Ugh, my head. I know bad hangovers. I know hangovers so bad, no cold shower or energy drink can fix them. I know what taking a punch feels like. I was seventeen when my coach thought me ready to step into the ring. Half an hour later,...
“And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” – Book of Revelation 6:8 “Alert: traffic ahead. Estimated travel time has increased by 15 minutes.” Simon sighed and drummed his fingers on his steering wheel....
The days all started with the briefing room—a wall-to-wall palette of aged pastels and stark, hospital grayness. In the center of our little room, an oval-shaped table dominated the space with every seat filled with a tired nurse. From one of the windows, a bar of morning...
I moved to a new town about a year ago. I was offered a job and was at a point in my life where I felt restless and eager all at once. A new job in a new town was exactly what I had been...
Two days ago, I drove up to northern Vermont to do a little hiking. I needed to get away from it all: my job, social responsibilities, the world. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone all weekend, so I picked a ten-mile trail...
I awake in the darkness, and where I might have otherwise thought myself blind, there is a thin shaft of light piercing the solid curtain of black around me. The light is reflected through a rounded patch of glass above my head, matched with the...
“What shall I love if not the enigma?” ―Giorgio de Chirico Part One The yellowed scrap might once have been printer paper, the cheap kind you pay five dollars for in some overly bright big-box palace of soulless depravity. I halted, stooped, and plucked it from the ground. Where...
I was the only one home when my father called me in for his deathbed confession. He wasn’t very old in the grand scheme of things, only fifty-eight, but after a violent mugging that took place about twenty years ago, his physical health hadn’t always been...
Tarmac turns to dirt, and the van bounces across uneven ground, causing my pen to roll off the passenger seat and the hanging cross to swing violently from side to side. There he is, walking straight towards me, about a hundred yards head, swaying his...
I should have taken more notice of the graffiti when I arrived at the Highbrooks. But the sad fact is that the strange scribblings on the complex were the least of my worries here. Traveling alone is never something I would recommend when you are in an...
I was 17 when I died. Okay, I’m lying. I was 46. But I was 17 at heart. I was living like I was 17. I was still at home with my mother, still living in my room that I had since I was born...
Gabriel Larson walked up to Colby Pittman on the playground at recess and kicked him square in the nuts. The heavyset, bug-eyed redhead crumpled to the ground. Then Gabriel kicked him in the stomach with the force of a raging bull. Nobody stopped him. Everyone...
First, Grant Bateman found out that he had lost his job. He showed up to work and was told to clear out his desk. When he got home, he found his wife in a flurry of activity that looked a lot like packing her things. She...
“Death by electrocution or hanging?” Ethan asks Garret killing time as we wait in line for the newest ride at the amusement park. “Boys…seriously. We are in the happiest place on earth, can’t you find something better to discuss?” I glance over at my husband Zack,...
If anyone ever asked me to name the best three people I know, Russell Allison would be the first name out of my mouth. We’ve been friends since high school, and in the twenty years since, I’ve never had any reason to doubt his honesty,...
When I was thirteen, I abandoned my best friend. It wasn’t intentional, not really. I’d been the one that had been sure of what we had to do—telling our parents, convincing them to tell the police, and promising Virginia what no matter what, when it came...
He makes the walk from living room to bedroom as if approaching the scene of an accident, as loath to see what waits in the bed as he’d be to discover a mangled body in a smoking vehicle. The bulges in the sheets are abstract...
When I drive, pell-mell, to the hospital for the birth of our first child, I never expect we’ll be leaving without the baby. I certainly never anticipate making the trip home with a doll buckled into the infant carrier, all glass eyes and vinyl limbs. ...
A layperson might have found it off-putting, but to Dr. Ian Wessner, the sound was comforting, nostalgic. It was like something from a Star Wars movie; a combination of R2-D2 passing on some critical message and the Millennium Falcon readying for takeoff. Even a regenerative...
Fact: according to the Insurance Information Institute, there is a one in one hundred and sixteen chance that you, taking your car out for a drive, will crash into a deer. Those odds increase drastically during the fall and winter months, during the white-tailed deer’s...
