Author: T.M. Camp
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the apartment across the way
We’re living in an apartment complex, a bit run down and seedy. But this is all we can afford. In the apartment across the way, a young couple live with their two small children. The woman is slight, dark haired and sickly. Her husband is darker, brows constantly knotted with rage. His mentally-challenged brother lives…
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david and mickey
It’s night and we’re driving, my friend David and me. I’ve known him a long time. Since we were in sixth grade, I think. We’ve stayed in touch that whole time, mostly. Well, we fall out of touch and then back into touch. We haven’t seen each other in years — almost twenty, I think…
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frantic spider
…the spider struggles against the pull of the water as the tub drains, a thin filament of almost wire-like web cast out like a dark line . . . it clenches like a fist in the water, and I feel the tug of the web and pull my hand away, leaving it to it’s fate…
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masks and shadows
Changing the sheet on my daughter’s crib tonight, strange flashes of faces in her room — white and black, bold stripes and contrast, large teeth and bulging eyes framed by wild hair . . . almost like the stark, menacing glee of Japanese oni masks. These flashes, somewhere between a mental image and a visualization…
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the floating eye
…and I have no breath to scream as my daughter falls twenty feet to the hard concrete floor, a gasp pressing out of my as I run to pick up her tiny, limp body. “Oh god, her eyes…” I turn away hiding her face from my wife so she cannot see how our daughter’s right…
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robotic
… a brief visual flash this morning, something white and glossy scuttling across the floor towards me . . . about as wide as the coffee table, slightly taller, ducking its head to pass beneath it . . . insectile . . . vague impression of shiny black eyes, stripes along the legs and torso…
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opening night
…I find myself in the front row, enduring an abysmal production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by my ex-wife. It’s godawful. Pretentious and ponderous. They’ve changed the language, modernized all the poetry out of it. And, insult to injury, they’ve added songs, turning it into a musical. Only Puck holds any interest. Dark and…
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early morning
Pushing through the soft fuzz of the baby monitor, my daughter’s cries jolts me awake: “Daddy, daddy, daddy…” I’m up and across the hall before I have a chance to clear the mist from my head. Standing over her crib, I pat her back and tell her it’s okay. Once she settles down I head…
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doing the dishes
…and as I turn to put a glass in the cupboard I startle and flinch backwards from the dark figure standing right at my left shoulder. Vague impressions . . . someone looking into my face . . . a male presence about my height but larger, heavy-set almost . . . broad head, the…
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Sunday nap
…there are three children playing at the curb, jumping in and out of a deep puddle of mud and dirt. The oldest of these, perhaps eight years old, stops in the midst of bossing the other two around and turns as he notices me… …and a man’s voice tells me “Look to the world around…
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brief reunion
…we sit together in the small living room, balancing plates on our knees and doing our best to keep up the conversation despite the fact that there are some genuinely difficult conflicts unresolved between a few of us. And the fact that some of us are dead. It’s a surprise to see them, my grandparents.…
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footsteps and flashes
After dinner, my wife runs to the store. My daughter and I play in my office. The whole time, my skin is crawling. I have a sense that someone — or multiple someones — is passing through my office, moving past us unseen. The sensation is uncanny, disquieting. My daughter seems not to notice. When…
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fragments
…a long bodied cat, muscular and lean, stalks through the room — insane eyes, gaping mouth drooling as it swivels its head from side to side . . . its long gray fur matted and ragged, trailing after it in the air… …I turn and see the electrical plug floating in the air before my…
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afternoon nap
Mind wandering around as I waited for sleep to come, dozy logic moving from Macon Leary to Edward Gorey to Ernest Hemmingway . . . then, the image of a local highway, the flashing lights of police cars against the pale winter sky.
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eastern promises
I find myself on a tour of a city somewhere in Eastern Europe. It is a dank, darkly industrial place — all smokestacks and ornate spires, brick walls stained with soot. Tagging along with a friend from junior high — he has made this trip many times before — I wander through the streets and…
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honeysuckle
About a month ago I noticed that whenever I walked into the kitchen of our house I could smell honeysuckle. This went on for a number of days before I mentioned it to my wife. She couldn’t smell anything. Even more strange, this only happened when I walked through a particular doorway. Coming in from…
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payroll
…I find that I have overslept and am in a rush to get a stack of deposits to the University’s bank by noon, otherwise all of the faculty and staff paychecks will bounce. The deposit is a stack of checks and slips totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are pink and yellow carbon copies,…
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the new office
…and I’m surprised to find out that not only are each of us getting our own office in the new building, but we’ll have an attached bedroom as well. A few of my coworkers even have bunkbeds. The gossip around the office is that this is to allow for a more Mad Men like atmosphere.…
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the shadow on the stairs
Dozing on the couch while the baby has her bath, I dream… …and at the turn of the stairs I look up to see a shadow slowly slide down the wall and onto the floor, like a black puddle of oil. From this pool, a figure slowly rises — an almost cartoonlike shape of a…
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daycare rescue
Somehow, I have become two people. There is the adult version of me, as I am now. And there is the teenaged version of me. Together, we are plotting to rescue my youngest daughter from her daycare. The details of why she needs rescuing aren’t explained but, armed to the teeth and sick with worry,…
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echo | the recursive old woman
Another entry from one of my old journals, this time from 1996. It begins simply enough… I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. You can read the rest here.
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music from an unknown room
And, again, there was music playing when I laid down to take a nap earlier today. Faintly . . . as though someone was listening to a radio in another part of the house. But, of course, no one was.
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music from an unknown room
And, again, there was music playing when I laid down to take a nap earlier today. Faintly . . . as though someone was listening to a radio in another part of the house. But, of course, no one was.