My wife says I’m getting so fat I might soon need a girth certificate.

He had earned an ‘A’ in science because of what he now deemed his pet. Not much bigger than a pinhead when taken from the pond, the amoeba had grown to nearly an inch and was in need of a new jar.

Unfortunately for Ryan Brown, he found the jar a little too late as he came home to find the one with his pet in it busted and empty. He searched the floor of the closet where he had the organism, but could find nothing other than a puddle of dirty water.

It was later, after school had let out for the summer that Ryan began hearing odd sounds coming from the attic above his bed. A dull thump, followed by a dragging sound.

For nearly two-weeks this sound continued. However, when he told his parents of the strange sounds they refused to believe him, insisting it was simply his imagination.

Eventually, he came to believe it was his pet amoeba. It had somehow escaped its jar, but had crawled inside the walls of the house and evolved to the point it no longer needed water.

One afternoon, while everyone was away, the ceiling above his bed caved in. The contractor hired to repair the damage said that the timber had been worn away, as if something had been rubbing itself against the wood.

For the next few months and after school was back in session, Ryan heard tales from his friends about how that neighbor’s cat or this neighbor’s dog went missing. All the while, he slept soundly never hearing another weird noise coming from the attic above his bed.

Then one evening the next door neighbor’s two-month old baby Emma vanished…

A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk into a bar. The rabbit says, “I think this must be a typo.”

With my wife out of town, nothing on the tube, and a case of insomnia, I decided to go for a drive. Soon, I pulled into the store where group of radio stations had once stood.

While standing at the register, the woman behind the counter asked, “So, what brings you out at this time of the morning?”

The conversation started from there and she offered up the fact that the store sat on the old foundation of her favorite radio station, which continues to operate from elsewhere now. I couldn’t help myself, letting her know I used to work at that very station.

Then the conversation took a more serious bent as she leaned in and half-whispered, “Anything weird happen when you worked there?”

“Well, what do you mean strange?” I asked back, wanting more information.

“You know, strange things, like ghosts and stuff,” she answered.

By this time her co-worker had joined us, as I replied, “Yes.”

He asked, “Know anything about a black cat?”

“That’s Moon Kitty,” I answered, “She was the station cat.”

“We’ve seen her,” they said in near unison.

The woman added, “She darts around here all the time.”

“We had a guy who worked here for two nights,” the man said, “Swears he saw a woman over near that corner. He left and never returned.”

I looked at the corner and knew that it was the area of one of the older on-air studios.

“That would be Christine,” I said, “She committed suicide while on the air one late night. She’s lonely, harmless, but has a real sense of humor.”

For another 15 minutes I regaled them about all my strange experiences. And as I headed out of the parking lot, I felt satisfied to have others confirm what I had experienced for myself.

Brady had not seen Duncan Amen for nearly three months, not since the first snows began to touch the low desert. The man was a rarity around Beowawe, not of any Nevada tribe, but from far north in Canada, where the winters were said to whisper instead of howl.

His presence alone was strange enough to the locals, but what unsettled them most was his quiet, deliberate isolation.

“A man like that doesn’t need company,” old Saul at the pony station had once said. “Company needs him, and that’s the dangerous kind.”

Brady hadn’t meant to think of those words when he packed his kit and headed toward the desolate flats where Amen was last known to camp. But the thought kept returning, scratching like sand against his skull.

He followed the winding trail until it broke into a dirt track, and then followed that until it was no more than a memory between brittle sage and shale. When the wind stilled, he could hear it, the sound of ravens, hundreds of them, crying and clattering in the distance.

The noise grew until it pressed against the world like a storm. Brady stopped, climbed out, and stood listening.

The ravens’ chorus shifted rhythm, a kind of pulse in their noise that made his skin crawl. That was when he noticed the prints.

They were unlike anything that belonged to a bird or a coyote or even the half-mad miners’ tales of desert wolves.

The three-toed impressions, deep and oddly spaced, seemed heavy beyond reason. Brady crouched and traced the edge of one with his finger, the packed earth slick, as if something oily had seeped from the print itself.

He had seen such tracks before.

That memory came unbidden: a late summer night, the same area, and Duncan Amen’s calm voice saying, “You’ll never find peace if you keep looking into the places the earth wants forgotten.”

Now, standing amid the ravens’ racket, Brady felt that same cold bloom of dread. He started forward anyway.

