Hope y’all enjoy. Cheers.

-Mason

Cole Barron thought the man was a pompous little shit. The red neck tie around his throat was knotted so tight it was as if the small man’s head was going to swell and explode, and he had to keep it tied off like a water balloon. Under the tie was a disgusting beige short sleeve shirt tucked into too-loose khakis. He probably had a job working behind a desk tapping away at keys in a cubicle no bigger than a closet. There were probably framed photos of his kids beside his monitor in dollar-store frames. There were, most likely, unopened granola bars in his desk next to a Tupperware salad from yesterday. He struck Cole as the type of guy who eats out for lunch and tells his wife the healthy greens she packed him were to die for, really. His kids probably loved him but didn’t like him and it had been a lifetime since he last brought his wife to orgasm but yet he emptied into women whose time were bought and paid for by the same job that was killing him. Judging by the folds in his neck and the redness in his cheeks, and the way he breathed just trying to tell the waitress to bring him a beer, Cole didn’t think that death was too far off. Couple years, tops.

“So can you do it?” The man asked.

Cole looked up, realizing he had been talking while Cole faded away into his own mind, figuring out this strangers backstory. “Hmm? What?”

The man sighed. “I was told you were a professional. Did somebody lie?”

“No,” Cole said, shaking his head and nodding his thanks to the redheaded waitress as she reappeared with their drinks and passed him his whisky, “I just don’t care for details. They weigh me down. And you bore me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You mentioned the money. Let’s talk about that,” Cole said. He had a certain way with people that most folk would describe as off putting. He made people uncomfortable. In his line of work, there were pros and cons to that, he supposed, but for the most part he found little joy in mundane conversation, in the rambling chitter-chatter of everyday life. Sentences should be informative or they are wasted.

The man sighed. “I can pay you ten now. Ten when it is done.”

Cole put his glass down before taking the first sip and stood up. “Have a good night, fella.”

The man was taken aback. “Wait!” He stood and reached over the table, gripping Cole’s sleeve.

There was a static moment shared between the two men as Cole looked into his eyes, without saying a word. There’s an unspoken language used by animals that is communicated between predator and prey that exists to tell prey they are in danger. Cole was fluent. The pudgy little man released his grip and began nervously adjusting his tie and clearing his throat.

“I can do,” he coughed as if the words were painful and looked around to make sure no one was listening before leaning closer and turning his volume down to a whisper. “I can do twenty and twenty. Better?”

“Thirty and thirty,” Cole said.

The man grew somehow even redder in the face. He resembled a young Joe Pesci, if Joe decided he’d rather be a limp-dick office troll instead of the scariest man in the world under five-four. For a moment it seemed the man was going to tell Cole to go fuck himself. Cole would be fine with that. There were always more jobs. They chased him, it wasn’t the other way around.

“Fine,” the man spit through gritted teeth and motioned for Cole to sit back down. Cole did.

The man kept darting his eyes around the bar as if he was expecting someone, a cop maybe, to suddenly charge them and slap cuffs on their wrists, turning his pitiful life upside down. That fear was annoying but so common in his clients that Cole only noticed it if it were absent. When someone was hiring him for a job, a lack of nervousness was a sign that the person was one of a handful of things: used to this (which is usually okay), a psychopath (okay, can be a headache), or a cop (code red, worst case scenario, all hands on deck, mayday mayday mayday).

“So, here’s the—”

“Nope,” Cole said, taking a long swig from his whisky and cola. “Nothing here. Specifics are going to be on a flash drive. You’re going to leave it here,” Cole pulled a business card for a local sub shop out of his jacket pocket with a pen, clicked the pen to life and scribbled down an address, and slid it across the table to the man, “at noon tomorrow along with the first thirty. All twenties, nothing larger.”

“Oh, okay,” the man said. “A drop. A dead drop, right? That’s what they call this? I watched The Wire.”

Cole didn’t answer. Behind the man, the redhead waitress was talking to a man that looked incredibly similar to a wrestler Cole liked as a boy. A big, mean son of a bitch with a bald head and a gut the size of a tractor tire. He had the same goatee and all. In fact, Cole could be quite sure it was the same guy. So sure in fact he was tempted to go over right now and ask for an autograph.

“Hello?” The man said, snapping his fingers in front of Cole’s face to grab his attention back to him.

“I’m not a dog. Snap at me again and I’m prone to snap back.”

The man  stared at his own hand as if it had betrayed him. He had been raised, it seemed, in a house without consequences. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Cole finished his drink and dug around in his coat for his wallet. “I need a name, address, place of work, personal details, physical descriptions. Photos if possible and any links to their social media would be a boon. Anything you got, I need. After you get it on the flash, clean it from your hard drive. Clean it well.”

“Okay yes I can do that.”

“Can you?”

“Mhmm,” the man nodded. “Yes I can.”

Cole studied him for a moment, leaning forward on his elbows. The man squirmed under his gaze. “Can you?”

The man looked down at his hands and fiddled his thumbs. He thought for a moment, really turning the question over in his mind. When he looked back up, Cole was pleasantly surprised to see the tiniest bit of steel and  determination in the man’s eyes. “Yes I can.”

Cole nodded. “Alright then.”

He made to stand and leave, and almost forgot himself. “One more thing.”

The man looked up at him.

“I have rules. When I get that drive, you better hope you don’t break any.”

Again, the man squirmed in his seat. He looked like a little boy trying not to piss himself. “Like what?”

“Break one and you’ll find out,” Cole said. The man looked confused. Cole didn’t have a problem with that.

The man tried to stand but Cole slowly brought his hand down to tell him to stay. “Wait ten minutes at least before following me. Drink your beer. Enjoy yourself.”

The man did what he was told and took a shallow swig from the bottle. Cole motioned to the big guy behind them. “He look familiar to you?”

The man didn’t understand. He turned sideways in his seat. “That guy,” Cole said, “big one with the chrome dome. He ring any bells?”

The little man studied the big one and then shook his head. “No, I can’t say he does.”

Cole jingled some coins in his hand before tossing them on the table. “Damn. Too bad.”

Cole Barron left, leaving the pompous little shit alone and bewildered, with only his beer for company.

The next day at noon, Cole was sitting underneath a maple tree in the park on top of a picnic table. He sat with his ass on the table itself and his feet perched on the seat. He gripped a steaming cup of gas station coffee in a flimsy paper cup. Cole drank plenty of coffee, maybe too much if he were being honest, but he didn’t drink it for the flavour. He needed the caffeine and had long ago surmised that if he wasn’t going to  enjoy it anyway, there was no need to pay good money for it. Eight bucks for a dairy filled, too-sweet artificial mocha-frappa-bullshit just didn’t make sense to him. Shitty instant java from a dispenser next to the chips and day-old hot dogs was good enough.

About ten yards in front of him was a tall wrought iron fence. Its black bars were ancient and most were either rusted, coated in splats of pigeon and ‘gull shit, or covered in spray paint. On the other side of the bars was Stanley Street, a mostly commercial road that sliced through the back of the city and looped up and around the edges of the park, framing it before joining back up with the highway on the other side. On this end the buildings that lined the sidewalks across from where he was seated were small and old, built at the beginning of the city’s life. They were made from brick and wood, not the concrete and steel of the newer ones. Most were small clothing boutiques, electronic stores, and a single book store. That always made Cole sad—there weren’t many things in the world more pleasurable than an afternoon spent in the stacks, loading up a cloth bag with new and used books, perusing the sections you knew like the back of your hand and gazing in wonder at the ones you didn’t. But they were a dying breed now and he knew in his heart that eventually there would come a day when the very idea of a physical book store will be just a fanciful memory.

The particular shop he was watching wasn’t the book store. It was a coffee shop. Not the massive chain with the scantily clad mermaid on the cups, but a local shop that brewed their own blends and while they still charged more than Cole preferred and he rarely ever patronized them, he still gave them his respect. Running a small business is hard stuff, Cole knew this first hand.

Cole checked his watch as he surveyed the scene. 11:58am. The sidewalk was alive with commuters on their lunch breaks. Mostly men in work shirts and the occasional button-down with a few suits and coveralls splashed in for good measure. There were women dressed in pantsuits and blouses. The door to the shop chimed and a woman in her mid-20s or thereabouts stepped out into the sunshine pushing a stroller with a smiling baby boy strapped inside of it. The little boy had what Cole’s mother had called a puzzle-piece smile. His cheeks were coated in the sticky chocolate of the donut he was wetly chomping into as his mother watched and smiled. Hers was the kind of smile Cole called a put-you-on-your-ass smile. The kind that didn’t care whether the person wielding it was a man or woman, it would and could charm you right on to your ass. The men and women who frequented Cole’s bed—there weren’t many these days, admittedly—almost always had those same smiles. He has a type, he supposed.

He watched the woman walk away and checked his watch again. 12:01pm. Late. The little man was late.

A short cramp of frustration began to surface in Cole’s chest but he quelled it for now. He was punctual as a rule—every second mattered and if one couldn’t respect that, then Cole did not need to respect them. He understood however that things happen. In his youth, this would have been the drawn line. A single moment of truancy and he would already be in the wind. But with his years of experience he developed an ability to understand that not every human was like him. Sometimes folk had a watch or phone set to the wrong time. Sometimes there was traffic. These excuses never applied to him because he didn’t allow them to, but he was an outlier in this.

So maybe the little man’s watch was slow. Or maybe he was stuck in construction, God knows this city is seemingly always under damn construction. Cole would allow him a few more minutes.

But that was it. And if the little man did show up, Cold considered if the price was going up. Cole Barron was not the type of man who enjoyed having his own time wasted.

Just as he was getting ready to let the frustration win and leave, he spotted the little shit coming up the sidewalk. He almost laughed at the sight. The man was hurrying like he was on the cusp of sprinting, a brown  paper bag clutched to his chest with both hands. He was dressed the same as he was the day before—bland colors and lifeless fabric—except now he had on large black sunglasses and a Maple Leafs cap pulled down tight across his forehead. He looked how he probably imagined he should look, just as the movies had instructed him. But to anyone with a single ounce of common sense he looked like the exact type of person about to perform a dead drop. Cole laughed and drank the last bit of the acidic black gas station coffee.

The little man made his way to the trash bin outside the coffee shop and began looking around as if he were afraid he was being watched. Cole was hoping the little man would spot him and they could share a polite wave. He could see the humour in that. But the little man did not see him and quickly stuffed the bag into the trash before turning and damn near running away.

After the little man was gone, Cole got up and went around the iron fence and jogged across the street, raising a hand to thank the taxi that stopped to let him cross. Once at the trash bin, Cole reached in with the coffee cup, exchanged it for the bag, and left.

It was as if he were never there.

Cole’s house was nothing to write home about and that was completely on purpose. Hiding in plain sight was his motto. If one gave no reason to be suspected, they never would be. It worked for him so far and he was a firm believer in not fixing what wasn’t broken. It sat off the side of the road in a neighbourhood no one would think was rich, but where nobody would be scared to walk from their car, either. His house was surrounded in hip-tall hedges and shrubs. It was a single story ranch style that he bought for way under asking price. He was a haggler when he needed to be.

The attached garage was the biggest selling point for him. He liked being able to slip his car inside and step out into heat, especially in the colder months or at night. The cold never took to him no matter how experienced in it he became.

Cole was sitting in his office, eating a peanut butter sandwich and scrolling through the files on the little man’s USB drive. Generally speaking, Cole usually has his mind made up at first glance. Usually just a single photo, a base description, sometimes just a name is all it would take. Deciding if he wanted the job really was quite simple.

