The first rule to writing is to write what you know about. No wonder I have so much time on my hands.

As a kid I was a liar for telling stories but as an adult, I’m known as a writer. No wonder I’m confused.

Grandma had an antiquated, mostly yellow umbrella rack, decorated with green eldritch beasts with long tentacles and red eyes. It resided behind her front door and held a lone, but very large looking black umbrella with an even darker, hook-shaped handle.

“You must never, under any circumstance, ever touch that umbrella – even if it is pouring rain, Sheila,” she often warn me.

As child, the rack unnerved me and because I was frightened by it, I never went near it. As an acknowledged tom-boy, I was used to playing in the rain without an umbrella or even a rain slicker, so I never gave the rack a second thought.

That is until the night I was beautifully styled in a long satin gown, my make-up perfect and red hair coiffed in a high bouffant for my senior year prom date with Herbert K. Smithhorne the Third. So, not wishing to get utterly drenched before I made it to his car and without thought to her warning, I grabbed the umbrella, opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

As I started down to the first step, I released the mechanism that kept the umbrella from opening and pushed the sliding tube upward. To my surprise the entire umbrella came undone, shooting forward off the handle, landing on the stone walkway a few feet from Herbie’s car and in front of where Herbie was standing.

He laughed at the silly sight and I giggled in embarrassment.

Without warning the black material became thick and hairy and sprang to life as it fully unfolded, then with it’s spindly metal legs, it dashed directly at Herbie. He tried to escape the attack and I screamed in horror.

The thing envelop him head to foot. He made a small squeaking sound that was quickly overpowered by a gigantic slurping and sucking noise and in a matter of seconds, it was over.

The hideous thing jumped to the car’s hood and turned to and fro, checking to see where it was and where it should go next. Then it hopped down into the roadway where a passing automobile ran it over, destroying it.

“Quit bellyaching! They’ll be here.”

“Ain’t no one coming to visit us.”

“I can hear their footsteps!”

“You can?”

“Yes, now dust off your tombstone – we’re dead, not bums!”

“Okay.”

Like making your bunk, regulation-style, or maintaining a proper gig-line, it’s a common item that every branch of the US military shares: socks.
They are a great source for individual training and discipline because the instructions are easy; pull your socks all the way up and keep them up.
The moral: find that common point from which to begin leading.
That is all.

“Yes, I know all about the legends…myths – whatever you wanna call them,” she said as she stripped down to her bikini. “They’re not true and I’m still gonna do it.”

It was dead of winter and the ice was a foot thick in the middle of Convict lake. With her boyfriends help, she had cut a hole in it large enough to slip into.

“I have a bad feeling about this, Babe,” the boyfriend complained.

“It’ll be fine. They’re jus’ stories – besides it’s too cold for a cold-blooded beast to be swimming about.”

“We don’t really know that its cold-blooded,” he countered, “What if dinosaurs were actually warm-blooded.”

“Oh, pish-posh,” she replied as she squatted by the hole and smiled, “Don’t forget to push record on your phone this time. I only want to do this once.”

He held the cellphone in front of him, recording her as she slipped her feet, then her legs through the hole, finally submersing her entire body, her head still above the water.

“See, I told you,” she smiled, looking up into the camera.

In a flash she disappeared beneath the surface. A multitude of bloody bubbles danced to the surface in her wake.

Damn it! I wasn’t gonna write today, but then I got this friggin’ plot-line in my head and 30 minutes later…

“They say the house is haunted,” the Realtor stated.

“More than likely rodents,” the buyer returned.

“No. We fumigated the building, so there shouldn’t be a rodent or insect in sight.”

“Either way, I’ll take it.”

Withing the month, he was moved in and starting to get settled. Geoff Mueller could not believe his remarkable fortune, finding an 1890’s 12-room Victorian mansion in the middle of nowhere Nevada, and though the house needed a number of repairs, ownership of such a prize thrilled him.

The middle of the fifth week and the strange noises began to emanate from the walls. As he sat in what had once been the library, he heard the scurrying of rats moving about, so he got up a banged on a nearby wall. The sounds dropped off.

