Not quite #fridayflash fiction - Alice in Sepia

She's an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. Wild eyes. Beautiful wild hair. The type of woman you could imagine riding stags in fairy tale forests. A forgotten scandal. Except, she left the boy, who was me. A secret so well hushed up, a tale so often rewritten that nothing true clings to it anymore.

Who was Alice? In a dream, she gave me a key. Upon waking, I found the missing lock, but here is the riddle. How do I open what is in this realm, with something left behind in that realm.

"I am both sides of the door," said Alice.

"I know," I replied. "That is why I cannot see you at all."

I am an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. I have my mother's wild eyes and hair. Alice separates the film from the page to look down at me, but I cannot make myself smile or talk.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction - The reflection and the echo...

This is just a bit of experimental story-telling. I came across this website on a rainy Sunday afternoon and wanted to play a little with the form....

Not Quite #fridayflash fiction - Alice by the Sea

There must be tens of thousands of little girls called Alice in the world. Some of them are not so little and not so innocent, but if we wrote down stories for every Alice that lives, breathes and swallows pills, they could fill a library, all by themselves.

But ask yourself this, how much mileage can you really get out of 'one pill makes you tall' and 'one pill makes you small' withing beginning to repeat the pattern, again and again and again, like a row of warped mirrors in the madhouse.

I'm going to tell you about an Alice that simply got fed up with it all and took a Path of Whispers, away from all the White Rabbits and Mad Hatters and Murderous Queens until she came to the sea.

The wind blew her perfectly brushed blond locks into a wild nest of disarray and the spray of the ocean splattered the unblemished pinkish white skin of her bare feet. She was happy, but still the possibility of being discovered loomed like a distant storm cloud on the horizon.

She did not bring much, but she still had two pills left and without hesitation, she popped the pill that makes you small under her tongue. That was the one that always shocked your senses - a swiftly impacting sensation that made you feel as if your weight had abruptly tripled. Followed by your ears popping and then a disorientating light-headedness, as if the see-saw that had just plunged, now swooped back up again. And finally, that dry burning at the back of the throat. Yep, that was the pill alright.

... and grains of sand were now sharp pebbles and rocks of quartz... The cold brine of the sea, the stabbing sunlight. Everything overwhelmed, as Alice stumbled to find the nearest haven of sanctuary within a sea shell.

Its smoothly curved pearly walls were easy on the eye, except in those places where they caught a glint of sun. That hurt. The surface felt good on her cheek, but the best and worst thing about the shell was the music you could only hear from the inside...

I know you've probably held a shell to your ear, but this is very very different. A secret that shells have kept very well is that they only let you hear what they want you to, and that corresponds roughly to what they think you expect to hear. A roaring whoosh and most people will wander off, none the wiser.

But each shell distills the vibration of the waves to a fine and delicate series of melodies that never escape. Each shell tunes the vagaries of the wind to secret arpeggios that might have been the undoing of Paganini and each shell blends the harmonies of the shifting sands outside to something rare and exquisite.

Before Alice, no human had ever been an audience to the overpowering symphony of the sea.

Madness conducted the little spikes of intensity that rose and fell, drilling against the inside of her skull during the first movement.

There was no interval, no break, but the shifting carried her to a scary sort of sane that gnawed and grinded relentlessly against its confining prison of bone.

Then, it broke barriers and spilled....

Her mouth was open and her throat vibrated with a high-pitched fluting whistle. Was she still listening to the music or had she become it?

Sensing a new element, an enhancement to its features, the shell had worked the dimensions of Alice into its music, bouncing new improvisations off her form. That was the way of the shell. It employed everything within its environment in the greater quest for audial excellence.

The girl thought tone was god and tried to move towards it. Then she decided that tone was the devil and tried to move away from it. Because the music surrounded her, the results were exactly the same.

She crawled towards what felt like the heart of the sound, its crescendo whorling around and around, in colors she could almost see.

The music changed, becoming cold and wet. The vibration of tone lingered in echoes, but it was passing. She had found the mouth of the shell, but outside, she still felt as if she had no skin, no hair and no face, even. She was nothing more than a pulse that continued to go ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, without end. She could not even tell whether she still crawled or had stopped. She might have hugged herself, had she been able to locate any of her limbs.

