All of my life, I’ve heard people say we are heading into a new utopian age of progressive enlightenment, and while I really wanted to believe that to be true, with the things I have seen going on with the world, I’ve had to remain...
It was my fifth day in Gloaming, Nevada – an unincorporated township skirted on all sides by scorched barrenness. I had never been this far west before, and so the craggy, acacia-dotted desert was dazzling to my senses. I remember wishing that I could extend...
Let me just get the obvious out of the way first; yes, I’ve actually been to the future. No, don’t ask me about the Pandemic, or the Climate Crisis, or the next election, or next week’s lotto jackpot. I’ve been to the far future, long...
How much do we know about our grandparents? Like, I mean how much do we really know about them? It can be easy to forget that your old, withering and often wise family members had lives long before we were alive. They were kids with...
My town is in one of the northwestern states, which, if you know anything about the northeast, means snow like...
Spring and summer are Daddy’s favorite seasons. He loves the smell of freshly-mown lawns, the stroke of sunbeams on his face, the songs of crickets at night, and the painterly bloom of plants...
Hiking has always been a hobby of mine. Every year I try to find new trails, seemingly untouched by man. I’ll travel across the globe in search of the best, most scenic views you can imagine. Bangladesh, Fiji, and the alpines are some of the...
Emery let out an aching groan as she slowly ebbed back into consciousness. Squinting in the near-total darkness and coughing up dust, she scrambled to get some sense of where she was and what had happened. The sharp, uneven edges of shattered bricks and splintered...
I was just fifteen years old when I learned monsters were real. That day, a Tuesday, I recall, I was a little later than usual coming home from school, on account of joining the Science Club. I’d just recently watched Donnie Darko for the first time,...
When you’re bad, you get thrown in jail. When you’re really bad, you get sent to prison. When you’re unspeakably bad, you get sent to maximum security and they throw away the key. When you’re the devil incarnate, well, nobody really knows what happens to you. Sometimes it’s...
I received the following email from Stewart, an old friend I haven't spoken to in years. At first I thought some spammer had gotten a hold of his address book. Within a few sentences, however, I knew it was written by Stewart himself. A long...
It was late when I saw the creature, running flat out down the middle of a country highway somewhere up in the Alleghenies. I had gotten off the interstate. Hitchhiking on the four lanes was illegal. Last thing I needed was to get myself picked...
I saw something back in 1990 that has haunted me ever since. We were a Boy Scout troop of sixteen boys between the ages of 13 and 17, going on a two-day hike along a trail that ran sixty miles from Richmond to Marion in Indiana....
I was always told not to look out a window at night, because you might not like what’s looking back at you. They call this an “old wives’ tale” or something like that, but for me, it was just a bunch of silly crap, so...
My family lived in Vermont for a number of years, in a small town called Northfield, south of Montpelier. There’s a local legend in Northfield, of a thing known as the Pigman. The story has multiple versions, as most do, but there are some parts that...
When you’re a teenager, everything is unfair. You can’t do this, you can’t go out, TV has to be off, and people just don’t understand how tough life can get. My parents always say I have no idea what “tough” is. But I think I do...
I remember each dream quite vividly. They were the kind you have where everything seems so real that when you wake up, you struggle to differentiate between the waking world and the dream world. The first night, I woke up and the sun had already risen....
You think good and evil don’t exist? That ain’t true. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve even seen the Devil. Our family was small; just my parents, my older brother Jacob, and me. Ma always doted on me, being the baby and all, much...
Jessie wondered if she and her brother would have more in common if they had been identical twins. The differences didn’t surface unless you spent several days watching them. Minus the lack of identical faces, they seemed to have the same bond that every other pair...
It is the night of Bacchanalia, and we are heading to the celebration. The woods are dense, but the path has been clearly marked with torches leading to the glade. We arrive – I, my wife, and our four children – dressed gaily in warm...
