She is furious with me again for some perceived slight. This has been happening quite a bit lately. Because her temper has no gauge, she insults me, a barrage of verbal barbs that tear at my emotions and I should be fighting back, but I refuse. My response to her slurs sit stale on the back of my tongue, threatening to choke me. I could end this with one phrase but between victory and love, I choose love.
“Nothing will ever harm you when I am near,” Alethea said, her voice mild and her breath moist with the promise of spring laced with the potential of a budding romance.
“That is not true,” Calvin said. “This is all a trick to lure me into dropping my defenses.”
“You do not trust me?” the she-demon who wore the face of a human seemed genuinely injured by the remark. “Do you see me as the weak-minded do, as some sort of heathen monster?”
“I meant no offense, miss, believe me,” Calvin answered, backing away as slow as humanly possible for he was taught as a young lad that immortal beings take no notice of unhurried movements. “It is simply against my religious beliefs to engage in amorous congress with The Beast.”
“And there we have it,” Alethea said as her gaze slid off his innocent, blanched face. “The sad truth and the final nail in your coffin. Before I send you from this wretched thing you call existence, know one thing: I would have protected you with my life til my undying day had you only accepted me as I am. Now, however, I will feast on your flesh and bake my bread with your bones.”
The one thing Crispin excelled at was pulling capers. The thing he was absolute shit at was maintaining a healthy intimate relationship, so when Fern left him, instead of wallowing in self-loathing and misery, he set out to win her back by treating it like a heist.
His hastily assembled crew consisted of a skip tracer to locate Fern’s exact whereabouts, a three-man extraction team to kidnap her, a props manager to supply non-lethal firearms and blood squibs, a location scout to find the perfect secluded warehouse to hold his ex hostage, and a greeting card writer to provide him with the mushy stuff needed to show her just how much he cared once he rescued her.
It most likely would have gone to plan had Crispin not overlooked the fact that Fern was an ex-Army Night Stalker who had taken out the extraction team, tortured his plan out of them and was now on his trail for a little payback.
It took omissions, half-truths and bald-faced lies, as well as everything she owned, everything she borrowed and everything she could steal to gain entry into this most holy of places. Melissa greeted the maître d’heaven with a sly smile as she handed over her excellently forged credentials.
Maître D tossed the documents aside and with the slightest flick of his wrist caused her clothing to evaporate into thin air. Melissa stood straight-backed and proud because she knew her body was immaculate, but there was something in the maître d’s gaze that forced her to look at herself.
At her left foot, a writing quill began engraving her evenly tanned flesh with silvery symbols that appeared to be beautiful and breathtaking when first applied but slowly turned a horrific mottled and bruised purple as the ink dried. The designs snaked up around her leg, over her inguen, around her ribcage and breasts and concluded on her neck, with the sharp point of the quill hovering just over her jugular vein.
“What the hell is this?” Melissa asked, gesturing at the jumble of symbols, none of which she recognized, that made her throat constrict just to look at.
“These,” the maître d answered in a civil tone, free of contempt. “Are your sins, a lifetime’s worth. You have been marked, just as Cain had, and since you strived so hard to enter this establishment, access has been granted. You are free to travel as you wish, but everyone will know your crimes and you will know unending shame. Please enjoy your stay.”
When her husband presented his idea, Morganna appeared to consider it but she had actually folded it up tacitly, gracefully, and accurately as she would have pleated a handkerchief of spider’s gossamer, and stowed it away on the highest shelf in her mind.
Her name and face are all but forgotten and the sole recollection I have is a time when she fell into my arms and I inhaled the scent of her shampooed hair. I was aware of how fast her heart was beating against my chest. Why? I cannot rightly recall but I knew it was due to something I said, some offhand comment spoken in the heat of an argument that cut deeper than intended.
“I want you,” she said this with absolute sincerity.
The problem? She was my impossible love and it was an unachievable dream for although I could physically phase through any object, I could not pierce the glass barrier between us and enter into the mirror universe.
“I don’t have the problems most celebrities do because I created a secret identity separating my work and leisure lives.”
“You’re a librarian.”
“Librarian of the month, if you don’t mind, which means I’m recognizable now, so I need my privacy when I go out to buy lingerie for the nights I hang out at local bars trying to score a young buck.”
“Mom!”
It was meant to be a rescue mission. One of our interstellar launches that NASA lost all contact with ten years ago finally reentered Earth’s orbit. Astonishingly, the ship still registered human life signs so an astronaut medical team crew was hastily assembled and a billionaire’s self-funded rocket commandeered to expedite the the rescue attempt.
For a mission done on the fly, everything surprisingly went to plan…until the rescue team discovered the zombified bodies of the interstellar crew connected to a bizarre life support system that kept their human hearts beating within their necrotic corpses.
The rescue mission commander immediately called for an evacuation but as the team prepared to leave, extraterrestrial lifeforms came out of stealth mode, closed in fast, and trapped them. The alien intruders forced their way into the humans’ brains, using a primitive mental pictogram code in order to establish a crude hive mind to learn everything they could about Earth’s defenses and their probability of survival in the war that was about to begin.
I heard the noise in the morning fog of the surrounding forest and caught the faint scent of wolf. I remained still for if I moved toward the rustling sound the wolf would take flight into the green and if I ran away, I risked being the creatures next meal.
So, I closed my eyes, inhaled slowly and imagined myself as a part of nature, a young flesh-colored sapling in which an animal might rest beneath for shade…and that was when she came to me, huge paws moving with a lightness and serenity that belied her size, sunlight catching highlights of her thick silver-grey fur.
Our encounter was brief, a satisfying of interspecies curiosity, but in that moment I was filled with contentment laced with an undertone of envy that I would never be as free as she, though it was my intention to devote my life to achieving that goal.
MADD FICTIONAL 