Vanishing Twin Syndrome
Some kid with a beard and a flannel, both in dire need of a wash, offered me Jungle Juice. I told him, no, I don’t want that. The stereo kept blaring that one unintelligible Nirvana song over and over, and I would have thrown my drink at the backwoods-grunge guy with the ponytail who had designated himself DJ, only I didn’t have a drink. An oversized white t-shirt containing a tiny white boy offered me an enticing plate of brownies, but I said no, I don’t want that. The music changed to something poppy, but I didn’t know how to dance to it. Everyone else did....
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Oct. 28 (Halloween)
For Halloween, this week’s contributors take us through dark passageways, where there may (or may not) be ghosts and other supernatural beings. In the short story “Infection” by Steven J. Bitz, a paranormal investigator and closet skeptic comes face to face with a truly terrifying experience. Deborah H. Doolittle’s poem, “The Ghosts in the Mountain,” tells the story not of a haunting but of the ghostly clues to a forgery. In a short story by Chris W. Martinez, “The Basement,” a college kegger goes terribly awry, thanks to a hidden...
Read MoreThe Huntsman
An amalgam of sea and cherries filled the woods. The August heat baked the scent into foulness, and I inhaled each glob of tart cherry and bitter salt with dread. It was the scent of my sister’s blood. I sat in a thicket, next to Sharon’s body. I used to call her Shar. Used to. Her head was gashed, her chest pierced, and her hands and arms covered in a sleeve of slash marks. Her body had been stripped. Blood cascaded down her cocoa skin. I tilted inward, as if my insides were being crushed like a soda can. At eighteen, I was six feet tall with a bulk of muscle, but my voice was washed in...
Read MoreThe Basement
“This party is going to be epic, really one to remember,” said Brad, leaning back in his crackling wicker chair. He and his three roommates wiled away the afternoon on the porch of their rented brick house. The house, battered and worn from years of hard use by college students such as them, lay tucked away in a leafy residential neighborhood about a mile from campus. Brad pushed his long, black hair from his eyes and crossed a sandaled foot over his knee. “How many kegs did you say we could afford so far, Birdman?” Birdman stretched his long, lanky legs out from the...
Read MoreThe Ghosts in the Mountain
In Zhang Daquan’s famous forgery, Drinking And Singing at the Foot of a Precipitous Mountain, the trees themselves have drunk too much, have climbed too high, have spun themselves around the winding paths one too many times. Scrub brush now clings on hands and knees while vertigo sets in. Everything is lush and leafy; even the pine trees gloat. Above them all, red chop marks float like bright kites on invisible strings. Just another scene from ancient China, courtesy of distressed silk. Distant hummocks, clouds, drifting smoke and mist, attenuated cascades all careen into varying shades...
Read MoreInfection
Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I can remember what my life was like before moving to Cedar Springs. My journal helps when I can think clearly, enabling me to record the good memories. But, too often of late, I emerge from a fugue, and my happiness quickly fades. In those times, I remember only that house and the terror I experienced one horrible night. When I first heard about the Hawthorne place, I thought it was going to be just another job. Move in, set up the equipment, take a few readings, then rationally explain the science behind bad wiring, mysterious drafts, and magnetic...
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