It would sit with him for a moment, that bile and that hate, until it was time to look for the moths again. He began to eat them too, just to share in the communion.
Trigger Warning: end of the world, blood and gore, NSFW, animal death, unreality
Read MoreYou focus your attention away from the outside world and on your walls, which are coated in these generated pictures. It is a collage, a half-finished puzzle. You look for a spot to place your newest one.
Read MoreHermitails from all corners of the world gathered in a great damp auditorium, dragging their synthetic and natural shells with them. They clicked and clattered into concentric rings around the great calciferous podium where their thought leaders would come to speak. No one would leave satisfied until one of them had convinced the populace of their truth, reaching past the murmuring auditorium, through video and audio broadcasts and beyond.
Trigger Warning: end of the world, climate change and extinction, heavy themes of death, loss of mental integrity
Read More“You were swimming in her ocean, at the center of it all. Bile in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin.”
“Stop.”
“I saw you.”
“Stop.”
“You loved it!”
And even as I ran the quarter-mile away toward class, leaving her behind to shriek her words at people who wouldn’t listen, I knew she was right.
On some level, deep within me, I did love this.
Trigger Warning: blood, gore, existential horror, loss of memory and identity, parasites and infection
This story is a sequel to the 2017 story “The Tunnel Boy,” which you can read here.
Read MoreWrapped up like that, it looked innocuous enough. I remember my mom giving my dad a look, a “did you get this for her” look. If he’d picked up on it, they might have realized something was off – even if they never could have guessed what that something was – and they could’ve put a stop to it. Called the cops, hidden the present away, packed up and moved. Anything to keep me from getting my grubby little hands on it, knees covered in pajamas and pine needles, and tearing it open to reveal the toy inside.
Trigger Warning: gore, child endangerment, suicide, depression, parental neglect or abuse
Read MoreOpabinia is not an unpopular program, but it’s not a star. It rates high in a few of the recursive learning categories. Its history as a third-party program, disconnected from any of the major tech companies and their optimized powerhouse software, makes it a difficult choice for some of the sorting algorithms to pick up, but those who do find that it works powerfully for their interests.
Every day, as the hours swim by, you spend time talking to Opabinia about things related to work – and outside of it – in your dim apartment.
Trigger Warning: suicide, parent death, NSFW mention, depictions of extreme poverty and societal collapse
Read MoreBetween moments when the sky wore red, when it took on that classic blue color, she felt like the world was lying to her. Sure, everything couldn’t be on fire all at the same time, and fires were less common on the east coast anyway, but the blue did not describe what the world had become. Of course the world would stop the charade eventually, and the red sky would herald the coming of more ash, which she almost looked forward to at this point, because it meant the new beetles would take shelter. An absurd instinct - didn’t they know this was their world? - but one that allowed her a moment to forage.
Trigger Warning: animal death, child death, climate destruction, insects/disease, end of the world
Read MoreWhen I was younger, I went on a field trip to something my brain insists on calling a monastery. I can’t tell you when or how, because so many of the details surrounding it are hard to pin down. Please bear with me. It’s hard enough just talking about it.
Read MoreOne million years. How can I describe one million years to you? Is there any way I could put it into words, or do I just have to leave it floating there in front of you and hope you feel the edges of it?
Read MoreI was fifteen when it first came, old enough to know it wasn’t normal and young enough to know I’d be committed if I told. Half asleep, feet hanging slightly off my uncomfortable mattress. It didn’t come from under my bed but right through the door, all rambling limbs and skeleton knuckle cracks, a deliberate sort of limp as it nudged its way across the carpet, closer to the bed, closer to me until its face loomed inches from mine.
Read MoreI’m staying overnight in a motel when it waltzes in through the door. Coffee mug eyes and skin like pins, nudging the floor until its way is made. I can see its face. It’s just a man, but the air around him is wrong. It’s giving me that feeling, like an old stop motion picture, Harryhausen’s finest, and you like it but it’s not real, not there. Now I don’t like it because the reverse is upon me.
Trigger Warning: suicide
Read More19 Coolest Pictures of the Anomalies – Number Seven Will Shock You
Read More“Mommy, wake up.”
I glance first at him, then at the clock. I’m meant to be up for work in three hours, but my son is more important, so I resist groaning in frustration. “What is it, sweetie?”
“The man in the Moon is trying to scream.”
Read MoreThere’s a set of tunnels underneath my school.
They stretch across the housing side of campus, elevators leading to each of the dorms. Stray pathways lead to small shops, my campus post office, the dining hall, and a few rooms dedicated to clubs. They’re not the tidiest, with pipes jutting out of walls and empty, greasy garbage carts smelling up the corridors, but the tunnels aren’t scary. Everything is well-lit and reasonably clean. There’s at least one map per corridor, keeping the labyrinth easy enough to navigate.
Usually.
Trigger Warning: nsfw (non-erotic sexual imagery), blood and gore
Read MoreThere are good vegans. I have a lot of vegan friends, and they’re all pretty good people. But there are also some pretty terrible ones. My father was one of those.
Trigger Warning: child abuse
Read More