She had no awareness of time passing, but after a while, she realized that the music had shifted from being an event to becoming a memory. She felt her fingers curled around her toes and slowly the rest of her body came back online.

She opened her eyes. She had to brush rags of hair the color of sleek seaweed from her eyes. Her skin was tinged green, hands and feet webbed. The girl called Alice swallowed hard, but then she remembered that she had wanted to be different.

Something grubby and white stuck to her palms. She stared at it for a long time before realizing that it was the remains of the pill to make you tall. Painstakingly, she licked her hands until they were clean. Then she got up and walked into the wild and the deep.

(t.y.m.... thank you to my inner muse and guide for coming through for me, once again)

Not Quite #Fridayflash Fiction: The Hours of Chronopolis

No one knows the hour... but if you have lived within the city of Chronopolis for a some time, there is a good chance that the hour knows you or at least has brushed past you in a busy street or waited behind you at the ice cream parlor or bought the last half dozen of freshly baked rolls just before you entered Maria's bakery.

This is your first lesson when arriving in Chronopolis. Each hour will surprise you.

There are hours that will fill you with unexpected melancholy for the boy who sat next to you in the ninth grade, you know, the one you last saw five years ago unpacking sacks of fertilizer in his dad's hardware store. Other hours will bring sudden inspiration about what to wear for the Halloween party in two weeks time. You get hours that will see you stripping off your coat to hand it to the woman begging outside the Fried Chicken joint and hours that will make you grasp your shoulder bag a little tighter for fear that it may be snatched away. Each hour is different.

No one is born in Chronopolis. That is your second lesson and it will take a while for this to sink in.

At first you will not notice this peculiarity, but when you do, it becomes a quest to find the one person that disproves what you suspect. You will search relentlessly, interrogating friends, acquaintances and even strangers, and they will smile tolerantly, as they too went through this stage. After a while it consumes you, wears you out and eats you up inside. The quest always remains bigger than you are. It is never met.

Nothing will prepare you for lesson number three and this is that everyone has their hour. No one knows this beforehand, but one day, a knock will come, or a nudge or a wink or a hand beckoning to you.

Whatever you were about to do, you will feel compelled to answer the summons and it will lead you towards the Tower of Chronopolis.

This building is perhaps the greatest of the city's mysteries. It dominates the skyline of Chronopolis from each wind direction and is impossible to miss. Everyone you know will have planned to visit it at some time, but to your knowledge no one has ever done this.

You will climb the tower, light-headed with wonder. You will admire the strange, gothic reliefwork carved into the walls, and secretly plan to return at some later date to make a detailed study of it. You realize instinctively that this is not possible now. Later, the need to return will fade like from your memory. No one comes to the tower of Chronopolis a second time.

You will arrive just before the hour at the summit and be welcomed. This is the last memory most people have before coming to their senses in the street below, roughly sixty five minutes later. One or two may recall being strapped into a pod-like column, but they are the crazy ones, who harbour other memories even more suspect.

No one remembers their hour.

This is the secret magic at the heart of Chronopolis. Each hour has a different soul. It may be a soul that delights in feeding ducks and swans in the pond at noon, or an hour that lights the next cigarette with the butt end of the previous one and then gulps down scalding black coffee to get rid of that dry, dry taste. You never can tell beforehand.

The final lesson of Chronopolis is that everyone goes home after their hour has come.

This is not the home you left behind when you settled in Chronopolis, or the home of your childhood. A key turns, something shifts and you are standing within the home that has always been there, at the very edge of your consciousness, the home you carry deep inside of you, always.

No one knows the hour...

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Angels and Monsters

The mother did not expect it to be true, but there it was, one thick green tentacle slithering across the Spiderman duvet, while a lumpy sac of pulsating torso heaved and hauled to achieve summit of her son's bed. My poor baby.

She had thought he was lying or exaggerating. Night after night the screams would interrupt the dark slumber of the entire household. He has a vivid imagination. Sure, vivid enough to make her see his monsters, crawling - At least it's not touching him yet.

She took a step forward, then hesitated. The tentacle squirmed into a new curl. Its tip lifted slightly. She stared.

