As soon as my Master Octavius let me outside, I felt the breeze of the wind touch my whiskers. I cared for him, and the rest of his family as if they were my blood mother who I unfortunately never met, or at least I don’t remember her face. She […]
My Uncle David was an eccentric man. That’s not code to say he was some kind of deviant. In fact, he was a pleasant and caring man for most of his life. However, he was also a sensitive soul and not much of a people person. David never got married
Winter is a brutal child of mother nature. It acts like a tyrant as it lays siege all over the land, claiming multiple casualties in its wake. That’s why many animals run in fear for their lives. They will burrow underneath the earth and sleep until the cold has left,
The Spider and the Orange Read More »
Below the peaks of the Catskill Mountains you will occasionally find an ancient and gnarled apple tree. Such a tree is a reliable landmark; signaling that an early American farmhouse sits, or once sat, nearby. Sometimes only a single shoot of the old tree remains, yet the ancient life persists
Everybody’s got a story. I don’t believe in ghosts but if you ever asked me if I’d been somewhere haunted, this is the story I’d tell. Down the road I lived on as a kid, there was an old dilapidated house. It was small and the yard was always overgrown
It’s hard for them, you know. For the animals. The buildup, the push. The ever-expanding girth and guts of the city gushing, contorting, bursting, spilling outwards. More and more, they lose themselves. Disappear in the chaos. Slip into the cracks. Good thing I wasn’t an animal. Instead I decided to
I have been a hunter since a very young age. A wanderer of the silent woods, a stalker of the croaking marshes, a drifter of the sighing deserts. My father was a hunter as was his father. I would say it runs in our blood, but I think it runs
I used to look out the rusted iron bars of my window and dream about being a bird. The chain that shackled me to my bed was just long enough to reach the windowsill, and so every night after my father would visit my room I would lie awake and
A Talking Crow Taught Me to Fly Read More »
At first, I didn’t think anything of it. My neighbor would stop to chat with me, leash in hand, and I would catch glimpses of the metal slider dangling from its belly. I assumed it was wearing a piece of pet clothing, or that perhaps it was the byproduct of
My Neighbor’s Dog Has a Zipper Read More »
There I was, scratching my ninth scratch-off ticket in a row at my local convenience store. My eyes widened with hope, but also sank in with the anticipation of disappointment. The other eight representations of my gambling fuel rested in pieces inside the store’s waste bin. Revealing each number using
The Cat With Human Teeth Read More »
3:30 p.m., 1-September: One three-person party entered the Rio Grande National Forest in Hinsdale County, Colorado. They consisted of Trevor Nyson (37 years old) and Matilda Nyson (33 years old), a married couple, and Benny Nyson (8 years old), their only son. 5:31 p.m., 1-September: Trevor and Matilda, highly distraught,
Monster Hunting and Other Inadvisable Behavior Read More »
When I joined the case at 47 County Street, I didn’t know what to expect. As a social worker, I see all kinds of screwed up things from child abuse, to children abusing their parents. Yet, when I got the reports from that household, I wasn’t expecting much. The initial
A Child Like No Other Read More »
Do you ever just sit and watch your sleeping dog? Observe as their little feet run along the ground, just waving halfway in the air as they let out innocent half-gruntled barks. Have you ever just wondered what’s going on inside their sleeping minds, what they’re dreaming about? Maybe it’s
My Dog Dreams About My Death Read More »
I’m going to tell you about a town—a town you should never go to. For your protection, I won’t tell you the name or location. But I’ll tell you this: if you ever think you might be in this town, get the hell out of there and don’t look back.
“Christ,” I muttered to myself, as the first flakes of snow started to fall. They gathered in fuzzy clumps over the windshield before my wipers cleared them away. I’d been waiting for fifteen — no, twenty minutes now — in my sister’s driveway. Had I chosen to wait inside with
It Wasn’t a Reindeer Read More »
This is a story about an old Welsh witch. It was All Hallows’ Day, 1 November 1974, when the people of my village awoke to find that my house had burnt down. My parents’ charred bodies were found and identified, but the investigators were unable to find and identify my
Part I Six years ago, if you’d asked me about the supernatural, I would have told you that it was a pretty entertaining show I’d seen on TV but none of that was or could be true. I know there are plenty of skeptics out there, that’s fair – witches,
A Summer of Wolves Read More »
Moving day. A chance to start fresh in a new place. New opportunities, new community, new home. Home. Not just a house. To Eric Sherman, this was a place he could finally call home. No ex-wives to hound him for alimony. No disapproving parents to question his absence of faith
I hate birds. I’ve hated birds ever since I was forced to go to my grandmother Vera’s home, who lived isolated in her inherited Victorian mansion. She let most of her estate fall away to ivy and rot, but not the 160-year-old astronomy room- that room was precious to her,
As the sun sank low in the evening sky, the residents of Bellmawr were still reeling from the horrors of the night before. Nearly fifteen hours after all hell broke loose at the intersection of Benigno Boulevard and Creek Road, everyone was still asking the same question: who started the
I had always loved this one cemetery ever since I was a little girl. Not only were the grounds beautiful, but the cemetery itself was absolutely massive. I always imagined it as a fantasy world, or a gateway to a totally different dimension where the souls of the departed could
Would You Like to Feed the Birds? Read More »
Cryptozoology has always been a minor interest of mine. I say minor because it was something I’d only enjoyed casually: a few internet articles here and there, scrolling through a couple of pages on a Tumblr blog dedicated to it, maybe watching one of those Bigfoot documentaries. You know, that
I can’t stand to be back here. This tiny, rural town I grew up in, it makes my skin crawl to see everything around me. I’m well into middle-age now, but it’s like this town has been frozen in time since I was a teenager. And the older I get,
The Wolves of These Frozen Woods Read More »
In the heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled by backwoods blacks and Cajuns—that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century—stands a strange, enormous ruin.
