Kevin awoke and there was no music from his alarm clock radio, only dead air. Lucky for him, the blaring of a car alarm from the street below was loud enough to wake him. He lurched out of bed aware he was running late and hurried into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and was about to step in, when he heard the noise of a cart being pushed across the floor of his apartment floor. With the shower still running and some water dripping onto the bathroom floor, he slowly creaked out of the bathroom and peered into his living room. There was a man wearing pajamas placing his TV in a pull cart. It was his neighbor,…

The parking garage was the epitome of lifeless urbanization—cold, sterile and emotionless. The cement walls were painted a drab grey with yellow horizontal lines along the walls. Fluorescent lights filled the four-story garage with a dull, pale light. The garage shook each time a car drove from floor to floor and the shaking became increasingly more apparent as it neared the ticket booth on the bottom floor. Inside the ticket booth, Trevor waited with a disinterested look on his face. He had done this job for what seemed like an eternity so a face of boredom was to be expected. The job was simple: a car would pull up, and assuming they did not have a monthly pay card, would…

It started about a year and a half ago. I was on the internet reading about Libya, Gaddafi and the Arab Spring when I felt a sensation on the back of the neck. At first it was just a slight itch but it progressively became more and more intense. It felt as if a little itty bitty ant was crawling up and down the back of my neck. The only way to stop it was to slap the back of my neck. Sometimes it felt like it was burrowing into my skin. Once it burrowed in, I had to itch it away or else it would keep going deeper. Nobody else could see it but I could certainly feel it.…

James had just moved to upstate New York and he knew no one except for a few flaky work associates. One night during a January blizzard, he heard a faint “meow” emanating from the nearby alleyway adjacent his apartment. He ventured into the snowstorm and found a half frozen, gaunt kitten in the alley next to his apartment. In the preceding months he nurtured the cat back to health and soon the cat was forever in his debt loving him dearly and always beside him. She was sitting on his lap, sitting nearby or watching him and analyzing his every move. She loved to be pet and relished the opportunity. James named her Siggie, after the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud.…

In the fall of 2011, a man hung himself in a bottling factory of a popular over the counter sleep aide company just outside Chicago. The man worked as a quality control manager and had just been laid off to save the company money. In the morning, the cleaning crew found him swaying in the breeze from the air conditioning system with a note in his breast pocket that read “sleep tight.” Over the next few months a string of strange deaths were associated with areas where the sleep aides from the factory were shipped. Seemingly healthy people had died in their sleep from apparent strangulation. All the victims had severe bruising on their throats. Oddly, police were unable to…