St. Bruvia was always a hungry town. It was an old place, older than most of its residents, with crooked wooden houses leaning toward one another beneath heavy snow and onion-domed churches whose ringing carried across the river. Whenever a family moved into a new house, they left something beneath
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Read Part One here “WHAT IS THE OATH of the Grave?” “Death’s first usher, the Dragon, first pledged it,” Great-Grandmother says. “Many did so in the past, but they’re few and far between these days. Most have forsaken it and sworn allegiance to the Exarch and his Law instead. The
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“Can you hear that?” The voice was muffled. The music blaring from my headphones drowned out everything around me. If he didn’t tap my shoulder, I wouldn’t have even noticed he was there. Sitting beside me on the bus, was a middle aged man in a hoodie and jeans. There
Can You Hear That? Read More »
Every device in my house woke me up at 5:38 A.M. I woke up before the alarm went off. That was the first wrong thing. In eleven years of marriage I had never once beaten the sound of my phone, but at 5:38 that morning—the fourteenth of November, a Saturday,
Imagine receiving an image from someone online, opening it, and realizing that you have just become part of a curse. That’s exactly what internet users experienced back when the image of the famous Smile Dog first appeared on the internet. If you’re familiar with those times, long before AI and
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I CAN’T MOVE. I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. The only thing keeping me alive right now, despite the stake in my chest, is the black substance running through my veins. I look like an unnaturally pale young lady, but don’t be fooled. My great-grandfather was a vampire. He wed
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It must be said from the start that Turin or Torino, as it is also called, is a strict city, elegant even for Italian cities, with strict rules regarding architecture, arrangement, street lines and geometry. And anything that deviates has only two options: it is glorified or marginalized. Palazzo Trucchi
I was born on June 10th, 1992. At least, that’s what my birth certificate says. It’s not as if I remember. In fact, I don’t have a single memory of my life before I was ten years old. My first memory is a vivid one. Just a young boy calling
I Don’t Think I’m Real Read More »
Everyone’s got one of those stories. A ghost that visited a childhood bedroom, a near-miss on the highway that should’ve killed them, a moment that never quite made sense no matter how many times they turned it over. I’ve got mine too, and for twenty-six years I’ve kept it mostly
Twice, two separate times, in the span of only six months, it’s happened. I go to bed, like any other night and wake up outside, lying on the ground in the middle of the woods, staring up at the eerie pine trees that rise above me. I can’t move, I
Unconscious Burden Read More »
Okay, so I have some friends from Castleton coming up for a week-ish long vacation. I’d already got the week off from the MILF (paid, thank god) so we’re set to drive around the area and check out some of the touristy places I haven’t gotten a chance to visit
I Took A Job In Northwestern Vermont: Entry Five: Investigations Part 1 Read More »
Three weeks ago, my roommate handed me his phone and asked, “Is this you?” It was some kind of prank video from one of those YouTube channels that film people without their permission and publish it to get views. I barely got past the first five seconds of the video,
I was never allowed to hear a recording of myself growing up. Read More »
It’s been raining all week, and I can’t mow my lawn. This is bad. I can hear the grass. I hear it when it gets too tall. It whispers, out there in the lawn, out there in the night. I can’t tune it out. It’s humming no matter where I
The Grass Got Too High Read More »
A sea of infinite darkness. This is my view as I sit outside on my small balcony and gaze up into the night sky. I had not done this in a while. But tonight I watched for hours as the sky shifted from its joyous sea of blue to the
There’s a legend in my town about the old farm road. Most people pay it no attention, but the old folks swear it’s true. “The Highwayman lurks there,” they say. We scoff and go on. After all, small towns like ours have a ghost story under every rock. This summer,
Obsessed with a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace. – Eugene O’Neill II am in many ways blessed, for I could have been very different. I could have been birthed in the plains of Africa, dancing for the rains
Drip. Drip drip drip. That’s all I can make out, the slow dribble of some far away liquid hitting the floor. The sound around me is muffled, like wax has been stuffed deep within the canals, eating away the vibrations before they reach my core. Each day, is it a
The rain from the previous night had cleared up, leaving a damp, heavy silence over the suburbs. In a different house, miles away from the tragedy that had struck Elena’s friends, four new girls—Martha, Naomi, Karen, and Molly—were gathered in a sunroom-turned-den. The mood was already jittery. Naomi had been
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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 »
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 »
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
Read Part One here Read Part Two here “You can’t fight what you can’t see or hear.” – Marion Strickler “For good to have any chance, there needs to be something pure.” – William Rayne “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are
An old truck came wailing through the autumn. The truck had once been white, but years in the rough had degraded the thing into an ugly gradient of browns. Now on the first asphalt in many long miles, the truck serpentined through the cursive country roads of some rolling land
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