Back in the summer of 1997, I needed a summer school credit in order to graduate. So I signed up for ENC 1001, English Composition. There were a variety of writing topics, but one of them was a "saturation" paper. The idea was for a group of students to go to a location as a group, immerse ourselves in the surroundings and write about the things we saw, tryi...
The sun rose, bathing the landscape with its eerie light. In what was once the City of Ottawa, Ontario, plenty of creatures were stirring. The rats, squirrels, feral cats, stray dogs and whatnot. Their numbers have skyrocketed since the humans vanished, and the dead metropolis has become their new domain. They like to run from me, and being super slow since...
Patron saint of love and lovers. The patron saint of love, lovers, and happy marriages has a change of heart. Did you ever stop and wonder why we have a Saint Valentine's Day? Did you ever wonder who Saint Valentine was and what he did to earn such a saintly perch in the Catholic religion? By the way, no other holiday, not even Christmas, is celebrated as...
Lisa was my wife, friend, lover for four too short years. Dead two and a half times the length of our marriage, she lies under an ancient oak tree's sprawling canopy in Overland Park, a relatively new, yet unfilled cemetery on the north side of the small berg I live in. On this May 18th, as I do every May 18th, I called on Lisa, the mother of our born dead...
Nick the Necromancer slowly walked through Saint Morgan Hospital's morgue like a kid in a candy store. Opening the glossy cover, she flipped to the passage in the book, You Can Raise the Dead Too, about choosing the right body. "Someone who died without completing something in life is the best, however anyone intact will do." "Alright," Nick said to the gr...
There are so many strange things that walk the world of man by day and most of them are much worse than us creatures of the night. Sometimes, I don't know why humans make such a big deal out of the darkness. They're afraid of the dark and what it brings. The truth is that they should be afraid of the light. True Evil prefers to move about in the daylight hou...
Cien couldn't remember the last time he'd rode as hard as he rode now. The MacPhearson keep was a two day ride. He'd forced his men and himself to make it a matter of hours. Their horses were winded, he knew, and they grew tired. He knew that as well. He also knew if he kept pushing as hard as he was he was going to lame his horse, or that of one of his men,...
Best Dead concert I ever saw was in 1978 in an old movie theater in downtown Atlanta. My good college buddy Joe had grown up in San Francisco, had seen them umpteen times, and was a true Dead Head with every recording, legit and bootleg, ever made. He had tickets for both of the consecutive nights the Dead would be in Atlanta. He was so blown away by the s...
36 Hours Later Off the Georgia Coast. Mary Ellen opened her eyes to bright sunlight. She wondered if Heaven was always so bright. But something was wrong. She sure didn't belong in Heaven. She could smell the ocean and feel a gentle rocking movement. She pinched herself on the arm. Damn it hurt. If you're dead you shouldn't feel anything. Her eyes adjuste...
Iain saw his men following MacRae towards the shore and broke from cover. Screaming as loud as he could and waving his arms, he hoped his brother, or one of the others would hear or see him. Grayson joined him, both waving their arms and yelling the MacLean motto and then more voices joined in. Stuart MacLean was riding with his clansmen in the last half o...