The basement is brightly lit, long fluorescent lighting driving out any shadows in the anthropological centre she calls her tomb. The aisles are long, the carefully laid out shelves crowded with neatly labeled white boxes. She wonders if the boxes contain other ghosts, but she has never seen anyone else lingering here like she does….
Harriet was going slowly along the road, avoiding putting her feet on any cracks in the pavement, when she heard the man screaming. It was a long, loud scream – the kind of scream you might call blood-curdling – and she stumbled to a halt. Setting her foot down just before a crack she looked…
“They say you are the one who can attend to my needs.” A cloaked figure waits at my doorstep. Behind her, twilight drags its dark, feathered wing across the horizon. A fortnight ago, the sun might have lingered. But the seasons are turning; soon, there will be frost. For now, we endure only bitter winds,…
There’s this thing about rocks. They sit. That’s it. In desserts beneath glaring suns they watch the world around them bake and boil. In the crashing waves and hidden riptides of oceans and seas they stay stubbornly, steadfastly, still. In forests, prairies, bogs, and fields they wait as one becomes the next or another. At…
You’re driving up the Pacific Coast for a family vacation. Your son asks about lunch and your daughter won’t stop fidgeting. Your partner needs to pee. You desperately want to stretch your legs. Your right leg aches, the way it always does on long drives like this. You see a sign for the town Seahaven,…
Who ever said death had to be so bad? Dalton was perfectly fine here, thank you very much. Being caught in the in-between of life and rebirth gave him all the time he needed to do what he enjoyed—watering the front lawn, trimming the azalea bushes, sipping on a glass of Casamigos at sunset…
The small god tears across the universe like time might break. Their being hinges on an axiom: outpace light; see the past. They push until their form is gaseous and all the worlds become one bright luminary ahead, but it’s too little, too slow. When they look back, their star remains dark. The small god…
The Grove of Knowledge benefitted from an accord with the fungi underground. The fungi spread far and wide, with eyes and ears in every corner of the realm, allowing them to provide the trees with all manner of news. “There’s a pirate queen docked in the castle’s main harbor.” “Lady Greyton has been missing for…
I did not invite the Tongue Takers to dinner, but three extra chairs have found their way to my kitchen table. They returned early this morning. News of their arrival oozed through town like a pox, spreading across the marketplace in a wave of moaning and wailing. The cleverest of us had fled inside, locked…
Emma understands that the world might be ending. Wormholes. Soft spots. A parallel universe that’s starting to leak through a hundred different holes in a hundred different cities. One of which happens to be just outside her house, right next to the mailbox, at the end of the driveway. How much longer do we…
