Choices

No need to tell me your sad story. I know how your world worked with Angela. Upside down. Crisscross. Days and memories folding over one another until you couldn’t tell up from down.
Sometimes she was the woman you couldn’t wait to see, other times, angry times, you ran from her, faster than the wind. Even after your children disappeared you found reasons to stay.

No crying on my knee. No bunching my skirts and wailing about Angela locked behind bars. She made her choices, you made yours.

At one time my choice was you.

Samuel’s Collection

O.K. Here’s story number one – or the story my husband thought too grisly. Thanks to anyone interested in reading.

Samuel had never collected hats because he’d never thought of it before. Rather disgusting in the end. All the hairs caught in the wool: red, blonde, black, gray.
And tiny flecks of skin.

Red-haired Anya, the seamstress. Blonde-maned Margo, the butcher’s wife. Old man Peterson, hair black as coal and his brother Thomas, gray-headed and scaley.

It wasn’t the fact that they were all dead now, it was how they died, shoved into a pit and shot, one-by-one. Samuel remembers how they lay bleeding in the snow. The only unstained clothing? Their woolen caps, now stacked neatly in his closet.

An InLinkz Link-up

https://static.inlinkz.com/cs2.js

Lottery

Today Pegman took us to Norfolk Island. An interesting place full of intriguing history.

Just last eve Aengus, Mich, Enda and me drew lottery straws. Mich drew the shortest. Me and Enda the long. That left Aengus the murdering lad. Mich the lad to die. We other two will witness all and be more than glad to tell.

If you’re nay here on Norfolk Island where Satan rules with a floggin whip and the fields be strewn with blood, you’ll think we friends have turned our backs against the lads we love.

But if you knew we four and the place we are from
you’d recognize the bond we share
through Father Maguire who preaches suicide as sin

But now we’re left to fixin things the very best we can

Mich’ll be freed by Aengus’s blade. Aengus freed by the rope. With any luck Enda and me will escape this wretched island of death with truths to tell back home.

The ‘Lottery’ explained by an entry in an Irishman’s Diary
The extent of the horror experienced on Norfolk Island between 1824 to 1847 led to what was known as “the Norfolk lottery.” Irish convicts feared that suicide, being an unforgivable sin, would send them to eternal hell.To get around the dilemma they devised a plan where four convicts drew straws: one would be murdered, one would be the murderer and two would act as witnesses at the trial to ensure a conviction.The victim would escape life without fear of going to hell, the murderer would be executed, escape a miserable life and the fear of going to hell, and the witnesses would testify at a trial in either Sydney or Hobart. Just getting off the island was a holiday for them and would possibly present an opportunity to escape.

What Sargent Filster Saw

His garage was full of boxes jammed to the flaps with a truly odd assortment of, well, rubbish.
Clear glass jars of toenail clippings, dust bunnies, cookie crumbs.
Matchboxes from around the world.Cocktail umbrellas. Plastic hula dancers.
Desiccated mice feet inside cardboard tubes.
Owl claws strung on leather shoestrings.
And rubber bands so old they crumbled when touched.
The thing that creeped me out the most?
A box of stuffed birds, moth-eaten and moldy, with bright yellow beaks
just like the one he sent to Mikey Short
with a note that read,
“Sing like a bird and you’re dead.”

(99-words)

An InLinkz Link-up

https://static.inlinkz.com/cs2.js

Detective’s Notes

This 150 word piece is for What Pegman Saw – in Dubrovnik.

Let’s say Tanya and Stewart had an affair.
Met at the bottom of the stairs
to grope one another in the dark.
Her whispering, “But my husband!” like a mantra
even as her clothes dropped on the cobblestones.

Scratch that. Stewart was a painter, Tanya his student.
They despised one another.
Still, they shared ideas about color and texture and the effects of wine.
And, after too much wine, they…?
You decide.

Or perhaps they were siblings –
they certainly looked alike –
with a deliriously dark secret
about what their father did at night.
Tanya’s room? Stewart’s? Both?
And that twisted them until they had no one but each other?
Alas, there are no definite answers to these questions, either.

What do we know?
At 5 a.m. both were found dead beneath the paintings.
Clothes flung across the cobblestones –
wine sloshed between them –
holding hands and smiling.
No signs of a struggle.

Beatin’ Feet

“Beat feet, beat feet, get outta’ town.” J.L. taps his fingers to the rhythm in his head.
Blinding headlights – coming and going. Lost his glasses in the fight.
Damn Loretta. Gotten herself pregnant. Swore J.L.’s the father. Freakin’ liar that Loretta.

Sirens. One foot on the gas. Other on the brake. “Beat feet.”
Swerve ’round the truck. Squeal between V.W. and S.U.V.
Over the center line. Back. Man his head hurt where she’d hit him.
Fixed her for that. Oh yeah.

“Beatin’ feet.” Wham! Screeching metal. Exploding glass.
Loretta flies through the windshield.
No worries, she’d been dead long before J.L. got outta’ town.

An InLinkz Link-up

//static.inlinkz.com/cs2.js?v=116