All posts by Chris Loveless

The place is a zoo, I thought, a little disturbed, as more and more people packed themselves into Casey’s Irish Pub. A Karaoke DJ was going full swing in the corner, and what seemed like hundreds of milling bodies pushed and gyrated on the dance floor. Beer flowed endlessly from the taps as several pretty young waitresses rushed beverage after beverage to their customers. Continue reading »

She is at it again, I realized, as I slowly stirred awake in my bed. The glowing dial on the bedside clock read 1:40 AM, and the steady tapping in the walls was growing louder as Mary felt her way through the walls of my old farmhouse. I sighed, flipped the covers off of me, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.  My stun gun sat on the dresser. I took it with me as I left my bedroom and headed for the cellar stairs. Continue reading »

Her online screenname was “KnickKnackQueen”, and he shocked himself when he asked her to meet him; normally he only began to pursue his prey after talking in the chat rooms for a few weeks. This time, it took only a few hours for him to realize that the inevitable ending was likely to happen. He had to have her, and soon. And so when the knick-knack queen said maybe, she would think about it over night and let him know in the morning, he knew he had her. She gave him her phone number, and he gave her his. A real number, it would ring, but not anywhere around here. And no one was likely to answer a payphone in the middle of a rundown shopping center with only an IGA that was almost out of business on a Sunday morning. Continue reading »

“Bill, what is this?” asked Susan, kneeling in the damp freshly-watered soil between a row of string beans and another of tomatoes. I didn’t answer her at first, concentrating on carefully pulling out a clump of weeds, taking are not to disrupt the stalk of one of my tomato vines. The moist dirt reluctantly gave up the clump of prickly weeds, the roots dangling wetly beneath my gloved fist. Continue reading »