Dear Reader, At the corner of Winter and Broad there is an abandoned house. Go into that house. The front door is closed but unlocked. Nobody lives inside, not even homeless people would dare stay in a place like that for more than a night. When you go in, you will hear the whispers. Don’t…
I’ve always had a terrible fear of being submerged completely in water. Not that I can’t swim or anything. My dad made me learn; he said I almost drowned when I was really young. I was afraid of it because, for as long as I can remember, whenever I am under water and look up…
I’m a first year resident at the local hospital, so I often work long hours and I’m always sleep-deprived. I do make decent money, if not nearly as much as a licensed doctor, but on account of student loans I live in a crappy apartment. The bedroom of this apartment is tiny and the only…
Publisher’s Note: If you enjoy this story, the author encourages you to read its companion piece, Sniff. My first job was at a 24-hour restaurant called Flavi’s, on Third and Burlington in Westlake. It was a real hole-in-the-wall place, the type where patrons line up beneath the menu board; specializing in burgers, gyros, and all-day,…
Once, there was a boy who loved to read. He read everything he could get his hands on, and loved going to his favorite book store. One day, the boy realized he had read everything the store had to offer. He confronted the owner, and asked him if he had anything the boy had never…
I wasn’t like other children growing up. I didn’t like talking to those smelly things in Kindergarten and I never participated in their silly games. But I had my own games to play and oh! What fun games they were! For example, a little girl once asked to borrow my crayons. I told her she…
There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After what seemed like hours, he came across a…
I was eighteen at the time. I’d just graduated high school, and what was probably a really exciting and memorable time for most people was a stressful race against time for me. You see, my dad was very traditional; if I were going to be living in his house after high school, even just over…
My name is Tom. I am a sound designer for video games. I love my work and I have been doing it for quite some time. I used to work for a small indie game developer called Razor Games LLC. My friend Jason, who hired me after I quit my last job for personal reasons,…
My room is tiny. Of course, that’s because it was built for efficiency. I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed in a dorm room, or even seen one for that matter, but I can tell you after having lived in one for the past four years: they’re built like stackable sardine containers. My five star,…
It wasn’t long ago I noticed a strange noise coming from the air conditioning unit, in the wall of the living room. At first it was almost imperceptible from the other noises such a device would typically make. It started out as a slight clanking sound, only when it was first turned on. I had…
Frank, Thomas, and Kirby enter the office break room at approximately 12:25 pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Each man holds various containers designed for holding food and drink, and as they lazily slump into the fiberglass chairs that were haphazardly pushed under the table after their previous uses, the room echos of violent thwop-pops and…
It was never a dull moment’s drive. Scotland was, by definition, a beautiful country of inspiring scenery, majesty, and relentless weather. Evie’s old hatchback had taken a beating from the rain and protruding tree branches that flicked across the windshield on this dark and stormy night in late December 1996. A single peppermint sweet flicked…
He liked to volunteer in the psych ward of his local hospital. His real job was as a stockbroker, but the stresses got to him sometimes and he needed an outlet. In the past he’d turned to booze to relieve the pressure, but that had taken him to places he hoped never to revisit. He…
My mother, my siblings and I moved into this awesome new house a few months ago. It’s a really cool plantation-style home out in what was once a rural area outside of New Orleans. By now the area is a little more built up, so it’s really more like a spacious suburb. Anyway, it had…
Everyone knows that kid in school, the one who spends half the school year at home because their immune system can’t handle the massive amount of germs and viruses that tend to accumulate in an elementary school. I was that kid. I found myself getting sick every other week. Something in my body was always…
Have you ever played One Word Story? It’s a very simple game: a few people take turns, going around to make a sentence. Each person adds one word, until the sentence is complete, then someone says “period” and it’s read back. It’s actually pretty fun if you play with the right people, but I’m pretty…
I used to live in a small town called Fenter. It was a quiet place to grow up with one school, a doctors, a police station, a cinema (with films shown a month after the national release date), two restaurants and a host of local shops on the west side. Over on the east side…
I remember the first time I witnessed that gruesome sight, right in front of me. It had been all over the news for the past week but until that moment, I was still unable to take any of the stories seriously. I guess that’s what happens in a world where the media exaggerates every little…
It’s true what they say – that when a person goes blind their other senses heighten in order to compensate. Knowing that, and thinking back on everything that happened to me, I still can’t come to a rational conclusion of how these events unfolded around me without my knowledge. Granted, I couldn’t actually see any…
The last storm was already on the horizon when I woke that Sunday morning. It hung in the south, a solid black wall of dust, churning and seemingly motionless. I’d every intention of sleeping late into the morning, as had been my Sunday custom since Adele and the girls had left, but the distant rumbling…
“Okay Father, we need you to cooperate with us here. If you’re honest from the beginning, things will be a lot better for you.” Officer Green sipped his coffee, a little too weak for this time of the night. Things like this didn’t happen very often in his small town so he wasn’t used to…
In Berlin, after World War II, money was short, supplies were tight, and it seemed like everyone was hungry. At that time, people were telling the tale of a young woman who saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd. The two started to talk. The man asked her for a favor: could…
Officially, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to reach outer space. His historic flight in April of 1961 kick-started the space race in earnest. The Soviet space program, however, was shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. There have long been questions regarding the existence of “lost cosmonauts,” those individuals who’d ventured beyond our atmosphere at…