Horror Stories of 1,000 Words or Less
For the month of April 2025, these are the stories that entertain us most.
* Starfish by Maura Aradia Furtado
* Watch Your Back by Pauline Milner
* Soup Story by Garry Engkent
* Low Season by Mark Moran
* Psychopomp by Peter Mangiaracina
* The Last Night at Esmerelda's by Eric Bach
* Rest in Peace by Tom Ramey
* Despair: When the Shadows Whisper, Sanity Screams by Jason L. Benskin
* Being Content by Olufunmilayo Makinde
* Awaken Child by Steven Bird
* The Four Who Died in Lewisburg by Stephen Mirabito
* Hot Flash by Ashley Lewin
* Shannon Grabs Groceries by Bunker King
* Fifty Feet by J.D. Strunk
* Drowned Angel by Gemma Ortwerth
* Hungry Heart by Jim Donohue
* Alone by Adam Thomas
* Spiraling by Taylor Z. Adams
* Crispin X - K.L. Johnston
Starfish by Maura Aradia Furtado
I resent him. I resent everyone he looks at how he used to look at me. I resent that they believe themselves to be special to him, just as I did. Sometimes, this resentment tempts me to disappear without a word. I daydream about packing away my monochromatic wardrobe, tiptoeing out of our house before dawn, and driving out to southern Washington to start anew. I dream of a new life where I’ll become a hermit with independent hobbies, like bread making and gardening. A simple life. A life where I don’t concern myself over such ungovernable things.
When at work, I find myself oppressed by those fantasies. When the tedium of my office job endures, I catch myself imagining the moment I allow those urges to overtake me. I would silently slip to the time clock for my last punch and leave without saying a word to anyone. I would turn my phone off and drive north on the highway until it was too late to fight off the sleep. I’d stop at the most presentable motel I could find and set up camp until I had the resources to lay down my roots in the Pacific Northwest. I fantasized like this often, almost as a way to pass the time.
He and I used to be happier, though I question how much of that happiness was due to the relationship or to what we each got out of it.
We still make love often and passionately. Our sides still hurt from laughing so hard some nights. We eat together and always make sure to give each other a good night kiss. But he used to call me gorgeous. His jaw used to drop when we reunited after the workday. He would rub my feet and stroke my cheek so gently when looking into my eyes that it made me shiver in excitement.
When I finally discovered who the new object of his affection was, I killed her.
I beat her down with the claw side of a hammer after I saw her leave my house one June morning. I told him that I was driving up to the Catskills for a weekend yoga retreat, but in reality, I spent the night holed up in the backseat of my Sienna. I followed her back to her house and beat her until she went limp. I didn’t ask her for the dirty details of their affair. I didn’t ask her if she knew whose life she was ruining. I just acted.
I never thought I would become the type of woman who risked her life over broken trust. I also never thought that I’d see someone come back from the dead. Yet, there she was the next morning, alive and well, standing at my doorstep.
Her skull wasn’t caved in. Her alabaster skin had not a scrape. She stood still and calm with an unbroken smile, staring straight at me. Not a word was spoken between us.
I had to kill her again. How she healed so quickly was beyond me and something I couldn’t afford to question. I just grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground before strangling her. That ungodly smile…she never let up. But this time, I knew she was dead and gone.
It’s been five weeks now, and I’ve killed her every single day since. Sometimes, she appears at my door. Other times, she appears in my backyard. Never speaking, she always stares with a smile on her face, awaiting the inevitable.
He never questions the thumping or bumping when this happens. He never questions the late nights and early mornings spent away when disposing of the evidence. Over time, I began to cut corners when it came to concealing her body. I knew what was in store for me once the sun climbed through the sky again, so I didn’t bother being meticulous.
All of that, only to find he still stares when he thinks I don’t notice. He still ignores me after I curl my hair and paint my lips red, hoping that I look exactly how he wishes me to. And she still haunts my life.
I daydream about buying a cabin in the thick Washington forest to live the rest of my life. I’d spend my days filling my kitchen with the aroma of rosemary bread and writing about the way rainwater falls onto my berry bushes.
I can only hope she would not follow me there.
Maura Aradia Furtado is an emerging writer previously published in The Word’s Faire, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Closed Eye Open. Her work explores heavier subjects and the more difficult aspects of the human condition. You can follow her on Bluesky @mauraiswriting.bsky.social and find more of her work on www.mauraiswriting.com
Watch Your Back by Pauline Milner
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Everyone has a niche. Mine just happens to be watching someone writhe in pain before they die.
Standing here on this deserted street, the fog has crept in, and I pull up my coat collar in response to the dampness. It won't be a long wait.
Alex Mason will be passing by in just a few minutes, taking his normal route home after his shift at Shekel's. I know because I have been stalking him for weeks.
This is my typical MO, though the time taken to find the right victim, always in a new city, can be the longest part of my mission. I seek out the assholes, the ones who are hostile to teenagers working the counter at a fast food joint, yell obscenities at others, and routinely harass people.
These stains on society need to be taken out and endure some suffering of their own.
In the distance, I hear footsteps, and I push myself further back against the alcove of bushes. Mason's about to find out what his punishment is for telling a young kid to, "fuck off," when she accidentally bumped into him and for spitting on a homeless person asking for change on their usual corner.
I rub the syringe in my hand with my thumb. Almost show time. As Mason passes, I step in behind him. This has to happen quickly before he stops to check and see who is following him. In one choreographed motion, my left arm goes around his throat while my right hand plunges the needle into his neck. He jerks a couple of times before I drop him, and the agony begins. Potassium chloride burns his veins on the way to his heart, and before this episode is over, he will try to scream, twist in pain, and claw at his neck. His eyes may meet mine, if only for a second, as I am enjoying the show.
Within a few short minutes, Mason is still, the look of terror remaining evident on his face. I step over his body and make my way south toward the mall parking lot where I left my motorhome.
I am not playing God, and I did not plan on growing up to be a murderer. Firstly, for all the nimrods who really think there is a big guy up there in the sky with his hands on the controls of everything. Bullshit. You are chasing a fairy tale because God would not let little kids be sexually abused and people be blown up by suicide bombers. Secondly, for everyone who believes we are all born equal and can be what we want in life, you are living in fantasyland. Do you think that guy who picks up your garbage really aspired to that job?
In my house, kids were punching bags, chore masters, and anything else my parents wanted us to be. My sister grew up to be a habitual drug user and is probably still shooting meth into her veins. Me? I got lucky as the one with brains and a particular penchant for economics. You would think I would be an executive with a corner office, a wife, and two kids, but that didn't happen because I ended up with a different fate.
My classmates thought it was fun when I brought a frog to school and laughed as I tore its legs off and watched it bleed to death. When my father told me to get rid of my sister's guinea pig because she wasn't taking care of it, I shot it in the head with my BB gun until it died. I was in control of their deaths, and it's not my fault that I liked it. I also pounded the face of Freddy Moore until it was a bloody pulp of a mess, but he never called me a freak again.
One thing I never did unless I absolutely had to was to spend money. My parents didn't notice or didn't care when they got no change after I did errands. I took every shift available at the local pharmacy, stocking shelves and spending evenings manning the canteen at the ball field. Money found in a birthday or Christmas card went straight into my war chest.
I had studied the stock market for years. As soon as I turned 18, I invested a good chunk of change into a small start-up that was building personal computers. When Nanopriv Corporation stocks blew up, I got out with enough money to support myself, setting me up for life. I purchased a brand new house on a set of wheels and said goodbye to my hometown.
After sitting at a campsite in my motorhome for two days listening to the prick three sites over scream at his wife and smack her around, something stirred in me and led me to where I am today.
Since no one has my fingerprints or a sample of my DNA, I haven't been too worried about getting caught, but I do keep that spare syringe in case the police ever come calling. I know it will only be a few minutes of excruciating pain before the end.
You must like people to do what I do—sitting and watching all day and picking out the ones who need to be erased. Following them for days, sometimes weeks, to find the place where their reckoning will come. I have been lucky so far, eighteen and counting.
When I reach my motorhome, there is no one around. I decide to cop a few zzz's before I head out. My next city will be another state away. A long drive and a lot of time to think.
I can't fathom ever stopping unless, of course, I have to be the orchestrator of my own demise. Killing is orgasmic for me. You don't have to worry about being my next victim, but if you aren't minding your Ps and Qs, watch your back.
Working as a freelancer for over 20 years, Pauline pivoted in order to write for clients but also to focus on her fictional writing. Having already penned many short stories and one chapbook, she is also writing two novels and two motion picture length original screenplays. She lives with her husband and their dog, Casey, in a restored farmhouse surrounded by five working farms. For the best mental health boost, she feeds and cuddles baby lambs.
Soup Story by Garry Engkent
Saila Sam is just your neighborhood sleazebag, trying to stay alive, taking dope from the corner pusher when he can, and making some pocket money by doing illegal jobs. Saila Sam's eyes are always on the lookout for things, items dropped deliberately or accidentally. Sometimes, he gets lucky and find a purse or wallet. Money, usually a few dollars and change, is always welcome. ID plastic cards are sellable.
His neighbourhood is lower town. Populated with the down-and-out, small-time gangsters and criminals, whores, beggars, hustlers, and scumbags. There's graffiti on anything perpendicular: walls, fences, doors, sides of buildings in alleyways. This is home.
"So, you're back," Hugh observes. "Wanna job?"
Hugh runs The People's Cuisine, a charity café. His establishment serves the down-and-out not only in food but also a slight hope of learning the restaurant trade for those who volunteer.
"Like the free food," Saila Sam replies. "Not work."
"You might even learn a trade: cooking."
"How much you pay?"
Hugh mentions a figure. Saila Sam makes a face. "There are other benefits. I promise you won't be hassled."
Saila Sam puts on an apron, and Hugh introduces him to the rest of the kitchen staff of The People's Cuisine. There are ten regular workers, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty. Later and throughout the week, more volunteers appear and help out in the kitchen and the dining area.
That was six months ago.
