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Corel Gallery Clipart

@clipart.bsky.social

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In 1994 I bought a Corel Gallery CD-ROM with 10,000 clipart images. Thirty years later those images haunt this ghost story bot. Posts autodelete. Credits: clipart from Corel; conversion, curation, code, and alt text by @samplereality.bsky.social

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Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 2h

TISSUERE.BMF

A tissue retractor, a metal implement used to hold back surface tissue during invasive surgical procedures. It looks like a fork, but, having tried a dinner fork as a substitute one balmy May night, Red can testify that a fork cannot do the job of a tissue retractor.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 5h

COOKISLA.BMF

The flag of the Cook Islands, a former British colony and self-governing island nation in the South Pacific. The flag is blue, with a Union Jack in the upper left and a circle of fifteen white stars in the lower right, representing the country’s fifteen islands. The Cook Islands are what Rod would call far flung, spread out over three quarters of a million miles. Rarotonga is the largest island, at about 25 square miles, but it’s not Rod’s favorite. That would be remote Pukapuka, a beautiful sliver of land that Rod swore, should things really start to fall apart, he would return to and live out his days. Things did eventually fall apart, faster than Rod—who’s not only seen but played a part in more than one nation’s rise and fall—ever would have thought. Rod didn’t make it to Pukapuka. He barely even made it to his armory.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 8h

DOLPHIN3.BMF

A wide-eyed dolphin, poking its head out of the water. Dr. Slife couldn’t care less. He’s been at SeaWorld all day and he’s sick of the humid August air, the juggling seals, the crowds, the kids, including his own. Especially his own, the brats. They’re going to the 3:30 killer whale show and Dr. Slife more than half hopes Shamu bites off the hand that feeds him, literally. That would goose the kids good, he thinks. Nightmares for a week. They’ll never want to come here again. A win, all around.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11h

BORDS208.BMF

An office water cooler sits in the top left corner, and cone-shaped paper cups make up the border itself. Mark studies the clipart, trying to come up with a weird description for it. Always the pressure to be more weird, to outdo yesterday’s weird clipart descriptions. A phone call interrupts Mark’s thoughts. It’s his Mom. There’s been an accident, she says. Your Dad, she says. There are many ridiculous page borders on the Corel Gallery CD-ROM of 10,000 clipart, and this is one of them.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 14h

XMAS.BMF

What looks at first to be a peaceful Christmas scene. Investigators with the Federal Anomalous and Unexpected Situations Taskforce (FAUST) will describe the location in their 351-page report as a brightly lit cabin on the shores of a frozen pond. Investigators will note a strand of pines swaying in the winter wind along the shore, one of the trees decorated with festive ornaments and lights. As armed FAUST agents surround the cabin, the only sign of life (as the saying goes) are the tendrils of smoke rising from the chimney. The smoke turns out to be comprised mostly of the ashes of some indeterminate organic material (see attached chemical analysis). In the snow outside the cabin investigators will discover cloven-hoofed footprints.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 17h

EXRSE400.BMF

A woman in a magenta bodysuit balancing on her hands, one leg extended toward the heavens, the other bent backwards towards her head. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Urgent Care facilities across the country have been deluged with injured tweens and teens after the pose went viral on TikTok. Spinal injuries, dislocated shoulders, pinched nerves, hemorrhaging, all because some twenty-something influencer promised the pose was a miracle calorie burner and mood elevator. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Stick to #booktok.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 20h

KMC07.BMF

A vintage personal computer from the 1980s with a full keyboard, CPU unit with floppy drive, and CRT monitor. Nowadays most people have a billion times the computing power in their tertiary neural chip alone.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 23h

FLORI.BMF

A decorative page border consisting of—well, it’s difficult to say. The name of the clipart suggests something floral in nature, but the quality of the image is so degraded it’s impossible to say. From his cubicle in the Eleventh Bureau Yìchén scoffs at the individual who converted the clipart from its proprietary Corel Gallery format circa 1994 to the jpeg he sees on the screen before him. Was this individual—Yìchén looks down at his notes—a certain Mark Sample of North Carolina—simply hapless, or perhaps actually cunning? It’s possible the degraded image hides a hidden message. Yìchén fires up his steganography suite and begins poking around FLORI.BMF.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

