By now, my dad knows I’m missing.
I don’t know where I am. I’m lying in sand. I was running, running through a park. Someone came up behind me — I thought it was another runner — and then a sharp pain, on the back of my head. Blackness, shot through with stars, then a binding over my wrists. Something over my mouth next.
Pain. A lot of pain.
The end of the story. If you’re interested in seeing it from the beginning, you can do so from this page.
Thanks for following along, everyone!
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A hot wash of air rushed up from behind Rose.
It raised the hair on her arms and neck and a shudder wracked her body. She heard her breath, thready and whimpering, rasp in the tight confines. She felt the air heat, a layer of gleaming, slick sweat caked her skin. She turned her head, slow, her eyes searching in the dark for the eerie dances of light.
The door stood black against the bright, hot edge of orange and yellow which danced on the wall, and from the crack between the door and jamb.
The kiriban prize for one of my faithful and very kind watchers on my deviantART page continues.
Enjoy, everyone. I think – think – only one more after this.
If you’re interested you can see the whole thing here.
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Rose shook, her eyes darted across the battered pavement.
Nothing. Utter solitude.
She heard a rasping breath, and her heart spiked. She yelped and looked over her shoulder, but only the dark square of the building against the bright midday sky stared down on her. She panted and realized the rasping breath was hers.
There’s a fog-stuffed path near my house, where all you can see is the ghosts of tree trunks and dense underbrush, the brambles and thorn bushes, the thickets packed with bird nests and slimy things. The mist swirls like stagnant smoke and the trees make an umbrella over it, shield it from the greedy sun trying to burn it off and expose the path of pine needles and dead leaves and soft, muffling peat. That path is at the edge of a flat where my great-great granddaddy built the house. He flattened out and cleared an area where trees weren’t too dense, where the hillside wasn’t too deep and where he’d have a view of the leaves changing in fall time. Off the front porch and down the rough-hewn half-log steps, down the gravel-coated walk and to the left you go, and there, between the trunks of two mighty trees, older than our country maybe, older than anyone can remember, the path sort of sneaks up and drops down a slope into the mist.
Yes, folks, sad as it is, this is it. I want to thank all of you for your patience while I struggled to get this written and completed.
Thanks to my friends for being such good sports and letting me take so much liberty with their “characters”. The people depicted are nothing like the people upon which they are based.
Hope you enjoy. Thanks for following along.
If you need to start at the beginning, it’s here.
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I don’t wanna look up, don’t wanna see, don’t wanna know … but I sit up anyway, like an asshole, and get a good gander at it.
There it is, at the end of the alley, heaving its body up and down. Then it charges like a bull. Right at the car.
Okay, so … I sorta forgot I had this, see. And, while that may not seem like a big deal to most of you, I had a friend nag me until I posted it.
In reality, I wrote this right after I wrote part 7; I just forgot to post it. And then I forgot it was there. So anyway — here it is.
And what about an ending? Anyone have any ideas? Love to hear ‘em.
And if you want to read the whole thing, you can start at the beginning.
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I’m pretty sure I hear Beattie shit himself … I know I did. He steps back so fast the light’s wiggling all over the place. Tower slaps her hand over her mouth to hold in a scream, but she keeps her gun up and she’s moving sideways toward Beattie.
