How do you chase something whose footfalls make no sound? What nets do you use to snare something incorporeal? And, assuming you can catch it, who in their right mind would dare hunt something no one knows anything about?

Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

The home where I grew up was built in the 1950’s, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Its living space was distributed in such a way that the master bedroom was at the extreme front corner of the structure, with a window looking out into the front yard. The other bedrooms were connected along the same side of the house via a corridor.

When my sister was born, we built a second master bedroom for my grandparents to live in, and the rest of the family played musical chairs with the living arrangements. My sister took my old bedroom in the middle of the hall, I moved into my parents’ former bedroom at the front of the house, and my parents took my grandparents’ old bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

By the time my brother was born, there wasn’t any more room to make additions to the home, and so he moved in with me. My bed was arranged parallel to the wall closest to the street. Were you to enter the room from the hallway, you would see my bed in the far left corner, with my brother’s along the opposite wall.

One night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I awoke. I found it strange that I should be awake because there hadn’t been any loud noises or anything that would have roused me. Lying on my back in bed, I actually considered this, when I noticed a faint light in the hall. It was pale green, like the face of a glow-in-the-dark watch. The light slowly grew in strength, as though its source were drawing nearer.

I was terrified. I had no plausible explanation for what I was seeing. At the time, we did not have any motion-activated lights in the hallway, and when my mother did eventually buy those, they were incandescent orange. Worse - whatever approached was coming from the hallway, which was the only way out of the room.

The glow entered and lit up the doorframe with a sickly green haze. The light was pale, and transparent - even as it drew closer I could see through it to the desk and television hutch behind it. The glow moved toward me. Once it had wafted halfway across the room, it changed. The light shifted to its extremities and became a ring. It did not become brighter - it was as if the light compressed itself and had become opaque in the tight area of the ring it formed. Within the ring it was as dark as the rest of the room, but not so dark that I was blind. My bedroom walls were painted stark white, and I had white furniture and so with the scarce light of the streetlamp beyond my window I could still see.

The space within the approaching green disk darkened, as if it had become a sheer film of black silk. The figure within the disk was human. It had a clearly discernible head, trunk, and limbs. I could not see details. I could not see its face, or digits, nor could I tell if it had either. The legs and arms were positioned away from the trunk in a posture that might have been uncomfortable for a person to maintain for too long, but this made it abundantly clear to me the figure was human-like. The air space that the figure occupied was perfectly dark, opaque. The area it did not occupy I could see past.

It floated toward me in a slow, even pace, as though it were on a conveyor belt. It did not swing its arms or move its legs as it approached. It did not have feet, but the pointed ends of its legs appeared not to touch the ground.

Just as it brushed against my bedside, numbers lit up in the glowing green circle. Twelve at the top, three to the right, six at its feet, nine at the left. In the center of the figure’s torso appeared a tiny disk of green light from which shot three bars - an hour hand, a minute hand, and a second hand. The seconds ticked with rigid precision.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the figure drew within arm’s reach. Meanwhile, my brother slept, unaware of any of this. Had it gone for him instead of me, I don’t know what I would have done, if anything at all. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

The figure brushed against my bedside, then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. The shadow in the clock was gone. Without its green glow, the bedroom was darker than before.

I did not sleep the rest of that night.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn’t fit those norms because it isn’t fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Krome Avenue runs north-south for the length of Miami-Dade County, approximately 36 miles. It is a two-lane highway located on the county’s western fringe, bordered on the east in some areas by nothing for miles, and on the west by the sprawling swampland known as the Everglades. No matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

There is a gas station on Krome Avenue at a four-way intersection. At the extreme corner of the gas station lot, facing the roadway, there is a triangular-shaped section with a ground-level backlit sign advertising the station’s brand and prices. Separating this section from the station is a chest-high hedge.

 The three other parcels along the roadway are plots of dirt and tall grass on which nothing is built. These plots run for acres in every direction.

