Lydia had the loveliest blue-black hair, and the fluorescent lights of the Halloween Factory danced among her waves. Today, she wore it down, casually tossing it as she perused the racks of costumes. I followed behind her, playing my part of loyal friend: the quiet girl she’d adopted at the college coffee shop two weeks […]
A carriage, exposed and burning at the foot of a sheer silver peak. Sunlight, intense sunlight. Smoke. Stillness. Blood. No movement. Then: a solitary figure moving away, stumbling from shadow into light. A change claiming him, deep and irreversible, making him something other. But go back. Trace the train’s journey through this unnatural place. See […]
The first thing you might notice when watching Suburban Slaughter is the flashing red thunderbolt on the corner of the screen; the camcorder is almost out of battery, and the characters are almost out of time. It starts with blurred static until a moment of clarity reveals two boys crushed by compression. Their bright shirts […]
The Hand At eleven o’clock, with my family tucked fast asleep, I tip-toed to the door and tied the last knot on my combat boot, knots that reached my knees. Rounding the corner, I collided with Baba. “Where do you think you’re going this late?” he asked, rolling the checkered foutah tighter around his waist. […]
(Circa 1953) It’s going on full dark when the car turns off the highway into the motel auto court. A ’48 Studebaker Commander careening through one last pothole, running roughshod since Fresno, on fumes since Old Town Calabasas. But it made it. They made it. Just past the red “VACANCY” sign, the car slows then […]
The statue looked uncannily like her mother. Its nose curved up, stout at the base and plump near the nostrils. Long straight hair fell below its waist; flowy, as if caught in the same wind that brushed against Roadside’s ears. If she squinted, a part of her was so sure that the statue would start […]
You’ve got to understand, first up, that I was obsessed with this boy mainly because he wasn’t the sort of boy anyone else would be obsessed with, which left him all to me. He’d kick a football with his friends up the road to school, right up the middle of the road, mind you, weaving […]
We were instructed to point the brush with our lips ––Grace Fryer, a dial-painter for The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, 1930 1.Glow Twirling the paintbrush in our mouths to sharpen the point glow-in-the-dark watches airplane dials clocks in the company darkroom our glow-in-the-dark cheeks necks hands our radium tongues constellations of luminous dust drifting as […]
Claire was in the van across the street from the girl’s house. Ted was beside her. He had the gun. The girl – Margaret Stone – was bald and chipmunk-cheeked, just like her pictures. She was on the large front porch watering a plant, her movements like a child’s: broad, lumbering, graceless. She claimed to […]
He wonders if the bed springs know that they are different things from the springs in his body that clench and unclench throughout the night, instinctive in a helpless attempt to roll himself away from the fire burning in each of his bones. It’s the left side, hip to ankle, shoulder to ribs. He thinks […]
Chapter Two My father had been obsessed with making sure I knew how to tell when and where an animal had been. When he was whipping his little Toyota truck, which he lovingly called The Yoda, up the side of a mountain, speeding around corners with no guard rails, he’d screech to a stop next […]
Chapter One The first person I tried to kill with a shadow was my sister. I had removed my only pair of stockings and left them to dry by the fire while I relieved myself. Remil had taken the socks, unraveled them into two useless piles of thread, and then laughed when she’d seen my […]