“Why can’t I come in?” Linda wanted to know.

Dad Bod
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

Dad was successful but unhappy. We all knew that he had the capacity to be happy, it was just that he was not. I suppose that we always thought it was because he worked too hard. He had a very successful business and seemed absorbed in that.

Mom was always telling him to sell the business and retire. We backed her up. All three of us had finished college, so it seemed that it was time for Dad to live for himself.

“I see that grin. You got something different, don’t you?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, what my helper said.” Beth replied.

It's been three years, but hopefully I can get back into writing. Here it is, picking up from the last chapter, more Tracy!
Once again, if you feel the need, go back and re-read the old ones, I had to.

This is a sequel to Summer Girl. The reason I’ve written one of my rare sequels is not because I had an unused twist littering my brain. I just wanted to pursue the relationship. Well, that was how it started anyway. Then started writing. Regardless of how the second part of the story developed it definitely is a spoiler for Summer Girl.

I never did go to the homecoming dance with Hank.

Driven from Normal .

Simon McKenzie started his week normal enough, but after a series of events he found himself standing in a bar wearing a cocktail dress. Chapter 19.

Part 2

I sat at my desk and pondered on what Cherry had found. Five deaths, spread over nearly forty years, was difficult to understand. The motive may be lost in time, maybe they weren’t linked at all. Maybe, the AI had just come up with gobbledegook. Maybe, no, certainly, this was going over my head this time.

Chuck faced the illuminated city of night below us. His voice was invested with emotion. I wondered where that was coming from.

Ambiguous
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

My name is Tracy. It was before and it is now. When I was young I never really thought of it as being an ambiguous name – like, for either a boy or a girl. Maybe it was just because we had no female Tracys at middle school. I mean, you think of Tracy McGrady and maybe Tracy Morgan, or the guy I was named after – Tracy Lawrence – some country singer that my Dad still loves to listen to. Then in high school somebody said – “Tracy is a girl’s name”. Suddenly the world seemed full of women called Tracy.

A desperate man uses a magical amulet to possess the body of his crush, but soon realizes he picked the wrong night.

CHAPTER 62
We had the next week before the new term started, and as the other four had cleared off back to the shared house that meant a week shared with a friend I hadn’t seen in what felt like a lifetime. Mike had always been there, and after Mam’s rather fuller explanation of the role he had played in my family’s move, I realised that it was indeed that, my own lifetime. That week was filled with familiarity, as Mike revisited places we both knew so, so well, and I got to watch Ish as he found new joys in wild places. He really seemed to click with Alys, and to no surprise on my part, it was all about birds.