Category: Haunted Passages

Haunted Passages Short Fiction: “Fate Cat” by Olufunmilayo Makinde

“Keep your hat on!” Ajoke’s mother yelled as she watched her daughter leave for school. “Yes ma!” Ajoke yelled back, pulling her cap tighter over her head by its brim as she ran out of the house and headed toward the bus outside. Ajoke was born with a cat on her head, just like her…
Two Poems for Haunted Passages: Disha Trivedi

Poem in Place of a Needle My lover writes letters, sealedwith saliva, and I cut them open,put tongue on paper that delivershis tongue. Become old-world lovers.Grandmother, grandfather, weddedby ocean. Nineteen, already armedwith a lifetime’s distress. Some lovers have reason for hurting. Onebigger than childhoods of butterbrowned over. Once, I was goodat scaling trees in the…
Three Visual Poems by Carolyn Guinzio for Haunted Passages

Limb A Thousand Times We Hold Them Out Before Us Carolyn Guinzio’s eighth collection, Cameo Blue, is forthcoming in 2026 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Earlier books include A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year, and Meanwhile in Arkansas (2025), winner of…
New Fiction for Haunted Passages: “Three Magi (Or Three Lost Men)” by Garrett Crowe

I. A bottle opener in the shape of a mystic—I purchased it at an antiquary that specialized in items made between the 50s and 70s. On a nail, the mystic hung upside down, legs crossed, praying with hands at his heart. It was molded in brass. I had to have it. It reminded me of…
Haunted Passages: Three Microfictions by Addison Zeller

The Dinosaurafter Augusto Monterroso The tip of the tail (a barb almost, dripping with rainwater) gleams despite the intervening clouds and leaves as sunlight plays on its back, continuing, while the storm passes on, along its skin and spine, and arcs like the rainbow that has already begun to form, until it pools in the…
“Placatory Congregation”: A New Haunted Passage by Steve Castro, Christopher Citro, & Dustin Pearson

The music of a wall decaying. Stars. Rivers in windows. Moon low over houses. If we stuck a fork in it, juice would fall over us. Build a play cave, cover it with thick blankets. With a small hand tuck the final flap in. The play cave was unique like our town’s pastor with a…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “Dust in the Cupboard” by Leo Alder

I lingered too long by the crematorium and got possessed by a spirit. His family had long since left. He told me they put his urn in the car while they ate at KFC. KFC, he wailed. He spat each letter cold down my spine. They ate at KFC. Can you believe it? He clattered…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Murder Portrait” by David Luntz

After I killed my best friend, I dreamt I’d “walked into” the painting he’d left for me in his will. It was in the style of some Dutch Master: a portrait of a young man reading a letter above a bowl of fruit. I snuck up behind him and read the letter. The letter told…
Haunted Passages Poetry by Eliot Cardinaux: “From the Surface of Time’s Ambivalence”

A broadcast of our non-existence, which terrifies others, comes through the Radio of Wet Clay & writes itself in my notebook. About the future distinguished—not by its undecidedly analog or digital construction—but from this present, living future (no, not precisely living; the word would be adjective)—it is said, that it risks going forward without an…