Category: fiction

  • The Cult in the Woods Sends You Flowers

    The cult in the woods sends you flowers on your birthday and engages in community programs. (They volunteered to pick up all the trash on the highway by mile marker 6, but no one saw anyone out there, no robed figures with strange gaunt faces or anything. The trash was just gone the morning after).…

  • A Bucket of Tiny Madnesses

    When you press them down, you hear their angry little squeals.

  • All her Killers

    They poked each other with their blades, spread their blood on the windows.

  • Crawling In, Crawling Out

    When she charmed worms out of the ground, she did so alone, with her wood rattler: a long stick carved with teeth, jammed deep into the earth, scraped so it sang like skeletons clattering.

  • We’re Being Eaten

    J– is studying at the kitchen table, pencil scribbling, lamp-lit, while the things slide in from the back yard. They slide out from holes we never noticed before (or maybe we always knew they were there, burrows with milk-gray wrinkled things inside, like overlarge moles, like leftovers we forgot about). J– needs to pass this…

  • The Pieces she Kept

    She plucked the shards out one by one and stashed them in a box under her bedroom floor.

  • 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.

  • That Thing Standing Behind You

    There’s so little to eat, the icebox is empty Is it too much to ask to dine with a friend?

  • The Snuggly Dead

    Arturo’s body was never found, and that was all well and good because after getting chased around by that chainsaw-wielding maniac, he could have really used a break.

  • There’s a Big Demon Alligator Sitting on the Lawn

    And the neighbors glared at you, of course, because they think it’s your fault.

  • “Great, but Too Many Floating Eyeballs”

    Our room was bitter cold and no manner of warmth from the fireplace could chase away the chill, so snuggling deep into the pillows on the antique canopy bed was just the ticket. The moaning from the hallways really helped my husband get to sleep in the absence of his white noise generator.