”What scares you?” Josh asked looking around the table. All other conversations stopped and the attention focused on him. He sat up a little straighter and grinned; he knew he had the floor. They sat outside the bar at one of the tables by the street, so they could smoke and enjoy the setting sun….
You get on the bus at around 11 PM. Finally. Later than you’d like. Much, much later. But at least, tired as you are, you’re finally on, headed home for the evening. You hadn’t expected the group meeting for your final project to drag on for so long, but your group got distracted and started…
Winter pounded on the door and walls around the wooden shack the men had found and hunkered down in. The small military force was at their wit’s and body’s ends; they were exhausted, soaking wet, and low on munitions, rations, and morale. Their survival was based on how much body heat the man next to…
Back in Fifteen Minutes By Christopher Haynes I got the call from Michael Corso just after seven. I was sitting down to watch the next DVD in my Lost: Season Two box set. Fall was blowin’ in and I was using all my non-working, waking hours trying to watch all the episodes because I just…
The darkness is insurmountable here. The air reeks of saltwater, decaying fish, and other human stenches that I cannot even begin to imagine even if I felt the desire to. An unearthly black fog has settled over the city, as it does every night, and I yearn for a daylight that feels as though it…
I was driving out to the desert. The panorama of distant rock, endless sand, and occasional cactus slowly blurring in my peripheral vision. Sparse cloud cover traversed the sky overhead, providing brief interludes of shade over deceptively large patches of the arid wasteland. I found my exit, an unremarkable dirt path most motorists would overlook….
The native crouched over the dying fire pit, he was making circle with the skulls. The smell of the jungle was overpowering, and he could he the distinct yipping of Jackals in the distance. The painted tribesman muttered unintelligible words in an unknown tongue hovering over the circle in the flickering firelight. His eyes snapped…
The Bay of Kola, off Murmansk, is a graveyard for old Soviet submarines, which spill nuclear waste out into the Barents Sea. Many a Western explorer has braved the subzero temperatures and biting tainted winds, but few have lived to tell the tale. The locals of Murmansk say that sometimes, when the wind is high…
Andrew Sullivan was a wealthy man with his wife and his son before he made his billions from founding internet companies. His companies survived the crash that took out his inexperienced competitors and thrived in the vacuum they created. Time passed and Andrew and his family were happy. His son was growing up into a…
This is part two of the Those Fine Young Gentleman series. Cavity.jpeg A further update on those fine young gentleman. This OS is, well, OK let me say it like this. If I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my own network security I would say someone else was in control of it. I’ve only…
Stories are often wrought in the darkness, the immeasurable sea of the unknown. Man becomes irreversibly convinced that here lies his demise, here lies his doom and his defeat. Such is his nature that he rarely pauses to consider the other, the light, the known world. It is not in the night that this story…
The snow rests pale on the naked metal of the shacks around me. The pastel paint stripped away in ugly patches, the rusted iron underneath leers orangish-red at my intrusion – like a thousand fiery eyes set in the suffocating whiteness that is all around me. There is no one here in this deserted little…
Some urban legends have a way of weaving themselves into communities like a sparkling accent. When I was a substantially younger man, our favorite local tale was the Grapevine Angel story. A crumbling and weathered concrete angel stood vigil in Grapevine Cemetary over the grave of someone whose name had long worn away from the…
Bitter cold was nothing new for Northern Alberta, especially not for January, and the cacophony of wind that tore through the woodlands was nothing if not wholly familiar and almost comforting to the one that huddled in the tree line, obliterated from vision by the pitch of night and the swaying arm of evergreen trees….
Okay, I know I had an announcement here about how this gallery functions, but apparently that part of the draft got eaten before it published. Thanks, WordPress. Love you too. Anyhow, for those of you who can’t figure it out without help – when you click an image, it takes you to that image’s page….
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 or had children. He lived…
Black Cab By Christopher Haynes When Shawn called me to hang, I still had no interest in eating—the wounds were still fresh in my mind like the first car accident you had or getting fired from a job when you knew it was not your fault. Amanda had taken what was hers, pulled everything out…
The great man was dying. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, motion picture camera and electrical light bulb laid in his bed in West Orange, New Jersey his life slowly flickering out. After years of failing health, he had recently slipped into a diabetic coma and at age eighty-three, the prognosis was grave. His…
When you’re asked to rate a person, irrespective of how crass that request is, you expect to be rating an individual who, though they can be offended or hurt by your assessment, will move on from the exchange relatively unscathed. Especially when you’re still in college, you never expect any experience to harm you forever….
Have you ever heard of the Grand Circus of Mysteries? You can recognize us by the large banner set up over the entrance; a circular sign with several slightly faded looking clowns, magicians, leaping acrobats and other exotically dressed performers decorating its length. A large, open circus tent sits in the background with the entrance…
“Can I take your picture?” Larissa sat a few feet away from me on the grey velvet sofa as I aimed my iPhone towards her. I stared at the screen intently for a moment before shifting my focus, looking over the brim of the phone at her defeated, hopeless state portrayed by bloodshot eyes. “What…
Grandpa told me, a long time ago About a man he once saw walking in the snow. The man’s shoes were golden and brown; The colors were the sun and the blood of the town. —— In bed one night, when the dogs were outside, And momma was talking to the neighbor (who’d died) And…
Within The Carcass Of Lunar Rot I have been sending this distress call repeatedly, and I have been trapped on this moon for what I hope to have only been the past two sidereal days. Can anyone hear this message? Can anyone send help? I do not know what to do anymore and I do…
“I can’t remember… The other car came out of nowhere…” Connor will relay mechanically in his dissociated state. Stitching together his fragmented memories for the police report after the accident. He will stare at the scene of the crash, glancing at each piece of scattered shrapnel reflecting his broken thoughts. The lights from the cruisers,…