The Uncertain Beyond
Chapter 1
Oren Kosmos
Give the Spirits What They Need.
When Death exits, sometimes she leaves the door cracked open.
At midnight, the Moonlight Motel’s empty pool beckoned. The lamppost could not illuminate the mysteries inside that dark, man-made hole. Mozi made a traditional Chinese offering at the pool’s edge. He lit a paper robe and placed it into a can of dry rice. The robe’s edges crinkled and faded in the fire. Smoke curled into the pool. Waves of darkness poured into the basin, smoothing its surface until it looked like a glass mirror. Mozi let the matchbook slip from his fingers. He knelt at the edge, peered past his reflection, and gazed into the Uncertain Beyond.
Sue-ling’s melodic voice rose from the depths of the pool, sending a ripple across his reflection. “Mozi, bring me back!”
The temperature dropped. Goosebumps sprouted across his bare chest.
Sue-ling emitted an agonized gasp. “Mozi!”
Mozi's reflection wavered, shaking its head; the real Mozi stayed still. Sue-ling's voice pierced through. “I am your mother. Help me. Give the spirits what they need.”
Chapter 8
The stranger studied him. “Marcel Proust.”
“Mozi Fong.”
“A pleasure, Monsieur Mozi. What an exquisite name. Does it hold any meaning?”
“I was named after an ancient Chinese philosopher.” Mozi said carefully, “Mohism. Everyone matters. Everyone’s equal. Everyone’s story deserves to be told. He believed in ghosts.”
“And do you?” Marcel asked.
Mozi was unsure whether Marcel was a dream or a ghost. “I—prefer smaller rooms,” Mozi said. “Smaller goals. Where I’m from, people aren’t equal. At least, they’re not treated that way. And no matter who you are, everyone disappears.” He hesitated. “I’m figuring out what’s right for me.”
“Even vanished stories leave traces. In tending small rooms, one discovers vastness.”
Mozi leaned closer, feeling heard, but tested the limits. “Do you believe in ghosts?” Mozi asked.
“Do you trust the past?
“Trust? Not believe, mourn, celebrate?”
“The past is colored by our memories and tinted by our emotions.”
Chapter Eight
Oren clasped Mozi’s hands. “If we looked back, would we lose everything? Will I disappear into darkness? If all your future beaus formed a constellation, could I be an asterisk among your stars? One could say that from a distance, a constellation is nothing more than a cluster of stars in an infinite sea of such; nonetheless, you matter to me.”
Mozi echoed, “It matters to me.”
“Even if for a brief sparkling moment, let us be the only pair of stars in a universe filled with intangibles.”
When Oren finished speaking, a rush of snow swept through the room. Books unfurled their pages. The fire went out and reignited as quickly as it had extinguished: Oren was gone.
Left alone in the room, Mozi carried a single candle down the staircase. Wax bled from the tip and down the stick. The entrance above him sealed shut. He covered the flame with his hand, his shadow stretching along the walls.
In the quiet of Oren’s now-empty bedchamber, Mozi set the candle by the veiled bust. Then he fell onto the bed, facing Denis’s pillow. He pressed his face into the hollow it had left, inhaling deeply. Denis’s scent filled him with ache. He cupped his hands and scooped Denis’s scent to his nose.
The weight of longing dropped in his chest.
He buried his head where Denis rested on the pillow and drifted.
The lace-covered bust of Oren turned slightly, its mouth parting to blow out the candle with a final sigh.
Chapter 10
“I’ve fallen in love with the sun, and now I’ve gone blind.”
Mozi
hook
The Uncertain Beyond
When Death exits, she sometimes leaves the door cracked open.In a forgotten Southern town steeped in ghostlight and devotion, Mozi speaks with the dead, and Denis runs from sins that won’t stay buried. Their bond—fragile, forbidden, and divine—blurs the line between the living and the lost. When Death opens her door, love crosses through, unafraid of judgment, rebirth, or ruin.
A lyrical dark fantasy of queer faith, longing, and the souls who refuse to rest.
