PRESS BY AN GRACE

It wasn't for me to know the findings. But it was for me to find out everything I was not meant to know. Awake that night lying prone on my belly, cocooned in bed clothes stitched from the zero of history as my father liked to say, I discovered I was many things besides a child. I was a virus. I was a wolf amongst a flock of white sheep. My presence risked an unsettling.

Press is the twenty-fourth of the announced features in The Needle Drops... Volume One. A tale of oppression, manipulation, and unchecked power wielded against innocence. With Short Fiction, we explore the various subgenres of horror in creative and unexpected ways.

In a small community searching for the promise of belief, a boy finds signs of a life redacted in his dreams. Like any child, he's a conduit through which those older but not always wiser can indulge their egos. Like any child he's a follower of rules that often seem opaque and arcane, that don't seem to make sense within a child's logic. Press is a story about concealed truths, and unrestrained power given to those undeserving of it. When the boy discovers he once had a name, he learns that despite what he has been told his whole life, sometimes the threat can come from within.

When the boy discovers he once had a name, he learns that despite what he has been told his whole life, sometimes the threat can come from within.

AN Grace is a writer living in Liverpool, England. His fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Queen's Quarterly, Young Magazine, The Racket, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and others.

You can find him on Twitter @isthisboring.