Ghost stories from Sleep Paralysis

The Locked Pantry of Jalan Dedap

The news came through a crackling phone line, the kind my mother had to hold just so to hear. The voice on the other end belonged to my aunt, and...

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The Leech of the Walled Garden

It was the dead hour, the cellular purgatory between three and four in the morning, when the old farmhouse seemed to breathe. I lay on my side, facing the wall...

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The Weight of Unspoken Things

The week had been a slow bleed of small disasters. My sister’s diagnosis, the foreclosure notice on my childhood home, the way my wife, Elena, had started flinching when I...

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The Bearing Gift

I remember that evening as if it were carved into my bones. The scent of curry leaves and coconut oil drifted from the kitchen, and my fiancée Ruwani and her...

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The Clock in the Wall

The morning of September 19th began like any other since my mother’s surgery. I woke to the faint chime of the antique clock in the hallway—a thing my father had...

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The Frequency of Falling Leaves

After my time in Puerto Rico, I thought I had left the strange behind. Five years of quiet in San Francisco had dulled my senses, and I convinced myself that...

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The Quilt of Thistles

The apartment on Meridian Lane was a compromise, a place to heal after the divorce that had shattered the life I’d known for twenty years. I’d lived with my mother...

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The Bargain Under the Floorboards

Mara had always been sensitive to the moods of the old boarding house on Maple Street, but it wasn’t until her twenty-second birthday that she realized the house was sensitive...

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The Gilded Procedure

In the stifling heat of a late August afternoon, I lay in my dorm room, the blinds drawn against the amber sun. I was a senior now, but the room...

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The Marmalade Jar

In the autumn of 2016, I returned from a wearying assignment in Kolkata to my ancestral flat in Mumbai, hoping to recover my equilibrium. My grandmother, Ammaji, was failing, her...

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The Concrete Flower

In the sweltering July of 2006, Corporal Jake Morrison and his wife, Elena, lived in a squat, sun-bleached duplex in the aging housing block of Fort Calloway, a base scheduled...

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The Unfinished Circuit

During my final semester at the Meridian Institute of Technology, I was drowning in a sea of deadlines. My capstone project, the Augmented Reality Navigation System for the visually impaired,...

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The Weaving of Fingers

In the quiet town of Millbrook, where the streets were lined with old oaks and the houses had porches that sighed under the weight of summer, Elara lived a life...

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The Pull of the Cedar Chest

When I was twelve, we lived in a creaking farmhouse on the edge of the Nebraska cornfields, a place where the wind never stopped whispering through the dry stalks. My...

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The Persimmon Room

When I was twelve, my parents split, and my father moved us into a renovated farmhouse on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. The house was old, but...

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The Tether

It was a Tuesday night in late autumn, and the house on Hemlock Lane felt emptier than usual. I was housesitting for my aunt, a sprawling Victorian that creaked and...

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The Third Door on the Lower Ground

Mara had always been drawn to old buildings, their creaking bones and peeling paint whispering stories of lives lived and lost. It was a fascination she shared with no one,...

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The Weight on Chestnut Street

Twenty years ago, I lived in a small coastal town called Portharrow, in a cramped flat above a bakery on Chestnut Street. The smell of yeast and sugar clung to...

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The Seismic Bed

When I was twelve, we moved to a compact apartment on the sixth floor of a redbrick building in the outskirts of Toronto. The city hummed with an undercurrent of...

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The Weight of the Weeping Elm

At noon, the sun hung high and white over the trailer park, and Marla finally got her four-year-old, Toby, down for his nap. The heat had been pressing all morning,...

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The Static in the Valley

I’m a practical man. I’ve spent thirty years as a civil engineer, inspecting bridges and tunnels, relying on measurements and physics. I don’t have a history of mental illness, and...

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The Pinning Weight

The first time it happened, I thought I was dreaming. My limbs were heavy, as if someone had poured cement into my bones, and an invisible force pressed me into...

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The Static Hour

In the autumn of 2001, I was living in a small farmhouse outside of Hillsdale, Minnesota. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down a gravel road, and the only...

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The Weight of Dusk

Mara had always known the heavy presence that settled on her chest like a stone, but lately it had taken a new shape—a pressure that began at her ankles and...

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