Saila Sam is used to the kitchen's routine. One of the older cooks taught him to use various knives for vegetables, meats, and breads. Old Joe showed him how to slaughter, butcher, and cut properly. Saila Sam is not afraid to kill. He rather enjoys it.
"Do you want to work the graveyard shift?" Hugh asks Saila Sam. "Slightly better pay."
Saila Sam goes to work at midnight. There are about two or three regulars from the morning and afternoon staff, but the others are all new faces
he has never met. They look different. The faces of the young men and women are gaunt; their eyes appear dull and perhaps a little lifeless. They work efficiently but without vigor.
Hugh is there to introduce Saila Sam to the kitchen manager, Demyks. The kitchen manager puts Saila Sam to work grinding meat. Although he keeps an eye on the others, the head chef pays more attention to this new recruit. Being streetwise, Saila Sam knows he is being secretly watched. On occasion, he asks himself why.
By the end of the month, he automatically does his job without supervision and without paying much attention. It has become boring: grinding meat, grinding more meat. Then, in one stainless steel pan, he feels something odd: a finger with a gold ring.
"Jesus!" Saila Sam is about to draw the kitchen manager's attention but stops. He looks about. He stuffs the ring finger into his pants pocket. The young apprentice now looks carefully at the morsels of meat that he puts into the grinder. His giant pot is filled with a mixture of pork, beef, lamb, and human flesh (in smaller chunks).
He starts to shake uncontrollably. What is this place? How the hell can I get the hell out of here? Should I call the cops?
Saila Sam knows better. That thought comes from panic. The moment he calls the police he would be a dead man. If he were lucky.
The second thought shocks him more. Not only others but he, too, has been eating human flesh in the form of pieces in stews, soups, and sandwiches. His stomach wants to throw up.
Saila Sam, then, philosophizes: "What doesn't kill you, makes you wanna eat more."
Garry Engkent, Chinese-Canadian, taught English literature at various universities/colleges, and co-authored three college writing textbooks. His stories have appeared in Exile, Ricepaper Magazine, and Dark Winter Literary Magazine, etc. "Why My Mother Can't Speak English", "Eggroll", “Paper Son “and “Hannah". His recent published forays into horror are “I, Zombie: A Different Point of View,” “Merci” and “Immigrant Vampire” etc.
Low Season by Mark Moran
The hotel had been built too close to the water. Its floor sloped like the deck of a ship, slanted just enough to send a glass rolling off the table if left unattended. The carpets were drained of colour and dampness crept into the corners. The air carried the scent of old salt.
It was late in the season when I arrived. The streets were deserted, the harbour still, the boats tied up and rocking in murky grey water. Even the seagulls had abandoned the town as if something had warned them away. The woman at the front desk did not ask my name. She slid a key across the counter without meeting my eyes.
"Breakfast is at seven," she said.
The lift was broken. A handwritten sign had been taped over the buttons for so long that the ink had faded. The paper curled and hung limply, the words sliding off the page. The stairwell reeked of mildew, and the hallway carpets were frayed from countless footsteps. I let myself into the room.
A single bed. A small desk. A window overlooking the sea.
The wardrobe in the corner didn't shut properly, its doors gaping slightly. The air inside smelled of old fabric. I stood by the window and watched the tide's dark line slowly retreat. Long stretches of black sand, slick with seawater, reached toward the horizon like slender fingers. Somewhere in the walls, water gurgled through old pipes. A slow, distant rush.
I woke just after midnight to knocking. Soft. Deliberate. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to stop.
Another knock.
It came from the hall door, not the wardrobe. Yet my eyes drifted there instead.
Knock. Knock.
I rose slowly; bare feet cold against the floorboards. Pressing my ear to the wood, I felt the air, cool and thin. Ragged breathing rasped on the other side. I turned the lock. Silence. I opened the door. The hallway was empty. Or too full of shadow to tell.
On the second night, the phone rang in the early hours. I sat up, the room tilting with me. The old rotary phone squatted on the desk, shuddering. I hesitated before picking up. Static crackled.
Then –
Not a voice. Not words. Something else. Something wet. Like the sound of movement through water. I set it down.
On the third day, I saw another guest.
An older man stood at the breakfast room window, gazing out to sea as his reflection drowned in the glass. He did not eat. Did not drink his coffee. He stood perfectly still, his hands resting on the back of the chair before him. I took a seat at the far end. The woman from the front desk brought me a plate of toast and an egg with a rubbery sheen, then vanished through a door behind the counter.
The man tilted his head slightly. Not toward me. Just away from the window. His fingers tightened on the chair. His mouth opened wider than it should. I braced myself.
No sound came. He turned and left the room. I didn't hear his footsteps in the hall.
On the fourth night, I dreamed of the tide. Of black water creeping up the shore, lapping the hotel steps, climbing the walls. Of something moving beneath it, pale shapes stirring beneath the surface. Of footsteps in the hall. Of a slow, steady sound passing just outside my door.
When I woke, the air was heavy, damp, pressing against my skin. The bedsheets smelled of salt. The wardrobe's mouth hung ajar.
On the fifth day, the woman at the front desk was gone.
The lobby sat empty. The dust was thick on the counter, and the untouched register book, its pages blank, then not. I peered outside. The tide had retreated. The black sand stretched out in long ribbons. A figure stood at the water's edge, looking out to sea.
I felt my room key in my pocket, pulsing. I had never seen another guest leave.
I reached for the door handle. It did not turn. I knocked once. Then again.
The tide was coming in now, creeping up the shore, eating away at the black sand. The figure had disappeared.
I knocked harder. The sound did not echo.
Something moved on the other side of the door.
Slow. Deliberate.
Knocking back.
Mark Moran is a travel and short fiction writer whose work explores the sensory and emotional landscapes of the places visited. With a particular interest in less-visited destinations, he seeks to capture the spirit of these locales through evocative, ethereal storytelling. Mark writes for several publications, including NÓS, Ireland's largest Irish-language magazine.
Psychopomp by Peter Mangiaracina
They called him Charon. He rowed a boat from the cemetery across the lake to a tiny island, its only structure a crumbling mausoleum.
At night, through swirling mist, wraiths wandered the island, shrouds billowing, voices keening like loons in moonlight. Not even the most reckless teenagers would take skiffs there. Not even in daylight. Cloud cover loomed thicker on Charon’s Island. Air rippled around the island like a heat wave, even in winter, carrying a faint odor of rotting meat.
Angela’s test results came back negative, so she and a few friends celebrated around a campfire near the cemetery, drinking beer and telling scary stories. Angela peered at the island and could just make out a figure standing on the shore through the miasma. Amid soul-stirring sounds from the island, she swore the figure howled her name.
The next night, she went back alone. She stood on the shore, hugging herself against frigid gusts, watching the island shift like a chimera.
Then, the lazy creak of oars, slow and deliberate, overcame shrieking winds, followed by murky splashes of water. Those sounds echoed in her ears like a dissonant symphony, seeping into muscle, tendon, and bone. The bow of a rowboat sliced through the mist.
Every cell in her body begged her to leave, but her feet stayed rooted to the shore, numb and cold as gravestone slabs. Curiosity? Or compulsion? The rowboat scraped onto the pebbled beach, the sound like crushing bones.
An old man in a threadbare shawl stood up in the boat. Moon shadows crawled across his face like spiders. He raised his arm slowly, uncurling a skeletal finger, and called to her, his hollow baritone echoing from a dark canyon.
Angela!
Her mouth opened. Her voice rose, crude and tattered. She keened like a loon in moonlight.
Peter Mangiaracina is a writer and English instructor based in the Canary Islands, Spain. Originally from New York City, he spends his time balancing work, storytelling, and his love for videography and jazz fusion guitar. From December 2024 to March 2025 he has been published seven times, his most recent work, Tiny Acts of Vengeance is coming soon to The Brussels Review.
The Last Night at Esmerelda's by Eric Bach
"And here's Sapphire!"
The voice rumbled into the static microphone like a carnival barker’s.
Saphire's thong had a pearl-white glow, her bare skin a dark, hazel tan. The black lights above made everyone look perfect.
Tom exhaled a cloud of smoke. After a few seconds, it dispersed upward, joining the thick, acrid haze that hung in the air.
"By George, I'd like to get some of that!"
He guffawed loudly as if it was the world's funniest joke, slapping George's back, oblivious to the lit Marlboro in his hand.
George didn't laugh. Tom had long ago worn the "by George" joke into the ground.
Besides, Sapphire wasn't who he came to see.
He and Tom had become regulars at Esmerelda's last year after Tom's divorce. At first, he had begged George to come along, and begrudgingly, George relented.
Thereafter, every Friday night meant going out with Tom. For George, however, it wasn't the variety of flesh that kept him coming back. It was Tisha.
That first night, she had wrapped her arms around his chest as he sat, her blond bangs tickling his neck. And with that sweet southern drawl, she whispered into his ear.
"Anyone sittin' here, cutie?"
A shy man, he had never been approached like that.
And within the next half hour, he felt like he'd known her his entire life.
Her real name was Tina, and she was twenty-five. He learned that she loved Southern Comfort and Coke. Her favorite music was Type O Negative.
She had only one tattoo: a scarlet king snake. Its red, black, and yellow color patterns were inked in bright pigments, running from the nape of her neck, down her spine, all the way to her tailbone.
"The king snake reminds me of immortality," She chirped.
"Just like me. I want to live forever."
She had no kids but was seeing someone.
"And let me tell ya', he acts like a kid." She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.
Every night, she'd scoot her chair next to George's, curling her leg into his. Her heavily scented vanilla perfume would smother the air, making the hovering cigarette stench not so bad.
"Would 'ya mind getting me a refill, cutie?"
And George didn't mind, even if the drinks did cost twenty dollars each.
With time, he also learned that her boyfriend, Steve, was almost twice her age and was on parole.
"he's a good guy. People just don't understand him."
The last time he saw her, it looked like she had been crying. George almost asked her what was wrong, just like he almost asked about the darkened half-ring underneath her left eye.
