Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction

By Cosmic Horror Monthly LLC

Are you sure something's wrong? Or are you just hysterical?

Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic is rage-made-art, an unsettling meditation that also serves as a charitable platform to support abortion rights in the United States. Inside are twenty-six haunting speculative tales that explore the social, political, and per

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cosmic Horror Monthly LLC
• Release date: May 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088130193

Book preview

PRAISE FOR ASEPTIC AND FAINTLY SADISTIC

In the introduction to Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, Jolie Toomajan brilliantly describes hysteria as ‘a one-person riot.’ Not a lack of rationality. Not a sign of weakness or mental imbalance. A riot. A righteous rage against standards and terms established by a society with the specific intention of keeping ‘certain people’ under control. What is the current attack on autonomy but a reiteration of those standards?

For many years, medical science labeled as hysteria virtually any natural response to being silenced and manipulated. The zeal with which doctors and lawmakers applied that label resulted in a wide range of assaults. The label has been used to justify incarceration, hysterectomies, electric shock therapy, and lobotomies. Why? Because when you legally reduce people to the status of guinea pigs, they are fully objectified, incapable of demanding and exercising human rights.

This unflinching anthology addresses the recent reassertion of political power over reproductive choice not as another news story, or another debate, but as an assault on basic human rights. Expect rage. Expect a riot of epic proportions within these pages. Because whatever it takes, these voices will be heard.

S.P. MISKOWSKI, AUTHOR OF THE SKILLUTE CYCLE

Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic is the kind of book you open slowly; curious but afraid of the sheer power of the terror staring back at you. I was afraid it would wreck me, and I was right; but I also needn't have worried. It put me right back together again. The sheer range and depth and breadth of stories and styles and emotions; the way one squeezes your heart until it cracks before the next tickles it back to life, the way that these stories represent US and speak about US and scream LISTEN TO US, there's honestly nothing else like it. It isn't just because of the cause it champions; if you know anyone with a body of any kind and a heart of any description, you've got to get this book. 

ALEX WOODROE, EDITOR AT TENEBROUS PRESS

Powerful and poignant, Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic resonates with brutal imagery, themes, and characters. Packed with 26 gut-wrenching tales brimming with blood, tears, and screams—this is one anthology you'll need smelling salts for.

P.L. MCMILLAN, SISTERS OF THE CRIMSON VINE

Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic is a battle cry. For every 'no' we wanted to scream but couldn't. For every chance left untaken. For the ones we had to break ourselves for, to leave behind. It reclaims the years we wish we hadn't wasted. It grants second chances for loves lost and fights unfought. It's validation and vengeance; tenderness and respect. These stories stoke the power within us while acknowledging our wounds and scars. They build us up while burning it all down. I couldn't dream of a more perfect reaction to everything we've had to—and continue to—endure.

CHELSEA PUMPKINS, EDITOR OF AHH! THAT'S WHAT I CALL HORROR: AN ANTHOLOGY OF '90S HORROR

ASEPTIC AND FAINTLY SADISTIC

AN ANTHOLOGY OF HYSTERIA FICTION

Edited by

JOLIE TOOMAJAN

Cosmic Horror Monthly Cosmic Horror Monthly

Copyright © 2023 by Cosmic Horror Monthly.

All rights reserved. Stories belong to their respective author.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

CONTENTS

Foreword

The Girls Of Channel 9

Jennifer Lesh Fleck

By Their Bones Ye Shall Know Them

Joe Koch

China Doll

Kelsea Yu

The Flock

Marisca Pichette

Exodus

Dante O. Greene

The Dark Mother’s Call

Cheyenne Shaffer

The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like A Word

Laura Blackwell

Speak Of The Hunger

Tania Chen

The Girls With Claws That Catch

Hailey Piper

Lakeglass Houses

J. Z. Kelley

Nectarine, Apple, Pear

Laura Cranehill

Light House

K. Wallace King

Oblong Objects In The Mirror (Are Closer Than They Appear)

Lillah Lawson

The Heaviest Fall The Furthest

Alex Laurel Lanz

Mother Mansrot In The Glass Mountain

Sarah Pauling

Revenge Dress

Susan L. Lin

Semelparity

Katherine Marzinsky

Body Parts

Sarah Zell

Riveted By Bullets

Dee Engan

Abaddon, 1861

M. Regan

Piece By Piece

Erin Keating

The Voice Of Nothing

Diane Callahan

The Potter

Aya Maguire

Right To Life

Ian Gabriel Loisel

Bitter Makes The Sweet So Sweet

Christi Nogle

How To Make A Girl To Love You (On A Budget)

Kenzie Lappin

Editor

Cover Artist

Contributors

About CHM

Content Warnings

FOREWORD

I'm furious.

