101 Words

The stage lights went dark. The screams from the audience were deafening. The spotlight fell on center stage. And there he is. He is so beautiful.

His white t-shirt hugged his muscles perfectly. He gripped the microphone and his velvety smooth voice filled the sold out arena. It’s insane what that voice does to me.

It feels like he’s singing only to me. His alluring brown eyes search the crowd. I wish it were me that he’s looking for.

Just this once. I need to feel him next to me just once.

I just have to follow through with the plan…

He had beaten her with his belt today; then slapped and kicked her till she had almost stopped breathing.

She’d had enough; today, she planned to run away.

He was in the other room, drinking and cursing. Scrambling to the open window, Radha got out.

Then—she ran.

Bare feet hitting the cold tarmac.

Suddenly, her cotton saree caught in her feet. She stumbled, her head hitting the sidewalk.

She couldn’t move!

Then, light as air, she got up. Glancing back at her body, sprawled across the sidewalk, she smiled.

She was free at last, he could never hurt her now!

There are two immortal cow sharks, and they live in the Mediterranean. They’ve been there 150 million years. They don’t care about the cold, the bodies. When the dinosaurs clawed, with futility, against the longevity of mammals and took to the skies, the cow sharks immigrated lower to the chill. Feathers and fur drifted down.

When boats of people are pulled deep—marked by others too late, too far, too African, too Arabic, too new—the cow sharks don’t care and welcome them. The cow sharks are after all scavengers. The cow sharks are older. They don’t worry about drifting bones.

She smiled.

They lay upon plastic chairs, bodies mangled, blood spilled on tiled floor. Fresh copper perfumed still air.

She could reset their minds to before. No one’d have to know.

A shotgun lay in her bony grasp. Warm metal soothed her spirit, still raging and glad.

She contemplated her options, to let them stay and suffer, or die mercifully.

The room returned to its former state. All came to came to life, none the wiser, bearing heavy anguish. She soon departed from their sight.

Until next time, they could stay.

Amaze, and suffer. That was good enough.

She smiled again.

A circus clown for thirty-seven years, Farcus was having a bit of an identity crisis. He felt like a two-bit entertainer from a generation gone by. Barely making minimum wage for pandering candy and sculpting balloon animals, he was looking for a change, a career shake-up. Clowns had taken a bad rap ever since King’s novel, It. Farcus thought I’m not a bad guy, why don’t people like me? So, when he saw the ’72 mint banana-yellow Dodge Charger parked in the Walgreens lot, he couldn’t resist. A coat hanger and screwdriver later had Spunkles the Clown working the Hurst shifter.