Category: Haunted Passages

An ominous wind circles you in the middle of an isolated woods. Your friends wander into an empty factory, under the cover of dusk, never to be seen again. These are “Haunted Passages,” new features of unearthly delights.

Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Magic of Certainty” by Kim Farleigh

Orville, prostate on a Jeep’s hood under a blaze of stars, aimed his gun at imaginary targets. A print of his wife’s last email dropped from the hood onto the desert’s sand. Orville’s typical scowl became a mean grimace after reading: “Don’t be angry now, but I’m in love with Denzel and we’re going to…
New Haunted Passages Short Story: “Abattoir” by Sofia Mosqueda

I imagine my husband as a shrike. This bird eats what he impales, wood splintering, his tree decorated with flesh. They immortalize death when they hang their prey on spines or barbed wire, feverishly pecking at their bodies for days, but their meat is never enough. At night, my husband wakes me by resting his…
Haunted Passages Short Fiction: “Grocery List” by Oliver Cubillos

You forgot to lock the front door. How could you be so careless? There’s an intruder in your home and it’s all your fault. Who would break into your home? Perhaps it’s the mailman or the crone next door. There’s a crash downstairs and you slide on your slippers. Maybe it’s that pesky rat. You…
Haunted Passages Hybrid Work: “Dead Bear” by Ari Cordovero

In the kitchen, no one moves too quickly. Plates are set down with care. Chairs slide in small increments. A cabinet door is closed with the flat of a palm instead of a snap. Porcelain animals watch from mahogany shelves— a fox mid-pounce, a deer with glassy eyes, a white horse frozen in a permanent…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Storn Williams Goes West” by Perry Genovesi

1. Tuesday Seeing what he thinks is a basketball rolling across the road at night, and then a boy in a pair of nylon gym shorts following it, Storn swerves. The Taurus veers off the asphalt and plunges into a bog. The headlights submerge into murky ink. The engine floods and the intake and transmission…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Jess Hagemann’s Documentarian Novel Mother-Eating

Back when I was growing up—a good, Christian boy in the suburban South—there were pretty much three cults that everyone knew by place or name: Waco, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate. That was the list. Sure, our parents would decry large-scale organizations like Scientology and Mormonism as cults, but (fair or not) that was largely denigratory,…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “I Ask Mom to Tell Me about Life Back on the Rancho” by Jose Hernandez Diaz

She tells me they had a hen house.I ask if only hens lived in the hen house?No, roosters and chicks, too, she says.She proceeds to patiently describe That sometimes coyotes would sneakInto the hen house, moving rocks, with their noses,Blocking doors to the hen houses. Sometimes, she says,Brazen banditos would rob the hen houses of eggs,…
New Haunted Passages Poetry: “Remember When Exciting” by Daniel Edward Moore

was a murder on the outskirts of town and two hundred jawsdropped quickly to the floor as water troughs on Main Streetfilled with human tears. Horses became tender like kittensyou could ride. Sparrows sang on crime scene tape in aminor key and barns became suspicious of holding morethan hay. Known for their love of God…
Haunted Passages Short Fiction Hybrid: “The Cartographer of Unobservable Roads” by Libby Banks

A PEDESTRIAN GUIDE TO THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE SYSTEM Seventh Edition (Revised) Compiled by: Dr. Rachel Wallace, Urban GeographerPublisher: Small Compass PressPrice: Free ROUTE 1: THE GRIEF-FOLD PATH Duration: Unmeasurable Difficulty: Moderate (if you’ve lost someone), Impossible (if you haven’t) Begin where the street remembers its old name. Turn left. Walk three blocks. You’ll smell your grandmother’s kitchen…