* Writer’s note – Originally published 2006 in Dark Fire Fiction. I am the author and own the story rights. “It’s time I told you about loss, boy.” We sat, my Pa and I, beneath the old great willow that marked the end of our property and the beginning of God’s country. It had been…
I’ve decided to share this here because honestly? I feel like I NEED to talk about this before I go crazy. And this is probably the only place where I could talk about this and not have people think that I’m crazy. My name is Elizabeth Black. I’ve lived in New York pretty much most…
I sat on my balcony, preparing to smoke the last cigarette of the night. It was late and my bones themselves were tired. As I snuffed out the cigarette and stood with a stretch, a noise caught my attention. It was so faint that I immediately brushed it off as the wind and continued on…
Hello, my name’s Charlie Ipstien. Dorky, I know. But I’m better known as ‘Chips’ by my familiar. I ain’t a classy guy, a lowlife thug people call me. And I admit it. Can’t really blame myself though. It was where I was damn raised. Messed me up badly. I grew up in the slums, the…
It all started when I got fat. I had been wanting to lose weight for a while, but being a not-exactly-starving-starving artist, I didn’t have the money to join a gym or buy equipment of my own. Yeah I could have gone running, but who want’s to do that? Not me! Never could run as…
It was All Hallows Eve as the old ones called it, but to us it was simply Halloween. A time for darkened skies, for fallen leaves golden and brown and the feet of children kicking with verve through them; for sweets and treats, for frightening films and spooky tales, for friendship, for the fear and…
Theists have a pernicious habit of countering non-believers with the ultimate cruelty of a life snuffed out in an instant. How can there be nothing beyond, when we are surrounded by beauty and complexity in this world? This world has afforded us a myriad of outlets and the tools to understand it or even master…
It was my senior year at St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic school in Texas. I grew up in San Diego, California, and moving to such a foreign place, I didn’t ever get along with anyone, even by my senior year. I was studying to be a theologist, and all of my classes were fairly…
If I were you, I’d stop reading. I know a lot of stories say that, but I’m dead serious. Stop. No? Well, it’s your choice. I can’t stop you. Well, consider this story a warning, and let’s leave it at that. It was a completely normal day. It’s always a normal day, when these things…
If there was any doubt by the turn of the twenty-first century, by the dawn of the twenty-second, it was an unmistakable reality: technological civilization was unsustainable. In 2130, with the global population nearing eleven billion, Earth was Hell. We all but exhausted our reserves of conventional petroleum, and the limited coal deposits left were…
“No, absolutely not,” I told the doctor. Dr. Murdock maintained eye contact with me. Whether or not he had any personal feelings about the situation, I couldn’t tell. I always thought it was eerie how detached some doctors could appear, almost as though they were machines that could turn emotion and off at will. Hell,…
Margaret Owen stared out into the distance from her quiet Vermont ranch, taking a break from attending to the oddly large quantity of dishes left in the sink. She never quite considered how the sink managed to be full by every evening, considering her husband works most nights out in town, and her two grown…
“Oh, honey, don’t leave the window open at night,” my Grandma used to say to me, “you’ll let in the draft.” She was a tiny pudding of a woman, with pink lipstick and pink patches of scalp showing through her feathery hair. Toward the end there, she didn’t have many teeth, which made her southern…
Stay calm. You know, I never actually thought about this, but I really need to type this since typing always calmed me down, even if only slightly. As you suspected, I typed this because, well, I’m feeling kind of nervous for no apparent reason, but I think I know why. I have this weird feeling…
I love my mice ever so much. You see, I own a little colony containing hundreds of mice, all finely bred and engineered in this very laboratory. But these are no ordinary lab mice, as they’ve advanced far past crawling through mazes for food. What began as a small nest of captured specimens from the…
A young girl suffered from insomnia, and throughout the night she’d often wake up for no reason. One night she awoke, and in the daze of half-sleep, she blinked in the darkness. Just for a second, she thought she saw a pair of reptilian eyes, gazing at her and glowing red. She sat up and…
My life ended in mid-December, the 17th to be exact. I survived a little after that, but that was the last day I lived freely. I was goofing off on the internet that day, kind of flicking through my newsfeed, reading interesting news stories, that sort of thing. Sometime after one thirty, I found an…
Prologue Doppelganger is a German word that literally means “double goer”. Legend has it that if you see your doppelganger you will die. There are many true instances where this has occurred for example In 1860, right after winning the presidential election, Abraham Lincoln had a vision of his doppelganger. It happened while he was…
“Cole Ryder. Age 23. Death by multiple lacerations to chest, reaching as deep as his lungs. Poor bastard looks like someone cut him open multiple times with a damned sword. No visible signs of struggle, indicating that he was either drugged before hand, or was hit unexpected.” the coroner recorded, working together with the officers…
I have been suffering from insomnia for quite a while now. No, it’s not because of Reddit. When I do sleep, I have this reoccurring dream. I suppose “reoccurring dream” is putting it lightly. Let’s call it a “reoccurring shit-your-pants party”. During this “dream” it starts out like any normal day. I wake up, curse…
I watched the fog creep along the ground and through the treeline at the edge of the property in a daze. I had been staring for a while, slowly realizing that I was still tightly gripping a mug. My hand trembled as I brought the tepid coffee to my lips, almost causing it to spill….
Nathaniel H. Jackson’s Journal November 11, 1911 I had never intended on venturing into that cave. That cave where no one ever dared to go near. I remember when I was a child how my friends and I would play around the property border. Back then, the cave was on a plot of land that…
I live in a pretty small, relatively unknown town. This is the internet, so I won’t divulge too much information but I will tell you it’s in southern Wisconsin. I live on the corner of Lawn and Elm Street, and pretty near to my house is a stretch of road that most people called “Mirror…
I’m not sure why I’m writing this. There’s a large chance that this won’t even be real to you. Of course it’s real to me, but then again, my definition of the word “real” has never been cloudier. Despite the potential waste of time, I am where I am in this moment, and writing this…