Thriller + Mystery

Lydia had the loveliest blue-black hair, and the fluorescent lights of the Halloween Factory danced among her waves. Today, she wore it down, casually tossing it as she perused the racks of costumes. I followed behind her, playing my part of loyal friend: the quiet girl she’d adopted at the college coffee shop two weeks […]

It was one of those preposterous summer nights when the sun forgot to set. We swarmed through the endless yellowed yards, a dirty dozen of us, defeating countless forbidding fences in pursuit of our prey. We cornered the twins by the Climbing Tree and fell upon them like stones; held one down, the other back, […]

A carriage, exposed and burning at the foot of a sheer silver peak. Sunlight, intense sunlight. Smoke. Stillness. Blood. No movement. Then: a solitary figure moving away, stumbling from shadow into light. A change claiming him, deep and irreversible, making him something other. But go back. Trace the train’s journey through this unnatural place. See […]

The first thing you might notice when watching Suburban Slaughter is the flashing red thunderbolt on the corner of the screen; the camcorder is almost out of battery, and the characters are almost out of time. It starts with blurred static until a moment of clarity reveals two boys crushed by compression. Their bright shirts […]

I hooked the orange pill bottle from Dad’s shirt pocket and flushed the rest of the oxy down the toilet, then sat for a while on the pullout couch in the living room where his body lay. It was clear when I walked in from the graduation ceremony that he was dead, so I took […]

Cigarette butts line the baseboards of my apartment. I have stacked them three and four high, lacquered into place with glue, gum, spit. My nicotine boundary is important. I crawl along in the dark and smell my stale ash-paper ramparts to remember when I burnt each dart. Penitents and Disputees flicker up my nostrils along […]

Claire was in the van across the street from the girl’s house. Ted was beside her. He had the gun.  The girl – Margaret Stone – was bald and chipmunk-cheeked, just like her pictures. She was on the large front porch watering a plant, her movements like a child’s: broad, lumbering, graceless. She claimed to […]

I’m in love with Melissa Lee. Problem is, so is my brother. Problem is, he got the looks. The charisma. The height. He’s older, so maybe I’ll catch up in the next couple of years, but by then, it’ll be too late. Problem is, he’ll win her hand. Problem is how that hand transforms from […]

Muddy footprints trailed Lottie on her way back to the porch. All that morning, rain fell, and wind played rough in the trees. Only now did glimmers of sunlight spill through crosshatches of oak branches. The air was sweet with damp grass as Lottie settled onto her front steps. Thin elbows propped behind, she watched […]

They didn’t say memes back then. So what did they call it? At the end, in the dark, Lizzie tried to remember. An in-joke but not a joke, a sign for the initiated. A Bob Dobbs sticker on the inside of your locker or a battered copy of an underground comic book. A way for […]

Their men and boys were gone before they’d crossed into Nebraska. Teddy was the last to go. Mary never thought he would make it as long as he did due to his temper and his drinking. But he did. Then one night, he went out to take a piss while they were camped inside a […]

We met in college, which is to say, Ohio. A small liberal arts school you’ve probably heard of and regard with either approval or suspicion, depending on your politics. Me, enrolled in the music conservatory, and her, art history, although really, her heart was set on baking. It was a coffee shop sort of thing, […]