It's not there. It cannot be there.

There were hairy things at the tip of the tentacle. They waved slightly, like miniature reeds.

This is your mind. Playing tricks. You're a grown woman, not a five-year-old.

It didn't help. You cannot unsee a thing like that. And she only wanted to help him. Getting to this point was difficult enough. Oh, the so-called experts who had not believed her. All children have nightmares. If she had a dollar for everytime she was told that. The first person to come up with a deal solution was an ancient Indian woman, who was a hundred if she was a day.

Add these herbs to his cereal and to yours also. Spend the night by his bed. If it is something more than the usual, then you will see it.

The herbs had the fragrant aroma of cinnamon and were surprisingly easy to digest.

Weren't all medicines supposed to taste foul.

The tentacle groped a fold of the duvet, briefly pinching Spiderman's arm. The mother took a deep breath. She was supposed to intervene, but how?

OMG. It's oozing onto the duvet. I better wash it first thing in the morning.

The boy trembled, but did not wake. The mother wished it was all a dream. As the tentacle reached for his shoulder, she jerked involutarily. The tentacle withdrew and curled slightly, like a caterpillar that had been prodded.

It heard me. It knows I'm here.

The monster repositioned itself. Of course. The mother shivered. Had she really believed she could handle this? Then she steeled herself. This was her baby. She would die for him.

"Why?" she whispered, hardly daring to speak. "Why do you terrorize my son night after night?"

The monster grinned through row upon row of serrated teeth. "Your son? Oh, the boy. what makes you think I'm after your son?"

The mother took a deep breath. Was it even possible to reason with a creature such as this? Hope surfaced. Yes. Maybe it was.

"Well," she said, all business. "What do you want?"

The monster smiled. Very simple. Only one thing draws us to little boys and girls. The prospect of dining on angelflesh. Little children are always watched over by angels. If that were not the case, we would leave them be.

"Really?" the mother asked. "If there was no angel, you would not come?"

By the very hairs on my tentacles I swear this.

The mother had much food for thought throughout the next day, but because she had slept poorly, it was not very clear thought. So the angels were to blame. Interesting.

Midway through the morning, she was back at the Indian woman's decrepid stall. She was very excited about this. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she said to the Indian woman. "You were the only person to help and now I have a plan. I need just one more thing. Do you have a magical herb for seeing the guardian angel of my little boy. I must have a word with him. Or her."

A hungry look entered the old woman's eyes. Perhaps she thought of other forms of bartering that were less sure, but more rewarding. "Indeed I do," she replied.

Again the mother had to sprinkle some herbs over the breakfasts of both her and her son, but the ingredient for seeing angels was pungent and a little more bitter, as if the taste alone already carried a caveat.

That night a second vigil commenced and the mother did not have to wait long before a beautiful golden glow surrounded the bed of her son. He smiled in his sleep, a lovely innocent smile and the mother hesitated for a moment. Then she remembered the monster of the night before and her resolve hardened.

"Hey you," she said. She was becoming used to communication with supernatural beings.

The angel turned and smiled also. "Well, good evening," she said. "This is a surprise. I wasn't expecting company."

"I was," said the mother. "I am here to ask a favor. As a concerned parent, I have been noticing that my child seems to have more than his fair share of monsters around. I looked into the matter..."

"I am always vigi..." the angel began..

"No interruptions, please" said the mother sternly. "Like I said, I looked into the matter and it was brought to my attention that the real and true cause of the problem is YOU!"

"Me?" the angel asked, perplexed.

"Yes, you. This is why I must ask, no beg, a favor of you. Leave my boy alone. Don't come near him. He won't be needing no guardian angels in the future. without the likes of you around, there will be no... "

The mother collapsed before she had a chance to finish her sentence. She fell gently, almost as if something cushioned her descent.

"My thanks," said the boy's guardian angel. "The problem with the adults is that they no longer recognize the shape of monsters. That one had its bulk curled all the way around her reason and it was squeezing the life out of her good sense, but she couldn't even see it. I don't know what I would have done."

"It's nothing," said the mother's guardian angel, "I was here all along. I've got it sorted."

"Good luck on the job."

