Mad About You

This story has no sex in it.

A group of people wake up in a video game world and are forced to work together to survive and find out how to escape.

The group struggles with what to do next, getting only more questions with each answer.

Chapter 11

“Lyra is gone. I don’t know where she went or… or how to get her back.” I say my voice trembling.

A slender figure walked out onto the wide bridge. The sun descending in the western sky cast a wide shadow from the west side of the canyon and bathed the east side in a reddish glow.

Hope's Light

Chapter 21

by Erisian

Book 6

Part Five

Chapter Twenty-One - Harvest

Pages flip past, a time-lapse of images documenting the expansion of a grand city rising in sacred service to the Throne. Structures of meaning and empowered will, each unfolding as perfect edifices of collaboration and interchange, each glittering under the eternal illumination shining from Above as channeled through the forged unity binding all to one, and one to all.

And below this glory of infinites, to a tower of dazzling brilliance a dark angel comes.

Chapter 16

I opened my eyes to see Mark gazing down at me. The expression on his face made me feel all soft and squooshy.

Was that a word? I was going to make it a word. Squooshy. The way you feel when someone you like looks at you like that.

“Hello handsome. What time is it.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Right on time. What do you have to say to me?”

“Well, your instincts were right for one thing.”

“What?”

"Mum I can't possibly do this. " Alex she told her quietly, horror evident in his voice. His mother standing next to him in their little combined kitchen and dinning room, snorted in rye amusement.

Gabe searched her father’s face anxiously. Desperately wanting to say something, but unsure of what. “You came.”

Looking Back from the Future
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

Back in 1999 when I was just 25 years old, I decided that I would enter the new millennium as somebody else. People make New Year’s resolutions every year, but I thought that a New Millenium resolution needed to be dramatic. I made sure that it was.

Charlotte and Michael continue with their lives and now, two years on it is Christmas time once more and change is in the air!

A Crumb Free Christmas - Two years on

Naomi snuffed out her cigarette. She rarely took more than a few drags from one. She just liked holding it. And it allowed her to take breaks outside. She still had a few minutes on her break and she wasn’t going to waste a second of it even if it was a hot, sticky summer night.

She leaned back in her seat and her eyes narrowed. Oh, don’t you dare, young man!

Hope's Light

Chapter 20

by Erisian

Book 6

Chapter Twenty - Music

Twitch let my head rest against his chest, his close presence reassuring and solid just as it had been on all those wagon journeys taken together through the dark. Thoughts rampaged anyway behind closed eyelids like a herd of startled graxh tearing through sharp-ferned forest. Between the blurred collapsing leaves and trunks crashing aside from the mental onslaught hung a simple circlet of gold.

And all it represented.

I didn’t know if I could do this.

Just ‘cuz she’s got perfect blonde hair and cornflower eyes and big freakin’ bazoombas. AND long legs, the bitch.

As Rob drove to Church for the Christmas Eve Service he felt torn. For several years the place of comfort and support the Church represented had become increasingly difficult for him to bear. For the vast majority of the congregation, the Religious Dogma was rote, especially the formal prayers and creeds. Rob didn’t see anyone who put any thought into what they said thus missing what the Faith was all about. He understood he was not having a Faith Crisis, but was slowly being consumed by a Religious Crisis. For the last 5 years, He’d been increasingly unable to rouse himself from bed, only attending sporadically. The closer he came to the Church for the Christmas Eve Services, the more anxiety he felt. This brought up the question of how, at age 73, he’d reached this unsettling point in his life. During the past 47 years he’d traveled the 36 mile loop between Church and home well over 3500 times so the route had become rote. His mind switched to auto pilot as he reminisced.

Alma Mater
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Oliver Furness came to me in 1898 – I remember that it was the year that the Spanish American War ended. He had a scholarship to the University, or thought he had. He saw that my boarding house and health clinic offered lower rates for “students with refined manners” and considered that described him well enough. He was a slightly built young man, seemingly ready to study, as I had been at the same age.

The Manchester Early Summer Carnival
A “How I Spent My Summer Vacation: I became a Girl” Gaiden
By
Rebecca Coleman

-2-
Searching for the Perfect Bathing Suit