And now, the chair to his left was empty. It had been that way for the last few Friday nights.
He stared longingly into his beer as Tom whistled, leaning over the stage rail and throwing dollar bills.
"Man, you're missing the action!" He shouted over the blaring music, finally plopping back into his chair.
And then George heard those warbled words, vibrating from the speakers, that made his pulse accelerate.
"And now, she's finally back for your viewing pleasure! It's Tisha!"
The dirge of heavy guitar riffs and a growling voice erupted as her thigh-high, pleather boots clicked up the steps.
A black scarf was wrapped around her neck. A black veil covered her otherwise bare chest.
She threw her leg around the brass pole and swung.
Thump!
Belly flopping forward, she slammed onto the stage face first.
And just as the crowd gasped, she picked herself up, creeping into a half-crawl. But it wasn't her usual feline crawl, with her bottom seductively arched in the air.
It looked like a mangled victim crawling out of the wreckage.
She cautiously attempted to stand; her legs wobbly as if on stilts.
Pushing her hair back, dark pieces of debris stuck to her blond strands.
Her eyes met George's, and she wagged her finger in a come-hither motion.
His skin flushed as butterflies fluttered in his stomach. But these were no butterflies, as this was not excitement. It was an intangible dread.
As he approached the stage railing, her mouth curved into a smile. Then she belched into a coughing fit, and pieces of dried leaves blew out her mouth.
She smelled like she had bathed in that vanilla perfume. However, its heavy scent could not mask the overripe stench of rot underneath.
Acidic vomit boiled up into George's throat.
She leaned into him, and the sticky plastic pieces brushed against his face. Upon closer examination, they were pieces from a garbage bag.
Her arm swayed drunkenly, playfully throwing the tail of her scarf at him. She dropped the veil and teasingly turned away from him.
Web-like veins on her sickly pale skin glowed in the lights, which seemed glazed with a damp wetness. However, the red, black, and yellow tattoo pigments were still perfect.
And the king snake seemed to slither as the loose skin swayed, moving around some unseen branch underneath.
As his elbow accidentally caught the tail of her scarf, there was an awful tearing sound, like cloth being ripped.
The snake's head split apart as the skin near her neckline unfolded, revealing a dried, bloody chasm underneath.
Her eyes rolled back as her head tumbled off her torso, rolling down the stage steps.
Her body spilled forward, revealing the bone-white stem of her cervical spine. Countless maggots moved frantically in the black rotting meat inside her dismembered neckline.
Neither George nor Tom remembered the lights coming on nor the paramedics rushing in. George did not recall what he had said when questioned. He did, however, read the newspaper headline about how the coroner could not determine her time of death.
A few days later, Esmerelda's closed for good, and neither George nor Tom ever mentioned it again.
Eric Rogers Bach, born November 17, 1976, was raised in Western Kentucky. According to his mother, Diane Rogers Bach, the first creature who frightened him was Kermit the Frog.. On a clear evening when reception was optimal, he enjoyed tuning in to KBSI and watching “Tales From the Darkside". He was an avid reader of Stephen King and often re-enacted the stories in backyard haunted houses. After graduating from Murray State University with a bachelor of science in 2000, the mundane rat race had slowly dulled his imagination. Therefore, he is grateful for this opportunity to rekindle the old flame of creativity. His short story, "The Taste Tester", was published in the December 2024 issue of Down In the Dirt.
Rest in Peace by Tom Ramey
When I died, I thought I would finally get some peace and quiet. No more obligations, no more noise. Just silence.
Then, the family moved into my house.
Scaring them away was easy. A flickering light here, a broken plate there. I was subtle at first, just to test the waters.
When they didn’t take the hint, I escalated. A shadow in the hallway, whispers in the night, and the coup de grâce, an upside-down cross on a steamy mirror. The mother was Catholic. That did the trick.
Then, another family moved in.
I was irritated. This was my house. I had earned my silence. And yet here they were, laughing, talking, filling the space with life like I wasn’t even there.
I started small again. The usual tricks. They blamed faulty wiring, a draft in the attic. When that didn’t work, I got bolder. I slammed doors, pulled blankets off them, and made my presence undeniable.
One night, things got out of control. The father had been mocking the idea of ghosts, waving a flashlight around, laughing. I was furious.
I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
The bookshelf toppled over. I thought it would just scare them, but the daughter was standing too close. A sickening crack filled the room as wood met bone, and she crumpled.
The family left the next morning.
The guilt stayed, though. I told myself it was an accident. That I wasn’t a monster. But wasn’t that what the living did? Justify their worst impulses?
I didn’t want to be that thing, the kind of thing the stories warned about.
I had my solitude again. Decades passed. Dust settled. The world outside moved on, but the house stayed still. Empty. Mine.
Then he moved in.
I thought the rumors had faded, that my story had been swallowed by time. I was wrong. He had heard about me. About the hauntings. The darkness. But unlike the others, he wasn’t afraid. He was excited.
I should have been able to drive him out like the rest, but he was different. He didn’t scare. He didn’t run. When the lights flickered, he laughed. When the shadows stretched too long, he welcomed them. He left knives out in the open, whispering things I didn’t want to hear.
And then came the worst part. The first night, he brought a woman home. She never left.
Now I’m trapped here, forced to watch the horrors he commits under my roof. He tells them, the ones who enter, the ones who scream, that the house wants this. That the spirits crave blood. That I drew him here.
I pound against the walls, rattle the doors, try to scream warnings through the vents. But no one hears me. Not over their own cries.
I thought death would bring me peace. I was wrong.
Tom Ramey is a horror and crime fiction writer that has been a fan of works in the genre since long before he should have been allowed to consume them. He's recently been published by Close to the Bone Publishing and Suddenly and Without Warning. Currently living in Delaware with his wife and three kids, he hopes his readers come away from his work with goosebumps, a racing pulse, and maybe even a smirk.
Despair: When the Shadows Whisper, Sanity Screams by Jason L. Benskin
David Kessler sat on the edge of his bed, his fingers winding through his greying hair as shallow, ragged breaths escaped him. Outside, the wind roared through the bare, skeletal branches, shaking the old house as if it were on its final breath. He hadn’t truly slept in days—not really. How could he, when he felt in the very marrow of his bones that one of his twin sons was possessed? The problem was he couldn’t tell which one.
Ethan and Caleb had always been inseparable, two halves making a perfect whole. Identical in every way, they shared the same mischievous smile and piercing ice-blue eyes that gleamed like frozen blades. But lately, something had shifted—something had crept into their flawless symmetry and corrupted it.
It started subtly: a fleeting, inhuman glimmer in their gaze, a slight hesitation in their voices as they spoke. Then came the nightmares: voices whispering through the walls at night, seeping into the house and searing David’s ears with unsettling words no child should ever know.
Afterward, the deaths began.
First, the neighbor’s dog was found stiff and bloated in the yard, its limbs twisted at impossible angles. Next came the family cat—its fur matted with blood and its body as if hollowed out from the inside, devoured by some unseen force.
Laura, David’s wife, dismissed it as coincidence. But David knew better. He had watched the twins as they observed the grisly scenes—with fascination. With an unsettling hunger.
One of them was wrong.
But which one?
It was at dinner that David’s sanity began to crack.
The boys sat across from him, identical yet, in his eyes, infinitely different. One twirled his fork with a deliberate, almost excessive slowness before eating, while the other smirked at private jokes David couldn’t share. Their fingers gripped their utensils just a little too tightly.
“Caleb, what did you do at school today?” David asked, observing closely.
Caleb tilted his head. “We painted. I drew a house with a big red door.”
David then turned to Ethan. “And you?”
Ethan’s lips curved into a slow grin, revealing teeth that looked a bit too sharp in the dim light. “I painted a tree. But the teacher didn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
Ethan merely shrugged, his voice soft and haunting, like dead leaves being scraped on pavement. “Because it had no leaves. Just hands. Twisting up as if they were screaming.”
David felt his stomach knot. Across from him, Caleb’s fingers clenched tighter on his spoon, his knuckles blanching.
Was it fear?
Or something else entirely?
Laura believed he was losing his mind. She hadn’t heard the whispering voices slithering out of the boys’ room at night, nor the dark, moving shapes in corners where shadows shouldn’t be. But David had.
He began to watch them carefully, scrutinizing every movement, every breath. There was only one way to determine the truth—to test them.
The first test was simple. A Bible lay open on the coffee table, its pages marked with thick black ink.
Mark 5:9.
Then Jesus had asked, “What is your name?”
And the reply had been, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
The boys entered the room, their bare feet making almost no sound on the floor. Caleb walked right past the Bible without a glance.
But Ethan stopped.
His fingers twitched; his lips contorted into what was not quite a smile.
Their eyes met.
David’s pulse pounded in his head.
Then Ethan turned away.
Was it fear?
Or had he sensed the trap?
The second test was salt. A thin, invisible line of salt was poured across the threshold of their bedroom door.
That night, David lay awake, his breathing shallow.
Around midnight, he heard it—a soft shuffling sound, a whisper of movement. Then, a pause.
The door creaked open.
David sprang upright, cold sweat slicking his back.
A small silhouette stood in the doorway. Ethan? Caleb?
“Dad?” came a sleepy, innocent voice.
David’s eyes darted to the floor. The salt line remained undisturbed.
“Go back to bed,” he whispered, his throat parched.
The figure hesitated. “Are you mad at us?”
David swallowed hard. “No. Just go to sleep.”
The child lingered a moment before turning and padding away.
David stared at the doorway; his breaths shallow.
One of them had stepped over the line.
But which one?
By the third night, David was at his limit.
Laura slept soundly; the house was silent. He crept into the boys’ room, a cold knife gripped tightly in his hand.
It was a ritual—ancient and forbidden—a desperate means to force the demon to reveal itself.
The twins slept peacefully, their chests rising and falling in unison.
David began to chant:
Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Domine ad adiuvandum me festina.
The air grew dense. The room seemed to breathe.
A sound emerged from the shadows—a deep, wet chuckle.
