Fiction

Reruns of TV series dating from her childhood. A low-budget 1950s sci fi movie with people screaming and running from gigantic atomic mutant insects—Oh God, not this!

I don’t even know how to take care of myself and my throat hardens and there’s a blue whale swimming in my chest and the water flows from my eyes.

You’re not evolving. At all. Steve Jobs gave you an iPhone maybe, and yet cancer took him away. Your technology changes here and there, but you, as creatures, do not.

And a smoky ghostlike Face had come to the Dead Boy’s mother Tammy in a dream, and said many incomprehensible things, which Tammy thereby did phone in to the local radio show and soon Tammy was with child.

She looked up and down the aisle to see who might have observed this. The older woman interrogated another label. The small dark inverted dome of a ceiling camera watched, but at its angle the bulky jacket should have blocked any view of the theft.

He had kept the tooth pressed into my palm the whole time, and now it stuck there in a skin-pit of its own carving. The blood had all but dried. Watching it, I was momentarily convinced that the tooth was moving, shaking somehow by itself, but I came to realize it was, in fact, my own heartbeat...

A CRYPTID slams down from the ceiling like a soggy futon stuffed with gossip, hitting the floor with a sound halfway between a slap and a whimper, then immediately begins steaming—not with heat, but personal humidity.

The VW bus rocked and giggled inside, snowflakes falling like feathers that night on Providence. Drawn to the clouds of piney smoke seeping from the bus, I couldn’t cover my loud laughter.

I was sweating and the patrons and even Jones were sweating and we were all in short-sleeves, but the man wore a suit.  When the door closed behind him, he didn't sit down and he didn't go up to the bar, not initially.

Margaret, though, merely ignored her husband’s fury and squatted to the floor and situated herself alongside the shivering body of the wounded man and ran her trembling hands through his black hair and eased his head into her lap.