Motion caught Mari's eye as she fled: a vision of herself dead and withered, overshadowed by a man whose face shone horribly waxen in the light. Mirror -- ! Towering behind her, the stranger's black eyes burned cold into hers. Mari's body turned to stone.
Rooted to the ground, Mari could do nothing but stare at the grey corpse in the mirror and the pallid stalker closing in. Soil and blood clotted the unkempt black hair that tumbled to his waist. The smell of dank earth enveloped Mari.
A pale hand emerged from his filthy black duster and settled on Mari's shoulder in a gesture of possession. Paralyzed, Mari shuddered in loathing. Chill spread from her shoulder through her limbs.
Lips tasting of ice, Mari whispered, "Why does... the mirror... reflect you?"
one day I ran out of codewords
The pain in my stomach had stopped, and I realized what the evil flowering within me wanted. It couldn't care less what I had done. It hated that I lived. The only purity that it commanded was death. And the evil waited breathlessly inside me, now that I had trained myself in the art of denying my own being. Nothing but my death would satisfy it, no viewpoints, no exonerating circumstances, no expiation.
yet darkness shines upon his lips
Some Tasty Links!
Space and Time Magazine, a speculative fiction magazine edited by Gordon Linzner. Web site design by Charles J. Burns (not the comic book guy!).
Epitaph, edited by Tom Piccirilli
Morbid Outlook, a long-lived zine gothique edited by Laura McCutchan
NEcon, where young writers learn to party like the pros in the land of H.P. Lovecraft
Speak of the devil, one of the aforementioned party pros' web sites: Red Demon's Dimension. As you can gather from the title, this is my friend Alexa DeMonterice's spiritual, mellow "safe space" for personal growth. Uh-huh. :)
My writers' group, CITH
My cat, Cricket =^..^=
a sad emaciated kiss of purity
that steals my voice,
writes cobwebs on my door:
Here I am safe, yet will emerge no more.
Unto Ashes
"And as my senses surrendered to what was heard, I was submitted to the melting of ages, and felt the cold resignation of sadness before the raping tragedy. Acoustic guitars, cords instruments, piano and epic percussions... intertwined with the synthetic flow of machines and the harsh textures of electronic treatments. The past was revisited by what is still to come, and the voices resounding among these timeless orchestrations spoke with soft anger, of melancholy and of the deepest wounds that could never be healed, not even by death, who awaits us with her gentle sorrow."
-- Jean-Francois Fecteau, a DJ who has been good enough to infect Canada's clean mountain air with our morbid musical arts.
A memorial tribute to Alexander the Great and Stupid, my late great tomcat (and his only known writing, the time he got on the Internet and told it all)!
