[ Roughly based on a dream I had regarding Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree ( Read more... )

I walked in the cold place between the worlds. Nothing but a steel sky above my head and a featureless wasteland of frozen snow in all directions. I did not know whether I stumbled toward the warmth of the great hall or back to the blood stained battlefield yet I pressed forward without pause. To stop now would be to succumb to exhaustion and an ( Read more... )

But then I thought, what if I'm the sister dark? What if you're the one who walks in sunlight and leaves me here on the other side to await manifestation at nightfall? I can see myself now: palms pressed to the cool mirror glass, begging for mercies you will never hear as you pass me by. Or worse yet: palms pressed to the unyielding barrier as you ( Read more... )

“Hide and Seek”

forgive me, sister
I don't mean to call so late
but aching fingers
still seek the comfort of touch
and still the words come
beloved and unbidden
thee to me, sisterI am a fool for calling ( Read more... )

[ An unplanned somewhat-prequel to one of the geekiest things I have ever written (and that's saying a lot ( Read more... )

Reading the old words is a wearying thing and I feel worn, so worn, and wonder now if I have aged with my ghosts in that same rapidity, like the wrinkling of flesh and the crumbling of bone when first the hidden portrait was glimpsed again by its forever youthful owner, or did the portrait own him, too terrified to look upon its canvased truths and ( Read more... )

“Tears of Scarlet”

Beware the serpent
who with fangs of steel may yet
devour dragons

"The Ravine"

Beneath clawed branches
midnight's shadowed castoffs lurk
the stuff of legends
untouched by pale crescent moon
hungry to be known again

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"The House"

Black stone, gargoyle crowned
timbers hewn from Samhain's grove.
Lift good Marley's jaw:
Come, come in, the knocker bids
the longest night awaits us!

-

"The Tree"Jack-o-lanterns ( Read more... )

The ocean swallowed their ships and spit the bones back splintered and stripped, so they turned their backs to its cold depths and claimed manifest destiny over the slumbering continent. But the desert was an ocean in its own right, a land of dunes shifting in tidal winds and thunderstorms as wild as any white capped tempest, and the rumbling wagon ( Read more... )

♢They are near. ♢He emerges from the cave as the snow falls all around, thick fat flakes that catch in his wild hair and do not melt. He stands very still on the slick rock ledge, listening, scenting, casting out for trace of the enemy. The wind carries the distant reek of fear and death. He scowls. Filthy, pathetic creatures; they dare not ( Read more... )