The only light comes from the gas station, which, at night, is lit up like daytime with harsh florescent lighting. Otherwise, the roadway is devoid of streetlamps. Nor are there any sources of light on the undeveloped plots. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown - I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

Very late one night, some friends of mine and I were in my car at this particular intersection. We were coming home from a day at the beach. We had had a good time and were all talking. I sat in the driver’s seat with my date to my right, a guy friend of mine (Chris) in the seat behind her, and his date sitting behind me. We approached Krome Avenue from an orthogonal street, about to make a left turn to head south. The gas station loomed ahead and to the left. It was pitch black in every other direction.

I stopped at the intersection to check for oncoming traffic. I looked both ways, and as my eyes shifted forward and I started to make my turn, I spotted a man standing beside the gas station’s backlit sign.

I hadn’t seen him when I first approached the intersection, but after I’d noticed him, I realized how hard it would be to miss him. The man was easily six feet tall and was wearing a stained tanktop shirt that glowed white in the harsh glare from the filling station. His paunchy gut stuck out from beneath his shirt and over the waistband of his denim pants. He was of heavy build, his shoulders drooping at his sides from the weight of his meaty arms.

His head was lowered. I could see his chin was pressed up against his chest. His full pink lips were drawn slightly, as though he were breathing through his mouth. He had greasy black hair that hung in curling strands before his face, forking like a river at the bulb of his nose. I could not see his eyes. Inky blue-black ringed the spots beneath where his eyes would have been. These rings stretched down well into his cheeks. While I couldn’t see his eyes, a strange feeling in my gut told me he was watching us.

Just seeing the man made me feel uncomfortable. I locked my eyes on him as I drove into the intersection, and then looked away to see where I was going. After the moment it took to complete my turn, I glanced at him in my side-view mirror. The man had shifted impossibly fast. He had turned 180-degrees to face me and stood now not on the grass by the backlit sign but on the gravel approach to the gas station. His arm was raised, hand balled up in a fist pointed at us.

“Did you see that?” I asked, cutting short the conversation.

“No,” said my date, sitting shotgun.

“No,” said my friend’s date, sitting behind me.

“Yes,” said Chris, after a moment’s hesitation.

Silence.

“Chris,” I began. “What did you see?”

Again, he paused. “I saw a guy.”

None of us spoke the rest of the way. Later, after I’d dropped the girls off at their homes, I gave Chris a ride to his house. Along the way we talked about what we’d seen. Interestingly, Chris related that he had continuous visual contact on the strange man, while I had to look away and then look back, since I was driving. According to Chris, the man never shifted position or raised his hand, which was bizarre because I was certain he had.

Admittedly, there are other explanations for what we experienced that night, but I maintain that we saw something supernatural. Everything about the man we saw, from his appearance to the sentiment he evoked in us, exuded menace.

Then, also, there is the fact that he came out of nowhere. The only plausible place he could have come from was the gas station, as there was nothing but open land around. Even so, he would have had no business standing by the backlit sign at the roadway. There isn’t even a bus stop there. And for him to have appeared there so suddenly would have required him to jump the hedge. The hedge was chest-high and thick, and it wouldn’t have been possible for a man his size to get across it so quickly.

You knew what you were getting yourself into by coming here. Sure, you came looking for great stories and bad drawings, and we deliver on both counts. Every so often, though, we slip in some bad poetry. And we admit, it is bad.

It can't be helped. After all, that is part of what we do here at Darkwater Syndicate. We really like bad poetry, and do try hard to produce the very best of the very worst. Sometimes we fail miserably and produce some good poetry. We don't necessarily call it "good", we just call it bad at being bad. Rest assured, though, as instances of this are few and far between. It brings us great pride to say that rarely do we fail at our mission of creating awful poetry. 

So now, without further ado, it is our dubious pleasure to bring you the first of our two intentionally awful poems, which we call: Poker Buddies.