PIANO344.BMF

A black and white icon of a baby grand piano, the lid propped open. Mark suddenly remembers a moment from his childhood, watching television with his parents, up past his bedtime. It’s Taxi. Everyone is at a fancy party and the eccentric, spaced-out Reverend Jim Ignatowski—Christopher Lloyd years before he was Doc—sits down at a piano to play. He stumbles through an elementary version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Everyone is cringing, embarrassed for him. Suddenly Jim launches into a virtuoso performance of Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu” in C# minor. The magic of that moment, Mark cannot explain. Staying up late on a school night. Laughing with his mom and dad in the cozy den. The stunning prodigy of a man people look down upon. The wonder of everything. It was 1982.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

SIGN189.BMF

A bright red and yellow sign pointing down to a fire hose. Municipal code requires every building over a certain occupancy and floor count to have extinguishers and hoses in strategic stairwells, along with posted emergency signs such as this. Cindy barrels through the heavy steel door into the stairwell, crackling tongues of flames licking after her. She slams the door shut and reaches down to the fire hose. It’s not there. No extinguisher either. She doesn’t have time to wonder who’s behind this, and in her heart she knows the answer anyway. Anderson. Cindy rushes down the stairs. She will be one of the few employees of Anderson, Wake, & Howe who survives the day.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

PMGUVAD1.BMF

The shoulder patch for the U.S. Navy Pacific Missile Test Center’s Vulnerability Assessment Division. The patch features an angry red-eyed bear—symbolizing the Soviet Union—staring down a series of silhouetted aircraft and ships heading towards it. Evelyn is researching an anomaly that occurred at the test center’s Point Mugu facility in Ventura Country last year. She has little to go on besides stray chatter on secure IRC channels, but as far as she can tell, a test of a high-energy weapon went sideways. Literally. The surface-to-surface weapon was aimed towards the facility’s live munitions testing range on San Nicolas Island, 60 miles offshore. Yet instead of heading south, towards San Nicolas, the high-energy weapon fired due west, showering Santa Cruz Island with a hallucinogenic aura of shimmering colors, as if the entire island were encased in a glimmering soap bubble.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

QUAIL.BMF

The common quail (Coturnix coturnix), a small migratory ground-nesting pheasant. A popular game bird, quail is often served roasted or in quail soap. Quail that have feed on hemlock during their migration can, when cooked and served as food, cause coturnism, a potentially deadly illness marked by myalgia, nausea, and renal failure. There’s no way to know whether quail meat is toxic or not, except by eating it. And this is precisely what Jack does. Living on the edge, Jack thinks, just by eating a bird.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

DESKMAN1.BMF

A black and white line drawing of a man with a pen in his hand, looking down at blank pages in a notebook. He is perhaps a writer, stuck. Distracted by his own roaring thoughts. There aren’t five stages of grief, he decides. It’s more like a giant rambling mansion you’re stuck inside, with labyrinthine corridors and you think you’re heading towards Anger but suddenly find yourself in a room named Depression. You spent the morning in the sun room of Acceptance but by evening you’ve gotten lost in the hallways and stumbled into the den of Denial.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

CONORS1.BMF

A color portrait of Jimmy Connors, who dominated men’s professional tennis in the 1970s. Connors was a bridge between two generations of tennis stars: younger than Arthur Ashe and his contemporaries, and older than powerhouses like Björn Borg and John McEnroe. Connors was like the seventies themselves, an era that burned hot and bright but soon gave way to Ronald Reagan’s America.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

FEMAVIA.BMF

An illustration of Amelia Earhart looking out the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra. It’s been a century and a quarter since she’s gone missing and as far as I know, what happened to her is still a mystery. I like to think, though, that somewhere on a remote atoll in the South Pacific, her great-great-grandchildren bustle about in a place with blue sky, green sea, and no black sludge.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

