Ghost Stories: Archive

Plotting

Plotting for a short story/novella featuring a transgendered librarian wizard and female warrior sidekick. Because it’s Sunday and I feel like it.

Mar 3rd

1 tag

Feb 18th

Charbroiled

Red thin discs go in one end, come out as sizzling grey globs of fat and protein only remotely qualified to be called hamburger. They smell of natural gas, they taste like the gristle left between the gums a week after eating a steak. It’s nothing processed cheese and big squirts of condiments can’t fix. Come on, fat America, eat your surgically repaired heart out. [[MORE]] Otis’ job was to...

Jan 12th

Longlea

Congressman Harold Dalton stood before the great, long estate, hat in hand, and, for the first time since he was a boy, felt nervous. The estate sat on top of long, rolling green hills in Virginia, on a parcel undisturbed for a thousand acres. The House itself rose from the verdant ground with pink stone facing and tall windows, with whimsical, and expensive, touches that suggested great love...

Oct 28th

Suggestions

“I thought we were going out tonight.” His voice was flat, but Charlotte knew what lay behind it. She looked down at the floral party dress she wore. “You don’t like this?” “No, it’s fine.” He was looking at his phone. “I can go change.” “I said it was fine.” His eye moved to the door without giving her a second look. ”We should go.” “Oscar.” She stepped toward him, feeling wobbly in her heels....

Oct 14th

1 note

This blog rarely updates, so please visit my other blog, a collage of music, clothes, food, and other things that I like.

Apr 16th

2 tags

Echo - work in progress

Neil sat down heavily on his padded computer throne, a massive chair that allowed him total comfort for the numerous hours he would spend at his desk. He took a gulp from the sugary, over-caffeinated drink, and waited for the rush to hit him. It would a long night, just the capstone on a series of them that had him preparing for his biggest caper ever. The National Intelligence Net/System. ...

Dec 24th

CARRY ME HOME - PART 5: CLOSURE

CARRY ME HOME PART 1: OPENING PART 2: HARPER PART 3: DEION PART 4: ANDRE Harper got her life together, somehow. It wasn’t easy, but she eventually found herself as a writer for a news website. She was paid to write 10 stories a day, and was allowed to leave when she completed the quota. Some days it took all day, and others she could be out by noon. Slowly, her life began to be pieced back...

Dec 22nd

CARRY ME HOME - PART 4: ANDRE

CARRY ME HOME PART 1: OPENING PART 2: HARPER PART 3: DEION Harper packed up her car the morning of graduation. We three partied, Deion, Harper, and I, all night never wanting to end. The morning after, she left. I don’t know all the places she visited, but she stopped in New York, the farthest place she could stand away from our hometown. She got a job a waitress at some shitty blues bar and...

Dec 21st

2 tags

CARRY ME HOME - PART 3: DEION

CARRY ME HOME PART 1: OPENING PART 2: HARPER Deion joined the Army the day after September 11th. He went down to the recruiting office, despite the pleas of his mother and Harper, and signed on the dotted line. The damn fool didn’t even have the sense to ask for a relative safe assignment like computer tech. After basic and advanced training, he was shipped off to Iraq. A week later his mom was...

Dec 20th

2 tags

CARRY ME HOME - PART 2: HARPER

CARRY ME HOME PART 1: OPENING Harper packed up her car the morning of graduation. The morning after she left. By the end of the summer she had seen nearly everything she thought she could see in America, and headed for New York to settle down. She had in her mind a thought of becoming an artist, or maybe an actress. That was what was great about New York, she had convinced herself, that...

Dec 19th

2 tags

CARRY ME HOME - PART 1: OPENING

CARRY ME HOME It was Harper who came up with the idea. She picked me up the morning of graduation and said, “Let’s get tattoos.” I had never wanted a tattoo, so I just shrugged. She drove to Deion’s and he sat in the back, twirling a cigarette between dark fingers. He didn’t object to a tattoo, so their enthusiasm overruled my concerns. She had already made an appointment for the three of us at...

Dec 19th

2 tags

CARRY ME HOME

HARPER RAN AWAY. DEION JOINED THE ARMY AND GOT LOST IN THE SHIT. AND I STAYED HOME. HARPER WAS ALWAYS LOOKING AROUND CORNERS AND THE SECOND SHE COULD SHE WAS OUT THE DOOR ON TO THE NEXT THING. SHE ALWAYS SAID “YOU NEED TO SEE THE WORLD IF YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER” BUT SHE NEVER WANTED TO BE A WRITER. SHE WANTED TO BE FOUND, I THINK. DEION WAS FULL OF PATRIOTRIC BRAVADO AND HOPES FOR A FREE...

Dec 18th

2 tags

Retribution or Reprieve

Most sane people can’t handle any longterm exposure to submarine life. The isolation, the eerie sounds just beyond the walls that seem to close in as the days and months pass without incident. It’s not like being topside in a normal boat, or in a car, where windows reveal the route. The submarine’s scenic views are computer screens, neon lights against black backgrounds to...

Sep 3rd

1 tag

Face

She peered out into the darkness, looming high above the street. She, the chosen, busty vixen to sell perfume. Or was it a handbag? She didn’t sell it well, except for herself, her sultry look mesmerizing for anyone who looked up. Tomorrow they would paint her over, hang up some other banner. Who would sell themself 10 floors high? Through rain and snow, attacked by birds, beaten down...

Aug 20th

3 tags

A Late Summer Daydream

From her apartment on the Upper West Side Melinda could see the Hudson lapping up harmless against the barriers. The row of brick buildings were shining with a buttery light that made her think of summer. It still was summer, she supposed. The heat was shrinking back into whatever place it hid for the chilly autumns and biting winters. But the view out her window was still summer. In her...

