Birdie’s son left in the Spring. She rarely saw him in that last six months he’d lived there anyway. He'd worked full time at Domino’s, came home after midnight, went straight into his room in the basement. She heard the TV. She heard the trips to the fridge for food. Occasionally she’d hear a friend of his come in with him, play video games for a couple hours, leave. She listened from her bedroom on the second floor. Aft...

“I fucking hate magpies,” said Tony, passing the pack of cigarettes to his friends gathered around him in the dark of the basement. “They’re mean,” said Bobby, as he took a cigarette and passed it down the line. “I hate the way they swoop. They’re scary.” “Ooh, Bobby’s scared of birds,” said Kyle, receiving the pack and pulling out a cigarette. “Scared the little birds are gonna poke at his little head.” “Stop it, Kyle.”...

To everyone in the room, she seemed like just a normal girl wearing Vans, bluejeans, and a red hoodie. Only she heard the whirring servos, the soft click of gears, the hum of electronics. Only she knew who she really was. “Come on,” said the boy with the gun. “Five high, six die. Earn it.” He handed her the gun. Her frail, all-too-human finger curled around the trigger. This wasn’t happening to her. This wasn’t her life....

My grandmother tried to kill me in my crib when I was two months old. She’s dead now. Did I kill her? I don’t know. It’s not a simple question, and there are no simple answers. All I remember is being covered in blood, her blood, as I lay in my crib. # I never met my father. He was a passing fancy, my mother told me. Someone to keep her loneliness at bay. I never met him, but I’ve seen him, swimming in my underwater dream...

“It’s all lies,” Seth told us, as he passed the joint to Cam. “The government will never tell you anything important.” Seth and Cam and Kyle huddled in the shadows of Cheyenne Mountain military base, partying, telling conspiracy theories as if they were ghost stories. Civilians could not enter the actual Cheyenne Mountain military base, but the city had built a public park below the military base. The park served as a no...

Screams erupted from every ride in the carnival, even the not-particularly-scary ones like the Ferris Wheel and the Turtle Train, as Conor walked the midway. The smell of funnel cakes and corn dogs and cotton candy washed over him. Discarded hamburgers and crushed lemons from discarded cups of lemonade littered the ground. He looked in the hall of Funhouse mirrors and saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Long red...

In dream, my skin has been charred soot-black, not all over my body, but on my arms, my legs, my penis, my chest. In dream, I only notice the burns if my eye happens to fall upon that area of skin. There is no pain. No pain, but a deep, shuddering fright when I see my blackened flesh and am reminded once more of the severe burns I carry. It was a dream the night of September 11th, 2006, five years after that other Septemb...

The basement didn’t show up on John’s radar until about a year after they had lived in the house, though other spots did, and much more quickly. His daughters took note of the upstairs hallway before they even moved in. Em said it felt weird. John felt it too, and even Alice, who did not put much faith in the supernatural, said she thought of the countless footsteps of previous lodgers and families who used to live here....

“Where the hell are all the forks?” John grumbled from the kitchen, not for the first time. “Emily takes them,” said El from the dinner table. “No I don’t!” wailed Em. El turned to her Dad. “Emily takes them and she hides them,” she said. “This is between her and me,” said John. “No need to get involved.” Sensing a temporary victory, Em added, “And quit calling me Emily!” John shushed them both and continued making breakf...

Em asked her Dad to mount a full length mirror on the inside of her door when she was nine years old. The mirror whispered to her just after she turned ten. Or rather, something in the mirror whispered. She had just started fourth grade, and for the first time in her life noticed that others looked at her, others judged her: her clothes, her skin, her weight, her hair. She started hearing words that had been around her al...

The girls had been getting along pretty well together in El’s room, El playing teacher, Em playing student (they always played the same roles without variance), but then Em had turned rebellious on her teacher and was threatening to not do her assignment until El shared some of her apple. Now they were fighting. John and Alice knew this because they were on the first floor of the house, in the family room, directly below...

In retrospect John blamed the incident on his own suggestibility, and on the scrapbook. The previous owner, Henry Stode, considered himself to be a bit of an amateur historian, at least when it came to the house. He had inherited an overstuffed scrapbook from the previous owner, who had inherited it from another previous owner. The book was not organized in any way; it had originally been a photograph book, with clear pla...

Dad was at work. Mom was at the grocery store. Her sister Em was at a friend’s house. El sat on her bed, playing with her kitten, Shadow. El had a feather on a string, and tossed it out like a fishing line for Shadow to chase. Something sounded from outside the room. Shadow jumped off the bed at once, his attention no longer on the feather. He bolted out of the room and took a sharp turn into the hallway.  El followed him...

Clocks had a way of misbehaving in the house. Clocks often misbehave, particularly mechanical ones. The clock in the car that is two or three minutes slower than the clock last spied before leaving the house. The clock on the oven timer that never quite matches up with the always correct digital clock on the iPad being consulted for a recipe. The unused coffee-maker clock forever blinking 12:00, from now until the end of...

“You’re fat,” the little girl inside the mirror said to Em. It was long past midnight. Em’s parents and sister were in bed. Em was standing in front of the closed door of her room, where her Dad had hung the full length mirror. She regarded the reflection. The person in the mirror looked just like Em. She wasn’t Em, though. She wasn’t even a little girl, though she looked like one. She wasn’t Em, wasn’t a little girl, pro...