And this time was no different.

Even though he knew his next move, he still liked information. That was the key to his success. No manner of training or experience could ever possibly beat plain and simple knowledge. So he read on, and he ate, and gathered. He learned addresses, workplaces, hobbies, and family members. By the time he reached the end of the last document he had a full grasp on the situation. But he went back up to the top and started scrolling again. He repeated this three times.

When finished—of both his research and his sandwich—he closed his laptop with a plan fully set in his mind. Sometimes his job required additional research outside of what is usually contained within the initial dossier. But the little man had proved to be quite adequate in gathering information and Cole didn’t need to consult maps, building blueprints, bus schedules. Nothing like that. By the time his laptop closed, he knew every single move he was about to make.

He went to his garage.

Bolted to the far wall was a workbench, above which hung all manner of tools one would expect to find in most garages. Hammers, saws, power drills. Things of that nature. The only real difference was Cole was a bit more organized than your average home craftsman. Every item had a place and he couldn’t bear the thought of something being hung in the wrong spot. When he was neck deep in a project he could reach up without looking and know exactly where the intended tool would be. His palm would touch it and his fingers would wrap around the handle without his eyes ever leaving his birdhouse or flower box.

The current project was a medium sized lighthouse he was building for his front lawn. So far he had only finished the base of the tower but he was hoping to have the rest finished by the end of the week. Therefore, the bench was littered in pieces of lumber and sawdust. Seeing his space so filthy and unorganized made his skin crawl but there was only so much he could do about that, yes? Only so many hours in the day.

He knelt under the bench removing a blue camping cooler. It was empty and light. He slid it out of the way. Behind the cooler was a plastic milk crate stuffed with old tools and bits of scrap metal. That too he slid out of the way. The entirety of the garage was unfinished walls with patched holes and crack-filled lines and indentations. Paint cans sat against the wall to the left of the entrance atop sheets of plastic. He had begun painting the garage five years before when he bought the place. It would be finished when he retired. For now, he needed the space to seem unfinished, a work in progress.

It would give him a reasonable explanation for the square chiseled into the wall behind the milkcrate.

With a light, quick smack of the back of his hand, the square fell out of the way revealing an alcove cut into the wall. Cole reached in and gripped the hard plastic shell of the case and pulled it out. It was rectangular in fashion and resembled a carrying case for some brass instrument. The kind you see school children lugging on to buses.

He stood with the heavy case and placed it on the bench next to the lighthouse base. He winced at the twinge of stiffness in his back and tried not to ruminate on what that might mean for his longevity.

He popped the latches and opened the box. Inside, pressed into a memory-foam mould that perfectly folded around the metal, was a Beretta 92 pistol and two magazines. Besides the gun and ammo, there was also a matte black carbon steel tomahawk. Its head was thin and pointed in the rear, with a bearded front blade. Cole took out the Beretta and checked the chamber, making sure it was clear—of course it was, he never stored it incorrectly—before looking down the barrel and checking the sights. He did not think he was going to need the gun, most times he didn’t, but he had a firm belief in being ready for whatever. He would rather have all his tools, and have them all in complete working order, and never need them than to find himself in dire need of one and have it jam or otherwise malfunction. Preparedness kept him alive, among other things.

Satisfied with the shape of the pistol, he palmed a mag into the grip and set it to the side on the bench. Next was the axe. It was a deceivingly heavy thing. Being so short and thin, it looked as if it should weigh close to nothing. Being a tomahawk (or throwing axe) it was light relative to full sized axes, but it still weighed much more than one would think. Cole spun it in his hand, transferred it to his off hand, tested the weight. He ran a finger gently along the blade and was not satisfied with its edge.

There was a whetstone and leather strap in the toolbox next to the bench. Cole retrieved it and began sliding the axe up and down the stone before honing it on the strap. When done, he traced his fingers along the edge again and smiled as a thin layer of his flesh peeled away with next to no pressure applied. It fluttered to the ground like a freshly shaved piece of parmigiano reggiano. 

Cole loaded the items back into the case and brought it into his house. In his bedroom he placed the case on his bed and turned to his closet. He cycled through the rack and grabbed the clothes he knew were waiting for him, the same he wore for every job. A black long sleeve shirt, black jeans, and on the floor a pair of black steel toe boots. Besides the colour, these clothes were generally not suited for his line of work and he had colleagues in the past rib him for it. But if things went sideways on the job, he preferred to be dressed like any other Joe Blow out and about at night. A tactical vest and cargo pants would give him away. A middle aged man who hated bright colours was a much easier sight to sell.

Once ready, he did what may be the part of this ritual he hated the most. With his pistol slung in its holster under his armpit and the axe clipped to his belt just under the small of his back, he hit his knees under the open window in his bedroom. Outside, the moon was full and stared back into him like a watchful eye. The void of night watched over him thickly and he could feel its touch on his skin.

There were many Gods in the history of man. In truth, that history was coloured with the blood of those who chose the Wrong God, the Right God, and the nonexistent Gods. As a species, humans have worshiped and killed for an innumerable number of them. Cole found this absurd. There were many reasons to kill a person. Many reasons to plunge a blade into someone’s chest. Some did it for vengeance, for rage, for money, for the glory of a nation that would never glorify them back. But to kill someone because their God was different from your own? That was ludicrous.

Cole prayed. His God was not one of substance, or of traditional worship, or one of prayers at all, really. His was the darkness between blinks, the hole at the end of the universe. The pauses between breaths. The gaps in memory where the demons we repress lay dormant and waiting. Cole’s God was the one behind us all. And His order, the order to which Cole dedicated himself all those years before, they were His true conduits. Cole did not kill because his God demanded it—he killed because he was good at it. His God was the absence of life and he prayed only because his offering needed to be known  and seen.

All of this, every time, was just another offering.

If he was being completely honest, this job wasn’t that difficult. The movies and books liked to make it seem like he was working against the odds all the time, going  up against the worst of the worst, the most dangerous monsters this world had to offer. Although there were exceptions — and trust him, those exceptions were big — the majority of his gigs were no harder than any other freelance position. After a while, it was all muscle memory.

The house was in a middle-class cul-de-sac. Mostly double story houses with neatly trimmed lawns and above ground pools. Some had Christmas lights up perennially along the gutters so that they’d be ready for next year. One had a Liberal Party election sign staked beside their driveway while another had a Conservative Party sign. They were neighbours, and shared a paved driveway.

The end of the road, the loop, was still in development and had no houses lining it. There was a new foundation surrounded by bundles of lumber and parked construction equipment and the rest was brush, trees, and a field of stones and brown gravel. Across the field was an elementary school that stood harsh and red against the night sky behind it.

The majority of the street was lit from arc sodiums that bathed the old grey pavement in soft orange light that didn’t dare stretch into the shadows of the lawns. A single section of the loop, next to the field, had no lights. This is where Cole parked. The house was a few doors up the road but while someone may see him walking, that was less noteworthy than a strange car parked outside of the house of the recently deceased.

Hiding in plain sight was the plan. Cole walked up the street, hands in his pockets, smiling. He expected to pass someone out on their step having a smoke, or someone walking their dog one last time before bed. But fortunately, he passed no one. The night was still.

When he arrived at the house, he quickly surveyed it to see if there were any changes between it and the Google Maps image he found on the web. Besides a new rose bush beside the front door, everything looked more or less identical. Two floors, a slanted roof, 6 windows in the front; 4 on the top floor, a wide picture window for the living room on the first along with what Cole assumed was probably a dining room window. The upstairs lights were on. The dining room was dark. Flashing pale lights came from the living room, indicating someone was watching television. The curtains were drawn preventing Cole from ascertaining any specific details.

That’s okay, though—it means they can’t see him either.

It doesn’t take him long to get inside. The security system wasn’t armed as people were home. Cole did his due diligence and made sure there were no outdoor security cameras or the ever popular Ring doorbell cameras. Sure, he could wear a mask and render these worries moot, but again, he was hiding in plain sight. Masks messed with that. And he just didn’t like them. They irritated the sensitive skin on his cheeks.

It took him all of thirty seconds to pop the lock on their backdoor. A moment later he was in their dimly lit kitchen. He listened intently and caught the opening song to a popular 90’s sitcom coming from the living room. He could picture the main cast falling over one another in a fountain and he almost found himself clapping along when the song called for it. Muscle memory was a bitch.

He pushed himself against the kitchen wall and slowly, slowly, peeked around the corner. A sectional couch divided the room in half. A woman and a young girl sat on opposite ends, both facing away from the kitchen. He knew the girl was 13 from the dossier. She was lost in her phone. The woman, the girl’s mother, was sipping a glass of rosé and watching the mounted flat screen.

He took a moment to look at them. This would probably be their last somewhat happy moment for a long time coming. But they didn’t know the service he was offering. They didn’t know the gift he was bringing them.

Cole moved fast and soft through the room and up the stairs, the sound of the television fading below him until it was nothing but the whispers of familiar strangers on the other side of the floor. Moving up the stairs, Cole knew this was where it could get messy. Ascending stairs was dangerous work. It gave any potential enemy the high ground and the ability to see or hear him before he saw them. So he moved quickly and reached to his armpit, palming the gun. He wasn’t concerned with drawing it now and keeping it bared and ready; he was quite positive that should he need it, he’d have it ready before the enemy even got close. Muscle memory, again. He would be faster.

He made it to the top of the landing without needing his firearm. The hallway was dark and lined with pictures of a happy family framed in matching silver. He noticed every picture was professionally taken. No candids. If this family was naturally happy and not artificially, there was no photographic proof in these portraits.

The photos told a story he was already well aware of — a husband and wife, a son and daughter. The son was older than his sister but not by much, being 15. Cole counted five doors in the upstairs hallway. Two belonged to the children (one had the glow of rainbow lights coming from underneath and the sound of machine gun fire so he knew the boy was behind it) and the remaining three were most likely the master, a bathroom, and some sort of spare room or office. This last room had light spilling from under and he figured that was where the target was. He hoped it was the master or office, he truly did not want to catch the man on the toilet.

Cole put a hand on the knob and turned it slowly, making sure to take as much time as possible. Slow meant quiet.

He pushed the door open. The room was small and painted plainly, the walls lined with empty shelves and dusty encyclopedias. A single lamp on the desk illuminated the room in yellow light. Besides the occasional family picture (copies of the same ones in the hallway) the only other thing on the walls was a signed and framed Maple Leafs jersey.

Behind the desk, the little man typed away.

He didn’t hear Cole enter and it was only when Cole closed the door gently behind him and spun the lock on the knob that he looked up. The colour drained from his face like a plug had been pulled in his ass and it all leaked out. His mouth fell open and gaped like a trout, his lips working to say something. Cole shook his head and made his way to the chair opposite the desk.

“Don’t be too loud. I didn’t exactly knock,” Cole said, and then motioned to the chair, “may I?”

The man looked bewildered. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and nodded. “Uh, yeah. Of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” Cole said and sat, unsheathing his ax and placing it on the desk so he wouldn’t sit on it, “you are a scholar and a gentleman.”

The man began to sweat and eyeballed the axe. Cole caught this and clicked his fingers, bringing the man’s eyes back up to meet his own. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why are you here?” The man finally said. “I did everything you asked. Was there not enough? I made sure to count it three times.”

“It was all there. Who signed that?” Cole nodded to the jersey. At first confused, the little man turned and looked at the jersey.

