Kate Kastelberg
Bio
-cottage-core meets adventure
-revels in nature, mystery and the fantastical
-avoids baleful gaze of various eldritch terrors
-your Village Witch before it was cool
-under command of cats and owls
-let’s take a Time Machine back to the 90s
Stories (31/0)
- Top Story - February 2024
With You I Melt
The sun breached the clouds early that morning. Yesterday bore wild flurries, uncharacteristic of March. Thick, wet flakes blanketed the ground and stole silence deep into compacted earth, a whole foot deep. The usually sleepy street rang with the cries of children, squealing with delight as they sledded down the one hill. The Creator, not possessing a sled, had worked with singular concentration gracing her young brow, working the snow into spheres.
By Kate Kastelberg 2 months ago in Fiction
The Case of the Missing White Case
To the One Who Lost Me, I am losing power. My insides are empty. I am cold. I cannot call to you, though the trace of your DNA still lines my grooves. Gummy, grimy, dirty against the smooth white. Opaque white, like the delicate curves and sinew of your ears—the thicker cartilage where the light doesn’t shine through—not the thin, translucent flesh that bore pink, pearlescent veins to their scalloped edge like squiggled lines from a cipher to crack. Like spindly seismic cracks in sidewalks lifted by giant oak roots beneath.
By Kate Kastelberg 3 months ago in Fiction
Who Stole the Selkie's Coat?
Take out your monocle and don your tweed, for I have something you must read. Gentle reader, beware, for this is a tale of epic twists and turns. It exists perhaps between the ethereal and the real. You may not believe it. I beseech you, though, to suspend disbelief (and judgment) until the tale is done. If you grant me this, as your humble narrator, I will mayhaps let you choose what ending befits you and the worldly sensibilities you have, no doubt, gathered from your experiences heretofore, before having chanced upon this tale...
By Kate Kastelberg 4 months ago in Criminal
Gladiolus
Preface: nearly two years ago, my partner and I bought a house together. Both of us first time homeowners, we laboriously moved our collective possessions from at least three different locations into our new home. That Spring, though still in the process of unpacking and organizing, I made it a priority to plant many new plants on the property, still getting to know the land. My crisis of identity came from being a new homeowner with the realization that I was now the keeper of many of my dead relatives’ possessions and found myself accumulating even more from aging relatives in real time as soon as the purchase of my new home was discovered. The crux of the crisis was this: I am now the last of my living familial line. When I pass, who will inherit all of this? What does it mean to have a legacy and do we get to choose the legacy we leave behind? The below poem was originally two poems that I then revised to combine into one; I hope it gets at the heart of those questions, as the answers to them are in themselves a living document that is constantly being combined, edited and re-vamped.
By Kate Kastelberg 5 months ago in Poets
