“Rebekah might have sleepwalked or whatever, but she ends up waking up in the middle of the woods, confused on how the hell she’d gotten there. The howls of the wolves in the woods woke her up. She sits up and breathes heavily, as if she had just escaped from someone who almost strangled her to death, or she just came out from the bottom of a river that tried to swallow and suffocate her.She coughed violently, but after that the tension in her breath and the pounding of her heart had reduced. After moments of taking care of herself not to cough out her heart or get a heart attack, she finally noticed the environment. All her efforts of relaxing herself went straight into the bin, because where she found herself gave her more fright than what startled her in her sleep. She looked down at her dress and saw what she was wearing; It didn’t belong to her, neither did she recall any memory of her putting it on. It was a sleeveless overall dress which looked even blacker and darker than a n

i-shirley24Shirley parked her car a few meters from the crime scene and just looked. She knew everyone was waiting for her to throw more light on what had happened; the local police waiting to wrap everything up, the corona was waiting to transport the body for an autopsy, and the press waiting impatiently to get the story or a statement at the very least. The press might have been the reason she got held up in the car, but that wasn’t all. She couldn’t get herself to walk in the building and look at the bloody scene. The angel of death had a habit of making every subsequent murder more unbearable than the previous one. They thought killing a baby was the last line the bastard would, but no, he showed them he had no lines to cross; he did everything and anything he felt like doing.Shirley sighed when she realized she was tearing up. She wiped the edges of her eyes with her thumb.“I’m so sorry --- I’m so sorry…” She repeated; more tears filling up in her eyes.“I’m sorry for the pr

I-Shirley BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA Peter Benedict saw his reflection and marveled at the way his image was chopped up and scrambled by the optics of the glass. The front of the building was a deeply con- cave surface, soaring ten stories over Wilshire Boulevard, almost sucking you in off the sidewalk toward the two-story disk of a lobby. There was an austere slate courtyard, cool and empty except for a Henry Moore bronze, a lobulated and vaguely human conception off to one side. The building glass was flawlessly mirror like, capturing the mood and color of the environs, and this being Beverly Hills, the mood was usually bright and the color a rich sky blue. Because the concavity was so severe, the glass also caught the images from other panes, tossing them like a salad-clouds, buildings, the Moore, pedestrians, and cars jumbled together. It was wonderful. This was his moment. He had reached the pinnacle. He had a scheduled and con- firmed appointment to see Bernie Sch

Michael WillsNancy BridgetMike had a devastating hangover, the kind that felt like aweasel had woken up warm and cozy inside his skullthen panicked at its confinement and tried to scratch and biteits way out through his eyes.The evening had begun benignly enough. On his wayhome he stopped at his local dive, a yeasty smelling cavecalled Dunigan's, and downed a couple of pops on an emptystomach. Next up, the Pantheon Diner, where he grunted atthe heavily stubbled waiter who grunted back at him andwithout exchanging any fully formed phrases brought himthe same dish he ate two to three days a weeklamb kebabsand rice, washed down, of course, with a couple of beers.Then before decamping to his place for the night he paidhis wobbly respects to his friendly package store and pickedup a fresh half gallon of Black Label, pretty much the onlyluxury item to adorn his life.The apartment was small and spartan, and stripped ofJennifer's feminizing touches, a truly bleak uninterest

Confluence.The word had been rattling around his mind, andwhen he was alone it would occasionally roll off his lips andmake him tremble.He had been preoccupied by the confluence, as had hisbrethren, but he was convinced he was more affected thanthe others, a wholly imagined position since one did notopenly discuss such matters.Of course, there had long been an awareness that this sev-enth day would come, but the feelings of portent had dra-matically escalated when in the month of Maius a cometappeared, and now, two months later, its fiery tail persistedin the night sky.Prior Josephus was awake before the bell rang for Lauds.He threw off his rough coverlet, stood and relieved himselfin his chamber pot, then splashed his face with a handfulof cool water from a basin. One chair, one table, and a cotwith a straw pallet on a hard earthen floor. This was his win-dowless cell; his white tunic of undyed wool and his leathersandals were his only earthly possessions.And he w