The Pageant Trap
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

You can probably guess how it began. It’s in the title. It was a beauty pageant, more than one in fact, but the first one had to be a “Womanless” Beauty Pageant.

My mother had been a beauty queen. She married my father who was an athlete and a pro ballplayer when they met. To his great satisfaction he had three sons. I was the youngest. We were all brought up to play sport as our father had. None of us had the slightest interest in domestic things. We wanted nothing more than to be like our dad.

Nancy's first day in Seneca Falls.

Miracles
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

My uncle was a religious man. When I say religious, I mean that he claimed to be a Christian. He claimed to live his life by the principles preached by Christ and his church. He claimed to be good.

When I say my uncle, I mean that he was the husband of my aunt – my mother’s much younger sister. That meant that he was not my uncle by blood nor was he more than about 10 years older than me.

A sequel to the Gun Princess Royale. Yanked off the streets of New Angeles by the tenebrous Pantheon organisation, and gifted with a deadly avatar known as a Diva, Nikola 'Sola' Raynar is a Lanfear - a huntress of Bloodliners and Wolvren. When she isn't hunting down the denizens of the night, she's busy finding ways to build up her nest egg for the day of her retirement from Pantheon. But when her rampant greed carries her a little too far, she finds herself in a mess that wasn't entirely of her own making.

Los Angeles International Airport:
Emily covers up a yawn as she stood on the arrival side, looking for her boyfriend. He was supposed to pick her up at the airport. She had caught an early flight from Houston, Texas back to California.

She had finished a three-day show in Houston. Her equipment was already at the airport and the moving team her mentor Sasha uses was picking it up and taking it back to the warehouse. Just as she was about to call her boyfriend, she spots his car coming towards her. She watches as he pulls up in front of her.

The accuracy of a forecast was only good if the right factors were taken into consideration. A good forecast could be wrong when an unlikely factor was not taken into account when making the prediction. This was how the reliable forecast of good time with many laughs was wrong for Renee and Matt’s visit to the Lincoln Way Bike Park. The reason for the change to miserable filled with regret was the sight of Lori walking towards them.

Cuckoo
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I should explain right at the beginning why Daddy did the things that he did to me. You see, Daddy is not my real father. That is the whole problem, and the reason why things fell apart. He told me that he did not want to believe that I was not his, so he ignored the fact that I did not look anything like my two older brothers. He loved me, and now he loves me more.

Mother Daughter Bonding
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

"I don't know about this," I said. “It’s like Stan and Kevin might have the wrong idea about us. Just because we like dressing up as women now and again does not mean we are gay, or anything like that. I'm straight, just like you Dad.”

"Sure," my dad replied, but did I sense a little uncertainty? "It’s just a fantasy thing. We have to explain that to them. It’s a release mechanism. I used to do it before I was married, and well, since your mother died, I just slipped back into old habits.”

The gymnasium was filled to the brim with costumed revelers. Kendalgroves Jr. High School annual Halloween celebration was in full swing with all the students dancing their cares away as the DJ was playing the latest pop hits. The room gym had been decorated in full Halloween style, with spooky glow in the dark skeletons hanging from invisible strings and plastic bats too. And in the center there could be a strange attraction.

Nancy experiences life on a packet.

A boy finds himself in a suburban landscape with no other people... except his other self. A woman breaks up with her boyfriend and storms out of a bar... but all is not what it seems.. A roommate's prank leads to new and unsettling discoveries. A door to another world leads to unexpected changes. An ancient entity awakens to find a world where gender and everything else have drastically changed. Dive into the strange and unexpected with stories by Hikaro, D.K. Fenger, Trismegistus Shandy, Shadow Dragon, and CasLon.

Part 11 of 11

Chapter 16
"Patty, this is getting out of control!" I cried.

"Getting?" she asks.

"OK, It's gone over a cliff and dragged the wagon train with it. That good enough?"

Part 9 of 11

Chapter 14
It took us two days to read all the things I had been given. It looked like being a Court Reporter involved more that pushing buttons on a machine, you had to take stenography and legal vocabulary and quite a few other courses to qualify. For a seventeen year old high school dropout, it looked like a lot to do. I just had to tell myself I was a twenty-one year old A student - just like my transcript said.

Part 8 of 11

Chapter 12
If my first - and last - date on Saturday was exciting, Sunday at the zoo was something else. Scary, exciting, thrilling, all mixed up. I now knew that Vito was no longer wanted as a murderer, although they would probably want me to do time for burglary and general mopary and dopary. I could still use that as an excuse to stay in my disguise as Eliza.

Nancy learns more of the world and herself.