I met Cassie for the first time when I started high school. She was in my art class, and the teacher, Ms Perez, was always giving her a hard time. She was talented, but lacked motivation, was what she used to say. Cassie didn’t seem to care, and seemed more […]
The bitter cold gusts ripped through the thermal underwear he wore underneath his camouflage, biting into his very bones. He had climbed into his tree stand about thirty feet up a yellow-leaved cottonwood and had huddled with his knees to his chest to fight the freeze. As he scanned the
My name is Lifeguard. There is a lot of thinking that takes place atop the seat overlooking the pool. I spend most of my days there; watching others play. Watching them have fun. I see grandparents bringing their toddler grandsons and granddaughters to the pool to splash around. Young parents
It’s that time of year again. Any day now the earth around me will be covered in snow. Children, who are not fazed by the cold, will spend hours outside playing In it. Building snowmen, having snow ball fights, and going sledding. And of course they will be looking forward
Staring at the clock, Brandon heaved a sigh as the digital numbers switched once again, marking the death of yet another minute as he sat outside the Sun Theater waiting for his girlfriend to get off her shift at the Flying Saucers bar. The gently humming engine of the older
It sounded like footsteps. When she was three, staring after the retreating back of a woman with a once-familiar smell, her young brain snapped at attention at a feeble noise behind her. She had turned then, getting even more tangled in the warm heavy blanket draped around her slender body,
This is not meant to scare anyone. Calling it a creepy story would be a bit of an insult, because it isn’t one. This is an expression of gratitude toward a friend, a friend who was always there for me. He watched over me as I was growing up and
I was 19 years old and still living at home. My dog Cooper, a pit bull, always slept with me. He would never wake up at night, let alone bark or whine. This is one of the reasons I was so unnerved when I was awoken around 3 am one
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When I think back on my life so far I find that one of the things I can’t stop thinking about, no matter how hard I try, is MagikTrick. Right off the bat I should say that I have no answers here. What I’m about to tell you is a
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Walter Thomas lied in his deathbed tired and sleep deprived, nestled underneath the covers. He had reached the ripe old age of ninety-five and knew that his time was almost up. He had not reached this age by living a healthy and wholesome lifestyle, but rather by stubbornness and an
I have dreamed more than once that a man may attain immortality by assiduously avoiding daylight, for it is only by the light of the sun that he ages; knowing this secret, one might go on living indefinitely. Only a few hundred people in the entire world take advantage of
I awoke to find myself in a darkened passageway. As I sat up from the dusty floor and rubbed my head, I realized I had no memory of who I was or how I got to this strange place. No matter how I got here, I felt I needed to
The Screaming Flail Read More »
In the town of Bisden, nobody leaves their home after dark. As soon as the sun begins to set — shutters are drawn shut, candles are snuffed out, and doors are locked tight. Before the moon is fully risen, the entire town appears deserted, and silence reigns supreme. “Did you
Children of the Moon Read More »
It’s been happening for about a month now. Whenever I stand in front of a reflective surface I see it behind me briefly before it disappears from view. I have no idea what it is, but it always manages to evade me whenever I look for it. When I first
Forgive me, as I am never sure where to begin telling a story. I never was a storyteller. I tend to include useless information and jump around. So I will do my best to do this story justice, considering it happened to me and the ones I love, changing us
Over the hill and through the moor, the candle man comes walking, up to your door. He lights up a candle and walks to your bed, leaves the candle in the window, and leaves with your head. That’s the nursery rhyme my grandma used to tell me when I was
In the late ’40s of the last century, after a decade of private research involving experiments with binaural beat brainwave frequencies, extrasensory cognition, and rare extracts of a South American vine, Dr. Tomás Roessner perfected a technique whereby one could actually intrude into the psyche and “see” another’s thoughts. Despite
I always get a little uncomfortable when the topic of the paranormal comes up, particularly when some people seem to be so adamant that ghosts simply can’t exist. I don’t attempt to convince them otherwise. As a matter of fact, I don’t share my experiences with them at all. This
I touched the button in the middle of the screen, and a quick blue flash filled the room. I turned my phone’s screen towards me, and looked at the photo I had just taken. I was smiling, and my new fluffy kitten was nestled into my arm, looking off to
My last memory was that of surviving a deadly Nazi airstrike. My head was groggy, still ringing from the shrapnel blast. I thank whatever god is out there that my helmet managed to deflect the hit. Shaking of the sensation, I got up on my feet and picked up my
Bored teenagers pick the worst places to hang out. Of course, this was the east end of Long Island where all the teenagers are bored. There’s nothing to do during the day if you’re not into sun and surf, and even less in the evenings. Summers are full of tourists,
Driving along the back roads at night can be a little eerie. Not if you’re country folk, like myself, but if you’re used to lights and other cars and night life, a back road at ten o’clock at night can seem pretty unsettling. There are millions of back roads in
Have you ever noticed an ordinary person simply standing somewhere that was obviously unreasonable? Like an elderly woman idle near a pub’s back entrance or a child motionless outside a bank. Yes, I know, I too thought, “Well, there’s got to be a logical reason behind it. So what? They’re
I told Gage not to take it. For weeks now stories had been coming in about these goddamn ‘chill pills’. That you could go to this awesome psychedelic place, you know, a real ‘trip’. And normally, yeah, that’d be my jam. That night we were at our usual place, a
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