Cthulhurotica by Cody Goodfellow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jennifer Brozek, Ahimsa Kerp, Carrie Cuinn, Gabrielle Harbowy, Don Pizarro, Madison Woods, Richard Baron, Juan Miguel Marin, Maria Mitchell, Mae Empson, Nathan Crowder, KV Taylor, Andrew Scearce, Constella Espj, Leon J. West, Travis King, Steven J. Searce, Clint Collins, Matthew Marovich, Gary Mark Bernstein, Kirsten Brown, Kenneth Hite, Justin Everett

there had to have been an embryonic transitional stage – with egg-born generations of men mouth-brooded by fish – before mankind could come out into the open air and lose our scales. A hero of rational thought. The first scientist and evolutionist.
    When Dennis first read the Pantalica papyrus, among his father’s papers, he thought it must be a hoax or allegory. It was on par with suddenly finding a lost love letter between Pythagoras and Medusa, or, rather between Pythagoras and a mythical talking triangle eager to reveal its geometric secrets. Absurd.
    Anaximander was supposed to be the first scientist. The man who first drew a map of the world. The man who first conceived of a mechanical model of the entire universe. Anaximander was a hero of deductive reason, of the triumph of the rational over the supernatural.
    Or so they had thought.
    From the papyrus, Dennis could see that the Thracian wife must have infected Anaximander with her Orphism. It was she, in the text, who offered the dedications to Apeiron and black-winged Night, and who played the wild flute that heralded the Boundless Chaos that is Apeiron.
    It was she who had introduced Anaximander, and now Dennis, to Circe.
    The author of the scroll wrote, and this certainly was no secret, that Circe was the daughter of Helios, sky-spawn, and one of the daughters of Oceanus, depth-spawn. Likewise, the author proclaimed that Circe commanded the gift of uplift and decay, of evolution and devolution. She could regress men to pigs and wolves and half-fish. She made of them living sculptures proclaiming what men had been and what they now were, both naturally (half-fish) and allegorically (pigs). She was not ashamed of her star-spawn heritage. Why should anyone else be? Let it be writ upon their faces and bodies.
    When one of her creations was criticized and rejected – poor Glaucus whom she had regressed to fin and scaly tail from the waist down, she was incensed like an artist who had received an unfavorable review. What blinded this nymph Priscilla that she recoiled in horror from handsome half-fished Glaucus?
    The next time Priscilla descended into her pool to bathe, Circe poisoned the water with primordial Apeironian ooze, collected from the deepest abyss where Oceanus slept dreaming and oozing from his tentacled orifices.
    The nymph’s lower body changed beneath the water line, regressing and transforming. She became Scylla, a monster.
    Circe had planned to laugh at Scylla’s suffering. She hated the slight against Glaucus, against her own flesh-craftsmanship.
    Only, there was something enticing about Scylla as she tried to run from herself, from the twelve tentacles, from the six hairy mouths where she had only had one woman’s hairy mouth, and each attached to her waist by a sinuous neck so that it could twist and turn to gnash its teeth at her, and bark like a dog, hairy as a wolf.
    “A fine story, wife,” Anaximander responded, the translation recorded, when she had concluded her description. “A tale for the fireside, and echoing Homer.”
    “It is no story,” she challenged, this woman from Thrace who has no name at this point in the papyrus.
    “Then what does it mean?” he asked, assuming it was some kind of allegory, a myth-garmented truth.
    “It does not mean. It is. It was. It will be again.”
    “I’m sure the person that taught you the story framed it that way.”
    “You would challenge Circe’s own account?” she asked, fierce-tongued.
    Anaximander was in no mood to argue this further. She was so young. So foolish. Perhaps he had been foolish to marry a woman in her teens when he was almost fifty-five, a very old man. “If Circe told me herself, I’d consider it, but I’d believe it when I saw Scylla wriggling and writhing in all her glory.”
    “Few enough men have wished for that.”
    “If such a creature existed, I would want to see her. It would be fascinating. She would be a kind of chthonic missing link.