Story is marked as mature

The Walmart and its parking lot were gone, replaced by a fleshy dome. Colors swam inside, alternating back and forth between contaminated white of curdled milk and the oily yellow of spoiled butter. It heaved and sighed and rippled with jellied motion.

W…

Story is marked as mature

Rain pelted the windshield of our station wagon and the wipers carried the water away in wide flat arcs. The radio was turned way down low until it was little more than a generic hum. Dad's fingers tapped the steering wheel as if he could still hear it. D…

Pressing into the mirror, I slid into shadow. Coldness suffused every cell of my body until the pain of freezing became numbness and unable to breathe, I drowned.

Ghostly presences, silent and eerie, faded in and out around me. Seeing details was hard, l…

“Haha, mommy. You made a boob!” Kara Jean laughed.

Sam looked at the curved mound of sand. She supposed the rounded knoll did look like a boob. It was going to be domed roof, something that would make their castle stand out against the half a dozen other…

Simon Krapper whimpered from his cross. He was still alive. Eyes bleary from pain, from tears, from the sun, blinked and did not see. He was beyond that. Sweat rolled off his body but still he shivered.

Willum pressed a damp sponge to the crucified man's…

I awoke with a start to noise from downstairs: a series of thumps punctuated by broken glass, as if someone had tipped out the contents of my liquor cabinet.

Throwing on my camisole, I slipped through my bedroom door and crept among the darkness of the u…

Red sunburned skin scored the rounded edges of my shoulder blades, along the outsides of my forearms, across the middle of my face and topped it off with a giant patch on my head where thinning hair had failed to protect my scalp from the sun. With a gene…

I stepped of the Rail and dropped down to street level. Anticipation quickened my steps. My presence triggered storefronts auto-advertisements causing neon signs to pop into view. Swatting off a nude model offering discount massages, I crossed a street gr…

I had been there working on the same sentence for an hour when she slid into the booth across from me.

Her smile commanded my attention like I was a ship lost in a storm and she the guide light from a light house. Delightfully, I could see a garden of wh…

Wind hammered the windows and made the shutters crack against the outside of Kevin's house. Bent over a chair near the fireplace, he listened to the sounds and imagined some great beast being hunted by enthusiastic men, courageous and true. Yesterday rain…

Before entering through the hole he'd made, Darnell unhooked his tether and attached it to a metal eye-hook below the outer handhold. Then he stashed his torch and climbed inside, careful not to tear his suit. After entering the airlock Darnell found the …

Darnell unclipped his laser torch and used the butt to tap on the door. He didn't hear anything. Pressing his helmet against it, he tried again. There was a hollow tonk tonk tonk but no answering sound.

He radioed Bach. “Been knocking and no answer, an…

Story is marked as mature

Kelly had been fourteen when she decided her father wasn't coming back. He had disappeared two years prior while on a walk, something he'd do quietly on his own every couple of days. Busy doing homework at the kitchen table she hadn't noticed it then but …

The wind picked up around me, growing denser as smoke from the burning city below infused it. Particulates filled the air with enough irritants to give my lungs a tickle without quite forcing me to cough. I worried about long-term exposure but the activit…

Descending down the stairs to the basement, I almost gagged on the overwhelming funk that permeated the air. It was the rank smell of a high school locker room just after summer practice; unwashed bodies and stale sweat.

The missing men's clothes lay sca…

When I woke, I found my body folded up around my stomach like a clam. That was where a hardening pearl of pain thundered, building pressure I couldn't ignore even while unconscious. My brain tried to get a sense of my surroundings at the same time as anot…

I breathed her in.

A storm of quicksilver lightning, and winds so cold they burned hot, rushed into me, consuming me. Trapped with pulsing, unchecked energy, I was helpless as a terrible violence expanded in my chest, rising to my head. This was her whir…

Although the night was clear and cloud free, the streets were dark. A summer wind brought a refreshing coolness off the ocean and I stopped my midnight wanderings to lean against a building, letting the air wash over me. It was sweeter than expected, almo…

Frank shook his head. His brain was slowing down. He was sure of it. His thoughts came too slowly these days like ships navigating through a thick and treacherous fog struggling through a sea of syrup. His brain felt like it was wrapped in smothering blan…

Rain poured down in thick sheets, dense enough to severely limit visibility. I couldn't see the enemy troops--not a single soldier, tanks, or mech--but I knew they were out there ever since my radar and communications equipment stopped chattering. The sto…

“Your hair looks nice.”

It slipped out of his mouth into real space. What had he done? Stupid, stupid, stupid! He tried to throw his headphones back on and lower his eyes before she felt the need to respond. One of the fat black ear cushions fell off an…

It's late and a thin, wispy fog has settled atop the streets. I don't know when it happened. Last I remembered, the sun was mid-set in a darkening sky. Now every street ended in a gray void. Did the fog creep in, floating like some otherworldly horror, or…