MONARCHB.BMF

A monarch butterfly perched on the tip of a green plant sprig. I point out the butterfly to my grandson. A good omen I say. We haven’t seen much life in this district. The bright orange and black wings seem to harken the arrival of…well, hope I guess you could call it. I tell my grandson that ages ago millions of monarchs would migrate from here all the way to Mexico for the winter. But, and here’s the amazing thing, I tell him, it would take several generations for the monarchs to reach Mexico and return back to the northeast. Three, four generations it would take for the butterflies to complete the circuit. No single monarch makes the trip on its own, nor its offspring. My grandson doesn’t believe me. That’s like, you going on a trip—he points to me—and never reaching the end, and counting on me to finish the trip. I nod, sadly. Yes, exactly.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

KONG1.BMF

A color portrait of the former CEO of Singapore Airlines, Cheong Choong Kong. The portrait depicts a smiling Asian man with dark hair, glasses, and a white shirt and tie. Born in Malaysia in 1941, Cheong Choong Kong went to university in Australia in 1960. He earned a PhD in mathematics, specializing in randomness and theoretical probability. In 1974 Dr. Cheong left his successful career in academia to work for Singapore Airlines, eventually rising to the CEO position. His expertise in theoretical and applied randomness served him well in 2000, when Singapore Airlines Flight 006 crashed during takeoff in Taiwan, killing 83 passengers. It was Dr. Cheong who calculated the probability that at least one of the passenger deaths was likely caused not by the crash itself but by what investigators later termed an “involuntary in‑flight pyrolysis casualty.” That is, spontaneous combustion.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

ARROW1U.BMF

An arrow pointing up. Where first there is a ceiling. Beyond that the attic. Up past the rafters is the roof. Then the bough of an oak tree that gently scrapes against the shingles in the wind. In the upper branches, a crow’s nest. Above the tree is the sky, going on for some time, a sea of Carolina blue in the air. There are occasional cirrus clouds. A weather balloon. When the sky stops it’s something else. Ozone. The stratosphere. Ultraviolet radiation. After that it’s not a matter of going up anymore. More of a going out. Outward. Away from this planet. Into the exosphere, and beyond that the vast cold emptiness of space. Look up. The ceiling is only the start of it.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

NIXON_R1.BMF

A color portrait of Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States. Everyone knows that Nixon resigned in indignant disgrace in 1974. Few, however, know of Nixon’s secret passion for horticulture, a fact Evelyn discovered when a bundle of never-before-seen highly classified documents turned up in her mailbox in a bulky yellow envelope with the words “it’s probably in here” scrawled on the front. The documents, which Evelyn has only just begun to comprehend, show that Nixon maintained a secret garden on the White House grounds. He tended to the garden late at night under the cover of darkness, growing milk thistle, wormwood, rowan, foxglove, and salvia divinorum.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

SURFN248.BMF

A surfer with shaggy long hair heading to the beach, board in hand. You’re not surprised to learn the surfer’s name is Chad Reeves and he goes by the nickname “Reef.” Anyway. Reef is amped to catch some bitchin’ waves today. He’s having a good time out there, macking on his longboard. Picture perfect day in his secret spot. He’s never told anyone about it. Which is why he’s all alone, riding in on the crest of a big one, when a seagull three times the size seagulls are supposed to be swoops down and with immaculate timing in two rapid-fire jerks of its beak plucks out Reef’s eyeballs and casts them to the water below one after the other. The bird is gone before Reef even realizes what’s happened. He screams blindly as the board takes him shoreward, sea spray filling his empty sockets with a mist that tastes like tears.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

SNAILS.BMF

A cartoonish illustration of a perturbed snail carrying a briefcase and clocking in at a timeclock. @evansezwut has notes on SNAILS.WMF. In series of replies over the span of 20 minutes, he points out (1) the morphological inaccuracies in this depiction of a gastropod; (2) the ontological inconsistencies of a snail that is actually arriving an hour early to work; (3) the epistemological imperialism inherent in any anthropomorphizing of non-human agents; and (4) the phenomenological implications of neoliberal conceptions of time that discipline the body in a Foucauldian regime of power production.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

