Oh you're all back now, huh. Cool. Cool cool cool. There's room enough for everybody so come on in, stretch out, make yourself at home. I've been here for awhile, of course, since the Upside Down wasn't cool, since before we could all spell Demogorgon, when it was just funny dice and banana seats, brown bag lunches and nostalgia movies and red baseball hats. I've been eating pop rocks and drinking soda, slushing it all around in my mouth and forcing it down, hitting refresh and retweet and trying not to rub at the membranes while this foliage grows around me, all over, up my thighs and my fingers and and into my belly.

We’re headed downstate and Natalie’s driving, she insisted, a Chicago girl who’s driven across Paris, Tokyo, the left side of London streets like a pro, so she can handle this, and I wake from a doze to find us weaving on my country road

On the road you see a cloaked and hooded figure. You are traveling north, he south. He hails you before you can pass.

At night I double check to make sure the… front and back doors are locked.

My first crush killed a man in Ohio. His name was Taylor;

the crush, not the man, whose name I do not know.

By day the Quartermain greenhouse is still an actively-maintained conservatory, boasting an impressive assortment of flowers and vegetables, along with some righteous weed.

That was the year

I dressed up as confident

I loved my best friend

but candy more

It will happen on a sunny day when other thingsare happening that are more important

It was the day of the dead. We pitchedour discreet rows of canvas mausoleums;

His flawless routine. The tea pot whistle: the slow pour: the towel draped over his head: his face over the bowl: the steam emanating.

the ghost is a presence defined by negative space, a nothingness gripping your leg, your waist, your lungs, your throat, your tongue, creating a silence surrounded by static.

One of the things Peter liked most about nights when the moon was full was that under its light he turned into a woman.

When the zombies came, they were kinda lame.

Saw kept his eyes closed but imagined opening them, seeing night. The sun would have set, everything gone dark.

I walk into the confessional booth.

I haven’t been in at least a decade,

and, between you and me, I should confess

When you died everyone came home

to fill up the church.

The three of us—me and Cassie and our ten-year-old daughter, Luanne—were carving pumpkins at the kitchen table when Lu announced that her favorite movie of all time was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Even now in the dawn of the seventh grade, you know that you’re taking a risk.

Is this a horror story? I'd rather not use that word, because it involves one of my very best friends in the distant past and there was no horror in the event I will describe.