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Pirate MoonA bloody moon rose, hungry, through the mist
to wash his crimson glow across the waves
and froth the surging whitecaps with the kiss
that sent ten thousand sailors to their graves.

Beneath that vicious moon, a sail was set –
as was the fate of some poor, hapless crew
oblivious to the impending threat
that drifted ever closer through the blue.

The moon smiled sweetly, bathing naked steel,
as cannon shuddered through the velvet night
to rend the sodden trader, hull and keel
and put an end to her frenetic flight.

The captain's grin shone redder than his sword
As he o'ersaw the booty brought aboard.

Waking from the DeadIt was like waking from a nightmare, an endless dream of fire and blood. Two miles of guns flashed behind my eyelids, six score horses screamed and reared, and men ran. The musket ball ripped through my belly again and again, and another split Jarosław’s head like an over-ripe melon. There was night, many nights, and there were miles and thorns and rocks and the slow easiness that heralded my death.
That was when the pain came, drowning me, searing me, consuming me. There were dreams at first, as though the battle had never ended, but as the pain grew, it blotted out all else, and I had at least a little peace of mind while my body was being torn asunder. There were voices as well, swelling and ebbing wordlessly beneath the roaring in my ears. I heard my brothers, daughters, wife, whispering amidst the death cries of soldiers and students, a low murmur like the echoes in a hallway in a place I had once known, and a few I could not recognize, speaking soft and low as thoug

The Siren - 12"Good morning, San Antonio."

It was like no voice Sandie had ever heard before, bizarrely tonal, as though the speaker could not decide whether he was talking or singing. The sounds came slowly, laboriously, elongated by effort and intense concentration.

She rolled over to find the creature standing in the doorway. The voices of morning newscasters drifted up the stairs and down the hall, but those voices were generic and familiar, drained of dialect and character, just like the voice of every other newscaster in America. The one that had woken her was different.

"Lane closures down San Pedro between the Anderson Loop and Sandau Road will

Cassandra - Prologue and Part 1Even in death, Cassandra was lovely.
Her hair cascaded over her ivory shoulders in sable cataracts, pooling in the soft hollow between her breast and throat. She was wearing the white nightgown, the one she knew I loved, and the fall had thrown it up, weightless, in gossamer drifts across her legs. Her bare toes were painted salmon-pink, the same colour as the roses in the crystal vase by the door.
So elegant, my Cassandra. I might have expected that she would sprawl, as one imagines that people do when they have died suddenly, but her body refused to surrender its accustomed grace. One hand curled beside her face; the other lay, palm up, across her cocked hips, its open fingers tenderly beckoning. Her eyes were closed, peaceful, the fringe of dark lashes sooty and familiar upon her fading cheek. Her lips were parted in expectation. At any moment, she would wake, look up at me, smile. Cassandra.
My hand found the banister, gripped the aged wood and guided me down the stairs

Fortunato's Prayer

Lure me in with silk and gold,
beaded velvet, satin threads
drawn across lips still red with wine.

Draw me down beneath the world
into some secret, wanton lair
while Carnival still beats within our veins.

Wall me up behind the dark
and leave me with my silver chains
to think on wiles byzantine,

Montresor's bleak design.

The Siren - 11Connie gnawed pieces out of the end of a ballpoint pen while Sandie tried to explain the situation.

"I mean, I just don't know what to do with him. He seems to have a thing for music, so I figure if he can figure out that guitar, I could maybe set him up with playing it somewhere, but I just can't afford to support a... someone else..."

"So it's a him, now?" Connie interjected, spitting a bit of plastic delicately into her hand. She shoved lavender fingernails through her mohawk and flipped the mass of blue-black hair to the other side of her head, making her earrings jingle.

Sandie made a face. "Well, once I tagged him with 'John Doe,' he

The Siren - 13A half-step behind Sandie, Mike heard it, too.
And it was mind-blowing. It sounded like angels, he thought, but he knew better than that. There was a far more down-to-earth explanation sitting on the couch – or at least, a more tangible one, he corrected himself. There were goosebumps on his arms and a shiver deep inside his spine, a sense of something not quite right. Still, he let himself stop in the doorway to listen, and for a moment, just a moment, he let himself fly.
Then the sound stopped, and that thing was standing at the end of the hall, its bald head cocked to one side, staring at them through impassive black eyes. The elation began to ebb, and Mike shook himself, entertaining a sneaking suspicion that John Doe was sucking up his happiness like a sponge. That was fair enough, he supposed; it was not really his in the first place.
“Shit,” Sandie whispered with a kind of dazed reverence.
Mike looked over to see tears in her eyes. She wiped them away hastil

The Siren - 2In the dream, Sandie was weightless. She had dreamed that sort of thing before, though, and understood that it would not last. When she dreamed that she was floating, it was only a matter of time before she dreamed that she fell.

