When I lost my mother in the store, I was only three years old. I can't remember what happened but I still wake up in a sweat most nights, an innate sense of abandonment, as though I have been on a mission to the moon, stepped outside the spaceship for a walk across the lunar landscape and left behind. Terror.

Mother never recovered from her fear. She spent the rest of my childhood in a daze from a mix of prescription pill cocktails, agrophobia and alcohol. Dangerous combinations.

She was currently in a secure medical facility, unrecognisable from the pretty...

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the fog sat heavy
in the valley cauldron.
each intersecting limb
was the peace of a friday
morning, interrupted.

we were singing
all the songs we had heard
before as children, and we
thought of having coffee,
but we didn't.

what does it mean
to be caught under a tree
at the break of what would be
a taciturn day, but wasn't?

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There once was a man who live on Richmond street, he died a few years back. Took care of his elderly mother who used to shave her head and named her pet cat Winston Churchill, she had a few pet birds too. Anyway, the man was a Musician. He used to park his van down by this old run down building in the center of town and sit with the door open playing his guitar. He wasn't the greatest and he wasn't the worst, he just really enjoyed what he did. I forget his name but I haven't forgotten the...

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Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.

"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they...

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"This is it?" Leila said with a wrinkled nose, her hands were clasped behind her back as she slowly approached the animal.

Myron stared at the blue ribbon sitting in a bow on the back of her head, eclipsing her dark brown tresses like an enormous butterfly. His eyes traveled down to her feet and the way her calves flexed as she walked on her toes around the creature.

"I wasn't lying, was I?"

"Dunno," Leila replied, and she hopped on a crate, her lanky, boyish form backlit by golden rays. It shone through her hair, making it more like...

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Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.

Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...

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As the walked along a long fenced pathway, she told Martin, that she was bringing him to a refugee camp, and that she couldn't tell him what time it is, because no one knows. She handed him a pair of binoculars. "Take these." Martin took the binoculars and she pointed her finger into the snowy distance. Can you make out that small shed out there?" Martin looked around in the distance, but could eventually see the shed she was talking about. "I do." "Listen, Martin, I need you to trust me now. You need to climb that fence, and run...

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She opened the envelope and screamed.

This was not the day to be squeamish. This was the day her daughter would be returned. Unharmed.

The finger was the wrong size and shape. John, when he overcame his initial shock, told her it was plastic.

They had both made the decision not to tell the police, followed the kidnapper's instructions to the letter.

So why was the envelope sent? A reminder of what could happen or was there something else going on?

Whilst Megan was making a cup of tea, John wondered whether to tell her about the tiny photo he...

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It stayed there, staring... Just staring him down. There was no motion for what seemed like an eternity. He kept his eyes on the beast, unblinking for fear of its immense unstoppable powers.

And then the second of peace was over. He reeled back, shock rolling up his arms from the knowledge that he in fact, no longer had fingers with which to grasp the beast as arm's length. The black pit of teeth consumed the digits and sought more. Clutching the stumps to his chest, the victim scrambled for ground; an escape from the vivid Death that lapped up...

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My email has been compromised, nevermind, nothing I write or receive is of any importance. The girl on the bench was full of self pity, having one of those 'the world is against me' moments we all get when we have too much free time and not enough to do. Usually by choice as usually there is too much that needs to be done but we prefer to surf the internet, read self help, watch tv or simply drink ourselves to oblivion, overwhelmed at the mess we ignore.

Jodie was a successful fantasy fiction writer, had a reliable good looking...

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