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…
The Color Behind Your Eyes
Meghan sat alone in a tastefully-appointed waiting room in Elysium’s New York office, fidgeting with the gold ring on her right hand. She was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck and black slacks and carried a leather document case, her attire starkly contrasting with the clean, off-white decor surrounding her. A pile of magazines lay on…
The Lost Humans Wiki
In our time death is no longer a biological certainty but a personal choice. People live for hundreds of years thanks to advances in genetic therapies and when their bodies finally give out their minds can be transferred into an artificial frame or a cloned organism. We have no conception of currency or scarcity. All…
The Rapture of the Deep
It was up at my grandparents’ cottage that I saw the thing in the water. Back then it was pretty normal to have a little place up north. Nowadays most people can’t even afford one house, let alone a second, but that’s another story. Meghan, my therapist, says I’m prone to diversions when talking about…
The Houseguest
The boys all lived together in one big house out in the suburbs. There were four of them who split the rent, plus a rotating cast of friends crashing on the couch at any one time. They had a YouTube channel together and their combination of laidback on-screen charisma and inventive video concepts — playing…
Super Meko Land
The game was cursed, that much was obvious. Anyone who played it was found dead by a massive, sudden heart attack three days later — it didn’t take a genius to spot the causal connection. Anyway, the Pentagon had theorized the existence of fatal media for years. The problem for General Douglas Clarkson was that,…
Night Shift
Barb hated the night shift. She figured that the only reason that management even kept the coffee shop open overnight was that it worked out to be cheaper to have an employee tidy up the place rather than hire dedicated cleaners. And while the front doors were locked from ten to five to minimize the…
The Deep Word
You meet a lot of weird people working in a tattoo shop. Like, a while ago my artist Rosa told me about this guy who walked into her place on a Tuesday afternoon. He didn’t look anything like the usual Williamsburg studio clientele, which are usually either already heavily-tatted artists and musicians or else 20-somethings…