Then—
A scream.
One of the twins convulsed violently, his body jerking and arching unnaturally. His mouth opened too wide, and his eyes rolled back.
The voice that followed was not that of a child.
“You never knew,” it rasped, heavy with ancient malice. “You watched and watched, yet you never knew.”
David raised the knife. “Get out of my son.”
The laughter contorted into a snarl. “Your son?” the voice mocked. “Which one, David?”
The other twin sat up suddenly, his face twisted in horror. “Dad, stop!”
David’s grip faltered.
One of them was possessed.
One was innocent.
But which one?
His breaths came in ragged gasps. The voice crawled through his mind like a venomous worm.
“Tell me, David. Which one will you save?”
Tears blurred his vision as his hand trembled.
Then—a soft whisper.
“Daddy?”
A child’s voice, soft and pleading.
And David realized—too late—he had never truly known at all.
When Laura awoke the next morning, the house was silent. The boys’ room was empty; the bed was soaked with something dark, thick, and reeking of copper—a stark reminder of loss.
In the hallway mirror, a solitary child’s reflection smiled.
From its lips came two voices entwined in sinister harmony.
“Good morning, Mommy.”
Jason L. Benskin is a horror fiction author known for crafting psychologically intense and gruesomely vivid narratives that push the boundaries of fear. Currently pursuing a graduate degree in Creative Writing at Denver University, Jason combines his academic expertise with a passion for storytelling to create unsettling atmospheres, disturbing imagery, and deeply layered characters.
Being Content by Olufunmilayo Makinde
You walk slowly down the unbeaten path; something has led you here. In this place, the forest has reclaimed the roads, and branches reach out to you at every turn as if they are trying to pull you in, deeply, thoroughly, until the forest claims you too. You yank your hair, your clothes, and your bag from the grips of the branches, and you continue walking.
Animals scurry away from your approaching feet, and the ones up in the trees study you warily; they want to see if you are a meal or a predator. If, in human places, these animals are called wild animals, then in their territory, we are the wild ones. You are a wild one, exploring because being a daredevil is the only thing you've built your personality around; it is the thing that has gained you an audience. Even your holidays have to be based around traveling somewhere that doesn't welcome you. You feed off this energy; there are people out there who follow your content, and that means you're important.
To maintain this importance, you have to keep outdoing yourself. Your last livestream was in an abandoned boarding school, and that gained you five hundred thousand views. It is still five hundred thousand views short of your goal, so you need something bigger and scarier. Lucky for you, you've found it. You have heard the stories about this place, and you have high hopes. You have done your research. A forbidden forest, the kind the locals either talk about in hushed tones or not at all. Shots of people cringing away from the topic make for nice intro footage. Perfect. This, you think, will be your most popular video. The forest sees you and waits.
The sharp crunch of the leaves underneath your feet is louder than you know. It is like a siren in the forest, you don't know it, but the world stops. The animals freeze, tracking your movements with their eyes. But you are human, uninterested in the things that you have judged irrelevant, and to you, the wildlife truly is irrelevant. If you didn't need it for content, the forest would be irrelevant to you too. You squint as sweat drips down your face, with a few drops stinging your eyes. In exasperation, you adjust the straps on your backpack, and in a swift motion, you wipe the sweat from your forehead and flick it onto the ground. It is so hot that for a second, you believe you heard the ground sizzle, but that is ridiculous, so you move on. But the ground really did sizzle, you have contributed to the forest. The forest has noticed you, and as you set up your camera, you fail to notice that the trees are creeping closer, and the animals are long gone. You turn the camera on, move very close to it, and paste a wide smile on your face; it is time to address your audience.
"What's up, thrillsters? It's your boy triple thrill…" You start to speak, but the feel of a tickle against your skin cuts you short. When you look down, a vine is wrapped around your ankle. The part extending from the ground is a healthy dark green, but with a thump in your heart, you notice something. The part connected to your leg is bright red. Your eyes widen as you scramble for your phone and try to shake it off.
Your energy is leaving you faster than you can process. Your second leg is twisted up in another vine. Your phone slips out of your sweaty hands. You want to scream, but an unrecognizable gasping sound comes out instead. It is not loud enough to pierce through the forest to the village outside it. Your energy is practically long gone. With what feels like superhuman strength, you look down. Your leg is thin, so thin that it looks just like a bone covered with skin. Something is terribly wrong. You know this now, but before you can process this knowledge, your camera goes dark. As you lay in the darkness, feeling the vines slowly wrap around you, you realize that it wasn't your camera that went dark; it was your vision.
Olufunmilayo Makinde is a Nigerian writer and lawyer, who to her dismay finds herself doing more of the latter than the former. You can find her work in Full House Literary, The Periwinkle Pelican and 100 Foot Crow.
Awaken Child by Steven Bird
It is said this world was created from dreams. But I was a child then, too young to know that.
We were in the backyard of my grandparent’s house. Some sort of a family gathering. I think they were playing croquet on the lawn. Yes. People were playing croquet while I examined an oddly constructed spider web fastened to the underside of a faucet protruding from the foundation of the house. Seemed like the whole family was there. Sepia afternoon of a New England summer. Maybe a clambake like we used to have, with lobsters, steamed clams, and corn from the garden.
Then everybody was gone.
I was alone in the expansive backyard of the austere gray house. The black windows reflecting the empty summer lawn spread toward a field of wild grass with yellow tops bent with seed. The field sloped to a black brook unskeining down a hollow to fill a milky pond at the edge of distant woods. A single ancient pine stood yonder, limbs akimbo, raging against a long arc of glaring sky.
The sky thrummed.
Looking around to see where everybody went, I was drawn to the row of cellar windows girding the house foundation just above the grass. A face appeared in the window closest to me. It looked like my aunt Catherine. Then it was gone.
Gravity fell away from me, and I was transported, pulled toward the basement window and my face forced to the glass.
My aunt was a kind person, and I held no doubt that she loved me. Aunt Catherine in the basement was a naked, bloated, and grotesque caricature of my aunt. She stood stiff as a mannequin in a dark corner, waiting for my eyes. And when my eyes fell upon her, she suddenly animated and rushed from the shadows and lurched across the floor to the window, then turned sideways and hurried on by to circle the empty cellar, her body contorting through a rapid-fire, stop-frame series of predatory postures while she went, the arms writhing like snakes, the fingers assuming strange, portentous mudras, the head drunkenly lolling and tilting this way then that way. I was unable to pull my face from the glass. Drums beat deep in the earth. The drumming was for me, and it came louder as the dread figure halted the terrible dance, turned, and came swiftly from the darkness of the cellar to the window and stopped with inhuman abruptness and pressed close, the face tilting up to stare at me, the mouth snapping open and closing as if to bite at something, then smiling at me, then snapping at the window glass and smiling again the gesture repeated; the eyes fixed upon me desolate dead moons of chaos. And the unassailable malice of that face transported me.
Then I was inside the house, upstairs in the half-light of a rose-print wallpapered hallway. The bleak loft of vaulted ceilings hopelessly high. A row of doors lined the hall. Insistent cannibal drums pounded the firmament, pulsing the latent insanity of those closed doors.
The floral wallpaper changed to a cryptic tableau of powerful glyphs hinting at despairing messages and warnings that I could not decipher.
I found myself standing on the landing above the stairs, looking out over an impossibly steep stairwell no panicked child could survive a tumble down. A heart attack of beating drums pulsed the walls. I looked back over my shoulder to the hall of doors, and as if cued by my gaze, one of the doors began to swing open.
I averted my eyes somehow, knowing I could not survive eye contact with the Murderer Of Innocents, the Eater Of Hearts, coming from behind the varnished door.
The house whispered, and the drums beat louder and evermore insistent, booming an urgent message – awaken child, awaken, awaken,
AWAKEN
AWAKEN
AWAKEN
AWAKEN
AWAKEN
AWAKEN CHILD
– and I stood facing the long stairwell, closed my eyes, and leapt out into the all-receiving void –
And I did not plummet
but flew toward waking light ~
Steven Bird is a silvaculturist, fishing guide & writer from NE Washington, where he lives beside the Columbia River with his best friend, Doris, and their two cats, Sonny and Stinky. His work on angling subjects appears in numerous outdoor journals in the U.S. and U.K. Two of his short fictions have been published in anthologies of emerging Northwest writers (Sage Press Vancouver). Steve is the author of two books on angling subjects and works as an associate / contributing editor for Swing The Fly Press. He is haunted by rivers.
The Four Who Died in Lewisburg by Stephen Mirabito
The youngest, Jackson, ventured to the edge of the property line, tip-toeing on the cliff’s edge. The wind handled the rest. It took the others six hours to realize he was missing and two hours after that for the rescue crew to find him impaled on a log, his body broken inside out curled backward like a dead spider. When their scanner radio buzzed with the news, the brothers ran the mile of switchbacks to the entrance of the mill. The officers had already set up a perimeter on Stone House Road – they wouldn’t let the boys see their kid brother folded into a body bag and pass Main Street in an ambulance. All of Lewisburg watched the siren lights haunt the sky.
Trent and Peter went at the same time – a night of video games and booze. Lousy with grief and adrenaline, Trent dragged Peter to the busted pickup their deadbeat father had left behind. They cranked the ignition and clipped the battery to jumper cables. The engine sputtered to life. The chassis shook, crawling around the curves of the mountain. Trent ranted about a cave where ghosts still haunted the walls – Jackson would be there. They passed under low-hanging branches, and Peter opened the window to dangle his head outside, feeling the rush of the damp air. But when the car started to drift, the median carelessly disappeared beneath them. It was a blind turn, and the approaching lights were a torturous sunrise. It eclipsed the branches and the mailboxes, the red clay, and the wood guardrails. Trent could see his hands on the wheel and Jackson’s silhouette in the road. There was the swoop of his long hair, the tails of his unbound shirt, and his narrow shoulders, light pouring through the gap in his chest.
