At his desk, Ken idled with a Polaroid picture and muttered a few confused curses. He had been staring at it for hours, finding something obvious and dismissing it as far too strange, refusing to appreciate it. “What’s that you lookin’ at there?” a coworker said over his shoulder. Ken turned it over and slid […]
You press the barrel of the Aegis-IV Longslide into your partner’s hole, and he spreads for you like he’s purpose-built for this very moment. Your spinal reinforcements are made to handle recoil, but you can feel the tension of him juddering up your arm as you hold him still, keeping him there, keeping him under […]
We are chaos. We are the teeth of dragons, shed like seeds. We look on your works, ye mighty, and we laugh. —Geoffrey Usborne Bryant “The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” I had known Geoffrey Usborne Bryant at school, so when I read of his death in the paper, I felt a chill. Only the chill […]
My best friend NPW has been collecting dogs from the side of the highway. He drives miles and miles each day with one eye to the shoulder, on the lookout for heaps of dark fur. Into black trash bags the blood-matted bodies go, and into the big plastic cooler he “liberated” from a summer hunting […]
“This green-gold city will embrace you/ Take you out of time and erase you/ And for one brief moment you will let her/ For one night only you’ll be hers” —Bess Morris, “For One Night Only,” 1924 The Ambassador Billiard Parlor, the Aeolian Hall, Our Metropolitan Madness Just before midnight on January 3, 1924, Ira […]
Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet. Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip of paint is exactly as you remember it. Time seems to have ricocheted off this place. Except not […]
Ghost malls are even sadder than living people malls, even though malls of the living are already pretty damned sad places to be. And let me get this out of the way right now, before we go any farther; I’m dead, okay? I’m fucking dead. This is not going to be one of those stories […]
I did not remember how I had gotten encased in a cherry tree. Though fragrant, this was inconvenient. It was much more tiring than you would expect, being entirely surrounded by tree. I tried to go to sleep, but the circumstances that had led me here were the only ones of which I could be […]
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish. —Richard Siken, “Wishbone” A girl walks into a bar. She grabs her forehead and yells “motherFUCK” and the bar and everything around it except for the girl explodes in a blast that vaporizes half […]