The Pink Helmet
I’ve been a teller at a bank in the financial district for six years, and the daily ride from my condo in the older part of the city to the...
I’ve been a teller at a bank in the financial district for six years, and the daily ride from my condo in the older part of the city to the...
The first time I saw it, I blamed the heat. We’d driven nine hours from the city to my grandmother’s farm near Sawmill Creek, a town that time had forgotten,...
The summer I turned twelve, my mother and her sisters gathered at our old farmhouse to sort through my grandmother’s belongings after her passing. As they rummaged through dusty trunks...
My grandmother, Nana Iris, had a peculiar habit of pressing wildflowers between the pages of her Bible. But the one she warned me about most was the marsh marigold, which...
My name is Elias Thorne, and I’ve always been attuned to the unseen. My father, a stoic man of science, dismissed my childhood claims as fanciful daydreams. When I was...
In the basement of St. Michael’s Church, beneath the flickering fluorescent light that buzzed like a trapped fly, I was teaching my younger cousin, Danny, how to prepare the thurible...
In the autumn of 2018, I was a senior altar server at St. Michael’s Parish in the quiet town of Bell Rapids. One evening, after a long day of community...
I’ve lived in the lowlands of Panay all my life, where the sun scorches the rice paddies and the evenings hum with insects. My grandfather’s wake was on its fifth...
The summer we moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane, I was six, and my sister Mira was barely two. Our father had died in a tractor accident in...
For years, I’d been a night watchman at the old Meridian Mill, a sprawling, red-brick complex that had been converted into a maze of small offices and storage units. The...
In the outskirts of Cebu City, where the mountains meet the sea, we rented a small, two-story house that had stood for decades. The walls were thick with old paint,...
I’ve always been drawn to the darker corners of the world, but I’ve never had the stomach to stay long. My friends called me a coward, and they were right....
I never feared the dark. Not the dark of a room, not the dark of a forest. It was the dark between streetlights on an empty highway that taught me...
It wasn’t the sort of thing that made you scream or run from the house. It was the kind of thing that sat in the back of your mind, a...
I used to live in the outskirts of a town called San Isidro, where the rice fields gradually gave way to rows of identical houses painted in fading pastel colors....
I moved to a small town in Alberta after my father passed, leaving behind the humid chaos of Manila for the dry, endless prairies. My new house was a narrow...
The old science building at Westbrook University had a reputation. Not for ghost stories or tragic accidents, but for its peculiar architecture—a labyrinth of narrow halls, sudden stairwells, and restrooms...
The afternoon sun blazed down on the cracked asphalt of the municipal sports complex, but I wasn’t there for the sun. I was there for the annual inter-school track meet,...
It was a Tuesday in late October, 2012, when the rains came to the Barangay Lower Sulok. I had just stepped off the jeepney at the corner of Mabini and...
In the autumn of 1987, the small town of Harrow’s Hollow was dusted with the first frost of the season. I was but a child of six, with a wild...
It was a humid Tuesday evening in late August, 2016, and the cicadas were in full chorus outside our rented townhouse in the dusty outskirts of El Paso, Texas. The...
In the autumn of 1987, I was a fourth-grader at Saint Basil’s Academy, a private school nestled in the rolling hills of Hudson Valley. The main building, a Gothic monstrosity...
The old house in Oregon had a staircase that creaked like a dying whale. My grandmother, Lola Ising, had moved in with us after Grandpa died, and she filled our...
I was eight when I first met the woman in the yellow dress. It was the summer before fourth grade, and my family had just moved to a small town...
Listening to the woods...
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