Not far from the university campus, an elderly man walking his small dog turns into an underpass and finds a shopping trolley, alone in the tunnel. The sight of it, suddenly there, a skeletal shadow in the empty space, makes him jump. The underpass is a regular route for students returning to campus from the…
Tag: Horror
The Few Who Eat Us
Who could fail to admirethose few who eat uswithout compunction? Great whites rip with serrated teethand call others inwith your hemosignal. Tigers when you are sweating and swatting in the banded shadowswill crush your throat. Crocodiles will bite then twisttheir whole body roundto strip you clean. Most admirable of all are polar bearsnearly invisible in…
Raw Vegetables on the Go
Previously published in The Golden Key We’d been in the kitchen a long time and the food was all gone. Burckhardt found me in the corner where I’d appropriated a chair and was defending it with my life. His lips were raw steak below blueberry eyes. “You always do this,” he told me. “Pretend you’re…
The Girls
There are three of them today, the blonde, the brunette and the new one – striped pink. Not that their hair has anything to do with the quickening of Gina’s pulse. So she tells herself, as she turns the corner from the bus stop and sees the girls loitering on her street. Gina doesn’t think…
Daytime Television
First Program Spiders The talk show host invites the Naturalist onto his stage. The Naturalist looks as all Naturalists do: he is dressed in khaki shorts, a button-up white shirt, a pith helmet, brown leather boots. The exposed bits of his arms and legs are coated in a thick layer of hair, a little too…
Five Stories in Which the Devil Appears
I A woman is walking to her car with a bag of groceries. Her young daughter is waiting inside the car. The woman has instilled in her daughter a powerful fear of strangers. The daughter thinks a strange man will try to kidnap her if he sees her sitting in the car alone, so she…
Best of Drive-Thru
—Welcome to Large Burger. Where the burgers are large and the smiles are on the house. Can I take your order? —Do you have a chicken? —We offer a range of chicken options including our signature Ranch Wagon and Ultimate Chicken five-piece dinner. Chicken sandwiches are also available in nugget form, with a variety of…
But Always Meeting Ourselves
The time machine first arrived during the summer. I was outside, mowing the lawn, when it insinuated itself into the shrubbery. The time machine was a tall yellow cylinder, like a can of pop someone had stretched. I remember it smelt like the carpets at my grandmother’s house, which I had crawled across as a…
Timothy Hawkins
When they said I was going to be on the radio, nobody told me they meant from the start to the end: Timothy Hawkins was born as a loser, tonight he will die as one, live for your pleasure. Ninety dull years he has lived without living – a minute and a half silence, one…
The Climbing Accident
Tragic.The way she dug into him hard with her crampons, her ice pick,working her little cleat to numbness against some pointed part of his anatomy: rise & fall, rise & fall, rise &fall, as deep in that dark room from which old childrenhad once emerged, she felt only the T-bar of pharmaceutical barrenness pressing against…