He followed the number on the card with one finger and dialled with another, the receiver in the crook of his neck. The call was picked up but nobody spoke. He replaced the receiver after a few seconds and took a sip from the glass on the table in front of him. A thread of blood appeared in the water from where he had bitten his lip, fraying out as it twisted around itself, becoming nothing.
"Now we turned away from the crushed wreck and again climbed into our planes to go on searching for him. But I was thinking, 'O you resuscitators from the land of the living, bank on the wind and fly back to your limbo called life. There is no saving one whom only death can keep alive.'"
Residing in Prince Edward County, (Ontario), when Rebecca is not the CEO of a busy household, traveling or freelance writing, she is plotting out my next dark fiction story. Active on both Twitter (@rhhouse) and Instagram (@rhousewriter), you can find her stories or articles published on CommuterLit.com, With Painted Words and in two upcoming print anthologies, Allucinor (ID Press) and The Stand (Polar Expressions Publishing). "Silent Houses" was previously published online at www.commuterlit.co...
It was a little less than two miles down Elm Street that we saw it. Blue with white shutters and trim, a large bay window and a garage attached to the house. Tall and homey, with a rolling yard and three stories of neatly painted edging. Completely out of our price range, and yet- “Ned-” I said, the startle in my voice bringing his gaze up from the map. “That house- it looks-” “Just like mine,” he said. Ned’s childhood home was a sprawling old farmhouse that had once had over two hundred acres o...
You almost cried, but you didn’t. While you tossed and turned and the room grew hot, as you screamed frustrations into your pillow and bit your lip and ripped at the bed sheets in your anger, you never once let a tear escape. You must know, my dear, that I truly believe that your strength is one of your most admirable qualities.
She looks up and sees him, only a few feet away. Nessa almost halts in shock. She hadn’t known that boys could be pretty. Not in the way that girls were pretty. Pretty that makes you stop and stare. But there he was. Except for the eyes. His eyes were very, very ugly. Surreal. Colourless. They were cold. They hurt to look at.
Blood and pus coated everything when she paused to catch her breath. Snapped tendrils wrapped wilting around bits of chair, dissolving into nothingness. Silence settled over the apartment. Emma experienced a moment of peace. It didn’t last long.
"You're being baptized?" "Sure am. Pastor Larry is going to do it up at Mud Hen Pond as soon as he gets out of jail." "Why's he in jail for?" "We don't need to get into that."
"But then there was a river; a dark, slow moving, languid, wide, and briny river, and some of us, if we threw ourselves into it, we thought, perhaps we could finally end it. I wasn’t convinced."
In these three flash pieces by Paul Beckman, a beloved boy's record-setting rubber-band ball leads to disaster, a call center employee's apathy overwhelms his empathy, and a bargain hunter remains oblivious to the empty noise that comprises his existence.
A surreal boardwalk, a dream0like beachfront, and the menacing sea contort our narrator's sense of reality, test the limits of her empathy, and blurs the edges of her own identity.
During their pilgrimage to the Somme, a group of misfits finds surreal purpose in an unexpected place.
They came to save us. But instead of salvation, they offer only "The Pain," a universal burden that all must bear. One woman attempts to stop her daughter's suffering, only to learn the hopeless extent of humanity's condition.
In an empty and hopeless wasteland, an indentured mason must labor under the watchful eye of a drunken overseer with a love for shotguns and 80s pop tunes.
A family trying to keep it together doesn't stand a chance after something uninvited is born in the attic of their home.
In a bleak near future where the human race is ruled by a strange, animal-like deity with an iron fist and self-obliterating love, one rebel has a plan in which everything seems to go wrong. Well, almost everything.
Frank buys a mattress for his shitty apartment, only to find that his new purchase is somewhat... inhabited.
An unhinged narrator bends the border between imagination and reality as he explores the dark spaces of his world.
Mythic sacrifice meets local tradition in this piercing story by Angela Enos.
In Amos J. Hunt's poem "In Which I Take a Task Upon Myself," a man who is desperate for sleep sets out in search of the barking dog keeping him awake; in the process, he discovers much more than a dog.
In this episode of The Breakroom Stories, a boozy stay at the family of an acquaintance gets real bad real quick for a narrator. Oh yeah... and about that narrator? Something clearly isn't right.
It's "Remembering Day," and a mysterious contraption appears in a town whose populace depends on Jones to decipher its meaning.
