"Give back my magic!" Ruta called. She forced herself to get up.

"Oh, no. I won't. I'd much rather keep this. Look at how lovely it is!" She twirled.

Ruta attempted to catch her, and the girl bounced away.

"Let's try out these new powers, shall we?" She…

Slowly, Grandma's frantic rocking petered to a halt.

"An ambulance is on it's way." Charlie announced. Lucy was bandaged with ice, but blood was already pooling again beneath her.

"She's getting worse." Paul's gaze shifted from Lucy, to their mother, an…

It had been fourteen days.

Two weeks.

A fortnight.

It didn't feel like it had been that long.

It felt like it had been much longer.

I remembered it like it was yesterday, yet it felt like a lifetime ago.

I remembered clearly, the looks on their faces, …

My Roller Coaster Buddy,

The man who’d “bomb” my hair,

A man of integrity, kind and fair.

Who loved to tease,

Who was silly and always had fun,

Everyone has a favorite memory of “Brother Murphy”.

To everyone he would meet,

He’d give them a …

Cicadas sang in the heat of the day. Mostly. But it was well past sundown and the night was far from silent. It overflowed with strange sounds, as if the darkened woods themselves were awake and agitated. It wasn't just the pulsing buzz of the cicadas e…

It's difficult to grow up. Shoot, it's difficult to even figure out what that means. I suspect that the act of growing up is rooted in pain. Pain that is unfair, unique to you, callous, and solely your responsibility. From the white-hot shard of ice whose…

I hopped over a pair of the ash-filled streams, so contaminated that the clear water of my childhood had become an opaque gray. The air wasn't much better but it was getting clearer. The sun behind the smoky sky was still such an angry red that I could fe…

Without altering his course, the man brushed by the human obstruction and with a negligible hand gesture sent him spiraling to the ground.

More hands reached out for him trying to take hold of anything they could. When they found something to hang on to…

A sullen sun, tired and heavy, settled on the Locata mountain ridge. It lay there like a man dying, bleeding pastel oranges and pinks out across the cloud streaked sky and down the purple shadows below.

These last moments before night were the most beaut…

Lloyd skated across an unnaturally still sky, the kind that looked and felt like twilight but you knew if you checked it would be nine pm or three am. Behind him followed a woman that wore many faces. He recognized some of them briefly, but knew that she …

I am a dead man walking. That's not a metaphor, not a promise of a future event the way you usually think of it. I really am dead -- and have been for some time now.

I walk the streets of this city. I pass by people on the sidewalk, and they instinctivel…

I joined my papa at the top of the hill. Intertwining my fingers, I stretched again, slowly pushing the sky away, reminding my muscles that they too must wake and ready themselves for work. The pleasant ache started in my upper arms and flowed both up and…

When the storm abated, we emerged to tie things down and try to get a fire going to dry some clothes. I carried chunks of wax in paper egg cartons for fire starter and we found plenty of downed sassafras, which burns when wet. Mom and her covers were stil…

Grims reached the outer fence, a rickety wooden thing with a large gap in between the top and bottom beam, that kept in the dumbest of the livestock. The gate was clear on the other side of the property and he didn't feel like circling the house just to u…

It would be quicker to go through town but Grims didn't want to carry the corpse through the streets of Eggtown South. He already had a reputation, hard and bitter, but there was a difference between being rumored as a child-killer and toting a dead one d…

Grims surveyed the horizon moving only his eyes. He held a long butted rifle against his shoulder, barrel hot enough to warm the air near his neck. Nothing moved. The jamperscamps and mooncats had vanished at the sound of the first shot. In the ruddiness …

“Don't be so sure of yourself. You killed a man and blew up a building, you did not kill F.A.C.E. Honestly, you did as much as you could have. Impressive work for a pair spies."

Jacqueline felt the familiar punch to the stomach that happened every time s…

The elephants decide to jump

Upon the sofa

bump bump bump

Unfortunate, as I see now

The couch had people

Holy cow!

But never mind, it's time to change

A cheaper one in

My price range

Four hundred dollars more or less

For couch and cousins

What a mess

The …

You knew each other in school, you were neighbors, but it wasn’t until years later that you become friends. You would meet, make each other laugh, have fun. You needed that in your life; there wasn’t anyone else you could hang out with.

But suddenly he…

The cabin boy, now Master of the Ship, walked alone

stepping over the glass-eyed corpses of meat and bone,

men who had once been, the only fathers he'd ever known.

He cried for his own loss and the light-lost souls forever gone.

The ship shuddered and cr…

The lights flashed red and I raced forward. Car horns and the screech of tires blared at me, scolding me. Careening towards the woman that stood opposite me on the crosswalk. She registered me with a look of surprise, then she smiled and spread her arms …

Story is marked as mature

Wonderful Auntie,

Beautiful Jean,

Oh, how I will miss you,

You'll never know what your friendship did mean.

Sleep well, my friend,

Jehovah saw all you did,

In His loving memory,

is where you'll be hid.

Your positive attitude,

Your loving spirit,

Will no…

And when my time comes for a nat'ral death,

Some future era of our shared, shamed land,

I hope and firmly plan that I shall be

Already gone and, I hope, barely missed.

At best, of course, I'd be received by God,

But as it's likely that I'll break His rule…

I've learned to trust that love exists aplenty,


And that most people long to be adored.


Some think that one love's all they can afford,


But open minds can oft embrace its bounty

-

And love the world entire, and each in turn!


My heart, so full of you, …