Brooke Duran

In between the bookshelves of a ghostly library is a dream for some bookworms, while it is a nightmare for others. It was mid-September, and young Alison Greenwood was looking for a new mystery that the library said they now held in their autumn newsletter. She wanted to read it before anyone else did, and to tell her patient boyfriend, Daniel Collinson all about it before he got the chance to read it. She loved the smell of paper. She adored books and reading. Of the many possible uses for a library, that was her favorite. She wasn’t bothered by the creepy, crooked backed, had-to-be-a-witch librarian, Miss Annabel Bertrand, with her long graying black hair, as if it were a new type of smoke, infecting the books, or even that boy that had to be close to her teenage years, playing pointlessly on a computer (with short brown hair and glowing, reflective, green eyes like hers). She enjoyed drawing the comparison of herself between the people that were one or two shelves away from her. Pla...

Christi took a deep breath. Her stomach beneath her brown shirt went in as slowly as her boyfriend making a decision that made sense with his career, their relationship, or anything that would make sense. When humble nature demanded her to finish the breath, her dark eyes darted around, growing in curiosity, searching for something else to do besides drift alone in her frightening thoughts in her locomotive seat that was currently traveling through Colorado. She found nothing beside her except the night lights from nearby towns and cities darting past her small window. She didn’t know why it was this difficult for her now to occupy her time but the strangest of feeling of fear. She was known as the little girl that always had something to do with her time while she was growing up, even if it was just a little game she made up in her head involving silly letters and made-up numbers. Big brown eyes, fizzy muddy hair, and a head full of ideas; that was what she was known for, growing up...

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 ...

Don’t get me wrong. I love it here. Who wouldn’t? It’s quaint. It’s cute. It’s redundant. It’s boring. Everyday, I feel like around a million people have only bright smiles to offer me, mustard instead of ketchup, and the seafoamy shade of green dirtied with the brown. Oh, sure if is perfect. Anyone would dream of living in America’s “good-neighbor city” of Middleton, Wisconsin just not me. I am suspicious of that sunshine of a grin that must be hiding something. I think it is nothing big or notable that we house a Mustard Museum. (Mustard, seriously?) I only notice the dirt when I look at the ground and am, I supposed to be happy about that? I’m no farmer. I’ve always been a runner through anything I could in the small Wisconsin town. Tell me how it’s the #1 small city to live in America. Make me want to run away from it even more. (It is actually the worst town in the universe.) That Middleton mug that you bought for your dad last time you were here, the yellow one lettered by thick...

Margaret Lucinda Brennan was so excited that day, it was difficult to sit still. She always felt like a bee constantly buzzing from wonderful flower, to gorgeous flower. She felt so adult (startlingly) and so childlike at the same time. She was at the beginning, and though she felt forever away from her destination, she felt like she was standing next to it already. It was all very mind-numbing, jubilant, and progressive. She was an adult. She had finally moved out of her hometown of Tazewell, Virginia and was ready for a new adventure. Though the place that she was moving to, artistic Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wasn’t that far from scenic Tazewell, she was ready for this stage of life. She felt like she had been ready for a time close to forever, and now it was finally happening. She felt like she was already jumping up and down like a new born rabbit that had just barely discovered it’s legs as she was sitting next to her mother, Patricia Marina Lassig Brennan in the minivan so old...

As the sun set, the desert wasteland that lie before me glowed a scarlet, eerie sort of red. It was redder than blood. It was more barren than a cavern. It was more desolated, plus lonely, like a haunted graveyard that barely any heavenly angels came from. I think that we all could have found our own comparisons to those deadly ideas, I knew that at least I could have. The scarlet liquid that travels through each and every one of our veins. Yes, it brings us to a beautiful life tense, surely to be enjoyed, but it is hidden, and once each of us cuts our skin open, the red stain on that now lies on our sleeve, if it does anything, it prophesies of death. Why is that? Is it unfamiliarity? Is it mystery?? Lets peer inside ourselves for a closer look. It takes in whole, around 60 seconds for the blood in your body to complete one track. It goes first to your heart to your extremities and then it returns, a simple, unfrightening, there and back again. Blood moves through the body much li...