Comfort the Disturbed. Disturb the Comfortable.

Fiction

The Slush Pile

These stories totally could have been published elsewhere. But why would we want to deprive our readers of our slush?

  • The Grind (Original Story)

    Inspector 113-A is sent to investigate a sanitation worker who arrived two hours late. Instead, he finds a missing girl, a market in human debt, and a city where almost anything can be made legal with the right paperwork.

  • The Collector (Original Vignette)

    A stranded couple loses their way in a violent snowstorm, unaware that something ancient is watching from above. It feeds on resentment, fear, and hatred, and it has already chosen one of them.

  • At the Mercy of Drivers (Original Short Story)

    One day, a door appeared in George’s kitchen. He ignored it, went to work, and hoped it would disappear. It didn’t. Eventually, George decided to deal with the problem himself, and everything in his life began to change.

  • First Death (Original Vignette)

    A childhood walk for coffee becomes an unforgettable encounter with mortality when a stranger walks through the door and turns an ordinary morning into the narrator’s first witnessed death.

  • Ferrying (Original Vignette)

    On a snowy roadside, a battered truck waits to carry another passenger toward a place few survive for long. The driver has made the journey many times before.

  • Travels (Original Vignette)

    A weary Traveller enters the only lit bar in a dying town, buys the worst pint on tap, and refuses every offer to stay. By sunrise, he is already moving on.

  • Moonlight (Original Vignette)

    A suited traveller waits beneath the moonlight for a late-night bus, but an old man’s strange warnings hint that not everyone aboard is meant to reach the end of the journey.

  • The Court of the Fleshmongers (Philistine Neo-Noir #2)

    Heraclones is promised everything he wants, if he can retrieve one missing girl. But when a fellow fleshmonger decides that some flesh deserves to be free, Heraclones must decide what innocence is really worth.

  • I Crawl Through Filth (Original Short Story)

    Yerwik the Foul has been kicked out of town, replaced as the local eccentric, and left to rot in a cave full of sewage. Fortunately, the forgotten have a goddess of their own…and she has quests to hand out.

  • Tom’s Murder (Original Short Story)

    A suburban affair curdles into obsession, manipulation, and violence as one man insists he is the only person who truly understands the woman next door.