Presenting “Wishbones,” a story by Cherie Priest, reprinted from recent Prime Books horror anthology Creatures for Tor.com’s Monster Mash. In “Wishbones,” a horrific composite creature with a long-lived past spooks some locals....
At the Andersonville camp there is a great, stinking dread. The Confederates don’t have enough food of their own, so they sure as hell aren’t feeding their prisoners of war; and the prisoners who aren’t wasting away are dying of diseases faster than they can be replaced. Here, the world smells like bloody shit and coal smoke. It reeks of body odor and piss, and sweat.
South Georgia is nowhere to live by choice, and nowhere to die by starving.
Down in the laundry room with the bloody-wet floors and the ceiling-high stacks of sheets, wraps, and blankets, Vinita Lynch was elbows-deep in a vat full of dirty pillowcases because she’d promised—she’d sworn on her mother’s life—that she’d find a certain windup pocket watch belonging to Private Hugh Morton before the device was plunged into a tub of simmering soapy water and surely destroyed for good.
Coincidentally, about that same time I began watching 