This continued throughout the week and by Friday, Geoff drove to town to purchase as much rat poison as possible. Having returned home, he moved from room to room depositing the small, but deadly boxes along the molding along the floors.

It was Sunday evening and after a lengthy day of tearing out the floor and repairing the sub-flooring in the kitchen, Geoff grabbed a cold beer and retired to the library, which had become his favorite room in the old mansion. As he sat in his recliner, noted that the endless scurrying sounds had ceased.

Next he was shocked to see a large rat, the size of a Maine Coon, watching him from the far corner. The animal’s eye’s caused him to shiver, they looked so human.

He slowly closed the book he was reading and chucked it at the giant rodent, which retreated through a hole in the wall. Not hesitating, Geoff went to his work area and got a piece of discarded drywall and returning began the job of patching up the opening.

Twice more he saw the rat, with it’s seemingly human eyes, as it stared at him and twice more it escaped as Geoff threw something at it.

Finally, he drove into town and purchased a 22-caliber rifle. Five days later, having satisfied the state’s waiting period, he returned to pick it up.

“Hunting rabbits?” the clerk asked.

“No, rats – big ones,” Geoff responded, “Tried poisoning them but it didn’t work and there’s this huge one that’s as big as a small dog.”

The clerked looked at the address on the registration form, “Your the one that bought old Marshal Williamson’s place.”

“Yes,” Geoff answered.

“Legend has it Marshal Bart Williamson never took prisoners, they think he killed a couple hundred, maybe more as a lawman. S’posedly he took on the worst of the worst with orders to only bring’em back dead. He’s dead nearly a hundred years. The old house has been empty for nearly 40 years save for a few brave souls like yourself who’ve tried setting up housekeeping there.”

The clerk went on the tell Geoff how every tenant of the old building had abruptly moved and how it was rumored that an entire family of nine had disappeared back in the 30’s and were never heard from again. Ever the skeptic, he thanked the man for the information and the conversation, then with his new rifle under his arm, he left the store.

That night, Geoff sat in his accustomed spot, the weapon loaded and a round in the chamber, ready to shoot the giant rat, should it appear. It was nearly three in the morning when Geoff jumped awake after having fallen asleep in the recliner.

The noises come from behind and in-between the walls had become commonplace and Geoff had learned to sleep through it. However, it was suddenly quiet, a silence Geoff, whether conscious of it or not wasn’t accustomed to and he awoke.

He sat there in the dim light as the antique wick lamp sputtered to remain lit. He twisted the knob, pushing the flame higher, only to see the glow of the huge rodents eye’s staring, unblinking at him from the far corner.

Slowly and deliberately, Geoff lifted the muzzle of the rifle and aimed. The muzzle flash filled his eyes leaving him temporarily blinded and he had to wait to see if he’d earned his prize.

Within a minute, Geoff was standing over the cooling form of the enormous rat. He poked it with the gun barrel, then certain it was dead, picked it up by its tail and tossed it out the front door.

Satisfied, he closed the door and returned to the library to retrieve his chimney lamp and head up stairs to bed. He stopped in his tracks and his blood ran cold as he realized he wasn’t alone.

The lamp fell from his hand as he watched a hoard of vermin swarm him through the blaze that had begun from the spilled lamp oil. He screamed and writhed in terror and pain as they bit and gnawed his flesh away, before he was overcome, falling to the floor.

As the flames engulfed the library and then the entire Victorian, Geoff Mueller couldn’t help but think he’d made a mistake in killed the big rat – Marshal Bart Williamson – the only thing keeping the other rats – his dead prisoners — at bay.

My new word has been officially accepted and published…

When Wen Shu Tang died that summer, the heat over Dayton hung thick as boiled silk. The air shimmered above the sand, and the smell of pig waste from his farms carried for miles.

The town mourned him in the practical way small towns do, by gossiping. Most agreed that Tang had been a hard man, polite but private, fluent in English yet foreign in soul.

