Border, KS

Isn't Kansas a little northern for Southern Gothic? (Updates Tuesday and Thursday)

Category: Book 1 Chapter 3

3.11 A Different Kind of Quiet

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 […]

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3.10 Reactions

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 […]

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3.9 Actions

“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 […]

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3.8 Words

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 […]

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3.7 A Quiet Night

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 […]

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3.6 Awake

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 […]

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3.5 Bustle in the Hedgerow

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, […]

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3.4 Pronounced “Par-Tay”

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, […]

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3.3 Choices

Antigone was waiting for her nails to dry when Siobhan padded in to her room. The house had an interesting floor plan, with two rooms in a hallway behind a door that made it seem like another wing. The rooms also shared an interior door, like two hotel rooms in a suite. They had unilaterally […]

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3.2 Still Capable

Walter killed the engine to his bike and swung himself off of it, rolling his neck around as he shoved his keys in to his pocket. The house he had found, with the help of the Marshal’s office on one of the many trips to and from Kansas City in the months before the move, […]

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