30 Mar Welcome Home
Chapter 1 Eli was startled by the sound of a key in the front door. He had been resting in the upstairs bedroom. He couldn’t sleep anymore and hadn’t been able to do so in weeks. He missed it. He hadn’t left the house in weeks...
27 Mar The Jackdaw
My hands were wet and clammy as I looked through the binoculars (field glasses, my mother used to call them), making the subtly curved view of my house jump and shift as I tried to hold on. It was inside with them, watching TV in...
25 Mar It Had Three Mouths
The night was quiet until we got the call that three men were beating a homeless person to death. Dispatch called two patrol units along with EMS, and when the first deputy got there, they phoned me as the investigator on call. I went to the...
24 Mar Toon Tipping
Every group of friends has a tradition. If you hang around a specific set of people for long enough, in-jokes will sprout from next to nothing. Routines will manifest out of thin air. Sometimes they’re clever; most of the time, they’re obnoxious, pointless, and asinine. Ours was...
23 Mar Never-Ever-Ever
I used to go hiking to clear my mind. It was nothing extraordinary. No backpack, no walking stick, no geo-locator app on my phone - just casual walks through White Leaf park. It wasn’t so much a hobby for me as it was a way to...
22 Mar Local Legend
Leonard Skye was a bit of a local celebrity in the absurdly small town where I grew up. Hunter, survivalist, general “man’s man,” Leonard was both respected and feared. You would never catch him wearing anything other than jeans, a t-shirt, and flannel. The silver ring...
12 Mar Dark Skies Trampoline Park
I first heard the name “Gravity Sphere” uttered at an awards ceremony for my seven-year-old son Joey. The assistant principal, a hefty forty-something woman named Huffner, was rifling through a jar that had small shreds of paper with children’s names on it so she could randomly...
09 Mar Essence
Lee was proud of his first apartment. He would have been more proud had he been able to share it with Alyssa, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. He hoped it would come in time if he was patient. They had been dating since...
07 Mar The Plunge
Wes didn’t care that it was dark. He didn’t care that it was cold. He didn’t care that he was miles from home. He just cared about getting away, about clearing his head. He wanted to be free under the stars for a while. He...
06 Mar A Nightmarish Reunion
Corey was at the bar getting himself another old-fashioned with an Irish stout chaser when he stopped to look towards the back of the bar. He saw someone on his way up from the outside smoking patio, someone that looked familiar, but he couldn’t place...
28 Feb Noseblind
I’ve been walking around for the past five and a half weeks without feeling like I’m truly alive. The positive test showed up first, and the symptoms came to plague me shortly after. Our son was kind enough to agree to stay with us until...
25 Feb Octopus Man
Being a police detective means you see a lot of horrible things. Things you can’t unsee. They haunt your dreams at night, and the images spill over into the daytime. Waking nightmares – ever hear of those? I get them all the time. Pretty soon, every time you...
24 Feb I Came to Earth From Outer Space
Every time I fall asleep, I have the same horrifying nightmare – a flashback of what we went through. In the dream, we’re back on Xangrath again. Everything is just the way it was, and my heart aches for reasons my sleeping mind can’t comprehend. My...
23 Feb The Monster in My Dead Father’s Basement Is Getting Bigger
The couch reeked of cigarette smoke, ashes, and body odor. It was faded yellow like the wallpaper, its springs creaking loudly as I sat down. It smells like him, I thought to myself, surveying my late father’s living room and its precarious stacks of old books...
22 Feb Be Careful Hiring Killers on the Dark Web
There hadn’t been a murder in Franzburg for over five years. Not since old man Weathers killed his wife over a Monopoly match gone sour and a marriage gone even sourer. Up until last week, that was. Now I’ve got three different files sitting on my desk,...
21 Feb The Trees Won’t Let Me Leave
“Let’s go hiking!” she said. “It’ll be fun, babe!” she said. Yeah…yeah, it’s definitely real fuckin’ fun right now… I’m sorry, I gotta…gotta stay calm, right? Okay… okay, let me start again. It was around 10:00 this morning when Selena woke me up with a thing of doughnuts...
17 Feb Odyssey of the Despairing Mind
I believe there are imperceptible forces, energies and intangible things, which, arising from some sub-dimensional source, act on our minds, influence our thoughts, and perhaps even create entirely new thoughts—ideas which we wouldn’t have normally, naturally considered. The human brain largely remains a mystery and is still yet...
16 Feb A Gift of the Undivine
I have only a few things to say, a few terrible events to relate, and then I must go and join my best friend. She is in the other room, struggling against her restraints, crying out wildly, madly, shrieking like a thing inhuman. In many...
15 Feb It Blew (Up) My Mind
The worst thing about trying to stop your brain from re-entering your skull is that, with it being your brain, you can’t exactly resist the commands it issues. You can struggle, dimly, bodily, but in the end, the brain wins out. It gets back into...
14 Feb We Can Put You Back Together
I’m sitting in a bar right now, somewhere in the more southern portions of Missouri; Howell County, I think. I haven’t bothered to ask. The police are on their way, the owner of the bar called them the moment she saw me stumble through the...