“Oh, uh, Mats Sundin.”

Cole leaned back and smiled. “No shit? Weed himself signed that?” Cole regarded the jersey for a moment. “Well goddamn.”

“Why are you—”

“You know my brother was there when he scored the 500th against the Flames. Now that was a moment.” Cole shook his head. “What a sport.”

“Please, if my wife—”

“If your wife what? If she hears me?”

The man nodded.

Cole leaned forward. “What if she does? You want me to do it, but you don’t want to see it, is that it?”

The little man seemed to shrink even more as he collapsed back into his chair. Cole could see the gears turning in his head as he tried to formulate an answer. He continued. “What did I tell you at the bar?”

“You uh, told me a lot of things.”

Cole picked up the axe and used it to point at the little man, which made him squirm even more. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t—”

“I told you not to break my rules.”

‘You didn’t tell me what they were, how could I have known?”

“You couldn’t,” Cole said, “that's the whole point, yet that doesn’t matter, and that’s the point. Do you know there’s a term for what you hired me to do? That it has an official name?”

The little man shook his head, his eyes never leaving the axe.

“Family annihilation. That’s what they call it. Now usually this term is used for husbands and fathers who, for some asinine reason, snap one day and slaughter their entire family. Usually they take themselves out as well. But this is a bit different, because you didn’t have the balls to do it yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” the little man said, his eyes getting wet, his voice shaky. “I can’t do this anymore. They’d be better off.”

“And what about you? You got some sweetie on the side, maybe some grand dreams of hopping the border and heading down to Florida to fuck your brains out all night and play golf all day?”

The little man was quiet. Cole nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure I’m not far off, and I’m equally as sure any excuse you give me to prove the contrary will be so stupid my mind will begin to evacuate my skull and leak out my ears.”

“She’s cheating on me,” the little man said.

“And that’s a death sentence?”

“It should be.”

“What about your kids? They have a second father they’re running around with behind your back?”

The little man sat up straight, a nerve having been struck. “It isn’t like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“They’d be…how could I…” The little man leans forward, bracing his elbows on the desk, lacing his fingers together and wringing them through one another. “How could I make them live with losing their mom like that? And I can’t raise them after having…done that. How could I look them in the eyes?”

“I need to be honest, man,” Cole said, “I’m having trouble believing that you even believe that crock of shit.

“Tell you what,” Cole continued, interrupting the man as he began to reply, “you be honest with me right now, and I mean 100% honest and open, and I won’t put a bullet between your eyes tonight.”

The man looked like he was about to throw up. His lips quivered. “Oh Lord, Oh Christ, what have I…”

“Don’t start that. You knew what you were getting involved in when you reached out. This is a train you’ve set in motion. And buddy-boy, your stop is here. Tickets, please.” Cole tapped the axe down on the table. “Truth. Now.”

The man  swallowed. Nodded. “Okay,” he loosened his tie and breathed. “She’s fucking her hairdresser. I thought the prick was queer or something. Then I found pictures on her phone. Dumb bitch doesn’t understand the Cloud—we have a damn family account! Our kids could have seen what he was sending her.” He paused. “What she was sending him.

“After everything I gave her, everything I’ve sacrificed. I’ve raised two spoiled, ungrateful kids with her who, by the way, hate my fucking guts. Do you know what my son called me the other day?”

Cole was quiet.

“He called me a pussy. Me! His own father. That kid has everything he ever wanted or could want. My own daughter won’t look me in the eye. They know; I don’t know if she told them or what, but I’m half a man in their eyes. They don’t respect me. Do you know what I do? I’m an accountant. I type numbers into a spreadsheet all day. I wanted to be a goddamn—”

The axe interrupted the man. Before he had even known what was happening, Cole had sprang forward and planted it in his skull dead-centre between the brows. The man gasped and mumbled, his eyes going cross to look at the blade. Cole released his grip on the handle and the little man fell back into his chair, making this awful wet clucking sound as his body began to tremble and his hands swatted at the axe. They missed it completely, merely batting at it like a cat as his motor skills failed. Damage to the frontal lobe will do that to a man.

Blood began to dribble down from the wound like a solitary tear. Cole straightened his back, felt a few pops, and groaned. He really was getting old, huh?

Behind the desk, standing over the little man (who was trying his hardest to stare up at Cole, his eyes wide in confusion and fear),  Cole had his hands on his hips studying the jersey.

“Mats fuckin’ Sundin,” Cole shook his head and smiled.

He met the dying man’s eyes and grabbed the axe handle, momentarily holding the man’s shaking skull still. He gave it a gentle pull and raised the man up as if he had a handle built into his dome. The man groaned, unable to form words or loud sounds. “I told you I wouldn’t shoot you,” Cole said and planted a foot on the man’s thigh and gave the axe a hard yank. It came out of the head with a wet crunch and all the blood it had plugged and kept at bay spilled out over the man’s face.

As the little man began to seize and his mouth to foam, Cole put one leather glove-clad hand on the man’s balding scalp and pushed it back, exposing his throat. He spun the axe around and in one clean, quick motion, swung the spike up and through the man’s jaw, nailing his mouth shut. He held the man like this for a little over a moment and when the man finally succumbed and choked to death on the foam and blood, Cole removed the axe and let the body go limp. It slowly sank off the chair and fell into a lump on the floor.

Cole bent down and used the man’s shirt to wipe the blood from the blade. He dipped a fingertip in the blood and used it to draw a half—circle on the man’s cheek and dotted each side of it. His God’s sigil. He said a silent prayer and then cleaned his finger off.

Before leaving, Cole doubled back and took the framed jersey off the wall.

His brother would love it.

Also no.

I’ve spent 3 years avoiding the fucking plague and have now spent the last week in hand-to-hand combat with it. I’m out of ibuprofen, I’m out of energy, and I’m out of patience. This will probably be shit.

Deal with it.

Hello. My name is Mason McDonald. Welcome to Graveyard Pillow Talk. What the fuck ever.

Last Saturday, I think it was the 20th but I’m not looking it up I don’t even care, I went to my friend’s Jack & Jill. What is a Jack & Jill you ask? I didn’t know. Still kinda don’t. From what I saw, it seems to be a baby shower for people who are getting married. There was alcohol. It was fun. I got kissed by a man. Should have left that part out maybe.

My wife and I have been very careful since 2020. Masking whenever we can, taking all the proper precautions. Do you know how much hand sanitizer I’ve used? Admittedly probably not as much as I should but more than I want to. We have went to very little public functions as a result. An outdoor concert once (where I got blitzed off Mike’s Hard Lemonade and slept on my back deck[see reference photo below]) and our own small, private wedding, but beyond that, we have stayed away from public gatherings.

And then my friend gets engaged like the little simpy munchkin that he is and now I get dizzy trying to climb the stairs to go do my gross bathroom stuff. Did you know Covid makes you do gross bathroom stuff? I thought it was either coughing or death, no one filled me in on the irreparable emotional and physical damage I would cause both myself, my wife, and our toilet.

Never thought I’d discuss diarrhea on a public forum like this.

Huh.

I digress.

So I’m not in the best of moods lately. I tried participating in PitDark (actually got a couple manuscript requests so that’s n e a t) but only managed a measly 3 Tweets. Beyond that, haven’t done much of anything. Especially not any writing. Although I did have a fever dream on the first night that gave me what I thought was a good idea for a story, maybe a novel even, that I then forced myself to remember until I was feeling better.

Which I did. But you know what else happened when the fever broke a day or so later? I realized it was a fucking King-esque small town story about an ancient hockey monster from the beginning of time.

I don’t even fucking like hockey.

This is why you should forget fever dreams. Just false hope and hockey, its all they are.

In fact, I’ve been so preoccupied with being ill and having just the worst story ideas, that I didn’t even realize until today that June 1st is rapidly approaching. For those who don’t know (let’s face it — that’s probably the majority of you) June 1st 2022 was the launch date of my book, A Time For Monsters.

I wanted to do more for the anniversary. But for obvious reasons (runningdownthegutterwithapieceofbreadandbutterDIARRHEA) I can’t do much now. I hope this will suffice: starting tomorrow May 29th and running until June 2nd, you can download my book here for free.

Is giving it away for free the bets option? Probably not. But I don’t have the energy to give a shit about it right now. Please understand.

Or don’t. You don’t owe me shit. I just made you read the word diarrhea like five times. Technically I probably owe you something.

I can’t think of a segue. I’m going to talk about the stories in the book now and give you insight on why they were written. Spoiler alert, it was because I was bored.

Also for real, spoiler alert. I don’t know how much I’m going to spoil, none of this is planned, but I’m not coming back up here to adjust this. Stop reading here if you don’t want spoilers. Or don’t. I’m too tired to fight. I’ve nothing left.

I pray for death.

Purple Turbulence

The opening story of the collection and probably my favorite of the lot. I wrote this story for a very specific (and very ghoulish, hint-hint, wink-wink) publisher during a submission call for one of their anthologies. While it was shortlisted, they ultimately passed. Which is fine. I only cried a little bit. Just kidding.

I cried a lot.

Take the hint I gave and read the opening line. If you still can’t see exactly who was my target audience with this one, I can’t help you.

Also it is cosmic horror on a plane. It isn’t fancy. But it is fun.

Leftovers

This story was previously published under a different name. I’m not going to post the link because the name is problematic for me. Allow me to explain.

The story concerns an unnamed protagonist (or maybe I named him I can’t remember) who, since childhood, has had an “imaginary” friend named Raspberry Bob. Bob isn’t all that nice, and maybe not all that imaginary either, but you have to read it to find out more.

The initial idea for this story started out with a line I had that I liked (it involves the boogeyman if you’d like to know which one specifically) and I had a name. The name: Raspberry Jack. Why is it now Bob, you may ask? Well let me explain, Jesus Christ I’m getting to it okay? Fuck.

Besides sounding like just the worst possible flavor variant of Jack Daniel’s, it is also way to reminiscent of the character Pretzel Jack from the excellent series Channel Zero. At the time of writing this story, I had only seen the first season of the show and as far as I can remember, Pretzel doesn’t appear until the fourth. Why is this a problem?

Pretzel Jack is an “imaginary” friend that is more than he may seem, with red markings on his face.

So is fucking Raspberry Jack. I didn’t catch this until after publication. So I changed the name of the story as originally it was titled simply after the character, and I changed the name to Bob at my wife’s suggestion.

I’m still pissed about it. Jack is so much better than Bob.

Nails To The Head

By far the oldest of the stories, this was written late 2016 for a short story contest a book store in my home town was hosting. I submitted multiple stories (none in circulation but if you dig hard enough, you’ll find two of them) and actually placed fourth for one of them. Nails was not the winning submission.

But it is the only one I liked enough to dig out of the drawer when I needed a final story for this collection. It is as close to a crime story that I’ve ever written, although I do hope to one day return to the genre, and it is just lean and mean. I do get a little romantic and full of myself with the ending and would probably do it differently if I could go back, but for the most part this is just a stripped down, lean-mean-torture-machine of a story.

At the end of the day, I struggle to even call it a story. It is more along the lines of a revenge fantasy the likes most men (most parents really) have at some point in their lives. The idea of holding captive someone who hurt your child and knowing you could do whatever you want to them? Look me in the tits and tell me you’ve never thought about this. G’head.

I like to say this is what happens if Liam Neeson were to play Bishop Ryder in a movie.

