The Static Hum
The summer of 2015 was the hottest in a decade, and my parents had decided to take a rare weekend trip to visit my aunt in the city, leaving me...
The summer of 2015 was the hottest in a decade, and my parents had decided to take a rare weekend trip to visit my aunt in the city, leaving me...
It started three weeks after Mira gave birth to her son, Arlo. They lived in a cramped apartment above a shuttered tailor’s shop in the old quarter of the city,...
My friends had always whispered about the ‘thrills and chills’ of Baguio, but I was never a true believer. I preferred the quiet company of mountains and pine-scented air. It...
I was born in the clamor of the city, but my earliest memories are of the quiet hum of cicadas and the smell of wet earth after rain. My family...
In the autumn of 2018, I was a junior at Meridian State, buried in textbooks and the sterile hum of the library. My cousin, Elena, was the one who called,...
In the winter of 2021, I took a night-shift position at a sprawling data center on the outskirts of a small desert town. The facility, a monolithic concrete block, hummed...
Six months have passed since we left that house in San Mateo, but the memory of it clings to me like damp air. My family moved to a coastal town...
The afternoon sun cast long, distorted shadows across the gravel lot of the Miller Funeral Home, but the air was thick and still, as if the world itself held its...
The summer I turned nine, the heat in our little town of Redwood Flats was a living thing. It pressed down on the rooftops, shimmered off the asphalt, and turned...
I never thought I’d share this, but I need to get it off my chest. My name is Mara, and I grew up in a small village surrounded by rice...
The apartment on Mendez Street was a study in cheap comfort. The walls were painted a watery green, the floor tiles were the color of weak tea, and the only...
It was a humid afternoon in late September when I took the five dogs out for their usual walk. The neighborhood was quiet, save for the distant hum of a...
The province had a way of erasing time. Months crawled through the rice paddies like molasses, and years could slip by without you noticing the seams. I was nineteen, or...
The summer we were nine, the world shrank to a single block of unfinished houses. Our street was a raw, red scar on the hillside, dotted with empty frames of...
It was the last night of summer in 2019, and I was twenty-two, housesitting for my aunt in her old farmhouse outside of Marrow, Kansas. She was on a cruise...
The old house on Maple Street had a peculiar way of holding onto the afternoon light, filtering it through dusty windows into long, golden rectangles that stretched across the worn...
In the autumn of 1987, I was nine, living with my parents in a creaking Victorian house we’d rented in the small town of Birch Hollow. The house was named...
I never told anyone about the afternoon I spent with Aling Bebang after she died. It was the summer before I turned six, and my cousin Lita had already been...
The summer I turned eight, my family and I spent our vacation in my grandmother’s nipa hut by the sea, far from the city’s noise. The hut stood on stilts...
I was six when my cousin Marisol asked me to share her room for the night. Our house, a sprawling single-story affair on Whetstone Lane, had four bedrooms. The master...
The first time I felt that wrongness, that icy finger tracing my spine, I was four years old, living in a subdivision called Mapleshade. It was a safe place, a...
Two years had slipped by since I last put pen to paper about my time in that strange abode. I speak, of course, of the old temperance hotel on Hemlock...
In the autumn of 2012, I was in the sixth grade at Pine Hollow Elementary, a school that was a maze of old, interconnected buildings. The arts block was the...
My name is Elias Vance, and I have always been able to see things that others cannot. It is a gift, or a curse, depending on the day. My mother...
Listening to the woods...
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