Once a month my mother, Ash, killed just enough to last until the next. She slunk home triumphant at dusk and hung the bodies in the shed: pheasants, rabbits, the occasional deer in season. The blood trickled under the door and out onto the step. Local cats convened, their tongues rasping in the dark. By […]
We buried the first ones, nice and proper. It sounds foolish now, but what could we do? After all, they were still our children. I even dressed my Sarah for the occasion—decked out in her Sunday best, yellow cotton bright against the dark brown of her skin, pattern hand-stitched to cover a mismatched body. We […]
The village school was not quite at the highest point of the steep main street, but it was elevated and isolated enough for Stacy to see the sea through the chain-link fence that bordered the far side of the playground. She could smell the sea from here too, crisp and salty, especially on a day […]
There were a number of old wooden signs that pointed the way to it. They could be found at crossroads, jutting from the grass verges, listing the local towns and villages on their pointing fingers. At the bottom, in small letters, one would invariably find: CORWICK—4 MILES I soon began to realise that it was […]
As Emily walks the darkness, flashing her torchlight into each vacant room, she realises that, yes, a house can be haunted. Not just the old, neglected buildings, the ones with overgrown gardens and broken windows, but also neat, well-maintained, detached holiday homes like this one. She’d never given it much thought before. Now, sneaking around […]
The body in the bathtub is starting to smell. I have been staring at it for hours, trying to forget that not too long ago the body had been he and not it, but that does not seem to be working. When he died I dragged it into the bathtub, leaving a trail of blood […]
My sister is the one who bleeds first. “Stigmata” our mother calls it, but there are other languages, other tongues ancient and cold as the stars, that would call it something else. She wraps my sister in cotton and lace and places thin slivers of ice on her tongue and coos in a voice I […]
Dion spun back to the oval of daylight and said a prayer. He didn’t pray to Jesus or Qamata. He prayed to his father, ten years lost and dead in the mines. Watch over me. Lead me to gold and back to the light. He sniffed his last lungful of fresh air, jasmine and pending […]
Our first night out on the ice, we traded war stories. Reyes, Viader, Kellet, Martinez, Ramone, McMann, and me. We were all career military, all career grunts, none of us with aspirations for command. Captain Adams hand-picked us, brought us to the top of the world—a blue place all ice and snow and screaming wind—with […]
There he is in the tub. Note the pores on his nose. Note the scarred cheek, the breakout here and there, angry ripe things red with a dot of white all ready to burst. Note the long hair, which I tried to wash last night; I’d put his head under the faucet, let the cold […]
