They gathered in the woods. The darkness entwined itself around everything it touched. Filling every hole, every space it could claim.

It was not the darkness that was so frightening, it was that which hide inside. Using it as a clever camouflage.

Something hid, something stalked and watched and he could feel it. It was looking at him, watching and waiting. Its gaze crawling across his skin like tiny spiders.

He hid within himself not wanting to accept it. He built up the layers to keep the darkness out. He would not fear the thing in the dark. he would...

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I was walking to grandma's when I spotted the yellow box with a question mark on it. I liked it so much that I leaned against it and stuck a little red thing in my chest. Unfortunately, the little red thing was poisonous and I died. My eyeballs fell out and my skin ripped open and I bled everywhere. Then my body shrunk so that I looked like a voodoo doll. I am still standing against the yellow box with a question mark on it.

bruno went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to buy mashed potatoes and figs. He only had...

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It had been a long morning. The shouting and screaming had been relentless, as it always is with three children under six. She had spent the hours trying to patch up arguments, mollify sulkers, and generally bring a sense of cheer. Even the thought of their friend's birthday party had not raised a smile at one point. She felt like she was near the point of giving up completely.

The twins eventually seemed to decide that if they got ready they may enjoy the upcoming festivities. By quarter to twelve they were dressed in their finest party outfits and starting...

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"She'd have preferred the electric chair," Melanie said.

A half grin sat on her lips as she stirred the crinkle fry in the ketchup far longer than anyone stirs crinkle fries in ketchup.

"You know when they were discovering the electric chair, they would like pay kids to bring in stray dogs and cats to electrocute to get the voltage just right," Beloved said.

"That's horrible," Melanie replied and she dropped the crinkle fry. "Why would you say that?"

"They finally tested it on an elephant!" Beloved said.

"Wait, who is they?" Melanie asked. She lifted her nose in the...

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I looked at the passport, and then back up at the woman standing in front of me.

"Are you serious?" I asked, a puzzled look on my face.

She looked sad.

"What is to be funny?" she said, her broken English somehow endearing.

"I don't know how they do things in..." I turned her passport over, and looked at the country name listed. It took up three lines, and many of the letters just looked like squiggles to me. "...your home country, but over here we do things differently."

"Is me!" she smiled, and I felt my tough exterior melting...

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She is running down a long road that she is not sure where it leads. It's a road deep in the country, there are tall dark tree's that surround her. Her heart is pumping through her chest, she can barely catch her breath. She tries to turn around to see if he is going to catch her, but she doesn't know where he went. The fear of him catching her keeps her going. She hears the sounds of the tree's leaves rustling in the wind and this sound alone makes her heart pump even harder. In her mind she...

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I stopped running and gasped for breath. My brother caught up to me and dropped to his knees in exhaustion. My hand traveled silently to the weapon at my waist. I stood behind him breathing heavily.
"I'm sorry brother, but I can't share this time." In one swift motion, I brought the metal down on his head. His body crumpled in front of me and lay motionless.
The audience stared open mouthed at me. The thundering applause filled me and my brother sprang up from his crumpled heap on the stage floor and grabbed my hand for our final bow.

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She didn't look at him as she gingerly opened the sketchbook he had laid in front of her. Carefully schooling her face into it's most neutral expression, just in case she didn't like what she saw.

She needn't have worried.

For as she opened the book and began to gaze over the imagery, the concepts, the scribbled annotations that sounded like he had been talking to himself as he wrote them, she became lost in the world he was describing.

She could feel him tense next to her. She understood that, by being shown his work it was like she...

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Travel light, but take everything with you. They were father's last words to me before he took my mother and sister down the wooded trail opposite mine and my brother's.
The cossacks had burned our village to the ground an hour ago, and he told us we had to flee into the woods, where they would have more trouble finding us.

When I was young, we used to play in the forest, so I knew it well. I would take my young brother Sasha to a lake a few hours' hike from here, that the cossacks don't know about.

I...

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I had been running for just over an hour, almost breathless. Whose idea was it to train for this marathon anyways? I've always liked running, but never really enjoyed it, you know? There are only so many routes you can take. This time, I decided to say screw the concrete jungle, I'm going to take this somewhere different. So I took to the hills, as they say. Not gonna lie, it was much more interesting than running on pavement. The damp grass under my shoes, the crunching of the twigs, all that good stuff. I stopped at the top of...

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