“I really despise this couch. Everything about it. You need to get a new one, or I’ll stop coming to these little chats.” “Focus, Daniella,” the therapist’s voice is low and colorless, like a forced kind of calming. “You were going to tell me about that night in the village, please, let’s just stick to talking about what happened that night.” Daniella fidgets, her lithe frame squirming as if her tattoo-covered skin is cra...
Mom screams. Short and piercing like she’s just stumbled across something startling. Her shriek comes from downstairs. ‘Sounds like she’s in the kitchen but why is she awake and out of bed at this hour?’ She screams again, calling my name. ‘She needs me.’ I spring from my bed, confused. Scared. Pausing at the threshold to my room, I look left. Mom’s door is open. I look right and see what appears to be the dim flicker of...
We had moved, thousands of miles away. Dad claimed it was a job transfer, but I knew the real reason. I knew it was because of the shadow in the house. At first, my parents didn’t believe me. Said I was just hearing things; all in my head. Then, out of the blue, Dad announced a job offer, ironically very far away. I felt safer the first night after the move. There was something oddly comforting about the new home’s unfa...
There’s a girl who I frequently see on my street. Each morning for the past week or so, I watch from the living room window of my lower east side home as she passes by. It’s usually at the same time and she is always dressed neatly; a valid assumption that she must be walking to her place of employment. She is strikingly beautiful and often I think I should go down, accidentally bump into her. I could time it so that I am...
Downtown Los Angeles To everyone in the room, she seemed like just a normal girl wearing Vans, blue jeans, and a red hoodie. They could see she was visibly nervous, understandably so, as were the other four people outside still waiting to be interviewed. “Are you hurt anywhere?” the woman asked. “Physically, no,” the girl answered. “Just shaken. Is it still going on?” “Yes,” said a man wearing a dark suit holding a cell...
It was haunted. It had to be. How else could it be doing what it was doing, stealing her soul bit by bit? Evil. Sadistic. It was incessant and invasive, convincing her that the world outside was not what it seemed. Pitting her against herself, that was its strategy. Whatever it was that lived inside that clock. She wasn’t even sure where it came from. Was it there all along; when she’d moved in? Or, did someone sneak into...
Charlotte Hale hated that she had to gather wild berries. It wasn’t that gathering wild berries was hard. It was that gathering them was not hard and at sixteen, she felt like it was demeaning. Her eight-year-old stepbrother, Albert, was perfectly capable of the task. So she could not, for the life of her, understand why she had to be the one to gather stupid frickin’ wild berries. “I need them for the salad, Char,” her m...
The call came in over the scanner that sat on the corner of Sheriff Rockwell’s desk. It was a little after 2 AM. “Tank...this is Sam…you got a copy?” Sheriff Tank Rockwell pushed back in his chair. Thick hands were folded over the perfectly bulbous belly that his wife always said looked like a swallowed watermelon. His eyes were shut and his chest was raising and lowering in the rhythmic pattern of sleep. “Tank..come in…...
It was Thursday, early morning in mid-July, opening day of the Lake Arrowhead county fair. Dana MacMurchy sprang from her bed with an enthusiasm equivalent to that of a child on Christmas morning. She was up and dressed so quickly one might have thought she had actually slept in her clothes. Braiding her hair was going to take too long, so her tousled chestnut locks were pulled into a ponytail. She then pulled it through...
She wakes with a startle, groggy as if hungover from some overindulging celebration. Though, it isn’t liquor that has her brain so foggy. Fumbling for her pen and pad—now kept diligently on the bedside table—she begins to scribble, no time to even compose herself. For a moment, images flash in her head like broken fragments of a flip-book animation. They don’t last long and her pen tries feverishly to capture any remain...
It was a day Lincoln High School would never forget. Thirty-five white mice with beady-red eyes scurrying the halls like inmates set free in a jailbreak. Susie had never told any of us her plan. Maybe that was because it wasn’t a plan, per se. She just got up and one by one, opened their cages, pardoning what was supposed to be an immutable death sentence—the 10:30, AP Bio class dissection. Chaos ensued. Susie waving her...
Breezes usher in on an orchestrated serenade of autumn. It enters cool and sedated, as subtle as the high notes of a summer song. Where once the raucous of beach-laughter and jubilant screams blended with crashing surf, they now trail off, dissipating into the scent of cozy fireplace bellows. I sit, chin on knees, and watch as the leaves’ brilliant folly comes alive. Colors held and hidden away from the heat, spring forth...
The power company needed the dam. At least that was what the newspapers had reported. The town was soon abandoned, cemeteries relocated, schools and churches gutted, stores emptied. It would take almost three weeks to fully submerge. She woke slowly. Her head was pounding and cloudy. She fought through the haze to connect one thought with another. None of them added up to make sense of why she was there. As she forced a...
Some say only ducks truly enjoy the rain. They obviously have not met Kerstin. “You’re stark-raving mad, you know that?” I call out to her from the bungalow’s front porch. “We haven’t seen the sun for three days. These puddles may very well be my only chance at a pool.” She jumps, splashing both feet like a rebellious child with a rose-colored pout. “At least we’ll save on sunscreen!” She has that carefree aura; the typ...
