Vexedly, I tapped the glass whose sloping walls warped and elongated the bookcases and fireplace of my study. It was dishearteningly thick, the Lessening having worked exactly to my specifications. Previously, when placing the bottle horizontally in it's …

It had been fourteen days. The painting was gone and with it my heart. Authored by an amateur it had meant more to me than any museum in the world. Each day that passed felt like a relentless excavation into my chest, letting in the outside ice and snow t…

October 14

Day five that Brent has woken up ravenous and exhausted. Officially it's day five. It's been at least five days since I noticed a pattern and decided to track it's course. I'm not surprised that he's exhausted. He told me about his dreams and …

It's been raining for two days straight. No matter what I do I can't see how to stop what I started. Honestly, it's hard to see anything through the wall of water beyond my window. The house across the street was little more than a looming blur and the st…

“This is what you don't see.” Janine unpaused the recording and upped the contrast and tint until everything on the screen became spiky darkness.

Before I could say anything to contradict her, she pushed a button and bright colors appeared next to my he…

He was here now.

Fear wrapped cold hands around my arms and slid them up to caress the back of my neck with light fingers. Not quite coinciding with his arrival, almost as an after thought, a bolt of lightning silently struck the ground where he stood, i…

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I was teaching English in Malaysia when the black spot first appeared overhead. It seemed small, barely larger than a fifty sen coin but without any real context it was hard to tell how much higher over the trees it was. Was it small and close or huge and…

Our words are fragile incomplete things. Stuttering, their half-shapes try to convey ideas. They fall short, as short as the silhouette of a chair falls short of being the chair itself. Even if that shadow is crisp hard edges from perfect lighting it can …

They had taken the light. All lights everywhere were gone. First the stars winked out one by one. Then the Sun grew dark before vanishing. Without the Sun there was no moon. It was probably still out there in that deep darkness but we couldn't see it.

We…

When the cliffs came into sight, I found that I wasn't ready to see them. Their vast dominance of the sky, those dizzying heights, even from this far away, toyed with my body's perception of which way was up. The sensation that I was about to fall sideway…

I saw the fat man with a beard again today. He had been a stranger kind enough to lend me half of his table at Starbucks. People are never that nice and honestly I thought it was a ploy to talk to me. Nope. He didn't interrupt me once while I was studying…

“I'm tired.” she said.

Her words sent a jolt of recognition through me. Not just the words and their flat tone, but the familiar darkness they masked. It was so easy to rely on exhaustion as a crutch because it was so easy to be exhausted these days. Any…

It was his need that broke me. I knew what it was like to be in a position where there was no other options than to ask for help even if I didn't take it. For him to be here now, asking me for help, it spoke of powerful desperation. In it, I could see a…

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Story is marked as mature

Yellow flakes spiraled down from above to settle on the city like the ash of some great holocaust. The yellowness that filled the air wasn't the pure color of a sunflower but rather a corrupted yellow like rancid butter. Near the ground, the dancing motes…

The city seemed endless when it was empty. Half of it, maybe more, was filled with unused treasures that lay moldering in growing mounds of dust. Long streets stayed dark, no longer powered now that no one was left to keep the electrical grids up and runn…

Our only warning was the earth crying out in a great grinding noise that swallowed all other sounds, a yawn of some half-asleep cyclopean giant angry at being awoken. The ground shifted and we clawed at each other to stay upright.

Amidst a roiling cloud …

Gone was the demure scion of the Burns house that I had known. In her place stood a crazed woman, nattering at nothing I could see though I could sense cold, electrical malignance blanketing the air above us. The motions of her body and limbs were stiff a…

There is a dark stain on my family that has been passed down through at least ten generations. It seems to affect men and women equally but no more than one in any given generation though we all seem to carry it. I can trace our weakness through four gene…

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When the knock that everyone dreads came, it sounded hard and insistent against the frail wood of our apartment door. Fumbling noises came from the room that my mom and sister shared before the lights flickered on, banishing the comforting ambiguity of th…

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My face must have said more than my silence because she added quickly, “It's not a church or anything crazy like that. I might be a little old fashioned but I know right from right. It's more of a social. We meet at the Autumn Garden Theatre. You know the…