I don’t know how much longer I can take this endless waiting before my sanity caves in. The walls of my house breathe my name. Shapes glitch by my window in my peripheral vision. I can hear them laughing and scampering just beyond the corner of my front yard. Covering
Simulation Sickness Read More »
Yuri Gagarin was the first man to enter space. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone ignorant of this fact. The knowledge of his feat seems almost universal, the Soviet cosmonaut’s name inseparable from history. Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the Moon. Perhaps an even greater
January 16, 2012. Klakzkrig. Exhausted, I was sprawling face-down in bed, feeling like I’d been dragged through a combine harvester and then forced to plow the rest of the field by hand. The day had been an absolute piece of shit: I’d been slaving away since dawn, completely wiped out,
Do you want to remember me? Read More »
If you are reading this, then I am more than likely dead. I want you to understand something before you read any further. I am not a dramatic person. I am not the kind of man who makes things up or tells tall tales to get attention. I have lived
Memories are fragile, but a photograph lasts forever. That’s why I never went anywhere without my DSLR. I needed to capture everything—the old hardwood floors of our house, the strange, keyhole-shaped pupils of our matching eyes, and the quiet, empty afternoons spent with my home-schooled younger sister Lucia. She was
A Perfect Exposure Read More »
FILE 2.8 [Ted Stokes] – The ‘TDC’ Experiment – 01/26/1992Note: The following text was found on a notepad in the now-destroyed ‘AFM’ base in central Idaho, and is presumed to have been written by Ted Stokes, a criminal and former inmate who was declared dead by natural causes in 1984.
FILE 2.8 [Ted Stokes] – The ‘TDC’ Experiment – 01/26/1992 Read More »
People at work call me the ‘Ninja Nurse’.I didn’t hate the nickname at first. There’s something almost dignified about it. Ninjas are disciplined and precise. They’re quick, and they move without being seen. If you’re going to be called something behind your back, you could do worse.But I know why
I Keep Finding Polaroids of Myself on Dead Patients Read More »
Age 2 Garuk could not have been more than twenty months when his first memory took root, and even then it came back to him in fragments, the way the earliest kind of memories always do. He remembered the warmth of her first. His mother’s body, the heavy musk of
Everyone remembers something different from the Windows XP era. Some remember Club Penguin. Others remember LimeWire. I don’t remember any of that. I remember Bonzi. I remember being around 8 years old and getting my first computer. Money wasn’t an issue in our house; so a computer for an 8
The Bonzi Kidnappings Read More »
The rain hit my bedroom window like a handful of gravel, throwing distorted shadows across the walls. It was just past midnight. The four of us—Caitlyn, Jade, Serena, and I—were huddled together in a fortress of blankets and pillows on my floor. My parents were away for the weekend, leaving
The Prom Queen’s Legacy Read More »
Brookings, Curry County, Oregon.December 2019. My colleague had been missing for a week. He’d been isolating himself for days, ignoring my calls, and even our inner circle of friends hadn’t heard a word from him. I was the first to genuinely worry. While I didn’t go to confront him directly,
The Beloved One: Smiling Corpse Read More »
Spring had arrived with the aroma of cherry blossoms, gentle zephyr, peace and lots of greenery..Occasionally a short, gentle and warm rain..A neighborhood in a splendid area, where most of them were characters with a lot of talent, but also former owners who had won their claimed houses, who had
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
Read Part One here (Author’s Note: These stories are meant to be read in reverse order of the zodiac, so this chapter comes first, though it deals with Scepi, the Keeper of the Fishes’ Dagger and the Pisces sign.) THE FESTIVAL OF SUMMER in Milham’s Ford was a sanctuary day:
Blood Moon: Law of the Fish Read More »
The tornado wasn’t the first thing I noticed. It was the silence. Every morning, I drove the same stretch of freeway just after sunrise. The traffic was predictable. Brake lights. Coffee cups. Morning radio. Semi-trucks drifting between lanes. It was the kind of routine that makes you stop paying attention
Don’t Look Forward Read More »
The bloody throne hall stank of wet iron and rot, and at the heart of it sat Kortul. She had taken her tusks years ago, ground the stumps smooth so that nothing of the common orc remained in her face. What was left was colder. Her skin was the pale
The comment was buried so deep under my latest video that I almost missed it. Try Dimer Ridge. Nobody comes back alone. No likes or replies. Not even a profile picture attached to the account. Just that one sentence sitting underneath a video where I’d spent twenty minutes walking through
There was a time when people paid attention to facts, to warnings. Not that you have a way to fix what others are breaking, but you can try to straighten, run, hide or stay and fight, at least you try something. Strange that over time, people no longer see, or
A book swiftly closed with a loud thump, and I turned around to toss it towards the pile. I stopped for a moment, admiring the never-ending tower of journals that came before it. A thousand pages each, centuries upon centuries of my duties recorded within them, ink slowly fading from
The cold winter air whipped past the buildings as thousands of people trudged through the snow-covered streets. The tall buildings cast long, imposing shadows over the citizens as they went about their last day on Earth. Few wandered with purpose; most were lost in the thick haze of confusion that
Elsie stood on the front steps of the mall, her brunette hair waving in the wind as she gazed at the fading storm, the clouds illuminated by the sunset. The air still smelled of petrichor and wet concrete, a nostalgic, earthy scent that brought her back to the first time
The Mannequin Does Not Move Read More »
The roman forum was beautiful. The painted marble gleamed in the spring sun and there was a breeze fluttering through the trees. Great flowers climbed the concrete buildings and flowered with all the colours of the rainbow.Such a lovely day for such a melancholy event. A magpie sat on the
Ilza walked at the center of the line, where the others could keep her between them. She was young for an elf, not yet into the fullness of her years, and it showed in the unfinished sharpness of her face, all angles that had not quite settled. Her skin was
Waylan stood in the dim light of the early morning, his truck parked at the edge of a forgotten dirt road. He bent down and laced up his knee-high snake boots, pulling the strings tight to make sure they fit just right. The boots were tough and made for rough
