The Mountain’s Poison is Sweetness, Too
An ancient, toxic poison requires a new guardian.
Blame
Read all the emails, chat logs, audio transcripts, Jira tickets, and other evidence related to the Kristie Breslin case.
Silence
It’s not the silence that gets you—despite the dire warnings in the training sims. After a few weeks the silence becomes an ocean, a universe, and it’s all yours. You float within it, your lungs fill with it, it becomes you. Yes, you control the silence.
The problem is the noise.
Betobeto Teketeke
I’m going to tell you a story, but on one condition: it must be read out loud.
House—Unpainted
A house down the street catches my attention. It sits half painted, the other half peeling white, with a quarter of the driveway paved. The cracks are still visible. A shadow passes by one window in the upper level. It looks like my daughter. I know it can’t be. I left her shadow inside the new house.
The Casket House
Charlotte Ephram, the bereaved widow, moves with her young son into the mansion of an estranged uncle.
The Bedroom Window
Ed’s brother is dead, but why won’t he leave?
Mona Luna
If you never met her, you’d think she was a real nice lady, yeah. Good with kids, never kicked no dog. Never sang a hymn out of tune. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she works down at the shelter, handing out socks and toothbrushes.
I go barefoot in my boots rather than take a single thing from Mona Luna.
Back To Normal
A woman awakens to find life strangely normal after murdering her husband, but normal is a world of constant dread, and the voice in her head is worse than the corpse in her bed.
The Atoll
We take shelter next to a low shelf of rock and watch the sun die a slow death on the horizon; an angry red eye drowned in a blaze of orange and yellow. Beneath it, the ocean is flat. A rippling, endless mirror, all of it one terrible display of beauty waiting to devour us like it did Hannah.