“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it – water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
From my old journal, The Daily Epiphany, August 14, 2000
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy
Triple digits
deadly coughing air
The full moon is a bloated orange
colored by windblown dust
I haven’t had a decent breath in weeks
The heat cracks the dried clay
cracks the calluses on the bottom of my feet
’til they are bleeding and burn in the morning shower
My gardening – if I did it
would consist of gluing brown desiccated leaves
back onto stickly branches
I finally watered my lawn
it smelled of wet hay
I sweat at work so much
I’ll change lab coats
when it soaks through my shirt and coat
the other day I went through four
When I drove home
I can lick my arm
and taste the layer of salt
I taste like a giant potato chip
And today’s flash fiction:
Lepidoptera by Clio Velentza
from Claw & Blossom
Bill Chance 