Part 6

As I was walking towards the lounge area I heard the maid call to Birgitta to say that the band had arrived. I followed her voice to the front door where I could see a mini-bus in the driveway with the girls, now in varying colours of the outfit I now wore, unloading their bags and their instruments.

In the three months since she'd entered the Program, Verity had been exposed to indignities without number: probes and penetrations; medical procedures which invariably left her shaken and tearful. The invasions never seemed to end. They'd explored her most intimate recesses with a barrage of wicked-looking instruments, delving and touching and pricking and poking until she'd begged them to stop, wailing like a child as each new device was inserted. Still, there was something worse than all the violations she'd suffered over the past ninety days...

Struggling to survive the lethal poverty of a post-apocalyptic world, young Verity Sherman has volunteered for "genetic reconfiguration;" a long and torturous medical procedure which effectively transforms biological males into fertile young women. If successful, Verity will be granted wealth, comfort and privilege beyond her wildest dreams - but only if she can survive the horrors of reconditioning. A dark, dystopian vision of a future where gender is a fluid medium and sexual slavery is the only alternative to the slow, creeping death haunting the slums of the Red Zone.

I found myself floating. Floating through the air, floating through space, time had no meaning, there was no beginning or ending through the realm I floated through. My body felt light as a feather. Then I felt my toes touch something. I looked down and noticed I was standing on some green grass. I looked up and noticed the sky was blue. I had gone from floating from nothingness to standing on earth again. Then I noticed it. Before me a massive gate with a fence running as far as the eye could see in both directions. The bars of the gate glowed in the sun. 

Jealous
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

She used to be Pete. We were friends then. We practically grew up together. My brother was older than me, so he ignored me, and Pete had older sisters. We hung out together. We played ball – shot some hoops and I pitched him some balls. He didn’t have a strong throw. We climbed trees and played in the creek on hot days. He was always around at my place playing e-sports games.

Pete was as normal as any other guy. At least he seemed that way. That was before he started calling himself Petra.

Crescendo

Groaning in abject humiliation, 'Nessa peeled her sheer cotton panties down to her knees, revealing her sleek, naked bottom-cheeks to her step-father. She wept in undisguised shame, tears glistening on her cheeks like liquid diamonds. She hated being spanked like a naughty little girl; it was degrading beyond all description –

Especially since she'd been born a boy.

Smile in the Photo
A Short Story for John (from a Cap by Becca?)
By Maryanne Peters

Can you fall in love with somebody you see in a photograph? Stranger yet, can you fall in love with a child in a photograph, imagining her to have grown into a creature with all the beauty and warmth in that image, but now with the body of a woman? It seems very odd, but it happened to me.

Jacked Up Part 5

I was the only passenger on the plane and the only others were the two pilots. It did not take long for us to get permission to take off and we did it on full power, it felt very impressive. We flew south and eventually circled a massive military base. When we landed the heat was oppressive, especially for someone who had dressed for a Detroit day.

"On reflection, it must've been the dumbest thing I'd ever done in my life up to that point. I had to live next door to this guy and his family; how could I have been crazy enough to think I'd get away with it? In a perfect world, I suppose I would have been 'straight' with him from the very start..."

Bruce Finds His Rainbow. Part 3

That day Bruce found out something that all afternoon shift workers know – there is nothing to watch on daytime television. He realised that he would need to fill his day with some productive activities or else go mad.

The wind was blowing hard, harder than before and small flakes of snow were starting to fall down from the sky. The sky above me was gray and cloudy and my whole body felt numb and small flecks of snow were falling down upon me. The door of the ambulance had just opened and I had been awoken from my sleep by the blinding light. My whole mind was numb too.

My eyes followed Jamie as she vanished into the crowd. And speaking of the crowd, the crowd just lingered around the dunking booth. If a person did not want to buy three balls for five dollars, they could just walk up and push the button for ten dollars. Like Jamie she had dropped ten dollars to drop me in freezing cold water, the little brat also managed to sneak in another push of the button when nobody was looking.

Part 4

Monday morning I was up and dressed for the office, my hair in a pony-tail and my takings from Saturday in my back pack. As I left my room Balnoor was walking towards me. “Did you see that girl who was here yesterday” he asked “she looked lost but I looked back as I walked away and she was getting into a flash car.”

In two thousand and eighteen I volunteered for the dunking booth attraction at the relaunch of the 'Discover Benton Festival' that has become a yearly event that draws a number of people to our small, little delta town. I was fourteen then and just starting to come out of my shell. I was new to Benton and in a way, I was still frail. Beside dealing with puberty and the discord that it brings, I was also trying to come to terms with me being transgender. My mother had just been buried four months before, and because I was in hospital when the funeral took place.

Bruce Finds His Rainbow. Part 2

On the Tuesday Bruce was easily on time and Bree was clocked in before 7.30. With Brucey, Geoff and Bill he again went to the unloading dock where he was surprised at the empty spaces where they had filled up with yesterdays’ unloading.

A lonely teenaged boy makes a Faustian bargain with a gypsy fortune teller, then discovers that the price might be higher than anybody can possibly pay.

Stowaway
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Part 1

“I’ll tell you what we are going to do,” said Dr Felton. Gina had referred the problem to her superior knowing that she would have a solution. “This boy cannot be concealed here, so he will need to hide in plain sight as one of our spa team.”

“But we have no men on our team,” said Gina. It was she who had found Miguel and promised to hide him. She was the source of the problem. Everybody stared her down.

Two miles East of town one would find an open field. A broken stone wall divides the field in half, in front of the stone wall, there is a creek. The field is haunted, haunted by the souls of some six hundred Confederate dead and some eight hundred Federal dead. There are a number of rumors connected with the field, some report hearing the roar of musketry echoing across the field early in the morning.

Jacked Up Part 3

Next time I came to there was a nurse beside me checking all of the tubes and drips. When she saw my open eyes she exclaimed “Oh good, honey, you are awake. I can now get you to see what moves again and what doesn’t without those rough doctors trying to bend you into odd shapes.”

A few careless words led to triggereing of hidden forgotten feeling for Steve.

Bruce Finds His Rainbow. Part 1

Bruce Grayson was aptly named. He was the epitome of a grey person. His complexion was grey-ish; his clothing was grey-ish because all the schools he had attended had uniforms that were uniformly some shade of grey. The only thing not grey about him was his shoulder length brown hair.

The origins of the phantom monster truck that is supposed to haunt the roads between Benton and Ebeneezer lays in the social upheaval the Civil Rights movement brought to this area of Mississippi. Radical elements of the population formed chapters of the then powerful White Citizens Council, the white people who had money, took their children out of public schools and placed them in private schools called segregation academies. Benton Academy and their rival Manchester Academy were two such schools.

My discovery of the limitations of magic in my real life at seven years old and how I chose to accept them and live or not as the case may be.

Jacked Up Part 2

Of course, we didn’t just knock on doors and ask if there was a strange person living there. We used drones from a distance to see the normal days for each house. We were able to eliminate about forty this way, the residents being larger groups were seen together and touching.