Robin J. Harrison

  It was 10 at night, Martin had just gotten home after a 12-hour shift at the restaurant, and his night just kept getting worse! First, his work day had been shitty, he’d gotten next to no tips, two people hadn’t shown up to their shifts and the sous chef had quit mid-shift. Next, he’d been asked (or rather, threatened with termination if he declined) to stay late to help close. Once he had blissfully been allowed to leave that hellish place, he’d had the unfortunate luck to be stuck at a green traffic light for almost two full rotations because the person in the car in front of him simply was not paying attention, on their phone with their music blaring, so they didn’t hear him lay on the horn. And now, to top it all off, he’d made it home, but his hands were so achy and tired that he dropped his house keys into the grate just outside his house. This was technically an easy fix; he just needed a screwdriver and some patience, but he was sorely lacking in the patience department at

  As she stopped to catch her breath, she looked back. Her first mistake was being relieved when she didn’t see it behind her anymore.  Her second mistake was deciding it was okay for her to stay still for a few minutes longer. Her biggest mistake, however, was coming to these woods in the first place.  Agreeing to this camping trip with her friends seemed innocent enough, but if she had known they wanted to go to these specific woods in Baldenboro, she would have demanded they go to another. Now, this… thing… was after her. She had no idea where her friends were and no way to contact them since she had dropped her phone as she ran, and there was no way in hell she was going to stop to pick it up. She gathered her bearings; she was sure that the thing - was it a huge wild cat? It didn’t look or act like any cat she was aware of; wild or domestic - had to be far enough away at this point that she could find her car and get the fuck out of there. It had to be. She didn’t hear it anywhere

  Everything about her was a lie. At least, that’s what common sense told me. There was absolutely no way that this woman was real.  Her red hair flowed in the wind looking more like fire than the actual flames that devoured the structure of the house that surrounded us. Her porcelain skin reflected the flames as she reached her dainty hand out to me, silently telling me to grab onto her blood-stained flesh. Her eyes, though empty sockets, filled me with what I can only describe as an intense sense of peace. Something had to be wrong here. My skeptic brain screamed at me as I reached out and allowed her to wrap her deathly cold fingers around my hand and pull me effortlessly out of the rubble that had trapped me for so long that I’d started losing feeling in my feet. “Who-” I had so many questions for this strangely beautiful woman whom I now owed my life to. She smiled a truly chilling smile, her red-painted lips curling up to reveal gnarled teeth that would be any dentist’s nightmare

He was at a proverbial crossroads right now, but there seemed to be no resolute answer; no one right way. But that was always life, wasn’t it? Real life had no black-or-white answers, there was no truly good or truly bad.  The main issue here, though, wasn’t that there wasn’t a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer, it was that both answers would absolutely destroy someone’s life. He took a long drag on his cigarette. He supposed he could choose neither, but then that would open up a whole new can of worms. He slowly let out the smoke into the chilly winter night’s air.  He placed a hand on his stomach, feeling bad for smoking, but still knowing he hadn’t even made the decision to keep it, yet.  He was pregnant, but not with his wife, Susan's child, but rather, with his best friend, Thomas’ after a one-night drunken fling. He’d immediately told Susan what had happened after he’d woken up the next day, and she hadn’t been mad and hadn’t brought it up since, but he could tell she was still distr