"Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Trick or treat," dancing around her and taunting her in a wild melee of mean spirited activity, disguised in Halloween masks, the four teenage boys screamed their hatred at her. I was stunned. I couldn't believe my eyes. It took me a second to react to what they were doing and to what I was seeing, before I went into action....
Christie was cold, lonely and hungry again this year. For four years in total now, she had not managed to beg for a meal. "Everything changed around Christmas," Christie thought, people got selfish. Sure, people chucked unwanted clothes in a homeless bin, but what was she going to do with a spaghetti string sequin top, when it was snowing? She needed to keep...
Simon worked in one of the high-end replicant labs that manufactured perfect copies of various celebrities. Each replicant took weeks to design to spec before being manufactured and Simon's firm pretty much charged whatever they wanted - they were that good. The company, Wallace, served the uber-rich and was always paid up front and in full. In 2069, most m...
There were no longer any secrets. Her belly was so round, the skin so taut; there was no question that in several days she would become a mother at the sweet age of 20. Complaining that she couldn't sleep, she often drifted off in the middle of the day when watching TV, listening to a conversation. Everything about her cried out white dream. She was a white...
Chapter 3 -- The Wizard The next morning, Maddie bounced down the steps of Dave's apartment building and headed towards the parking lot, seeing Cindy waiting in her car for her. It felt so strange to Maddie that today was Sunday, yet she had not gone to church. Still, she recognized that these were unique circumstances, with a great number of pressing erra...
All characters are adults. ***** My name is Bud. After the state released me from prison I used my few dollars of separation money to start life anew someplace where opportunity wasn't rare or, worse, unknown. So I rode the bus to Gulfport, a town about the size of Savannah, on the Gulf of Mexico. At Gulfport I went to the halfway house I hadda referral t...
Out in the night, a storm began to rage. Lightning raced across dark clouded skies, lighting up the world in swathes of flashes. Rain would be coming soon and up on the roofs of businesses and urban buildings. If anyone say, they would just see a dark shape flutter between flashes, desperately trying to get home. This hell form of a woman would hide when she...
I watched Alicia get off the subway and almost didn't recognize her at first. I was expecting to see her in her professional clothing, but she had on dark jeans, brown boots that stopped just below the knee, and an orange top that was shaped like a triangle and hung off one shoulder. "Damn, girl. You look hot!" I whispered, as I hugged her and gave her a qu...
"Freefall," Rebecca Quinn thought to herself as the elevator lowered her and her Husband down to the lobby of her office building so they could go have lunch together. "Freefall...That's just what my life feels like right now," she had to stifle a perverse chuckle at the irony of the comparison between the elevator and her place in life. Rebecca had been m...
CHAPTER 2 Why hurt yourself with anger when someone else makes a mistake? After over 2 years without having any contact with the O'Neal family at all, I was in my room at the Denver Rescue Mission. I had been given free room and board there. They said that they recognized my work on the streets of Denver and knew that I was integral in their own reach out...