Jason looked in the bathroom mirror, adjusted the knot of his necktie, and heard laughter. The sound startled him. How could there be laughter when he was al...

High on a hill overlooking Manchester, dark figures move through the heather. Slim bodies bending in the low light. Groups of them, fanning out across the wh...

Most people fear the darkness but we have learned to dread the light. Our village, tucked away in the mountains on the edge of the forest, has just six hours...

(TW: graphic violence and mentions of rape) It was late at night. Perhaps just a stroke after midnight. A pitch-black sky descended where all the owls and ot...

(TW: drug use and graphic violence) It was a Thursday. A hard worked, dull Thursday, when the nightmares came back. I was on the couch watching a new season ...

“They’re so strange,” I said to myself, taking a long drag from my cigarette. I watched the Wilkinsons in their front yard and thumbed mindlessly through my ...

Cash Money was a skull. This skull didn’t know where its body was, nor could it even ask. That name was only available to its undeserved memory because a you...

With dirt still under her nails and smudging the knees of her jeans, Gwen wasn’t feeling like her best self next to the radiant corpse before her. Nicky’s cu...

Life is a loop that you can’t escape. That’s what Daddy says, staring across the foggy sea. I rest my chin on the safety rail and reach for my parent’s hands...

Once, upon coming of age, the son of a land-owning man asked to receive his inheritance early. He understood that, per tradition, he was not to receive this ...

She stuck out her thumb, putting on her biggest smile. Her mother would not approve. Janeen got the semi-truck to stop for her. “Where you headed?” Asked the...

They were watching a re-run of The Lucille Ball Show. “Be there in a jiffy!” Lucy said into the telephone. “How long, exactly, is a jiffy?” asked the Time Tr...

I tucked three books under my shirt as I got ready to leave. The owner was in the backroom and he wouldn’t miss a few books, besides he barely paid me anythi...

We haven’t always been like this, my sisters and I. Gnarled creatures wailing tunes of melancholy and death, waiting for the one who got away. Not too long a...

It was a sad day for Ivor Williams. A sad day for the Cuckoo. It was the first day of the last week that the Cuckoo would make its run. The Cuckoo was the la...

Mary hadn’t felt like this in a long time. By a long time, I mean ever. Not once had she felt this way. It was an unremarkable night. She thrust off her duve...

In his mouth was the scent of lilies, lilies like in Gethsemane. (and the redbud tree, the redbud tree where you... ) Sulfur overcame his senses, his eyes an...

“Just a few more steps…” Florian guided the elderly Mrs Margaret down the stairs, her legs rattling like a gate in a storm. As she reached the pavement, Flor...

The insects and animals all met at the pond before sunrise on a Saturday morning in late July. They lived in the fields surrounding the outside amphitheater ...

Helen stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, her face framed between two vodka bottles, and then she looked at the group of men spilling out ...