“My god, boys… will you just stop?!? If you keep messing around you’re going to miss your bus and I can’t afford to be late today.” My spirits far too defeated to attain the authoritative tone needed for the situation. Stewie and Collin are still...
I bought an older house, with no basement. All I thought at the time was that I would own my own place, at long last; I didn’t think how inconvenient it would be to have just a simple crawlspace. It doesn’t go all the way...
In the room over his London shop, Darke methodically counted the copper, silver and most especially the gold coins that had poured in during the day. The feel of the cold and beautiful metal in his long, wispy fingers was always comforting to him. The...
I opened the back door to my house, without bothering to put shoes on, and walked towards the line of trees that stood at the entrance to the forest. It was summer and the warm breeze carried with it the smell of nature, thick and...
I used to think of Hell as a faraway place. For those of you out there who still hold that belief, this piece of my life is for you. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this; I’m honestly not sure. My therapist says writing about our...
Edward Harker waited in his office until the financial management firm of Harker, Parks & Associates was empty, and then took the elevator to the parking garage beneath the Manhattan skyscraper. He found his Lincoln Navigator and started it up for the first time in...
It was on the third day of the stench permeating the house that we decided to call the landlord. In the last month since we had moved in, there had been a lot of creaking and groaning from underneath the house. It was built sometime...
My name is Henry Himura. I work for a large law firm situated near downtown Los Angeles. We’ve handled some of the biggest, most controversial cases in the last two decades and have built quite a name for ourselves. I am using a pseudonym, because,...
They’ve called me a shit-magnet since I was a kid. It’s only an expression, sure, but I think it might also be a real thing. If a smile can attract smiles sure as a corpse can attract flies, there’s no reason a guy like me...
“Come on, Jim, you know it’s going to suck.” I didn’t nod, though I wanted to. Mark was right, as usual. Most of camp had sucked, to be honest. Tom, on the other hand, tried once more to be the voice of reason, even as he tugged...
As a freelance convention planner, I stay at many hotels over the course of a year. I spend about a week per trip in an all-expenses-paid suite of my choosing, doing nothing but studying the location and interviewing the staff on hand to get a...
Need a crime scene clean-up? How about a crime scene clean-up up in a hoarder’s house? Well, free-market problems get free-market solutions. It only makes sense I ended up with Cesar. I guess you could call me the President and Cesar the VP but those are...
There it was. A fragment of the universe, hurtling through the cosmos. And there I was, gazing up from the comfort of a farmhouse rooftop, built by my father’s hands smack dab in the middle of nowhere. In all the years we lived out there...
All our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. (‘Macbeth’: Act 5, scene 5) With turned, frozen earth stinking sharp on his big coat and gritting black under his fingernails, he checked the side lane was empty before clinking the allotment gate shut behind him....
“Holy shit! Is that what I think it is?” Brandon’s eyes widened into saucers and, despite being filled with an unabated rage towards his older brother just a few hours ago, Michael couldn’t help but smile and nod at the expected reaction. Even with everything...
As a code enforcement officer, I’m not well-liked by the citizens of Winter Garden, Florida. Most of the time people tend to get upset when you tell them something about their property violates the standards of the City. I’ve only been doing this job about...
There was nothing strange about Amber. She wasn’t too tall or too short. She was of average height and weight. She wasn’t ugly but she wasn’t pretty either and her grades, although passing, were never top marks. She lived in an average house, with an...
Roxy’s Lounge. It was the sort of dimly-lit, mid-century styled bar that was too classy for me by half. In the real world, it’s the kind of place I’d have gone to get shit-faced on overpriced cocktails at a Game Developer’s Conference after-party. But that was...
The house sat empty at the top of the hill. Its security lights were a beacon in the night, like a lighthouse alone in the mist, warning ships away from the kiss of sharp shores. The closest neighbor was further away than a man could...
I left the university campus behind to do fieldwork in the Deep South. I was studying folk songs from southern states that had neither a time or place of origin nor a known composer. Those old songs that just seem to rise out of cultural...
