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...

The house stood at the entrance to the block, dwarfing all the other houses. John and Alice learned a bit of the history of the house from the previous owner, who was a bit of an amateur historian. The original owner of the house, a Mr. Reginald Bowens--the man who built it, gave it life, brought it into the world--was a railroad scion for C&S Railways. The smaller houses in the neighborhood that huddled under the house’s...

Supper was grilled chicken and rice, with green beans, one of El’s favorites. Her Mom noticed the subdued reaction when her plate was placed in front of her. “Is something wrong, honey?” asked Alice. Silence, at first. Eventually, El told the family that she saw a ghost in the house the night before. “Where?” asked Em. “In the bathroom,” said El. Em started laughing. “Were they pooping?” She laughed again, and John and Al...

The realtor described the place as a grand old dame of a house: a three-story high Victorian in a state of slight disrepair, built in 1897 but with so many random, period-inconsistent architectural details added on over the years (a deck over the front door, a mudroom added on the side, several of the larger rooms broken up with wallboard and framed for apartments) it did not qualify for the historical registry. People si...

The woman in the mirror spoke to her. This was before she covered all the mirrors in the house. This was back when she was like eleven, maybe twelve, before all the crazy shit happened. Back when they first moved into the house. The woman had been in her mirror for some time. Hiding. At first, Em didn’t even now she was there. She thought it was her own reflection. Em noticed the woman only when she smiled. The woman smil...

Her name is Betty Bowens, though all the neighborhood kids call her Betty Bones, and she lives in the old house at the end of the street with her three dead children. They are dead; she is not, merely old, very old. Her children died of different causes, at different times: hit-and-run, cancer, suicide. Two were adults when they died, the cancer and the suicide. Her boy Tristan, poor lovely Tristan, he was the hit-and-run...

Apprentice I cannot hope to ever matchyour lovely flowing linesyou measured words, your metered pacethe cadence of your rhymesAll I know is how your wordstouch something deeply hiddenThey recognize a secret placeThey call my name unbiddenAnd so I dance to your sweet songIt frees me, brings me lightMy stumbling gait, my earthbound waltz is transformed into flight

By mid-afternoon it was snowing, one of those early spring one-last-time sucker- punch squalls, and as the sun went down, and the streetlights came on the temperature rose a couple degrees and the snow began to mix with freezing rain. This would have been around the rush hour. There were only five people in the Tip Top, two of them playing pool and requiring quarters, but the rest just sitting there, so the bartender had...

The Christmas tree was up by the first weekend in December and fully decorated by Sunday night, just before prime-time TV, but all feelings of accomplishment faded when Renfield the cat jumped headlong from the entertainment center onto the top of the tree and rode it down like Slim Pickens riding the A-bomb in Dr. Strangelove, a movie Bob loved enough to have viewed multiple times (Karen had never seen it). There was sur...