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Got Cha!

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By Garry Engkent [ Prologue: This is a true story—okay, not quite. I changed a few facts and details even though my therapist suggested the whole truth and nothing but the truth as a kind of confessional to ease the stress. “Confession is good for mental health.” I insisted on not giving real names, not in first person. Just Tom, Dick and Harry. To give some distance, perspective. My female therapist sighed. It has been a tough six months for both of us here in the institute .] On a Wednesday, he killed his three closest friends—violently, mercilessly, deliberately. Why? Twenty years ago, he and his buddies played a childish game on an old woman. “Hey, your shoelace is undone,” he said, pointing down at her shoes. Automatically, the old lady looked down. “Made you look!” he laughed, and his pals joined in to humiliate the white-haired woman more. When this trick was played, many times before with his friends taking turns, the tricked person looked embarrass...
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Darkness, my old friend

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Darkness My Old Friend It’s only a shadow on the wall, but it makes the hairs on Carrie’s arms rise. She wakes from a nightmare, just in time, as one does when the chase is on and you’re the prey, and she can’t drop off back to sleep. She goes downstairs to get a glass of milk and check out the shadow. She lives alone in the woods and enjoys the dark. It feels primitive. Makes fear scintillating. Spawns bogeymen. She never locks her doors. Makes no sense, since all an intruder has to do is bust a window on the first floor. No burglar alarms either. If some fool is that desperate, come on in! She makes her way down the stairs, half asleep, half on instinctive alert, and again spots the shadow, sliding across the fridge like a smudge. Forget the milk. She slips silently outside. The night is warm, and she knows her way around as well outside as in. She tiptoes down the hill toward the creek, to the clearing she created as a meditation space. Leaves underfoot are damp, mu...
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A Complicated Story of a Certain Love

They barely fell in love, and she disappeared. He searched for her for months, frantic with despair. One night he got unlucky - a vampire caught him. The young knight managed to kill it but was bitten and became a bloodsucker. He wandered around the world and kept looking for his beloved. Then he found her, and she was dead too. She decided to remain on Earth as a ghost. Love was more important than eternal peace. Vampires are immortal. The knight went to the settlement and allowed people to kill him with a stake.. Together they went to the other side. Christopher T. Dabrowski https://krzysztoftdabrowsk.wixsite.com/krzysztoftdabrowski https://www.instagram.com/krzysztof.t.dabrowski/ https://www.facebook.com/Krzysztof-T-Dąbrowski-166581686751600/ Note about the author: Books in USA: "Escape" (2019 - Royal Hawaiian Press), "Anomaly" (2020 - Royal Hawaiian Press), "A Monsters Pretending to be Human" (2024 - Alien Buddha Press), "Dest...
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After the Storm

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Pale. Wide-eyed. Troglodytesque we step into silence. The silence, thick and heavy. A curtain. An intermission until it begins again. Begin again it will the howling, rattling, crashing, banging, clanking destruction. The wind’s revenge. Its revenge will subdue us for a heartbeat, then we will forget until the curtain rises.         by Dorcas Wilson  
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Dragons Awake!

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“Steve… Steve…Steve…” Steve opened his eyes and saw beige canvas. Oh, yes, he was taking time out from his work as an environmental biologist to assist his uncle, a renowned palaeontologist, on his latest dig. Uncle John had high hopes for the bones they had started to uncover yesterday. “Steve…” His eyes travelled around until they focused on what was standing beside his sleeping bag. No, he wasn’t awake yet; he was still dreaming. A very small dinosaur was there in the tent with him. And it was calling him by name! “Steve, pay attention! This is very important day for both of us. Although your uncle thinks I’m a dinosaur, I’m actually a dragon.” The apparition carefully unfurled its wings and let a brief puff of smoke out of its nose. “See?” “This is the best dream I’ve had in a long time! Do tell me more.” “You’re not dreaming, Steve, you’re awake and I’m the ghost of the dragon whose bones you and your uncle started to dig up yesterday. I died here a long time ag...
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The Broken Nutcracker

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I used to visit Aunty Sash on Saturdays. My mother was glad to have a ten-year-old out of the house for the day. I enjoyed it because Aunt Sash fed me on cake and Corona which was a kind of lemonade in those days. She couldn’t move around very much so she would sit in her chair and tell me all the scandalous things my mother used to get up to when she was younger. Then she would go on to the extraordinary behaviour of her neighbours. It was only later that I realised all this jiggery pokery came from her imagination. One day there was a broken nutcracker on the draining board. She said she had broken it trying to crack a peach stone. Aunty Sash did not particularly like peaches and I later found most of them wound up in the bin. “Why are you trying to crack peach stones?” I asked. “Can you just pop to the shop and get me another nut cracker and then of course I will tell you.” I brought the new nutcracker and she got me cracking the peach stones. That nutcracker soon broke too and I he...
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Silly Questions

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Marcelo Medone “Why does the moon float, Mum?” “I don't know, son. It's just hanging in the sky. That's all, my dear.” “And why doesn't it fall?” “Because it's always been there, even if sometimes we don't see it.” “Always?” “For a long time. All of our lives.” “But that's not always.” The boy looked at his mother with a resigned expression. He put his head on the pillow and covered himself with the blanket. When she was about to blow out the candle, he took her hand and looked at her in anguish. “Why do things fall to the ground and not come up by themselves? Why can't we fly like birds? Why do apples fall from the trees?” he asked. “Always asking silly questions, Isaac. You'd better worry about useful things.” Mrs Newton kissed her son on the forehead, blew out the candle and left her son's room. Isaac looked at the full moon through his window and said to himself that maybe he wasn't asking silly questions.
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