Late at night, he sneak out. When he thinks I's sleepin'. When he thinks I don't hear him for being so exhausted from tendin' to the baby, who got a bad case of the colic.



But I hear him, his big bare feet slidin’ over the floor boards in the hall and the click a’his nails, grown long. When he come back to bed in the mornin’, his hair a right mess with brambles, there’s somethin’ sticky, dark, an' thick in his beard, an' his breath smell like old meat.



I try not to wonder…

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“I think you should leave,” she says, and she doesn’t know why, because a court sealed envelope run door-to-door by Sheriff Jackson hasn’t stopped Mike and she doubts her words will.

 

Mike grins—that feral cat grin that once made her feel wanted but now just makes her back and legs ache with the memory of bruises—and nearly breaks the…

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Head bowed, he breathes deep and chokes on the odor of flowers, the subtle cloying scent of lily and sharp tang of lilac settling on the back of his tongue.



She’s next to him, holding his arm; he can feel the soft swell of her breast against his tricep and the sturdy warmth of her body molded against him from torso to calf. She breaks away as the double doors open, twining her fingers with his, and guides him down the aisle to the resonant thrum of organ music; his gait hitches right… Continue

I learned a long time ago that the dead are all around us.



You know those flitting shadows you sometimes see out of the side of your eye—those things you dismiss as imagination (or the cat)?



Yeah, that’s them; and once you realize that’s them you get better at seeing them. They go from flitting shadows to lingering figures with shape and form and faces.



Of course, as you get better at seeing them, they start to notice you watching; a lot of them don’t mind, they’re… Continue