A Culture Of Swine

Again written for an anthology it didn’t get accepted for, this was written as my attempt at extreme gore or Splatterpunk to put a name on it. I don’t generally enjoy those types of stories so I don’t think I hit the mark with this one. That isn’t to say I don’t like the final product, or that it isn’t violent (easily the most graphic story here) but it definitely isn’t Spklatterpunk and they were right to pass on it.

The title would make a dope metal band name though, right? Fuck yeah it would.

Don’t Pick Up The Witchstone

This is one of two or three stories written specifically for this collection. I can’t tell you where the idea came from, as most authors will tell you the ideas usually pop up from the aether with no warning nor prompting, but I can tell you what it started as.

I had this image in my head of a field of sunflowers at the cusp of dusk, just as the sun was setting and everything was orange and otherworldly. Something big was barreling through them, but I couldn’t see what it was. All I could see what the rustling of the flowers and the path it was carving. And I could hear its chuffing breaths.

At the edge of the field, awaiting the beast, was a young girl. I didn’t know who she was, but she knew the thing was coming and still she faced it, determined. I needed to know her story.

So here it is.

The Salesman

Written for an anthology. Rejected. I’m sensing a depressing pattern here and I DON’T LIKE IT.

I usually don’t gush over my own work, I’m too self-deprecating for that (he typed fattily) but I have to say that I really love this story. It is dark and tragic and atmospheric and just fucking weird as hell. I offer no explanation to the world this story inhabits; WW1-era London, Colonial America, who knows the setting. It is an old world, it is a darkly magic world, and for our tragic hero Tom, it is a sad world filled with jealousy and rage. I can’t explain much more than that without directly spoiling the story and while usually I don’t care about that, I really don’t want you to know what this story’s about before you read it.

So like, go read it please. Pretty please.

On The Frozen Waters Of Lake Namara

This story was also written for an anthology but unlike the previous stories, it was actually accepted and published by the always wonderful Nico Bell in her book, Shiver. The theme was Winter, so I had to make this one cold. Weirdly enough, I’ve never been one for winter-themed horror stories (maybe being a Canuck I just got tired of seeing all that cold wet bullshit every year) but this story actually turned out to be most folk’s favorite of the book. In fact, it was my most successful story right up until December of 2022 when I published Arno through Quill & Crow’s Bleak Midwinter Anthology which, again, had to be winter-themed.

I can’t escape the snow.

Siren

I wanted to write a traditonal Lovecraftian tale (without the racism and poorly described monsters). I also wanted to see what a Mason McDonald version of the Greek Sirens legend would look like. Did I succeed? I don’t know. But there’s tentacles here. They made the cover of the book. *Shrug*

Jar Of Teeth

In an episode of Bob’s Burgers, Linda shows of a jar filled with Gene’s baby teeth. I can’t remember much else about that particular episode, but I remember thinking “huh, what if she planted that?” And then this story fell out of my brain like a bag of pebbles.

Fun fact — most of my stories take place in the same world. Not to say it is some sort of MMSU, but more so that if one character hopped into their car and drove to the home of the a character from another story, they’d be there. I hope that makes sense.

But this story is one of a few in this book that make direct references to other stories and offer concrete connections. As far as I can recall, there are 3 that do that. Can you spot the others?

It’s Always Easter In The Stuck

Sometimes I take edibles, and sometimes I take way too much. This story happened after the latter. I don’t have much to besides I was high when I wrote this, don’t actually remember writing it, and the stuffed bunny is real. My mother has it and it scares the piss out of me whenever I make eye contact with it. She calls it Rabby.

I call it my enemy.

Scavengers

This was the final story written for this collection. It is my take on “nightcrawlers”, multimedia journalists who work to get the scoop on accidents, murders, that type of thing. Honestly just watch the movie Nightcrawler starring Jake Gylhygandiubhb. It’s better.

22.5.7.3.4

A story that I forget about quite often, maybe because of the awful fucking title, but I am actually quite proud of this one. As a rule, I usually hold quite a bit of disdain for time travel stories. Or time travel elements in general. I find the existence of time travel in a story causes me to focus more on the probability of every action and scene and takes me away from the story itself. A good example is the movie Looper(2014) I fucking love that movie, but I still miss parts of it because I’m too busy analyzing how Joseph Gordon Levitt turned into Bruce Willis.

But I think I did an okay job of avoiding those pitfalls here. At least I hope I did.

I don’t know man, time stuff is above my brain level.

I Defile

The longest story in the collection, this is my version of a werewolf story. Or as close to one as I’ve ever gotten. I’ve always proffered ‘wolves over ‘pyres and wanted to explore what it would look like if I sunk my claws (ha!) into the genre. What came out is a sort of mash-up that boils down to “what if Dexter was a lycan?”

This story is bloody and gross and sometimes a little angsty and ooooh I just think its fun. Its so fun. I like woofers.

Blinking With Our Eyes Open

I really decided to end my book on a bummer, didn’t I? Holy fuck…

One of my biggest fears (and it makes perfect sense because of my diagnosed medical anxiety) is losing control over either my body, my mind, or both. This story is about a virus that ravages the planet that makes you do both. It is not happy. There is no moment where you should smile reading this. It is bleak and sad and holy SHIT why did I leave the book off with this one?

This is why I need an agent. Someone to tell me not to do these things.

Well there you are. Maybe that made you want to read my book. Maybe it didn’t. Probably it didn’t. But now I can say I did the very cleats in term of marketing and i can not feel guilty as i spent the rest of night being a lazy bag of beans. I need to step away from the computer now before my eyes burst and my brain leaks through my sockets like I’m crying my own memories.

Fuck Covid. Get my book here.

Okayloveyoubyetalktoyoulater.

Okay.

Deep breath.

Here we go.

Hello everybody. It has been…quite a while, hasn’t it? When I started this newsletter in the Fall, I had vowed to do my best to stick to somewhat of a plan and really dedicate myself to it. I didn’t want to give up on it like so many other of my failed projects.

Well it seems I’ve failed again.

Even though I was doing something fun with this new venture (Dave’s Gonna Fist Fight The Kraken is never too far from my mind)I let it go stale. It sat in the back of my mind and through my neglect, it hardened and lost its freshness, and thus lost even more of my attention, until I just stopped coming back. I let it sit and rot in the back of the overstuffed and underutilized pantry that is my mind.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise, right? I mean, I’m a writer for fuck’s sake, we practically invented giving-up-halfway-through. Talk to any writer, published or not, and ask them how many pieces and projects they have started and left unfinished and you will be met with the blankest of stares before an onslaught of uncontrollable laughter.

That’s our jam, baby. Our portfolios are printed on the flesh of rotting stories.

But no matter how common of a practice that is, it always stings. Maybe you notice while typing that the story just isn’t interesting, or maybe you miss a session and fall out of routine for a few days and find yourself returning to an unfamiliar manuscript written by a stranger, or maybe you’ve reached the final act and fall out of love before your characters do; no matter when it is or where you are when you lose your grip on a piece, no matter how many times you’ve been here and done that, it hurts like a bitch when your story, your poem, your baby slips from your fingers and falls down, down, down, to wherever it is the dead stories go. You’ve sang this funeral song before, but yet you still shed new tears because sometimes loss is necessary but that doesn’t mean our hearts are ready to let go.

These are the thoughts running through my head today as I read the latest in a series of rejection letters that I’ve received lately. As I sit and deal with the familiar emotions coursing through me, as stoically as I am capable of, I reflect on what it is really is I’m reading. A finished story (or as close to finished as it can be, which is always the way, isn’t it?) of mine is deamed unfit for an anthology I was truly excited for, yes, that is quite literally what I am reading, but I realize it is also a lesson. And that lesson is:

At least I know this one isn’t good enough. I have my answer to the anxiety I was feeling. Maybe I clean it up, sell it somewhere else. Maybe I can’t. But at least now I know, right? I raised this baby up as best as I could and if it fails after it leaves the nest, at least I have peace. Closure, even.

But what about the others? What about the years of incomplete stories, of adventures untold, of loves ungiven, of lives unlived, that litter my desk and hard drive that will never get the chance to fly for themselves.

At one point before starting each and every one of the dozens (or, let’s be honest, probably hundreds) of unrealized projects, I had been excited enough about the initial idea to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. I fell momentarily in love with them, as fleeting as it was. And yet, I let them die. I let them sit behind and collect dust like some ugly, forgotten things. With those stories, even the ones I once and presently loved, I’ll never know if they worked or not. I’ll never know if they were good. Or if they resonated with anyone. Or if maybe one of them could have helped someone during a hard time in their lives, or maybe they could have helped kill a few hours for someone.

But I’ll never know.

They’ll just stay forgotten. Less than forgotten actually, as you have to actually live to be capable of being forgotten. These stories didn’t even get to take a breath, let alone take flight. And that’s sad right? I think that’s sad.

So I took inventory. And I don’t mean of my incomplete projects. I mean I took inventory on how I was approaching failure. In my mind, the rejection on my screen was the definition of failure. That something I wrote just wasn’t good enough. But how is that failure? That is a finished thing that served its duty. Its watch is over, its job is done. No, my real failures are the stories I’ve never told due to circumstance, inspiration, or just plain old laziness.

Every time I give up on a story, when I give up on myself, I fail. I fail in the true sense of the word.

I’m not saying every story should be finished — sometimes we just have to let go and as I said above, it is a necessary evil. But I am saying that giving up the good ones is so much more a failure then getting a rejection on a complete one, and the thing is, the real stinger, you never even know which ones are worthy until you actually write the damn things.

So I’m going to try and finish more things. I’ll still have to let some of their little hands go along the way, that is always going to be a part of the job, but I can try and do better with my ethic.

My ideas, your ideas, they deserve that much.

They are us.

They are pieces of our individual eternities and as with everything in this life, they are finite things. Eventually the good ones stop coming to us all, or we stop coming to them, and I bet when that day comes for us, and it will come, we will regret the stories we never told so much more so than the ones we did.

That is an awfully serious way to describe how I felt abandoning this project. With it said, expect a new chapter of Dave in the coming days and expect to see more of me in your inbox with random musings and such.

Also, SubStack Notes seems fantastic so expect more of me there as Elmo Muskrat continues to destroy Twitter as a viable option.

I’m also planning on releasing a few stand alone short stories here if there is any interest. Time will tell — but if you’re reading this and would like some more free fiction in your life, let me know.

Until next time.

- Mason

“What the actual fuck was that?” Dave yelled as we ran from the lake, through the woods, the both of us panting and cursing and trying not to trip as branches whipped us in the face.

“I don’t know,” I said, “just keep fucking going.”

The woods were a dark as thick as oil, the moon having hid behind a stray cloud. I didn’t have my phone out and I wasn’t about to stop and fiddle in my pockets. I couldn’t see anything at all — I just blindly ran, aware of Dave’s presence beside me even if I couldn’t see him.

I wish I could describe to you how I felt in those moments. There was still enough fading alcohol in my blood to lighten my head, but it was balanced by the heaviness I felt after the visions. It was like I smoked weed with a concussion. I was running from an impossibility, some sort of monster or creature or alien or weapon or whatever, and I was running from my own thoughts, and I was running from the way it tore into my brain and forced itself into me. I was running but I couldn’t see; I was on a treadmill in the womb, sprinting in place looking for any sign of an exit. I wanted Hell to be over. I wanted to get out of those damn trees and back to my home where I could clean myself of the dirt and blood and sap from the stinging branches and I could climb into my bed and force this night out of my mind.

