Fiction

Russell Hastings checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past eleven p.m. Central Park was cloaked in the darkness of an unseasonably warm October. He had just under seven hours left on his graveyard shift. A bag of sandwiches and a large thermos he stole from his grandfather years ago filled with diet soda… Continue reading Last Night In Central Park

Detective O’Rourke strolled down an eroding hallway, the shadows hemmed in sulfurous orange while stark-white LEDs splayed across the wall to her right. Smoking inside hadn’t been legal in twenty years, but the building was a rotting shell, so an ember hung a few inches below her fingertips, trailing ghostly smoke. Her hair was in… Continue reading An Approximation of Thunder

When my campfire died, the darkness rushed in to devour me like a starved hunter. Scrunching my knees to my chest, I defensively pressed my back against the trunk of a gnarled oak tree. I could no longer feel my feet. “Be brave,” I whispered in my mind. I hated the thumping heartbeat in my… Continue reading The Shadow and the Wolf

There are things that live in the walls here, but they don’t tell you that in the welcome tour. Well, they don’t tell you about a lot of things before the state abandons you here for ‘defiance’. Twenty girls jammed in a too-small room. Clothes folded in the lockers but with no locks to keep… Continue reading Things that Live in the Walls

Finally, someone has lived to tell the tale. He remembers the cave. He remembers the way. He memorized everything. Such a good boy. He was missing his left leg and three fingers on his right hand when we found him. We were besides ourself with joy and fear regardless. The Lads have never returned anyone… Continue reading A Winter March

Nathan Blaustein was a short man, with narrow, seemingly inert ice blue eyes that nevertheless were penetrating. No one closely observing him as he stood mutely taking in his wife Bea’s histrionic distress would make the mistake of thinking him unfeeling. For there was something in the way he watched her, in the way the… Continue reading And Those Who Watch

When it comes to getting rid of your wife and best friend in one night, timing is everything. So many things can go wrong. So many threads need to align. But the truth is, I could have been an actor or director in another life. I recognize, unlike most, that everyone has their roles to… Continue reading Excuse the Outburst

It’s gone, I think. I can no longer hear the clicking sound it makes. Others like it chitter and call to others of their horrid kind. I have been hiding in the collapsed marquee of a theatre (Waiting for Godot was showing here in the before times, the lettering reads) waiting for the thing to… Continue reading Southeast

I never understood my father. It might sound clichéd, but it is true. My father had been in active service during the war, fighting against tyranny. I was still in the womb when he departed, off to some foreign place, danger waiting for him on muddy fields with gunfire acting as the song of a… Continue reading Jack

The day Sam’s son died was also Sam’s last day of freedom. Sam’s son was named Matt. Matt was ten years old and resembled his father’s good looks with dark hair and blue eyes. Sam was a tall lean man and Matt was a wiry athletic boy that was good in many sports. Matt’s favorite… Continue reading Sam’s Son

It made no sense that we should be haunted by the coyote, and a whole town no less. If it had been the ghost of the child, or if it had haunted the Weaver family, or Joe Maclean, the man who’d tracked the creature, shot it and brought back the tattered dress of Lily Weaver… Continue reading Coyote Storm

Life had never felt the same since the murder of my father. He had been a cruel and wretched man—harsh, loveless, and incapable of seeing me as anything more than his second-born and, therefore, unworthy of much regard. I had no illusions about his feelings, and yet, in the wake of his death, something restless… Continue reading My Brother

Ethan nearly drove past without noticing it. The directions the man from the gas station had given him weren’t very clear. The gravel road off Highway 22 was unmarked, veiled by a dense thicket of dark pines. His headlights skimmed an old, weather-beaten sign hidden behind the brush; gold letters too faded to make out.… Continue reading Vacancy