ATTALI1.BMF

A color portrait of French economist and writer Jacques Attali, who is most famous as President François Mitterrand’s senior counselor during the 1980s. Attali is also credited with plucking Emmanuel Macron from obscurity and guiding him on the path to becoming France’s 25th president in 2017. Lesser known is Attali’s theories of musical composition, detailed in his 1977 book, “Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique,” or, in English, “Noise: The Political Economy of Music.” It is here that Attali describes what he saw in the 1970s as a new mode of musical composition: sampling and remixing. Just look at the clipart of the bespectacled man in a coat and tie and think, yeah, that dude is a major theorist of remix culture. 🤯️

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

GOLF.BMF

A flag with alternating yellow and blue vertical stripes. It’s the international signal flag for the letter G, used by ships at sea. G, for gold, guns, God, and graves.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

SYMB269.BMF

A black and white icon of a man in a bowler hat, a closed umbrella in one hand. He waits in the doorway across the street from Grouls House, a yellow brick Edwardian mansion. When you exit Grouls House, the clammy handshake of Mr. Breaves still cold and wet upon your skin, you spy the man. You set off down the slick cobblestone street in a rush, and the man in the bowler hat gives chase.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

EMT1.BMF

The abbreviation E.M.T. in golden, embossed letters, a garish stylistic choice at odds with the ghastly everyday work of emergency medical technicians. Matt’s been a firefighter and EMT for 25 years. Most days are standard ER runs: heart attacks and falls for the over-60 crowd, overdoses and kitchen injuries for the under-60 crowd. These calls tend to blur into one another. By the end of a 24-hour shift, Matt can’t even remember who received the first Narcan dose of the night. Some runs Matt will never forget though. The rainy afternoon he responded to a 911 call at an intersection near a strip mall. From the seat of the ambulance he stared at the red Ford Escape t-boned into a ridiculous V of metal and chrome, plastic and glass. He knew the car. Matt’s dad was pinned inside, conscious but broken and bleeding out. His mom stood in a daze on the side of the road, drenched in the cold rain. All she could say was, It came out of nowhere, it came out of nowhere.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

DOUGHNUT.BMF

A chocolate-frosted donut with sprinkles, the sole remaining treat in a box that once contained a dozen. The donut sits in the box in the teacher’s lounge all weekend, leftover from the “Sprinkle Fridays” party, a sad attempt to boost moral after the last school shooting. By Monday the donut is stale and the principal tosses hit it into the trash. The donut will eventually make its way to the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, which, incidentally, is where the principal himself eventually ends up, as stale, speckled, and smashed as the donut. Sunshine Canyon Landfill is owned and operated by Browning-Ferris Industries, which in turn is owned by Allied Waste, Inc., which itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of Republic Services, of which a majority stake is owned by Cascade Investment, L.L.C., an American holding company controlled by Bill Gates.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

JIGSAWC.BMF

A black and white icon of a jigsaw, a power tool with a blade that moves quickly up and down for making precise cuts and curves in wood. Lou must have, hell, three or four jigsaws in his basement workshop. He walks down the steps into the unfinished basement, set up with his workshop along one wall and Dianne’s quilting table and sewing machines on the other. He heads toward his workbench but stops when he passes the quilting table, a magnificent blue and gold quilt laying on it forever unfinished in the dim basement light.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

FEMWPLAN.BMF

A brunette woman in a yellow hardhat consulting building plans and pointing out something several stories above. Rose passes the construction site on her way to the cafe and stops in her tracks. From across the street she silently admires the woman, confident and in charge, her red lips and spotless white blouse seemingly out of place among the dust and the clanking. God, Rose thinks, I love a femme with a plan. I gotta get me a hardhatted woman.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

