I’m going to tell you a story.  It’s about a long winding staircase, a long winding staircase into darkness.  Thick darkness.  You will have to step carefully, feeling each step beneath you with your foot, with your toes, to make sure it’s there, to make sure you aren’t about to put your weight on empty space, having missed a turn in the dark.  You might want to take your shoes off.  Taking your shoes off might help, and you don’t want to fall.  This is not a game.  There is no net.

I have this friend. A writer of pretty good prose and godawful poetry (which even he would admit) A playwright in remission with the dramatic impulse re-emerging (he's always been a drama queen) And my friend? He has this little problem. Every October, he wants to write the ultimate horror story or ghost story or other Eldritch indulgence. But he can't. Not because he's blocked. Because he's afraid.

She saw the cottage from a long way off, and wondered if this was a bad sign:  if she could see it, other things could too.  But it offered shelter.  If offered protection.  Maybe there would be something inside to use as a weapon.  She ran.  Ran over uneven forest ground, over tree roots and muddy patches, and didn’t dare fall:  fear kept one foot in the air at all times.  She reached the wooden door:  it was creaky, not very sturdy, but it was open.  She pulled on it, stepped in, and closed it behind her.  The first thing she saw was a latch.  She closed it.

The back door of my apartment opens into an alleyway covered in murals. On weekends, people flock to this urban tourist attraction, cameras at the ready. They photograph one another posing against the vivid colors, hoping to get an ‘original’ shot of the graffiti so many others have already developed. By Monday, litter is the only sign of the recent influx of visitors. Discarded spray paint cans, beer bottles, and snack food wrappers move like tumbleweeds down the street they can’t seem to escape.

I knew about the wallet.

Okay, this is how James died.  He and his wife Annie, who never really liked me but we tried to get along because we knew he couldn’t choose between us, were on a trip to Spain.  They take trips all the time, and I’m incredibly jealous.  James is an intellectual property lawyer, so they have money, and Annie doesn’t work, so they don’t have to coordinate schedules.  They just up and go when he gets vacation.  My girlfriend has a government job, and our vacation schedules never seem to overlap.  We’d go on trips if we could.

A man walks into a bar. It sounds like a joke, I know. A man walks into a bar with a white plastic bucket. No one recognized him. Andrea the Chilean waitress leaned in and said to me, “That man, he looks like a real scum bucket,” and I laughed and wished she would say it again, but when he placed the bucket on one of the shaky tables, Sofia, the wife of the bar owner, O’Malley, yelled, “Holy fuck, a little baby alligator!” She flipped her wet rag over her shoulder and leaned in.