Most people hate most surprises most of the time. It’s only when you secretly suspect that there’s going to be a surprise, and the surprise will be exactly what you wanted but didn’t have to ask for, or what you would have wanted if you had known that it was a possibility, that a “surprise” is
The whole collection is live! Oct 31: TRICK OR TREAT It is a thousand years from now. Whenever now is, it’s a thousand years after that. A cure for mortality has been created—crafted—perfected. Humanity has moved to the stars. Why not? We have literally nothing better to do than to explore the
October Nights: 31 Tales of Hauntings and Halloween Available on Kindle A collection of flash fiction: 31 tales for the 31 nights of October. As wide a variety of horror as I could come up with–from Barker to Bradbury to Zenna Henderson. SPOOKY SHORT FICTION – PERFECT FOR A HALLOWEEN NIGHT! Thirty-one horror tales of
Oct 30: GHOST “It’s experimental,” Whitcomb said. “So we’re not sure what’s going to come out of it. It could be about as interesting as giving a toddler a keyboard.” “You know what they say,” Nicholls joked nervously. “An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type
Oct 29: FULL MOON Mary could only leave the house on a full moon. The doctors said she had agoraphobia, but that was because they didn’t have a word for what she had. She had always thought it rather strange—that the inside of her mind was determined by words, rather than the other
Oct 28: CEMETERY The day was gray and depressing. The golden leaves had all fallen and been raked away, and the hills around the cemetery were dull as pot-metal from all the bare tree branches. One or two evergreens speckled the vista, but for the most part it was scenery in need of
Oct 27: MASK Whenever I get a diagnosis, I’m never really sure that it’s my diagnosis. I have what I have nicknamed Mystery Autoimmune Disease, or as my sarcasm-laden boyfriend likes to call it, “MAD Cow Disease.” I forgive him because he painted me a picture of a Holstein cow in a can-can dress
Oct 26: VOODOO Sam’s kitchen wasn’t one of those photogenic open restaurant kitchens. Au contraire. It was stained floor tiles and a gaping grate in the middle of the floor, battered heavy-guage pots hanging from blackened hooks, a walk-in baking oven with yellowed glass, a mixer with a bowl that could hold a couple
Oct 25: TRANSFORMATION I found it while going through an old newsgroup, looking for a copy of one of the first poems that I ever wrote. Rec.alt.tentacles, the newsgroup where all the cool kids hung out back in the day. Everyone pretended to be some sort of extra-dimensional being of godlike status. I
Oct 24: BONES, PART II (Haven’t read part I yet? It’s here.) It was time to face the airplane. Lakeisha’s son lay injured in a hospital in Hawaii. She had to go. Cars and trains would not do, of course, but Donte, in a delirium, had left her a message: The bone man