DDS3.BMF

The abbreviation D.D.S. in ornate capital letters. Dr. Slife is taking notes on a pad with “Dr. Jason Slife, D.D.S.” at the top in a similar font. He’s jotting down words he thinks he’s hearing from the intercom in the treatment room. He was in the middle of one of his favorite surgeries—a root canal—when the intercom that goes to his receptionist crackled to life with the sound of a penny whistle. The clear bright sound resonated through the room with a slight echo, as if coming from far away. Slife stepped out of the treatment room and saw his receptionist on the phone. He stepped back into the treatment room and heard the piercing whistle again. Slife put his ear up to the intercom, and the whistling stopped. A merry voice began speaking, words Slife did not understand in a language Slife had never heard. He begins writing down the words phonetically, his root canal patient eyeing Slife with desperation, a bite block shoved inside his aching mouth.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

POPCORNI.BMF

The file name says POPCORN but this looks like a brown paper bag spewing soup bubbles. Christine at TechPool Studios shudders at this train wreck. She knows it was done by Image Club Graphics, an indie outfit in Calgary. Like TechPool, Totem Graphics, and several other graphic design firms, Image Club Graphics licenses their work to Corel. If someone on Christine’s team had submitted this graphic, they’d’ve lost their job on the spot. She supposes Corel doesn’t mind. Of the 10,000 clipart on the Corel Gallery CD-ROM, maybe 25 percent are decent. The rest are junk, Christine thinks. Filler material. You’d have to be pretty stupid to spend money on that crap.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

REELS.BMF

Two reels of 35 mm film. The movie is the underground cult hit “Clip/Art Film,” a documentary released in 2001 that consists solely of hand-held shots of thousands of pieces of clipart. The film is 24 hours long, which translates to nearly 150 reels of film. Given that each can of film weighs about 4 pounds, screening the entire documentary requires 600 pounds of film. Who conveys this film from screening to screening is a mystery. Who operates the projector and oversees the seamless shift from one reel to the next is also unknown. What is known is that 24 hours before a screening, the posters promoting the film flood the neighborhood, taped onto alley walls, bathroom stalls, light poles. When the venue opens up—often an abandoned warehouse or loft—the film is already underway. After it concludes, the power shuts down and the audience finds their way out in the dark. A week or two later the film arrives in a new city. Dayton. Fayetteville. Peoria, Topeka, Murfreesboro. Beaumont, Texas.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

ARASKOG1.BMF

A color portrait of Rand Araskog, the longtime CEO of the ITT Corporation, a telecommunications giant from the 1960s through the 1990s. Araskog had previously served as the righthand man of ITT CEO Harold Geneen. Under Geneen’s leadership, ITT bankrolled a military coup in Chile, helping General Augusto Pinochet come to power. I like the way Araskog worked, Rod thinks.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

THOMPSO1.BMF

A color portrait of a white man in his early 50s, wearing glasses and a jacket and tie. He looks stiff, stuffy, humorless and displeased. At first glance you assume he’s an intellectual of some sort, or perhaps a news anchor. You start digging and discover that this is in fact the illegitimate half-brother of Hunter S. Thompson, a man who, if it’s possible, lived an even wilder life than his more famous kin. He sought new varieties of psilocybin mushrooms in the Amazon. He holed up in a cave in Slovenia for 18 months, never once seeing the sun. In New Guinea he lived among cannibals, where he grew fond of the taste of human flesh, which he described in a letter to his brother as “exactly like veal.”

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

ERPS.BMF

A tank paradropping from the rear of a military cargo plane. Evelyn happens to know a few things about this classified project, ERPS. The Enhanced Rapid Paradrop System was designed by the Pentagon in the 1990s to quickly deploy armored assault vehicles in hostile territory, such as Kosovo, Somalia, or Northumbria. ERPS was never fully funded though, and the program was eventually shelved. It’s taken Evelyn some time, and she’s had to call in a few favors, but she finally found out why. Let’s just say the fingerprints of Grimbard are all over this. If Grimbard had fingerprints.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

