Stories
Fiction & Micro-Fiction
Fiction: Beautiful Insanity
He is a tiny man. Under four feet tiny. Balding pate. Small eyes. Round, tortoiseshell glasses. Tattered brown suit. Nothing to look at, certainly, not that anyone is looking. He glides through the crowd, clearing a path without word or gesture. People move aside for...
Gods of Dirt
There were things we worshiped before the new gods. Things of the dirt. Things of the dark. Things that moved and swarmed and crawled in the spaces beneath our feet. We feared them, even as they ignored us. To them, we were the worms. And less than worms. We were the...
Fiction: Shade
Night clings to the forest like a shroud. The darkness is nearly absolute, the silhouettes of the trees only just a hair's-breadth deeper black. The sounds of life are everywhere, however. The chirps of insects and the calls of nocturnal predators. The sounds of...
Fiction: Death, Unstay Thy Hand
I can tell the Wellbutrin is doing its job. This is the third individual item I've written in as many days, which I think may very well be more than I've written in the last year. I also have story ideas spilling out my ears, which is also something that hasn't...
Fiction: Fog
"Ain't natural, Karl." "'Course not." "Fog's 'sposed to burn up in sunlight, not pile up against the edge of a man's property like it's beatin' on a wall." "Ever'body knows that, Carl." "Yeah? Well somebody 'parently forgot to tell ol' man Hemp. Ain't natural." "Ya'...
Weight of the Kraken
Chaz raises the weapon he holds in his left hand. He can feel the Weight of it dragging his arm back toward the earth, but it is that very same Weight that allows him to wield the hand cannon at all. When he first claimed the Kraken, when he first held the Object that...
Confession
She is tied to a rack. The ropes at her wrists and ankles dig cruelly into her skin. Her fingers and toes have long since gone numb. She barely notices. This is as it should be. Figures move in the shadows around her, checking her bonds, adjusting her garments,...
Out of Darkness, Unto Destiny
New piece of Destiny fan fiction I wrote last week. This one merits a bit of explanation. I wrote it as a kind of transition piece for my clan, Tied the Leader. The TTL Gunslingers were founded on and modeled a bit after Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. At the...
Creeping Cough
She had a cough. Deep. Wet. Ragged. They called it the creeping cough. Non-communicable to humans. Supposedly. And yet here she had it, and it was taking over her body. Already, fingers of the black fungus were reaching out from the corners of her mouth, which meant...