Short Stories

The front door slams downstairs. If I hear whistling, it’s dad. If not, it’s her. I count my heartbeats in my throat. The sun has started its slow descent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It might sound clichéd, but it is true. My father had been in active service during the war, fighting against tyranny. I was still in the womb when he departed, off to some foreign place, danger waiting for him on muddy fields with gunfire acting as the song of a mockingbird.