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Life had always been hectic: the constant push forward through time, the ever repeating change of scenery every time his family had to move. But there was always one place where life — for just a few short moments — managed to feel more like a calm ocean wave lapping onto shore than the tsunami it usually had been. The little oceanside town his parents always chose for their vacation, with its salty, warm breeze, the calming sound of the seagulls circling above, and the small, colorful fishing…

Back when I was about 12 we used to live in an old farmhouse near the Tombigbee River. It was about a mile away so walking there was a regular afternoon pastime. There were a few ponds on the way and a couple of broken down older farmhouses and barns to explore. My friends and I explored them a few times.

There is a level of great genius one may reach that far surpasses that of burning madness. There is madness, and there is animo. In a frigid, foreboding cave, a hypogeum of petrified stillness, disguised carefully as a luxury property, hidden somewhere within deep glacial valleys of scenic Swiss mountains, you can find a mechanical man, with a mechanical plan.

The wind is cold. The late autumn night wind drilled through the battered glass window of the small eatery, scraping against faces with a dull, lingering ache. The diner's old incandescent bulb flickered erratically. Its light fell upon two bowls of steaming rice on the table, and also onto the bowed head of the student. No one knew that this seemingly silent high schooler, always wearing a washed-out school uniform, was already rotten to the core.

Not by much. You would not notice it walking through. You would notice it if you were sent to fetch something and had to count the doors, and the count came out wrong, and you stood there with your hand on the light switch, doing it again. Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The hallway had been built in 1962 and there had never been a fourth door on the right. My mother said this the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times. The sound came from that wall.

Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she'd added at the DMV and never let anyone drop. I hadn't refilled anything. I hadn't opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.

“HELP!” I yell, at least I believe I’m yelling, the feeling of my skin bubbling, is it bubbling… I don’t know. I can feel it, but I don’t know if it is what I think it is. I am or at least what I believe I am… I don’t know. It’s cold wait what does cold feel like again sigh I think I sighed. My body grows old and decayed, my flesh turning a colour I cannot perceive, my hair falling out of my grotesque scalp or what’s left of it. He… no, IT did this. My senses have been stripped away from me, I…

I was eleven years old when it happened. It was Halloween night, and my parents had gone out with my aunt to a party across town, planning to stay overnight at a hotel and return the next afternoon. That left me at home with my seventeen-year-old sister, Jessie, and our older cousin, Hannah. I absolutely adored Hannah; she was the fun, cool older cousin who always brought us treats and took us on adventures.

"What are you gazing at...? What's there outside the window...?" "Outside the window...? Nothing." "Nothing? Looking at nothing?" "It's her... my... my ghostly girl." Beloved women... They, like a sudden downpour, come, turn you into themselves, and vanish… leaving you… leaving you alone with your own shadow called sorrow.

Aware of my dependence, of how insignificant I am in the claws of the monster, I cannot bring myself to feel panic or the urge to run from it. I want this. I want it, and I plunge into the abyss, into the depths that rake their claws across my thin, frail body, and I even find pleasure in it, because at last, after all these years, I can feel something. I experience this euphoria, this furious rapture beating inside my rib cage with nine separate hearts, while my head grows hazy and heavy, as…

Shadows risen from the darkness... Moonless Night follows the shadows like a plague. Silver bells, Darkness shadows, and Endless stars... Into the Darkness is where it starts... Into the Darkness, opal stars and golden moons arise. Followed by screams in the dead of night... Lovely and Afraid with haunted eyes of emerald shade... Would you walk alone into the Darkness of night? To find yourself and the endless night? To meet him in the middle of the night...

The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up. I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting. Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.

The widow, Laura, walked into the garden. Cracked Stone walls surrounded her, their green vines slithering toward bushes plump with blood-red berries. At the center of the garden stood a rectangular stone basin shaped like an angel. It knelt before the pool as if to deliver water from its mouth. Yet what flowed was bleak black water, filled with sticks and the smal bodies of dying insects. When she was younger, she remembered tossing coins and watching them sink into the water's darkness.…

I I wished it with my whole being, which is to say I wished it with something I didn't know yet was a cage. Let me tell you about Delia first. Not because she's the main point—she isn't—but because you need to understand my obsession. Delia is the kind of pretty that makes pretty people feel plain. She wakes up, and her hair is already in order. Her laugh hypnotizes you and puts you in a trance. People lean toward her as plants do toward light, without even knowing it.