Of course, that’s nothing new. I have been furious for years, choking on it every time some asshole smugly explains my own body to me, my own career to me, my own desires to me. As time wears on, my ability to keep my little ball of rage quiet and content in the dark has waned. It moves closer to the door every day. I laugh in faces, roll my eyes. I argue and fight and refuse to let my smile make me prettier, more palatable. I write mean feminist stories. Little things to let it breathe. I want it to reach the door, even though I know that when it finally does open the door, everyone will call you hysterical.

When I started reading the submissions for this project, I realized quite a lot of people are nursing that fury (and letting it speak) and I found myself simultaneously feeling both better and worse. It isn’t just me is both a triumph and a tragedy in most cases, this one is no different.

There are many hysterias. The wandering uterus, responsible for all manner of ills, from headaches and joint pain to ideas about perhaps wanting an education. Hero worship devolving into irrationality insisting on reasonableness. Asylums and vibrators. Screaming sobs and trembling hands. But the hysterics Freud and his ilk sank their claws into were simply women and girls telling the truth about their lives; when they found no one listening, they got louder. When you think about it like that, hysteria is just a one-person riot.

That riotous loudness is one of the reasons hysteria was immediately so attractive to me as a theme, and especially as a theme for an anthology that benefits an abortion fund. Those of us concerned about losing our rights to comprehensive reproductive health care have been telling the truth about our lives, we have pointed at the writing on the wall, and we found no one listening. We will have to get louder.

The stories in this anthology are also as varied as the hysterias. They run the gamut from the meditative and sad to the rage-filled and violent to light-hearted and fun. Several touch on pregnancy and reproductive access directly, but others do not. There's fantasy, science fiction, and horror; flash fiction and full stories; a range of views and philosophies. The authors engage with the ways in which bodies are weaponized or controlled, ignored or centered, ours and not ours, the ways we resist and the ways we don’t. But all of these stories have opened the door for a brief while and let that hysterical ball of anger and grief and frustration, what we usually keep so tightly controlled and tucked away to survive, out into the air.

Frankly, I think it's beautiful.

Jolie Toomajan

THE GIRLS OF CHANNEL 9

JENNIFER LESH FLECK

Rumor was in Alt-Cor, first they juiced you, knocked you cold. Eloise expected and wanted this. Hobbling in her orange jumpsuit, head down, sentencing over, she craved the needle, the oblivion and reprieve.

They took away the jumpsuit and sad gray undies, lined El up with others against damp green tile. One side, a pink elbow accidentally knocked her ribs. Other side, the curve of a brown shoulder, somehow familiar. 

Maybe Jilly from Block Two-Alpha—wouldn’t it be wild?

Eyes up and straight ahead, ladies! 

Like a line-up.

The CO turned a hose on them, full force, drenching cold, playing it across their bodies. And El’s jaw went like the wind-up skull in her dorm room, jittering, teeth chattering.

So. No juice, no fleeting relief. 

But the dripping braids and hunched shoulders trudging ahead, this was indeed Jilly. First on the block who’d been kind to Eloise, showed her the ropes. And El had to snatch up hope, whatever butterfly form it took. It’s how you kept going. Those who hesitated, protested, or stumbled faced swift corrections.

Changing Room, someone barked. One. At. A. Time.

El expected something humiliating and uncomfortable—clown suits, hair shirts. Alternative Corrections was known for their creativity, each new season broadcast on Channel 9.

Instead, what greeted her was a curious machine. It churned, pumping something like gray soft serve from its spout into a trough. Freaked to the core, El giggled.

Shut your face. 

Two men, no windows, no camera. They could do whatever they wanted, and she’d be blamed. Eloise swallowed her scream and held still, so still, playing statue.

They came at her with rubber gloves slathered in glop. Mud, only mud. Warm, obnoxiously comforting after the freezing water. Slapped on starting with her neck. Breasts and navel and hips and thighs and legs, until she was caked, encased, her body heavy with it.

Ponderous, shackled, earth-laden, El stood before the appraising eyes of two female COs.

Can I ask what’s happening to me? she said. Surely a woman…

A boot to her bare toes. 

This, the closest Eloise came to passing out. But she held on, pictured clinging to a cliff overhanging a valley split by a river. White torrents. A cruel sun spangling granite boulders. A lizard warmed itself on one and winked at her.

