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Returning from the Amazon was one of the most exhausting and exhilarating experiences of my life. That trip to South America had been the perfect escape from my suffocating routine as a rising attorney in the United States. After years of hard work, I’d secured a solid position at Marston & Associates, and with a recent promotion offer, life finally seemed to be heading in the right direction. But since I returned, something hasn’t felt right.

“It’s going to happen, Jack. Nothing we can do about it. The wheels are already in motion. Higher-ups tell me I need to release the staff by the end of the week.” “Then ‘AM 640 - Talk of the Town’ becomes what, exactly?” Ron sighed. “Another DJ-less, auto-programmed, adult easy listening station.” “Aww, Christ on a bike,” I said. “They’re stealing the soul of this industry. Our Arbitron numbers grew last ratings cycle.”

Hi, my name is Michael. This happened a few years ago, on Halloween. It’s something I haven’t told anyone properly. Not like this. Not in full. But I think about it almost every night… and it doesn’t feel like it’s fading. It was supposed to be a normal Halloween.

Two months ago, I almost died. When you imagine your death, most people think they're gonna go peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age. Very few imagine you'll die because you slipped in an oil puddle in your driveway and cracked your skull on the cement. That's what happened to me, though. My car, an aging beater I had kept for longer than any rational person would have, nearly took me out before I had a chance to sell it. The betrayal cut me deep.

“Gabriel! Gabriel!” I screamed. “Who is Gabriel?” the police officer in front of me asked. I was in the police station’s interrogation room. My neighbors called the cops on me, saying that I “went crazy” and that there was “an insane lunatic running down the street in a t-rex onesie, screaming ‘Gabriel!’” The cops showed up, handcuffed me for “public disturbance,” and put me in the back of the cop car. “Answer the question, Spencer!” the officer yelled at me.

In the time of the Pharaoh Shoshenq II, shortly after the end of the grandeur of Egypt’s New Kingdom, a time when the ordinary were ignored and their activities long since forgotten, lived a resourceful, scribal young man named Anseb; resourceful because the early death of his father, which had left the family poor, had forced the development of such traits and scribal because his still young, well-meaning mother, attractive though talentless, had managed to pay for her son’s education by way…

Subject: I think I found my living room on a Deep Web website, but the rug is the wrong color. Entry 1: Posted 3 hours ago. I’m shaking while I type this. I always been a digital explorer... another idiot who browses the Deep Web just to see the weird things people host. Mostly it’s just broken links or forums for people obsessed with 90s stuff. But tonight I found a site called The Staging.

"I heard birds singing outside. I didn't know birds still came here." "It is a beautiful day to be alive." — Unknown ... I wake to warm light slanting through the curtains. The air smells of toasted bread and coffee, and in the distance, I hear my mother humming a familiar tune, soft, gentle, but off-key. It sounds like she's humming with her mouth closed.

I uncapped the red pen and added another "X" to our calendar. A small one, as not to take up more space than needed. After all, the box already had three others inside just like it. Who knew how many more we would have to add?

Within the dark penetralia of the human soul, where fear of the unknown festers and finds its deepest dwelling, there stood a town named Desdemon. Hidden among towering pines, shrouded in perpetual mist, its days were sunless, its nights without dawn. The air was frigid and damp, steeped with whispered tales of cosmic dread, as though even the churning fog carried secrets too terrible for the tongue.

I never really did want to go to that Christmas party, but I have to say it turned out all right in the end. The Christmas party was to be held on the great stage at the Opera House downtown, and it was open to all employees of the law firm Goble & Mundorff and their immediate families.  That last part was a problem for my brother Henry and me, because our mom was a paralegal at G&M, and she’d made it clear that she expected us to put in an appearance.

Let me guess, you clicked on this story because of the title? Yeah, you did! Well, hopefully this love story, and yes this is a love story, will catch your attention long enough for you to finish it. For starters, I am Mathew Connors, and I graduated from Texas Tech a few years ago. I met my beautiful wife, Angela, in college. We have 2 amazing kids, Jonah, and Abigail, they are 10 and 8. They say that when you find the one you are destined to be, it’s like “Love at first sight”, well in our…

“I was fourteen at the time. I and my friend Leo Carper went to the Grizzly Rocks,” the storyteller hesitated as he stumbled on a thought, then continued: “I should have put it a different way, so I correct the error. Leo should have come first: of the two of us, he was the major figure, as it were. Daredevil is about him. Ringleader and photographer par excellence,” the storyteller paused and could not go on for a few minutes as he rode out his overwhelming feelings. “I thought back to his…

I woke up under the shade of a tree. I was tired and had a headache, and I didn't understand what was happening. There were police cars in front of me, and a large crowd of people were gathered around, but I still couldn't grasp what was going on. I walked a little way and saw my friend's car. I tried to grab the door handle, but I couldn't. I tried several times, and at first, I thought the car was locked, but then suddenly, I reached through the door.

The sidewalk had a way of holding onto things, not objects or anything a person could reach down and pick up, but something far heavier and far more stubborn, something that clung beneath the surface of cracked concrete and refused to fade no matter how much time tried to grind it away, and it stretched through that forgotten part of the city like a scar that had never healed, uneven and silent and wrong in a way that people could feel without ever understanding, which was why most avoided it…

The rain carried on as mercilessly as it had the past two weeks which miraculously happened to be just the time when I moved into this dumpster of a town. Me, the 13 year old, Finn Junior Hollis. Watercliff, Bakersfield. Things that shouldn’t be associated at all, right here to shove in the universes face after all. Or rather, this was the universe shoving it into my face as if this is its idea of some cruel joke. First of all, not only was I damned to live in an uneventful place like…

“Hey Zsolt, you wanna hit?” Claud said. “Hit?” “Yeah, a hit of Red Sunshine?” he asked. “Red Shoeshine?” “No, ya’ dummy, Red Sunshine.”

“Peter, can you even see anything up there?” Harry, the oldest yet least mature forest Ranger, said over the two-way. High on my perch in Tower 3, I had a full three hundred sixty degree view of A_____ National Forest that stretched out to the horizon. This was a dumb joke he liked to ask every time I drew the short straw for this position. “Yes, vision is clear. No smoke. No fires. No adverse weather conditions.”

Unfortunately, my brother is a bit of a loner. He likes to be alone most of the time and loves playing video games. He doesn't have many friends because he's not very social. I don't remember much about him, and his memories are almost forgotten, but there's one thing that my family and I all remember: Nan 102. I don't know how to explain it. It might sound silly and illogical, but, my brother, all I remember from that night and that incident is that he was playing a video game. He was playing…

There was a time before history. Before words. Before sanity.