He felt the weight of his body pulling on his wrists where they were chained to the wall in the dungeon of the ritter's castle. His cheek rested against the clammy stone wall of the chamber. Still, though, the sweat was dripping down his brow and into his eyes. There was nothing he could do about that now. Von Rostock had left him, saying he'd be back after...
Self-help gurus tell us we grow by "breaking out of our comfort zones" -- and yet few of us ever do. After all, we are creatures of habit. We prefer the safety and comfort of what we know. Maybe this is why it is said that life repeats itself -- because we gravitate towards the familiar, over and over. I've heard these clichés, of course, but was still su...
It was so dark and the waves near the shore were so choppy that Tab had difficulty seeing the little beach on the ocean side of the Lower Head lighthouse, and he almost was at the entrance into the Shernhaven harbor before he got his bearings. He brought the motorboat he'd borrowed from Keith Dodson in to land as close as he dared, dropped the anchor, and sl...
John Dungan, the third son of Archibald, the Baron de Blaguere, of Ardkill, Londonderry, was a man of few words but of precipitous action. When the Irish potato famine started destroying the lives and working ability of the families producing the Irish whiskey at his family's distillery in Londonderry—and particularly in challenging his endurance at watching...
When the scheme first got started, it seemed to be no big deal, really. By then there wasn't anything to protect and after the first time as part of the boarding house service there wasn't that much to be embarrassed about either. My family came to Asheville when I was just ten. For me, it was an improvement over the dreary coal mining towns of western Penn...
It was just a moment in time. At least David thought it had been no longer than that, but every time he thought back on it, it seemed like it had rolled on forever, long enough for him to see the look in everyone's eyes and to analyze what they were thinking. Paolo Flores, the mixed Portuguese-Bantu Mestico young man who was his assistant in translating the...
My great grandfather built a cabin on a small lake for he and his new bride. It was an actual log cabin, complete with pot bellied stove and stone fireplace. My grandfather modernized it some, adding indoor plumbing and electricity. Then my father did even more. Including adding a second bedroom and modern kitchen. Throughout all this modernization, they ma...
I Around the living room, Cole raked his irises of honey-brown. Never had he seen so many matched items and polished surfaces. No wonder Rick wanted his other property painted pronto—to pay for the goodies of this house with the rent income of that apartment. "Would you look at that screen?" Rick said. He sat up on his black loveseat of leather. "Ou...
My world collapsed when on that fateful Friday afternoon where all twenty of my fellow colleagues and myself were assembled in the showroom to be told that we were all being made redundant. The cheque for two week's severance pay wouldn't last me long for I'd only not long ago signed a rental lease on the flat where I was at present now residing. I saw the...
Crashing through the undergrowth of the tropical trees in the hot, humid air, Kweku fought to understand where he'd gone wrong. It wasn't his fault that Nana Opuku Ware, the Ashanti King, favored him, a by-blow, over the son who would be king, Okyere. Kweku had overheard Okyere whining to the king, telling him that Kweku was revealing to the Dutch team cam...