HOW I MET YOUR MONSTER

On a stretch of West Peak in the last weeks of May, where the path narrows and the basalt drops away, a small short-haired black dog appears at the edge of a hiker's vision, paces alongside them for a little, and is not there anymore. The body sometimes registers the cliff edge a half-beat before the eye has caught up, and the dog often arrives in that half-beat. What I have been turning over for some time, with this case and with cases of its kind, is whether the dog acts th

A pair of traditional, at- minimum- vintage salt and pepper shakers sat on a shelf in a multi-generational Latino household in the spring of 2015, and the household had begun, slowly at first and then all at once, to come undone around them. Spoons fell from counters with no hand near them. A picture frame turned a quarter inch on the wall in the night. Doors that nobody had touched eased open and eased shut, and the youngest children began waking with scratches on the parts

My grandmother's house held a clock I knew from the inside before I knew it from the outside. It hung on a wall in a dining room furnished the way German immigrant homes of that generation were furnished, every surface holding something, every shelf carrying a purpose, the cuckoo clock above the sideboard in the quiet corner of the dining room ticking with the steady carved-and-painted patience of a piece of the Black Forest that had been mounted in an American room and never

The cattle came up between the two fires at evening, and the druids who had built the fires spoke over them as they came, and the year reorganized itself around the agreement that the herd was now under the protection of whatever had been spoken over the heat between the flames. This is the picture Sanas Cormaic, the Irish glossary attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennáin and dated to roughly the early tenth century, gives of May 1, where the entry for Belltaine derives the name f

In the last installment of this series, I followed the blood. I traced it from Bathory's bathtub through Roman gladiatorial arenas, through Aztec temples and Maasai cattle herds and the Christian Eucharist, through parabiosis laboratories at Stanford where old mice grew young again on borrowed plasma, and I ended up standing in front of three words that I have been circling for most of my life without fully understanding why they kept appearing together. Iron. Salt. Sunlight.

I left you standing over a bloodless cow in an Oregon field, ten gallons of blood missing from a thousand-pound animal, the ground beneath her dry. I said that blood is the most foyson-dense fluid in any living body, and that I believe what the mutilation data shows is extraction. I promised you this piece about blood, and I have been thinking about it for weeks, turning it over, because the more I look at the history and the science, the more I think blood is the thread that

In the last three installments of this series, I have been building a case. I started with the foyson itself, that old Scots word for the essence or goodness of food, the quality that Robert Kirk described in 1691 as the substance that faerie peoples extract from offerings while leaving the physical matter behind. I moved into the biochemistry of freshness, showing that foyson has a measurable analog in the biogenic amines that accumulate as food ages, degrading precisely the

In the last installment of this series, I talked about the foyson diet- about freshness as a measurable biochemical state, about the biogenic amines that accumulate in food as it ages and how those compounds degrade the very essence that nonhuman peoples appear to seek, and about salt, that ancient ward, and the way it preserves cellular integrity at a level most of us never think about when we reach for the shaker. If you haven't read "The Foyson Diet" yet, I'd encourage you

I'd like to introduce some perhaps leading edge science, nutrition and folklore connections, and I think a gentle, relatable way to do that might be by explaining how and why I discovered them. So.. My body runs on a very short list. Fresh red beef, cooked as little as I can get away with. Fresh eggs, fresh butter, fresh whole milk. Every single day, without fail, or things go wrong quickly and measurably. The beef has to be red and it has to be recent, not aged, not cured, n

A lifetime of sensing unseen energies led to measurable proof: a body that pulls in the essence of others, nourishing or draining depending on what it encounters.

My husband and I had just walked into Walmart, near the produce section, and I felt someone staring at me. Hard. I looked up, thinking I was imagining it, and locked eyes with a man I knew immediately was not human. Artemaeus was already gone. He was laser focused on getting his dinner ingredients, hellbent on alfredo, rushing towards dairy without a backward glance. The lights overhead were bright and cold. The A/C in Florida is legendary most of the year because of our

I was standing at my kitchen counter several years ago with two mixing bowls, a notebook full of failed ratios, and a problem I could not solve. The problem was powder. Specifically, the fine, chalky film that coats most commercially flavored teas when natural flavoring agents - particularly cream and butter elements - are introduced to loose leaf blends. Anyone who has ever brewed a cup of something lovely from a grocery store shelf and noticed that faint, unpleasant residue

As we move into the last phase of Autumn, I find myself in my annual, nostalgic state. Memories of months and years past fill my mind, and I'm grateful to have this online space, which allows me to write some of them down to share with you. Lately, I've been recalling fondly my experience with a person that research reveals would likely best be known in our society as the Leshy- have you heard of him? According to Russian, Appalachian and other folklore, the Leshy is a woodla

Hello, Eerie Expeditioners! You may have read some of my contributions to the pages of the magazine recently, and now that I've been...