“Six. Seventeen. Nineteen. Forty-five. Twelve. And…Twenty-three,” he finished, the last of the lotto numbers rolling off his tongue, which was suspiciously dry considering the speckles of spit that now clung to the sneeze guard separating him and the attendant. He cleared his throat before wetting his...
In Milan, under the relentless sun of a summer that seemed intent on sealing the city in an endless embrace of heat, a website appeared almost by chance in the dark labyrinth of the deep web, a digital recess that very few dared to enter....
The following anonymous tip was deposited into the mailbox of the Lincoln Police Station in Lincoln, Nebraska. * * * * * * The ice cream place on the corner of N 48th Street and Vine is a front for human trafficking. It used to be called Soft Serves (and...
To the writers of Retlaw and Drummond’s Almanac, I’d like to thank you for the vestige. Your county map, in its textured patchwork of onion yellow and copper goner green, was among the last to list my fair town by name. Of course, I understand why that...
I suffer from a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, or Visual Release Hallucinations if you want to get more technical. It’s a condition that’s far more common than you might realise — it’s estimated that as many as half of people with gradual loss of vision...
This autumn, a couple of work friends are going deer hunting. It’s been the talk of the office for two months straight. It became the conversational watering hole, and everyone who doesn’t take part is left to dry out in the sun. Hell, even Vicky,...
I was born a burden. My parents said it jokingly, but I could tell it’d always been on their mind. Even as an infant, I had bronchiolitis, hypersensitive skin, and several infections. My mother used to say that I was made as if God was...
I used to do small scale construction work with a private firm out in rural Minnesota. Mostly private jobs. Someone needs a new deck or wants to build a guest house on the edge of their property. This isn’t really the “I want a custom...
I never thought we’d be in danger. That was never a real, conscious thought. After all our adventures to ghost houses, séances, or abandoned asylums, none of us had never actually run into something dangerous. But a couple of years ago, that changed. It was...
