Author: Heavy Feather

Four Poems by Tony Mancus

All the Things Your Head Can Be your head is a pew, you drape its curve. your empty palm, pass the plate along with three dollars pulled from your pocket to stifle your candle-lit worry. the trace of a thought in one dream as it’s drawn across thresholds—your tiny form against a massive door, pressing,…
Two Poems by Andrew Cantrell

Heliotrope Where one finds that moody is like a word or like the register in which the sky loosens its grip on the day’s seething or it’s ghostly when you break it down to phrases and lineation sloughed stark and low in the cinema of our accumulating afternoons as they buckle, fold, and wither the…
“Halloween Memories: The Dark,” a short memoir by Scott Cole, author of Triple Axe, for Haunted Passages

I was twelve. We had just moved to a new town that August, and I hadn’t yet made any real close friends in the short time we’d been there. Two Halloweens earlier, when I was ten, we’d just moved to a different new town. That year, I made plans to go trick or treating with…
Craft Essay for Haunted Passages: “Standing at a Line in the Sand with a Shiver in Your Heart” by Bones Are Made to Be Broken author Paul Michael Anderson

I want to talk about the limitless possibilities of what horror is and what horror can do. I want to rail against the mainstream critics and dilettantes who deride the genre every time something major comes along—the release of an IT, the premiere of a Walking Dead, the publication of a Let the Right One…
“Election Night, Missouri, 2016,” a flash essay by Brad Aaron Modlin

All day, rats had bolted through my body. I spilt my coffee. I couldn’t hold a pen. To an old friend, a pre-Missouri one, I wrote: I wish we still lived in the same town, so I could bump into you on the sidewalk, and you would tell me everything will be okay. Come night,…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Cable Company” by Darkansas author Jarret Middleton

A barmaid closing up for the night stopped polishing a glass when a telegram dropped through the slot of the front door. She picked up the envelope marked “urgent” in red and unearthed a manila slip with a single typewritten line. “mechanism operational,” it read. “ascent at 0600. signed, the cable company.” The barmaid raised…
Five Poems by Esteban Rodríguez for Haunted Passages

Landscape with tree and leg Then you come across a tree,and hanging from its branch you find a leg—long, pale, severed cleanlyat the thigh. You walk beneath it, study the chain bolted to its knee, studythe way the sun—searing the edges off the leaves—cauterized its flesh.And even though its nails are broken, even though its…
Fiction: “The Lawn Jockey” by Dez Miller

I’d been thinking about that swimming hole for nearly half a year, since the middle of winter. I first saw it in a photo on Hunter’s dorm room bulletin board. The 4 x 6 had lanky Hunter poised midair, his arms and legs flung about dramatically, his mouth open in what I imagined to be…
“Attend the Way,” short fiction by Theodore Wheeler

It’s because he has a train to catch that Rodney leaves his room after suppertime. He puts on dress shoes and his green suit, the one that looks good against his skin. Earlier that afternoon, the big woman next door trimmed his hair. He lives in the Kellogg Rooming House, an old brick building near…