It was an odd sensation, floating there in the dream. She could hear the world – cars and a dog and the rumble of a jet passing overhead – but there was nothing to see. She tried to raise her hand in front of her face, but she had no hand, either.

I'm a Presence, she decided. A Presence floating in space. That was comforting, because a Presence could not fall. She listened to the sound of the highway.

da

The Siren - 16The smile had surprised him, but Mike got over it. He was starting to get an inkling of something, something that would explain a lot. He hesitated to think too hard on it, though; it is a capital mistake to theorize without data.
He looked around. Connie had found herself a drink somewhere and was chatting up the nongendered beatnik, who had ditched the fake glasses and picked up a small fedora. Sandie and the Nacho person had moved off to talk business with a woman whose shirt urged readers to “Eat At Mag’s.” A low murmur had sprung up in the Zone, but still, everyone remained mostly seated. It looked as though no one could work out an appropriate reaction to what they had just heard.
John, meanwhile, had been forgotten. He stood still on the dais, bathed in a halo of dull, yellow light, the microphone still dangling from his fingers. No one had told him to move.
This time, Mike could see the confusion on the creature’s face, even though it was little more

The Siren - 9The creature slumped in a corner of the kitchen. Sandie had told it to sit, and it could not seem to distinguish any practical difference between sitting in a chair and sitting on the floor, so it sat on the floor.

Mike kept an eye on it while Sandie paced. Somehow, it seemed even creepier now that he knew it was both a dead body and a vaguely person-shaped amp. Dead things should not be that loud.

"Okay," Sandie was saying – very loudly, since two thirds of those present were still half-deaf. "Okay, weird is not necessarily bad, but within limits, you know? That was bad. No, trust me. Attracting attention for being weird is a recipe f

The Siren - 15Connie hooked one arm around Mike’s shoulders. If it had been anyone else, he would have had to object, but Connie was the sort to brook no objection. Her mohawk was gelled upright for the occasion, stained red and saturated with glitter to complement her sparkling nose ring, brow rings, and two dozen earrings. Her blue leather jacket creaked and crackled against the black leather sofa. Her fingernails were the same red as her hair, and they tapped out a pattern on Mike’s shoulder.
Mike put up with it. He had ironed his pants and his shirt and polished his shoes, but that was about it. His pasty face and blonde hair showed up in the low, yellow light, but the rest of him vanished into the couch. He edged an inch or two away from Connie, partly because San Antonio was not big enough to ensure that he would not run into a parishioner and partly because the spikes on her belt were digging into his hip.
“Ow,” he said.
“Oh, man up,” Connie returned.

The Siren - 7The thing sat still and silent on Sandie's couch, swathed in the oversized black shirt and faded jeans of some long-ago boyfriend. Its white hands rested, motionless, on Its denim-clad thighs while Its expressionless eyes stared through the wall into nothing. It had not moved in more than half an hour, not even to breathe – which only made sense, Sandie thought, since It had been dead and rotting the last time she had seen It.

On the other hand, it was hard to be sure that this visitor was the same one that had shattered her window. The faces were so different, and this one was not dripping, but the voice in her head was the same. It fe

The Siren - 6The rest of the night was quiet, and so was Sandie's morning. If the alarm went off, she never heard it, and she slept hard until nearly ten, when her phone rang.

"I think it's gone," she told Connie. "I mean, I don't want to jinx anything with optimism, but at least it's gone on vacation."

She drank her coffee black and supervised the installation of a new door. She picked up the phone to call Mike, but remembered belatedly that he had a noon Mass, and set it down again to wait until later.

Local news entertained her until the thump came from the new door.

A person's silhouette was visible through the frosted glass, standing still and da

The Siren - 4Mike brought a pizza for lunch, and the crew piled into the back of his minivan to enjoy it. He disconnected the battery to keep the interior lights from eating up the juice and opened all of the doors to invite a breeze. Even so, the sun turned his car into an oven. At least the pizza was hot.

The sign on the Baptist church down the street flashed: "Pray for Rain."

"You feeling okay?" Mike asked. He had on a red plaid shirt that almost managed to hide the pizza-sauce stains. His collar was curled up in the cup holder in the front seat.

