Just a little over a week ago, I was awoken at seven in the morning by a startling phone call from my mother. She informed me that her sister had just passed away in the hospital. For three years my aunt was battling leukemia to...
“It’s just a mirror”, that phrase echoed in Elisa Smith’s mind every time her gaze fell on the blackened glass hanging in the long hallway of her grandparents’ house. The mirror was nearly her height, its opaque surface barely reflecting the outlines of the room,...
“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...
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...
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...
ONE Unlike most psychiatrists, Fiszman didn’t have a sofa or a chaise longue in his office. Nor did he have a bookshelf. Nor were there any sharp objects on his desk like pens or paperclips. He didn’t wear a tie, either, or shoelaces. In fact, anything...
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...
Part I The night the boys broke into the Sanctuary, the Covenant bells had barely stopped ringing. Sherman Cantrell sat through the last of the evening prayers with his head bowed and his chest aching, listening to Elder Lamont Havel drone through the closing litany. The old...
Part I Sara didn’t realize how much of the town was gone until she hit Main Street and found more plywood than glass. The old diner was a vape shop now. The hardware store her mother used to drag her through on Saturdays stood empty, windows painted...
Part I Dana Quill first heard the name in a voicemail that cut out halfway through. “The Pit,” the caller said, his voice low and ragged. “They’re not doing cage fights down there. They’re… growing things. If you want a story, this is it. But don’t come...
Part I Shawna Coleman rode home from her own wedding with the bouquet in her lap like contraband. The car’s interior still smelled faintly of hair spray and champagne. A few stray grains of rice clung to the fabric of her dress. Drew drove one-handed, his tie...
Part I Dr. Meredith Rowan preferred to schedule new patients at the start of the week, when her mind felt the cleanest. Mondays had a crispness to them, a sense that the slate had been rinsed overnight. By Thursday, the edges often blurred. Trauma work could...
Part I Stephen Hampton didn’t expect to find himself back in uniform, even part-time, but his phone began vibrating on the kitchen counter just after six in the morning. He recognized the number—Patricia Simmons rarely called him outside of holidays or bad news—and answered before the...
Annette Grayson liked the part of the day when everything finally went quiet. The last of her third graders had been collected, the last forgotten lunchbox reclaimed. She’d stacked math workbooks, wiped stray marker streaks off desks, and turned off the humming fluorescence in her classroom...
Part I Christian Ward had driven into strange towns before, but Hollow Creek greeted him with a kind of quiet that suggested the place was thinking. The highway wound through the Appalachian foothills in a series of broad, predictable curves until the last stretch, where the...
It was supposed to be the summer that finally gave him a chance at feeling normal. In 1984, sixteen-year-old Wyatt is sent to Camp Chattahoochee—an escape from the state home, from cruelty, from the ghosts of the family who abandoned him. Instead, he finds first...
Samantha Barkley has spent years fighting to keep her home bakery—and her family—from collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations. When a vindictive client destroys her reputation overnight, Sam finds herself desperate, exhausted, and cracking under pressure. Then a stranger tells her about someone called...