Denis
Denis drove a 1982 black Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, a presidential automobile characterized by its long, razor-sharp edges. Denis fixed his eyes on the Moonlight Motel in the sideview mirror.
“Can we turn on the lights?” Mozi asked.
“It’s okay now,” Denis said, turning on the headlights and revealing a dirt road flanked by a canyon of towering trees.
Mozi flicked on the dome light and rifled through the box. “We’re out of deodorant.” He checked the backseat, shook the sheets, and groaned. “I forgot my books.”
“Goddammit.”
“A library book.”
Denis slapped the steering wheel. “Why do you waste your time reading?”
“Because I don’t know nothing! Anything.”
Denis turned the car. “Can they trace it back to you?”
Mozi lowered his head in shame.
“Dammit, Mo.”
Mozi looked out the window. “I can fix it!” Mozi’s melancholy face appeared in the window’s reflection.
After some silence, Mozi said, “I don’t want to sleep in a car no more.”
“We need to do whatever it takes to survive.”
Mozi faced him. “A place where the water runs clean, where the meals can be made hot.” He paused. “Let’s stay in South Carolina.”
Denis’s jaw clenched, his scowl deepening with frustration.
Mozi asked, “I don’t want to live on the run no more. We’ve met so many people, but we got no friends. We’ve moved everywhere, and it’s all a blur, like we’re on a carousel horse, spinning fast, riding nowhere, but I see that brass ring.” He reaches out into the air. “It’s always out of reach. Denis, where we running to? What’re we running from?”
“It ain’t running! The world’s spinning. We’re just keeping up.”
“My life’s slipping through my fingers.”
Denis closed his hands around Mozi’s.
Mozi asked, “What’s the brass ring look like to you?”
“Another ride, you and me—surviving.”
“Surviving? That’s all?”
“Surviving is the brass ring.”
Denis braked. They plunged forward and back.
Mozi asked, “Why’d you stop?”
“We ran out of road. We can’t go no further.”
Trees barricaded the place where a road once was.
Mozi searched Denis’s eyes. “I feel hopeless, like we don’t have a future… nothing.”
Denis put the car in park. “Rich people—they ain’t happy. They chase fairytales. Buy things, people, power. To keep ‘em company. To feel new. To feel!” He pulled the key out of the ignition. “They’d trade it to be young. Healthy. To be wanted. Mozi, they want to be us!” Denis handed Mozi a rolled-up sheet of music. Mozi unrolled it, revealing intricate filigree framing the words: “Frédéric Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 1.”
Mozi, pointing to the composer, asked, “Who’s Chopping?”
Survival
vs Stability
Order
vs Chaos
Human
vs Paranormal
bio
Rodney Hom has made a creative life about death.
Webby Honoree and Student Academy Award winner—A multidisciplinary designer, filmmaker, and author, he crafts stories that blur the line between beauty and decay, love and ruin, the living and the lost. His debut novel, The Uncertain Beyond, is a queer Southern Gothic dark fantasy where death becomes a mirror for desire and redemption. With a designer’s precision and a poet’s heart, Hom builds worlds where faith falters, beauty rises, and transformation is the only salvation. He lives and creates in the American Southwest.
Editors
Primary Editor: Mark Spencer
Mark Spencer has won four major national awards: The Faulkner Society Faulkner Award for the Short Novel, The Omaha Prize for the Novel, The Patrick T. Bradshaw Book Award, and The St. Andrews Press/Cairn Short Fiction Award.
“The overarching narrative design is wonderfully effective; you consistently move gracefully (and creepily) from character to character, plotline to plotline; and you have a consistently distinct and compelling omniscient narrative voice.
The short scenes—like in a streaming Netflix or Amazon series—enhance the reader’s sense of a swift pace. Every plotline and character is compelling—no weak narrative threads or people.
And the comedy is delightful! The novel really is a superb blend of horror, mind-bending action, pathos, and comedy.”
Consulting Editor: Timons Esaias
Timons Esaias was shortlisted for the Hugo Award and has received multiple nominations for the Rhysling, Asimov’s Readers Poll, and the British Science Fiction Awards.