Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in your own subconscious; any place you think you know is different after dark.

Tellingly, the most arresting odes to slumber are spoken by those who can’t have it.

Nobody wanted to huddle in a moldering churchyard after midnight because there was nowhere else to smoke. But huddle they did. Misery loved company and made strange bedfellows.

“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.

She knew she sounded like a know-it-all but had never figured out how to avoid that particular pitfall.

He should have been dumber. Anybody that good-looking deserved to be dumb.

“Saint Anthony’s Fire. It was a sort of medieval epidemic. Caused gangrene and hallucinations and made people feel like they were being burned alive.”

“‘C. burranicum is an endemic species—it doesn’t grow anywhere else,’ according to sophomore biology major Wes Tucker, who was forced to leave his room on the fourth floor of Coblin Hall. ‘Killing it would be like, mycological genocide.’”

She learned to live in the permanent twilight of sleep-deprivation psychosis. Life, if you could call it that, was a never-ending out-of-body experience.

“I’m one of your lab rats, Tom. I’m the ghost of lab rats past.” He went still, stopped struggling. Hannah blew a kiss in his ear. “Honey, do you remember me now?” What a charming name they gave it. Project Honeydew. That must have been Heather’s idea. She had the same cold, sticky sweetness. She insisted everyone call her Heather, not Dr. Lockley. Even slippery little rats like Hannah.