Lucinda of the Ashes

Lucinda held her breath, as she raised the glass rod above the vial and tapped the rod to release the single drop of liquid that clung to its end.

The drop fell in the vial, joining the muddy liquid within. The liquid turned ruddy, then clear. And it stayed clear.

Lucinda dared to exhale just as the liquid began to swirl and turn ruddy, then muddy. She ducked under the table just before the vial shattered, spraying red flames and charred bits of glass in every direction.

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The Belly of Boston

When the baby boy was born, he was fine and healthy, but though he ate ravenously of his mother’s milk, he began to lose weight. His swarthy complexion grew pale. He cried all the time with the pain of hunger. His parents brought him into the hospital and the doctors performed test after test, whatever tests they dared on a newborn infant. Finally, they found some kind of an anomaly in his blood work. They scanned him with a new type of imaging machine and concluded that something was abnormal about his digestive system, but they couldn’t quite figure out what. There wasn’t anything missing. There weren’t any abnormal masses or tissues or anything else that wasn’t supposed to be there. Except…except for a strange haziness that the scan showed in the area just above his stomach. A haze that the doctors could not explain.

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