Reactor, January 2026
Eben Cull, an unemployed warehouse worker desperate for money, responds to a mysterious “WRITER WANTED” ad and meets Arathusia, a peculiar woman with raven-black hair who possesses an unusual talent she calls “spewing.” This involves entering a self-induced trance and speaking in a rapid stream of consciousness that occasionally coalesces into coherent stories amid nonsensical fragments. She offers Eben three hundred dollars per two-hour session to handwrite her utterances, explaining that she wants his inevitable failures to randomly shape her words into something beautiful.
During their interview, Arathusia demonstrates her ability, and Eben glimpses a disturbing story about a farmer who bricks his daughter into an underground root cellar before shooting himself. The fragmentary tale haunts Eben over the following days as he prepares for his first session at the Parliament Hotel.
When Eben arrives for the job—having forgotten his pen—Arathusia equips him with her invention: the “Starlight Stylus,” a silver pen connected to green wire tendrils that wrap around his hand. This device assists his writing through massage but also punishes him with painful stings when he slows down, forcing him to maintain his passionate effort despite fatigue.
As Arathusia begins spewing, Eben struggles to capture the torrent of words. The session shifts between meaningless verbal chaos and coherent narrative fragments. A story emerges about a young girl who visits her mother’s grave and tells her father about a dream involving a mysterious gentleman named Twin Owls 12—a well-dressed figure with a bird’s feathered face and beak who spat violet liquid into her mouth.
The narrative becomes increasingly immersive for Eben, who finds himself seemingly inhabiting the scenes he’s transcribing. He observes quiet domestic moments: the girl saying prayers, her father reading in the evening. But tranquility shatters when the daughter begins spewing in her sleep, unable to be awakened. Her father grows panicked as she chants incomprehensibly—until suddenly Twin Owls 12 materializes in the room, laughing like a screeching blue jay.
The revelation that the girl in the story shares Arathusia’s name suggests these may be memories from her childhood. Before Eben can process this, Arathusia’s trance ends. She reveals she remembers nothing of what she speaks and depends on his transcriptions to discover her own words. When Eben asks her to lunch, she declines, warning him about her jealous husband and advising him to avoid meeting the man.
After paying Eben and departing, she leaves him alone in the hotel room, where he notices a sinister painted owl portrait that had been watching him throughout the entire session—a detail that takes on ominous significance given the story he’s just transcribed.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab’s Return, and Out of Body. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, Big Dark Hole and The Pandemonium Waltz. Ford’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies from Reactor to Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to McSweeney’s and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories and been widely translated. It has garnered World Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nebula, awards and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year mention.