There is no such thing as psychics…or mediums…or the afterlife and nothing you say is going to convince me otherwise. I am the authority on this subject, for I am a scientist, and you are not…you are nothing…you couldn’t even keep your husband around for the kid, so what do you know? Sorry…sorry…that was a …
His meditation was interrupted. He’d decided at the office that he would meditate as soon as he walked in the door. Before Coleen was home. It felt rude to meditate when she was there, when they had so little time together. It was also embarrassing. Just the thought of Coleen looking at him sitting lotus …
When the Mustang swerves across four lanes into his path, he has no time for a flashing life. “Now?” his mind asks. He will die with his front seat full of generic butterscotch pudding packs for his pregnant wife. He will die with one hand slamming the wheel and the other full of a half-eaten …
I’d read about the parking lot there in the Shepherd, a local free newspaper. Parking around Brady was always difficult since they’d built it up and made it a shopping and restaurant district. People would go there, leave their car in the laundromat lot and have dinner or shop. When they returned, there’d be a …
Continue reading “The Brady Street Laundromat” By Mark Putzi
The merchant was taught—ever since she was old enough to fear anything—that monsters could walk in daylight and nightmares could wear the skin of normalcy for a short time before slipping back into the depths below, shedding their masks as night falls again. So, when she was roused awake by a stranger knocking on the …
Continue reading “Falling in Love with Teeth and Coral” By Penny Senanarong
It started the night you showed me the bruises on your ribs. We were sitting on top of some elementary school, neither you nor I had ever gone to, when you lifted up your shirt. Oh, how it looked: bronze skin stretched so taut against the xylophone of your ribcage, and all those marks, plot …
The brain tissue had just enough blood around it that it looked alive, but all that blood was where it wasn’t supposed to be, and she was missing that part of the head, which should shield it from our view. There were so many tubes and lines in her that it was hard to believe …
Continue reading “The Cleansing in Marissa’s Tub” By Sam Kaspar
“Listen, I have to tell you something.” I almost hung up the phone then because I just didn’t want to hear it. I mean, I knew it already, I knew it in the tone of his voice, but in reality I knew it in his posture—and in his eyes that no longer met mine. I …
Continue reading “i was born in nineteen seventy…whatever” By Sybil Wilen
A blast of damp, frigid air blustered through the opened doors of Marlow’s Tavern. The cold wake skirted past the punters, rushing the bar before they did. The barman Brian Legarty felt it raise a chill on his bare arms and watched it lift the flimsy Christmas decorations tacked to the dull walls, making them …
They’re regulars at Gray’s Sporting Goods, and not the regulars you’d expect—–fishermen, marksmen, student athletes—no, they’re an ancient man in a wheelchair and his equally old, but able-bodied wife. New-hires soon learn that they’ll never buy anything and let them be. A department head or manager will approach and say, “How are my favorite customers …
Burnt Pine 