Border, KS

Chapter 4: Progress The weekend passed in blissful and uneventful ease. Antigone and Siobhan went to their extra-curricular activities, and Walter spent most of the weekend trying not to pick at his stitches. Monday came and, despite the Marshal’s protests he did not have to, Walter was back in to work at 7:30 AM. By […]

A few hours passed and the house was pulled into a different kind of quiet, that of restful sleep punctuated by occasional snoring. Antigone and Siobhan pulled their mattresses to the single door that separated their room and slept, if not side-by-side then as close as possible. In their dreams they saw the rings of […]

There are many kinds of silence a house can have. A still silence of emptiness when all the residents are gone, or the heart-broken silence of a loss. The tense silence of a fight, or the warm silence of a quiet night when all is right in the world. The police brought an ambulance with […]

“Get back!” Walter shouted as the man came at him. The man was so fast all he had time to do was get his hands in vaguely the right place to move the thrust. As the other man bowled in to him Walter managed to push just enough that when he was slammed back into […]

Morgan paused at that, still as a statue while Walter finished putting the coffee into the single cup maker and set it. “I’m sorry.” She offered. For a moment the only sounds in the room were the coffee maker, and the background noises of all houses. “It was…important to the two of you?” Walter nodded […]

The sounds of music left the front porch of the Richards house like smoke on an evening breeze. Smoke also left the front porch on an evening breeze, as Walter reclined on a chair with a cigar in an ash tray next to him. A glass rested next to it, water condensing on the outside […]

Images swam before Siobhan’s eyes. She saw and did not see, comprehended and did not comprehend. The raven spread its wings and took to the inky sky, a thousand stars looking down in judgment. A pool as still as the sky reflected only the black above, and the face that peered down in wonder and […]

The forest was larger than Antigone had expected, a dense verdant mass almost dripping in the late summer humidity. The cicadas were deafening at first but once they were into the forest proper they dropped off significantly. It left the woods with a faint buzzing in the distance matched by the shuffle of their feet, […]

Very few things can drown out the concentrated musical explosion that is a high school party in a house absent of parents. Antigone had to admit that a Kansas summer with a bumper crop of cicadas was doing a rather good job of it. It had taken them twenty minutes to walk to Lacey’s house, […]