I had it all, or at least that’s what my parents told me. From a young age I had always done the things they instructed me to do. When I slouched in my chair as a child my father told me to sit up straight and be alert. You gotta watch what’s happening in this world, he said. And so I did. I watched him clean the gutters, or patch cracks in the walls, or replace sink piping. When I was overw...

Jane said she is going to the party and my heart lurches. My jaw drops, it stays dropped. There’s no way she’s ready for the degenerate antics that occur at those things. For the ruin it’ll cause her. If not immediately, then down the line, when someone contacts her to tell of a video they have that she won’t remember because she decided to go balls to the wall since it was her first real part...

I’ve been waiting for weeks now. They say it happens shortly after you’ve received a visit. A day or two at most. Then you’re gone. Step off the curb without looking, miss the first step going down the staircase, release your last breath as you sleep at night. However it happens, it does, and it’s always after a crow visits you.

The birds used to be more common. You’d see them on telephon...

I think of that professor at that music college in Tennessee. How he said his position was to wipe the stars from freshman’s eyes. He was referring to readjusting expectations of future fame and fortune to a focus on building a career based on industry knowledge and experience. But I guess he cleared my head of stars completely.

I wound up at the local community college back home in Maryland....

Another one appeared this morning. A raised jagged line running beside his right eye down to his cheek. He didn’t know how he was going to hide this one. Maybe a hoodie; the weather was getting cooler. He just didn’t want to be taken into the office again at school and questioned for the better part of a day. That’s what happened when the waxy callouses formed on the back of his hands, as if ...

Brittany put down the book with tears in her eyes. She wiped them away with her sleeve and then did the same to her runny nose, something that would’ve disgusted her normally but she was too much caught in the emotional upheaval the story she had just finished evoked. It was a short story in a collection, which she had picked up the day it released earlier that week, from her favorite author, an...

Jeff was a quiet man. A dependable man. He managed the morning shift of the prepared foods section of the local food market. He’d wake early to slow cook his marinaded meats and vegetables, heat the soup made ready the day before, and slide trays of biscuits into the oven. He didn’t talk much, an avid fan of obscure independent films. If a coworker got a word out of him not regarding a food p...

It happened again.

Happens everytime I see my father now.

I wake up screaming, sitting in the dark, the covers tossed aside, my breath a chaos of odd rhythms.

Our relationship didn’t hold many memories; definitely not fond ones.

But he never tried to kill me.

At least not while he was alive.

All that changed once he died.

He took notice of me then.

More so than calling me to the garage to stea...

The rift opened, dragging me with it. Stacy was intent on tearing apart our friendship. Not the one between her and me, which didn’t actually exist, but the one I held with Nathan. We’d been hanging out a couple of years now, generally after work, on a Friday evening, hitting up a nearby bar for a few beers before easing into the weekend. Besides that we’d go on fishing trips every once in a w...

“Go take a walk,” is what my mother said. Words she would say when annoyed or displeased. Words that had come more frequently like the growth of weeds.

But I knew better than to stay where I’m not wanted. And even though I’m not one for orders, an afternoon walk required no boarders.

I grabbed a small pack and headed for the woods. With the Sun toward the horizon, my trek might be over bef...