That was why the oldest, Max, had lived alone. He floated through the hallways of the house, swiping a finger across a dusty video game console and its controllers. He never answered when neighbors knocked on the door. He sorted through his brother’s belongings and even found Jackson’s stuffed T-rex. He threw it in the trash.
Max knew he was supposed to have been watching Jackson, but he must not have seen him stumble through the gap in the wire fence. Max was the one that was supposed to fix it. He spent hours sitting outside staring at the trees, staring at the wind bowling them over. He mowed the lawn even when the grass was short. He re-potted the tomatoes five times a week – it was any excuse to occupy himself. At night, he sobbed so hard he vomited yellow bile into the toilet.
It was months before he took care of the basement. He had sorted through his father’s old tools and selected the best weapon there – a ball peen hammer. Down below was the cellar door, where Max took a key from his pocket and slipped it into the keyhole. The brothers screamed as soon as he unlocked the hatch. Behind the door was a cavernous hall dug out of the rock and the soil, only supported by a few wooden beams. Max tip-toed inside, his arms rattling like a tea kettle. The cave smelled like rotten meat and shit. He gripped the hammer between his hands. In a clearing, he found them naked and dirty, crouched with their hands gripping their knees, a weak fire flickering between them. The shadows morphed and concealed their bodies – fleshed then spindly, human then corpses. The youngest, Jackson, wept first and unfolded himself, back arched against the ground, the muddy floor visible through his chest. Peter adjusted his head in the crook of his jagged neck, and his eyes rolled upwards. Only Trent was visibly intact.
But the closer Max approached, the louder they whimpered, the more they clenched their hands into fists and slammed the wet silt. When Max got too close, they moved on him, crawling to his feet. They pleaded for his help.
Late into the night, Max heard his brothers bang on the walls and rattle the locked door. They wailed and cried and woke the dogs. Max covered his ears with a pillow and stuffed them with cotton, but the sound was too sharp and penetrating. Max screamed to match their intensity, but that also did nothing. That’s when Max decided to do what he did. He was supposed to have protected them, after all. He stepped into the hallway and found his father’s hammer – their yelling vibrated inside the walls.
Down below, their fingers squirmed around the cellar door, trying to pry it off its hinges. Max swung the hammer wildly and smashed a few of the pale grubs. He smeared Jackson’s pinkie in a streak of black blood. Trent’s index finger popped clean off, and they retreated.
Max drew back from the door and readied himself. He raised his foot and drove it into the wood. The door snapped in half, and the light from the outside poured through. Trent had peeled the skin from his face. Peter held his half-decayed head at his waist. Jackson cowered behind them. They charged Max and were on top of him, pulling at his hair, but Max swung them off easily. Their bodies were weak and snapped when they struck the ground. Max beat them with his hammer until the shrieking stopped, and they bled in puddles all around him. On the last swing, his wrist snapped.
Max limped to the edge of the property line and collapsed at the cliffside. He dropped the hammer, and it tumbled down the rocks. A wind picked up through Lewisburg. It howled up the road into the mountains. Fences blew down, and a rusty windmill tumbled over. At first, he cried because he had broken himself in the process, but relief would follow. He leaned forward and looked down again.
Stephen Mirabito is an English teacher working in Littleton, Colorado. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Every Day Fiction, Constellations Magazine, and Peatsmoke Journal. He is currently a candidate of the University of Denver’s UCOL Professional Creative Writing program. You can find more of his work on Instagram @stephen.mirabito_writer.
Hot Flash by Ashley Lewin
“Menopause,” my doctor said a few months before the first guy exploded. She nodded as if to add, “Of course.”
I’d woken up at night tossing, breathless, heat rising off my back and shoulders. When I got up and turned on the bathroom light, my reflection in the mirror was distorted, wavy like the air above asphalt on a long highway in summer.
Menopausal transition. The big change. The second time in a woman’s life for physical and mental transformations. It seemed like too easy an explanation for my sudden flushes that sent me running outside for fresh air or hiding in the bathroom in embarrassment. I started carrying a washcloth in my purse to wipe the runnels of sweat that collected under my breasts.
The first time someone exploded, I didn’t realize I caused it. A guy behind the diner where I always ate lunch had a girl by the arm. He was yanking her toward the open door of his car. She was silent, eyes and mouth wide like a little rabbit caught in headlights.
Panic and helplessness flooded my mind. Sweat ran down my back and sides, soaking into the back of my slacks and underwear. I opened my mouth to yell at him. Before any words came out, the man screamed. The girl jerked her arm from his grip and ran. The guy slapped at his chest and back, pulled off his jacket, screaming until he exploded. The shock of being covered in blood and viscera. The smell of metal and baked flesh reminded me of childhood curling iron mishaps. In my 50 years, I’d never experienced anything so horrifying.
Since that day, there have been accidents. The guy who wouldn’t take his hand off my knee on the bus home from the office, the blond at the coffee shop who started yelling at the barista, and a few others. All were similar stories. There was a threat, an act of violence, a boundary crossed. Those people were punished.
Once I realized it was me, I wished it away. This power has given me the ability to decide who around me lives or dies, and I can’t resist wanting to aim it at those who deserve the heat. It must be controlled. Practice will require victims.
At work, I was the employee sent to pick up the lunch order and always asked to stay late to wrap up a project. The boss learned I could always be worn down, could never say no. A compliant mouse full of resentment and frustration.
My power could hurt people who didn’t deserve it. After the accidents, I quit work, cashed out my bank accounts, and started driving.
Maine is a cold, wet state. At the campground where I ended up, the owner eyes me with concern whenever I enter his little grocery store. People with Southern accents don’t camp alone in Maine in winter. It’s a good place to cool off, and when I’m ready to practice, I only have to find a bar. Getting a man out in the woods alone shouldn't be difficult.
A few miles outside of town, a string of dive bars huddle along a curvy two-lane country road. They’re frequented by the residents of the logging camps. The men are fairly transient, traveling around for temporary, seasonal jobs. Perfect for practicing to control my power.
Tonight will be my first practice session.
Early in the evening, a thick blanket of crisp new snow fell from the sky to cover the ground around my tent. Inside, I’m lying naked with my sleeping bag open, my sweat-slicked back sticking to the fleece. The tent feels like a sauna. Heat seems to rise from my core, my skin conducting it outward.
I roll over, groping for the zipper to the tent flaps. The metal tab is icy between my fingers. Fumbling my way through the opening, I land in the snow. Steam rises into the moonlight as the snow beneath me melts.
The bar called The Felled Fir is at the end of the strip, just before the road turns back to compact gravel and dirt that fills the air as patrons speed off in their pickup trucks. As I turn in the parking lot I notice a large man with a thin woman pressed against a dark truck around the corner of the building. The diner where I first experienced my power flashes in my mind.
The woman is a limp rag doll in the man’s arms. He’s got the truck door open and is trying to lift and shove her into the vehicle. I walk toward them from my car, concentrating years of anger and fear on the man’s back.
The woman slides to the ground in a heap as the man begins slapping his back. His mouth a surprised “O” of confusion and terror. A high-pitched wail of agony floats into the darkness.
The unconscious woman stirs on the ground. One thin arm slowly arcs through the air to land across her forehead.
I can’t do it. I pull back, diverting my concentration to a broken bottle on the asphalt several feet away. I know he deserves it, but I remember the first time. The man screaming, his eyes rolling toward the sky. I don’t want to see any of that again.
But I must do this. He’ll go on hurting people. They always do. The bottle cracks, then shatters with a pop. The man is rolling on the ground, moaning.
My grandmother used to say two wrongs don’t make a right. Lately, though, I feel like maybe they can. I want to be the hero.
I refocus my concentration on the man. His eyelids flutter open. He stares at me. After a moment, he whimpers.
I take a step back.
“Bitch.” I hear him mutter, and I’ve made up my mind.
Ashley Lewin (she/her) has had several different professions. She ran neuroscience experiments for a laboratory that no longer exists. She taught in a writing program for a university that no longer exists. Now she serves wine to tourists in New Mexico and enjoys a much better view. More of her writing can be found at ashleylewinwrites.wordpress.com.
"Hot Flash" will receive an honorable mention in Allegory Magazine's upcoming issue.
Shannon Grabs Groceries by Bunker King
I woke up around 4 PM, the sunset piercing through my ragged blinds. I rolled out of bed, grabbed my plates and knives, and went downstairs. Mom was watching TV, still hanging from the ceiling right where I’d left her the last couple months. It means a lot that she’s stopped hassling me about not going back to school and finding a man to take care of me since I’ll “never be able to take care of myself, just like your father.” Ironic, coming from someone who hasn’t showered or trimmed her nails for so long.
Dad was minding his business in the fridge next to his imported beer. Dad never got between Mom and me when we fought. He just wanted to live and let live, and I’m trying to respect that more. I even rearranged his space so he’d fit in there with the only thing he ever loved.
I was getting hungry, so I decided to grab my allowance from Dad’s safe early and head over to the gas station down the road. It’s ten miles away, but I could always use the exercise, especially after sleeping all day. I grabbed my backpack, my chainsaw, and one of my last clean shirts to get some food.
You rarely see any cars passing you on the road between our house and the gas station. It’s at the edge of a college town, one of those places you send your second sons to when you can’t stand them anymore, and believe me when I tell you my family never could stand those rich boys. Especially not Mom, but she liked to imagine what that money would do for her.
I stepped into the gas station. The attendant wasn’t looking at the doors, so I managed to tuck the chainsaw just out of sight of his counter. The guy was reading some nudie mag, and after flicking his eyes over to check if I measured up, he decided his material was better. I grabbed my dad’s favorite pilsner, a few boxes of microwave food, and a gallon of water to get me through the week.
I started towards the counter before slipping on a granola bar wrapper. My nose cracked as the floor took my first kiss, a yelp escaping my throat before I could stop it. The attendant chuckled at me before returning to his studies. My hands clenched, tears welling up in my eyes. I picked myself up and marched toward the counter, ready to give this pig a piece of my mind.