Snapping to, El realized they were poking her. Prodding deftly. Almost as bad as the medical exam, the wand that proved she wasn’t pregnant and thus an eligible candidate.

Dots on their fingertips. Small, dark, like periods at the ends of sentences.

Seeds.

Sentenced to seeds.

Pushed into the soil she wore, planted all over.

Jilly next to her, one small-but-huge good thing. They can’t converse during the day, can’t even turn their heads excessively, lest it break their cast.

Day and night were relative conditions, controlled by banks of floods. Lamps glowed like fireplace embers, a warmth without cheer. At intervals, showers misted.

A warehouse, like where El worked, driving the forklift same as any man, shifting pallets of goods. An endlessly consuming public meant endless shifts. Eventually they’d pay for some college, if you lasted.

But here, only women, bodies smothered in clay and loam, wheeled in on daises. Enough room to carefully recline on their platforms, or sit, or stand facing the dictated direction. Each serving her time this way. If she lasted.

Today’s direction is north. Like the compass needle standing tall and true, back when El hiked alone (so brave!). Probably when she was initially flagged for observation. A woman like that…

Ten rows total, ten mud-caked people per row. Faces: black, brown, white, freckled, sunburned, blanched, every shade of fearful and enraged. Hair: coiled, kinked, frizzled, lank. Cropped or left long, disappearing into earth-suit collars.

At night, they whispered. Everyone did. El inclined her head towards Jilly’s, and Jilly did the same.

Wanna go home.

Never touching anything with a dick again.

Not worth it.

All this being filmed.

Cameras everywhere.

Cautionary tale for the girls.

Poor things. Horrible world, this.

Imagine being raised, only knowing this.

Gotta scratch. Itching. I’m going crazy.

Hold it together. I know people on the outside organizing something. Promise?

Okay. Okay. You, too. Promise, Jilly?

Promise.

Feedings came in two varieties.

By hose three times a day, rubber teats along its length. Chalky, lukewarm. If you refused to latch, you starved. Refuse three times, and they’d punish the bits of you that showed. Noses, lips, nipples, soles, toes. Twisted, pinched, shocked, smashed.

The other nutrition wasn’t for you. Robotic sprayers wheeled overhead, and you clamped your mouth and eyes tight against the poison.

Fertilizer to nourish the seeds pushed into your earth-coat.

Coax them to break through the crust.

Which they did. On everyone, by day five, six, or seven: tender shoots like unlucky clovers. 

Jilly broke her promise. She slipped into a madness like falling in a fast spring creek.

No, El said. Shhh! Come on, Jilly, don’t do this to me…

Tickles! Itches! Never stops!

All of them, together, a field bristling with green growth.

Please, then, for the little girls watching, El said. Be strong for the girls of Channel 9.

Jilly fell to babbling, raving.

That night, under red nightlights, Jilly went Hulk. Everyone turned to see, like petals tipping toward the center.

Small red globes dropped from her cracking soil-suit like fat pearls of blood. She snatched one, bit it, laughed. Radishes, my friends! We’re growing radishes!

Alarms blasted. Floodlights. Back to spouting nonsense, Jilly staggered through the waste on the floor. Before they reached her, she kneeled by El’s dais, saying to her ear only, Lexington and Main, 202, basement.

These words kept El going.

Despite new loudspeakers at night: "Sluts! Whores! Sluts! Whores!" So many broke, hauled off to Mental Lab or worse. A bumper crop.

Despite the live-broadcast harvest. Hoedown music, fat ruby roots plucked triumphantly like sins.

Hope tucked in an envelope with a cryptic address.

BY THEIR BONES YE SHALL KNOW THEM

JOE KOCH

From his belly there protruded a fine firm bone, a slender bulge above the navel one might mistake for a dislocated rib. Claes was old enough to understand armory season had come late this year, young enough to think his gravid state could elude the elders indefinitely. With the taste of hot metal building like gum decay upon his tongue, firing time approached with biology’s natural and relentless inevitability, and the bone inside him, hungry for bullets, pressed its aggressive barrel outward, aiming at disclosure from beneath Claes’ pale skin.

Skinny and sick, he ran away. Claes had a vague idea that somewhere beyond Paradise Territory’s border there dwelled renegade doctors who might cure him of puberty’s gift. He’d failed to purge the steely bone and its spleen-crushing stock with induced vomiting and surreptitious starvation. Laxatives left him weak. Downing a bottle of cough syrup knocked him out, but he woke up still bulging. Finally desperate, shy pleas to Catherine to hit him in the stomach with a baseball bat escalated into a fight. Her screech of betrayal followed as he fled to the dusty highway over the border: didn’t he understand dodging the draft was a crime?