My lungs felt ready to explode, my chest hollow and filling with water, when we bounded over a log, barely staying upright, and we fumbled into the empty liquor store parking lot. We caught our breaths under a halogen lamp, the orange light making us look like teens in an indie coming-of-age drama. Except we looked more like chubby old men with cuts all over our faces. I braced myself on my knees and bent forward, trying not to puke. Dave had his hands behind his head as he sucked in big lungfuls of air and looked to the sky, eyes closed, as he walked in small, slow circles.

“Shit,” Dave said, “fucking shit fuck cock shit dick ass fucking FUCK WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?”

“Quiet…” I heaved, held my puke back, took a breath, panted. “Gotta…be quiet.” I was painfully aware of the cruiser still where we left it and I didn’t want a cop asking questions right then. Not ever, really, but especially not then.

“Did you see that shit too? All those…what the fuck were they?” Dave said.

“‘Course I did.” I said. I pointed to my face and the scratches that divided it like trails on a map, caked with drying blood. “You think I did this ‘cause it was fun?”

Dave blinked and brought his fingers to his face, suddenly aware he too had tried to claw the images away even if it meant tearing his eyeballs from their sockets. “We gotta go,” I said, “come on.”

“I saw…” Dave said as we began walking away. He breathed out and shook his head, not looking at me. “I don’t know what I saw. So much shit.”

“I know. I saw it too.”

“What do you think it was? An alien?”

“I don’t think we need an explanation right now, dude. I need distance, and I need it fast. I need to get home and pretend I’m not schizophrenic.”

“You aren’t crazy ‘cause I saw it too. Or are we both crazy?”

“I don’t know if you can simultaneously catch insanity.” I said and winced as my foot collided with an empty beer can and I watched it scream across the parking lot, bouncing off stones, making a racket. “I hope.”

Luckily the lights of the police cruiser stayed off and I saw no movement coming from inside of it. The cop was still asleep.

As badly as I wanted to go home and forget about this night, I stopped in front of the car. Because I had a thought, and it was a pretty big one. “Wait a sec.” I said.

“What?”

“They know it’s there, right? Whatever the hell it is, they know about it.” I pointed to the cop to emphasize who I was talking about.

“Yeah, so?”

“So, why the hell is Officer Benadryl here the only one on guard? This place should be locked down like Fort Knox, shouldn’t it? Like federal agents, scientists, the army, fucking Nasa I don’t know.”

“Maybe they don’t know it’s there,” Dave said and gave me a little shove, getting me walking again, “maybe they think it’s something else? Like they never saw it or something.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I don’t believe that. It makes no sense.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“This just feels like a plothole.”

“Like the eagles in Lord Of The—”

“Dave you gotta let that go.”

“THEY COULD HAVE FLEW THEM THERE IS ALL I’M SAYING.”

That got a laugh out of me, somehow. As we rounded the corner of the liquor store and started down the sidewalk once again, the night began to feel normal. We passed a parked black car and saw a pair of fat raccoons scurrying across the road into the shadows. The farther we walked, the more distance we put between us and the lake, the less it felt like it had even happened. I began to hope that after going to sleep in my own bed, I would wake up and the whole thing would feel like a bad dream.

I hoped, but I didn’t believe it.

Not for once second.

Sure enough, my night was full of sweating, tossing, and getting up every hour to sit on the toilet and pretend I didn’t feel like I was having a heart attack. Images of burned cities, destroyed planets, the walking dead, filled my mind every time I closed my eyes. I couldn’t forget them. I couldn’t push them away.

By six in the morning I had multiple missed texts from Dave:

“What the actual…for fuck’s sake,” I said with my head in my hands after I read his texts. Dave had always been a weird guy. That time his friend Mario — I say his friend and not our friend because Mario once pelted me in the eye with a crabapple in fourth grade and I hold grudges — grew weed that smelled like cat piss and air fresheners and gave Dave some, Dave stayed up all night having a panic attack because he thought Martians were invading Mayflower and they were coming to probe him first. Kept saying he saw them creeping around his house.

I still think Mario gave him acid.

I called Dave and he didn’t pick up at first but after I hung up, my phone buzzed with a text saying he was on the shitter and to call back in five minutes. So I did.

“Tell me about the car.” I said, grabbing the bucket of Folger’s from beside the coffee maker and twisting off the cap. I inhaled the aroma of the coffee deep into my nose and for a moment everything was normal and okay. Coffee has a strange way of doing that, doesn’t it?

“It was a Lincoln I think. Or something like that. Shit g-men drive in conspiracy movies. You think it was the FBI or what?”

“Well we are in Canada, so no I do not think it was the FBI,” I said, “honestly I think you were just—”

“I SWEAR TO CHRIST BUD IF YOU TELL ME I IMAGINED IT AGAIN LIKE THE ALIENS I’M GONNA LOSE MY MIND—”

“Relax, I don’t think you imagined it,” I filled a filter with two hefty tablespoons of coffee and closed the lid on the coffeemaker, “I think it was just someone out on the street who had nothing to do with you.”

“Dude, after what happened yesterday? Don’t you think someone could be watching us now? We know what they’re doing out there.”

“Do we, Dave? ‘Cause I don’t have the slightest fucking clue what happened last night. I really just want to forget about it.”

Dave sighed and I heard the bubbling of his bong, then a coughing fit, then he spoke. “Alright. I’ll drop it. But we gotta talk about what happened. Do we tell Mike?”

I thought about it as I watched the coffee begin to drip into the pot. “Maybe. How about we meet at Frankie’s later? Text Mike.”

“Why don’t you text him? He never answers me.” Dave said.

“Don’t start the text with ‘sup, goatfucker?’ and maybe he will.” I said.

Dave laughed. “Nah I’m probably gonna call him a goatfucker.” Click. Then he was gone. Like Batman, or a fart in the wind, Dave knew how to disappear.

Later that afternoon, I was waiting on a bench in the small walking park across from Tim Horton’s, holding two cups of coffee, waiting for Lily. She and I first met in high school and had been dating ever since.

That’s it, that’s our origin story. Not every couple has some long, romantic tale of how they met and fell in love. We met, we liked each other's faces and butts, and we started dating. Sometimes life is beautifully complicated, full of twists and turns, and sometimes it is wonderfully simple, full of stable love and people who care about you.

Okay, maybe it is a little romantic after all.

I watched cars drive by. People walking with their dogs and shit bags hanging off their leashes. The park wasn’t anything special but it was the only one within walking distance to the town proper and thus it was usually somewhat occupied. Lily and I liked to meet here once and a while on the busy days when we couldn’t go to one another’s place.

I debated whether or not I should tell her what happened. On one hand I wanted to unload the awfulness I felt inside of me. I needed to get those images out of my head, the knowledge of what is in the lake. I needed to vent my feelings, to use a phrase I’m not terribly fond of. But would it be the right thing to do? If it was affecting me so badly, wouldn’t it be some form of emotional terrorism to force it onto her? Or was that being overly dramatic? And, may I add, would she even believe a single word of it? If she told me that she and a friend were attacked by some sort of lake monster that infected their brains with horrific images and thoughts, all while they were drunk and stumbling home from the bar?

I wanted to say I would believe her, that every word from her mouth would find a home in my trusting brain, but I don’t want to lie to you. I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. Quite possibly, I would become convinced she was crazy.

Would she think I was crazy?

Was I crazy?

I saw her park across the street in the Tim’s parking lot and waved to her as she jogged across the street. I loved the way she ran, the way her head bobbed, the way her arms swung, the gentle sway of her hips. Okay I just loved all of her but let me gush a minute, will you? Lily wore her hair medium length, just above her shoulders, and it was brown and wavy. Her eyes were chocolate brown and I found myself lost in them every time I looked at her.

We embraced, we kissed, and she took her coffee from me. “Oh thank God, I need caffeine.”

We talked for a bit about our mornings and her work — she was a veterinary assistant at the only vet in town which meant she was the only veterinary assistant as well. She told me how she had to “purge the anal glands of a Tibetan Mastiff”. I did not like the topic. But I liked listening to her. Lily had this way of talking about the things she loved. Each word pulsed with enthusiasm and joy, brimming with admiration. She often had to hold herself back from rambling, especially when she got going about animals, and it was like watching a dam swell, bursting at the seams from the rising waters behind it.

I think she loved me because I never asked her to stop. I could listen to her gush about the ass of an overweight fluffball for hours. Once, over a few bottles of wine at her parent’s cabin, she spent two hours explaining the differences in dog breeds. I listened to every single word, smiling and nodding and wondering how such a wonderful creature could bare to be around me.

For real, I listened to every word; ask me any question about a dog’s ass. Go ahead. I’ll know the answer.

That doesn’t sound like as big of a brag as I thought it would.

“So are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Lily asked, sipping her coffee.

“What?” I said.

She laughed. “I always know when you’re hiding something from me. I can see it all over your face, babe. Literally.” She waved her hands in front of her face, acknowledging the scratch marks that tore through my features.

A lake monster violated my brain last night and my other best friend might be suicidal, I thought, but I didn’t think just blurting it out would be the best way to approach the situation. “I didn’t sleep much last night. The boys and I had some beers and I ate shit on the way home.”

She laughed and finished the last of her coffee. “You’re lying, but that’s okay. You’ll tell me eventually,” she leaned over and kissed my cheek, “you always do.”

I couldn’t help but to smile. She was right, I can never keep things from her for very long. Eventually, I would tell her what happened. But I needed time to figure out exactly what happened. Or if it had happened. It wasn’t exactly the type of thing that gave one confidence in one’s own mental stability, you know?

We said our goodbyes and she trotted back across the street to her car. I watched her go. Just as she pulled her car out of the lot and gave me a beep and a wave, something caught my eye.

Parked on the side of the road just a little ways down from where we were, was a black Town Car. I couldn’t tell the specifics of it because I was too far away and also I don’t know shit about cars. I don’t even know if Town Car is the appropriate type of vehicle. Thinking of it, Town Car might even be a model, not a type. But it was large, black, and had tinted windows. Like the type of car a government agency might supply its agents. Like the FBI.

I stood there and looked at it for a second and then I tried doing what Dave had done. I waved.

The car started and pulled away, using the parking lot to k-turn and drive the opposite way from me.

“Holy fuck.” I said to myself.

What if Dave was right? What if we were being watched because of what we saw?

Goddamnit, what if he had seen aliens that time? I gave him so much shit for that.

I wanted to ask Dave to reconsider, but what was the point? When he had his mind set on something, it was hard to dissuade him. We creeped along the outer edge of the parking lot, trying to remain in the shadows the best we could, until we were close enough to the parked police cruiser that Dave could catch a glimpse of the inside. He craned his neck and after a moment started to laugh.

“Dude’s asleep.” Dave said. He kept walking and I looked into the cruiser as well and sure enough, the young cop was reclined in his seat, his hat over his eyes and his feet up on the dash.

“That is way too convenient.” I said. I wanted to slap my hand down on the hood to wake the cop up and potentially put a stop to this misadventure but Dave was already disappearing down the path into the woods and I decided that maybe I should just let him have the moment. I followed.

“You’re going to get us arrested,” I whispered, “you do know that, right?”

“When did you start being such a bitch?” Dave said.

“I’m a bitch because I don’t want to get arrested?”

“Yes.”

“That seems crazy.”

“You know what else is crazy?”

“What?”

“That you’re not eating my ass right now. Keep walking.”

Dave was a poet, in his own way.