The tracks led him to a low rise overlooking a shallow basin where the remnants of Amen’s camp stood, a wickiup framed in willow and draped with hides. From afar, it looked darker than it should, its surface shimmering faintly, like something breathing beneath the skin.

“Hallo!” Brady called, more to break the silence between the birds’ cries than to announce himself.

A shape moved in the doorway, and then Duncan Amen stepped out, tall and thin, his hair tied back with a strip of sinew.

“Brady,” he said, smiling faintly. “You always were the one to come walking into trouble.”

Brady stopped short. He’d expected wear, sickness, maybe loneliness, not this strange liveliness in the man’s eyes. And the hides stretched over the wickiup weren’t deer or elk. Their texture was unfamiliar, faintly scaled, the color of wet ash.

“You killed them?” Brady asked, his voice more hushed than intended.

Amen chuckled, a sound that didn’t entirely belong to laughter. “Weren’t as quiet as they thought.”

The words seemed to ripple through the air, echoed by the ravens above.

Brady ducked through the low doorway, following Amen inside. The dimness was immediate, but there was a glow, faint, greenish, not from firelight but from the hides themselves, as they pulsed.

The interior was orderly, though strange: bundles of herbs, a circle of white stones, a pot of blackened resin. At the center of it all lay a hollow in the ground, lined with odd feathers.

The scent of metal and decay hung heavy, and beneath it, something older, a mineral tang that reminded Brady of storms underground.

“What is this, Duncan?”

Amen knelt by the hollow. “Something that was buried long before either of us was thought of. It moves still, sometimes. The beasts you saw, they came from it, like bones rising to complain about their graves.”

Brady felt the world tilt a little. “And you killed them?”

“Had to.” Amen touched one of the glowing hides stretched above. “Their flesh burns like cold fire. Keeps the rest from hearing us.”

“The rest?”

The man looked up, and for a moment Brady saw the reflection of the green light in his eyes, two tiny suns flickering in bottomless wells. “Listen.”

At first, all he heard was the ravens. Then, beneath that, another sound, low, resonant, like the hum of earth shifting deep below, which rose and fell in rhythm, almost like breath.

Brady backed toward the doorway. “Duncan…what did you dig up?”

“I didn’t,” Amen said. “It dug itself up. I just told it no.”

The sound grew louder, swelling until the hides began to tremble on their frame. The ravens outside broke into chaos, a single black cloud spiraling into the gray sky.

Brady stumbled out of the wickiup and fell to his knees, staring as the ground around the camp began to shake, slow and wet, like the heartbeat of a buried thing. Amen stood in the doorway, arms raised, chanting words that cracked and shimmered in the air, not English, not any tongue Brady knew.

The glow from the hides brightened, each pulse striking in time with the deep rumble beneath. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the noise ceased.

Silence rolled across the flats. The ravens were gone, and the wind held its breath.

Brady stood, his throat dry as dust. “Duncan?”

The man lowered his arms. “It sleeps again,” he said softly. “But not forever. Nothing that old ever sleeps forever.”

The hides still glowed faintly in the twilight as Brady turned and began walking back toward his Mustang. He didn’t look back.

But as he went, he thought he heard, faintly, from the darkening sky, the soft laughter of ravens, echoing the sound he wished he’d never heard again.

Man with Coronavirus seeks woman with Lyme Disease.

The sky was a darker pallet of stars now, and he had no way of knowing how long he’d lain at the base of the hill. In fact, Bobby Davis was slow to recall how in the world he’s come to to be there in the first place.

Reflecting as hard as he could, all he could mentally picture was that he’d parked the vehicle, got out and walked to the edge of the precipice. After that everything was general blank until he awoke.

Instead of worrying over what had happened, he need to be in the present so he could safely assess himself for any possible injury before trying to roll over and stand up. Wiggling his fingers, he found that they worked; that same for his toes.

Slowly he moved every part of his body, finding he hadn’t broken anything. Davis concluded he’d jus’ ‘rang his bell,’ exceptionally hard before he rolled from his side onto his back and sat up.

“Holy crap,” he mumbled as he looked up the escarpment from where he’d tumbled. He could see where his body had left it deep impression in the red sand, between the even redder rocks, on its way down.

How he’d missed those rocks, Davis thought, “Only God knows.”

