By the time the house came into view, the sun was gently lifting the dark horizon like a blanket. My dry eyes strained to bring it into focus. The house leaned slightly as if it were either resisting the wind or on the brink of collapse. …

First, there was darkness. I waited in its grasp just long enough to second-guess myself. Did I come to the right place? I thought, resisting the urge to step backward. As if to answer my doubt, her voice, in all its warm supremacy and terrible magnificence, split the darkness. At…

The ceiling seemed to hold my gaze with indifference — uninterested and uninteresting. It had been three days since I had found the portal, and I hadn’t slept since. I still couldn’t believe I had made it out. But, then again, maybe none of it had been real to begin…

The tower loomed thirty feet above the beach as we carried our belongings toward it. The ocean’s surface in the background rolled into the horizon. Twin sets of plastic steps led halfway up to ladders stretching the rest of the way to its pinnacle. It was clear at once the…

In a long-forgotten corner of a college cafeteria, there lived a cockroach named Pierre the Hatsman. In his dreams, he saw every one of his friends and relatives donning one of the dozen or so hats he had painstakingly constructed from stray threads and fabric fragments he had collected. Being…

In the heart of the old-growth forest, an acorn named Fella dangled from one of its mother’s countless branches. “What will you do once you escape this place?” Fella whispered to its slumbering sibling. Its words vanished, carried away by an icy breeze — the last breath of a fading…