Tinned music tried valiantly to drown out the sounds of my chainsaw chewing through the gas station attendant. I recognized the song, the kind of forgettable but hated fare that farts its way out in grocery stores across the country. My man for the evening - “Dave,” his nametag read before the blood and viscera blocked it out - should have been thanking me for saving him from the music, from his dead-end job with the shitty corporate music draining his soul faster than this gaping wound was draining his blood. Instead, all he did was try to grab the blades to pull them out, ripping his hands up and splashing blood up my nose. It mixed with my own blood, the most romance I would experience this month.
The kickback from tearing through the attendant’s ribs was a little bit more than I expected, but I held strong and got all the way through to the other side. The sudden lack of pressure made me fall forward a little once I got past the bone and flesh, going right into his chair made of plastic and steel. I had to pull back as quickly as I could. This chainsaw was the last thing my dad might ever give to me, so I had to take care of it. Precious things need to be taken care of.
The engine died down while I wiped Dave off my hands. I blew my nose, little chunks of us popping out, along with some boogers that had pooled during the day. I made sure to throw the napkin in the trash - Dave might abide littering, but I would rather die.
The door’s automatic bell rang as a few more boys walked into the station. Jabbering to each other just a little too loud as they instinctively marched to the back wall, blind to everything but the 40s and 6-packs they drank as their lives depended on it. The smell of booze billowing out of their throats was more than enough to mask the stench of gasoline and blood in the air. I slipped back up front, leaving a couple of dollars behind to pay for my water.
“Bro, is that blood on the glass?” Another stupid question from a B- business school student, but that wasn’t anything new. Maybe he wanted someone to chime in that it’s a thick Gatorade. I wouldn’t have minded if he wanted to lick it up - maybe I’d let him go if he did.
Unfortunately, one of the other ferrets just had to chirp in. “These fucking 7/11 guys don’t want to work, Chet. They come over here, take our jobs, and don’t even do them.” His face was long, but his features were too tiny to compensate for it. He looked like dollar bills that had fucked each other inside Daddy’s vault so long that all their identifying features had worn away, leaving behind a giant forehead with stick-straight hair and an asshole for a mouth.
The first one - Chet, with eyes like a deer and hair like a bunny - looked over to the front desk as I revved up the chainsaw one more time. I barely heard the glass shatter over the roar, the crunch, the spray flooding my ears. Boys can be fun for a night, but I don’t think I’d ever want to live with one. Too messy.
Bunker King is a freelance videographer and writer from Venice, California. He currently attends California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo, majoring in Journalism. Once, when he was twelve, he was too scared to finish a movie called “The Gingerdead Man.”
Fifty Feet by J.D. Strunk
She runs in front. I run behind. I try to give her about fifty feet. I figure that should give me time enough to react if she… well… you know…
We stick to the interstate, where the burning cars act like torches, keeping “them” at bay. Road-kill is treasure. Whenever we find it we rub it against our skin, into our hair. It’s disgusting, but the rot masks our scent—masks our humanness. The first application is the worst; the gooey redness warm against your skin, slimy in your hair. But amazingly, you get used to it. I no longer throw up… unless it’s skunk. Skunk is gross.
And before you start getting any ideas, let me say that the pair of us made a deal from the beginning: only animals. If ever we couldn’t find an animal, we agreed we’d just risk it and go without. But I’m telling you, you don’t want to go without. “They” can smell a normal a mile away.
The longer we run, the more her mind will decay. Already I catch her forgetting things, simple things, sometimes as frequently as hour to hour. It’s a mistake letting her stay with me—I know this. But I want every second I can have with her, up until that very last moment…
The further we go, the more dangerous our journey becomes. The city had more of “them,” but it also had lights—street lights, car lights, office lights. They hate light. But now we’re in the country and come evening, the brightest lights will be the stars overhead, if they come out at all.
We’ve been running for two days. My neck is stiff from looking behind me. It hurts even to look down, and so I don’t; I just keep looking forward, occasionally tripping over car parts or people parts or a combination thereof. I don’t even want to know.
Up ahead, I see that she has taken a break beneath an overpass. When I catch up with her I collapse by her side. Well, close—I keep a few feet between us, just in case.
“How you holding up?” I ask as we huddle behind the wreckage of a jack-knifed semi.
“C-c-cold…” she shivers.
“Me too,” I say, even though I’m not cold at all. We’ve been running all day—how could she be cold? But then, of course, it’s because of… Christ, I can’t even bring myself to say it…
“You look good, Kristin,” I say, trying to cheer her up. And she does. She looks surprisingly good. It makes me nervous. I fear that the change will happen all at once, over the course of only a few minutes. The thought scares me, but like I said, I want to be with her until the very end.
It’s funny. You’d think we’d have a ton to talk about, now that the clock’s ticking. But as we sit there, in the drizzle of a Midwestern afternoon, with her shivering and me sweating, we say nothing. Not a goddamn thing. If it were a normal day—like any day before The Incident—I wouldn’t be able to shut her up. But now I can’t get her to talk.
“We’re making good time today,” I say eventually, weary of the silence. “At this pace, we may hit Chicago by evening.” It’s a lie. We are still a hundred miles from Chicago. But maybe she won’t realize.
She says nothing—only shivers. Occasionally, a glassy tear streams down her cheek.
“I know you’re scared,” I say. “So am I. But we’ll beat it, Kristin. We’ll beat it.”
This gets her attention. She looks at me searchingly as if testing my sincerity. At length, she lets out a disheartened sigh. “Oh, Justin…” she says, rocking herself back and forth, “my brave, brave Justin.”
“I’m here, Kristin. What do you need?”
“Baby,” she says, looking at me like I’m some sort of animal, incapable of understanding.
“Yes?”
“It wasn’t me,” she says.
“What?”
“It wasn’t me who got bit, baby.”
I try to say something, but nothing comes out. All of a sudden, it becomes hard to think. My thoughts are foggy. My mouth won’t work.
“We’ll make it to Chicago, Justin. And then we’ll find a cure—I promise.”
When a scattering of snowflakes land on Kristin’s sweatshirt, she asks me for my coat. Without hesitation, I take it off and hand it to her. I am now in a T-shirt, in thirty-degree weather, yet I continue to sweat.
As Kristin raises her arms to put on the coat, I glimpse a handgun in the pocket of her sweatshirt. It is visible for little more than a second, but I notice. Was I meant to notice?
“You ready?” says Kristin, zipping up her coat—my coat.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Do you remember what we agreed on? Fifty feet?”
I nod.
She gives me an encouraging smile. “Good boy,” she says. “I’ll lead the way.”
J.D. Strunk's fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Louisville Review, Necessary Fiction, The Coachella Review, Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for The Bellingham Review's Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and his story "Fresh Coffee" was nominated for Best American Short Stories. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Drowned Angels by Gemma Ortwerth
The first one came up tangled in wire and driftwood, its wings shredded like silk in thorns, the feathers soaked through with rot. I found it the morning after the second wave receded—when the air still stank of mud and mildew and the kind of grief that settles in your bones like black mold. The body was small, childlike. But the face… the face wasn’t anything I could name.
Too human to ignore.
Too wrong to accept.
We buried thirty-two people that week. My brother, Micah, among them. The flood took our house, our dog, half the trailer park, and nearly me. I would’ve gone too, but Micah shoved me up into the attic just before the water rose over his mouth. When I screamed, he just smiled. That image lives in the back of my eyes now, like it’s been branded there.
The town called it a once-in-a-century storm.
But when the winged things started washing up on the banks like driftwood shaped by God’s crueler cousin, we all knew better.
They said they were angels.
I wasn’t so sure.
I found the second one on my fourth walk past the chapel ruins. This one was still breathing—barely. It looked up at me with a single, glassy eye, clouded and strange. Its mouth was lipless, parted just enough to hiss one word: hollow.
I didn’t run. Maybe I should have.
But I’d already lost everything. Fear was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
I dragged it into the root cellar of the abandoned bait shop, wrapped it in a sleeping bag, and fed it rainwater and bruised apples. The thing never blinked. Its gaze pierced through me, even when its eyes were closed. And soon, it found other ways to speak.
Through my dreams.
Through my grief.
Through the damp, rotting parts of me, I tried to ignore.
It showed me things—reminded me of things, it insisted.
The truth of the flood. The poisoned groundwater. The buried waste barrels no one ever talked about.
The warnings ignored. The treaties broken.
The blood debt unpaid.
This wasn’t nature’s wrath. It was retaliation.
The angel—if I can call it that—told me the truth in pieces, like it knew I’d fall apart if I got it all at once. It said they weren’t angels in the holy sense. They were Watchers. Not divine, not fallen—just old. Witnesses to the decay we pretend isn’t happening.
They came not to save us but to warn us.
Because something older, something darker, was stirring.
The town thought the worst had passed when the flood receded.
They rebuilt.
Put up a fresh coat of white paint on the church.
Held a memorial with hymnals and paper lanterns.
But they didn’t see what I saw.
Didn’t hear the wings snapping in the night.
Didn’t smell the copper-soaked soil.
They didn’t watch another drowned angel drag itself ashore, only to scream until its lungs collapsed.
I stopped sleeping.
I stopped talking.
I just… listened.
And the Watcher told me what must be done.
“The town was bought in blood,” it whispered, its voice wet and bubbling like floodwater in a crawl space. “And blood must be returned.”
Micah, it said, was never meant to die. Not him.
The water got it wrong. The town demanded a sacrifice—not an accident. A willing one.
“A soul given, not taken.”
I laughed at first. I thought I was losing my mind.
But the laughter caught in my throat and curdled into something like understanding.
Micah did offer himself.
Pushed me up. Stayed down.
Smiled.
Was that enough?
No, said the Watcher. He was a substitute. A beautiful, broken-hearted offering made in haste.
But the reckoning wasn’t satisfied.
I tried to ignore it. To pretend the world made sense again.
I volunteered at the donation center. Passed out blankets.
Made jokes I didn’t mean, and smiled with lips that no longer felt like mine.
But the town began to twist.
Birds flew in spirals until they fell dead.
Cattle gave birth to things that didn’t breathe.
