When my sister Amy called to tell me she'd found our mother's old recipe box while cleaning out her basement, I was in the middle of reading an article about pattern recognition in the human brain. The kind of article that makes you feel superior for reading it, until you realize you've absorbed exactly none of it. The timing wasn't lost on me - here I was, trying to understand why humans see meaning in randomness, while simultaneously wanting to believe that finding Mom's recipes exactly three years after her passing, to the day, meant something profound.

Three years ago, I moved to Salem - not the witch trial one, the other one - after fleeing San Francisco’s increasingly hostile rental market and increasingly friendly street crime. While most people worry about black cats crossing their paths in a town like this, I found myself preoccupied with another dark harbinger: crows.

It all began with a single meow, piercing through the double-paned glass doors that separated my living room from the great outdoors. There, standing on my back porch, was a black cat…

The thing about working at a motor lodge that fancied itself a rock-n-roll hotel was that eventually, someone was bound to go through a window.

The apocalypse didn’t start with zombies or nuclear war. It started with a document processor who’d had enough.