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 […]
The Ghost of You By Heather Wright One cool October evening a man by the name of Nicodemus was walking down a trail that was all too familiar to him. The path was enclosed by woods, with trees that were brilliant with leaves of rustic reds and bright orange. He
We’re lying on the floor of a stockroom in a gas station. Malia and I, the chubby, middle-aged clerk and an older couple I’ve never met are lying facedown on dirty cold floors surrounded by the detritus of running a small convenience store on a highway. The young man with
I have to stop doing this. I know I have work in the morning. I know I have one strike, but I just get distracted. The basement is dimly lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the center of the room. Well, that and my television screen. The beige walls
8/4 I’m not even gonna try and convince you this is a true story. I mean it is, but I don’t care if you believe it. I just needed to put the words on the screen, and put it out in the world to get it off my mind. Let
They were strange. The people in the woods. Beautiful but strange. They come to town every Sunday dressed in their best, they would be on the last pew, looking as serene as ever, keeping to themselves the whole mass. They’d be dressed in colorful clothes of expensive silk. Bright green,
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“There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.” ~Stephen King I looked down at my feet as I walked along the weathered sidewalk and thought about how worn my All-Stars looked. The black was faded and the white was more ivory than
On October 1, 1957, Callie purchased the small cottage overlooking Cimmerian Bluff. She was quite alone in the world. Having just lost both her parents in a head-on collision three months ago she felt it was time to make a life for herself, to move to a new town where
In autumn 2003, my first year studying at Cambridge University, a rumour began circulating about a VHS tape that was causing students to go insane. Nobody knew who had first found the tape, or where they had found it, but the stories started in October, when a history student allegedly
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They told us it was the greatest technological achievement in human history. They told us it would forever change our role on the cosmic stage. They told us it would lead to a Golden Age of exploration, prosperity, and expansion. They were lying. Even after the expenditure of untold billions
The faucet is dripping in the bathroom. It has been the whole night. I haven’t gone in yet. Yet. I moved here two months ago. It’s my first house and I had no idea what I was getting into. I’ve been tearing down wallpaper, ripping up carpets, painting everything. And
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Mark’s head rocked wildly in the pillow as a muted moan popped from his throat. His eyeballs thrashed about under clenched lids, kamikaze fireflies trapped in a skin jar. He jerked awake, and his first sight was the glowing bulb of his bedside lamp. It lit the room in a
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
There it is! In between the static. It’s faint at first, buried deep in the hiss, but after you hear it, after you know it’s there it becomes so loud you want to cover your ears and scream. I can sound the words out for you, but that’s it. We
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“You may commence, Chief Inspector.” The two constables started to write down notes as I began, my sweating forehead reflecting the bright shine of the desk lamp despite the harsh cold temperature. A notebook with a cheap webcam was recording our talk. “We were called the September 29th, Dundee division.
I’ve been blind since birth. This in and of itself is not what this is about, but it’s a crucial part of the story. Throughout my life, I’ve used lots of different kinds of assistive technology; braille keyboards, voice command apps, adapted smartphones… Recently, I tried human echolocation for the
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This week, I moved into a new house. The house itself is lovely, with two stories, three bedrooms, two baths, a fenced-in backyard, and a big kitchen. The tree in the front yard is tall and strong and does a fine job of blocking my living room windows from the
At first we didn’t even understand what was going on. Well, by we I mean those of us who do not hold degrees in astronomy and quantum physics. We were told that earth’s spin was slowing and would come to a full stop in less than five years. The first
“Shhhh shhhh, it’s okay baby, I’m here now.” She coos into my ear, stroking my feverish cheek as I sit still in her gentle embrace. She hums a soft tune I’ve never heard before. I can’t believe it’s already been a whole hour since I first woke up, and I’m
Ruby was in her usual spot. Sitting cross-legged, right under the stern “No Busking” sign that was screwed into the old brickwork. “Busking” being the British term for street-performance; juggling, fire-breathing, magic tricks, whatever. Ruby was a musician though. A pretty good one, so she’d been told. Just the simple,
I was driving out to the desert. The panorama of distant rock, endless sand, and occasional cactus slowly blurring in my peripheral vision. Sparse cloud cover traversed the sky overhead, providing brief interludes of shade over deceptively large patches of the arid wasteland. I found my exit, an unremarkable dirt
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I was on a business trip about a year ago and I had to drive from Denver to LA. It was a long drive and I was growing tired of the road, so I stopped at the Holiday Inn hotel that was nearby. I walked up to the desk and
I never used to frequent bars, at least not as much as I do now. With no job, no family, no nothing to return to, save for a bottle and an ashtray, I couldn’t find anywhere else to waste time. I don’t do much else besides mold myself around a
Mitch, Bill and I knew this church well. We all grew up going to it. Now of course we had all ‘fallen away’ so to speak. It is not a hard church to get into. The second floor windows were never locked and there was no one in the neighborhood
