The horse was in shock. It didn’t know what had happened to it as it could not comprehend just what was going on, and the farmer to whom it belonged, could only stare with a similar level of incomprehension. Standing at the gate, as ‘Bessie’ a retired Haflinger horse, lay on her side in watery mud in the corner of a field, her legs cycling slowly, head moving around, eyes blinking, her heart pumping its last as it lay som...

A thorn and wilted rose for The Apocalypse to linger and decay in the shadows of a herd biting off the throat with words inappropriate with the quill of a feather stuck in one's craw on empty pages hemorrhaging worms a bloodbath of Draconian shattered dreams of unconscionable lies swinging on the gallows with fragrant child of festering embryos to blossom in this desolate place in death's Masquerade so sweet my cadaverous...

Karl had been a concentration camp guard during the Second World War. He was known for his cruelty and brutality towards the prisoners, and he took pleasure in their suffering. But when the war ended and he was captured, his life took a strange and unexpected turn. The survivors of the concentration camp had decided that Karl deserved a punishment that was fitting for his crimes. They had hired a powerful witch to cast a...

Chapter One: Boris woke up one morning to find that his head had been replaced with a beehive. He couldn't believe his eyes as he tried to scream, but only a faint buzzing sound escaped his lips. Boris clawed at his face, trying to remove the hive, but the bees were too powerful, too alive. They swarmed around him, stinging him, and warning him to accept his fate. Boris had always known that something like this would happ...

...in death coming close, brushing the moon, my decaying corpse, to kissing my birth, laying down playing dead, with my fate touching my body, once the eyelids, in life wearing masks over my genitals, nothing to read, except for my obituary, dust drifting over my face, brushing the moon, translucent jellyfish

I had never been to a Mardi Gras before, but it sounded like it could be fun. In fact, I was quite excited about it. I hadn’t long been out of the army, so could do with a change of scene. It wasn’t at all like I expected. At first, I was a little hesitant about going on my own, but everyone was so friendly. If fact, most people were very friendly. Friends did warn me that going alone may be a problem as I could fall vict...

“Look, I know you’re all hot-to-trot on this crazy idea of yours, but just put a lid on it, okay? We’ve got real work to do without chasing ghosts.” “But Sarge, people have been disappearing every year! And they’re always…” He turned on me. “Listen, Minneapolis-fancy-pants POHL-leece man! This is N’Oleans,” he said, deliberately emphasizing his Louisiana accent, “and people disappear here all the fucking time! Especially...

Flowers of smoke choking the timbers curling around my forfeiture from chimney's sweep dark torches of roses now turn to ashes from the winter shed then turn to dead with eyes in the embers

Riding in on a charley horse with a crow rocking your nightmares away dressed in a blue suede suit God Bless, you buried gentlemen of roadkill and bones at times a tooth fairy when you sleep not as macabre as it sounds the crow doesn't kill it just eats

Who knows bellows better than the wind hung from a tree from where the roots run of which no one knows from what seed it comes like a gallows with long neck boughs hanging life in effigy suffering not smiles crying for the willows alone in the shadows kissed by the macabre of a clandestine moon longing to share whispers... "Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop"

He noticed it as soon as he walked through the door, and was about to mention it, but then thought better of it as the youth settled behind his desk and set about turning on his computer. His black eye looked angry and painful, spread across the cheekbone and blending away on his right temple, as though prior to coming into work he had gotten himself into a nasty fight, him on the losing side. He seemed to get on with his...

As the night begins to swarm using nitrous oxide with a beer chaser teetering on the brink of insanity in the charms of the body farm beneath the dirt's jaw candy of lessons learned from the past with a cricket's toothache using death's pickaxe and dental floss for green gums teetering on the brink of insanity using nitrous oxide with a beer chaser

The air was sweet, heavy with the scent of ripe, cloying fruit. The sound of buzzing near the pomegranates that swayed and hung low in the heat was distracting me enough that the woman’s pulse thudded against mine, the salt of her blood splashed its way down my throat like stolen refugees running for asylum in the new land of a foreigners body, was background noise to the glare of the sun. It felt like my pores were squin...

It was difficult to be the type of person Serenity was in this day and age. Her last boyfriend Crenshaw did not understand her attraction to buildings over people. He didn’t understand why she hoarded, collected housing magazines and architecture manuals like others collect other more normal things. It was the geometry and beauty of them. They held a kind of symmetry that humanity didn’t. And so when she found this house,...

My soul is my gothic violin with the bow of the picador played softly in solo in the world of my dark oyster warming my marrows blood running cold in a caravan with a melody of strings and the madness it brings fathoms deep among the dead... my soul is my gothic violin