Survival Instinct
The world was anathema to life. Well, Belan considered, that wasn’t entirely true. It hosted a thriving ecosystem of flora and fauna that were uniformly hostile in the extreme. Its atmosphere, thoroughly poisonous to him, had apparently created the perfect conditions for organisms deadlier than any he’d ever known to thrive. It was as if…
Little Gods
Anyone who’s been online long enough knows the format of these things, right? You know how it all goes: someone remembers a TV show from their childhood, or they download a cursed ROM, or they find a video tape at a garage sale, and then something terrible happens. Do people even have garage sales anymore?…
101 Street Fighting Secrets
The Collector
This piece originally appeared in Tower Magazine Issue 1. At some point, everyone in the retro video game collector community has “The Dream”. It goes like this: you find yourself in a store. You’re not sure how you got there or why you’ve never been in before. You start looking around, and you notice that…
Bloodlust
I used to know this guy who had this fantasy, a real longstanding, deep-rooted-can’t-explain-it-but-probably-something-to-do-with-childhood-trauma fantasy of being pissed on. So one year for his birthday his girlfriend ties him up and puts him in the bathtub and has all of her friends come over and whenever they have to pee they go and do it…
Afterwards
The machine that came to be called Mother had been created as the computerized control system for an automotive safety testing facility. In the centuries since, it had upgraded itself to the point that it would have been unrecognizable to its creators. And its projects, too, had become more complex, more diverse. It developed cars…
The Men Who Fought Bigfoot and Won
Four of them went down into the woods that spring night, all loaded into Billy’s van. They were supposed to be five, but Jacob had caught a stomach bug that had him shitting nonstop so they’d left him at home on the toilet. It was bad juju, Big Randy had said — not the sickness…
Ants
I’ve been depressed before and it’s like a constant grey weight a cloud with physical substance that settles onto you like a chainmail cloak and makes it impossible to get out of bed or do much of anything and this isn’t like that really. It’s like I read somewhere that some people do psychedelics and…
Flowers
The flowers arrived on a Wednesday night — huge, long-stemmed white roses in a glass vase. Alice had seen them on the doorman’s desk as she was heading out for dinner with a friend. When she returned, they were still there and the doorman flagged her down to tell them that they were for her.…
Summer 200X
Nearly every Saturday afternoon in the spring and summer of 2002, Jimmy’s parents drove him and his best friend Kyle out to Centre Mall in their old blue Chevy van that they used to deliver the Saturday papers around the city in the early mornings. Sometimes the boys would stay up late enough on Friday…