He had lived in the back of his laundry on Pike Street, above the ceaseless clatter of washing boards and steam. Some said they saw light in his window late at night, greenish, ghostly light, as if fireflies had taken to crawling along the glass in unholy patterns. Others dismissed it. Tang was an industrious man. Perhaps he read late, or experimented with detergents.

Only Brady knew better.

Brady was Tang’s only friend, a miner’s son who’d once hauled barrels for the laundry and stayed on as handyman. He was often summoned upstairs to fix leaking pipes or broken hinges, and though Tang always paid fairly, he never allowed him to linger.

“Some rooms are not for company,” Tang once said, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes.

After Tang’s death, the sheriff told Brady to collect the man’s belongings and find a relative in China. There were a few trunks of clothes, some ledgers, and jars of preserved ginger, simple enough.

Yet when Brady stepped into Tang’s quarters, the air was thick with camphor and decay. The walls felt damp, as though they sweated grief.

Behind a false panel in the pantry, Brady found a narrow door. Its key hung from a thin red thread nailed above the lintel.

The key was cold, too cold, even in August, and for a moment Brady hesitated. Inside lay a room Tang had never spoken of.

The place was small, low-ceilinged, and lined with dark lacquered wood. A circular table sat in the center, carved with dragons that seemed to writhe when the lamplight hit them.

Around the table were five figures, upright and still. Their bones gleamed faintly, bleached to the color of moonlight, dressed in tattered silks that had once been bright.

They were not whole skeletons. Each frame was a patchwork of mismatched bones, one with two left femurs, another with hands too small for its arms. Yet they were posed carefully, reverently, as if Tang had arranged them for dinner.

In the middle of the table stood a porcelain bowl filled with dust. It pulsed faintly, like something alive.

Brady staggered back, bile rising in his throat.

He told the sheriff, and within a day, the coroner came from Carson City. The discovery drew half the town to the laundry, people whispering in the streets while the deputies carried out the bones.

The coroner’s report came within a week: none of the remains belonged to Chinese individuals. Stranger still, no two bones matched, as every skeleton was a composite, an impossible gathering of the dead.

Speculation ran wild. Grave robbing, witchcraft, old-country, superstitions? Brady alone remembered Tang’s stories, told over cups of tea after long workdays, about “the hungry ones,” spirits that devoured identity and memory, leaving behind only fragments.

Tang had once said, “The dead are never gone. They are waiting for names.”

After the coroner finished, the bones got packed in a crate bound for Carson City. Brady signed the papers himself, relieved to see the wagon leave.

But three days later, word came that the crate had vanished somewhere between Silver Springs and the capital. No one ever found it.

Years passed. The laundry changed hands twice before burning in a freak fire.

But those who worked there after swore the walls sometimes creaked with voices, not words, but the soft, rhythmic sound of syllables trying to form. On windless nights, the scent of camphor and pig’s blood drifted through the ruins.

Brady dreamed of them nightly. In his dreams, the mismatched skeletons rose from their chairs and turned toward him. Their skulls were wrong, assembled from parts of many faces.

When they spoke, their jaws moved in discordant rhythm, and from the porcelain bowl came the sound of breathing, steady and deep. In one dream, Tang was there too, younger than he had ever been in life, his skin pale and waxen.

“You think you bury what you do not understand,” he said, “but it buries you instead.”

Brady woke to find sand in his bed and a faint mark on his chest shaped like the key he had once held.

Somewhere beyond the desert, in a place no map records, a table stands beneath a black sky. Around it sit six figures now, each dressed in rotting silk, waiting for another to join them.

The bowl in the center still breathes.

She was skilled with a scythe.
I sat on the side of the dirt and gravel road, watching her
With each sweep of the blade, she laid low another quarter sheave of wheat.
Stopping momentarily, she mopped the glistening moisture from her brow.
She smiled at me.
I smiled back.
She picked something from the ground.
Playfully, she tossed it in my direction.
I looked down and reached for it.
A gray pebble.
She was already upon me when I looked up.
Her eyes wide and perfect white teeth locked in a maddened grin.
She was skilled with a scythe.