Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

Theo was one part bartender, one part business manager, one part one-man goon squad.

“Occam’s razor,” Edie repeated. “The simplest explanation is the best explanation.” It was a motto she’d tried to instill in her staff at the Times—along with the official motto, Salva veritate. With truth intact. But the truth was never simple, seldom whole.

Her fingers had an unsettling tendency to vanish or multiply, to sprout scales or talons, on the rare occasions she slipped out of her body without realizing.

Most people never traversed the numinous no-man’s-land between sleep and waking, where the laws of the physical universe went to pieces.

objectively beautiful people could bend the rules in a way objectively average people could not.

Truth, she had learned in her time at the paper, was almost always stranger than fiction.

She’d tried every humidifier and white noise machine and meditation app invented, and still the most reliable way to achieve oblivion was vodka and Klonopin and raspy AM radio in a language she didn’t know.