The Unshriven

November 12, 2025October 22, 2025 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

They come through the tunnels of Hell into the sunlight, wearing rusted armor astride horses of gore. Ancient swords hang at rotted hips and over decaying shoulders. Some carry morning stars, or battle axes upon which the blood of old wars has dried so hard it has bonded to the steel.

In dark madness they come, up fiery slopes of magma toward the snow-capped mountains of heaven. But the holy gates are shut against them and only earth is left to abide their time.

Unshriven. Unforgiven. No Heaven or Hell will have them.

Fortunately, they find that humans are both filling and taste great.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Hollow

August 27, 2025August 23, 2025 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 8 Comments

In the time of the hallowed moon, in the season where the chill lingers, the world grows still, and waits. Alone at campfire, I sit, wanting to burn. The firelight draws a sorcerer’s protective sphere around me; I dare not turn my head to see what lies outside. The darkness squirms.

Behind me, the forest exhales. Ashes in the fire swirl into embers, ghost upward into a vampire sky that sucks them gray again. The embers are a surrogate for my soul, fragmented, blackened, lit only by a semblance of heat that leaches quickly away.

I look to the stars. Perhaps they will comfort. Their light cannot be consumed by any earthly hunger. They care not for the concerns of carbon. But their icicle twinkling reminds me too much of cruel laughter. Shrinking, I coil in upon myself.

Nearer laughter swells. It howls in the trees. It cackles in the shadows. The night puts on a cloak of thorns. I close my eyes but my ears are open and stung. A visitor is coming, stalking on tenebrous limbs. I feel the weight of his presence, the surge of air that he pushes before him.

My heart hammers a heavy rhythm; my mouth tastes of venom and brass. Blood drums like the hooves of horses beneath my skin. Sweat crawls like freshly birthed roaches. Stench overwhelms—mold and fungi, toads and spittle-bugs, spider webs painted with tincture of silver.

And now he whispers at my shoulder. Gooseflesh arises as he cajoles me to spurn the light, to gaze upon him, to own his words. He promises a balm for sad fear—if I join him. Perhaps I will accept. Why cling to fire-glow when black-shine offers honeyed freedom from all concerns? Of course, the visitor is lying. Nothing sweet gilts the freedom that he offers.

I’m not sure that matters.

∼ Charles Gramlich

I See Your Night, and Raise You Hell

June 11, 2025May 20, 2025 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 5 Comments

I was crossing the University of Arkansas campus at Fayetteville with my wife, Rachel, when a young male student approached us and said something weird. It was Saturday and there weren’t many people around. Just a few moments before, I’d found an odd-looking pencil on the sidewalk and some impulse made me pick it up. It was lime green and about twice the length and heft of a regular #2 pencil. I figured it might belong to an artist or something and still had it in my hand when the kid made his comment.

“Looks like you could stab someone with that thing,” he said, pointing at the pencil. “Do some serious damage.”

Now, Rachel and I were older than your average college kid and both of us were dressed well. I wore a jacket and tie. Surely the kid would have thought of us as parents or perhaps considered us faculty. What student says that kind of thing to parents or to faculty members he doesn’t recognize?

The comment clearly made Rachel uncomfortable, so I just ignored the guy and walked on. We were here to see Rachel’s son and within a few moments found his dorm room and began our visit. A little while later I had to use the dorm’s bathroom and was standing at the sink washing my hands when the same young man came up beside me.

“Stabbed anyone with that pencil yet?” he asked.

Irritated, and not eager to have an uncomfortable discussion with a strange young fellow in the bathroom, I snapped, “No! And it’s not in my plans for today.”

He smiled crookedly. “Look,” he said. “I know you’re a psychopath. I recognize you because I’m one too.”

I sighed, then reached beneath my coat and drew out the silenced 9-millimeter I generally carried in a shoulder holster. Quickly placing the business end of the pistol against the young man’s chest just over the heart, I pulled the trigger.

“Phfhfft.”

The kid’s eyes widened but my movements had been too swift for him to react. He collapsed slowly to the floor, like a blow-up doll deflating. He kept looking up at me as life fled him.

