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- io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine.
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Hell is Empty” by J. R. Dawson. Enjoy!
Hell is Empty
by J. R. Dawson
And all the devils are here.
“What’s that from?” Millie asks as she gets her coat.
I stand at the back window, looking out. Usually, you can see the downtown skyline from this position. Today, it’s just the hellmouth. A long tube that looks like an esophagus that’s been yanked out of a kaiju and dangles from the ground. Bloody, meaty, smoking.
“It’s Shakespeare,” I say. “I don’t remember which play. I think one of the Henrys.”
Millie follows my gaze to the hellmouth. She zips her coat. She purses her lip.
“Well,” she says, “we need dog food. We need to work out if I’m gonna hit my minimum for reimbursement.”
“I know,” I say.
“It’s far enough from us I think we’ll be okay, if we make it quick,” she says.
Our phones ping again.
I look down.
A new woman has been killed by the devils. Executed, I should say.
I look out to the hellmouth again. Twenty minutes away.
When I was a kid, back before all this, when things were peaceful, we had tornado warnings. And I remember standing behind the couch, my entire nervous system on fire, as I listened to my parents decide if we should go watch the funnel cloud from the porch or if we should go down in the basement.
The Midwestern ambivalence to deadly things coming straight for us, but we need to keep our heads about it.
“It’s moving a little,” I say as we step out onto the porch. And Millie checks her tracking app.
“A little,” she says. “The hellmouth is mostly downtown but it looks like the devils are fanning out.”
“Here?”
“Only a couple.” She looks to me. “We’ll be okay.”
The ones in Chicago didn’t move. The one in Portland didn’t move. The one in New York only moved a little. But the one in DC multiplied.
“Fucking asshole,” Millie mutters as we slowly make our way off the porch and to the back garage. We haven’t had the energy to ice the pathway to the garage.
The fucking asshole is the guy who made the deal with something below and dark and awful. Because like anyone who makes deals, he wanted power. And now we have devils.
Once we get into the car and turn on the heat, we duck onto the normalcy of the neighborhood streets, where you can’t see the hellmouth anymore. But I keep my eyes open.
Millie looks at her phone. “It says the woman was yanked right through her windshield,” she says. “Her wife was right next to her.” She gives a little gasp and lets her phone fall into her lap, her arm limp. Her eyes the hard kind of scared, where you don’t let yourself cry. She looks up at the sky, like the devils are going to descend right onto me.
“We’re okay,” I say. “We’re just getting dog food and going to the gym.”
And the grocery store’s parking lot is still crowded. There are still people asking for change at the sliding doors. Teenage boys in lime green vests still collect wayward carts. We still struggle to find a parking spot. And we go inside and there’s still Purina dog chow, in a big smelly plastic bag for our dalmatian.
The supply chains are still open. The trucks are still going. People are still working.
No devils here. All just downtown.
And it seems like a lot of people in the store don’t even care that a hellmouth has opened. Maybe it’s something we’ve all come to decide we’ll work around, like a squeaky stair. I think when I was a kid, a hellmouth would have been enough cause for a grocery store to close. But now we’re all so silent as we wrap our scarves around our faces to keep out the cold as we jog to our cars.
Maybe we’re all numb.
That hard kind of scared.
And on the way to the gym, we see busses picking people up from bus stops and if you don’t look to the sky where the red and black smoke are now churning into a Chernobog-esque swirl... or how a winged bat-looking thing shoots over the intersection on their way to attack someone... they sound like helicopters and... it could almost be like it used to be.
I stare at the devil above as it disappears and goes north.
We’re okay, this time.
The devils already killed most of the poets in town. I’m not a poet. I can’t put all these words and images and contrasts together into something coherent. But my body begs me to make sense of it, to swallow it all down and digest it and regurgitate something beautiful.
“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” I whisper again. The only semblance of art I can grasp right now. A poet, a long time ago, before the tornadoes I saw or the days like today, said something I can hold on to.
Millie looks at her phone as I drive. And she says, “The Tempest. It’s from The Tempest.”
“That makes sense,” I agree.
We park in the gym lot. We walk inside. The only evidence of the hellmouth within our little cocoon of treadmills and ellipticals is on television screens hanging above the weightlifting equipment. Like it’s a movie. Like it’s happening somewhere else.
And then the sky goes black outside.
And I grab Millie’s hand and I hold it very tight and I wait for the devils to shatter the glass, rush inside, try to take her.
Let them try to take her.
I will fucking murder them, I will claw them with my nails until I am nothing but dust.
Then the sun returns.
And no windows are broken. No devils arrive. The TVs only flicker for a second, and then they’re fine.
And that waiting, the waiting for the strike, it fills my nerves with an unwanted horror. The anticipation of something.
Just get it over with, I want to say.
But nothing comes. No absolution. Just more notifications on our phones, and the newsroom on the TV keeps spinning how the hellmouth is actually a really good thing for the economy.
•••
I want the day to be over. My body is on fire.
I open my phone again as we buckle into the car to go home.
Millie puts her hand over my screen. And she says, “Look at me.”
I look at her.
Her big green eyes, her curly ringlets, they’re all here in front of me trying to ground me to a home I’m so afraid of losing.
“When we are on our phones,” she says, “are we using it to connect with someone, to get information, or are we doomscrolling?” We both know the answer. “So just take a second, and be here with me.”
How can I “be here with her” when the sky is red?
She gently puts her hand on my shoulder. “We are still here. On our way home, we’re going to text our neighbors and see if there’s anything they need while we’re out. We’re going to go home and make yummy food that is good for our bodies, and we’re going to get a good night’s rest, so we can show up tomorrow. The neighborhood will need us. Even if it’s just putting a door back on its frame or donating an extinguisher. And after we do all that, we are going to crawl into bed again, and we’re going to get back up. Again and again. Strong. And ready.”
“They can take it all from us,” I say. “Any of that can be interrupted by . . .” I wave outside. The air is cold and dry and tense. I can feel it like a dybbuk latching onto my shoulders, digging into my spine.
She nods. “They can,” she says.
That’s all she says.
No buts.
No resolutions.
She starts driving, though. We call our neighbor, they ask if we can drive through and get something to eat for them. They tell us about their neighbor, who might need us to run an errand tomorrow. We drive through Burger King. We deliver a warm collection of kids meals and whoppers.
Then Millie and I haul our dog food in through the porch and the back room to the kitchen where our dog waits. I numbly follow. She doesn’t pull the curtains closed, we can still see the hellmouth.
And we quietly make some chicken noodle soup. We watch She-Ra and we hum along to the theme song. We crawl into bed. And the sky is still red. And I am still scared. And she touches my skin.
I think to myself, as she holds me close to her warm chest and stomach and I feel another human against my back, that all the devils are still here, but so are we.
About the Author
J. R. Dawson (she/they) is the Golden Crown award-winning author ofThe First Bright Thing. Their short story, “Six People to Revise You,” is a 2026 Nebula finalist. She has other short work in places such asF&SF,Uncanny, andReactor. Dawson currently lives on Dakota land in Minnesota with her loving wife. She teaches at Drexel University’s MFA program for creative writing, and fills her free time with keeping her three chaotic dogs out of trouble. Her latest book,The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, is a sapphic Orpheus retelling.
© Adamant Press
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the April 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Justin C. Key, V. M. Ayala, Ashok K. Banker, Andrew Dana Hudson, Andrea Kriz, P. A. Cornell, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99 or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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