Dark Entries
Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its
... See moreSarah Perry • Enlightenment
There had been a moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other
... See moreSusie Boyt • The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories
“Sweet keys of sun in the dusk of the toaster,” Anna said one morning at breakfast. I looked up at her, briefly, but made nothing of it, distracted as I was with the morning paper. The day continued quietly as we went about our routines, and other things she said didn’t cause concern. But in the afternoon, as she came in from the garden and wiped h
... See moreTessa McWatt • Vital Signs
I have entered sadness as one might enter a room – this after weeks of my heart having for its habitation a place as unyielding and flat as an Essex field in winter! John Bell says: What ails you, wife? He produces gardenias, hair-combs, lenses, bracelets in amber and jet, celestial almanacs, a white hen – reminds me that the whole exchequer of his
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