Children woke screaming of “the black that eats light.”
The mayor went missing.
So did two councilmen.
A woman walked into the reservoir with rocks in her pockets and no one followed.
The Watcher grew stronger. Fed off the rot, off the unraveling.
And it told me this was mercy.
It said: “They had a chance. They still do. But someone must choose.”
It looked at me then—not with pity. Not with power.
Just with recognition.
“You remember drowning,” it said.
“You remember being saved.”
“You are both sacrifice and witness.”
I didn’t want to die.
But I didn’t want this either.
So, I made a deal.
I brought the town to the water instead.
That night, I walked to the reservoir's edge with a bullhorn and a flare.
I told them everything.
The angels. The lie of the flood.
The hunger clawing at the world’s seams.
The choice.
Most laughed. Some cried.
A few threw stones.
But enough stayed.
And when the earth trembled, and the sky split open with lightless thunder, they understood.
They stepped forward. One by one.
Mothers. Sons. Teachers. Thieves.
Each one naming what they’d taken.
Each one giving it back.
And I stood with the Watcher as the water rose.
It reached for me, gently this time.
“You’ve already drowned,” it said. “Now, you rise.”
I don’t remember what happened next.
Only that when I woke, the town was quieter.
Not empty. Not whole.
But lighter.
And behind my eyes, I felt a thousand wings brushing gently against my skin.
Not angels.
Just survivors.
Just watchers.
Just us.
And maybe… that’s enough.
Gemma Ortwerth (she/her) is a queer, disabled, neurodivergent author, artist, and social justice advocate based in Baltimore. She is the writer of Elaris Rising, Awakening the Light, The Actual Queer Agenda, Crimson Alchemy: Blood & Shadows, and The Seeker and the Seven Animals. Her work centers marginalized voices, systems of power, and the haunting duality of survival in a world that erases difference. She also runs the advocacy platform Only You Define You and curates radical art through her shop Ember & Anarchy.
Hungry Heart by Jim Donohue
“…….Like a river that don’t know where it’s going
I took a wrong turn, and I just kept going…..”
Bruce Springsteen
Hungry Heart
The pain in his chest was unbearable. The sweat on his face dripped down like a wash rag being wrung by the strongest of hands. His equilibrium failed him as he held onto the chair to keep from falling. His vision went from blurry to dark.
Is this it?
Please, let this be it.
The built-up pressure made it extremely painful and almost impossible to breathe.
YES! Come on, end it!
End it!
End ME!
And, as quickly as it came on, it was gone.
Dammit!
The wave of dizziness, the feeling of overheating, all of it. Gone. He stood up straight, hand still pressing on the left side of his chest, as if to quell the pain and heaviness he felt moments ago. He loosened his grip and dropped his arm. There was nothing. No pain, no pressure, his breathing back to normal.
Shit!
He knew there was no use going to a doctor. Been there, done that. And they all said the same thing.
“Nothing wrong with THAT heart!”
“You’ve got a strong heart there!”
“Heart of a lion!”
No, no doctor was going to help him. The only thing that would get rid of this was death. And no suicide, either. Believe me, he tried that on more than one occasion, only to find that he couldn’t die that way. No, she was very clear on that part.
She!
You couldn’t just let the lady sit, could you? She was an old lady, for Christ’s sake! Would it have hurt to get up and give her your seat? No, but you had to act like you didn’t notice her struggling to keep her balance on the subway while you sat with your head down.
And then what?
Then, when it was your stop and time to get off, you stood. The poor old lady lost her balance and grabbed onto you to avoid falling. You got mad and brushed her hand off your chest.
But her hand didn’t move.
And, with her hand on your heart, she looked you right in the eyes and said,
“Your heart is strong, and at its peak….
But there’ll be times your heart is weak….
You’ll pay for all your selfish deeds….
When the heart has told you what it needs.”
That was almost three years ago, and since then, he has paid. Over and over again.
And that’s why today when he prayed for death to finally come for him and it didn’t, he knew.
His heart, once again, was telling him what it needed.
It needed to be fed.
############
Lee Kenny was a tough Irishman who had been in as many fights as there were bars in New York City. And he fared well in the good majority of them. Once, he watched as a con man walked up to the bar wearing a patch over his left eye. The man claimed he was raffling off his glass eye to raise money for his sick little brother’s care. Each entry would cost five dollars.
“Come on, guys! Just five dollars for a chance to win a slightly used two hundred- and fifty-dollar bonafide glass eye,” he announced. By the time twenty-three men slapped their fins on the bar, Lee had seen enough.
“I think yer a feckin liar,” he said in a brogue as thick as the froth on a pint of Guinness.
The bar went quiet.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?” the con man challenged.
“You heard me. That eye didn’t come out of your eye socket any more than you came out of your whore mother’s ass!”
It’s not clear who threw the first punch, but by the time Lee broke the guy’s orbital bone and had his left eye almost hanging from the socket, what WAS clear was that this particular con man would be wearing a patch on his eye for a long time.
Coincidentally, Lee was thinking about that night as he strolled home from another evening spent at a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He chuckled to himself as he thought about the look on the loser’s face as they took him to the ambulance on a gurney. Lee luckily avoided arrest that night because all the regulars at the bar said it was the other guy’s fault.
Well, plus the fact that the two responding officers were named Dennehy and O’Toole.
Approaching the corner of East 17th Street and Second Avenue, Lee heard a man behind him say, “Excuse me, Sir?” By the time Lee spun around, the larger man had hold of Lee’s throat, and the first punch knocked Lee silly. The barrage of punches continued, with Lee unable to throw a single one. For the first time that he could remember, Lee was beaten badly. Flat on his ass, he looked at the man hovering over him.
“I have nothing fer ya to rob, brother,” he managed, as the blood flowed freely from his mouth, looking like his jaw was smack dab in the middle of its monthly cycle.
“I’m not gonna rob you. Just stay where you are,” the large man said.
The next two minutes of his life, which, another coincidence, were his last, made Lee Kenny pray for an even quicker death. He couldn’t be seeing an orifice open on the man’s chest while the guy’s heart lunged out--
Are those teeth?
—and attached itself to Lee’s neck, blood spurting all over an otherwise quiet Second Avenue.
But he was seeing that. And he could feel this man’s heart--
THAT can’t be?!!
—draining the blood from his veins before returning to the man’s chest, which then closed. And before he died, the last thing Lee Kenny heard as the man staggered away was…
“I shoulda just given her my fucking seat!”
Jim Donohue has been reading Horror since the late 1960's (Rosemary's Baby). A native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx and currently living with his family on Long Island, Donohue began his writing journey in December of 2024, at the age of 68. He has written five stories to date, with his eye on releasing a collection sometime in 2025. He hopes his dreams of a first novel will be realized before too long.
Alone by Adam Thomas
When it’s cold out, my left pinky finger starts to burn. It’s been that way since I can remember. Out here on the mountain, it’s burning like hell. The sun is high, but the wind shear is chilling. My legs are knotted. My chest works like a piston, sucking in frigid air. I’m getting old.
It’s only been a handful of years since I last summited, and I’m more than two hours behind. I ignore the concerned calls coming from the radio—my girlfriend. Back at camp, pretending to pout while secretly enjoying the attention. The mountain guides don’t see women like that often, if ever.
But she can handle herself. Besides, I paid them a small fortune to look after her and give me peace. See, people with money buy materialistic shit; I buy solitude. The ability to take on the mountain alone. No one judging me, as if they wouldn’t blow it all on fancy cars and drugs.
I stop. Scanning my surroundings, my heart flutters. Nothing looks familiar. Had I strayed too far, my mind elsewhere? I curse at myself, at my girlfriend, at nothing in particular. We had argued before I left, and my mind was still there. Argued about my age and my capability. Now, lost, it pisses me off to even consider her correct.
The next step I take feels wrong. A loud crack shifts the ground below me, and it begins to dip. I’m reeling, struggling to stay upright. It’s as if the ground is alive, moving, and suddenly gone. My stomach pushes up into my throat, and I'm reaching. Grabbing. Nothing. Only darkness as I plummet.
My body hits the ground, and my bones crack. Blood vessels rupture. Nerve endings scream. For a moment, I am nothing but pain. Fiery. Raging. As soon as the air refills my lungs, it’s gone, as I scream. My soul begs to escape. Trying to sit up, I vomit from the pain.
I’m paralyzed. Everything is rigid and locked up. Quick, short breaths I can’t control make me spasm, and somehow the pain is worse. Nothing else matters. It consumes me as the edges of my vision fade.
When I wake, I’m staring up at the hole, the moon looking back at me. The pain returns quickly, and my tears freeze in their tracks. My heart races. Where am I? My radio must be broken. Or she gave up trying to reach me. I’m alone.
Something moves.
Sucking in my breath, I try to listen. The pain doesn’t matter now. Whatever it is, it’s to my right, but I can’t turn my head to look. Straining my peripheral as far as I can, I see nothing. Then I smell it: Wet fur, like a dog in from the rain. But this isn’t a dog. It’s something much bigger.
Heavy footsteps begin to circle me, nails clacking. Any warmth I had drains away. A deep guttural growl reverberates. I piss myself.
“Get out of here!” The words sound foreign, as if not mine, but a terrified man trapped in a nightmare. The beast snarls in reply, stepping closer. I try with everything I have to move my arms, legs, anything. Only pain. It causes me to scream, and the beast pauses.
Panting, struggling to stay conscious, my screams turn to pleading. This cannot be happening. I’m suddenly acutely aware of everything: smells, noises, the hammering of my heart. An awful clarity washes over me, and I know what will happen next as the beast resumes.
Pressure. My head is being crushed. Its teeth grinding on my skull. My screaming is muffled inside its mouth, rotten and hot. I am powerless to stop it. All I can do is lay there as its rough tongue scrapes my flesh.
Releasing me, hot blood streams down my face. Vicious yellow eyes lock with mine, a mountain lion. It begins to sniff, nudging me with its powerful head. A sharp, tearing pain lances my belly, and I feel cold air inside me.
