For Readers

  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

  Oct 23:  MAD SCIENTIST   My best friend and I hadn’t talked for eleven years, after the accident.  She said she was sorry, I said I’d never ride in a car that she was driving again, and she said if I didn’t trust her absolutely then I didn’t deserve her friendship, and I said,

  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