See You on the Other Side
(Part 6)
By Sabrina G. Langton

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Author's Note: Welcome to the second to last chapter. This one is my favorite, well, um, one. Lots of love, friendship, and positivity floating around these words, well, until they aren't, ha, and the drama comes in... I hope YOU like it.

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"That will be, let me check. 22 dollars, times 11 months, plus tax, $263.50."

Girls Just Want to have Fun
-3-
Accessory Shopping and Ear Piercing

I got off the bus swearing at myself in a village in the middle of nowhere where only a few poor sods could understand English. It was in December 1947 and the quicksilver would have shown minus 40 if it had been able to. It had been a very long journey and the worst part had been the last. 4 hours on a rickety bus that didn’t even pretend to be a coach! I had to remind myself why the hell I was there. Sure, the case interested me but the real reason was that Boston wasn’t big enough for both me and the men in black.

Geneva at the front desk was the first to see Kim come in on Take Your Daughter to Work Day and noticed she had some kind of Vase but didn’t say anything except her usual “Good Morning!”

"Morning Geneva, going to be an interesting day with all these girls here today, isn’t it?”

Though the might of his right arm was already legend, it was not by battle prowess that Sigurd held his men steady in the face of a boiling sea of fearsome creatures, of horrors that would freeze the blood of the most bold.

Blind Date
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I would like to be able to say that I had no hand in it, but that would not be true. We all knew what we were doing – it was a joke at Al’s expense. The problem was that we all seemed to have left Al behind. We were all fully developed as men by the time we graduated high school, but Al never seemed to have quite got there. I suppose that we might try to excuse what we did by saying that we teed him up with a blind date that might help him to “man up”, but how would a transwoman be able to do that?

Haida attempts to negotiate a cease fire on the town...

Late night, Friday, February 6, 2009

Kenny

“No, no! Stop! Stop shrinking!”

Somehow, I wasn’t myself anymore. I was the house. It seemed like the kind of thing that had to be a weird dream, but it felt very real. And I was shrinking, trapping my family members inside the house. One of my sisters had gotten caught up in one of the walls, and I could feel her presence in my mind.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun
-1-
Bikini Shopping

It was summer again, and the mall was crowded with people. Madeline and I had decided that we needed a break from Benton, from working our fingers to the bone, from just the rustic lifestyle. And so, she and I decided to spend the day roaming Metrocenter Mall, the largest mall in Mississippi. I was over the moon, not only was I looking forward to spending the day with my best friend, who has stood by my side through thick and thin. But also like any girl I would jump at a chance to do a little retail therapy.

If you reached the end, the final end of the final rope, and could take a mulligan, would you?

See You on the Other Side
(Part 4)
By Sabrina G. Langton

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Friday, November 19th

"He was hard! And you let him leave. He ain't ever coming back." Martyn was laughing when I told him about the Friday before.

"He leaned in to kiss me so his male parts didn't get too close. I didn't mean to turn him on."

Cocktail
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

It seemed as if all that Jack needed to do was to get drunk. They had been seeing each other for almost a month. He had been determined that this was a relationship that would work. Perhaps he just tried too hard. That was how she let him down – hard. It hurt more than he could ever have imagined.

Chapter 7

“Firstly,” I said. “I think that one of the new members in the drama class has been telling his boss about the flow of information. They probably used to get snippets from Vlad, without knowing exactly where he got them from. We can use that to lure the unit to somewhere that is away from oversight, where we can just eliminate them. I saw that the Arrivals Board had a flight that had landed from Belarus. It was Aeroflot, so those duffle bags they were carrying could have been heavy weaponry, they looked bulky enough.”

Raquel looks at her reflection in the full-length mirror mounted on the back of her bedroom door. It finally took her eighteen years to become how she felt inside herself. A smile appears on her cute youthful face.

“Are you ready to go yet, Raquel?” Larry comes walking out of the main bathroom, fully dressed.

“Yeah, I’m ready, sweetie.” Raquel turns around to look at her boyfriend.

Mary Shelly

Mary Shelly, no not Mary Shelley the authoress of the original Frankinstein and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley the poet. I’m referring to Mary Shelly the self made multi Quettanairess, the wealthiest person in the inhabited universe.

"Joannie!" called Caleb. "Are you getting up?"

There was a high-pitched groan from the little girl's bedroom, and Caleb limped to the door. He knocked on it and called again. "Joannie!"

“Sleep!” came the voice from inside the room.

“It’s time to go to the factory, Sweetie!”

“Wanna sleep!”

The Redemption of Jamie Sarah Potter
-4-
Armageddon

What happened next, none of us expected, and I none of us could have ever dreamed of in our wildest dreams. But somehow the fact that Cerridwen was transgender got out. I mean, I'm also transgender too. But I'm not as open as she is about it. I was dismayed when that little bit of news broke. I expected that would take all the wind from our sails and our so far united effort would fall apart piece by piece. But as history proved me wrong.

A little light fluff, for the season . . . .

I was looking at a photo of a much younger Irene Trainer, a husky, bearded man at her side and an infant in her arms. She was young. Pretty. Smiling like a spring morning. I started to cry, and somehow completely forgot that Mom was on duty. “I . . . I . . . Oh, Mom, it’s so awful!”

Ellen Carpenter woke first. She always did on a work day, and almost always on weekends, too. After enough time, some habits just stick with you. The pattern had become a routine - throw on a dressing gown, step into slippers and pad down the stairs to make a pot of tea and some breakfast for both of them, sit quietly listening to complaints about work colleagues she had never met, make a packed lunch and a flask of coffee, then a quick kiss, a “have a nice day”, and she was on her own again.

Sexpiation
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

When the world is on fire, how far would you leap to escape the flames? That is how we looked at it. We were not escaping from justice – we were escaping from madness.