I found the painting in the basement in a Japanese tansu. Noriko had moved in a lot of antique furniture when we got married, primarily from the late Edo period, and I had lost track of most of it. The painting itself was buried underneath a stack of clothing and wrapped in old brown paper. […]
Nemi sat on her hut’s woven straw floor, peeling purple skins from shea nuts then dropping them into a bowl. Her bony, gnarled fingers, drenched in purple like withered lavender flowers, struggled with the pearl-sized fruits. Each naked shea clanked into the bowl, a sound like a raindrop on a roof’s straw. Glass mourning beads, […]
It was a wolf, rather than an ailing grandmother, that tempted Red into the woods. All day his cries echoed, small, plaintive sounding things that filled the forest. By the time she found him, night had fallen and the blood on the snow looked black. By moonlight, she pried his paw from the rusted jaws […]
“One final question, Cassandra. Why do you deserve to be sacrificed to the great Yog-Sothoth?” The candle on the table flickered as she studied the hooded man’s dark eyes and considered her answer. She hated when the elder gods sent a proxy. How hard was it to show up for themselves? It made her feel […]
She was cursed with a fairness that strangled her. Expectations woven into her dark hair, an openness and roundness to her eyes that filled her with horror. They were too pale, too pure, too winsome to protect her. Terrors poured in while tears poured out. Hate and bile ran through her veins, but when her […]
I’ve been lugging it around for years… rolled up and stuffed in my gym bag… tucked in the hollows of old sneakers kept under the bed. For the longest time I “hid” it in my sock drawer wrapped in plastic like an unopened 3-pack.
His love is alchemy; his touch transmutes. I turn to gold at his faintest glance.
“Do I have a mother?” he asks me. He is precocious. Every father thinks his son is special, but I know. His eyelashes are so fine they are almost transparent. His skin is the color of ripe wheat. He is as beautiful as his mother, but more so, because she was so full of fear. She was a creature of shadows, and my boy is all sunlight.
Keith thought he was looking for a new guitar. The brass numbers, 2281, nailed above the door of Vic’s E-Z Pawn told him to go in. He trusted the numbers. If you added 2+2+8+1 you got 13, which was lucky, because that’s how old he was when he started.
Keith pushed open the door.