The Deep Ones, they called us. The High Priest of those, they called me—yes, and worshipped me as High Priest of themselves as well. You did. Well, some of your lowly, straggling, mortal kind. All around this tiny, tired rock; in South America, Hawai’i, in Africa, in Greenland, in dull, dank Dunwich, even...
The con had wound down. The fans were all gone back to their mundane lives, leaving the five of us in the con suite. Our host, the Gaming Director, passed around what was left of the free sodas. We drank and stared out the window as darkness gathered in the skies above the hotel...
Max plunged the sensor into the ground, waiting for the battered LED in the hilt to show if the decomp level in the grave made it worth digging up. If it was daylight, and if the cemetery management would cooperate, he or Jerry could have asked, saved themselves the trial and error. If, if...
Continued from Part 1 With SHOWCASE #11, we cut over to the “Crevasse” site design. It seemed like a great idea at the time. The original SHOWCASE site was, to be blunt, old, and very much a product of old-school browser-based desktop-oriented thinking. As outlined in “Show Your Work”, by late 2013 I’d concluded...
Henry Newman and I had been friends ever since his parents first brought him home from the yard sale. I didn’t care that he was older, and it didn’t matter to me that he couldn’t swim or speak seven languages...
Mrs. Sprague paused in front of the china cabinet when she heard a thunk. “What was that?” she called into the parlor. “Boys?” “Nothing, Mrs. Sprague,” they sang back in unison...
I sat on a bench on one side of the small, battleship-gray drop bay of my patrol cutter, Oliveria. The last month and a half of the patrol had been mind-numbing, but taking a ship of wasters into custody would soon make it all worthwhile...
Colin had a white birthmark on his blonde hair and one on his blonde lashes. Blindingly white and full of bones, he looked more like a towering birch than a teenage boy. “You want to know how white I am?” He whispered over the book stacks...
I answered the door myself, as I always did when the shelter had visitors after dark. The gaunt man on the doorstep swept aside his cloak with one hand. “I am Nikolai,” he said. “I haff come to take Lucy home.” More than his emaciated physique, the power of his stare gave him away...
Members of the Tri-City Literary Writers Group sipped green tea and waited in the farmhouse’s spacious kitchen. They’d been together for five years and recently switched their meeting location from a coffee shop to this rural dairy farm, after reading a newspaper article. This was their third meeting and they were excited...
Zantoinell reclined in her bath pool, enjoying total contentment. The hot salt water was divine, and so was being the Supreme One of the Zarkindell Realm...
Christ stepped under center and began barking out signals, his long, lank tresses hanging out the back of his helmet. McMullen, the Raiders’ weak-side linebacker, was on his toes as if to blitz, but the Lord saw through this ruse and figured Oakland was probably going to drop into a Cover-2 zone...
Kirima’s ice skates hissed as she glided across her frozen pond. Four smooth strokes, then three crossovers, her left foot over her right, then four more strokes. Her skates left gouges and a trail of ice shavings. Her hair clung to her temples, and her breath misted in the cold air...
Unlike most of his brethren, the dragon Slagadune slept with both eyes closed, for he could smell any intruder foolhardy enough to stumble into his cave. A single blast of his blazing breath would turn the hardest steel to ash and melt skin and bones to butter. What’s more...
The heavy ceramic angel sitting high on the shelf above the sliding glass door was perfect for what Sham, the ethereal, had in mind. That fat, orange cat had to die. Its death was the only way he could become a real ghost...