Aug 14th

1 tag

Horizon - Work in Progress

It was always about control. When Jakoba slipped further in the layers of her patients’ subconscious, she could feel herself fill the cracks, make them whole. In a way, it was like the patient was gaining sanity by taking a bit from Jakoba’s. Thousands of tests had been run before the technology had been approved for wider psychological use, but she still had doubts on the safety of...

Aug 6th

To Third

The ball came howling in, and boy, was it really moving, like a bike with no brakes going down Cobb Hill. Roger squeezed the bat, wringed its neck, and tensed up in anticipation of the pitch. He was gonna hit the shit out of it. He felt his shoulder muscles clinch, and then loosen as he unleashed a holy terror on the ball and bam! it was off like rocket into the outfield. He tossed the bat to...

Jul 30th

What was lost ain't worth getting

Sometime between the 8th Street and Bellvue stops, Mary realized she had lost her necklace. A thousand stamping feet had passed by during the stops, and any one of them could have gone off with her necklace, attached to their shoes or crushed to dust. She was beside herself, of course. That thin, looping yellow necklace had been on her neck for the past thirty years, had seen hurricanes and the...

Jul 17th

“You are the acid in my guts. You are the pile of sand behind the curtain of my...”

– Amelia Gray

Jul 15th

2 tags

Hush

The lobby of the hotel was flat and cold, empty because of the late hour. When Nina pulled open the heavy doors from the street, she felt that she was disturbing something private. She shivered, pulled her coat tighter. The lobby felt scarcely warmer than the street, where swirling snow had grown heavier as she had walked her way back to the hotel. She would have taken a cab, had she seen any....

Jul 10th

The Car Battery Chose 5:00 PM to Die

Renault was already late when the car battery turned over and over like a box of TVs tumbling down a staircase, refusing to start. Great, he thought. The parking lot, so full that morning when he had pulled into work, was now completely clear. There was no one he could sneak a hit of electricity from. Standing outside the vehicle now, since the internal temperature of the car felt somewhere north...

Jun 25th

“English is an ocean, full of words that live, change, and die, and that your...”

– John Jeremiah Sullivan

Jun 21st

2 tags

The Champ and the Goat

Top of the ninth, giant men stood on crisp white bags contrasting their grey uniforms. After letting up two singles, and a sacrifice bunt before striking out the next batter, the pitcher Jimmy Yoan took off his stiff new hat, and wiped away the sweat. Cheers thundered from all sides, anxious fans hoping for a little bit more of magic this late September day. Up to the batter’s box stepped one...

Jun 19th

Big Country

Through the towering concrete canyons came a howling wind, the hot dying gasp of summer. Tourists, clutching expensive cameras, lowered their heads as they moved on down the avenue, while the hot dog vendors and beggars and everyone else calmly took the push of air. Wendy pushed her way through, too. She wasn’t a tourist, not really, but she had been away from the city that she could...

Jun 11th

1 tag

Return to Sender: Address Unknown

Darling, I wish you knew. But we’ve been distant for so long, I don’t even know what to say anymore. Not that you haven’t been amazing and more, or that we haven’t given it our all. It’s just, things are different. I’m in New York, doing my “New York things,” as you so disdainfully call them. And you’re in Dallas, the city where we met,...

Jun 5th

2 tags

In the Cereal Aisle

The supermarket was quiet the way overstuffed stores rarely are, except late at night when only the junkies, freaks, and late-shifters shuffle by the shelves. Quentin counted himself as the last part of that category; he had been working the early morning shift at the 24 hour video store (the only one left in the Valley!) for nearly three years. Now all he wanted was some cheap food to take home...

Jun 4th

1 tag

The Year Was Rotting

She leaned back against the thin hotel bed, stockinged legs slightly crossed, and I could see a small white triangle between her legs and underneath her skirt. She looked at me, beckoned me to the bed. Outside a train roared and huffed and blew by, a wolf at night with big bright lights that filled, for a brief moment, the room with a kind of eerie, harsh light. Her ski-slope nose, too big for...

May 29th

4 tags

Achieving Quietus

“I’m sorry, miss,” the waiter said, handing back the bill folder. “But your card has been declined.” Melinda’s stomach compressed instantly down to small point at the base of her spine. Declined? How? A hundred other thoughts sprung instantly to her mind as she numbly took the folder and stared down at its fake black leather covering. Her date, a dumbly...

Feb 15th

2 tags

There is a long thin red piece of string

Allen sat nervously on the hard airport seat, fingers entwining and loosening frantically. His wife, Eleanor, was in the bathroom. To his right sat a mountain of a young black man, who bobbed his head slightly to the little white buds in his ears. The rest of the waiting area was packed. People milled around in small packs, or occasionally by themselves, bags and coats in hands. Allen wanted...

Feb 7th

1 tag

Harper Murray, Beloved Daughter, Dies at 15

GLENDALE, AZ - Harper Murray, a local area teen, was struck and killed by a vehicle while crossing the street near her high school this past Wednesday. She was 15. She was a well regarded student at Clark High School, involved with many clubs, a two sport letter-earner, and straight A student. Her passion was animals, and she hoped to someday be a veterinarian. Friends described her as...

Feb 6th

yes I am doing this now

this is a thing and I am doing it

Feb 6th

1 note

human justin upton is angry click here if he hits a home run into friday’s front grill click here if he hits a home run into friday’s front grill even if not at chase field

Jun 15th