Showing results for "mike" in Short Stories

A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from the “invaluable” (George Saunders) author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material “These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live...

For the first time in one unforgettable collection, Skin and Bones features eight gripping original short stories in the bestselling Mike Bowditch series—including one brand new, never-before-published story—from Edgar-award nominated author Paul Doiron.

In The Mass of Shadows, Anatole France weaves a solemn and haunting tale of love, memory, and the fragile boundary between life and death. Through the voice of a sacristan recalling his father’s stories, we enter a world where the dead return not in terror, but in reverence—souls bound by affection, regret, and unfinished devotion. Once a year, they are granted a single hour to reunite with those they loved, gathering silently in their parish church to attend a Mass said not for the living, but for memory itself.

A group of bandmates celebrate the recent success of their album and tour by going a trip. But it's a bad trip. A very bad trip...

One winter night, as the snows fall outside their home, and a boy cannot sleep, his father tells him the story of a saint. A martyr. She is well known to all Christians in the land. Her, and her infant child. She is credited with stopping the reign of the pagan king.

I didn’t want to do the holograms. I never did. I reiterated this fact to myself as I saw her standing there, beautiful as ever. My sweet Mollie. She even was wearing that blue dress that she loved so much (I loved it even more, if that was possible—she looked so good in it!). And even from where I was standing, 10 feet away, I could see the curls in her blonde hair bounce as she turned her head. I could see her blue eyes. Vibrant. Real. So real...

A man is tortured by a sound that only he can hear. It was easily ignored at first. But now the insomnia is getting to him. He must find a way to stop the noise.... Anything is better than this.

Doctors have been traveling back in time to vaccinate populations against viruses. But nothing has been changing in the present. One man is about to find out why....

Two men are trapped in darkness. A shipping container, buried underground. No idea who locked them in there. It's been days. A week. Maybe more. And then the lock opens. Something is thrown inside with them. A gun. With only one bullet.

Jason Cole was working on finding a suitable picture for some newsletter or something. One of 10 or 20 specific photos he would find that day. Same old thing he’d done a hundred times before. Looking through stock photos, this time for a cooking ad.

Joseph isn't a painter. He's a junkie. Well...he was getting clean. Was clean, for a while. But then he started seeing it.... An abomination that threatens all life on Earth. And only he can stop it, by painting.

When Pfc. Chester Michael had gone over all the ways he that he might die in the war, when he thought about them back at the barracks weeks before Utah Beach ever happened, the top things on the list were: gettin shot, gettin blown up, and gettin fuckin shot. Weren’t those the normal ways that soldiers were dying in this war? Yeah. So that’s probably how he would die too. By getting shot at, and those shots not missing.

A kindergarten teacher has show and tell day earlier on in the school year. It goes down the alphabet, so the first day (today) is "A". A boy brings in an empty box, saying that he brought an "alien" to school.

A volunteer candy-striper stays over night at St. Mary's hospital to watch over a boy from her class. The same boy that had asked her to the school dance five times already. The same boy that she'd rejected five times already....

A criminal wakes up locked in a walk-in freezer.

I’ve been having the same dream now for a long time. It’s a recurring dream…or nightmare. I can never tell for sure because the emotion is different. The details are the always the same—the smells, the sounds of my shoes, etc.—but I never know what’s on the other side of those doors. I do now.

When the body of a young man is pulled from a submerged car in Roque Harbor, rookie Game Warden Mike Bowditch is shocked when the man’s driver’s license identifies him as none other than...Mike Bowditch. For weeks, Mike and his colleagues have been fielding reports of a man terrorizing the locals while posing as a game warden, wielding a plastic pin-on badge and claiming to be “Warden Bowditch”. Who is the imposter, and how did he end up dead in the bottom of a harbor? Mike must uncover the truth in order to clear his own name.

New owners of a dream cottage on a remote Maine lake find themselves taunted, then menaced by an unknown figure. When the local authorities refuse to help, they turn to retired Maine game warden Charley Stevens and his young protege Mike Bowditch for protection. But Charley begins to suspect there is more to the mystery than the couple is letting on—and if he and Mike don’t act fast, the situation will explode into violence.

This story is about two brothers who lived next door to each other in the countryside. They both came into a fortune at the same time, but it ended with very different outcomes for the brothers.

A man in an insane asylum believes his handlers are lizard-people wearing human skin.