My year-round default pastime of choice is reading horror fiction. Thus, you can imagine my excitement when October comes around and horror recommendations are in demand for 31 delightful days.
Unsettling Glimpses into Other Worlds: Review of Mannequin & Wife by Jen Fawkes
The collection undertakes—with some success—the difficult job of creating stories that delight while carrying unsettling premises and undertones.
How to Ask Your White Teacher for a Letter of Recommendation
Compliment her, ah, unfettered teaching style. Don’t mention the bewildering feeling you had in her class, one of being erased and reconstituted.
Spent
It’s the witching hour, and I am the whittled witch: from lack of sleep, from a long, notched day spent with nothing to show for it save skin that’s been touched raw.
Abandoned Things
I’ve been here for as long as I can remember, but I never thought it was lonely. The shadows of Tall buildings follow me around all day and give me little reminders.
Please, Be Sensitive
I finish telling my therapist about the assault. She takes the time to write the last part. The silence is oddly comforting.
The Glue
I stood up and scanned all the items in the house. Everything looked like she had been living there until just a moment ago. I had to sit down on the chair for a few minutes.
Drought
He told Jay, “Hold still,” digging his fingernails in the raw, yanking out triangularout bits triangular bits of asphalt. The bleeding got worse. But he ran water over the wound, and with his pinky thumb, he spread the antibiotic cream, before bandaging him tight, with a bit of room to breathe.
Behind the Birch Woods
She stared at the words on the page and tried to trace their shapes with her fingers. Collectively, they were supposed to deliver the climax of a love story between a knight and a country girl in a remote Scottish town, but Yuyan saw them as tiny ants, the brown type with large heads and small bodies she’d see back in Hunan.
Resignation
Martin Ellis didn’t think himself difficult to work with, but when his left foot turned in its two weeks’ notice, it gave him pause.
