A strange sound woke me around two in the morning. I lay listening for a while. A human cry, forming unintelligible words, repeating them after a pause and getting louder. I slipped out of bed and went into the living room. Padded across the cool tiled floor to the open window, lifted the blinds and …
TW: This flash deals with sexual assault. Not all men, although there was that time when that reptilian managing director pulled me oh-so-close, ran his scaly fingers though my hair and underneath my top, hissed when I told him I had a boyfriend. I heard the others describe me as just another one of his …
Mother has latticed wings, translucent tinted amber, sectioned like leaded glass in church windows. Her flight is poetry, lyrical, beautiful, full of grace, deadly. She kills on the wing, takes prey in taloned limbs, rips off wings and devours it headfirst. Harnesses the wind, owns the air. The physics of her flight is art and science. She hovers, darts and …
Zoe pries out one of his eyeballs with the tip of a screwdriver and rolls it between her thumb and forefinger. His good eye stares blankly out at her. She’d expected to see some blood. She moves to plunge the screwdriver into it, to see what will happen, before changing her mind and dropping the …
She’d Expected to See Some Blood by Steve Campbell Read More »
Entering through the heavy green, odd-shaped door, Dr Charles Dennis shivers. An inclement night: wind tears through the old house, the hospital, where desperate souls bury immorality, illness, fear of the immortal, or they bury themselves. Tonight, something other than death, sickness, and despair saturate the place; something else seems to have permeated the thick …
The preparations for Halloween start the daytime before. My little brother Joe can barely lift the turnip he’s chosen onto the bench in our tiny galley kitchen. The swede’s underside is roughly chopped away from its root so it sits on the bench at a crooked angle that we don’t think to correct. Part of …
A Night of Strange Occurrence by Steven Patchett Read More »
An empty suit lies discarded on a bench, legs spread, arms hanging loose. You lift a limp sleeve and let it drop. The cheap shine reminds you of the suit you bought for her funeral. Don’t spend good money on misery, she said. But there was a kind of guilt in that. You ease yourself …
John is woken by the cat on his chest, doing that weird stepping, kneading, clawing trance cats do when they’re tremendously content. Pinning John in place, dribbling reverently. Purring mysterious feline pleasure all over his torso. Settling its tapered body like a lion in Trafalgar Square, tucking its paws under all neat, pushing its nose …
I can’t bear the creak that comes from my chair at night. Steadily rocking, back and forth, back and forth. Ghosts have no respect, honestly. This particular one is called Gertrude. She’s been rocking in my office chair for the past three weeks and it’s probably time I do something about it. Occasionally, just as …
FUCKINGIn high school, Hailey told the few friends she had that she’d walked in on her parents doing it. She said that when she saw their limbs in the half-light, all bunched together moving in ways they shouldn’t, she vomited. ‘They looked horrific,’ she said, ‘like a giant spider feasting on something ̶ a …
The Truth Behind Hailey’s Arachnophobia by Anika Carpenter Read More »
Yes, Huntington. Dark glasses. Pinot Noir. Proficient in Latin, French, and German. Huntington is Protestant. Huntington dated men and women in college, but he’s married to a woman now and they have two children. He’s still bisexual, so please leave your heteronormative notions at the door with your shoes, thank you. Huntington jogs. Huntington enjoys …
It’s almost Halloween and the guesthouse owner has embraced the season with a ghoulish fervour, but it’s clear we have different perspectives on creepy. I tiptoe past pumpkins, a scarily unconvincing cat, waft past webs of spiders, store-bought rather than spun from neglect in my normal haunts. This is not a hotel in a hostile …