My mother told me it was contagious, her proclivity for loneliness. When I was a boy, I couldn’t quite describe that emptiness in the pit...

i. Träumerei, "Kinderszenen" No. 7; Robert Schumann I was four when I fell in love for the first time. With tender fingers, I traced...

The Amber House, Main Hall, 1920s

The bar was eerily empty. I was, unfortunately, the first to arrive, which left me with the task of finding a comfortable enough table...

In the realm of the Djinn, warmth emanated from apples. Apples were big fireballs that grew on smoky trees whose size, shape, or color...

The classroom door slams open with the rough tumble of edge only brought upon by teenage girls. It lets in a drafty winter breeze, which...

I dreamt about my sister, dead these many years. It seemed she was in a place of ghosts. In my dream I put my face up to hers and kissed...

There was a cabin in the center of a grove. Trees like giants. It looked like they were scraping the sky. This cabin sat right in the...

Destruction She runs. She runs and the Devourer hunts her relentlessly. It is a creature of fire and chaos and death. She had bound it...

The pine woods creaked lazily in the slightest of breezes as I returned to the cabin. Wood pigeons and songbirds cooed and twittered...

"I need to go out," Emma didn’t care whether anyone in the residence's security staff heard her or not. Everything that happened in the...

Jack received a package on the night of his graduation. It was from his brother, Gabriel — he lived too far away. He opened the package...

Brick didn’t remember falling asleep by the motel pool. When he awoke, he sorely regretted it. As he stirred on the plastic lounge chair,...

Lucy stepped on an ancient landmine outside Girvetz Hall. I talked to her Brother, Suvin, about it while we were on the beach, and Lucy...

Her eyes were shiny and still, like glass. Her skin, now the texture of porcelain, and devoid of any life; pale as the face of a ghost....

Jade thrusts the marinated fish into the wok before instinctively flinching. The oil jumps up from the wok immediately, just as she...

August of 1999 When Jim Gradferd died, everyone in the bloodline had rushed to the chapel, even those who weren’t speaking to him during...

Shape shifter This would be the first time I’m saying that every opposing side knows their rights and has their lefts stashed in courage....

It was just three quick days after his death that our father’s cremation appointment had us driving across town. He rode in the trunk....

On a Summer Night in 2018 “Nicks, can I have another one?” “I don’t know, little one,” Nickole “Nicks” James, the babysitter, replied....