“Sometimes I reach out into the sky wishing that maybe just this once the laws of reality suspend and I finally touch a star,” the woman with thick glasses lazily sighed to herself in the back alley. Her arms displayed stories sketched with scar tissue; her features blurred her age to be somewhere between twenty-five ...

Lula Mae Darling melts behind the cash register of a gas station off Interstate 95. Through the translucent cigarette ads, a faded, peeling South of the Border billboard glows into the night; its hypnotic imagery pressures children into every parent’s nightmare: a roadside amusement pit stop money guzzler. She’s never been. She doesn’t even know ...

“Juliet Renee Andrews, don’t you even dare!” Nanny stormed her way over to the hospital bed, glaring at Mrs. Dubose, still glued to her chair in shock. “And shame on you Carol for making her think that way!” “She didn’t, Nanny,” Juliet soothed. “I’ve been thinking about this since he started showing up again. My ...

“Wait, wait.” You wave a hand in Charlie’s face, wishing there was a drink in your hand now. “He was eating the women?” Charlie nods. “Yup, he’d drag ‘em under and keep ‘em for a few years or so, then kill and eat them over the course of the next decade or so.” He frowns. “I ...

“So, did you find anything?” Charlie’s glass thuds to the worn table top, the ice clicking against the rim. “Not a damn thing,” he says, face scrunched up in vague annoyance. “There was nothing on that town that the museum didn’t already tell me. Went there on my first day.”  He frowned at the glass. ...

“You still want to hear all this?” Charlie asks. He’s switched to water now, offering to buy you a drink but not pushing when you decline. You motion for him to go on and he shrugs. “They found what was left of a body on my third day,” he begins. .     .     .    .     .     . ...

Part One It ends with a picture in a cold case file. A young woman, hollow eyed and limp, lying in a hospital bed. The ring finger of her right hand missing, gnawed off. Juliet Andrews was her name, also known as ‘Julie.’ She was hospitalized four days before her death, which occurred when she ...