“When psychopaths meet, it’s best for one to kill the other immediately and get it over with,” I told him.

Holstering the pistol, I left the bathroom. I kept the pencil. The kid was right. It was a great tool to put through someone’s eye into their brain. On a college campus like this, I felt sure it wouldn’t be long before the perfect target presented itself.

∼ Charles Gramlich

But What of Home

January 8, 2025December 27, 2024 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 3 Comments

Always, the man traveled, first away from his home in the country, then away from the city, then away from Earth, the sun, the solar system. Ever onward, ever outward. At nearly the speed of light, which didn’t seem fast enough. He called himself an explorer, never a coward. In the coldest, deepest depths of space between stars, he came upon a derelict spaceship floating silently. But not emptily. He went aboard.

The other pilot in his seat was long dead. He wasn’t human but the man felt a kinship with him. This being, too, had been a traveler, an explorer. And somewhere along the way he’d despaired and opened his space suit to a vacuum he’d let into his own ship. He’d left a last recorded log. The button to play it rested under one thin tentacle.

The man pressed the button. And he understood the message. These aliens must have had some kind of translator that connected directly to the man’s brain waves and turned strange gibberish into language. The words said:

I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. If you’re hearing this, go home. In the end, there’s nothing but home.

The man began to weep. He thought of the family he’d left behind, the lovers he’d spurned, the children he’d never had. He went back to his own ship and turned it around. He blasted for Earth. He yearned for the blue marble; instead, he found a dirty brown cue ball. The traveler had forgotten one thing in his urge to flee his past—time dilation. He’d aged a few years in his journey; the earth had aged millions. There was no home to go to.

Before opening his suit helmet to the air, and his ship to the vacuum, the man recorded a message for whoever might find it, though he knew it would be useless: “You can’t go home again. The only thing to do is never leave!”

∼ Charles Gramlich

Roadkill

October 9, 2024October 7, 2024 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

No moon. A sky flecked like mica with stars. I had my Harley redlined, the V-Twin burning between my legs. It’s always dangerous riding fast at night. But since the change I had nothing to lose, no one to care if I lost it. Then I saw her, lying across the blacktop.

Dead, I thought.

But she moved when I swerved to avoid her. I got the bike stopped, u-turned, winced as I saw… Her back was broken. I hung the bike on its kickstand, the headlight painting her, refracting jewels from her liquid eyes. I rushed to her, knelt.

She opened her mouth but made no sound. How could she be alive? How could she breathe with a chest half crushed? What was she doing so far from town? What sick fate had sent a vehicle to rendezvous with her at this lonely spot? There were no signs of burnt rubber. Whoever hit her hadn’t even slowed down.

I tried to force, “It’s OK,” through my lips. The meaningless words wouldn’t come.

Then she looked past me toward highway’s edge. I turned, saw some shadowy movement. When I turned back she looked like she was sleeping but her chest no longer rose and fell. My feet followed where her gaze had led, and I saw why she’d been crossing the road. Saw what she was returning to. Or running from.

Her puppies had been born dead. But in this new world they hadn’t stayed that way. They smelled me, and squirmed toward me through their mother’s afterbirth, their baby teeth stark and white and gnashing.

I backed away, then screamed as a sudden flashing agony lanced through my legs. I fell, rolled instinctively away from the pain. The mother hound’s mouth was flecked with foam and blood. My blood. Her eyes had been reborn as scarlet hells.

I tried to get up, found she’d torn out my Achilles tendons. Still screaming, I scrabbled away along the highway. The hound growled and hitched herself toward me, her paws slapping at the asphalt. Intestines unraveled behind her. I laughed hysterically as I realized the mother’s broken spine would keep her from catching me.

Then I saw the puppies. On the road. They couldn’t walk either. But they were crawling faster than I was.

∼ Charles Gramlich

The Visitors

July 10, 2024July 4, 2024 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

The alien spacecraft slipped into Earth orbit. It looked like a giant saucer, as too many movies had predicted. No writing or symbols appeared anywhere on the hull. It glowed mysteriously.

