Category: Haunted Passages

Ben Segal: “Hungry Ghosts,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction

Ghosts eat ghost hamburgers from ghost cows. You can’t kill a ghost though, so the ghost cows are eaten piece by piece, fog slabs sliced off their lowing bodies. Such practices of piecemeal slaughter flourished in the time before refrigeration and were banned as cruel by Kosher law. Ghosts are in this way heretical, or…
Haunted Passages: “Pocket Scalpel,” a one-act play by Nathan Dixon

Cast of Characters C: A 32-year-old college counselor living in Durham, NC. Over the past several years she has been dealing with the news that she carries the BRCA-2 Breast Cancer Gene. She must undergo an array of preventative screenings every six months, knowing full well that in the (not too distant) future she will…
Michael Sikkema Haunted Passages Poem: “How to Be a Haunted House”

1 After the first rainshove up what’s beenburied in the flowerbedsThe teeth. The toy trucksThe steak knife 2 Use yourfaceto bendthe others 3 Bleed brighter 4 Stay inthe sharp partof the storyuntil it hurtsright. Findthat smallvoice andstretch it 5 Fog the changes 6 Manifest your walkersin earlier clothes 7 No neon 8 No fanny packs…
“Every Theatre Has a Ghost,” a poem for Haunted Passages by Heather Lang-Cassera

—for a former Siegfried & Roy stagehand You were the one to cut the illusionist himself in half with your followspot; to light him at low level; to hold the cable with perfect tension in the dark, before the shift in zenith, and then coil quickly hand over hand; to walk past mirrors, O, such…
Cindy Savett: Three Haunted Passages Poems

Rachel and Mother Speak Their Lines Clay Mother,drop down through me darkly, lash my winds toyour breast, swaddle my singed urge forendlessness, Blind Mother who stumbles over my ransomed pulse. Rachel, I stagger through trembling grades of your silence,weave torn time with your spent breath; stay etched, child, on my yellow-edge days. Sky Daughter, you…
Haunted Passages: “Booger Hill,” a short story by Christy Crutchfield

Tess is Eve under her coat. She made the costume last year, three felt leaves sewn strategically onto a tan bodysuit. She’s just come home from the grocery store, but I nudge her back into the car. “Where are we going?” she says. I put a bottle of wine in one cup holder, a bag…
“Static Pressure,” a flash fiction for Haunted Passages by Cooper Shrivastava

I am 612 feet below the surface, and I am furious. Eric is connected to my dive belt by an 8-foot rope. When I look in that direction, I feel myself getting angry again and I purposefully let it go. At these depths, an increase in heart rate and breathing means increasing my risk of…
“Leap of Faith,” an ekphrastic short fiction for Haunted Passages by Mark Blickley

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Leap of Faith I’m a dead frog and I don’t say this with any pity or understanding or shame, it’s just an observation that people seem to like us, like us a bit too much because they like to push hooks through our jaws and cast us…
“Cobweb Lake”: A Short Story for Haunted Passages by Hernán Ortiz

My friend and I were skipping stones near the bodies that floated on the surface. We imagined that if the ripples touched them a hundred times, the bodies would wake up. But if the stones touched them instead, they would stay asleep forever. Most were thin stones we collected among the undergrowth that surrounded the…