THE ALTAR(ED) SLATE & SNAKEROOT WORKS
PRESENT:
Ossuary Erotica
Volume II: Issue II
Stories by:
Heatherlie Allison and Patricia Cram
View Trailer HERE.
Made by hand
Printed on 100% recycled paper
Dimensions: 5.25" x 5.25"
56 pages
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. MANTEIA
By Hollow Hand
In our last issue, one of our stories introduced Hollow Hand, the severed remains of an ancient trickster and godhead. To our mirth and welcome, an anonymous author claimed to have found themselves subsequently possessed of Hollow Hand’s voice. The writing that followed is MANTEIA, a channeled collection of one hundred and eleven original fragments of vision offered by the spirit as penance and as omen for each of our readers. Each issue’s omen has been determined by chance.
II. ELEGIA
In the Face of Love Undying
As the world around them falls to ruin, husband and wife discover rapture in death.
“Despite the inevitable souring of the lovers’ sickness, these phantom images unrolled like the scroll of an old fortune, ice-frosted flowers blossoming. Together they sensed an invisible sweetness. A distant perfume.”
III. AN OCEAN INCARNADINE
By Heatherlie Allison and Patricia Cram
Through past-life regression sessions, a battered woman breaks karmic patterns.
“As I inhale, I swell, feel a rising of kin untangled—fins and tentacles, stalks and filaments, all open in welcome and waiting. As I exhale, I release all the tension built preceding this gathering—this convergence. Back and forth, we commune like this, mind-to-mind.”
IV. LAVILAS SALIVAL
When a transient pair decides to cross a river, they strip away life as they know it.
“Ever encircling—treading out there and snarling, the one who was here first and always. Birds from sky could fall, but not us, not us.”