Jon-Paul Smith

1. Wherein Things Known Become Unknown And Things Unknown Become Known Thirteen year old Tommy Wheeler was pushing his bike through the underbrush, taking the shortcut home this time, when he saw the Big Tall Man. The Big Tall Man didn’t see him though which was a good thing for now because, as Tommy would find out later, once he looked at you he took you down the Rabbit Hole, in the Away From The Light, somewhere deep in the Halfway, and once he took you there no one knew what happened next except for the fact that you never came back. But Tommy wasn’t currently thinking about any of that. Right then he was thinking about finding his way home. Because this shortcut wasn’t as easy as he remembered, especially with the long gnarly fingers of darkness reaching through the branches of the trees overhead, clinging there with a death grip. He’d come back home in the dark probably hundreds of times before but something about this was different.  The darkness itself felt different.  The dark

A Gorgon In Dade County by Jon-Paul Smith Ronald kept telling me there was a Medusa that lived in Dade County up on the mountain in a trailer. “She got snakes in her hair,” he said, his eyes getting wide behind giant plastic frames, holding his hands around his head.   “Keeps em up in curlers.” “They’re not Medusas.   They’re Gorgons,” I said, handing the joint back to him.   “Medusa is the name of a person.” He ignored me every time I told him that.   I’m not sure he understood the difference. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.   Born and raised on Sand Mountain.   Three years in the state pen.   Didn’t learn to read until he was maybe twenty-five.   Even then he kinda struggled with it.   I got to know him back when he was slinging weed for my step daddy.   After a while he got tired of smoking weed with the old man so he took to hanging out with me in my room. I was twenty one years old, a junior in college, writing code in Pascal on an ANSI terminal.   It always made his eyes