It felt silly to even think such a thing, but it was true, wasn’t it? The skies hadn’t been clear since they had started building that church. Almost three months ago. When it didn’t rain, the skies hung in sullen… Continue reading

It was just down the hall. Thirty seconds at a dead sprint, and he could be safe. She had already gone. Almost three hours ago, and he had listened with his ear pressed against the door as her footsteps had… Continue reading

“It’s not right,” she said, as he tore another page from the book and began folding it into the tiny square that would make it easiest to swallow. “Of course it isn’t,” he said. “If it was right, we wouldn’t… Continue reading

The sun still seemed to move behind the glassy heavens sometimes, searching bleakly through the blue as if it, too, had lost something it couldn’t give up on trying to find again. Returning again and again. They squinted at it… Continue reading

She didn’t move when he sat down beside her. The breeze blew smoke from the tip of her cigarette in her place. It stirred her hair, or he might have thought she was made of stone. That was how it… Continue reading

Nothing is safer than a pearl in a hailstorm. She’d never understood the phrase, until the plague had come and, with it, the rats, and suddenly they’d seemed to be the only safe things in the city. Until a strange… Continue reading

The wind chime lashed and clattered against the house’s brick siding and the blue sky. Too violent for melody, spinning the metal bird that embellished it like a sparrow in a gale. The potted marigolds on the table beside it… Continue reading

How long had she been shuffling those wastes in her grimy environmental suit? The clock had told her at first, of course, smartly, to the second, but some speck of dust from without or drop of sweat from within must… Continue reading