She plucked the shards out one by one and stashed them in a box under her bedroom floor.
Author: Lorna Dickson Keach
It Only Played Piano
It didn’t even weep ceaselessly. The ghost didn’t throw knives or stomp or bang on the walls. No one’s toes were nibbled.
We Got on the Wrong Bus
A skeletal hand was left on the seat Charise wanted. When she poked it, it scrambled under her feet.
Come be an alligator
Grasp our babies /gently, between
massive jaws / teach them / to chomp minnows / and toes
I might be a dungeon
Peering inside, I saw
what might have been gray cobblestones,
rough-hewn stairs, old pitch torches
We Bought a Box of Organs
It sat on the front door stoop: one large, seeping box, addressed to both of us, and we did not, of course, remember buying such a thing.…… Read more “We Bought a Box of Organs”
A Letter from Your Love Interest (who is not an Embalmer)
When you leave I’ll preserve you (your memory, I mean). I’ll tuck my dreams of you away in a bed of Egyptian sand for centuries and centuries,…… Read more “A Letter from Your Love Interest (who is not an Embalmer)”
This Town has too Many Dark Festivals
The rites have been described as highly uncomfortable.
This Old Hellhouse
Maalphegor came with it’s own door-to-door salesmen; at the beginning, they looked a little like Bela Lugosi clones, but as the years wore on, the shadows in the salesmen’s faces deepened, a bit like Pazuzu from the Exorcist; then increasingly they began to look like Slender Men once Ralph and Edna’s children came of age.
A Note on Cosmic Horror
Rather than xenophobia, I think, good cosmic horror and weird fiction practice something closer to exophobia–this fear of things outside human perception or outside what it means to be intrinsically people.
Nothing Fun will Happen this Halloween
no goblins will glare out of dark cellar shadows because/
we all know, for quite certain, that monsters aren’t real.
You Have Been Visited by the Weasel of Sorrows
I will return: Monday, Tuesday, Friday. Blank checkboxes sit beside each day’s name.
