Muscle Memory

Other residents would cradle baby dolls, designed to match the heft of a newborn. But for Grandpa, who’d been one of America’s top reporters, only a typewriter would do. It didn’t even need paper; as the nurses discovered, simply sitting at the antique Olivetti was enough to quell his nightmares. Though his mind was gone, his fingers retained echoes of his memories, shaping them into the staccato sound of clacking keys.

He would sit there, morning to night, at his little utilitarian desk. And while he never produced a single page, we still cherished each and every word he wrote.

From Guest Contributor Keshe Chow

Possibly Stephen

The writer stared at the page, expecting inspiration to spring at him from the fibres of the old-style reporters’ notebook.

Words trickled...gushed...cascaded. He ripped the page out, rolled it into a tight ball and chucked. It bounced off the bin, thran as the incorporeal muse.

“What was wrong with that?” she asked, form flickering in the draught.

“It was in Latin,” he spat.

She giggled a bit. “Sorry, my mind wandered. I know, how about–?”

“Look, could you put on something less filmy. It’s distracting. Tired, not dead.”

“Tweeds okay?”

He nodded, and wrote Misery.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

Policing The City

The victims all offered the same sparse testimony. They were each accosted in a dark alley without warning. The last thing they remembered was a man wearing a black coat and fedora.

The police wanted to keep the stories from making it into the press, so as not to tip off the perpetrator. They made sure to silence all the witnesses.

Of course, a reporter got onto the news and he had to be eliminated as well. When it eventually leaked to the paper, it became necessary to kill everyone.

As you can see, policing the city is hard work.

The Bee Farmer

The idea had been simple enough when his editor proposed it, a story about the mysterious fate of the disappearing bees.

Now, after weeks of interviews with scientists and bee farmers, he found himself on this lonely road, in the middle of nowhere Arkansas.

As he pulled up a long gravel drive, he noticed the air was pregnant with bees.

He knocked on the farmhouse door. A grizzled, bearded bear of a man answered.

"I wanted to ask you about the bees on your farm."

"I reckon I'll have to kill you like I killed the others," sighed the farmer.