Patrick Juhl
Bio
Born in California, live in Tennessee. Wanna know more? Well maybe there are hints hidden in code in each of my stories. But probably not. I've got a black cat named Peewee.
Stories (18)
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One Point Seven-Six Parsecs
It was dark. Blackness enshrouded the sleeping figure like a great, fuzzy, blanket, warm and still. The silence filled the space with a presence that was almost physical. He woke in stages, rising from the depths of unconsciousness like a diver ascending, then pausing, then ascending again, until, before he knew what had happened, he was awake, and he would not have been able to pinpoint an exact moment when he “woke up.”
By Patrick Juhl4 years ago in Futurism
Fish Lures
It was not alive. It was not dead. The thing rotated slowly in the air above the pond, and Carolyn squinted to see it. Dead things had a certain look to them–living things, too. This was somewhere in between, hovering and slowly revolving, perhaps nudged by the breeze. It was not suspended by anything–just suspended over the water, fur ruffling in the frigid air. It was a tabby cat, motionless, but certainly not dead, and just hovering, like how a small green inchworm seems to hover when dangling by its little thread of silk.
By Patrick Juhl4 years ago in Fiction
A Door in my Nonna's House
There’s a door in my Nonna’s house that nobody ever opens. “Sewing room,” my grandmother always told me, but the sewing room, piled with fabric scraps and cookie tins of buttons and needles, is the door on the left of that door. “Linen closet,” my mother said, and she grew up in that house, but the linen closet is the door on the right. I haven’t tried to open it. “It would be wrong,” I tell myself, but that’s not why. When I pass that door in the dark, slightly shorter, slightly more narrow, a slightly darker shade of off-white than its siblings, I skirt far around it to run to my bed and sweep the covers over my head. “Base,” I think, panting. “Base, base, base.” Nothing can get me.
By Patrick Juhl4 years ago in Horror
François
The approach of winter tinged the summer with a bite like pine needles. It wasn't cold yet, but François felt the winter in his bones–in his slender fingers and his tough skin grown to something, as it suddenly seemed to him at poignant times, almost like paper. It seemed that way to him now, as he twisted the apples from their dry stems and dropped them, gently, into the basket that balanced on top of his ladder.
By Patrick Juhl4 years ago in Fiction
Velvet Night
The restaurant glowed across the parking lot like a warm bed of embers, barely reaching the smattering of dark cars that huddled in the pounding rain. The charcoal-colored blazer that Vince held over his head blocked the worst of it, but by the time he had run the fifteen feet from his car to the restaurant, the coat was already soaked through, uniformly darkened by the deluge. His pants and shirt were wet from the chest-down, perfect for his mystery date with his sister’s mystery friend, Sadie Emerson. Only his hair and shoulders remained mostly untouched as he locked his car with a chirp and fell through the door.
By Patrick Juhl5 years ago in Futurism
