Plain Jane never shone so brightly as when she held a pair of knitting needles in her long slender hands.
Her aunt had taught her the craft, hoping to initiate her into the family business, but eons later Jane still only filled in when the older woman was forced to take a few days off. Jane couldn't blame her. Holding that much power in your hands was intoxicating. No wonder she never wanted to retire.
Still, progress and time marched on, the strong became weaker, and the elderly were superceded by their more youthful contemporaries. When Jane suggested destinies be...
Vanquished.
She looked at the body of her enemy lying there on the floor. She knew she should feel a sense of triumph, but instead there was only sorrow. Sorrow for the lost years, the million memories that would never be, the milestones both present and future that would never be shared.
For you see, the dead body belonged to her mother.
Her mother had run out on her father soon after her birth, and the girl had wondered all her life what it was like to have a mother. Someone to make sure her hair was perfect on picture...
"What do you mean, you don't have any? C'mon, Billy, this is me! Don't hold out on me, OK?"
The party crashed and throbbed around her, the scowl on her face morphing into worry, almost into fear.
"Billy, what the hell's going on here? Nobody's got any!"
She listened for a moment.
"Oh, don't be an ass. OK, yes, I called some other guys before I called you. I'm not trying to cut you out of my business, you're my rock solid, the best source in town. You ALWAYS have some. I didn't want to bother you except as a...
monster was close behind, groaning with teh weight of its recent feeding. The awnings above shuddered witht eh raor, the inhuman aching roar of a beast long gone from the mortal realm. The man gripped his shoulder, a wound sputtering orange-red blood. The beast hunted my scent and fear, grasping at the walls of the citadel with its massive tendrils.
A mouth emerged from its muddied hide, screaming with the fuel of nightmares and horrific things. It was the face of a child, crying and in seconds, it was swallowed back into the amorpheous body of the beast. The man...
Running from the larva, Nick wondered if he could stop for a second, catch his breath. He carried on, the survival persona taking over, making him look ahead at the hovering helicopter, knowing his life depended on reaching it...........
This part of the dream would never go away, he'd been recording it for years, wondering what it meant. He'd never been anywhere with a volcano, or any life of death scenarios, or had any worrying health concerns that he could recall.
Every night at three am he would wake, drenched in sweat, shouting out 'wait for me' to the helicopter...
There were times like that, where even if it was something relatively mundane, he could stare long and hard at it and still have no clue what it was. Sometimes it worried him. One, it meant his vision was probably steadily worsening. Two, that he would imagine up something else in the place of an everyday object did not bode well for arguing his sanity. On the other hand, he could just say that meant he was ten-fold more creative than the average person.
A lot of the times he managed to draw up something quite unsettling though, and it...
Absent. That's what mom has been for the past three years since the day the front door slammed shut on her and the four carrier bags of belongings. That's all she took, her makeup and her best pair of shoes. Crocodile skin. Horrid looking things but they seemed to mean more to her than the family.
Kathleen, the youngest still kept an eye on the front path most evenings just in case mom returned. Rest of us knew that very unlikely as her latest boyfriend had been very rich and mom had always been a gold digger.
We lived with...
Have I ever told you the story of how I got expelled from high school? It all started with this asshole kid, Greg Helsprat. He wasn't called "Greg Helsprat" back then. Instead, we called him "Fistbump". He hated it, but it fitted. He used his fists a lot, but most of all he kind of looked like a fist. Anyway, Fistbump seemed to enjoy treating other kids like crap, but he always had something special planned for me. Maybe he hated funny people, maybe he had a crush on me, maybe because I coined "Fistbump". I never found out why....
He set the plate before her. Two slices of charcoal blackened toast, plump stoneless cherry jam, no butter or spread. It wasn't punishment for climbing out the bedroom window to staying out late again. It was all they ever ate after mom died. They got through a loaf of bread a day.
She no longer cared what happened. All she could think about was Ross. He cooked her pumelled bloody steak, creamy mash with chives, grilled tomatoes covered in mixed grain pepper from a silver pot. Loved her with food, milky coffee and kisses.
Next week she was going to...