Dames.

I don' trust dames.

'Specially not when they strut into my office, inches upon inches of legs, tight, glittering dresses, and pitiful, woe-is-me expressions.

"Oh, Missus Hearthfire!" she cries, back of her hand to her forehead, body angled juust right against the silhouette of my open door. "You must help me, truly! The music made me do ( Read more... )

They told me I was magik when I was ten.

Do you know what that does to a person - a child of that age? I had a life, already - an ordinary life, with friends and enemies and schoolwork and bullies, with Anna and Susan and Dad and my slowly growing awareness that most people had a Mom as well. I had my little things I cared about - I loved ( Read more... )

Hidden deep within Norway's Jotunheimen mountain range, surrounded by brilliant, glittering ice as far as the eye can see, there lies a house where no one lives.

In eras past, it has been a longhouse, or a manor, or a tent, or a cathedral, but right now, it is just a house. It has big, thick, clear glass windows, through which the bright sunlight ( Read more... )

Mabel.

Mabel was a beautiful old apartment building, on the corner of 51st and Queens. She embodied classic Jacobean architecture - I especially adored the sixteen pilasters adorning her façade. She was painted in a riot of colours, and she had a wild, lush rooftop garden, behind her parapets ( Read more... )

Today is the day.

I pace around my dressing room, and try to breathe. Why they even bothered to give me a dressing room I don't know; the thing was as perfunctory as their respect -- no light, moth-eaten walls, mirrors not cleaned since before original sin, probably...

There was no sense in which anyone cared about me as a performer in my own ( Read more... )