Brooke Duran

I am far past sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and sufferings, for I am only a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for you to believe that I, who am now but only a shadow, was a hale, hearty man only two years ago, a man of iron, an athlete at his best! Although stranger still than this fact is the way in which I unfortunately lost my health. I lost it through the act of helping to take care of a box of guns on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night. Let me elaborate. I belong in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One lonesome winter's night, two years ago, I reached home just after dark, in an ongoing snow-storm, and the first thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest childhood friend and schoolmate, Enoch J. Heydari, had died the day before, and that his last utterance had been a wish that I would take his remains home to his poor old father and mother in Ohio. I was greatly startled and grieved, but the...

Alora threw open her rundown, scrappy, smelling like it was wood with mold door against the back wall. It was pitiful. Not an ounce of concern was held in her mind for the piece of wood that sure looked, plus smelled like that alone should break it. No concern was held in her mid for much anyone, or anything currently. She was simply happy to be back in her crappy apartment after a long day of work. Sure, the living space was dull and had to be infested by rats, if not something much worse, but at least it held a bed. A falling apart, frayed, dusty bed, but a resting place, nonetheless. She did not want to wash off her smeared with makeup, plus the gross sludge of the day face, so she did not. She left the black lines that were highly defined under her eyes since there was no one to judge her in her dark, dreary-draped apartment, or so it seemed so why should she try? Alora Finamore spent every waking moment of her life trying to impress somebody who was anybody, well, at least when ...