Tag: soul

Portrait of an Evil Sparkling Skull

Everyone was excited about my upcoming vacation, until I told them what I’d be doing.

When I said I’d stay home and paint, some people thought I was talking about painting the walls of my apartment. When I clarified that I’d be painting pictures, a good number of people were polite enough to pretend that sounded like fun. A few people’s eyes sincerely brightened, and they asked a few more questions. The kind that restore my faith in humanity just a little.

One of my co-workers had a weird but fun reaction. She pointed to the wall of our shared office and said, “Can you paint us a magic portal to get us out of here?”

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They Stand. They Watch. They Wait.

“What would happen if I accidentally looked at one of them?” Adira asked.  “Or if I spoke by reflex, before I could stop myself?” She was the passenger.  With a sudden swerve, the driver pulled aside.  Ignoring the horn of the car that just missed side-swiping them, he gripped the wheel.  His shoulders heaved in […]

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The Surgeon’s Secretary

“Here, you see?” the surgeon said, as he pointed with his scalpel. “At the nexus of the heart and the brain? Between the eyes and the throat, right at the back of the mouth, where the voice is on the verge of emerging?”

The secretary peered past the gleaming scalpel and tilted her head. There was nothing to see at the moment, other than the expected anatomy inside the mouth. The corpse that lay on the dissection table had been long vacated. But the surgeon claimed that he had cut through at just the right time, the fleeting moment right after certain death.

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One Wicked Warlock

There is a tall tower to the north. It is made of stone that looks a common gray from afar. But I have been close enough to see the stone shift hues, to glitter with the gilded veins of an otherworldly ore, to fade into a pale so utmost as to be nigh invisible.

A warlock once lived there, it is said. Now the tower is abandoned.

But that does not mean is it safe.

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Maugre Death We Walk

“There’s no need for this,” Morgan said, glancing over to his right shoulder, where a heavy hand lay on him, holding him in place.  “I came willingly.”

He was in the living room of the woman who had introduced herself as A.J.  The woman whom he suspected was responsible for the “resurrections.”  Morgan hadn’t quite figured out what term he would use for it in his story.

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The Thief, the Fairy, and the Raven

The thief fell from the tower’s upper window.  She had lost her precarious grip on the pitted brick.  She remembered that she should roll herself up into a loose ball to protect her head and neck.  But by the time she remembered, she had already struck the first branch of the tree in the orchard below.  Then she struck another and another.  Scratched and thrashed and bounced about, she finally reached the ground, thankful that the soil was soft.  She lay there for far too long a moment.  The breath had been knocked out of her.  And she feared moving for fear she might discover that she could not.

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