Steve Hanson
Stories (72)
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The Sin Eater
The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Reynolds didn’t hear about this until at least a day later. It was Mrs. Greystone, as always, who brought in the latest gossip and elderly woman’s fears. It was a Friday afternoon, and Reynolds, still the junior-most deputy in the sheriff’s department despite no longer considering himself a “rookie,” was dreading the late-night shift he would have to start when evening hit.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Horror
Ari the Navigator
“There weren’t always dragons in the valley.” The human child who whispered these words was lying inside the small boat, sleeping, with her red hair bunched under her body and her arms splayed over her face, as if to shield out long-forgotten sunshine remembered only in body and dream. The peacock sitting across from her craned his narrow head for some further hint of where her dreams might be taking her, if for no reason other than to learn more about this strange creature he shared the boat with. For the past hour or so he had watched her sleeping form, listening. She occasionally muttered half-formed words, strange incantations under her breath. But the girl remained as mysterious to the peacock as the mighty dragons that surely soared across the skies of the valleys carved deep into her dreams.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Fiction
Carpathia
For the first day after the girl moved into their cabin, Abigail never heard her speak. The girl’s mouth moved, Abigail could see that. But she never spoke out loud for Abigail to hear. Instead, the girl whispered strange and secret words to the small, porcelain doll that she clutched in her hands so tightly that Abigail thought it might have been frozen to her arms in the icy waters of the sea.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Fiction
Mickey
Looking back on that entire three-week period of the summer of 2015, it seems clearer now that I was always going to be the one to take Mickey to the island myself. It would be too cliché, of course, to say that “I needed him more than he needed me.” But, in a broader sense, both of our lives at that point complemented each other’s in enough ways that anyone else would have been redundant.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Petlife
Unknown World
The damn owl drew me into the whole mess. The second mess, I mean, the one ten years later. The one with Aria. Who knows how things would have turned out if I had missed that one on the NFT exchange, but lately everything seems to be nothing more than an endless web of possibilities expanding infinitely into the ether, before collapsing into the most troublesome and irritating realities.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Fiction
Wildflowers
The low clouds of cigarette smoke hung below the chandeliers in the darkness of the lounge as Douglas entered. He had taken his last Xanax an hour ago, and flushed the rest down the off-white toilet in his single-bed hotel room. His head spun. A small woman sat at the bar with a vodka and a sad, curved face. He passed her and she glanced up at him beneath his hat, and he saw that she was dressed as a flapper from the Jazz Age. She smiled—he tried to return it, but he suddenly couldn’t feel his face, so he kept walking without looking back to watch her face lose its trace of that second’s happiness lingering below her soft eyes.
By Steve Hanson4 years ago in Fiction
