Mermaids, ghosts, and a haunted house? Spooky things abound in my short story “Bipedal Motion,” which you can read here.

“There was a group of wild children who had claimed the manor house’s untamed back garden as their own; to rule over as they saw fit, to hide out in when their parents cast them out into the night, and to live in when they yearned to return to a more primitive time in their lives. And ever since Odette had moved in, they had been sneaking about, letting her catch glimpses of their large bright eyes and devious white teeth as they peered out of the hedges and reached out to her from the rose bushes, their thin hands only suggesting the feeling of real skin. Odette wasn’t sure of their intentions or why they had decided to take up residence in the garden; she imagined that they had been living there, behind the manor house, rarely seen and often heard, for years—for many very long years—as they seemed more comfortable living in the garden than she did living in her husband’s ancestral home. But more unnerving than the duration of their stay, Odette wasn’t entirely convinced that they had always been children; she thought, perhaps, a long time ago, they could’ve been something else altogether. And even more than their constant presence, the way they suddenly appeared out of the darkness and then disappeared back into it, even more than the way they pulled faces at her as they peered in through the windows, and the sounds that came from them that woke her from sleep, what worried Odette the most was what would happen to them when they stopped being children.“