Russell Hastings checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past eleven p.m. Central Park was cloaked in the darkness of an unseasonably warm October. He had just under seven hours left on his graveyard shift. A bag of sandwiches and a large thermos he stole from his grandfather years ago filled with diet soda…
Month: August 2025
Things that Live in the Walls
There are things that live in the walls here, but they don’t tell you that in the welcome tour. Well, they don’t tell you about a lot of things before the state abandons you here for ‘defiance’. Twenty girls jammed in a too-small room. Clothes folded in the lockers but with no locks to keep…
The Shadow and the Wolf
When my campfire died, the darkness rushed in to devour me like a starved hunter. Scrunching my knees to my chest, I defensively pressed my back against the trunk of a gnarled oak tree. I could no longer feel my feet. “Be brave,” I whispered in my mind. I hated the thumping heartbeat in my…
An Approximation of Thunder
Detective O’Rourke strolled down an eroding hallway, the shadows hemmed in sulfurous orange while stark-white LEDs splayed across the wall to her right. Smoking inside hadn’t been legal in twenty years, but the building was a rotting shell, so an ember hung a few inches below her fingertips, trailing ghostly smoke. Her hair was in…
Root Work
Google this shit if you want to, but the park is a death trap—and no one seems to give a damn. Governor Healy proposed a “statewide resource” to improve coordination in missing persons cases. That’s it. A resource. Like we haven’t been losing people for decades in the same places, with the same unanswered questions….
A Little Bad Luck
On Thursday we killed everyone, and it was every bit as wonderful as she had hoped. But on Friday, the first day of our perfect new life together, I woke up with a bad feeling. Late morning sunlight slanted through arched balcony doors. I blinked at Marcia, sleeping next to me on a massive mahogany…
Hollow Faces
Mile after mile of Texas highway thundered away beneath the navy blue Mustang. Jeff pushed the muscle car into the far left lane and dropped the hammer. Sara’s hair flew back. The high southern sky stretched blue and clear over the bone-pale landscape opening around them. Scarred by dry arroyos, the land was dotted with…
Vacancy
Ethan nearly drove past without noticing it. The directions the man from the gas station had given him weren’t very clear. The gravel road off Highway 22 was unmarked, veiled by a dense thicket of dark pines. His headlights skimmed an old, weather-beaten sign hidden behind the brush; gold letters too faded to make out….
My Brother
Life had never felt the same since the murder of my father. He had been a cruel and wretched man—harsh, loveless, and incapable of seeing me as anything more than his second-born and, therefore, unworthy of much regard. I had no illusions about his feelings, and yet, in the wake of his death, something restless…
Coyote Storm
It made no sense that we should be haunted by the coyote, and a whole town no less. If it had been the ghost of the child, or if it had haunted the Weaver family, or Joe Maclean, the man who’d tracked the creature, shot it and brought back the tattered dress of Lily Weaver…