Part I  I work nights at our old middle school. It’s a small place—two floors, one gym, a cafeteria that still smells vaguely like canned ...

Part I  The tires hissed over gravel as Alexis Kidd turned off the county road and followed a winding lane that sloped toward the lake ...

There was a time when I could still tell the difference between work and distraction. Now, they’re the same thing. Lines of code, endless and ...

I hated John Sweeney from my first breath. That might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The feud began in my grandfather’s ...

Looking for a new beginning, Cameron takes a high-paying job at a pharmaceutical plant with a lot of secrets—and even more red tape. But when ...

My hometown of Mildensboro is shrinking. Cherie, my wife, was the first to call it. One night on our back porch over a beer she ...

When art teacher Seth Kline moves into an old farmhouse with his five-year-old daughter, Lila, he hopes the light-filled windows will help them heal after ...

There’s a lotta darkness in this world. That’s a lowercase ‘d’ dark, mind ya. There’s also the capital ‘D’ kind, but that’s another kinda thing ...

I don’t post here often, and when I do, it’s usually dumb stuff—neighbor drama, weird noises in the old building, that kind of thing. This ...

In a world reduced to rubble, where the living cling to routine just to survive, Joseph Emerick finds that his greatest enemy isn’t the wasteland ...

“Farewell, happy fields, where Joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors, hail!” — John Milton, Paradise Lost Standing under the glow of a flickering streetlight, John Avery’s ...

The…the dark.  God, so dark. Can’t feel, can’t think, can’t… I’m floating in the black.  No, not floating.  There’s something under my feet.  My God, there’s ...