Tag: Mystery

All Stories, General Fiction

Missed Connections by J.D. Strunk

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On that day, as on most days, the 8:22 was right on time. Book in hand, I boarded a nearly empty car and secured a seat facing west, so as to avoid the blistering fire of a Colorado sunrise. The city burned amber and rose as the doors dinged closed and the train lurched forward. I gazed out the window as we glided out of downtown, past campus, and under 6th Avenue. At Broadway we met I-25, which we would parallel for the remainder of the journey south.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Trolley Workers by Paul Kimm

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A neighbour two down from us was the only person we directly knew who lost someone. A family member that is. Even though just a distant cousin of theirs, it tore their family apart. Just like it did many families, and how it changed the whole fabric of how we live. Looking back on it now you wouldn’t think such an innocuous job could matter so much, that it could change everything about how we live, but it did. Of course, the tragedy of so many going like that is the main thing, the sheer lack of explanation to this day and how we do things now is borderline unfathomable. Most of all though, I think about our neighbour’s second cousin, just one of thousands, an estimated sixteen thousand, but knowing someone who knew one of them, who left us on that day, just makes it so close.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

The Exchange by Toye Eskridge

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The Exchange by Toye EskridgeBattalion after battalion, the towering pines stood rigid, guarding both sides of the blacktop the salesman barreled down in his cream Studebaker. The pointed hood knifed the stifling Southern air.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

The Random Roommate by Adam Kaz

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My landlord Enid lived above my garden unit in a tchotchke-coated little old lady apartment which I had never visited until that fall evening. A Sunday. On her kitchen table were placemats of art nouveau nymphs and salt and pepper shakers fashioned like bowling pins. She handed me a coffee mug in the shape of a cartoon character and said, “I hope this is good.” I didn’t say how I like my coffee, so on her own volition Enid put in lots of cream and lots of sugar.

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All Stories, Horror

Miss by Keith LaFountaine

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And so she stands under the lamp post with her camera strapped around her neck and a candy cigarette tucked between her lips. That’s just for kids, isn’t it? But this woman certainly isn’t a kid. She has the look of a doting aunt. It’s in the eyes: the eerie combination of leering adoration and simmering jealousy.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

You’ll Never Understand the Circumstances That Brought You To This Moment by J Bradley Minnick

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Story goes: Wonders like Rock School are more dreamt and pieced together by collective imaginations than planned; perhaps Tumbling Creek had called itself forth during the flood season and its rushing waters had picked up the first rock and transported it to the top of the hill and set it down there and once Rock School took shape, it could only become what was intended.  

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Short Fiction

The Other One by Richard Leise

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The woman at the door stared at the children.  She was pregnant.  Seven months low to the ground with what she knew to be a boy.  She ran a hand up and down her stomach.  It had snowed overnight, and it was snowing still.   

The boy and the girl were sixteen or seventeen.  Maybe younger.  Neither was dressed for the weather.  Blue jeans and black t-shirts.  Black sneakers. 

“They want to come in,” she said. 

“Who did they say they were, again?” 

The woman looked through the glass eyehole, past the strange children.  A white horizon absent direction.  There were no tracks in the snow.  It was windy, and the wind pushed and pulled the fallen snow.  Still, it would have been nice to see tracks.   

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Lone Inheritance by Tom Sheehan

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Henry Searles, once an unknown character in this business, did not imagine what the insides of Ted Gentry’s house looked like because he had no idea where to begin his search for furniture, trinkets, odds and ends, lackluster fragments of Gentry’s past, lost articles in a blindly-kept closet holding piled up clues. It all appeared pointless and highly impractical, just a guy he met on the corner where the river slips under the bridge, had a drink with him at a bar, like they were old friends suddenly rejoined rather than new acquaintances, but Gentry, sort of mystically, left a note with the barkeep to deliver to Searles if anything ever happened to him, as though Doom itself had made the call.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The White House at the End of the Lane  by Tom Sheehan

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Dimac looked again and the white house at the end of the lane was pale yellow. He tried to find a simile, then a metaphor, and was lost in the miracle before him. The change had happened in the blink of his eyes, and it unnerved him so that he closed his eyes, waited for the white shingles to settle back into place, become their proper selves, as if he could say that about shingles, and opened his eyes.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

The House Across the Street by Robert P. Bishop

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Harvey looked out his front window, saw the real-estate lady pull into the driveway of the house across the street and get out of her car. She walked to the For Sale sign with Sale Pending pasted diagonally on it.

Another victim is moving in, he thought.

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