The chainsaws do not stop.

Perhaps they can’t. Maybe hell contracted them to torture me, otherwise I might enjoy an average purgatory week working from home with just the yappy dogs next door to superimpose irritation.

“He wanted to climb into the ground, reach into the soil. His green eyes had darkened to hazel, and the same urgency, that same tunneling desire, caught hold of her like a fever.”

The number creatures—the Ints—wiggled on her screen, wringing their serifs, and shuffling in the small spaces between themselves. Deana knew how they felt.

“Haikus wrap themselves /
around Mona Lisa’s smile”

Catherine didn’t much care for her job. It wasn’t that the squirrels gave her any lip. They had dental plans, 401Ks, and the whole caboodle after all. The Sound, though, that gave her the shudders.

Sometimes in the night, when the dogs stopped barking at the cars along Route 40, the house ceased settling, and the wind came to a rest in the branches of the old maple by the farmhouse, Rachel sensed them.

Evelyn was on the way to her big meeting with the department heads, but the box of kittens on the side of the road read ‘take what you can’ and what was a middle-aged woman to do? Leave them? 

​Of course the freaking not.