Other Stories and Other Stories is a collection of flash fiction and short stories written by me. Mostly they serve as practice. Recurrent elements have seem...
... whosoever reveals the secrets of [this] book to any save an initiate of the First Circle, a thousand plag[ues u]pon him, he shall be as the dead ... may he suffer the Eightfold Curse! First... ... On the night of the New Moon may an acolyte be initiated into the Eighth Circle and ... may he learn of its true name, which he must swear up[on pa]in of the Eighth Curse never to reveal to an…
A further curious case arose, recorded in a now obscure German medical journal in 1898. It seems that a certain Mr S. from the city of Düsseldorf had gone to a physician with a rather atypical complaint, that he had a song stuck in his head. Naturally, the physician dismissed him at once, as he had no wish to have his time wasted by such a trivial and everyday matter that harmlessly happens to…
There’s a wasp’s nest hanging from the upper sash of one of the windows outside my bedroom. I think it has been long since abandoned, but I haven’t taken it down. Perhaps I am mistaken and it hasn’t been forgotten by those who built it; but that isn’t my concern nor the reason I’ve left it there on the window sash. In truth, I think I have developed a great sympathy for the wasps—or I tell myself…
for how this all came to be? It’s not so interesting a story after all. You might imagine some writer, bored, or perhaps half-mad, but in that way wherein the line between madness and genius is so thick it could be seen from space; bored or half-mad, but if mad, mad only in an insipid way 1 . Perhaps that is so—we might as well assume it—after all someone had to have put it all in motion—so we…
In the 19th century, a most curious thing happened in both England and France—though unremarked upon at the time by the peoples of either—itself a curious thing given their intense rivalry in all matters in those days. For a number of years—precisely how many is a difficult answer to divine—this strange phenomenon drew on without comment, though in those lingering days one could hardly have…
Lately people have been coming home, whether from work or school or merely a five minute errand, to find that it is gone. Not that it has burnt down or that they’ve been evicted or any other such mundane, ordinary life thing; but that it is well and truly gone, and where once a house had stood there is now a void. Where once there was something, now there is nothing. No, not an empty space, but an…
[Editor’s note: There is no story here and it is not clear why it was written. Perhaps it was an experiment in automatic writing. In any case, it has been annotated for the reader.] I will tell you a story, the story of The. Oh, it’s only a story, reader, yes only a story, it’s says so in the title, let it come and let it go; yes, you know the creature demands the distinction be made between…
"The Labyrinth has many paths each leading to a new and wondrous sight." So the advertisements read and reviews rave. You can hear them, the so very satisfied participants in the mystery, gathered outside on their ways home after the great experience, talking. They cannot do justice to what it is that they have seen, and their words are almost incomprehensible to each other as much as to any…
Oh, please don't ask her name, I can't bear to say it—I can hardly bear to think of it—and yet I can't stop thinking it. She's dead now, the world is and shall be always bereft of her, dead and gone now and forever. I think so, anyway. No, no, I'm sure of it—I must be sure of it—I can't stop thinking about her death, I can't stop thinking about her being dead. It is getting late now, almost…
It was in the 1960s, I don't remember exactly what year, in December, and the harshness of winter had set in; snow had begun to pile up alongside roads, frost clung to trees, evergreen and dead and bare alike, and the winds swept a chilling air across the streets as if trying to confine all of humanity indoors. Outside, even in the heart of the city, nature, callous unfeeling nature, seemed given…