A pop-pop-pop plants sky flowers

They shine and dance and say hello

Mama says they rain down like showers

I’ll think long about it from my pillow

Some of them look like shapes

Circles and stars and other things

One even looks like a crazy ape

I like the whistling one that sings

Everyone loves it just the same

They cheer and yell and clap

I wish they’d up there spell my name

My feet stomp...

Sabrina nearly punched the kitchen door open as she entered. The hot, salty air, thick with fryer oil and cigarette smoke and profanity, rolled over her red cheeks. She didn’t stop to talk, not even when Dawn offered her a puff or when Alex lifted his plate of ‘accidental’ chicken parm her way.

She reached the break area and halted for a moment, processing. The snide look that the customer gave ...

Nurse Mel-Mel, as Melinda Marks was occasionally referred to as by children staying on the ward, entered the nurses station with the trifold piece of paper in hand. Something about it made her feel dirty, as if she were stealing secrets. But she knew the night nurse would have simply thrown it away for garbage had she left it. And the way it was addressed…

- “To any curious party”

She certainly...

Carter was a little too drunk to have heard the knock on his bedroom door, and way too high to have cared. So there he lay; face down on the engine-block-sized beanbag chair. He’d had the wherewithal to roll himself over in the middle of the night to avoid the whole Hendrix thing.

Anthony knocked once more before just barging in, hoping his brother had also remembered pants. Boxers was enough, h...

The embers danced their way up toward the overhanging canopy. It looked kaleidoscopic from any distance. Unfortunately, not a single one of the campers noticed the beautiful sight. They had been properly ensorcelled by Pops, who had just stood up, throwing his hands around in a showy, emphatic motion.

“It was, and I mean this with no fooling, no crazy talk, no… no BS, this frickin’ tall.” He rai...

The room had lost its carpet to a new one of torn wrapping paper, cast off gift box tops and twine. BB sat in the middle of it all as her siblings went bananas. No one knew what she did so everyone seemed to be having a good time.

Dad, playing Santa as always, handed her the next (and seemingly final) package. She accepted the gift, feeling a swirl and mix of feelings inside her. It didn’t look ...

Glenn pulled himself free of the pile, heard something pop. A short, airy utterance fired from his lips. To him, any creature that made such a sound must have been injured and quite pathetic.

The entire pile of holiday rubble shifted and shuffled into a rockslide of papercuts running over Glenn’s expose skin. He gritted through the pain and stood up.

Everyone else had seemingly gone while he wa...

The crack of the staple gun snapping the paper to the post made him flinch, even though he was the one doing it. It took three staples to get the missing persons sign to stand upright against the wind and gravity. Ben knew that by weeks end this one too would be covered up by yet another but it was protocol by now. Might as well try.

He moved along down Main Street, past all the businesses with ...

Beep

Beep

Beep-beep.

“Shit, m’am can you— please, can you come here?”

Footsteps, high heels, cut through the clamor of the crowd. She’s a manager.

“I double scanned the bottle so can you just take that off?”

She sighs, mutters into a walkie talkie on her lapel.

“No sir, I’m gonna have to void the whole transaction. Sorry for any inconvenience.” She pulls on a lanyard, another beep. Sh...

Cora blew the bits of plaster from the paper folds of the journal. They misted into the air like a first snowfall and wafted down to her feet and the floor.

The words on the page were hard to make out; clearly the works of a sub-eight-year-old girl doing her best at good penmanship, under duress at that, if Cora had to guess.

Some words stood out though. Mommy. Hungry. Hidenseek.

Monster. Ce...