Mesmerized by disbelief that this was now his life, his future, all other possibilities erased by the violence of his inherited marrow seeking genetic self-expression, his freedom forfeit to the war effort, Claes followed the empty highway on foot, equally fearful the existence of rebels outside of the territory might be myth or truth.

Feet heavy with combustion propellant edema, will weakened by the needy weapon growing longer and feeding from his gut, Claes gave up hope under the hellish sun. No wonder it was illegal to leave. No human could survive out here. He veered into the weeds and succumbed to the sweet lure of rest or death. It didn’t matter which.

The ditch was shallow. Ants, flies, and hoppers avoided Claes’ metallic sweat and smoke-charred breath, but curious pill bugs gathered near his belt. Many more amassed quietly in his palms as he stared upward, eyes open to the sky’s brightness to let everything else turn black.

The ground trembled. Rumbling from the highway grew louder and slowed to an idle. Footsteps across the sandy berm brought a shadow over Claes.

Thirsty, hon? I’ve got water.

She might have been his mother’s age or older. The strangeness of her clothing told him she was from elsewhere, not Paradise Territory, not the sky-lands of the enemy, not even the mythical ocean he’d read about in story books. This must be what renegades dressed like.

The coolness of her shadow cloaked him in uneasy relief. Claes thrilled that the rumors were true: where there were people, he’d find doctors. Where there were doctors, the possibility of release.

He struggled to stand. The bone had grown larger as he lay, impeding the ease of bending at the waist. The woman reached for his hand. He shook the pill bugs off. He didn’t want to hurt them. They rolled into little armored spheres, and he waited for all of them to drop.

Over here. The small woman gestured with a twist of her neck after Claes was up. Taller than her, too thirsty to hesitate, Claes ignored the intuition warning him that strangers outside the border probably weren’t in the habit of being so kind.

The idling rumble on the highway came from something that looked like a chemical tank to Claes, except the edges were squared off. It had wheels and expelled blueish smoke. Clear panels lined the sides at eye level. To his surprise, the woman opened the end of the tank like a door to a room. Claes expected liquid to gush out. He’d never seen a van or car before.

The woman stepped back. Go ahead. I won’t bite.

Moved by curiosity as much as dehydration, reassured by the wide berth, Claes climbed inside. Benches lined the horizontals. Canteens hung at the back. As the running engine vibrated, a ring of carabiners rattled against the metal grate separating the driver’s cab from the cargo area. Claes didn’t notice the blankets and rope piled in the corner until he’d already begun to gulp water and heard the door slam.

He dropped the canteen. Water spilled. Claes grabbed and shoved at the door. He found a handle, but it didn’t work. Another door slammed behind him. He swung toward the sound. Beyond the steel grate, the back of the woman’s head appeared.

What are you doing? Let me out.

The head remained unresponsive. His fingers clung to the grate.

I know you can hear me. Talk to me, please. What’s—

The rumbling of the vehicle increased. Floor, walls, and roof shook. Then the whole apparatus moved. Claes couldn’t believe it. The rolling cage moved faster than he had ever moved before. His heart raced out of control. Claes watched the highway sliding away faster than river rapids through the side windows, as if his past were eroding behind him. He swung forward, and through the front shield beyond the driver’s impassive shoulders, the cliffs and weeds and clouds rushed up to collide and then swerved out of sight.

He threw up on the grate. The head tilted towards the sound and then resumed its original disinterested state. 

Claes sank clutching his stomach and curled up on the shuddering floor. His gravid bone battered his other internal organs as the cage shook. The ring of carabiners jangled overhead. Watery vomit quivered and slid like an amoeba near his cheek.

People in Paradise Territory always said aching and nausea were normal, that growing a freedom bone was a boy’s birthright and the true path to honor, to manhood. Claes should have been thrilled to sprout one so young. Maybe he was selfish. Maybe that’s why he was being punished like this. Claes didn’t want the responsibility or the scars. He wished it would all end, this helplessness in his body, this helplessness inside the rattling cage with its cruel metal edges, every inch of his body vulnerable and shaken so hard, he wished his bones would finally crumble to dust and cease to resist; and then it dawned on him. A way out.

He unfolded his arms to expose the bone of muzzle and butt that branched out diagonally across his body. The mark of manhood tasted of nitrate bile and deformed his muscles and skin. Claes missed his flat torso, the body he’d known all his life. Thus, no longer cradling his jagged abdomen protectively, no longer worried about the sharp pain as he stretched because