’t get better when she finally moved to her school, either. Amy thought that getting away from her family would give her some breathing room, but they had made sure to send her off with a gift: a headband of purity. It was a clunky thing, and Amy hated it. But they made her promise to wear it, hoping it would make any males think twice about trying to touch her hair.

  Then Amy made friends, and they all had purity headbands, too. They had had similar “talks” with their families, but they didn’t seem disoriented by any of it. The opposite, in fact, was true: they embraced all that they had been taught, and wore their purity headbands like badges of honor. Anyone who didn’t wear one was sneered at in private, and the friends gloated over their superiority. Amy, of course, didn’t voice any of her doubts or discomforts. Everyone assumed she was one of them.

  Amy played it as safely as she possibly could: she declined every party invitation, she always checked under porch steps, she never let a boy touch her hair. Really, she never spent time with boys at all. They were dangerous creatures, though Amy was very curious about them.

  “My father wears my mother’s hair on his jacket front,” one of her friends boasted one day. The others sighed and commented on how they hoped they would find a man who was that romantic. Amy focused on a beetle scurrying near her foot and didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I’m planning on finding my husband here,” another girl said. Amy looked up.

  “Don’t you want a career?” she asked.

  The girl laughed. “No!”

  The girls planned out their weddings and talked in hushed tones about the hair-cutting ceremonies, and what they would wear, and how it would feel. They talked about the wedding scarves their husbands would buy for them. Amy always just listened.

  She was walking home from a late class one night when one of her male classmates offered to see her back to her hut safely. She declined at first, of course, but then she noticed some of the other boys looking at her, and she agreed. This boy at least was nice, and she decided that she trusted him. He had always made an effort to talk to her about subjects that he knew interested her. In truth, he seemed like the type of person she would want to have court her. He was charming.

  Once they reached the door of her hut, the boy hugged her. It felt nice, so Amy hugged him back. He started to pull away, but then leaned in very slowly to kiss her, giving her ample time to say “no” or push him back. It was a nice kiss. She pulled away, of course, and the boy walked home.

  Over the next few months, Amy and the boy spent more time together. He made her laugh; he made her feel good about herself.

  One night, she let the boy follow her inside her room. It was pouring rain again. Of course, in the back of her mind, she heard her grandmother’s voice: “If he even sees you with your hair down, he won’t be able to stop himself... you’ll only have yourself to blame.”

  Amy let her hair down. Her purity headband clattered to the floor, and the boy stepped over it, staring at her locks.

  The boy touched her hair. He kissed her. Then he was on top of her, kissing her, and his hands were in her hair and it felt so good. Amy lost all sense of time. She loved the boy.

  When he pulled a razor out of his pocket, she didn’t notice. It wasn’t until she felt it against the skin at her temple and it began to rasp over those first few centimeters of scalp that her eyes snapped open.

  “Wait!” she said. The boy paused, razor held to her head. He told her he loved her, that he would marry her and buy her a head scarf and keep her hair and treasure it always. As he talked, he moved the razor even further across her skin. A small lock of pink cascaded to the pillow.

  “But I don’t want...” Amy started. A tear slid down her cheek as more of her hair was shorn away from her. More tears came, but it also felt so good. Amy felt loved, and safe, and...

  And suddenly bald. And cold. And oh, what had she done?

  Amy sat up and looked down at the pillow in horror. All of her beautiful pink hair was piled up. The boy was starting to gather it, and was stuffing it in his coat pockets.

  “Aren’t... aren’t you going to braid it? It will get all tangled that way...” Amy started.

  “Yeah, I’ll braid it tomorrow, I promise,” the boy responded. He kissed her and left.