A moment in time and a story told by a grandmother to her granddaughter that highlights the heightened feelings of first love and her discovery of the true meaning of Christmas.
TWO LETTERS FROM DEAD WOMEN… A CAMERA FROM A DEAD MAN…
That’s all Robert Sterling, a once renowned photojournalist, had to help him redeem and resurrect his life from two years lost in a drunken downward spiral. Was the young girl he could only see through the old camera his mother had left him a ghost haunting him from a past he had spent decades burying? Did she exist, or was he going crazy just as his mother had forty years ago? He had to return to the small town he’d left nearly four decades ago to find out. Back to where he found and lost his first love. Where when he was 18 years old, someone tried to kill him for what he’d done.
The Querency—beginning at midnight on 24 October—is when Witches and Cats seek to bond with each other. It lasts until sundown on Hallowe’en, when the Choosing—the selection period—begins and lasts until midnight [11:59:59pm]. ~Ordinatio pro Felis Silvestris Catus [Regulations for Woodland Cats]
One day I came across a photo of a decaying building sitting on a cliff over a sea, and, struck by it, wondered: ‘What’s its story?’ Read what it told me.
“We stopped checking for monsters under our bed when we realized they were inside us.” –Charles Darwin
It is a land of ancient city-states, morto e sepolto… the dead and gone. Remnants of forgotten and abandoned houses and estates sprinkle the countryside. Once thriving and vital, now no one lives in them, and the keening of the winds through the ruins is their only sound. Even in towns and cities that live, in almost all, there is a legend sometimes distorted far from its origin of a casa stregata… a haunted house. Some are deathly still, lonely cenotaphs, mere empty markers of a tragic past. Others contain souls that sleep awhile and awake… hungry.
What if you could give someone you love one more hour of life? The passion of love bursting into flame is more powerful than death, stronger than the grave.
The Querency—beginning at midnight 24 October—is when Witches and Cats seek to bond with each other. It lasts until sundown on Hallowe’en, when the Choosing—the selection period—begins and lasts until midnight [11:59:59pm].
~ Ordinatio pro Felis Silvestris Catus [Regulations for Woodland Cats]
I had a note in my story-idea book for some time about a revenge killing at the height of a hurricane. It seemed a perfect way to cover up a crime. One hurricane-season morning, while enjoying my coffee and watching hurricane news (I live in Florida), I toyed with the thread of a few lines for that story as the caffeine kicked in. As I scanned my images folder, I came across one (a text image) that gave me the title and the core of the story’s protagonist. It fleshed out my premise… you can push a person too far, and then the 6th commandment (or other laws) may not keep them from doing what they must to survive. And what better time to do something so drastic than when you stand a good chance of getting away with it.
The dead woman’s head rested on sheet music and a keyboard. Someone had arranged her long hair and swept it back from her face. The flower over her left ear… maybe was already there. The open eyes were sea green. When she was alive, they had depth and probably changed shade with shifting sunlight. Now, they were shallows, as still as shoal water over coastal muck. Her face… smooth, unlined. Not a hint of a life lived badly… but one that seemed hardly lived at all. “She wanted to sin, but she was too shy.”