It starts like this: a pinprick of blood on a white sheet. Caroline nearly misses it. She would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the snow-blind blankness of her new bed set. The spot is perfectly round and rust red, the planet Mars in miniature. “The god of war,” she thinks, a bad omen. Her […]
At dusk, he carried a small backpack into the park, unfurled a one-man pop-up tent near the ablutions of the main camping ground. The tent screamed vivid yellows and blues—jarringly incongruent with his craggy face and deadpan expression. Until recently, it had been his son’s. From the many times they’d come here together. Way back […]
Halloween was the best family event of the year. Every Halloween, The Cousins played Ninjas. Our grandmother had ten children. Ten children all got married except Uncle Steve. He died in Vietnam, and my dad always poured a beer into the grass for Uncle Steve when all the siblings got together. All these children having children is […]
You don’t remember how you got here, just that you woke up on a dusty futon in a large empty garage with a slick concrete floor that you place your bare feet on as you jolt awake. Light is coming through the high windows on the one wall but you can only see tree tops […]
Ten years ago, it came and unleashed hell upon my little desert oasis. When I finally confronted it—striking a deal that would end its reign of terror—the missing had reached twenty-two. It may not seem like a lot, but for us that was nearly a quarter of our population which meant everyone either knew someone […]
Now that he has passed from this life, I can reveal the remarkable tale he entrusted to me. With respect to this narrative, my name is unimportant. Know only that I was a close friend of Ian Bellairs for many years. Moreover, I was an admirer of his work as a crusading journalist of long […]
Prologue: The Tree That Feeds on Silence “When a child cries at midnight and the dog does not bark, the ancestors are the ones rocking the cradle.”– Old Tiv saying In the far stretches of Taraba State, where the savannah breathes in long sighs and the earth blushes red beneath bare feet, there lies a land shaped more by […]
It hadn’t been a conscious thing, the way he lost his mind. It slipped away slowly, like water draining through a crack in the hull. Somewhere along the way, he knew it was gone. Hunger consumed it. Hunger could do that, especially when you hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe it began when he couldn’t tell […]
Although he couldn’t save his wife, Matthew said he was lucky to escape the woods. Later, it came out that, onthe first day of the hike, as he’d planned all along, he hit her on the head with a stone and pushed her off a cliff. Her body struck the rock wall twice, then crashed through the canopy of trees below. Some of her short mousey hairs stuckto the stone, which he chucked after her. He timed twenty minutes on his watch then called for help. No one came. Even […]
Emily remembered long ago when her parents found her in the backyard as a child, knees in the mud, digging in the dirt with her bare hands. She looked up at them as they loomed over her, the gentle rain beading on her father’s glasses and painting dark dots on her mother’s red jacket. Emily […]