When my buddy Tony told me the winter edition of Full Bleed was in the works and they were taking art submissions, I knew exactly what I wanted to contribute: The Gate.

Full Bleed Zine is a horror zine based in Chicago. Its contents burst forth with musings about films, new and old, slasher and monster, aliens and kaiju. Have you seen Alien Romulus? You should! Editors Ed and Tony gave the newest addition to the Alien-iverse two thumbs up. Like heavy metal? Then check out the best upcoming shows around Chicago and coolest recent releases. Are you a book worm? Then the section on horror fiction is just for you!

So, The Gate.

Carl Sagan once said we are made of "star stuff", and that truth is something that fuels my spirit. The Gate is a window into this very eternity, a cosmic fate which we are all destined for.

Adorned with bird motifs and hewn into a meteoric rock face, this masonic archway transports one from the Earthly, terrestrial, and famililar to the Heavenly, celestial, unknown. In death, our bodies return to the earth below us. In billions of years from now, an impossibly vast expanse of time, we will become not only the trees and birds and other skittering things which live on our rock but also a part of the Sun, a single star of a multitude which stretch across the sky above. In time, the matter which makes up our bodies will become new stars and planets, our distant yet inevitable fate. And if we're lucky, we'll become new life elsewhere.

Have you ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon? I visited it for the first time in 2023, and that feeling of awe which sweeps over you as you realize how small you are in the face of these enormous desert chasms is humbling, clarifying, edifying. When the James Webb Space Telescope finally began operation back in 2022, its images stunned me in that same way, reigniting my childhood passion for astronomy. The vast, ancient forms and sweeping movements it captures are hundreds and millions of lightyears away, testaments in primordial light of colossal, inconceivable structures.

This is our destiny—to become the stars once again. True cosmic horror.