stillness is a lie, my dear
Content note: This year’s Halloween story is extremely graphic. If you’d like to read something less gruesome, how about this? ‘The Greeks believed that the seat of the soul was in the liver,’ you say, pulling out the offending organ and placing it gently on the cutting board. The man screams, but you pay him […]
When she wakes, the air smells like feathers and shit and something damp and heavy. It’s like being inside her cousin Mark’s barn on the edge of town, where the chickens cluck and scratch even in the darkness, filling the empty space with a meaty, sharp odor that persists even when the doors are open […]
‘I’m going to be so glad when this project is over,’ she said, righting the headstone she’d unearthed from a deep pile of tangled ivy. Her hands were lashed with tiny cuts and swelling hives from where the ivy had bitten at her, and she was covered in dirt and smears, her t-shirt drenched with […]
The dead watched her. At first she thought it was ordinary, and everyone lived in the world like she did, as though you were living in a giant fishbowl, watched by silent, judging ghosts just beyond a glass wall. When she was a child, sometimes they played with her, especially when they, too, were children, […]
Something is dripping in the basement again. She can’t recall why she went down in the first place, and fumbles for a light switch while the noise grows in the darkness. The air is heavy and musty, with a sharp coppery, metallic note, which surprises her, because it seems like half the household staff is […]
Dr. Jane Diamond adjusted the microscope carefully, seeking the elusive structure that seemed to disappear every time she attempted to look at it straight on. It, she suspected, held the key to her research, if only she could document that it really did exist, and wasn’t just a figment of her imagination. She was tautly […]
A Halloween tradition at this ain’t livin’; short fiction! This story is actually the beginning of a larger project I’m working on. I may continue posting excerpts here if people want me to and if I stay focused on this project. These are two fairly large ifs. Several people pass by the dead woman in […]
In honor of Halloween, gentle readers, here’s some fiction for you! It was a sunny day when we moved into the house on Fir Street. The neighbors glanced curiously at us as we carried our belongings up the path, wrestling with mattresses and heavily-laden boxes of books, and periodically they drifted over to say hello, […]