“It’s not enough to be ugly, right, you freak?” the children would laugh. “You have to live in an ugly house, too.” Every day, Olga heard variations of this cruelty. To her classmates, she and the house were the same thing, as if one explained the ugliness of the other. Throughout her tortuous school years, […]

She was a lover of history, of the remembrances of generations gone before. She believed it grounded her. It reinforced that she belonged to a time and place of her own, and soothed the rudderless feeling that sometimes swept over her. Recently she had taken to wandering the local graveyard, next to the Church of […]

I was coming out of the entrance when the shot rang out. To be honest it didn’t ring like a bell, it was a thin sound like breaking ice, like the release of bubbles of nitrogen gas in the synovial fluid between my knuckles when I crack them. I have learned a lot about biology […]

The naked man stood in the doorway, eyes unblinking. A portion of the left side of his skull was gone, but there was no blood, no gore. Gene tried to outstare him, afraid to look away, and was about to give up from the pain of the attempt when the naked man began to disappear, […]