Crap, the cafeteria was full again, so full that every table hosted several people sporting laptops and folders busting with papers that spilled out onto each plastic tabletop. Jenny held her tray of food in both hands and sighed heavily. Not a single goddamned place to sit and eat her lunch in peace.
Briefly, she contemplated going to the park bench outside, but the thought of November's chill made her reconsider. The smell of fresh sweet potato fries tickled her nose and made her mouth water. Annoyed but starving, she swallowed her pride and sat cross-legged on the floor against...
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...
Jason could barely make out the piece of ocean where she had sunk beneath the waves.
Bitter tears coated his cheeks and he tasted salt as he gazed across the water to where he had last seen his dearest love. He had taken her for granted. He realized that now. He had never given her the attention she needed and deserved, and now he had lost her forever. He wiped his reddened eyes and pointed to the approximate spot of water where he'd last seen his beloved classic red Camaro. "That's where she sank," he told the insurance adjuster, sniffling...
"Goddamn it." This is what the cop said when the door first opened.
"It's not what you think. I can explain. See, we were playing a game. Hide and seek sort of thing, and things got a little out of control." He mumbled and shuffled, which the cop always took as a sign of guilt.
"Okay, we need to get him up off the floor. An ambulance is on its way. And you --" The cop pointed at the mumbler. "You need to come with me."
Mumbler shrugged and kicked at the table leg. "I didn't do anything. It was...
Bocci. Bocci ball. Bowling on a lawn. That's what I was doing in that old photo. But strange. Usually you bowl with other people. Usually there's markings on the ground, a target ball to shoot from. In the photo, I'm just standing there in the middle of the lawn, facing the house. My house? God, I don't know whose house that is. It could be a field house, or a club house, and I'm playing bocci, a game I don't know how to play, have never, as far as I'm aware, ever played before in my life, and I'm hunched...
It was him. even now my breath drew short as I thought about it, all the things he used to do, all the million little ways that he would never let anything go, every little rumer that he spread or whisper behind my back.
Richard Delany had just walked into my board room. Mine.
I saw him look up and I know that he recognised me, I wished that I had chosen to wear the stilettos this morning instead of the practical comfortable shoes that are my fail safe whenever I know I am going to be in long meetings...
Twist and he was dead. Broken neck. Watching the agony in the contorted face I could only stand in my own space of terror. Knowing that no-one would ever believe what happened. Instinct told me to run home, pack a bag, passport, money and take a plane to the other side of the world. I could not move.
Simon's hand touched mine and for the first time since kindergarten, I held hands with another boy. What seemed like hours later we moved and looked at each other, mirrors of incredulity and shock.
John had told us years ago the bizarre...
We all have a demon, a monster, something of a dark creature around us.
There are many types of these creatures. They tend to look the same though, darker than the pits of the deepest holes and overwhelmingly dripping of toxicity. Once they have hold of you it is very hard to to get rid of it. There are many different types of these creatures however.
Some make you feel like you’ll never feel happiness.
Some stop you from eating.
Some will pretend to let you feel happy until they let you crash and crack.
Some will make you harm...
I've been following Soulscum for a while now. I don't know what he wants. I don't know why he's here. All I know is that he's left behind a string of broken storefronts and mass hysteria.
I had to do something about him.
He stopped to look through a window. "Maybe he's scoping the place out" I thought to myself. But he turned his head like he recognized something in there. That's when I realized where we were.
Soulscum was squatting right in front of my friend Tim's antique store. Lucy was inside trying to clean the place up a...
Shattered.
She had always had a fondness for that word, the way it reflected the brokenness it supposedly defined, the way the consonants lined up, hard and jagged on the ears and soul. Maybe that was part of its appeal. She had always had a fondness for broken things...
She stared at the black screen before her, out of practice and rapidly running out of time as the timer quietly mocked her, accused her, with its silent countdown. Time was running out. Would she have time enough to mend the shattered peices of her soul? In the seconds that remained...