My parents live up North, and so every Christmas my drive to their house is defined by a lot of grey, brown and white, as well as bitter cold. Never liked the cold. I spent the first 18 years of my life in it, so I think I definitely have an educated opinion on it. I don’t like the passionless white-skied coldness, or the stark freeze of the deep dark night where you can see your breath billowing out from you like a smokestack, and I especially don’t like when the sky is a deceptive bright blue and all sunny, the rippled clouds all golden and hazy purple, and you go outside thinking it’ll be warm and it’s still fucking…

I’m a rabbi, so you can imagine the kinds of conversation I have when I counsel my congregants. Family troubles. Marital strife. And sometimes, theology. The other day, one of my congregants―a young, sensitive woman with hair almost black and eyes just as dark―came in to see me. She was in the midst of a crisis of faith. “If only God would speak to me, or give me some kind of sign…,” she was saying. “Oh, Rachel,” I said, smiling, “God indeed does speak to us. But not with a voice―that would be too dramatic… too Hollywood. Instead, He speaks through coincidences. Haven’t you heard the saying? ‘Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.’” Rachel held my gaze. “Has God…

I’ve heard all about all of the little “games” from the internet, little rituals with beings that hunt you, games that people spread stories about, games that people get wishes for, I feel jealous of them, most of the time it’s just a prank, or if something does happen, at least they’ll more than likely survive. I find it annoying whenever I spot one of those clickbait videos, (PLAYING BLOODY MARY AT 3:00 AM!), because they mock the people who made these stories, or in my case, encounters. My name is Jonah, but I prefer to be called Jon, and I am here to document my account of the ritual game known as “The Candles” I guess I should start…

“The mind over matter is me” – – – That was the quote that lingered in my mind. I saw it once—on a TV screen during a mental health awareness ad, which played after the show I was absentmindedly watching had ended. It stayed with me, I pondered how powerful our minds can shape our reality. The thoughts we think, beliefs we share, and our perceptions of reality aren’t merely passive but actively influence how we experience and interact daily. It had me thinking, that despite everyone living in the same physical world, billions of individual realities, cultivated by billions of other people co-exist under one shared present, does that make sense? But what do I know? I was just…

My son died yesterday, on an autumn evening, when the wind blew hard and the leaves hid from the first cold. The ambulance arrived too late. Since then, silence scratches my mind. But the worst thing was the wait every night, when he returned. My son died yesterday, but that night he came back to me. At first, I only heard a weak murmur with my name on his lips. A kind voice from the darkness. “I’m fine,” he told me. I saw him at the end of my bed, standing in a corner, barely a shadow. I knew it was him, it couldn’t be a trick of my mind My son died, and he has visited me every day,…

It’s been 25 years to the day since my friend Baptiste disappeared. Not officially. The date in the police record says ‘September 14’ because his aunt didn’t report him missing until three days later. I was the last person to see him though. I know when and where he disappeared, and I told the cops, but they brushed me off. I was just making things up to protect my friends, they said, and that I had watched too many horror movies. Baptiste and I were thick as thieves ever since first grade. To most people, we must have been an odd pair. The shy, withdrawn kid with the thick Haitian accent our classmates often made fun of, to a point…

This is a story of a boy I met when I was still young. His name was James Elkin, and he lived in the house two doors down from me. We weren’t friends, but I did greet him a few times when I saw him. He always looked small for a nine-year-old and had long, uneven hair. I remember walking past his home on my way to school each day. Many times, I saw him out collecting insects. He never harmed them. He wasn’t very friendly, but he wasn’t cruel either. His parents were always very kind, often offering jobs to us younger kids so we could earn a little change for bubble gum or something we wanted. Because of…

I remember when the nightmares first started. I think it was ten, maybe twelve years ago. We had just gotten a new house, one of those old buildings that cracked and groaned when anything moved inside it, the ones they sell real cheap to poor families like mine instead of demolishing. I was only 16 at the time, and my dad thought that he, my brother, and I could use a rest start away from the city. Sometimes I wish we never started, I wish we never moved out of our old apartment, but sometimes, I understand that maybe it was fate that brought me here, fate that dragged me to the front steps of a nightmare. I remember that…

I never thought much about puppets. They were relics of another time, something my grandparents might have found amusing before the age of screens. I’d seen them in dusty attics and antique shops, their faces painted in stiff, eternal grins. They were lifeless, inert things that didn’t deserve a second thought. But that was before it came to town. It started in the early days of October, when the air was thick with the promise of decay and endings. The traveling puppet show arrived without fanfare—no posters, no announcements. One day, there was simply a tent in the empty lot at the edge of town, its canvas tattered but grand, striped red and black like a bloodstained circus. Kids at…

This morning, I cleaned out my closet to create space, and I discovered a plastic bin filled with childhood memories. Being sentimental, I removed the bin and began searching through it. The bin mostly contained artwork from my elementary school years, and the majority of them were scribbles or fingerpaintings on bright construction paper. In particular, a crayon drawing of my entire 3rd grade class drew my attention. I have to say that I must have been quite the artist back in the day because I actually recognized some of my classmates. It helped that I had tried to spell their names next to each stick figure, even if I misspelled them horribly. It just gave me that warm and…