All Stories

I flick my tongue across each individual tooth to busy my mouth with something other than talk. I am rooted to the spot in the backyard―once my yard, now Kate’s―and also rooted to something else. The soft whisper of a time not so long ago, when Kate was younger and more vulnerable, and I stood […]

She stood in the attic, holding the thin blanket to her chest, transfixed by the dark stain on the mattress. It was summer and the heat here under the slanted raw wood beams lowered itself like a cape around her shoulders. High up she heard a buzz, a fly banging against the one window, a […]

Notes made by DX (not real name), while observing Geoffrey Sidwell, during the period of almost 2 years in which Sidwell was resident at the care facility: They asked me to watch him and observe from a distance, and paid me good money. I have to make these notes. I am supposed to just sit […]

My ex-wife’s mother is buried in my backyard. And that’s not the creepy part of the story, I’m just telling you that to add a little context to the rest of my story. So maybe you’ll understand things a little better. It’s perfectly legal in some places to bury people on your property. I was […]

The house is quieter than you’d imagine for how many people are inside of it. The women keep looking over their shoulders like actresses waiting for whispered lines from off stage. They smile at each other constantly, whenever they meet another pair of eyes. It sets off a chain reaction of teeth unveiling across the […]

This is a simple story: a path, a predator. Here is your bloodred coat. Here is your basket of treats. You know the rules. Good luck out there. # First: the path. A magnificent slick black double serpent that cuts through the land and races between cleaver-sharp slices made into hills, revealing the skeletons of […]

1. Jenson and Liv had been in the cabin for two months when the first note appeared nailed to a birch limb arcing over the freshwater spring. Don’t drink the water. It was never meant for your throat. The handwriting was almost illegible. At first, Jenson worried detractors had followed him from their previous life, […]

Whenever Jacob goes out—to the grocery store for packages of hot dogs and cans of SpaghettiOs and cases of pop, or to the gas station to fill up the tank of his truck—he locks Minh in the closet beneath the basement stairs. If someone—a TV repairman, A Jehovah’s Witness, a neighbor—comes to the front door, […]