You love Dr. Markoff. You have always loved Dr. Markoff, even before the film began. He is unlike any man you have ever met. Have you met many other men? It is so difficult to remember. His hair is black as jet. His eyes are as deep as night. When he speaks in his low […]
It’s the end of summer, the evenings only just starting to turn cold. He doesn’t join me for tea again today, so I spend my time beading by the window, stringing bead after bead after bead, my eyes straining against the failing light, the tips of my fingers raw. Cook finishes her chores and joins […]
Markos Koszjan sits alone on Halloween night and watches himself on the heavy wood-sided TV. On the screen, he is a darkened monolith, his black suit an empty doorway that sucks up all the light, tapering from his broad shoulders to his waist, naturally narrow and cinched tighter by an unseen girdle. At the ends […]
A month after Danielle Haas was buried, the cemetery caretaker Mr. Wolf was found dead on the grounds with a rake in his hand and an awful look on his face like he’d just seen the Devil, or so the rumor went at school. Everybody was so convinced that he’d met the ghost of Lady […]
I Runs Two bodies lie twined in afterglow. Sunlight falls across sweaty skin. The man is young and generously furred, his belly a little soft. The woman is strikingly beautiful. Her nonchalant draping of herself across the white sheets in oblivious sleep looks like something that should be filmed. This is Ngozi, fifth wife of […]
Once the waxy dusk went black, the color rotting away behind distant mountains Claudette might never see again, the men in red coats came to work down in the narrow road. This was the third night they had done so. They huddled there between the decaying building and the newer one, around some obscure task. […]
Do me a favor, Papa, and don’t let them market this as a fucking ghost story, okay? I may be dead, but I’m no ghost. And before you get all defensive here, remember that it was you who first taught me my contempt for ghosts when you proclaimed that ghost stories were no more than […]
Nikola winced at the heat of the plates as she loaded them onto her arms, gripping one with the crook of her elbow and balancing the other two on her palms. She backed away from the counter to avoid Carla, though Carla said, “Careful,” anyway before calling for her order. Nikola glanced at her meals—beef, […]
Tom received the first letter postmarked from his hometown in May, and continued to get them at irregular intervals throughout the summer. All had been forwarded a half-dozen times or more, addresses crossed-out and heavily edited, having passed through various film studios and the offices of former agents. One had been forwarded by the editor […]
Isobel hesitates outside the grand door to the chamber she’d thought to share with Adolphus. It’s a work of art, with carven figures of Adam and Lilith standing in front of a tree, a cat at the base, a piece of fruit in transit between First Man and First Woman so one cannot tell if […]
