Closure Inc.
“What I want is a night like it was in the beginning. Do you understand? When life was fun. Before everything seemed to become such a chore. Before you let the world grind you down and take your positivity away. Before you started moaning – constantly – about work and trains and rent and money. When we used to talk and appreciate each other, and not just spend all night scrolling on our phones. Before you became a dull, angry, closet alcoholic, Brian.”
Saturn Devouring His Sons
“I would lay sleepless in my bed, exhausted and terrified in the flickering darkness. I would imagine the floor rumbling beneath me, the boards breaking apart like an insect’s hive. I would see the pale malevolent fingers emerging from the dirt, groping blindly around the crumbling edifice of my house. Every evening my floor would rupture to reveal a subterranean hell made of raw bleeding flesh and gaping bloodshot eyes. Repeatedly I fell into fissures filled with his hot fetid breath and gnashing gore-stained teeth.”
A Fleeting Victory
“The official records taken at Fort Indomitable suggest that nothing occurred on July 17, 1861. Initially some reference was made, documenting that a horse race between a soldier at the fort and an unnamed Navajo brave was won by the American. Some weeks later, this record was removed and destroyed.”
The Trial of Bartholomew Brown
“The first thing they found was John Robert’s foot, still joined to a leg that had been torn off half-way down the shin. Only a few paces away lay the grisly spectacle of his remains: a mangled mess of bloodied flesh and protruding bone, a hollowed trunk beneath snapped ribs, and his still-intact head, obscured by a thick smear of mud and gore where the murderer had dragged him out of sight and into the long grass at the back of the farm.”
The Miracle of Bradford Town
“Frankly, Bradford needed this miracle. Our factories and power stations had shut back in the early nineties. By ninety-eight, when the statue went up, we had died a slow, indifferent death. Unemployment was rife. Small businesses had shut. And something evil had entered town, keeping curtains shut well into the daytime. Some folk walked the evening streets ashamed, pock-marked skin over bones, their teeth decaying, their eyes sunken and hollow. It was like they were drained of all hope and vitality. Like God had abandoned us.”
The Tailor’s Tale
“In its most nascent stages of community, Spearfish had been a bawdy and lawless den, dedicated to every conceivable expression of vice and iniquity. It was a free-for-all, built on gold and gambling, hard liquor, and whoring. There had been much violence too. Dead men had drifted along the currents of the nearby streams. Others had soaked up mud and rainwater in the town’s thoroughfare. They say the owners of the bordello and the saloon bars were often observed disposing of those men who had lost arguments or found themselves dangerously excited around the working girls.”
Another Day
“He was a different man when he walked into his home in the evening.”