When she woke, the sun was already out and shining, blasting the dust and pavement, infusing everything it touched with blistering heat. Summer is always brutal as hell on the coastline.

Sarah rolled over and checked her phone. No calls; nothing scheduled in the little touch-screen planner. Her weekend was free to do whatever she felt with it, and what she wanted, as usual, was to spend the day at the beach.

She called Kasey before she even crawled out of bed. “When do you want me to pick you up?”

“Not today,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I'm not feeling it.”

“Seriously?” Kasey was a diver, a beach bum, a snorkeling fiend. Once, last year, she'd insisted on diving the wreck of an old single-engine plane during a storm, at night, when they had seen sharks only a mile away that afternoon.

Jessica Brown is a thirty-year-old fan of horror and dark fantasy whose works have been featured in Horrotica, The Harrow and The New Flesh, to name a few. She will be published in an upcoming issue of The Nocturnal Lyric and in Pill Hill Press' Twisted Legends anthology. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.