The woods of Mayflower weren’t anything special to look at, mostly just birches and maples, cedars and firs. But they were filled with stories and legends, histories on every path, nightmares off of them. There were ghost stories and murders and monsters and ghouls. Every kid in town knew the story of the Mayflower Mauler, the masked terrorizer of necking teens and sexually active camp counselors. They knew of the Blistered Bastards, those undead, mutated corpses that roamed the woods every Autumn looking for fresh flesh to consume and young boys to adopt into their ranks. There was Old Franklin, who sometimes was an old hermit, sometimes a genderless witch, sometimes a disgusting slug-person who wriggled along the paths and slowly overcame and devoured those it came across. No one could really decide on what story was the right one so the town sort of circulated them all.

I wasn’t too concerned about the monsters that lived in these woods, but I was very concerned about Dave’s behavior. He was always reckless and a little fucked in the head, but right then he’d been acting stranger than usual. Or maybe I was imagining that because of the talk we just had. Maybe I was observing from beneath a level of guilt. I didn’t know, but deep down I knew he wasn’t himself. When you’re with someone as long as I had been with him — as friends, we only joked about fucking one another, we never actually had, but that’s neither here nor there and quite honestly it sounds hella suspicious for me to say it, so I really shouldn’t have — you learn the language they speak when they don’t use words and the way Dave was acting, I knew he was anything and everything but himself.

We passed multiple branching paths and lumps in the darkness but now that the parking lot was lost to the trees behind us, it was getting harder and harder to see. I pulled out my phone and clicked the flashlight but Dave just marched on into the darkness, his phone in his pocket, working by little more than feel and memory.

“Christ Dave, I can’t see shit. What are you expecting anyway?”

Dave never stopped walking. Didn’t even slow. “Nothing.”

“Then why are we doing this?”

“What else were we going to do?”

“Go home? Go to sleep? I have work in the morning.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Alright,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “don’t gotta be a dick about it.”

I was still pretty buzzed but it was quickly wearing off and heading into hangover territory. Soon my eyes would be burning and my head would be splitting. Last thing I wanted to be doing when that happened was lurking through the woods in the middle of the night, getting whipped in the face and dick with branches.

Eventually we came to an opening in the trees, the path fading away from a thin dirt walkway to a wide barren clearing. The smell of fresh water and frog scum filled my nostrils. Lakes smell different at night, I’m sure of it, because I also smelled a sweet, flowery scent I never smelled in the daytime. The night changed so much. None of us are ever the same after the sun goes down and the moon rises. Every person is a shadow.

Yeah, even I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean.

I could hear the soft slapping as the water lightly hit the stony shore. If it were the daytime, I would see the low grassy hills that surrounded the lake, the cedars that stuck out like cowlicks at the edges, the pussywillows sprouting from the shallows, the brown foam that crests the ridges like milk on the upper lip of a child. I would see how the blue shined so bright it was almost a white under the burning sun. But it is night, so all I see is blackness.

“Okay, cool, a lot of nothing. Can we go now?” I said.

“There’s got to be something, they wouldn’t make a big deal outta it if there wasn’t.” Dave said.

I thought of the concrete facility across the water, that stone and steel castle that sat pushed back into the trees and loomed like some kind of creeping predator. Once again I pictured large pipes pumping toxic waste into the water. Do concrete plants even produce toxic waste?

“Dude let’s just go, okay? I don’t know what your problem is, but I do have an idea, and we can talk about it in the morning but right now I really need to go—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dave said and held his palm out to me, looking around, “you hear that?”

I listened. Nothing. I heard the gentle splashing of the water, the chirping of frogs, the buzzing of insects, but nothing else. I ran my hand through my hair and sighed. “Listen, I—”

“Shh.”

“Stop interrupting—”

“Shut. Up.”

“This is incredibly frustrating—”

The Earth shattered. Or, that is what it felt like.

It sounded like an atomic bomb. Something inverted the lake, waterfalling straight up, a tower of water almost fifty feet or so. I could barely see it save for the reflection of the moon. The water was pulsing, flowing like a burst fire hydrant, defying gravity and heading towards the sky.

Dave and I didn’t move. We were frozen in place as this barely visible impossibility roared. The sound was something between the rumbling of a jet engine and the screams of a field of dying bovine. I wanted to reach out and grab my friend and tell him we had to go, that we needed to get out of there before whatever was in the lake grabbed us and took us under with it, pulling us to the bottom, to the end of our lives, but I couldn’t move. I felt anchored to the dirt.

There was something inside the cyclone. I saw long, roping things grabbing at the water. I couldn’t discern anything other than their general shape and I can only compare them to spaghetti. Thin, noodle-like things that twisted and raveled into one another like headphones in jean pockets.

My head hurt. I brought my hands to my ears, thinking it was the sound, but it didn’t help. The throbbing started quickly from the back of my skull and ripped forward to the front of it and felt like a hand reaching over my scalp and trying to peel me like a fruit.

I was vaguely aware of Dave also clutching his head, his fingers tearing at his long hair, and then we both fell first to our knees and then to our sides. I heard screaming. I didn’t know if it was him or me.

A voice spoke inside my head in a language I couldn’t discern. I only speak English but like anyone, I can usually tell what language a person was speaking to a very vague degree. If I heard something like chi or yang, my horribly white ass could discern it was something from Asia. If I heard loud phlegm that sounded so incredibly angry I was scared even if it was a hello, it was probably German or Russian or another language from that region. My point is, I’m dumb as shit. But also if the language was one of man, I would recognize that.

It was not.

It was words that weren’t words spoke by a genderless voice I can promise you was not human. It sounded like if a fish spoke Arabic through one of those voice changers they use on witnesses in crime shows, and then played backwards with reverb and extra bass. It was nonsense, basically, and it was the single worst sound I’d ever heard.

It said many things. I don’t know how long we were on the ground for, the epic cyclone still exploding in the lake with its long appendages snapping at the air, but no matter how long we were, that voice spoke for hours. Days, maybe. I’ve no way to know. It felt like an eternity.

Of all the words it spoke, one stuck out the most. It was probably the flavor the voice used for it. As Dave would say, it put some mustard on it. Enunciated is the closest word.

The word: kragh’gin. I have no earthly idea if that is the right way to spell it, or if it is even going to sound in your head like it sounded in mine, but it is my best approximation.

It repeated over and over again, each time a new image flashed before my eyes. I need to be very clear here: these were not my thoughts. They were the thoughts of something else being projected into me. Forced into me. I saw —

—flayed bodies upon cracked posts, a black cathedral pointing to a reddened sky behind them, unguarded gates to the mouth of hell—

—a crucified orca suspended between chain hooks to giant, onyx monoliths that threatened to split a sky turned green from illness only it wasn’t an orca it was a —

—then the blackened, ruined face of a child turned to ash from—

—a skyline of a city turned upside down and dead, the streets crawling with the limbless corpses of people chained together and moaning—

—a virus ravaging bodies, bursting from inside them and lighting the heavens afire—

—men in masks atop a pillar of flames and they were looking down at me and I couldn’t ask who they were and they—

—atop a clouded city I saw God and I knew he wasn’t the right God but he was a God—

—bodies, burning, torched, lost—

—the ruins of a temple under the ocean and something was rising from it there was a shadow—

—long tendrils of inky blackness stretching from the horizon, wrapping around the sun and extinguishing it, pulling it down, muting it—

Then I was me again, the voice gone, and I was gasping for air as something grabbed my chest and pulled, yanking me to my feet so quick my neck whipped back and my head struck a stone in the dirt. “Get the fuck up!” Dave screamed into my face. His own face was soaked with tears and blood and I began to panic, thinking he was hurt, and then I realized there were claw marks on his cheeks and his eyes, and his hands were bloodied and I knew that my face also hurt and felt wet and I realized what we had done.

I was dizzy from hitting my head but I was aware enough to know we had hurt ourselves but it wasn’t our fault, and I knew that we had to go while we could, before whatever was in the lake could destroy us.

As we ran back to the trees, side by side, arms pumping, breath hitching, the roar still firing on all cylinders behind us, I heard a whispering. It took me a minute, but I found the source:

It was me.

Over and over again, involuntarily, I was saying,

Kragh’gin.

As always, thank you for reading. Things are starting to get interesting for our fellas in Mayflower. Hopefully they make it out of this.

Cheers, guys.

Kragh’gin.

Mason

Not going to lie, the first part of me wanted to judge the man. After all, it was barely past 9am and he was driving. I wanted to pity him too because, well, it was barely past 9am. But then I thought of something else.

I thought that there is a murderous psychopath waging war on Ukraine. Right-wing terrorists are legitimately at the point of starting a new civil war in the States. We have Covid deniers, anti vaxxers, gun nuts, homophobes, transphobes, misogynists. We have Donald Trump, Ron Desantis, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, Vladimir Putin, Pierre Poilievre, MTG, Lauren Boebert. We have Elon Musk causing Twitter to fucking implode just because he can. We have high gas prices, a dying planet, the warmest November my province has quite literally ever seen, low wages, police brutality, shitty healthcare.

So then I thought: same man, same.

Welcome to Graveyard Pillow Talk. Pull up a headstone, pour some coffee and off-brand rum, and take a load off.

Edits on Arno, my soon-to-be-published story from Quill & Crow, are in. Working with Cassandra and Damon is awesome, they are so full of love and enthusiasm for their work that it is intoxicating. Their insight and input are invaluable (see what I did there har har har). Cassandra also has a new book out, the 3rd in her amazing Ancient One’s trilogy. You should buy it.

I truly can’t wait for you all to read this story. Arno is a special one for me and the love it has been getting from those who have read it makes me smile. Having people read your stuff is one thing, but having them react to it so positively is a completely other beast. I don’t know, makes my heart warm and all that nonsense.

Okay, so it’s not nonsense but I have a very hard time expressing my feelings so you’re just gonna have to deal with me brushing it off because if I don’t then I’m going to start thinking about the nice things people have said and I’ll start crying.

I also just finished the first 4 chapters of a cozy fantasy/horror novel and sent them off to an interested publisher. I first pitched them the idea back in June and honestly, I had forgotten about it until they responded requesting the opening chapters earlier this month. Hopefully they like it because although it is incredibly different than the things I usually write, I’m growing very fond of the characters and the world I’ve created. I’d describe it as Elder Scrolls x Night At The Museum x Neil Gaiman. Yes, I consider Gaiman to be a genre all his own.

If they like it, great. If they don’t, I’ll probably finish it anyway. Its just good natured fun which is far removed from the dark shit I usually write.

The next chapter of Oh, Sh*t! Dave’s Gonna Fist Fight The Kraken! is being written today and tomorrow, and should hopefully be sent out tomorrow night. I can’t stop thinking about this story but its difficult finding the time to write between my fiction projects, my content writing gig, and my day job.

Some fun info OSDGFFTK (I still hate that fuckin’ abbreviation): the three main characters introduced in Chapter One are loose amalgamations of myself and my 2 best friends. Both the narrator and Mike are combinations of one of my friends and myself (and of course original qualities as well, that’s how fiction works) but Dave is based on my friend Jeremy.

Let me tell you a little about my friend and why I based this character on him.

Jeremy and I met in 9th grade. Our communities had 2 Junior High Schools and in our 9th year, they built a new one and combined the student body of both so instead of running two facilities, the municipality only had to worry about the one. That, and the copious amounts of asbestos in the two older buildings made the decision easy.

The summer before the school year started, my parent’s neighbour brought her son over to meet me. They did this because since we both went to different schools, we could possibly help one another mix with the students from the opposing school, respectively. Not a bad idea, to be honest.

