There exists an oddly prevalent nightmare in which a person’s teeth are broken or knocked out. Although I am glad to report that I’ve never experienced it, I have suffered…
Horror
The Dog Park is Sacred!
Some people can shout without raising the volume of their voice. Kathryn Thoms had that ability. The target of her Thursday afternoon ire was Ronald, who’d managed his local Kroger…
Shock Totem
A chapter from Th. Metzger’s novel Shock Totem, to order from Amazon click here. Brian was on his bed, doing the Prong and listening to the invisible Negroes inside his…
Tilly’s Dolls
Ottilie Harwood lived in one wing of Sedgwick Hall, and her widowed father lived in the other. She knew him mainly through traces: the scent of pipe smoke, a crumpled…
Baggage
No one—not her friends, business colleagues, or Wall Street rivals—ever guessed that the oversized briefcase that had become Thelia’s trademark was actually her husband. If she ever found herself in…
Peeky Eyes
Anya sat bolt upright in bed and sucked in air through clenched teeth. Her nightshirt clung to her skin and her hair was smeared wetly against her cheek. She gasped…
The Spectre of St. John’s Churchyard
Vacant heart and hand and eye,Easy live and quiet die. —Sir Walter Scott I. Providence, Rhode Island, 1848: The Hotel Bar The bar in Edgar Allan Poe’s hotel is a…
Sphincter and Sphinx
The new client was a hugely fat, fez-wearing mystery gink from the incest-and-incense-redolent East. He had beautiful hands, ripe with purple finger jewels. He seemed a little too happy to…
Stairway to Nowhere
1. It’s been fifty years since I first heard the Pipes of Eld. I was fifteen when the ancient-modern sound emerged: flutes, crude wood or shining silver, reed-pipes, recorders and…
Hunchback Assistant Tells All
1 My dear Mrs. Shelley — No, that won’t do — she’s neither “mine” nor dear — To Mary — No, that sounds like a dedication, when nothing of that…