There once was an aardvark demure

He crept through dusky crepuscular

For his task was to visit

Sir Necrotic Despot

And deliver a much-needed cure

It was not until Augustus sat down to play the piano that he finally realized he could no longer feel anything. And that did not surprise him. 

The first time they set up the Ouija board it takes the girls about an hour to realize they have to actually ask me a question. “Here goes nothing,” they say, and nothing is right. They sit with the board between them for awhile until one of them gets my hint.  

The mouth of the bass kept opening and closing against the paper, even with the sides cut out and the organs smeared. It didn’t bother her, of course, it never did, but the maiden frowned at it anyway. 

Ramuli lay spread out on the floor of an oak planked living room. The room was bare around him, empty of all things, as was the rest of his home. He felt long, thin pinches down his bare back where the floorboards, old and warped, spread apart and left gaps, some as wide as a human finger.

A man got on a city bus and said, “Regis Toomey.” The bus was not crowded and was a nice bus, not one of those articulated freight haulers.

Freddie went and hugged the flood.

Freddie floundered in the mud.

Freddie went crazy in the head.

And now Freddie Flounder is dead, dead, dead.

She was new to the vampire game.
You could tell she was unsure of
trajectories, splash patterns.

Edward Gorey tales colored our childhood. The Wuggly Ump, who devours brass doorknobs, mud, carpet tacks, and children, figured large in our lives. We imagined its beady eyes, its grin filled with pointed teeth.

I come from a village of basket weavers. Wicker to wool, bamboo to bark—if it was meant to hold something, we could craft it.

When his father moved out, Tyler went mute, sitting in his room surrounded by Tinkertoys, building cars and houses that would not break. He would ignore the voice of his mother that penetrated the carpeted floor, punctuated with words that made him sweat.

One of the bright guests died suddenly that evening.  It was Miss Helena, who wore a long strand of pearls and an ostrich feather in her hair.  Some said she’d drowned in the mansion’s gray fountain. Others claimed she’d fallen down the garden’s stony stair.

It was the summer that we, of our own guts, decided to become anesthesiologists. It was the summer that my twin sister and I went about capturing the smallest animals we could find and placing them in dirty green-glass jars which smelled of brine.