Stories
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The Meddler (Redux)
Some women were born to lead, others to follow, but Faith discovered she wasn’t a woman at all…
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Aeton and Ioasephyn (Redux)
Aeton was made for Ioasephyn, and she him, of this there was never any doubt. Formed during The Great Making and united in an unbreakable union when the world was in its infancy, the couple consummated their love as the molten planet cooled…
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Thirteen for Halloween: Municipal Surplus
Debra Miskovic spent Halloween morning trying to determine whether the city owned one floor scrubber or two.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Auto-Close
Toni Radomski first noticed the missing gas call because Curtis DeWitt was driving in the wrong direction. His service truck appeared on the dispatch map as a blue triangle moving east along Washington Street, away from the neighborhood where Toni sent him twelve minutes earlier.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Found Heirs
Monica Szarek found the first living descendant before lunch and the seventh before anybody told her the land might be poisoned.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Witness Marks
Gary Lunsford knew somebody adjusted the kitchen cabinet because the hinge screws no longer agreed with his pencil marks. He found it after breakfast while returning a skillet to the lower cabinet beside the stove.
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Thirteen for Halloween: The Storm Chair
The chair appeared beside Doreen Gaskins’s mailbox while Melinda was inside packing medications. It was an ordinary kitchen chair, one of four that belonged to a maple dining set her mother bought sometime during Melinda’s adolescence.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Proof of Delivery
Darryl Beranek knew Mrs. Ries’s signature well enough to recognize it at 3:07 in the morning, which presented a problem because her package was still beside him in the van.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Lifetime Warranty
The first replacement window arrived eleven days after Colleen Zurek inherited the house, three days before she moved into it, and approximately twenty years before she expected the window to need replacing.
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Thirteen for Halloween: Weight Bearing
The pressure sat high on the inside of her residual leg, several inches below the knee, where every step pushed the same hard edge through the liner. It did not feel like skin friction.