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I couldn’t take the calls any more. I just couldn’t take knowing. There was nothing I could do to stop them from coming through; I had to put an end to it.

Sweat trickles down my forehead; I don't bother to wipe it away, and my eyes sting from staring at the monitor screen for far too long. The office room I had rented for the short amount of time I'm living in this city was cluttered, and the mess almost filled to the maximum capacity of the room--files and recording tapes everywhere. Stacks of loose paper and documents threatened to topple and create more disarray in the ridiculously small room. But my busy mind was focused on the bright screen:…

The pain ended quickly. I rose and tried to find my body. Probably lying mangled underneath the metallic wreck. Dying in a road accident is definitely the worse way to go. "So! Had a nice life?" asked a voice behind me. I turned around to find a woman smiling. Since she could see me I was pretty sure she was a soul like me. She giggled, "You are taking it pretty well. I am Cindy by the way." I spoke evenly," What happens now? Hell? Heaven?" She laughed louder. Before I could say something I…

Everyone has tales about the strange and bizarre. My story is about how my half-hole mask saved my life, and continues to save my life to this very day. Late in December, I was traveling north from California to my home state of Oregon. Nothing fancy, I was just going to visit the family for the holidays. On my way north I hit a small snow storm, nothing awful, just a lot of snow falling all at once.

“Bobby! Pay attention!” he heard his teacher say. He snapped out of his reverie and looked up to see her glaring at him. “Did you hear anything I’ve been saying?” she continued. Bobby shrugged his shoulders. Prior to being disrupted, he was daydreaming that he could freeze time, and before that he was imagining himself navigating the classroom if he was only 5 inches tall. The teacher continued to rant at him, just as they all did, then she placed him on detention Friday night after school.

Your Majesty, I do not mean to interrupt. I do know that today is a day of celebration. That this feast you have thrown has been in my honor. But I bid you give me the floor. For there is no cause for celebration. You celebrate today for the death of a beast, and yet I aim to make amends. For you see, the beast lives on. I can see by the look on your face that you are confused…and perhaps you feel you are owed an explanation. If it pleases Your Majesty, I will give you just that.

My friend and I always used to walk through a wonderful, spacious park when we were younger. It was full of tall trees, and it was very nicely maintained. In this large park, there was an abandoned mansion – I can’t really say how long it had been there, but on that day, the front door of the mansion was wide open. The two of us decided to check out what was inside the place. As we inched through the door, the very first thing we noticed was that the mansion’s floor was littered with crumpled…

“Anna! Wake up! My angel is here!” “What?” I eased one eye open until I was squinting at my brother. I would have opened them farther, except I couldn’t. He was shining a damn flashlight in my face. I shooed my little brother away that night, barely even bothering to look. That was the biggest mistake I have ever made.

I've decided to kill myself.

The cold was the first thing I felt. Even before my eyes were open I felt a very deep chill in my core, a thousand spindles of ice sewn between my tissues. I blinked, my eyelids slowly bringing and stealing back the darkness, and with it the desire to keep them closed forever.

When I was a small child, I was terrified of the dark. I still am, but back when I was around six years old I couldn’t go a full night without crying out for one of my parents to search beneath my bed or in my closet for whatever monster I thought was waiting to eat me. Even with a night light, I would still see dark shapes moving around the corners of the room, or strange faces looking in on me from my bedroom window. My parents would do their best to console me, telling me that it was just a…

Hello. I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is an anxiety disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, or behaviors. In other words, my life is a a systematic pattern. But yesterday, I experienced a flaw in my own system. I awoke that morning in my lakeside home promptly at 6:45AM, as I do every morning. Before leaving my bedroom I made sure to touch the doorknob three times. I have to. I need to.

The weekend was the time when somebody like me, a 12-year-old boy, didn’t have much to do apart from playing alone in the house. My mother kept an eye on me at all times, and I can’t really blame her, after all, I think I broke every single window in this house at least twice. That’s why I’m not allowed to play football indoors anymore.

The last pale stripes of light were fading quickly behind the city’s expanse that evening. The street, still damp from a recent rain, glimmered thinly. The streetlights had not yet flickered to life, and the street was hanging suspended in that breathless squinting moment between light and dark.

I’ve always loved the movies. As a film fan, my attention would instantly snap to the TV when I caught a commercial for an upcoming movie. Most of the mindless, overproduced garbage Hollywood churns out is pretty forgettable, so whenever I discovered an indie film with a relatively fresh concept, I was excited to see something different.

Last year, I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.

Our journey began at the end of everything. The world had ended, but ours had just begun. We had lived our lives in solitude, confined for as long as we could remember, but that was about to change. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?” I asked seemingly no one. After a while, a voice I’d never heard rang out. “Hello! Yes, I can hear you. Who am I speaking with?” The British voice crackled out, and a wave of excitement overcame me.

My best friends Darius and Jordan learned about my fear of swimming during an impromptu tubing trip on the Farmington River. The summer after I turned twenty-six, Darius and Jordan took me to Foxborough Park, a park that ran alongside the river. Foxborough Park had recently undergone improvements as a part of the town’s beautification project. My parents once described the park as being “overrun by druggies and dropouts.” After the project completed, the town’s lilly-white, upper-middle class…

The handwritten sign plastered to my door was not something I could miss. ‘Rent due on Monday: don’t be fucking late this time.’ Living with my best mate’s sister had been working out reasonably well, and to be fair, I felt terrible about being behind on rent so often, but I still wished Hazel would find a less passive-aggressive way of reminding me.

There were six of us when we left the trading post and traveled in the western direction, following the river in the shadow of the Inech mountains. The market we had visited was one of the few places in the world where a ragtag group like us did not stand out from the crowd.