Hearsay Horizons

I was in bed by ten. A radio woke me, some kind of music. It repeated. Not my ringtone. It was two in the afternoon, and I had no messages from the boys. I shook myself into awareness. The music was one of Matt’s songs on loop, and it was only getting louder. Matt’s phone. Joseph wouldn’t call Matt’s phone instead of mine, but I had to check. I found my feet, then clothes, and then Matt’s phone.           Who is this?” I rubbed my chin with the nuckles of my other hand. Needed a shave; I needed a shave last night, but I couldn’t face the thought of a razor. I wanted a shower. I needed more sleep.           “Hey. Am I speaking to Matt Lavenza?” The call was tinny, and the speaker sounded distant. A lot of static and noise in the background.           “This is his father.”           “Mr. Lavenza,” the bored voice said, “Can I talk to Matt? I need to let him know what he needs to bring f...

Angela lowered her arm and rubbed her burning eyes with her free hand. Her body ached with weariness. It wasn't even late afternoon yet, but she only wanted sleep. Eric's mental issues could wait. The police must have seen these things already, looked through them, ensured nothing in them could help them find Eric. If he'd had some mental lapse that started with that patient in the hospital, who knew where he was? Joanne already didn't like Angela; without any other family, maybe Angela could piss off the social worker enough to judge her an unfit parent. It wouldn't be hard. Angela lifted the papers and let them slide into the box.                 Of course a picture, sliding out f the rest of the pages, fell on top. Of course it was that picture. Sunset, lake, silhouette. Angela handled it like a dead thing. Two people fishing in a boat. Before there were kids, there had been fishing together. She remembered Eric's laughter as he recounted this...

“Nonononononononononoooooooo--” The electronic voice cuts off suddenly as I jerk the AI core out of the squawkbox, and the fragile metal limbs fall limp. The rudimentary sensors on the small robot hull have been damaged by the monotone scream of pain. The incessant howling of the winds seems muffled compared to the robotic cries of resistance. One of the pointed limbs has snapped. I attempt to fix it, but I give up and break the rest of the digit off; it will not fold into the hinged plastic crate like the other three, and I must close the box before the winds pick up again. The limb goes into my knapsack along with the core. The glassy cube clinks against many of its brothers and sisters. I push myself to my feet and continue onward.                           There is no one left to name this place, but I knew it as Abida. Once a thriving town, it is now a desert. What once were buildings are now dust thrown like iron f...

I was packing up for the end of my shift when Henry found me. I’d given him my shift report to turn in so that I could get out of his way faster. We weren’t supposed to do that. I thought he’d changed his mind and had come to make me turn it in myself. His face was more troubled than that.          “You can’t make stuff up,” he said. He pushed the report at me like it explained. I took it back and gave it a skim. Nothing seemed wrong.          “Make up what? She really wouldn’t sleep until they let me dose her. She kept talking and crying…”          “Not that,” Henry said. “That.” He tapped my report. The skin assessment. “Yesterday during lunch she was, like, totally fine.”          “A lot happens in a day.” Henry leaned in toward me. More people were coming by now to punch in or out.          “She’s my first round. Can you hold on, and maybe come with me? D...

Angela dragged her suitcase up the driveway, following the others’ earlier flight toward the back door. She maneuvered up the single concrete step that was the stoop and up the short flight of stairs into the kitchen. Angela saw clear through to the living room through the doorway in the kitchen. Joseph and Matthew sat on the couch with their back to her. The TV was off, but their heads were bowed, and Angela heard muffled explosions and digitized dialog from their phones or games. Joanne the social worker gave Angela a brittle smile from her seat in the dining room.                “Welcome home!” she said. Angela finished pulling her suitcase behind her into the dining room as she considered a response. After the travel, the cops—an invective wasn’t worth it. Wasn’t worth seeing Joanne changed out with a cop to stay in the house; Angela hadn’t heard the car pull out of the driveway, and she wondered whether, if she pissed off Joanne, Joanne woul...

“Mrs. Lavenza, this is the Auburn Police Department. This is our third attempt to contact you. Your—Mrs. Lavenza, your husband is missing, has been missing for weeks, and your children need you. Please call us—”                              The first two attempts to contact Angela had been more formal. She hoped that this dispatcher, or cop, had been written up, or disciplined. Or fired. You don’t call someone two weeks after a man disappears and guilt her for not responding. Angela responded. She came back to cops, and two children staring at her like she was some strange animal.                              Both cops offered Angela their badges for scrutiny. Each had a coffee from the airport kiosk, and one had donuts. The woman carefully applied cream cheese to her bagel like she needed to distance herself from the stereotype. The ma...

The boundaries of what affect us change with time and location—and scientific progress. In the introduction to her collection titled The Female Thermometer , literary critic Terry Castle presents Sigmund Freud’s perspective that the uncanny arises from childhood fears and desires that have been warped into abstraction by our repressing them. Freud points out that fairy tales that feature toys that come to life or impossible circumstances never create the uncanny, because we leave reality at the door. Castle goes on to apply this to 18th century society: in the attempt to be more empirical, scientific and philosophical minds instead fertilized the fields from which the uncanny stems. More was impossible, so moments when those things seemed to intrude on our lives became more inescapable. The era sought to shine a light, but it only made the shadows more numerable.               Theoretically, this means that there are even more occasions in our ...

Is it possible to write an American Gothic novel? Southern Gothic explores issues of prejudice and race within peeling, decaying plantation houses, but can a writer more directly translate conventions and patterns from the original Gothic novels to her own work? Gothic novelists in the 18th and early 19th centuries wrote during a time of shifting class and religious boundaries. What scared their audiences may no longer scare us. Several events happened as I began my study in the Gothic genre that made me sensitive to what I needed to keep and leave behind as I rewrote my story, “Knowing is Half the Feast,” into an attempt at American Gothic, “Losing Face."            I spent the first 23 years of my life under the self-perpetuated illusion that I had some mental impairment people ignored due to my slight disability. I believed having this meant that each eccentric moment, every ordinary slip or mistake, was a symptom of a problem that no one else acknowl...

"I, Gail Cooper, being of neither sound mind nor sound body... it’s dark now. I thought that I would be able to see in the dark, that... I don’t know what I thought. It’s already getting difficult to remember myself. I am struggling to remember 'Gail.' I suppose I won’t care soon. 'It' won’t care, soon.                        "There was no supernatural development at puberty, nor is this transformation a culmination of nagging mysteries and doubts that have been building my entire life. I’ve always known that something was wrong. I’ve always had contact with them. I’ve always felt, somehow, that I have worn ill-fitting clothing. It seems as though my fingers have always felt as though they’ve been bulging out at the ends, splitting at the seams of flesh. My fingers are not my fingers. Twenty-one years of wearing someone else’s gloves. The sleeves of my person-suit have always been too short, and these lanky legs have never bee...

Each time I look at a piece of knitting or crochet—or something as mundane as a rubber band ball—I consider that it started from almost nothing. Just the base, a thread or a rubber band, wrapped around itself to create its own foundation until finally we have a sweater, or a mediocre tourist trap.                This feels like that. Staring into empty space that isn't even an abyss, and wondering whether, even if I can assemble a scarf, anyone will like it. I wouldn't even attempt this—in fact, I did stall out once before—but I recently stumbled across Captain Awkward . Her first few stitches were posts to the void discussing weird social behaviors; eventually a request for advice came in, and now she probably gets more questions than she can answer!                Hearsay Horizons primarily focuses on short stories, snippets, and flash fiction. I may post longer short stories in chunks, or it may be som...