Misdialled

I like a nice hot shower to help me recover from a heavy night out, and last night had been one of the heaviest. It had been the birthday of the girlfriend of a friend of someone I worked with so naturally I wanted to help her celebrate. It would be rude not to. About […]

Journey

The pain is everywhere now. The cords are tight around my arms and my legs, the long cuts on my back from the scourge weep blood, but the pain is no longer confined to arms, or legs, or cuts. I am pain, a fire from head to toe flaring with every beat of my heart… or […]

Flotsam

The crack in Context hung before my eyes like a twisted thread of blue lightning, frozen immobile. It was hair-thin but it shone, and as I walked around it the crack always showed me its same shape as though it was superimposed over the scene and how I viewed the scene was irrelevant.

The Gardener

“The thing about inspiration,” Simon said, “is that it is not a tame thing. You can’t force it, it should pounce on you unexpectedly,” “From outside?” I was bored with his nonsense and this dire little bar. I wanted to get home and write, but I was suffering a bad case of writer’s block “Yeah,” […]

Momentary

It was boredom that drove me. The drugs were simply for something to do. Acid, peyote, salvia, shrooms, they were all just things to do. I’d read Castaneda, and Huxley, and the others. The mysticism of it passed me by, the experiences all I wanted. I was introduced to Petrie by the friend of a […]

Legacy

“You have to help me,” she said, “We’re of the same blood.” Three in the morning and she’d shaken me awake, grinning broadly and asked if I would help her hide a body. I’d got used to this since moving into my grandfather’s house. She came with the territory it seemed. She was gorgeous, pale […]

Poppy

Crack

Clear Path Forward

Often she dreamed of towers and dragonback flying and strong hands holding hers, of golden rings blazing with power and of long tracks in the wilderness that led, finally, to nowhere at all. At precisely 06:15 the screen in her apartment blared out its alarm and dragged her upright and attentive while she was still […]

Hey, you. Yes, you!

Hey. I’m sending you an image. It will reach you somehow. You’ve been unresponsive since we got you back from the enemy, but the doctors say your mind is active in a dream prison they made for you. A life so real you can’t escape it. Reasons to stay there. I don’t know what dream […]

Wooden Heart

The grove of trees was secluded, and it was dark. It was ancient and largely unknown. And it was waiting. The eldest of the trees held court there, squatting like a bloated tyrant with a tanglewood crown and grasping miser’s fingers raking the earth around its corpulent trunk. Healthy things did not grow there, wholesome […]