October 2017

  Oct 22: JACK-O-LANTERN   We carved the turnips and other roots with their eerie too-real faces, Against the spirits and fair folk, from their barrows now abroad. The demons and the devils set up their tricks in secret places, The sun was set and the witches and the warlocks shed facades. ’Twas time for […]

  Oct 21: HORROR MOVIES   John Pientka was a real rat-bastard of an older brother.  He was the kind of kid who’d sneak up behind you and grab you just to make you jump.  He’d pick on you just to get Mom to yell at you to shut up.  He snapped bras, he smoked

  Oct 20: FREAKSHOW/SIDESHOW   October 10, 1899 Darling Cecilia, I pray this letter finds you well in Rochester, and that the doctors have already found a cure for what ails you.  You know that I pray for you every night before I go to sleep and every morning when I wake up.  I feel

  As you can see if you investigate the list above, there are two bones entries on this list–the 19th and the 24th.  I decided to run with it.  Part II is here.   Oct 19: BONES, PART I   Lakeisha woke straight up out of the worst nightmare she’d had in her life.  Seriously.  Her

  Oct 18: VAMPIRE   The night before I took my first writers’ retreat, I had a dream about a vampire.  God!  You know what I’d been scared of encountering on that trip?  Not vampires.  Ghosts.  I knew other writers who had gone on the retreat, and about half of them had either seen a

  Oct 17: OWL   The old barn doesn’t smell like much when it’s cold, but in the summertime when the sun slices through the cracks in the boards it smells sweet, like straw and old manure.  The wood creaks in the wind, it creaks underfoot.  Up in the lofts it smells sour, because there

  Oct 16: SKULL   Stop me if you’ve heard this one. … So a guy walks into the Hangar Bar last Sunday night, well after the game had wrapped up, with a big fake skull under his arm.  I mean, this is no normal-sized skull, it’s as big as a beach ball.  There are

  Oct 15: BLACK CAT   I first encountered the woman in black on a moonless October night in dreams. I, Ferntail the Cat, was gathering information on a certain nightmare that had recently begun encroaching upon my ward Jaela’s dreams.  Once she was solidly asleep, I had entered the realm of dreams and traveled

  Oct 14: VAMPY LINGERIE   It had all been a series of mistakes.  Moving to the new town, making friends, taking up Judy’s dare to bike past the old Alterwerth farm, and then, even worse, taking up her dare to go inside the creepy old place, especially considering the number of women that have

Oct 13: BAT   You’re watching a surreal Italian horror movie and a bat is ravaging a woman’s hair, trying to bite at her face. It’s a stuffed monster.  Real bats don’t do that. … You wake.  It’s a hot night, the window is open.  Something dark flutters in the room. “It’s nothing.” You go