So 9th grade starts. Jeremy is my class but being from the opposite school, I didn’t know him and we had zero contact. We mainly sat in pods with kids we already knew. In Gym class, they combined 2 classes for every Gym period to better make use of the space and time. My neighbour happened to be in the class we shared the gym with so our two friend groups combined. Just so happens, he had been friends with Jeremy.

We were all standing around talking and shooting the shit, when whatever game we were playing in Gym that day started and our group dispersed. Both Jeremy and I hated Gym class so after the other kids all broke apart, only he and I were left standing there by the bleachers.

It was awkward. We said a couple bits of small talk but we both were obviously waiting for an excuse to walk away.

Then I said something which I cannot remember, probably something along the lines of “so what’s up?”

He responded with: “When I was a kid, I put a Hercules lunch box on my head and ran into a door.”

When I stopped laughing and could see again, I saw he too was almost passing away from laughter.

We’ve been friends ever since, and our relationship is quite literally the exact same as it was then. One of us says something beyond stupid that only we find funny, and then the two of us collapse into a large mass of jiggling paste as we fade away.

Besides that, he’s a great guy who makes my life more fun and interesting. Who else would have gotten wasted with me and hopped on some swings at a playground at 2am when we were 19, who else would drink a litre of vodka with me in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, who else would get drunk and watch Tucker & Dale Vs Evil with me not just once, not just twice, but more times than we could count?

We drink a lot, is the general point of this.

I also fully believe that Jeremy would fist fight a kraken if he had to.

I know he reads this, so let me end this part with something literally only he will understand:

Don’t worry Jeremy, I’ll earn my apple fritters today.

I plan on finishing Cabinet of Curiosities over the next couple days. I’ve seen the first 3 episodes and it might be the best horror TV anthology I’ve seen since Channel Zero and in some ways, it may even be better. Del Toro has such a deep understanding of fear and what makes us afraid — I know he will go down as a complete legend of the industry, up there with names like Price, Hitchcock, Carpenter.

And he deserves every bit of it.

I don’t have much today, I’m afraid. With both of my jobs, the Arno edits, and the fantasy pitch, I had to give up on my NaNo project for this year. While it bummed me out to have to do that, as I had so much fun with it last year, I had to do it because I’m having some success in other writing endeavors and if that isn’t a good reason to drop a project, I don’t know what is.

Thanks for reading my ramblings. I don’t know if this newsletter is going to have legs or not, but with all of my friends leaving Twitter, I don’t know what else to do. I do know, though, that whether or not the bird app dies, I’ll always have my friends both online and in real life.

See you on the other side.

- Mason

Chapter One

“He had like a whole belt made out of nipples. Crazy shit like that,” Dave said through a mouthful of buffalo wings, raising his beer to his lips. We were sitting in our regular booth at the back of the bar behind the pool tables and next to the shitters. Dirty Frankie’s was the best bar in town, even if it had carpet floors and wood panel walls covered in framed photographs of fish, deer, and naked women. It was also the only bar. So we took what we could.

“Didn’t he have a box of vulva’s too? Like under his bed or some shit?” I said. Mike sat across from us eating pretzels and looking at his phone. Every time we spoke he would glance up over the top of the little glowing rectangle and regard us with a look that said, what the actual hell?

“Maybe,” Dave said, and took a swig, ripped a burp, and wiped his mouth with his shirt, “what’s a vulva?”

“The outside of a vagina.” Mike said without looking up. Dave took another drink, shrugged, and looked back at me. I nodded.

“Yeah the outside part.” I said.

“For real?” Dave said.

“Yeah,” I said, “for real. A whole box.”

“Nah for real they have a name for just the outside?”

“It’s a complicated system. Women’s reproductive organs are complex, it’s not like our dicks where we just point and shoot and their job is done.” Mike said.

“Yeah but to name just the outside seems weird. Isn’t the whole thing just a vagina?”

“Kinda, but not really.” I said.

Dave took another drink, thought about this, and said, “Well fuck eh?”

I stood up. “I’m going to need another. You boys good?”

Dave passed me his empty bottle and Mike shook his head. “I gotta get going soon. If I come home drunk, Melissa will have my ass.”

“If she got her own ya wouldn’t have to worry about it.” Dave said.

“Her own what?”

“Her own ass,” Dave said and held his hand up in the air, sideways, and ran his other down in front of it, “flat as a board my guy. Nice lady but she got the ass of a ten year old Norwegian boy named Börk or some shit, with the little dots above the o.”

“What’s your wife’s ass like, huh?” Mike said. “Oh that’s right, you don’t have one.”

Dave leaned back and rubbed his stomach. “All right big shoots, we don’t gotta get feisty now. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Mike said.

“Yeah you know I love Börk, she’s a good lady.”

I turned away, laughing, before I could hear what happened next. I went to the bar and asked Phil for a couple more beers and he took mine and Dave’s empties along with the $7 I slid across the counter in loonies and toonies. While I waited for our drinks, I examined the photos above the backlit wall. Most were of Phil himself with his little beady eyes and bald head, some were of his son Crash — honest to fuck his birthname was friggin Crash — and others were polaroids of trout that Phil and Crash caught out on Bellover Lake. The use of polaroids may imply these pictures were old, taken from Phil’s glory days, but to be honest with you, some of them were less than a year old. The one farthest on the right was a rainbow trout the size of a toddler and I know good goddamn well it wasn’t there the year before. Phil just liked people to think he had an interesting past. So he faked the present.

Above the bar was a tiny RCA TV mounted into the corner. It was the only screen in the place. I went to a bar — sorry a sport’s grill, whatever the good goddamned fuck that meant — in the city once and it seemed like every inch of the interior was covered in big flat screens playing 72 different sports at the same time. Who would want that?

Phil’s TV was an ancient thing that got about three stations, two of them being news, one being TSN. It was usually on TSN unless the Leaf’s were playing. Phil didn’t have many rules for his bar, but there was one single big one: no Toronto Maple Leaf jerseys, hats, or games. He took this rule very seriously. He kept a blue recycling bin the size of a milk crate outside by the door next to the smoker’s bucket and told anyone in a Leaf’s hat they can leave them out there. This would have cost him business if there was any other place to drink besides your own basement or garage and Dirty Frankie’s.

(Side note — we never learned who the hell Frankie was or why he was so dirty that they named a bar after him and his filth. Every time one of us asked Phil about it, he just shrugged and said the name was already on the place when he got it.)

(Side, side note — Phil built the building from the ground up so that answer was terrifying and I didn’t like it very much at all.)

That night the TV was playing the news, so the Leaf’s must have been playing. It was the local station and a young, brown haired woman I almost recognized was standing in front of Phil’s only competition and also his only supplier, the local NSLC — Nova Scotia Liquor Commision.

The beer store, for folk from away.

I say I almost recognized her because the TV was such a piece of shit that you could barely see past the noise and the static. Her voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of the void, like I was watching some Poltergeist-type shit. I couldn’t read the ticker tape at the bottom, either. Not because of the static but because of the actual silver duct tape Phil had stretched across the bottom of the screen. In black marker he had written across it “i cant turn it up lost remote suck my ass”.

“...accident. Officials say the lake will remain closed off to locals for the remainder of the week, if not more. Residents say they’re worried about the fish and what this will do to local hobbyists. I’m Rebecca Moore, with Mayflower News. Back to you, Sean.”

The screen cut away back to Sean McGuire, a pasty faced redhead that went to high school with my dad. Da said he once caught him in the girl’s bathroom sticking his pecker between the stall doors and fucking the wood. “I’d have been disturbed if there was anyone else in there besides Sean.” Da told me.

Never did think to ask Da how he caught him in the girl’s bathroom, but I don’t think I’d like the answer.

After hearing her name I did in fact recognize Rebecca. We went to camp together when we were kids. I knew she was working for the news now but I hadn’t seen her on TV before. Which, to be fair, isn’t saying much because how many people actually watch the news on TV anymore? I got all my news from social media like a real man.

Bellover Lake was behind the liquor store. Everyone who fished Bellover — or Bendover if you asked Dave — parked beside the black brick building and had to walk a stony, overgrown path to find it. It was about a ten minute hike, twenty if you were drunk, or three and a half hours if you were on mushrooms like Dave, Mike, and I had been back in ‘12.

About a week ago there had been reports of some sort of accident and the police had blocked off the path. There was a cruiser in the liquor store parking lot at all times. At first they had used yellow police tape to rope off the entrance to the path but eventually they pulled up a concrete divider and sealed it off.

Of course, rumours started to fill the air around town. Some said they’d found a body, some said the government was doing some sort of experiment back there, one guy even stopped Mike and I outside a Tim’s and told us that he saw a Martian land in the lake and start mating with all the trout. Mike asked him what he meant and the guy said, “Fish fuckers, boy, all them Martians are just fish fuckers.”

My guess? On the opposite side of the lake from where everyone swam and fished and such was Kevin’s Concrete & Steel, the biggest employer in town, and I had bet they messed up and spilled something in the water and now it was all fucked. Happened to Dominion Beach up the other end of the island way back when and no one could swim there for the better part of a decade.

“All’s I know is they better have that lake ready to go come fishin’ season,” Phil said, putting my two beers down in front of me, “or I ain’t gonna be happy.”

“What ya gonna do if they don’t, Phil?” I said, taking the bottles.

“I ain’t gonna be happy is what I’m gonna do.”

“Just gonna be real mad are ya?”

“I’m gonna be somethin.”

“You gonna write a strongly worded letter to the editor are ya?”

“Oh I’m gonna do more than—,” he saw my smirk and swatted at me with his bar towel, “oh piss off b’y.”

I hurried back to the table and put Dave’s beer down in front of him and sat. Dave was listening to Mike and nodding diligently, absentmindedly popping the top off the bottle with his teeth. It was a twist off.

“You can’t do it forever,” Mike said, “you’re almost thirty.”

“I’m closer to twenty-five.” Dave said.

“Motherfucker, you're twenty-nine years old.”

“I rounded down ‘cause it’s over the five.”

“No way in hell your mother wasn’t huffing industrial strength carpet cleaner when she was pregnant with you.” Mike said and sat back, his arms behind his head, his eyes wide, exhausted.

“What are we talking about?” I said.

“Dave here thinks that selling weed is a respectable and stable way for a grown man to make a living.”

“It’s legal now,” Dave said, “I’m not a dealer, I’m a Cannabis Farmer and Distributor.” Dave said this last part with a faux-British accent and a flutter of his eyes.

“You grow it in your barn and sell it behind the high school!” Mike said and slapped his hands down on the table, looking at me in astonishment.

“Don’t look at me, I think it’s great weed.” I said and took a drink from my beer.

“See?” Dave said.

Mike sighed. “Of course you’d say that. He’s never going to grow up if you always take his side.”

“I don’t always take his side, it’s just good weed.” I said.

Mike looked tired and I couldn’t really blame him for it. I understood that Dave and I were an exhausting duo. The three of us had been best friends since childhood but sometimes it seemed like Mike and I tried to move on from high school and Dave just stayed behind. Like he got held back so many grades, his life itself got held back.

“It’s not just the weed, dude. What about the time he stole Devon Brunson’s Mustang? Or the time he did donuts in the police station parking lot? Or when he got drunk and drove a car into Bellover?”

“Bendover…” Dave whispered.

“Okay so three little things,” I said, “so what? We all do stupid shit.”