At the end of the day they decided to play
a couple of rounds of poker:
the doctor, the lawyer, green grocer Sawyer
and the insurance broker.

"One of us is a snake," Sawyer said, mouth agape.
The others looked on with blank faces.
Sawyer said, "I quit! I'm through with this s**t!"
For he had in his hand five aces.

That Sawyer is the last honest man on earth. To his credit, he walked away from the mother of all poker hands -- enough aces to trump even a royal flush. 

Next we bring you: Unscheduled Dentistry.

Hammer in hand, she went at the man.
"I'll do anything to appease ya."
That's what she said as she swung for his head.
"Except I got no anesthesia."

Interpret that as you will. Is our unnamed dentist protagonist a charitable yet misguided soul endeavoring to ease her patient's toothache pains? Or is something more sinister afoot here, such that her two lines of dialog are uttered in irony? One thing is for sure, this short poem says more with what it doesn't say.

Your thoughts?

Brace yourself. We're about to get surreal.  

Coffee is as much a part of office life as water cooler gossip and awkward holiday parties. Gone are the days when people drank it just for enjoyment. Today, it is the fuel for the engines of commerce. Much as you can't be expected to work on an empty stomach, most office denizens can't be expected to think without a mug or two of the brew.

It's come to be that people drink it less for taste and more for effect. Coffee, then, is nothing more than the medium for delivery of caffeine, much like a bitter pill is the unit for delivery of antacids. We knew a guy who drank so much coffee his kidneys practically floated in it. He was my politics professor (note it says "POL 380" in the margin).

Never did I crave coffee so much as when I started working in an office. But, at the very least, never have I craved coffee as badly as our dragon friend shown in the doodle. Walking you through this doodle is a tall order, but we'll do our best.

Apparently, the dragon wants coffee (black, extra sugar, no cream) so bad that it consumes his thoughts. Permeates them, in fact, to the point that his thought bubble precipitates coffee. The mug in his thoughts tips over and spills coffee into a dog bowl on a passing flying carpet. Some time later, the dragon finds a mug of coffee from... somewhere... There's no clear indication of where he got it or even who is holding the mug as it tips the coffee into his mouth. Is there a shred of sense in this? Nope, sorry.

Now that we're on the subject of things that don't make a shred of sense, I present to you Cobra Catapult. Say you've got your opponent walled up in an impregnable fortress. Your men are anxious, supplies are low, and winter is on the verge of freezing your troops where they stand.

What to do?

Simple. You load the largest catapult you've got and bombard the fortress with a single cobra in a wicker basket. The fright of seeing the flying serpent should panic the opposition into surrender.

Sun Tzu said that.

Shoes fly off
The feet of
A girl on
A swing.

The swing stands
On a farmstead;
Wheat fields
In the valley.

The land lies
In a photo
In the clutch of
An inmate.

The inmate
Sits on a cot
Within a cell
Up on a stage.

The stage rises
In an exhibit;
A wax museum
In a brochure.

The brochure rests
In the hands of the girl
Who's left her swing
To get the mail.

Have a look at the title. Those two words tend not to go to together. The mere mention of the phrase might make a chef make a face like she'd had rank garlic shoved up her nose. Sound preposterous? It is! But brace yourself, dessert soup not only exists (yes, this is in fact a thing) it's also delicious. And what it is is Korean-style shaved ice.

Have a look at the photo above. It looked like that only on its way from the kitchen to the table. No sooner had the waiter set it down on the table than he said, "Take a picture. It won't look like that in a bit." Sure enough, he then pounded the icy confection with a spoon until it was flatter than the surface of a frozen lake.

What a shame, I thought, that something so artfully presented should be reduced to the sugary slurry you see below.

To describe how it tastes, we'll need to construct an appropriately complex metaphor. Picture a certain Japanese cartoon ambassador of cuteness, a purely original and unique character of our own creation (according to our attorneys) named: "Greetings Feline." If all its childlike innocence and whimsicality were to be violently extracted and whipped in a bowl of shaved ice, you would have something about half as delicious. Chocolate syrup supplies the other half to the deliciousness equation.

