The door hardly closed behind me when Anja comes down the stairs. "You have an appointment today." "What appointment? There was nothing in my agenda." "It is a last minute thing, kind of." "What is it?" "I will not tell, you will see. Today is a Penance Day." I am annoyed; I had planned to fiddle around on my car as the children are not here today. The...
There are places in this story where the same person is referred to as Missy, Mrs. Smith or Also. Please understand the names are to give the perspective of the person viewing her. There is no overt sex. If you are looking for a cheap thrill you will not find it in my stories. Hank Williams Jr stated once that he writes songs about subjects he knows. I wri...
It has been a really long time since I posted the previous chapter of Paradise Island. I moved jobs and became really busy and the muse just left me. Thanks to everybody who kept sending me emails to carry on writing the story. Without those emails, I wouldn't have found it in me to restart writing. Hopefully, the next chapter won't be so long in the writing...
Rachel - Right now my life was in mortal danger and I didn't even know it. I was doing my best to help my husband and if that meant throwing Grayson under a bus. Fine. Anyway, I knew now that what Jim and "his people" had told me was probably much more the truth than not. My new life was nerve wracking in ways I had never expected to ever have to experienc...
It has been variously described as a philosophical thought experiment, ethical conundrum, and nightmare job interview question. "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?" An offshoot of that question had real world significance to me. ****************** In many ways I won the gene lottery when I was born. I'm not t...
Chapter Four: The tangled knot The airline tickets were not cheap, but we were able to fly out that evening. Since I hadn't unpacked after leaving the hotel, I was ready to go, and Gretchen kept a bag packed at all times. Our flight took off late, as expected, and I dozed fitfully in the first class seats that Gretchen insisted we have. She insisted on pay...
Chapter 24 Vesper had no idea how much nonhumans enjoyed dancing until she watched all of the attendants at her wedding dance on top of what should be an incredibly cold mountain. It should have felt absolutely frigid outside during her wedding, the cake, and the dancing after, but it wasn't. She actually felt quite flushed as she danced against her husband...
I dropped the towel I'd used to dry my hair to the balcony floor, opened a beer and sat back inhaling the salty evening breeze. A vacation was long overdue, or at least so I'd been told, but there was that old restless resentment bunched up in a corner of my mind, just waiting for me to relax to swallow me up. "Fuck off," I muttered at it. I've never been...
Nineteen 'If you can replace something, it can't be that important.' - Richey Osgood, Rock Week, 2000. After Candice Barkin's trial in 1997 – a life sentence imposed for the murder of Will McCann and the attempted murder of Vaughn Madden – Richey left England in an attempt to clear his head. For the first time in two decades he was able to travel for pure...
The chill October breeze sent a shiver through my body as I closed the front door of my parents' house who I had been visiting that evening. As I locked the mortice, I heard a sound to my left. I looked round and, in the frame of light created by the open front door of the neighbouring house, I saw, over the dividing fence, my 'childhood sweetheart' struggli...