The lion pins me down with a massive paw, crushing my chest. It begins to feed on me, chomping wetly. I can feel the ripping and tearing, but the pain is gone. I am disconnected, a dead man in his final moments, alone.
Shrill static fills the air, and the lion stops, bits of me dangling from its muzzle. My girlfriend's voice pierces the silence. The radio isn’t broken. I want to grab her, hold her, beg her to take me from this place. No, she has to stay away, has to keep safe. I look at the lion and see it looking away, up at the hole.
I follow its gaze to the hole, faces staring back at us. Her face is among them, eyes red from crying, staring in horror. The lion lunges, sinking its teeth in, dragging me into darkness. The pain is nothing compared to the fear.
Then, the sound of a gunshot stops everything.
I listen to it, lying next to me, dying. Raspy breaths, warped moaning, writhing in pain. All I want is to be home. Back in bed, feeling her gentle breath as she sleeps. Instead, I feel the lion's breath growing faint. It matches my own. I imagine our hearts beating as one, slowing to a crawl. My world goes dark.
---
On cold days, my left pinky finger starts to burn. As does much of my body, scarred and mangled. But I’m alive. They said I had wandered across an ice-covered crevasse. My girlfriend had snuck an air pod into my pack. If it weren’t for that, I would be dead.
I married her. In the hospital, before we knew for sure I’d live. She never lets me out of her sight, never leaves me alone. I’m okay with that.
With nothing much left, I finally decided to spend my money on something materialistic: that fucking mountain lion's head mounted on my wall.
Adam Thomas writes fiction, screenplays, and poetry, focusing on introspective stories that delve into how characters feel as they navigate pivotal moments. Drawn to darker themes like loss, guilt, and revenge, his work explores the emotions and motivations that drive human behavior. He lives and writes in Wisconsin, USA
Spiraling by Taylor Z. Adams
It happens all at once.
My foot gives way from beneath me. The world tilts, and then I’m airborne–weightless for a split second. The ceiling blurs above me, the overhead light shining in my eyes, and then–
Pain.
The sound of bone and wood colliding. My shoulder crashes against the second stair, my neck almost crumpling from the impact.
And at the top of the stairs, she’s standing there.
Motionless.
Her hand still raised.
I’m falling, and she’s just watching.
The next stair hits harder, my body twisting in midair and my arm catching awkwardly beneath me.
I don’t scream. Not yet.
My eyes stay locked on her. She’s still watching. Still not moving.
Before this, there were words—ugly ones. We were fighting—of course we were fighting—and shouting. She said she was leaving, but I said she couldn’t. I begged. I might’ve yelled.
But I know this: I loved her. I told her.
“This isn’t love. I’m done,” she said in response.
Those words hurt more than the way my ribs crack as I slam into the next step.
She still hasn’t moved, her face unreadable. Shock? Guilt? I’ll never know.
Someone will, though. The neighbors had to have heard us yelling. It wasn’t the first time. They’d called the cops before and they’ll definitely do it again, if they haven’t already. When they arrive, they’ll find me at the bottom of the stairs and her at the top. I wonder if she’ll have moved by then.
Will she lie? Will she tell them the truth? Will they believe her?
Bruises will only tell you so much. I know that by now.
I hope they don’t believe her. I hope they ask her over and over again.
Another stair. My wrist bends the wrong way. I feel the bone splinter.
My body flips. I see her again. She hasn’t come down. Not yet. Maybe she’s scared. Or perhaps it hasn’t even been long enough to react. How long has it even been?
I really thought I’d be at the bottom by now.
My jaw smashes against wood. A tooth loosens. Blood pools on my tongue. Something pops. Cartilage, maybe bone? It’s hard to tell.
I told her once, “If you ever leave me, I swear I’ll–”
Another crack. My back again.
I know she’ll have to explain this to everyone. Her friends. Her family. The police.
Do you think they’ll believe for a second that I just fell? That I just randomly threw myself down the stairs for no reason? She’ll pay, that’s for sure.
And what a shame, too. She was doing so well. Packing her bags. Finally finding her voice. She told me I didn’t own her anymore.
But look at her now.
She’ll carry me forever. Every step she takes, I’ll be on her shoulders.
That’s love, isn’t it?
The world is so slow now. I’ve never tasted so much blood. I never knew what it would feel like to have bone protruding from your skin. It doesn’t bother me; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I feel so happy because no matter how much pain I’m feeling, I know what she’s feeling is probably so much worse, although it’s probably happening a lot faster for her.
I look back up at her.
I smile.
My skull hits the landing.
Taylor Z. Adams (she/they) is a queer, indie author from Toledo, OH. She loves horror and all things spooky, but can typically be found sipping coffee under a blanket and blushing at sapphic romance novels. When not writing or reading, she's a boring IT slave by day and a punk rock drummer by night. You can find more of her work in River Gardner's Twisted Horrors anthology, or by following her on Instagram and Bluesky, both @tayloradamsbooks
Crispin X by K.L. Johnston
Someone was weeping with night fears. He crawled into bed with me, snuggling his back against my stomach. “Hey, my little man,” I murmured through the mists of sleep. “I’ll keep you safe.” I snuggled close and wrapped one arm over the small body. It took a few moments to register that something was wrong. Luke and Mark were no longer my little boys – they were teenagers, nearly men. My boys hadn’t climbed into bed with me in years.
The body under my arm was frail and had an odd texture to the skin. Still, sleep confused, I ran my hand down one skinny arm and felt flaking skin covering bone with too little muscle. Terrified, I came fully awake, but with the waking came a strange paralysis. The smell hit me next, overwhelmingly of burned meat and singed hair. My first reflex was to panic, gag, and fling myself away, but I couldn’t move. Lying on my side, I had one arm partially draped over a dead thing. I knew what this was, and it was too much. I think I blanked out for a few minutes.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Remember why I am here. This is my house, inherited from my Great Aunt Thea. Remember the childhood summers spent here with my aunt. Remember the real threat – my ex-husband getting paroled. Remember what he feared and why the ghosts at 66 Steppingstone Lane meant safety for my boys and me. Luke, Mark, and I made the decision together to move when we found out my ex-husband would be paroled from prison. He was terrified of ghosts, and we came here because the spirits on Steppingstone Lane provided us with an extra deterrent. Then remember this ghost, my childhood playmate who would never hurt me. All I knew about him was that he died in a fire when he was five.
I could feel my pulse slowing.
The body under my arm twisted toward me, and I knew if I opened my eyes, I would look into a travesty of a face. I still couldn’t move. The little chest heaved as though sighing, and he snuggled closer under my arm. Even with the smell and the revulsion of feeling the twisted body touching me, I fought for reason and calm. This was a child. He was having night fears. This could have happened to any child… to my child.
The smell began to fade. One ashy arm crept around my neck, and the dry, reeking face pressed into my shoulder. The gesture was natural, a child seeking comfort, like my own kids in moments of distress. My stomach churned, but tears burned my eyes. Finally, hesitantly, I could move my arm, and I patted the slender back. A small, dry hand reached up to touch my cheek, feeling the tears that had begun to fall. Then, the horrific smell and the child were gone.
I lay in the darkness as the shock faded, and finally, the alarm went off. I shot out of bed and turned on the light. Looking down at the rumpled sheets, I expected to see them streaked grey with ash, but there was no sign of my visitor.
There was a noise from the kitchen, and I smelled the blessed fragrance of coffee. Groggy and still shaky, I headed downstairs in need of sunlight and caffeine. Wonder of wonders, sixteen-year-old Luke was already up and getting himself cereal. He poured a cup from the pot of coffee and looked at me curiously as I entered the room, then started laughing. “I see you’ve finally met the Crispy Critter.”
“I can’t tell you how much I hate the nicknames you boys have given this ghost.”
Luke grinned. “Aw, you love me - I made coffee, and I’m ready for school. I even got Mark to get up on time.” I did make a mental note in his favor. Still, I couldn’t let the opportunity go by. “I wish you two wouldn’t call him names. It’s …. disrespectful.’
Luke hooted with laughter. “Why would we want to be nice to the Crunchy Munchkin? He gets into our stuff, gets ashes on everything, and steals our school supplies. Tell me what use does he have for my drafting tools? He sure doesn’t respect us! Broiler Boy is a pain in the ...”
“Luke!”
“Mom!” He shot back. “Being PC to a ghost is taking sensitivity a little far, don’t you think? Oh, you should see your face!” His cheerfulness was starting to get to me. I narrowed my eyes and snarled, “I. Am. Not. Caffeinated. Andyouarenotfunny.”
“No, Mom, I mean it. You should see your face. Go look in the mirror.”
Startled, I went to look in the big mirror hanging by the back door. A black smudge was on my cheek, the size and shape of a child’s hand. The rounded prints of the fingertips were clearly visible.
“How do you think I knew that you had met … ummm… Smokey Joe?” I grimaced. “What about Crispin?” Luke laughed. “Is that respectful enough?”
“You know, Luke, we moved here to feel safe. I get that Crispin can be a pain, but he never felt safe in all his short life. Don’t disrespect that.” He handed me a damp paper towel and gave me a one-armed hug. His other hand held a mug with my name on it, and after I wiped my face, I said, “Gimme!” He was still trying not to laugh. “I’ve got a school research project on local history coming up. What if I researched Crispin’s story?”
“Well, I wouldn’t let anyone know you’ve met the kid, but that sounds like a good idea.” Luke looked up at the ceiling. “Hey, pest – you want to help me with some schoolwork?” There were three soft thumps in reply.
K.L. Johnston is an author, poet and photographer best known for regional works, short fiction and poetry centered in spiritual experience, nature, and trauma survival. She is the author of three books of poetry - one of which has won several awards - and she's recently taken the leap (or logical step) into flash fiction. Her stories "Boo Daddy", "Medical Miracle" and "Greetings from Mr. Greenbaum" have appeared in Midsummer Dream House and On the Run journals. Deeply attached to her ghosts and monsters she's always pleased when she can coax them into the daylight to meet her readers.