The alarm clock went off but it didn’t wake me, as I wasn’t asleep. I’d been up for hours lying in bed. Just thinking of the sleep I wasn’t getting was keeping me up, to say nothing of all the other tasks on the day’s punch list. I turned over to face the alarm clock. It blinked 5:05 a.m. in incandescent red. 5:05. SOS. In hindsight, I should have known better than to go to work that day.

This is the story of how I went insane.

The office was a long way off but the commute was short. At 5:20 a.m., expressway traffic was light. If I really stood on the gas, I could get to work in half an hour. All the better for me that there was no one on the road, as I was at the office in what seemed to me a blink. Piecing events together after the fact, I figured I’d dozed off at the wheel for a few miles. I was exhausted.

I pulled into the car park and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. As usual, I was the first to arrive. The time-activated lights in the office wouldn’t come on for another ten minutes, at 6:00, but by then I’d already had a cup of coffee and gotten started on my second.

Well before the sunrise, I was already at work.

My desk was covered in file boxes, looking like an overstuffed filing cabinet had gone on a bender the night before and puked all over my desktop. Not a square inch of faux wood saw sunlight.

That last thought made me take pause. For nearly a year that I had been working for the firm of Banco Banque and Banquiao, I hadn’t seen any sunlight either. Every day I woke up before sunup, bedded down at midnight, and spent the hours in between at the office. Even at eleven stories up, the office never felt more like a subterranean cavern. My pasty white complexion was proof of this.

The boss checked in at 7:05. I met him in the break room and had a coffee with him. At 9:00 I was due for another, as the effects of the first were starting to wind down. The rest of the office staff filed in at 9:00, and so I thought it best to get a fresh mug before the support staff emptied the pot.

By 10:00 a.m. my caffeine-addled heartbeat felt like a flock of hummingbirds trapped in my chest, yet I was still nodding off at my desk. It annoyed me to no end that I was falling asleep where I least wanted to sleep, and just hours ago I could not sleep where most I wanted to.

There was no time to sleep. There was no time even to live. The billable hour is a thing of the devil, and it had me in its grip.

The office required me to account for every minute of my work time, and expected each minute to be devoted to making my boss money. This I did to an admirable extent: of the fourteen hours spent at work daily, on average I captured twelve billable hours. Two of those hours were spent doing those ancillary, non-billable things I needed to do to support the billable time, such as book-keeping, drinking coffee, and using the bathroom, though I knew of co-workers who had discovered ways to bill the client even while on the toilet.

Of those twelve billable hours, every day my boss skimmed another three off the top, nicking fractions off of each of the billable activities I’d completed. Every week, before writing big checks to the firm, the client would review my time report and knock off another hour or two each day. The firm where I worked would grudgingly acquiesce, thankful to accept some payment over none. By month end, half of my billable hours would be gone, and the boss would drag me into his office by the scruff of my neck. Our discussions were always the same: “Get your hours up, or you’ll get canned.”

It had gone on this way for ten months. As long as I’d been working there, the firm had had it in mind to fire me.

Things really started to get strange at 11:00 a.m. It was Monday, but I had to keep reminding myself because I’d worked fourteen days straight. To me, it felt like the middle of the week.

The days were running together, as though days past and days ahead had melted into a pudding and were blobbing up together. I kept reminding myself to do things I’d already done days ago, because I’d forgotten I’d done them, and because they were super important and needed to be done. I doubted whether I’d actually driven in this morning or just spent the night at the office. My dreams - when I could sleep - were of things I had done at the office or things I needed to do on arriving there. That I was sitting at my desk seemed surreal, like some bizarre yet mundane deja vu.

