Stories by Leon de la Garza
From beneath me, under my skin and sheets and bed, comes a whisper of the thing called Rat, but I can’t understand it. Its voice enters my ears like the time I tumbled out of a moving skilift, a loud thwomp, thwomp, thwomp, as I stumble down the snowbanks of St. Moritz. Help, I yelled…
A disembodied hand has killed a woman. John is sitting in his bed, watching the news in disbelief. It happened at a gas station just outside the town. There is video footage on the TV. A giant white hand emerges from the darkness offscreen, floating. It’s the size of a man. The woman cannot see…
I had been standing behind everyone at the funeral. The time was somewhere around 6pm and the bright sun was shining in the faces of the attendees, making me wonder if the sunglasses were serving a purpose this one time. I didn’t want to get near the casket. My sister’s dying face was already etched…
The baby has been crying for days. Has it been a week? Has it been two weeks? In the mountains Jerome never counts the days. When he or Lily are thirsty, he brings water from the well. Hunting is an everyday endeavor. The sun tells the time. The seasons guarantee a motion through the years….
The eye is now upon me. I can feel its gaze, its invisible pricks stinging the skin beneath my mouth. I’ve been biting my lower lip to distract myself from it. I’ve been biting my little finger, too. It itches every now and then as I stare into the growing thing on my bedroom wall,…
The time is 1:21 AM. You are walking across a park in your neighborhood. Sleepless nights curse you. Your mind swirls with terrible ideas from half-baked nightmares. You awoke tonight with the unsettling vision of a massive mattress overpowering a fragile old gentleman. He wanted to carry it, but it was too heavy, and now…
In a distant planet of a distant stellar system, under the dimming light of an orange star, a man stood silent, staring at his fallen ship. He didn’t know what had happened, he didn’t know how he had ended up in that alien planet, with his fate almost sealed, with his crew dead and…
Darkness engulfed Earth. Acid and ash rained over the continents. The wind screamed as it passed through the cracks and the holes and the windows of the decaying cities. A sad melody rang over its atmosphere reaching every corner of the world to remind its non-existent inhabitants of the death they had endured. A…
I entered this chamber fifty two years ago. I remember that day in its entirety. My memories before it are sparse, it was a different life, they were different times. I remember my body. They said it was perfect, I was short, slim, smart. I agreed with them when they told me, but they didn’t…
Part One ”It‘s such a pretty view” Rita sat silent on the edge of the roof of the 200 story building with her feet dangling over it. The wind swayed her dark hair in a rhythmic manner and she took a deep breath of it and tasted the dirt that flew with it. ”Do you…