The Weight of the Hollow
I first noticed it in the autumn of my second year at the Armitage Peak Research Station, a remote outpost perched on a windswept ridge overlooking the boreal forest. The...
I first noticed it in the autumn of my second year at the Armitage Peak Research Station, a remote outpost perched on a windswept ridge overlooking the boreal forest. The...
I have always been a person who feels things deeply, perhaps too deeply. My name is Meera, and at twenty-seven, I have learned that my sensitivity is both a gift...
My name is Arjun, and I have always been a skeptic. I grew up in the bustling city of Hyderabad, surrounded by the hum of technology and the glow of...
The old schoolhouse in Millbrook had been standing since the 1920s, and by the time I was in fourth grade, it had developed a personality of its own—creaking floorboards, drafty...
I was jolted awake by a sound that didn’t belong to the night. It was a soft thud, like a book falling from a shelf, followed by a low creak...
The house sat at the end of a gravel road in the Cascade foothills, a rambling Victorian that had seen better decades. I’d moved there after my divorce, seeking silence...
The summer I turned twelve, my family moved into my great-aunt Edna’s house in the dusty town of Porphyry, Arizona. She had passed the previous winter, leaving the house to...
When I was a boy in the hill town of Dunmore, I feared the dusk more than any monster. The flicker of a dying bulb or the creak of a...
My sister Marisol and I shared a cramped attic studio in the old Vossman apartments, a building that leaned like a tired pilgrim against the noise of the industrial district....
The first time I saw the hollow man, I was seven, standing at the end of the upstairs hallway in our new apartment in the old Thornwood building. He was...
I never thought I would be writing this, but something happened that made me put it all down. Please forgive any clumsiness; I’m still shaking. I live in a small,...
The rain had been falling for three days straight, a steady drumming on the tin roof of my small cottage in the Appalachian foothills. I had moved there a year...
My wife’s parents, Harold and Edith, were visiting her Aunt Margaret in the coastal town of Dunmore. Margaret had recently moved into a sleek, modern apartment building called the Meridian,...
I spent eleven years working the night shift at the Meridian Data Center, a sprawling, windowless building on the outskirts of a city that never truly slept. The building was...
My mother, a woman of quiet nerves, used to tell me of a place we lived before I was born—a crumbling flat in the shadow of a decommissioned steel mill...
I’m Mira, sixteen, and I’ve been keeping a secret for eight years. It started when we moved to a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, into a sprawling...
The old quarry road had always felt wrong. Even as a kid, I’d pedal my bike past the rusted gates and the ‘No Trespassing’ signs, convinced something watched from the...
The first time I set foot in the village of Kharagpur, the monsoon had just begun to recede, leaving the red earth slick and the air thick with the smell...
It began with a flicker in the periphery, a trick of the light, as if the world had hiccuped. My name is Elena, and I’ve spent the last three years...
In the humid embrace of a coastal town, the monsoon had just begun to chant its rhythm against the tin roof of the Singh household. The building was a three-story...
The Rainwood Apartments had always been a place of quiet routine. Through the thin walls, you could hear the rhythms of other lives: the clatter of pans from the Delgado...
The bus groaned as it climbed the last switchback, and Mira pressed her forehead to the cool glass, watching the valley drop away into a sea of mist. The driver,...
My company had expanded its operations into the remote corners of the country, and as a junior auditor, I was often sent to assess new branches. This time, my colleague...
I have always been a light sleeper, but that night it was different. The cold of the mountain village seeped through the old timber walls, and the only warmth came...
Listening to the woods...
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