The world governments learned of it quickly and would have preferred to keep it from common knowledge, but there were too many eyes in the sky. People found out and began to panic or rejoice, depending on their particular mindset.

The governments kept their missiles trained on the craft and kept their militaries on high alert. But then nothing happened. The thing just floated there. That increased the panic.

No one knows for sure who launched the first nuclear warhead at the UFO. Probably one of the smaller countries. But the spaceship used some kind of gravity weapon to slap the missile away. It crashed not far outside Moscow and grew an ugly radioactive toadstool.

Russia, figuring it was China or the US taking advantage of the distraction to attack them, launched a retaliation. China and the US responded with their own retaliations. France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, and India joined the fray. No one shot any more missiles at the UFO, only at each other.

A week after it arrived, the massive alien craft slipped out of orbit. There were no eyes in the sky to notice. And not many left on the ground either.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Lord of the Mountain

April 10, 2024March 31, 2024 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

With no place left for me among the people, I fled to the mountain, my face wet with tears. Better to be alone than tormented. But on the fourth night in the forest, I heard God growling in the darkness and knew I was saved.

I climbed from my tent and stood swaying under the midnight moon. For days I’d eaten only mushrooms and drunk rainwater trapped in puddles and stumps. Sleep had been elusive. I was tired and emptied of everything inside of me from four days ago. And yet, I felt peace for the first time in my life.

God snuffled amid the trees beyond my fire. I heard him cracking sticks and digging at hollow logs. I heard his incisors sharpening themselves as he chewed at some sacrament forbidden to me. I knelt and prayed. I asked his forgiveness; I asked his love. He did not answer

Perhaps, I thought, my fire kept him away. I doused it to blackness. I lay on my back and spread my arms as if crucified, opening myself in invitation. And God came to me. He wore a hair shirt like the ancient saints; he smelled of cedar and hot sweat; his breath was full of meat and blood.

I lay stiff and still. God sniffed my body, between my legs, up my chest, across my face. His tongue was rough when he kissed me. And I put the knife in his throat and ripped it across.

He did not cry out, not with his windpipe severed. His attempt at a roar birthed itself in a dark and sticky rheum that flooded my mouth. The great spirit reared onto his legs and clawed silver streaks in the ebon sky, then collapsed on top of me. His weight was like the kingdom of heaven. I thought I would die from lack of breath.

But I did not die. I lay for a long while beneath him, until the warmth of his body cooled. Then I peeled off his shaggy coat and pulled it around my own shoulders. It leaped and twitched with life. In past times I might have named that life as fleas and ticks, but I knew now they were angels, which live always on the body of God. And so now they lived on me. For I had ascended to my rightful place.

Far down the mountain below me, I saw the lights of the village I’d fled so recently. It made a place of emptiness, of great loneliness. Just as, a few days before, I had been lonely myself amid its crowds.

I took off the ex-God’s hands and fitted them over mine, with their long, curved black claws. I pulled his sharp white teeth and placed them in my own mouth, though I had to cut my jaws wider to accommodate their majesty.

I would go to the village now, clad in glory. And they would believe. They would know how foolish they’d been not to recognize the God inside me. For that, they must be punished.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Heaven

January 3, 2024December 15, 2023 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 4 Comments

The spaceship jarred as it landed. The computer had brought me down safely from orbit, but I was half dead, choking for breath, mind spasming from lack of oxygen. The recycler had broken down. Even my space suit was nearly bled dry of air. Somehow, I made it to the airlock. I didn’t know this planet. Was the atmosphere breathable? I had no choice but to find out. The outer hatch opened under my desperate palm. I staggered through, fell to hands and knees, slapped my helmet release.

A breath shuddered into my chest. Warm. Languid. It fed me. My lungs filled; my body drank the air like nectar. I coughed myself back to life, then forced myself to my feet. The view froze me. A low mist coiled around my legs, as if I stood on a cloud. But up through the fog thrust metal trees, of copper, black iron, gleaming platinum. Their leaves chimed in a zephyr breeze. Above me, the sky was clear and golden, like melted butter.