“Hello?” he finally asked, speaking into his headset, “Anyone there? Can you hear me?”

Nothing. Then he realized it had fallen off on the way down, so trying to talk to base was an impossibility.

He recalled a conversation from a while back, saying, “These head pieces are shit. They fall off and they stop working.”

“Well, don’t let it fall off then,” he was told by some smart-ass.

At least Davis knew where he could find it. Getting to it was impossible for the time being, so he set the idea aside.

Finally, he stood up and look at his surroundings. He could try to climb up the way he’d fallen down or he could find an easier and safer route to get back up to the Rover.

“Not the most auspicious beginning to a Mars mission in the history of manned-flight,” he chuckled as he limped, stiff and sore along the bottom edge of the massive, and thankfully smaller unnamed crater, “Maybe they’ll name it after me.”

“Hey, the program for recording sound is on the fritz,” Tom told Chief-slacker.

“Okay, I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Slacker said, hanging up the phone.

Half-an-hour later Slacker arrived and went immediately to work to fix the problem. It took him two-hours and several reboots of the computer to finally get the system to work.

Without waiting to see if the system would remain in operation, Slacker left the radio station saying, “I’m taking my wife and kids to the state fair. Give me a call if you need me.”

Less than 20 minutes after Slacker left, Tom sat at the desk in the newsroom editing sound for the morning news show. Before he could complete a single project involving the recording of two wraparounds and two features, the system went belly-up again.

Once again he dialed Slackers number. Tom explained that the same problem as before was happening.

“Well,” Slacker said, “Keep rebooting the computer. I’m at the fair with my family. Call me if you still can’t get it to work.”

An hour later, the program that recorded and played back audio still would not work. So Tom called Slacker again and told him it was still down.

“Yeah, well I’m still a the fair, Jus’ keep trying,” Slacker said, hanging up on Tom before he could protest.

Reboot after reboot and the program failed to work. At midnight came the shift change.

“What do you mean you don’t have any sound,” the oncoming jock shouted, “You should have had the Engineer down here working on it.”

“I did,” Tom told him, “And he left after it began working and has refused to come back because he’s at the fair with his kids.”

“This is bullshit,” he shouted at Tom, “Then you should have called Mr. Bully and have him deal with it.”

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Tom responded, “And get my ass chewed for disturbing him for something like this.”

“You’re an asshole, Tom. Plain and simple,” he growled.

“No,” Tom shot back as he headed out of the office door, “We work for assholes who don’t do their jobs and we don’t get paid enough to deal with their shit and ours too!”

The following morning Tom got a call at home from Bully, “I understand you didn’t call the Engineer to have the sound problem fixed?”

“Yes, I did,” Tom answered, “But he only came down the one time and then gave me the excuse that he was at the fair with his kids and wife.”

“That’s not what he says,” Bully stated.

“Check his cellphone and you’ll find he’s lying to you,” Tom said.

“Anyway, you left your relief with extra work because there was no sound available,” he continued.

“No,” Tom returned, “Chief-slacker did.”

“I’m gonna have to sort this out,” Bully offered, “Look of an email from me.”

That was the last Tom heard of the situation. However he refused to trust Chief-slacker ever again, something he already knew to do when it came to anything Bully said or did.

while i could not sleep
i counted all your freckles
my moon sleeps brightly

There was something odd about the lone Elk as it moved through the dense scrub. Jackson watch it through field glasses for a time, but could not put a finger on its strangeness.

Then aiming his glass southward, he located his hunting companion and friend, Richie near the base of a hillock. The man’s orange vest stood out against the stark brownness of the high desert landscape.

Richie was stalking the same Elk which continued to graze until the hunter drew within 30 yards. He raised his 30-30, aiming to bring the animal down, then with a quick and panicked jerk, dropped the rifle.

“What in the…” Jackson exclaimed with a loud gasp.

Jackson watched as Richie hastily retreated, crawling till he was certain the Elk was unable to be see him, before standing and running. It would be days before searchers found Richie, hiding in a narrow cave, mumbling about ‘how human the eyes of the Elk seemed’ as it looked back at him.

Richie was institutionalized, so Jackson said nothing about how he’d witnessed the Elk stand on two hind legs and walk as if human. Nor did Jackson utter a word about the pair of human eye’s that stared menacingly at him from the face of an Elk.