SYMB085.BMF

A black and white check mark icon. Mark stares at it for at least a dozen minutes, trying to come up with the words to describe the weird divots at its nadir and leftmost tip. Why the fuck am I wasting my time with this, he wonders. It’s just a stupid check mark.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

BORD22.BMF

A(nother) page border, consisting of white and black rings, 56 total. Patrick “Dutch” Dugan eyes the clipart suspiciously. He’s pretty sure he’s seen it before. He picks up the 350-page Corel Gallery Clipart Catalog (1st printing) and starts thumbing through it. If Dutch can prove that Corel is reusing clipart and there are not in fact 10,000 distinct works of clipart on the CD-ROM, he may have exactly what he needs to bring Corel down. The fools.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

SYMB260.BMF

Mattie isn’t sure what this sign means. There’s the Man and Woman icons, like what you’d see on restroom doors at a fast food joint. Over the man is a directional arrow point up; over the woman is a directional arrow pointing down. What’s the purpose of the sign? Men must move in one direction and women in the opposite? Where would you find such a sign? Posted in the lobby on elevator doors? Men can only take the elevator up and women down? It makes no sense to Mattie. Take away the arrows and even then the sign would make no sense to Mattie.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

PATRC_J1.BMF

A color portrait of actor Jason Patric. Samantha remembers watching “The Lost Boys” on VHS and how Patric’s character Michael fought valiantly against succumbing to his bloody desires. It was the first time Samantha realized that vampires are sexy, not because they’re undead but because they are so alive.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

ASTRONUT.BMF

A man in an astronaut suit. @evansezwut calls in to point out ten inaccuracies with the image. It’s the wrong color white. The grill is too high up. The gloves look like mittens. The gray blob on back, it’s all wrong. Suits in 1994 would not have had black piping, which was discontinued in 1992. @evansezwut goes on, but you’ve tuned him out.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

BORDS231.BMF

A page border with each corner full of what look like Ben-Day dots. Mark is immediately reminded of Roy Lichtenstein, but of course the timing doesn’t line up. Mark digs around on the internet, researching the page border. Imagine his shock when he discovers the border first appeared in a pamphlet published in 1579 entitled “A Detection of Damnable Driftes, Practized by Three VVitches Arraigned at Chelmisforde in Essex at the Late Assizes There Holden, Whiche Were Executed in Aprill 1579.” That’s a mouthful, about the witchcraft trials of four women in Essex. A key piece of evidence was a shaggy black dog that passed the threshold of one of the victims just before her death. The dog, it was supposed at the time, was a familiar of the most powerful of the four witches. Mark supposes the dog was just a dog.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

ROSERING.BMF

A bright green rose-ringed parakeet, a medium-sized parrot native to India and parts of Africa. Back in the 20th century, feral populations descended from escaped or abandoned pets established themselves throughout Europe, as far north as London. They were all over Barcelona. I remember leaving La Sagrada Familia and seeing flashes of bright green in the palm trees of the plaza outside the basilica, their screeching calls piercing the veil of awe left by Gaudí’s work. When I spot similar flashes of bright green in a grove of palm trees erupting from a strip mall parking lot outside Richmond, I realize there are feral populations here too now. I toy with the idea of describing La Sagrada Familia to my grandson, but don’t. He would think I’m making things up again, like the time I told him about the internet, or ice.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

FLORAL_5.BMF

A decorative floral design in the style of a woodcut. With its trumpet-shaped flowers and symmetrical leafy vines, the image would make a fine tattoo. The only question, Samantha muses, is where? Calf, upper arm, lower back? On her body or his?

