Lemon Peel

Fifteen-year-old Jennifer couldn't sleep. She had woken up in a cold sweat as though something was terribly wrong. Throwing the covers off of her bed, the young girl swung her legs over the side and hopped out. She felt not ill, but also not right. She needed water. Standing up, Jennifer made her way out…

Imaginations

With unrelenting sorrow, the man quietly laid down in his hole. His world seemed to unravel before him, and before long, he could not tell reality from fantasy. Imaginations ran wild, convincing him of that which likely didn't exist. Shovels above heaped dirt upon his body. The weight of it held him down as he…

Final Girl

Christina had been living all alone since the bombs dropped seventeen years ago. The apocalypse had come, and to her knowledge, she was the last human alive on earth. For this reason, her body paralyzed with fear when three men emerged from the edge of the forest. Christina was out in the open and nowhere…

The Goat

The discomfort she felt was not a result of his touch or even the overly tight metal restraints that cut into her flesh. It wasn't even that she had been tortured for days upon the slab, unable to move. These were all traumas, to be sure, but nothing was as unsettling as the goat that…

Angel

Eleven-year-old Shawn had recently moved to the small town of Salisbury, Idaho, with his parents and six-year-old little sister, Amanda. They arrived in an old but well maintained Station Wagon and moved into a large suburban house with a two-car garage and white picket fence. Although his sister adjusted to life in Salisbury relatively quick,…

Perfect Breakfast

Sophie woke up slowly and with a smile as the gentle rays of the sun kissed her face through the window. A delicious scent wafted its way into her nostrils, and the gentle clangs of metal on metal awakened her more fully. Brian was making breakfast in the kitchen. Sophie hopped out of bed and…

Dog Food

The rain beat down in thick, heavy droplets sending small shocks of pain through the young man's broken and beaten body. The old man had left him for dead, but didn't count on the younger's resolved to push through. The young man dragged his own bloody body across the pavement towards the chain-link fence with…

Veal

"More," demanded the morbidly obese man as he finished off the last bit of gravy smothered meat. "But sir," his man-servant replied with a nervous twinge, "if we continue at our current pace, people will get suspicious. The police are already searching the streets night and day." "I said more!" The man-servant sighed and went…

Hungry for Music

As he sipped his fifth evening coffee, the musician was blissfully unaware of the danger that lurked behind him. As he had spent the day cleaning, throwing out old food and trash, he’d left the front door wide open to keep the air inside his home fresh as scrubbed and sanitized. His headphones blaring, he…

Leading Fear

"Everyone is afraid of something, but collectively, those fears feed into each other. What you have to do is to tap into that fear and cultivate it in such a way that it grows exponentially, but you have to feed the fears in both camps so that they each develop a blind loyalty to their…