“It was all in the same night!” Mike said, and stood up, slinging his coat from his chair and around his shoulders. This was three-beer Mike — pissy as all hell but kind of made good points. “Guys you both need to grow up. We can’t just be teenagers the rest of our lives.”

“I ain’t a teenager, I’m twenty-eight!” Dave said, raising his beer.

Mike looked at him with the shocked look of a parent who just saw their child shit on the living room rug, then he looked at me, and then Dave again. “You’re twenty-nine, dumbfuck. Take that away from him!” Mike pointed at Dave’s beer while looking at me and with that he turned and left.

“Why he so mad, ya think?” Dave asked. “Börk not putting out?”

I wanted to agree with Mike. He made some valid points. Dave did need to grow up, and maybe I was keeping him from doing so by defending him, or maybe he was holding me back, or maybe we were both tied to one another like anchors and we were sinking to the bottom fast. But I still threw my head back and laughed until tears stung my eyes because no one could make me laugh like Dave. No one provided more fun in my life than Dave. Maybe we did need to grow up but if we did, would we still laugh like that? Would the core elements of our friendship still remain the same? I wasn’t against change, I was just fucking scared of it.

An hour later Dave and I were walking home, both of our cars still in the lot beside the bar. After Devon’s Mustang took a bath, I made sure Dave never got behind the wheel after having a few. I should have always done that, but Dave is a big guy — as wide as he is tall, and he’s fucking tall. Easily six-seven. He kept his hair and beard long and usually wore all black looking like a bouncer. So if Dave wanted to drive, I wasn’t going to be able to physically stop him. After the lake incident however, I asked him what he would have done if instead of taking the ‘stang for a swim, he clipped a kid.

He started listening to me after that.

“Mike seemed pissy tonight,” Dave said, trying to kick a rock and missing, stumbling into me. I pushed him back upright.

“You said that.” I said. “He did, though.”

“Think he’s mad at me?” Dave said.

“No. Yeah. Maybe. Probably, I don’t know. Mike seems mad about a lot these days.”

“He knows I don’t actually think Melissa looks like that, right?”

“He knows.”

“I should tell him.”

“Don’t tell him you think his wife is hot.”

“But—”

“No buts.”

“Okay.”

We walked in silence for the next few minutes. Mayflower was the kind of small town where you measured distance in time, not kilometres or blocks. Everything was X minutes away from something, because there wasn’t enough of anything to use anything else.

Headed down Main, under the buzzing orange glow of the ancient halogen lamps the town would never replace, I looked at all the stores and shops that now stood empty and forgotten, their windows boarded up. Mayflower had never been thriving, but nowadays it seemed like it was barely breathing. It made me sad. It also made me think how long could I remain here before I stopped breathing, too.

But if I left, what would happen to Dave?

He shouldn’t have been my responsibility, I know that, but in a way he was. I didn’t like to think about it much.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Dave asked, suddenly. It caught me so off guard that I had to look up at him first and I saw he was staring straight ahead, his eyes glossy. Dave had a habit of getting emotional when he was drunk or high enough but no way was either right now. Takes more than four or five beers to put him into that state. So when I saw his eyes shining wetly in the orange light of the flickering lamp overhead, I felt something was off.

“What? No,” I said, shaking my head, “of course not. Why?”

“I think Mike thinks so. And I think he’s right.”

“Mike’s an asshole sometimes.”

“Yeah but all of us are.”

“That’s fair.”

“It’s just,” he rubbed his eyes and dragged his hand down his face through his beard, the classic guy way of trying to hide our tears, “I don’t mean to be like this.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” I said because I didn’t have anything else to say.

“Sometimes I think I let my life pass me by and you guys are all moving on with your shit and I’m still just doing the same shit I always did.”

“How am I moving on? I’m still right here with you.”

“You got your shit together. I still live in Ma’s basement for fuck’s sake.”

“I think you let Mike get in your head.” I said.

“I’m more than he thinks I am.” He said.

“I know.”

“You believe me?”

“I do.”

Dave went quiet for a few minutes. I didn’t know if he was going to speak again. I didn’t know if I wanted him to. It was the most open he had ever been with me (except for when we were kids and his dad died and he asked me where I thought dead people go and I told him I was just a fucking kid like him and I had no idea) and to be honest I was a little uneased by it all. On one hand I was glad my friend was opening up, on the other I wanted him to just make a dick joke and move on from the whole thing.

When he spoke next, I winced, expecting him to keep going with his uncomfortable sad shit. But he didn’t. “Fuck it,” he said, “lets take a look.”

I was confused until I saw what he was looking at. In front of us, tucked behind two cedar trees on either side, was the NSLC. A small black brick building like every other NSLC in the province. Its blue and purple neon lights were all out for the evening and like everything else in town, it looked old and rotten under the halogen lights of the street.

Dave wasn’t looking at the liquor store, though — he was looking at the parking lot beside it, and the gravel path that ran behind it to the loading bay, and the now-blocked dirt path that snaked into the trees behind it. Yellow police tape zigged and zagged over the block haphazardly. Some tape was covered in dirt and trapped underneath it from when they plopped it atop the old barrier of caution tape. They hadn’t bothered to cut it down first.

There was a police cruiser parked beside the building, sitting in the shadows. “There’s a cop,” I said.

“When’s that ever stopped us?” Dave said, and marched ahead of me to the lot.

Against all my better judgement, I followed him.

He had a point.

When had it ever stopped us?

Well, there it is — Chapter One. This is going to be a strange one and I hope you stick around to see where we go. I’m a pantser so I too don’t know where we are going to go with this but I’m excited to find out. This is a weird way of putting out a story for me as I’m posting as I go and only giving each chapter a once-over before hitting the publish button, and I don’t have an editor. So excuse any errors, please. I’m just a boy.

Until next time,

Mason

A newsletter no one asked for.

Hello, my name is Mason McDonald. You may know me from such hits as “Conservatives Want Us Dead So Let’s Yell At Them On Twitter” and “Here’s A Spooky Story I Wrote During A Depressive Episode”. Other classics include “My Mental Illness Is Your Problem Now”, “How Fat Can One Man Get”, “I Have No Mouth And I Must Meme”, and my personal favourite “Is A Beer And Existential Dread A Meal?”.

The problem with Twitter, where anyone reading this probably knows me from, is that you only get 240 characters (unless you’re cool with putting a little yarn emoji bEcAuSe iT mEaNs tHrEaD but every time I do that, a little piece of me dies) and it is also now owned by an actual harbinger of the apocalypse who uses bad memes to manipulate the stock market. 240 characters is just not enough for me to really dig my heels in, bite down, and embarrass myself.

So I said to myself, I said “Mason, your two other blogs you’ve made in the past both failed and left you feeling worse than you had when you first started them, why not try again?” And I have a thing for devilishly handsome fat men with steadily declining mental health and a hairline like a shaved coconut, so of course I had to listen.

Now you might be thinking, “this guy is weird. How did this even end up on my screen? What is it even about? Why do I feel groggy? What was in that drink? Where am I? Who am I? If God is in Heaven and Satan is in Hell, then which deity inhabits our mortal realm?”

To all that I say: What the actual fuck? But I’ll also say: read on below and I’ll give ya a little listy-poo about what to expect from this bad idea, this abomination, this friggin’ waste of time.

This is Graveyard Pillow Talk — pull up a headstone and let’s get busy, babydoll.

First things first, this place is going to be home to a new serial novel — Oh Sh*t, Dave’s Gonna Fist Fight The Kraken! A newsletter serial novel seems like a fun thing that might keep some of the ol’ intrusive thoughts away and to be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it done. Now that doesn't mean it hasn’t been done, it does however mean that I’m subscribed to about six newsletters and read two of them. In all fairness, there’s probably a metric fuck ton of serial novels published this way. What did Charlie Manson say in that old Family Guy bit? “If I haven’t seen it, it's new to me!”

Yeah I’m uncomfortable with my first instinct being to quote an animated serial killer too but you’re too far in this to back out now.

Anyway.

OSDGFFTK (holy fuck that is an awful abbreviation it looks like a white supremacist militia camp) is going to be a horror comedy about a group of friends who make a bet over a couple beers that one of them — Dave, duh — couldn’t win a fist-fight against the thing that recently took up residence in the lake behind the local liquor store. Is it the actual Kraken from Greek mythology? Or is it just some fella with weird arms eatin’ up all the folk in town? Who knows!

Well…I know, and yeah it's not just some guy, that would be false advertising, wouldn’t it? But trust me it isn’t what you think, either.

I’m hoping the first instalment goes up sooner rather than later, but I don’t have a date set in stone yet. Best thing you can do is subscribe to this weird fuckin’ thing and hope for the best.

Or don’t. What the fuck ever dude, I ain’t gonna twist your tits to sign up.

Unless you ask nicely though, I suppose.

For the news section of this newsletter:

I recently had a story acceptance from the wonderful folks over at Quill & Crow. My story Arno (based on a Twitter thread[for fuck’s sake] you can find here) will be published in Vol. 1 of their upcoming Bleak Midwinter anthology of winter-themed gothic horror stories due out on December 17th of this year.

My first story I ever published was also a winter piece, titled On The Frozen Waters Of Lake Namara. It was first published in Nico Bell’s Shiver anthology and later collected in my book A Time For Monsters. I suppose there’s a joke here somewhere about the Canadian writing stories about snow but if I make that joke I may collapse in on myself like a black hole.

I really like Arno, because I usually hate my work. But this one feels special. I don’t know. It's just a strange story about a weird little guy and I think it's neat.

What am I working on?

Well, write now — hahagetit?pleasebeatmetodeathwithalargerockandputmeoutofmymisery — I’m working on OSDGFFTK and gearing up to try NaNoWriMo again. I beat it last year but I hated the finished project so I’m hoping this year I get something I can actually stomach. It is titled, tentatively, Berserk, My Brother but that may change. I won’t be giving any more updates on it until I’ve got something substantial.

I also just finished and submitted a short fiction piece called To Devour Stardust. It is a body horror story about termites, inspired by Pinocchio. I think it is icky and I like it.

As of yesterday I also secured myself a content writing gig for a legal marketing company. It isn’t anything crazy, but a few extra bucks on the side while flexing my writing muscles is never a bad thing. I’ve done a few freelance gigs in the past but this is the most lucrative so far.

Right now I’m not reading anything as I just finished a binge of Headful of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay and The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group both by Grady Hendrix. I read all 3 back to back over two weeks and I’m a little book’d out at the moment. I’ll probably pick up something else right after Halloween.

I really enjoyed Book Club, liked Ghosts, and couldn’t get a grasp on Final Girl. It felt like a crime thriller by way of a horror story, while Hendrix wrote it like he wasn’t trying too hard to be either and in the end it was this weird amalgamation of references and action scenes that read more like a YA Slasher Fanfic than anything substantial. I still love Grady though and I will be first in line to buy his next book.

I’m also not watching or listening to anything specific right now as I get ready for All Hallow’s Eve. It's been horror movies and spooky songs all October, baby.

Tonight we are having friends over for a little Halloween party. I’m going to drink too much and eat way too many edibles. It should be fun if I survive it. I’m sure I’ll tweet some stupid shit so be sure to follow me over there if you haven’t already because if anything, it should be fun to watch me embarrass myself.

Well that’s all I have for you today. I hope you stick around, at least for OSDGFFTK. If you don’t, that’s cool. Like I don’t know what I’ve done to make you hate me so much but yeah it’s cool I guess. Whatever. Fuck off then.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. You’re my precious little cabbage.

Farewell, friends. Until next time.