Anonymous

It doesn’t take me much. A hair flick, the way he raises his eyebrow, quizzically or mischievously and suddenly I’m there. I’m ready to go. He knows this about me, about his ability to turn me on. He wears white ribbed tank tops with a small notch cut just right in the center and will reveal the secret to me when I least expect it. That tank top with the little notch cut out, making it incredibly easy for me to rip off his body, becomes all I can see. He knows the power he wields over me at any given moment.

That’s why I’ve agreed to this game of his. He wants to see how far he can push me until I yield and give in. We’re at a party, and he’s watching me from a distance, wondering just when I’ll succumb to my need to ravage him. I’m sure it’s driving him mad, that I’m not driven mad at that very moment. He’s probably thumbing the little remote control in his pocket madly trying to adjust the speed on the mechanism that’s between my legs. It would probably be thrumming with maddening pressure, forcing me to demure from the conversation I’m currently having with a striking blond girl, and find him across the room. I know he wants me to beg him to take me back to our hotel room and finish what the night has started. I feel his eyes on me as I continue to flirt with the blond in front of me allowing her to put her hand on my knee, returning the gesture. He thinks he has me. We wants to have me. I can feel that need from him, that confusion. I should be his by now. That’s why we’re doing this, why he wants to do this, why he’s doing this to me. But what he doesn’t know is that earlier I took the batteries out. The power is mine now. So is he.

Julia Staley

Julia Staley's blog is having some difficulties, and she didn't want to leave her partner hanging, so we're posting her response here!

Charts and optimal dates and preferential temperatures. One line or two.

As if she could summon whatever it is that makes up the human soul as easily as she could a cab on a busy New York avenue.

Why can’t he see it? Her shoes slipped in the early slush.  I’m no lab result.

He had tried to tell her:

“The human heart is as unfamiliar to me as the new life forms I study.”

Hive minds, queen bees and honey.  She knew he preferred that to talks of love anyday.

She was just his assistant, transparent as a beaker.

~*~

In celebration of their 1-year anniversary, Trifecta Writing Challenge is teaming up with Velvet Verbosity this week.

So the prompt for the anniversary challenge was:

"Charts and optimal dates and preferential temperatures. One line or two.  As if she could summon whatever it is that makes up the human soul as easily as she could a cab on a busy New York avenue."

I'll be honest, I was really off-put when I read that.  I had no idea what to do with it, and it wasn't my usual writing style.    I immediately had to Google "preferential temperatures" because I needed to know what sort of a person might be talking about that.  Well, my results gave me articles about insects.  The rest followed.

My partner in the challenge is Natalie Amatera... her part will follow,and I will add a link once it is complete! (And probably just post a complete version here because that way it will flow.)

This was a lot of fun.

Behold, a Revenant Revelation

--C.D. Tolliver



Zora,


Once a


Maiden was


Buried alive, though thought


In


Extremis. She


Awoke


Perplexed. And came


Out of the


Crypt, confused, barely


Ambulatory, where she had


Lain twenty


Years,


Paralyzed,


Sleeping. The


End

Stay Dead!

NO! Not again!

Those fools, playing with nature.
The dead are supposed to stay dead!
This poor woman, mindless and naked.
She never knew what she was getting into.
Just let them die!

--By Swirls

Something Wicked

Reluctantly, Elle had agreed to go to this new club. Sydney had been begging for weeks, but it wasn't really Elle's scene. She was more into pencil skirts, stockings and 5 inch heels. But Sydney always came out with Elle to her clubs, so it was time to grunge it up a bit, break out the fishnets and smudge the eyeliner.

There was a slight line outside when they arrived, obviously Goth inspired, just up Sydney's alley. At the office, Sydney dressed like everyone else, just a bit heavier on the eyeliner and mascara. But after hours, she let loose and played by her own rules. Elle looked up to Sydney for her sense of freedom and not letting anyone tell her what to do. Yet as Sydney was fearless, Elle was disciplined and together, they made a good team.

They shuffled through the line and finally made it to the entrance. The bouncer at the door checked their IDs and scowled them through. After stopping to pay the cover charge, at an old fashioned ticket booth to a man with a studded collar, they were finally in.

They took a few steps and felt a slight dip in the floor. At the same time, a cloud of smoke, almost like fog, engulfed them in it's mist. Sputtering and coughing, they stumbled through to collapse into a couple of chairs by the bar. When they caught their breath, Elle looked at Sydney and saw she was covered in a fine glitter. "Am I covered in glitter too?" Elle asked. "Yeah!", Sydney giggled.

Elle looked out around the club and saw a girl she was standing in line behind, who was also covered in the strange glitter. Only, she didn't look quite right. Her face looked distorted and sinister. Looking around, she saw that everyone was starting to look like that. Elle turned to ask Sydney, only to find the same look on her too. What was this place?

Famous Fears and False Phobias

--C.D. Tolliver

Sinister sinusoidal slitherers:

Odious ophidiophobia.

Barking baleful beasts:

Syncopated cynophobia.

Mewling maniacal menaces:

Awful ailurophobia.

Fiendish finny phantasms:

Icky ichthyphobia.

Scorpizophobia:

Scary scatterings or scorpions?

Platypodophobia:

Fatal philosophical flat-footedness?

Pantophobia:

Dangerous denim dungarees?

Stranger in the Attic (The Piano Man)

--C.D. Tolliver

The piano sat, undusted, in the corner of the room. Everything else was meticulously spotless. There was something dark in the mahogany – a vague feeling of unease that deflected the casual viewer and terrified the cleaning staff.

Tammy stared at it. There was a black man in the wood, surrounded by shadow dressed in the darkness of night. Light fled his presence. Tammy was 3 years old. She had watched as her parents burned to death in their car after the accident, helpless. She wasn’t afraid of anything except white-tailed deer on the road on rainy nights – and Sponge Bob, of course.

It was a bright day and Tammy was mesmerized by the black figure, cloaked in dread, staring at her from the wood through the film, with dust bunnies at his feet. He looked, she decided, like a combination of Wally Cox and Jim Parsons, only taller, with ebony hair and anthracite skin, and eyes like raccoons when a car’s lights hit them at night, bright and red.

“You’re not my imaginary friend,” she said with certainty. After all, the black man wasn’t pale blue, and he didn’t have fangs so much as rows of slate shark teeth. “I’ll get a rag.” She left the room and came back with furniture polish and an old t-shirt. She carefully dusted the piano so she could see him, but not a millimeter more, because she wasn’t a servant. “That’s better,” she said. “Do you hunt deer?”

The black man flowed out of the piano like a genie and stared at her. “Generally, I eat maids,” he admitted with a smile, which would have been disturbing to Tammy’s parents, if they still lived.

“I think you are a good demon, like Socrates’, not a bad ghost," Tammy replied. Three is such an awkward age to know things. “Will you be my friend and bring me the heads of the deer that killed Mommy and Daddy?” “Of course, I will. We’re going to be good friends.”