And in that sky drifted a silver city. I heard trumpets belling, and rising over the city’s spires swept a flock of beings. They were white, blindingly white, with feathered wings.

For an instant I wondered if I had died, or if I lay dreaming with a brain damaged from oxygen loss. But I’d always understood the difference between fantasy and reality, and the reality was that the creatures who dove toward me were angels. They began to sing. My heart swelled with the beauty. I lifted my own voice to join theirs.

The angels swirled before me in diaphanous glory, with luminous eyes honed and piercing. Their wings beat the mist. Their voices lifted higher and higher. For a moment I knew the harmonics of heaven. Then my voice faltered; I couldn’t match theirs. No human throat could capture this music. No human body could contain it. My heart hammered and hammered. Again my breath labored. The angels swarmed closer.

I wondered why they pointed at me as they sang? Why were their sweet lips drawn back over sharp, sharp teeth? Only when my ears and nose and eyes begin to bleed did I understand. This song was no song at all. In a rage of laughter, the angels of God tore me apart.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Spot

October 11, 2023October 9, 2023 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 8 Comments

Spot is my pet and I love him. My daddy brought him home last week, but already we’re inseparable. He sleeps on the floor by my bed and I feed him scraps from the table when no one is looking.

I love my daddy, too. And not just because he brought Spot home after my dog, Rover, died. Daddy knows everything. He teaches at a major university and is a doctor, though I’m always sposed to remember he’s not a “med doctor” but a doctor of Sperimental Psychology. He says med doctors are just plumbers.

I’m eight years old and one thing that worried me at first about Spot was that he was older than me. So was Rover. But when I asked Daddy if he thought Spot might die soon from old age, he said not to worry, that Rover had died from barking too much and Spot doesn’t bark.

Spot plays all the games I like, as long as I give him clear orders. I especially like to play fetch with him, and he never gets the ball all slobbery like Rover did. The only thing I don’t like is that he’s not as much fun to pet as Rover. Part of it is that he doesn’t have Rover’s soft fur, but I think a lot of it is the ugly black box attached to his head. It gets in the way a lot.

Daddy says the box is really important, though. He says it has lectrodes that control Spot, and that without it Spot would run away. I don’t want that, so I’ll just have to live with the box, I guess. I sure wouldn’t want to see Spot’s picture on a milk carton like those other lost kids.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Once Upon a Time with the Dead

July 19, 2023June 29, 2023 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 6 Comments

Alkali dust under the white blaze of a Mexican sun.
Riders are coming. To a village standing idle on a ghostly quiet day. Or so at first it seems.

Then, from the bell tower of the adobe church a lone guitar chord rings out. Quick fingers pluck a haunting tune. From one blank window comes a wink of silver. From another a click-click snap. Men are waiting: good, honest men who are aware only that an old hatred is sweeping across their land.

The riders drift into the village square, long gray coats flapping in the dry wind that moves the dust. There are five of them. Known men. Wanted men who covet what doesn’t belong to them. Men with strange, dangerous names like Doc, Clay, Jesse, Ringo, Sundance. Their eyes are black, colder than the single-action Colts at their hips. The leader is Jesse. He dismounts, spurs chinking on the paving stones that mark the square.

Jesse’s movements are a signal. The guitar clashes, strings shredding with sound. From the windows of the town rifles speak smoke, and the rolling crack of gunfire hammers the brilliant sunshine. Bullets tug at gray dusters. A horse drops, and another, their riders leaping free, hands diving for pistols, coming up belching fire.

Jesse takes a shotgun slug to the chest, a .44 round through his shoulder. But his own guns are banging. Splinters and glass fly from the building above him. A man tumbles through a broken window, crashes through fleeing pigeons to the street.

The villagers are outmanned. This is not the predictable evil they had expected. Their bullets tear holes in flesh and tattered gray, but it is only the defenders who fall, until they all lie crimson and still against a canvas of light and stark shadow.

But the gray riders? They do not bleed. They will not lie down. Though dirt has been their friend before.

∼ Charles Gramlich