Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

Nobody in their right mind would loiter in its long shadow in the middle of the night, but nobody in their right mind still smoked these days anyway.

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.

Tuck’s every emotion manifested as a kind of nervous tic.

“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.

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.

Tuck—worn down by years of debt and drudgery—often opted for the path of least resistance.

If anybody wanted to know why she was there after hours, she’d say she forgot something—her glasses, her phone charger, her professional ethics. Whatever.

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.

The trees gathered in close like so many curious cryptids. Hannah, home again among the monsters.

“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.

Lockley was, whatever her shortcomings, objectively beautiful. And objectively beautiful people could bend the rules in a way objectively average people could not. FACT.

“Remind me why I’m taking relationship advice from you?” “I agree, it’s embarrassing.

It hadn’t occurred to Tuck until just then that, despite his bustling bar, despite his animal magnetism, despite being such an obvious extrovert, maybe Theo kept coming back to the Anchorite because he was, in some bewildering way, lonely.