• The Hole in the Corner of the Dining Room Floor by Odin Meadows

    My piece-of-shit cousin Brice waved the card in front of my face for just a minute too long, each wag building the pressure bit by bit. I stared blankly ahead. My body became a bubble, holding back an unspeakable rage with the thinnest of films. “Finders keepers,” he sneered. The bubble popped. It was inevitable.…

  • I Know You’re There. Somewhere. by Raima Larter

    We were hiking in a dense wood when a sudden rainstorm blew up. We ran for shelter and came upon an old abandoned house. A mansion, really, that must have once been beautiful. “How lucky is that?” you said and bounded onto the porch. I nearly fell through the rotten boards, but you caught my…

  • Thrives in the Waste by Cameron Esbenshade

    The heat oozed through the windows and pooled behind Scott’s blackout curtains. If he sat still, hunched over his desk, he could stay cool enough to think. Scott’s home office was dim, every lamp left off in favor of the roaring air conditioner that hissed tepid air through its bared teeth. Half-filled applications glowed primly…

  • Life Clock by Mark Connelly

    The day Marcie left rehab, her mother handed her a gift. “Honey, I got you a new phone with an important app.” “Great, Mom.” Marcie looked out the window as the car pulled onto the highway. The last six weeks had been hell, and she was eager to get back to her apartment for a…

  • The Shadow by T. R. Murray

    Caw! Caw! Tom tilted his head and eyes towards the sky. Even in the darkness, he could see the silhouette of a murder circling overhead. Waiting for the inevitable, he thought. He turned back to the road. The moonlight made a futile attempt to fight its way through the overarching trees on either side. He squinted…

  • Incendiary by Jamie McKinlay

    I’d never been able to eat bacon, not since I burned down the flat where my brother Eddy and I lived with the Bogeyman. It’s the smell. That unmistakable reek of fat and flesh crackling. Even years later, sitting in the food court of a motorway services off the M1, as I attentively cut the…

  • Benjamin and the Family Gathering by Mark A. Wolters

    Ben was six years old when he heard his mother weeping, snarling, and, to his amazement, she seemed to be gnashing her teeth. He sneaked downstairs and heard the screams. All his brothers were either in their rooms or out of the house. Why hadn’t they heard this or done anything? The door from which…

  • The Groom by Nenad Dragan Mitrović

    Part I Marco sat behind the wheel of his Audi A4 convertible, a gift from his parents earlier that year. The road from Smederevo to Belgrade lay drowned in a stagnant fog, the kind that descended without warning and might linger for an hour, a day, or forever—it was never clear which. Mid-May, yet they…

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