"Better," Sandie said. She bit off a string of cheese and helped herself to an orange soda from the cool

The Siren - 5All Sandie learned from her very expensive blood tests was that there was no reason for her to have paid for very expensive blood tests. She did not have leprosy, or hepatitis, or any of a number of different anemias. The news was a comfort, but the check was not.

Sandie bought a book of stamps and sent a stack of poems away to the offices of Lead Soldiers, thinking that a small royalty would at least begin to fill the dent that a new door and a medical bill had left in her bank account.

"Maybe you could take up a special collection for me," she told Mike as she got him a glass of water – root beer was an unnecessary expense.

"Meh," h

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FreedomsYou have the right
to tell me what I ought to think
how I should believe
what I should accept
and what I must despise.
You have the right
to tell me who I ought to be.

I have the right to ignore you.

Letters from Aunt Bernardine - 1 17 January, 1932

Dear J and V~

Sorry for not writing sooner, but there was a spot of trouble regarding passports, and you know how that goes. It's sorted now, so Gran and I should be back in town for Easter. Of course, that assumes that we can catch the train, which isn't always a certainty in these parts. I'm hopeful, though Gran is less so. You know how she is. 'Remember poor Aunt Ermentrude,' and all that. If not the train, there'll be a boat. All we have to do is go south to reach parts swarming with English, assuming the mountains don't kill us, and Gran's whinging doesn't kill me. Naturally,

The Siren - 10Sandie made an effort to swallow her shock before Brandon could see. Connie was not as subtle.

"Holy crap," said Connie.

"Holy crap," said John Doe.

"What kind of problems are we talking about?" said Brandon, backing a step away.

"What kind of problems are we talking about?" said John Doe, recoiling from the sudden rush of mistrust.

Please, please stop, Sandie begged silently. The thing met her gaze expressionlessly and set the napkin down on the table. It touched one white forefinger to the sugar shaker, and Sandie could feel a question rising in the mind behind those flat, black eyes.

Later, she whispered. Not now, later. Please, just

In the mist by the sea

There is nothing like waking up to a mist-cloaked ocean and the sound of the rising tide against the jetties. Coffee in the gloaming, hot oatmeal, the first rays of sun breaking through the fog. My chest and arms are burnt from yesterday, my hair is wet with the sea mist, and my soul is refreshed. I believe that I can finish the course, now.

And then the sun rises, and the mist catches fire. The gulls wake, and somewhere beyond the dunes, an eagle calls - beneath it all, the buoy bells.

The sea is life, living and moving, breathing, longing. It's the scent, sounds, the feel of the salt in my lungs and the breeze on my skin. This is where th

Profile SkeletonName: (Self explanatory, but can do with elaboration. Meaning of name, appropriateness, background, connotation. Also includes nicknames, titles, etc.)

Race: (Varies depending on genre. I use this for species, as well as a brief species description for fantasy worlds, but also for census-race in real-world stuff.)

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Disturbing the Peace

by =QuiEstInLiteris, May 24, 2012, 7:06:30 PM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / Humor / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

Women in corsets
disturb the peace.

Disturbing the Peaceby =QuiEstInLiteris

Literature / Prose / Fiction / Humor / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

Six-word-story.

I've noticed that people stare more at a woman clothed throat-to-heels than at a woman with nipples showing. I find that curious.

EDIT: Changed 'crinolines' to 'corsets.' Apparently, 'crinoline' is somewhat interest-specific jargon. >>;

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*TheSaneInInsanity May 12, 2013 New member Hobbyist General Artist

Hallooo ^^ I can see that you have corset art ^^ Maybe you would be interested to join my corset contest with prizes? [link]

~Writer84 Jun 3, 2012 Hobbyist Photographer

Too true a woman in a corset is stunning

=QuiEstInLiteris Jun 4, 2012 Professional Writer

I do like the silhouette produced by a properly-fitting corset. There's a refinement there largely abandoned by modern fashion.

~Writer84 Jun 4, 2012 Hobbyist Photographer

Indeed I agree entirely

~Jay-niisouleater May 30, 2012

LOLS

=QuiEstInLiteris Jun 4, 2012 Professional Writer

~Jay-niisouleater Jun 4, 2012

it's true though

*callerofcrows May 30, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Ah, the power of suggestion. Maybe this is a bit of a crude analogy, but aren't presents more exciting before you unwrap them? I guess it's the same theory here. Mystery carries its own sensuality.

=QuiEstInLiteris Jun 4, 2012 Professional Writer

xD Suggestive analogy, I suppose. It's true, though. Once you know what it is, it just finds its way onto a shelf to be looked at occasionally but never played with.

*callerofcrows Jun 4, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Bahahaha, yup.

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