Let the Right One In: Manifesting Your Soulmate

By Chris Daley

When compiling a list of qualities desired in a soulmate, people rarely include the crucial traits that you’d want in a partner when it truly is “for worse.” I will not make that mistake. I need someone who:

1. Can outrun zombies while carrying me piggy-back style after I’ve been injured but not bitten.
2. Believes me when I say our child’s imaginary friend is really the ghost of someone murdered in our home.
3. Does not think trying to film supernatural happenings in an abandoned building as part of a reality show is an effective way to make it in Hollywood.
4. Turns me immediately once he becomes a vampire so that I will never doubt he wants to spend eternity together.
5. Is able to fashion weapons from nature and found implements, whether we are in the desert where our car has broken down unexpectedly and/or an eerie forest where we are camping.
6. Will pay whatever it costs to fly in the best exorcist from Rome when I am possessed by the devil.
7. Understands real estate well enough to know that a beautiful Victorian in a neighborhood with good schools on the market for more than six months is absolutely haunted.
8. Fluent in spells and several alien languages.
9. Able to withstand more torture than several other strangers randomly captured and held in a basement.
10. Knows me so well that he will instantaneously recognize when my body has been snatched.

Chris Daley works as Lecturer in Writing and Library Communication Coordinator at the California Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, The Collagist, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, among other venues. She received a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center with a dissertation on Los Angeles literature and alternative religion. She can be found on social media at @escapegrace and at chrisdaley.com.

Why we accepted this piece: This piece is bursting with personality and voice. The editors frequently lament the lack of basic logic in supernatural/paranormal media, so this piece struck a chord with us. We loved the hilarious concept and execution.