"Avery," she said, eyes flashing, "Avery, Avery."
I held the snake in my hands. "I need to take care of it. It's lonely."
"Animals belong in the outdoors, not in kindergarten."
"Then I belong in the outdoors, too!"
"Avery, if you continue this for one moment longer –"
"Don't worry," I whispered, almost to myself. "Flora will get you. Flora will get you."
She came a few minutes later, rage flickering on and off in her pale face. "What's all this?"
Miss Duncan glared. "Your sister brought a snake into a kindergarten classroom."
"What the bloody –"
"Flora!" I yelped....
I danced in the circle. Just me, my friend Jeanine, and a fairy. That's right, a fairy. People who study this would call me an idiot. NEVER GO AND DANCE IN A FAIRY CIRCLE, YOU WILL DIE. Oh yeah? Screw you, I want to dance. Dancing is really fun. Especially with a fairy. But I'm kinda tired...I've been dancing for three weeks straight. I should be dead, no human can go without water for more than a week. And I'm rather sweaty. Hey Miss Fairy, can we stop dancing? Please? I just need a water break.
Marie Antoinette sat in the tub, eating chocolate truffles and drinking champagne. Her ruffled leggings lay in a heap on the floor. She thought as she looked out the window that she was ever the perfect Mademoiselle. She gazed out onto the misty countryside, daydreaming. Although, what could she dream about? She was living her dream. She took another bite of chocolate and smiled.
Just then, her little sister's pink range rover came trundling into the driveway, reminding her that it was 2015 and she was not in France. She would not marry her prince, because princes don't exist nowadays....
Backwards, triumphant, towering low over this once perfect field of brown and dusk.
held soft in the omnipresent rapture of breathing.
"What the hell happened here?" The man in the blue button up military coat came up to the wreck. He wore a hat on his head, and had a handlebar mustache.
"Well sir... It-" A young black man began to explain the incident.
"Shut up, I didn't ask you nigger." The man immediately silenced the young black man, who rested a large pick-axe on his shoulders. The black man recoiled slightly. "You there, tell me what happened here." The military man pointed to a young white boy who was looking at the wreck.
"The train just... Crashed Mister. It was...
A game. Thats what i thought it was, thats what my father told me it was. I was a child during world war II, a jewish child. My father took us to the station to catch the train towards the camp. He told me it was an excursion. WHen we git to the camo we were seperated from mum. The uniformed men spil us in to men and women. We were taken to a store room that was turned into a bunker, when a soldier walked in. He needed a translater to translate the soldiers commands to italian as most...
I lost my grip on the wheel. Well, not really. In reality, I lost my grip on everything. In that moment, nothing else mattered. The world around me became a blur of distant activity and the noise around me sounded like a conversation floating through walls from the other end of a house. The world both started in motion and went completely still in the very same second. In that moment, walking past him in the hallway, I forgot my name. All I could remember was the image of him walking to his locker that burned itself into my mind....
Kelsey had always hated Kent. Kent was a skinny, chaste, and weak man. His skin was light and ashy, his hair not blonde but not quite brown. His teeth could have been more white. She hated the way he talked, all whispery. His voice, unreliable. His feelings, pushing up and making this more of a life.
Kelsey looked in the mirror and hated Kent so much it hurt. She hated him with sorrow. She hated him with Rage.
She decided to kill him.
She took a knife in her left hand.
She held out Kent's right hand, as if showing...
Mitch sits on the porch steps. He see his daughter near the tire swing. She spins and spins and spins, her tight blonde curls flying around her as the late evening breeze weaves its fingers through her hair. He thinks of how much she looks like an angel. The force of her delightful twirling sends her tumbling back into the soft grass beneath her. Mitch looks to his wife resting her head on his shoulder as she sleeps and smiles. This is their life and it is good.
Her name is Octavia Fabrizi and she is 76-years-old. Born in Florence, Italy, she has lived her entire live on the outskirts of the villa where she and her husband have a small business selling baked goods. Every morning before work, Octavia takes up her bicycle and rides for five miles back and forth It is this exercise, and her love of life, that has kept her alive. Or so Octavia believes. Possibly she is right. It is a question that does not bother her overmuch. She's seen too many, older and younger, pass on to the Otherworld and, thus,...