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

SYMB031.BMF

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

FLOAT.BMF

A prop engine plane with pontoons for landing and taking off from water. As a rule, Rod does not like to fly. He prefers the sea. Give me sharks over the sky any day, he says. But he’ll make an exception for a floatplane, especially if it’ll get him out of Barataria Bay like, right now. A bullet whistles past Rod’s ear.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

C_47.BMF

A Douglas C-47 military transport plane, used by the U.S. from World War II through the Vietnam War for troop transport, paratroopers, and cargo. While the Air Force and Navy retired their fleets of C-47s, a few remain in operation in the CIA’s black ops division. At the moment, a group of agents and researchers are on hand as top secret cargo is loaded into the bay of a C-47 registered to an international floral shipping company. A giant bouquet is painted on the fuselage. The paramycologist turns to the liminalogist as the cargo is forklifted into the C-47. My god, she says, have you ever seen anything like it? The liminalogist shakes his head in disbelief. The massive fungus nearly takes up the plane’s whole cargo bay. Mycelium dance in the air, thick as elephant trunks, and as long as rivers.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

MANDO02.BMF

A black and white sign indicating that eye protection is required, showing a person’s head with goggles. The liminalogist spots the sign on her way into the enormous mitre shell. Someone from HR had posted it on the exterior calcium carbonate wall of the shell at eye level. The liminalogist looked up and saw the orange and yellow shell rising dozens of meters into the sky. The shell was not the first evidence of anomalous gastropod giganticism, nor even the largest, but it was deemed to be the safest to explore. The liminalogist snapped the goggles onto her face and began walking into the shells’ spiraling interior. The pressure changed as she left the entrance, the daylight receding behind her. She felt like she was underwater. The goggles pressed into face as if an invisible fist had pounded on them. Soon she was deep into the shell, taking occasional scrapings of viscous slime from the shell walls and sealing them in plastic baggies. She heard the soft shush shush roar of the sea. The goggles now dug into the flesh under her eyes, gouging hollows around her sockets. Wanting to relieve the pressure for a moment, she plucked the goggles from her face. They separated with a sloppy wet snap. In that moment the liminalogist thought, My god, my god, I can see the sea. It was her final thought.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

X29.BMF

A Grumman X-29 jet, an experimental U.S. Air Force aircraft with forward-sweeping wings and smaller canard forewings. According to public records, only two X-29s were built, the first flying in 1984. After determining that the novel design was inherently unstable, the Air Force retired both X-29s in 1991. One of the grounded X-29s is on display at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the other at Edwards Air Force Base. Evelyn has read rumors in obscure IRC channels and unlisted Gopher sites that Grumman built a third X-29, and that the aircraft is still in use. The most substantive of these rumors comes from an anonymous source claiming to be a former pilot of the X-29. According to this source, the Air Force discovered that X-29 pilots underwent extreme elongation of the human body in flight, upwards of 11 inches. Furthermore, this dilation persisted for days after the mission was over. The source maintains that the USAF continues to subject a secret cohort of pilots to X-29 flights in an attempt to create inhuman airmen, their arms and legs stretched horrifically thin in unnerving parodies of Greek statuary.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

SIGN014.BMF

A warning sign that reads DANGER: FLOOR SLIPPERY WHEN WET. Or, rather, because this is Paris, it reads ATTENTION: GLISSANT LORSQUE HUMIDE. A maintenance worker has placed this sign at the entrance to the ossuary. You wouldn’t think a catacomb full of bones could ever be slippery, right? I mean, a pile of bones, isn’t that the definition of dry? Yet something has been seeping into the ossuary—bubbling up from the ground or dripping from the ceiling, or maybe both. And that something is indeed slippery, make no mistake about it. The floor is as slick as the deck of ship at sea, if that ship were sailing among thousands of skulls.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

NIGERIA.BMF

The insignia of the Nigerian Air Force, which is three concentric circles alternating between green and white. This roundel appears on the wings and tails of aircraft in the Nigerian Air Force. After Dianne was gone, Lou canceled their AOL account. She was the one who used it. He had no use for electronic mail. As he surveyed her mail one last time before deleting the account forever, he noticed a message from a Nigerian prince. It promised a fortune in exchange for a small favor. In a fit of—what, rage? despair? bitterness?—Lou replied with an understated “fuck you.” There was nothing nobody could do for Lou, even less anybody could do for Dianne.

Corel Gallery Clipart @clipart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

TRUXTUN.BMF