“Damn it, Benji, it’s missing!”

Benjamin turns, muscles drawing up under his navy jacket like puppet cords. A man preparing to strike another against his own desires, all to keep the teenager in line. Mob violence hardly ever discriminates by age.

At least not here in Boston. Never in Boston.

“You better find the wretched thing, Paul…” His knuckles fatten around golden rings, “I swear on my ...

He’s a motherfucker.

Always has been, always will be.

For the millionth time this year, I’m wiping sticky yellow stains off the toilet seat because the man I stupidly said ‘ I do ‘ to, can’t be bothered to respect any one of my million requests to lift the damn thing.

A microcosm for the entirety of our marriage, really.

Had I been raised better, I might’ve skyrocketed my standards before ...

“We have to move the bed, Charles, because when this house falls it’s going to crush us into the ground!” The slender woman shouted, pointing a single angry finger behind her.

One… Two…

Three ominous crows in the sky.

Just my luck.

The man’s enormous shadow seemed to draw in a slow inhale, pinching the bridge of his upturned nose as if to stifle a breath of fire… But this man wasn’t a dragon, ...

My father once told me that I used to frighten him. I was a baby, and he’d sometimes check on me in the early hours only to find my dark eyes wide-awake, and staring silently from behind the wooden rail of my crib.

Not a lick of sleepiness in my pudgy face.

9:44 PM

Is what the birth certificate says.

I’m nearing thirty, and my eyes are still just as dark as ever. Darker actually, black espres...

“Where did you get this?”

Momma held up the gun in her freshly manicured hands, the pink and white acrylic clicking nervously down the barrel.

“Some man put it in my bag at lunch, told me he’s going to need it later.” My little girl was only five, yet here she was, calmly explaining to her grandmother—as if I weren’t standing right here—that a stranger had put a firearm in her little rainbow b...

They came in the night.

Every phone in town could be heard, screeching with the emergency alert we’d been preparing to receive for weeks:

HUMANOID THREAT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

No one knew what they were. There hadn’t been a crash. Or a UFO sighting. They simply took New York City overnight, moving from borough to borough before they spilled into New Jersey through the...

Milton knew she was more loved than he.

For who else could know more about love for the lady than the man who had maimed and slain their neighbor’s daughter, Emily.

And though she suspected he’d had something horrible to do with the girl’s disappearance and their eternal aging, Annie had never asked—she was too frightened to know; better to carry on with Sunday slices of cake, and cups of tea a...

I am alone most days, except for when it rains and he comes to visit.

In truth, I don’t know much about Mr. Higgins.

We only ever meet for coffee.

He takes his black, with a dusting of cane sugar, and after one sip, his shoulders slouch beneath his coat and he waits calmly for me to finish my chai. Sometimes he tilts his head toward the door, and I know he means for a leisurely stroll throug...

It had been fifteen years since the sun had last risen.

You took it with you.

And ever since then, the world has existed in darkness. No color. No warmth. Only the icy air of a dying planet. Sometimes I ask myself if you knew what you were doing—if you knew the consequences all your calculating and all your theorizing might bring… Maybe something happened to you in that lab, I don’t know.

I’...

I think I just met the happiest person in the world. And I don’t trust it. No one is actually that happy deep down. How can they be? It just doesn’t make sense. Isn’t she paying attention? Doesn’t she read the news, or see the hungry, lining the streets, oozing economic loss and addiction? There is suffering in every crevice.

Every apartment, every cubicle.

I mean the planet is literally dying...