Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw something move. His closet door was creeping open, the yawning mouth stretching wider and wider, until it ever so gently tapped up against the adjacent wall, and finally came to a stop.

He smells like menthol cigarettes and latex. When he pulls his arm back, she notices the plastic Batman bracelet on his wrist.

When he finished his sandwich, he took a cigarette out of the nearly empty box on his nightstand and lit it. He started wheezing as soon as he took the first puff, and it took awhile until he was able to stop coughing. When he looked up, he could have sworn that the spider was watching him again.

Randy tried to push Freddie’s body off his lap, but the dead corpse was stiff with rigor mortis. Randy still could not believe a kid had died at school. Nobody was supposed to die at school. They all wanted their teachers to die. They wanted Mr. Joiner to die. But not each other.

“The Devil don’t mark on the outside, Wade. He leaves his sign deep inside. It’s the church that makes a show of outwardness. Eat your groats now, like a good Lad.”

I looked at my friend. I thought, how wretched a life, to have never met the god of in-between things!

I watch through my curtains as the blurry mailman walks back down my driveway and onto the next house. He’s got on the little shorts and the iconic mailman hat. I want to go talk to him. I haven’t spoken to a human in days unless you count the Postmates guy (but I don’t)…

An acorn fell at her feet. She was standing under a spread-out branch an oak tree. A live oak, still bearing its leaves, although now brown and desiccated. The lawn too was sparse and dun colored. Then she saw it—the one point of color standing out in the monochrome of muddy earth and grey tombstones. Green.

The Italian game. The knight would come out next. Karlsson smiles to himself, pleased that he was one step ahead of the Grandmaster, rightfully assuming that he would not lead with a Gambit.

an inability to recognize the truth doesn’t make it false