Glass breaks in random and chaotic ways. In a near instant the cracks can ripple throughout, separating the shards from the inside until it finally crumbles under its own weight. When this happens, its fragility is truly realized. But how random is it really? Glass can sometimes break in a …
For those not accustomed to it, life in rural Eastern Europe can feel very lonely and isolating. I’ve spent all of my teenage life and most of my childhood in London, but recently, about a year ago, we were forced to move back to the old country due to financial …
There’s something haunting the Eastern European countryside. Don’t let it see you. Read More »
How you’ll die is written on your forearm. Don’t look now; you can’t see it; but it’s there. I can see it. It’s horizontal. Big and bold. Always black. Oh, and how old you’ll be. I call it your “death stamp”. I was eight; looking at the arm of my …
The road had been covered in a dense fog. Denise decided to rent a room for the night, seeing as she had parked near an unfamiliar hotel. She got out of her car, looking around for any signs of an entrance within the grey haze. A small light broke through …
She tried pulling herself back, but however hard she tried, however hard she pushed, she could not stop her feet dragging her towards the open window. She dug her heels into the wooden floor, feeling splinters coming off it as her feet dragged her onward. Her hands caught the window-sill, …
When I was a child there was nothing to eat. I was the eldest of five, so it was my job to make sure that I always let my brothers and sisters eat before me. War was inching inward from the coast, and as it marched closer, our food grew …
Concerning the Masquerade Sara Stonewood Global News 09/05/18 [Sensitive Content] Halifax, NS So with the Halloween season close at hand, many police departments are bracing for an upswing in crime, particularly reports of pranks and practical jokes taken too far. As many of my readers may know, in previous years …
We had all liked Mr. Winscot. He didn’t mind when we used the sledding hill on his property and he always gave out the best Halloween candy in the neighborhood. So when we heard he’d been taken by the Tall Man, everyone was really bummed out. You wouldn’t have heard …
I must warn you now that every detail included in this account is not of my own invention – though I wish from the bottom of my heart that it was exactly that, an invention – and that none of it is at all pleasant to read, so if you …
My mom hates her father. Grandfather Jack’s name might as well have been a swear word when I was growing up. Dad told me the story once, on the condition that I never tell mom I knew. Jack was married to my Grandmother Kathy for 22 years before he …
I’ve been dead now for almost five weeks, it feels different than you might think. Of course, I’m not really dead, if I were I wouldn’t be able to write this account of what happened to me, but legally at least, I have been declared dead. Once you’re dead it’s …
So I work at a cemetery. Pinelawn Memorial Park to be exact. My family has owned it for nearly five generations, and I’ve been working there since I was 12 (officially since I was 15). Cemeteries, I know, are sort of inherently creepy, and despite my family being in the…dead…people…business(?) since long …
When someone asks you about your dream home, how do you respond? It might be an apartment in a big city, a big house on a farm, or (if you’re like me) a cozy house with a picket fence in the suburbs. My husband and I moved into my dream …
One night outside Longfield, Massachusetts was all it took to never feel peace again. The little town is not too far from Thoreau’s famed Walden, and curiosity drove me and some like-minded friends to make the trek one hot summer. It’s a little place, and so secluded that you won’t …
Becoming a parent changes everything. We have implicitly accepted the notion that all things in life should be regulated for orderly consumption. I expect to know exactly how much manganese is in my Froot Loops, thank you very much, because a bureaucratic sub-sub-committee in Washington wrote it into Agricultural Bill 3301913-B, just …
The red lights are only making the pain worse. It is an immense, earth-shattering pain, in my midsection and in my head. I try to move, but I can’t; I try to speak, but I can’t do that either. It hurts too much, and my voice obeys me no more …
There is no fear as potent as the fear of the unknown. No monstrous visage discovered yet has been as terrifying as the infinite potential for horror which exists before the mask is removed. That is why we humans, in our naive misunderstanding of the universal order, are gripped by …
The swirl of voices awoke Jared from his troubled sleep. Vera, his wife, was disturbed only by his tossing and turning, she couldn’t hear the voices. They were in his head. A senseless drone of overlapping whispers, faint but present, troubled his mind. He could discern no sense or message, …
There are few left alive who remember the Song and Dance Man. Time has claimed the ones that survived the long night and I’m sure they went willingly to meet their maker. Life takes on a strange tint after a night like that. The ones still left – Bill Parker, …
John Watkins warmed himself by the fire crackling in the grate. Orange embers scuttled over the logs, clutched at the brick, stole away like a timid lover. He listened to the low hum of the men talking. It was soothing to hear the murmuring in the low-lit drawing room, as …
The next time you are sick, ill, weak… When your mind is foggy and your bed feels like the only place you can be; beware the Collector. It comes in the dark, in the silence. It comes for the decrepit, the unsound of mind, and the weak of body. I’ve …
“Holy shit! Is that what I think it is?” Brandon’s eyes widened into saucers and, despite being filled with an unabated rage towards his older brother just a few hours ago, Michael couldn’t help but smile and nod at the expected reaction. Even with everything that had happened earlier in …
Do you ever just sit and watch your sleeping dog? Observe as their little feet run along the ground, just waving halfway in the air as they let out innocent half-gruntled barks. Have you ever just wondered what’s going on inside their sleeping minds, what they’re dreaming about? Maybe it’s …
You have to listen to me, this isn’t right. You can’t do this. You can’t let this happen! Okay… hold on, let me try again. Something different this time, calmer. Explain what’s happening. Okay, my name is Nic. And as of right now, I am the last person on earth. …
