Stories by Leon de la Garza
Start by answering your ringing phone. It’s the police. Panic for the shortest instant before remembering you haven’t left your house in weeks. It’s not illegal to stay at home, is it? Think hard. Feel a shiver climb half-way up your back and listen to the phone. Your mom is dead. Motherfucker. She died this…
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…
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…