“Let’s go hiking!” she said. “It’ll be fun, babe!” she said. Yeah…yeah, it’s definitely real fuckin’ fun right now… I’m sorry, I gotta…gotta stay calm, right? Okay… okay, let me start again. It was around 10:00 this morning when Selena woke me up with a thing of doughnuts...
His name was Connor. Dustin Connor, but he never went by that name. Some called him Con or Connor. I called him Mr. Connor. Mr. Connor was the bravest and most imposing man that I and many have ever known. He stood well over six feet...
There was roadkill all up and down the highway this morning. It is nine AM and sunlight is sifting through the treetops. The lake is still and black and crawling with bugs. Thin grass grows beside it, tamped down by the boots of men I’ve never...
James was an eight-year-old boy with the heart of a dog and the energy of a hummingbird. His mother died when he was only five, so he lived with his grandmother, Babcia. They were very poor: their house was a tiny, dilapidated thing, with a...
I’ve never been good with people. It’s always just been easier to live my life alone, burying myself in fiction and living vicariously through the stories I read and watched. It was comforting to do that. My life could never have been as interesting as...
At first, I didn’t think anything of it. My neighbor would stop to chat with me, leash in hand, and I would catch glimpses of the metal slider dangling from its belly. I assumed it was wearing a piece of pet clothing, or that perhaps...
I think there’s three of them still out there — three wolves. Aside from the one I killed, I’ve only seen two at any given time, but they’re distinct enough for me to tell them apart — there are three of them. We’ve been trapped...
The “rustic cabin” was little more than a shack, sitting in the midst of the Louisiana bayou. All that led to it was a dirt road, and the dirt road wound off the main road for at least five miles before arriving here. Even calling...
My name is Clem. I grew up in a little town in south Louisiana called Chickapin, about an hour west of New Orleans and right on the edge of the deep bayou. There were channels everywhere, and you could make it from my backyard all...
I bought an older house, with no basement. All I thought at the time was that I would own my own place, at long last; I didn’t think how inconvenient it would be to have just a simple crawlspace. It doesn’t go all the way...
“Christ,” I muttered to myself, as the first flakes of snow started to fall. They gathered in fuzzy clumps over the windshield before my wipers cleared them away. I’d been waiting for fifteen — no, twenty minutes now — in my sister’s driveway. Had I...
Kevin felt the all the air leave his lungs; somehow every time it happened it caught him off-guard. He had been going to school with Aria May Pearson for nearly four years now so it wasn’t like this was the first time he had ever...
The competitors of the thirtieth annual “Super fish” tournament sponsored by the Angler Warehouse could not have asked for a better day; seventy-five degrees and not a cloud in the sky. The competition was open to just about every type of fish that Lake Michigan...
