“Daddy, why is mommy so cold?” She was dead. Maurice knew that much, but why was she so cold? His father, a stout man named Gregory, was silent. Everyone knows we die. Not even children deny it. Yet knowing a fact and believing it are different....
I have been doing this for many years. Sure I have changed schools a couple of times, had to even move states to help with my wife’s elderly parents. But I have always viewed the kids on my bus as an extension of my family. At the...
James was an eight-year-old boy with the heart of a dog and the energy of a hummingbird. His mother died when he was only five, so he lived with his grandmother, Babcia. They were very poor: their house was a tiny, dilapidated thing, with a...
The boy hated the nights when his big brother snuck out. He would stare at the empty bed in the bedroom they shared, under the large open window in the eave. Through there, every now and again, he could hear the unmistakable metal thuds of...
I keep hearing them crackling; I can’t see them, but I hear them. At first, I thought it was just a distant wolf howling or my imagination playing up, but now I’m certain that they’re here — somewhere amid the trees — maybe watching me,...
“Do not go outside! Ignore all cries for help, no matter how human they sound!” shouted Alex’s dad. He pulled the cellar door over and paused to look back. “And lock this door behind me.” The door slammed shut. Alex locked it, walked down the stairs...
Tom Strand had to pee. Sixty-four ounces of gas station root beer sloshed in his gut, disrupting the constant thoughts of his mother. The problem was Tom hadn’t seen a rest stop for nearly an hour, and dusk was beginning to settle over the Louisiana...
From the moment she learned to walk, little Myrtle dreamed of becoming a tap dancer. She would totter through the house, her chubby bare feet slapping arrhythmically on the hardwood, her squeaky voice calling out “Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta!” like tap shoes on a stage. When her second-grade teacher...
We called her Spacegirl. Her real name was Megan Daniels, but nobody actually called her that. She’d been Spacegirl since Grade 2. She was the kind of kid who stuck out in the crowd with her long red hair, ghostly pale skin and Coke bottle glasses....
Some said it was the moon’s glow that would hit the aged broken glass of the church’s upper lofts on certain nights. Others claimed it was merely their imagination...
The Mandela Effect. That phrase never meant anything to me. Spooky, I guess, but it wasn’t something I thought about for more than five minutes. I mean, honestly, until college, I didn’t even know what it was. I’m not one for conspiracy theories or ghost...
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...
Walter was cool. Walter was tough. Walter was 13 years old. As the only teen on his block all the other kids that lived on Revenant Falls Lane were in awe of Walter. They were especially ravenous for the kinds of stories he could tell them that his...
Being the divorced father of a kid can be a challenging and rewarding job all on its own. Especially when you’re running your own major business. I’ll be honest, I never wanted to have kids in the first place, and the whole married thing was...
“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...
My name is Mortimer Lipschitz. I know the name itself suggests otherwise, but I shit you not. That's really my name. I used to wish it wasn't. On all that's holy, I wished it wasn't. But I suppose that the name was never really the...
The spring flu was been going around the school like usual, but some people were sicker than normal. They didn’t just have fever and headache – their faces were blotchy, their eyes bulged, and they all wheezed like they’d just run up 10 flights of...
Jake Thomasson pulled the sleeve of his sweatshirt down, covering his hand, and wiped away the condensation from the window. It was the third time he had done this in the past ten minutes, but he didn’t want to miss seeing if any cars drove...
The anniversary of Layne’s death wasn’t for another three days, but when “Cochise” came on the radio as I approached that curve, I took it as a sign. Layne’s favorite song. I pressed the gas and shifted gears as Chris Cornell began to wail. The...
