“The moving truck is gonna be here in 20 minutes!” I heard my fiancé, Roger, shout from downstairs. “Okay, almost done!” I shouted back. I had been up in the attic packing boxes with the last of our stuff for the last couple of hours, in preparation for our big move. Roger’s job was relocating…
They call her the queen of mischief at King City High School—a title she earned with little effort. No one matched her audacious, rule-breaking nature. Fear held everyone back, for good reason. She didn’t dread getting caught, being exposed, or facing what terrified others. The absence of fear was what pushed Cassidy Greene to the…
Congestion. Ninety minutes. The worst for a while on this busy street for Ted in the capital. And on the way to a job interview. Frustrated wavy lines of groans from city drivers locked in an inescapable traffic jam as exhausts belched out fumes. Despite the immobile lanes, Ted’s thoughts drifted from a simmered impatience…
Read part one here So I thought I’d take some time to go over some of the Abenaki legends in the area. I mentioned some stuff about the Tall Men and Skadegamutc in the last part but this whole place is rife with some truly weird legends. This place is like the Bridgewater Triangle or…
It was early October. Acorns were raining down on the tin roofs and cheap ravaged asphalt shingles of the mobile homes around Lake Junior in Interlachen, Florida, like mother trees were dropping their kids off to make their way in the world. Across the lake the entire sky was illuminated every few seconds as lightning…
My wife had been on me about my weight for a while. Said I needed to start taking my health seriously — “for our children,” whatever that means. I didn’t argue. I just started going to the gym after work. Seemed easier than fighting about it. She was so happy she bought me an Apple…
I’ve been a police officer for a long time, and there are certain things you learn to ignore if you want to sleep at night. This is not one of those things. I’m writing this anonymously because I was involved in a case back in 2019, and despite everything we told the family, despite everything…
Lucy was good at hide-and-seek. Maybe even the best. Other children were always hiding in the most obvious places—a closet, under the car, behind the sofa. But Lucy knew better spots. She hid in the shadows, almost in plain sight, where the seekers’ eyes simply failed to deliver the message to their brains. It was…
Paramedics are incredibly superstitious. It’s surprising how much people will argue with me about this simple fact. “Oh, definitely not. They’re too reasonable, too smart, too calm in a crisis to engage with something as irrational as superstitions.” Some will even fight with me about it, for an absurd amount of time. As if I…
It must be said from the start that Turin or Torino, as it is also called, is a strict city, elegant even for Italian cities, with strict rules regarding architecture, arrangement, street lines and geometry. And anything that deviates has only two options: it is glorified or marginalized. Palazzo Trucchi Levaldigi, is one of those…
Eric awoke with a violent fit of coughs. His lungs squeezed painfully as his throat spasmed, forcing the yellowish phlegm past his lips. It landed in a web glob on his hand. Looking down at it, Eric could see the black specks dotting the thick mass. He took his thumb and rubbed the phlegm between…
“Can you hear that?” The voice was muffled. The music blaring from my headphones drowned out everything around me. If he didn’t tap my shoulder, I wouldn’t have even noticed he was there. Sitting beside me on the bus, was a middle aged man in a hoodie and jeans. There were strange stains blotched into…
My name is Lydia. I’m 30 years old, and I love celebrating Halloween with my best friend, Martha. Martha and I have been best friends ever since we were ten years old. We do everything together, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. You see, when I was seven years old, my…
The driver talked the entire way to the shore, seemingly unable to keep his mouth closed. He blabbered on and on about how shitty the weather was, how hard his life was and, his favorite topic, how weird I am. He said that I’m way too thin, my eyes look weird, my fingers move way…
There is this idea I have always clung to. Most people won’t even consider it. Are our ideas our own, or do they come from somewhere else? Maybe some are our own, but sometimes we pick up a signal from the universe, a forgotten memory locked in time. I have been creating the rituals for…
I found it in the back corner of a thrift store, hidden beneath a pile of broken jewelry. It was an old, tarnished mood ring with a thick, silver band that looked too big for any normal finger. The stone in the center had a dull, cloudy hue, but something about it caught my eye….
Heather found herself in bed, unable to move a muscle—trying her hardest to shift her arm and wake her husband sleeping next to her, but to no avail. She was in sleep paralysis—a phenomenon she’d read about but never experienced until then. It frightened her to lie there helpless, but she reassured herself that it…
An old truck came wailing through the autumn. The truck had once been white, but years in the rough had degraded the thing into an ugly gradient of browns. Now on the first asphalt in many long miles, the truck serpentined through the cursive country roads of some rolling land dotted by farms. Jud was…
Despite popular belief in the western hemisphere. Access to indoor plumbing is a luxury few in the total population of the world have. In America, it is considered to be the standard, even for the poorest to have indoor plumbing. However, there are places, where even in the wealthiest country on earth, it is a…
It all began with the painting. My mom is an artist—she has a very creative style, one that often leaves me speechless, but not always in a good way. She’s into abstract art, and some of her pieces are a little… unsettling. Most of the time, I can just ignore them. But this one—this one…
The Forensic Video Analysis contract was completely standard but for two things Rayna had never seen before: A redaction where the company’s title usually went, and a personal note from a boss she had only met over video call a handful of times. Tell me if they’re like what the news says. If they’ll let…
Three weeks ago, my roommate handed me his phone and asked, “Is this you?” It was some kind of prank video from one of those YouTube channels that film people without their permission and publish it to get views. I barely got past the first five seconds of the video, but I didn’t care about…
A lot of people remember that movie. The one with Mike Myers playing as Dr. Seuss’s most famous character. The Cat in the Hat. It was one of those films you watched once as a kid, and then instantly forgot about the next day. Then, the memory of it creeps up on you several years…
“The penguins are coming.” An old man rocks in his chair and takes a drag of his cigarette. “What?” “The penguins are coming,” The old man repeats. “What penguins? We live in Missouri.” The other gentleman, Gerald, shrugs as he leans against a supporting beam of the porch. “Penguins going to be at the zoo?”…