(back to part one)

(reading time: 1 hour, 15 minutes)

Ghosts Broke Down my Door

The soup wasn’t doing the trick. Diamond stared down into the paper cup of swirled orange tomato broth. There was some kind of tiny pasta in it, but they’d all sunk to the bottom. It was still steaming, so she played with it, chasing the end of the trail with the tip of her nose, but she couldn’t feel any warmth there.

Half of it was inside her, but she was still the coldest she’d ever been in her twenty-six years of life. She’d only been in the game of playing Dr. Pox Morbisha for a year, and they’d already run out of ideas for her gimmick. This time they’d just dropped her into a tiny black bikini. Continue reading →

(back to part one)

(reading time: 1 hour, 29 minutes)

Open Season on Man

Micah really only needed one other person to help him attach the chair to the lift, but he knew Charlie well enough to know he could never amount to one whole unit of helpfulness. He was the kid who always veered off the trail on his sled. Threw his bowling ball into the next lane. Got the wrong order at a restaurant and ate it without a word of acknowledgment or complaint.

He’d seen the boy, at several different ages, wander in from the trails with various bloody scrapes and contusions, a smile on his face, no idea how it happened but certain that it didn’t even hurt, not one little bit. Continue reading →