Mother brushes my hair, one hundred strokes with the silver comb, each night before I go to bed. She does it while I’m sitting at my vanity, counting off strokes one at a time in that bored, flat voice of hers. Sometimes I like to watch us in the mirror as she does it, a […]
Curled up in a corner of the couch, curtain nudged aside, Hank waits at the front window. It snowed last night, just enough to cover the ground, not quite enough to make everything look fresh and clean, and cold seeps through the glass. Hank can see the driveway, the whole front and side yard, and […]
At first, she thinks it’s yet another accident, here on this straight stretch of back road treacherous only for the speed it provokes in the young and the impatient. Another accident, right where that Nelson girl was killed last summer in fact, and Lynn lifts her foot from the accelerator, squints her eyes against the […]
A whimper came from Davey’s room and it woke Ella up abruptly. She had always been a tentative light sleeper and that problem had got even worse since they had moved out here into the countryside. A sudden violent blast of wind or a car going by on the narrow lane outside their house? Her […]
William Pennyfeather was years dead, opened up from thigh to chin by something in the haunted underground of Holborn Station. Until an hour ago, this had been the most traumatic experience of his existence. Again, he looked down at the patchwork of rough cloth and thread his spirit had been trapped in, a crude approximation […]
TOOTH “Isn’t this exciting!” said my mother as she plucked my tooth from the flesh of minced pork encased within the half-bitten fish ball. Nestled in the center of my mother’s palm was the small canine. Blood from my gums found a home in the creases and lines of her hand, overfilling them before dripping […]
They’d just passed the Alabama state line when Winnie saw the billboard. Winnie’s dad sat in the front seat, his bloated face wrenched into a squint to keep the sun out of his eyes, and her mother beside him, tearing her split ends into smaller and smaller pieces that Winnie imagined floated into the air […]
It wasn’t a library, not really. And not a lending either—only called that by courtesy, because what was hung up on strings like shark fins was printed: crumpled pages of smeared ink, worn through in places and torn but they weren’t being sold as books because there was only a page of each anyway. The […]
The girl is dazzled by the bright displays. They pass a rack of cakes and she cranes her neck. Sit still, says the father. Or do you want to walk? The girl nods. Okay, then you walk, says the father, and lifts her out of the trolley’s seat. Don’t you start complaining about having to […]
I like to sleep in other people’s empty houses. For a long time now, the only place I’ve found real rest is in a stranger’s bed. It makes me feel safe, being somewhere no one would think to look for me. My own apartment is haunted. It took me discovering an old can of Luke’s […]
