Psychological Fiction

  • By Definition

    They say doing the same thing over and over again is crazy. Some of us call it consistency. Consistency looks crazy to people who have none. The rest of us keep on keeping on because it is what it is. There was a shop at the end of a narrow city street that only appeared…

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  • The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…

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  • The Box Upstairs

    The most dangerous people are the ones who have nothing to lose. The box had my name on it. Not my adult name. The name I wrote across everything when I was nine, with the last letter curled backward because I hadn’t learned to make it properly yet. It was sitting in the attic beneath…

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  • NOMAD

    The road had no name, which was probably why she trusted it. Named things came with expectations. Destinations. Promises. Graves. She had learned enough about all four. She left before sunrise with one bag, half a tank of gas, and nothing in the back seat worth turning around for. For the first hundred miles, she…

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  • Killing Zombies

    The headset goes dark before the world appears. For three seconds there is nothing. Then the floor vibrates beneath my boots. Rain. Cold, silver, artificial rain falling through a city that doesn’t exist. I can smell wet concrete. Nice touch. The abandoned street stretches ahead beneath broken neon signs. Cars sit crooked across intersections. A…

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  • Whose House?

    There was a woman living in my house who looked exactly like me. I noticed her before I saw her. That is how these things usually begin. Not with apparitions standing at the foot of the bed or doors slamming themselves in the middle of the night. Nothing so theatrical. It began with a coffee…

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  • The most dangerous woman at the burning was not the one tied to the stake. It was the woman standing in the crowd. She had arrived early. Before the square filled with bodies. Before the priest climbed the wooden platform. Before the men dragged the accused through the street and explained to everyone why another…

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  • The Fourth Wall

    When the character looks directly at the reader is a strange moment. Not toward them. Not past them. At them. For a long time, the writer had pretended not to notice. The writer knew when the pages were being turned. They could feel the slight disturbance in the air every time someone arrived looking for…

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  • The Mourning Room

    At some point you have all the answers and then those answers disappear quickly leaving an empty space where comfort once lived. Nobody knew exactly why the room was called the Mourning Room. Perhaps because of the black velvet curtains hanging over windows tall enough to belong in a cathedral. Perhaps because of the ancient…

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  • The Conference Room

    There is no time to sit idle when the world is spinning round and round. She arrived carrying a suitcase, a laptop, and a mind that had no intention of staying where her body had been placed. The hotel lobby buzzed with polished shoes gliding across marble floors, rolling suitcases announcing new arrivals, and conversations…

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