Fiction – Page 4 – What's Your Real

The Next Tick

Part II of The White Roe The curve of her cheek split between panes. She stared past her broken face to the nightworld beyond and its seizure of skeleton trees. They wanted solidity against the black sky and its skirling windhounds who chased anything mad enough to grow beyond the castle and its harbor of…
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The Prophet Before

Was it rebellion, if allowed? Defiance, if ordained? Sin, if redeemed? God was alone in His knowledge. He carved the spheres of the universe and deserved something all Himself. While he birthed all manner of creatures, his true child was Conscience. He hid the child in the fruit of paradise and adored their fatal…
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The White Roe

Alone we conjure companye To stay with us the waning hour; Is not God highest figment of Man’s first solitude? The hunter inspected the parting of the grass. The wind blew through it a song of betrayal that turned his head toward the juniper thicket and would end in a wail and a thump. Sup…
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Suckling Hunger

Tabitha and her man lived down the ashen road in a hut of mud brick and thatch roof that cracked with cicadas on summer nights and sounded the whole house of fire. Tabitha listened and wanted her own children to teem the hut. She had a son by her man Olin. It was a start.…
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Sibling Minds

He surrounded me voice and touch like a summer night. His breaths fogged my lips in a wintergreen cloud, a stinging pallor that carried sweet sayings like barbacoa on the Christmas-black dawn. Rich, dark and shining, Zofloya lived to his name, towering and strange, smelling—how could he not?—of peat, honey, chocolate, leather, truffle, mink, cedar, char. His…
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Set Sun

Life is an acquisition of lessons. Take your slingshot, hunt them like waterfowl, and string them up to fry in the sun. The truth will simmer up a sweet, charring black. But the best lessons are the ones that hunt you—splitting bulrushes noiselessly, seizing you by the scruff, and dashing you on the rocks. Those lessons…
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Outbound

Part II of Round and Round The highway strip softens as you ride past. The grass lengthens and shines like bulrushes in the light and you realize it’s sunny. You haven’t noticed all this time because the radio tuned your sight to other things you can’t recall now that you’ve been jolted. But laying back…
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Aboard

Won’t you get on the bus? He holds the door open for you. You should thank him by accepting the invitation. You shouldn’t trust him. But you don’t take enough risks. Which one is it, mother? No one tells you what to do so you grin back like a dog. You ask, you’re nervous. She…
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Phoenix Creed

Thus saith the LORD…The brush grated her eyelids. Silver in the eye crease and under the brow. Scarlet on the lid, sweeping a horizontal teardrop to her temple. Behold, I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood…
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Michaelangelo

If you saw me down the street, you could think I was a punk. I’m nothing special or anything. Not a looker. Only thing you might notice is my forehead. People stare at it, and that’s okay. Long as they don’t pay it more mind than my work, I’m not too particular. Just making my…
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Category: Fiction