Lunchtime rolled around. At the bottom of my desk drawer was a bag of apples. I ate one whenever I got hungry. For several days straight I’d eaten nothing but apples, going through a half-dozen daily. At the time - and this is the scary part - it made perfect sense. Eating apples was a boon to efficiency. They were healthy, they needed only one hand to eat and left my other hand free to do work, and since they came in a bunch, I could eat these all day without ever having to leave my desk.

Hungry as I was, I tried to keep the drawer shut as much as I could. The bag of apples was see-through, and underneath it was the resignation letter I had written three months before. I hadn’t signed it, but I’d come very close. It wasn’t dated, but that was intentional, as I could just as easily write in the date when I felt it was time.

I called my wife to let her know I wouldn’t be joining her for dinner at home. Although I told her that I’d be home at 7:00 p.m., I’d already devised a plan for the day. I didn’t tell her this while on the call, but at 7:00 I’d call her and tell her that I needed to stay a while longer. Then, at 9:00, I’d send a text saying that I’d be at work ‘til midnight. Everyone would have gone home by then and the office would be quiet, making it an optimal environment to net a ton more billable hours. Then, when I needed to, I’d sleep at my desk and wake up at 5:00 a.m. the following day (still at my desk) to start the day off. Thankfully, I’d stashed extra clothes in my office, so I could change into them and none of my co-workers would be the wiser that I’d spent the night at the office.

I revised my plan after I’d had another coffee. I didn’t need to sleep. Sleep was beneath me. I shuddered with giddy laughter. I was thinking so fast I was almost prescient. It felt great. My hands shook and my typing speed took a tumble, but these losses could be recouped tonight since I had no need to sleep. And the feeling in my chest that my blood had turned to glass shards as it coursed through my heart could be ignored as a passing inconvenience.

Furtive whispers accompanied shuffling up the hall. “Someone’s fallen.” A man in the building across the street had hurled himself from the top of the car park. What a mess he’d made. He’d ruined his suit, which didn’t matter much anymore, because it didn’t fit him as well as it must have before he took the dive, as the man was spread out for yards across the asphalt.

A question struck me then, as suddenly as an open-palm blow to the forehead: what could drive a man to leap from an otherwise structurally sound office tower? This question may as well have been rhetorical, judging by how quickly the answer came.

I rubbed my eyes, elbowed past the crowd thronged at the glass to get a better look at the dead man lying in the street. In a blink he had gone from wearing pinstripes to brown trousers just like mine and back to pinstripes.

That was the wake-up call, more so than the alarm clock buzzer at 5:05 - SOS - a.m. I went back to my desk and wrote a two-sentence resignation email, completely forgetting about the carefully drafted letter that had sat in my desk drawer for months. I threw the bag of apples into the wastebasket. I didn’t know it just then, but I would develop a taste aversion to apples that would last months.

I powered down my PC and sat, elbows propped on the desk, with my face in my hands. A partner at the firm shoved through my office door without so much as knocking.

“Get your stuff and get out,” he said, which was polite enough, considering he refrained from punting me in the ass when he said that.

That same day my name was removed from the associate roster, and my profile and all signs that I had worked at the firm for nearly a year were obliterated. The Egyptians did no less a job with Hatshepsut.

I went home and slept for two days straight, not rousing even to eat. When I awoke, a shooting pain between my eyes rippled my vision and threw off my sense of balance. As I hadn’t had any coffee during those two days, my body was furious. You don’t come down easy from a ten-month caffeine binge.

I rolled out of bed. My first piss in two days looked like infield clay and collected into silt at the bottom of the toilet bowl. I felt like I was ninety-nine years old. Even shuffling around the apartment in sandals got me winded. It would be a month before I was in any shape to do anything more physically demanding than shopping for groceries.

Without any sense at all of the time, I went outside and stood in my apartment’s parking lot. The sun was out, shining in the center of a cloudless blue sky. A single tear rolled down my cheek. More followed. Many, many more.

It seemed such a trivial thing to forget over so short a time as a year, but I remembered then, that the sky is blue.