Out on the farm, in the dead of night, no one was asleep. Beyond the trees and the end of the driveway, big, bellowing vehicles roamed up and down the road running north-south, red lights strobing, blinding flood lights sweeping the eastern edges of our property. We were under threat of invasion by some dark … Continue reading The Masque of the Monochrome Marionette
The young man with blond curls was immortal, an instrument of some ancient, evil force. He’d committed terrible crimes against my family, tried to kill us by bombing a building we were staying in. When we cornered him at last, we beat him until he would have died, had he been mortal. His body was … Continue reading The Damned Eaves
I think this was the first one. It's the oldest one I can find, anyway. Mom says I was about eighteen months old, so as of this posting, this would be approximately forty-eight and a half.
I was part of a team sent to represent the Lincoln chapter of PFLAG at a national convention in Arkansas. The convention was at a church, in a town where much of the industry that had kept it alive had dried up, leaving whole blocks deserted and streets in disrepair. The church was also a … Continue reading Hunters Become the Prey
A great darkness had fallen over the city of Lincoln, placing all power in the hands of a very few, making it so we could not get jobs and were persecuted for not conforming. A group of us went to a big trailer in the Near South neighborhood that had been converted into a church, … Continue reading Sopranos and Dead Cats
I was a teenager again, living on the farm. A girl my age named Laura came to live with us. She looked like my old college roommate, with pale skin and long, dark brown hair. Her sister had died a violent death and her brother had died of some degenerative disease. I didn’t know what … Continue reading Dream Girl in White Convertible
When I was little, I had a children’s storybook about the friendship between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. The one thing that stuck with me was this picture of the two women walking along a street together as, in a tree high above them, a large owl of indeterminate species gazed down at them. That … Continue reading The Awl and the Orm
