Browsing category fiction

death


It’s a shadow at the back of the mind. Just on the verge of being. A heavy cloud that settles at the base of who and what we are before flying off, upward and onward. Taking our breath away just as sure as it put it there in the first place. A vague, willowy figure

jabberwocky


The evening was a strange one. Darcy danced on her two sore feet to an out of tune fiddle played by the neighbor’s cat. Her brother slid across the floor on his belly making hissing noises and laughing out loud. I got scared and started writing a story about Old Lady Filmore and how she

go bump


When or how I knew is still something of a mystery because it all came at once and with such force, the way knowing sometimes does, I wasn’t sure I knew at all. I looked at the napkin, yellowed with age the same shade as Sarah’s skin; and at the silverware, Edwardian and platinum; and

working on: the coming of darkness


Summer faded into fall and the leaves began to drop. To rot by the road and on the mountain side. Old Man Bishop killed a hog. Invited the whole town out for pulled pork and revival. The place needed a soul cleaning and a man from Alabama was coming to do just that. In a

life remaining


She didn’t have much in life – mostly – but she had this. Authority bought by age. And she hated it. Hated the pain and the rigidness and the way life seemed to have left her, a bit at a time, until now….now nothing was left but tired old skin. Deflated and hanging. Folded all

prologue 2.0


Death has a way of taking over a small town, where everyone knows everyone else, even when they don’t. Preachers come out and talk about God and the Devil and about how sometimes things just happen and they don’t know why. Men stare up at the sky and sit alone in the dark, behind four

symbols


Each plate, each cup, even the little miniature saucers to sit the cups on, came separate in their own individual boxes. Bundled and wrapped in plastic bubbles and cardboard to show that they were special. Not like those cheap deals her neighbors got from the Dollar Mart that came all bunched up together and with

bright. and as black as burning coal.


His eyes sat, as eyes should sit. Square in in the center of his forehead. Low. With just enough space in between, but not too much. There was no strangeness to them. The color was not extraordinary. The shape, unremarkable. When he looked at you, they lay flat. Motionless. They saw but didn’t care. The

out, damned spot


He died. He died and he reckoned, as a dead man does, that if he’d only had one more space of time, one more year to do it all again, he could set right that one thing he set wrong. Bailey had always been the sort of man who missed the mark. Like when Joe