"And you also. Looks like you're going to need it." The mother's guardian angel kicked something invisible. "And you, old flea-bitten, blunt-scaled excuse for a nightmare? Still haven't given up after all these years? You're not pulling that one on me again." There was a sigh that could have been the bed creaking or a window frame cracking under a sudden gust of wind. No one human heard it.

(Okay, it's a bit long for a #fridayflash, but this is where the 'not quite' would apply... I'm not sure if this is a children's story or an adult story... maybe a children's story for adults ... and it is anonymously dedicated to someone's mother)

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: The Muse

She was conceived in the heart of a song that contained about as much tears, blood and visceral matter as most births.

Her arrival surprised the composer, who had been expecting a melody only, not a whole woman with long drapes of birch colored hair streaming down her slightly stooped shoulders. "Are those wings?" he asked.

She blinked, staring at the motion of his lips. Then she parted hers and mouthed a pattern that was close to identical. Open, close, tongue brushing teeth, open again, close, open, close. No sound came. She did not appear to expect any.

"No," he said, rounding the O.

She imitated the motion. Still no sound.

"You cannot speak," he observed. "Can you hear? You are beautiful."'

He led her to the couch. Some of the hair slipped and he saw for certain why she was stooped. "They are wings," he said. "Are you an angel?"

She blinked, then got up and walked over to the piano. Some of the sheets of paper were filled with notes. She smiled, as if something about the melody delighted her. Then she found the pen and wrote, I DO NOT KNOW in large block letters. I DO NOT REMEMBER.

The composer's mind was conflicted. An excited you can write! battled with a protest that he used the music sheets for other types of writing. Trembling fingers, he found a notebook and passed it to her. He retrieved the sheets of paper, past her scribbling, he saw how the rest of the melody would go. The notes just seemed to fall into place and he wrote them down quite fast, lest he forget them, caught up as he was in the unexpected phenomenon of the winged woman.

"Why did you come?" he mused, more to himself.

I WAS DRAWN HERE, she wrote. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT MYSELF.

"Do you have a name?" he asked.

I DO NOT THINK SO, she replied.

"Do you need anything?"

A GLASS OF WATER.

The composer poured her a glass of water and went back to the business of music, which seemed to flow a lot easier in her presence than it did before.

She stayed and hours drifted into days, weeks, months and finally years. The composer wrote many songs, some of which he recorded himself, while licensing others to fellow musicians.

He became famous and aclaimed. The woman sometimes felt she could almost, but not quite remember a life before him, but she felt no need to return to it. Only two aspects blemished their happiness. The first was that no one seemed to notice the woman beside the composer. In the beginning, he tried to argue the reality of her presence, but he soon grew weary of persisting in a debate he never won anyway.

The second grief was hers. Although she fully comprehended him and could communicate fluently through writing, she never learnt to speak or hear anything. It was apparent to her, that their was some important factor in the composer's life that she could not take a part in. Sometimes, she would pore over his work with the intensity of an obsessive and would almost imagine that she could hear the melodies. She would press compact disks to her cheek bones or rub earphones against her lips or ear lobes, but nothing ever came out of these objects.

At the end of his life, as he lay dying, the composer said, "If one wish remains to me, it is this. That somehow you will now be able to share in my gift."

His body stilled and cooled and his spirit returned to the Source of all life. With tears in her eyes, she fingered one of those useless musical devices again. Something assaulted her mind with sharp pinpricks that went chi-chi-chi. There was a loud CRASH! that made her duck for cover and a SCREEEEEEEEEEEE! that grated her inside in a way that was very hard to deal with.

She sat up. Her ears worked. Suddenly these assaults on her nervous system became a joy as she realized that the composer's dying wish (and hers) had been granted.

"Are you the nearest of kin?" asked a nurse, and the words echoed in her ears before blossoming to comprehension in her mind.

"Yes... yes, I think so," her voice sounded odd to her own ears, although she experienced no difficulty producing those first words. That, too, surprised her.

She could not wait to be alone, to enjoy that which had been denied her throughout the composer's life. She stumbled outside and it took several moments before she worked out the reason for her lack of co-ordination. The wings were gone. Music flooded her being, intoxicated her, each note all but leaving her devastated. Was this the music of her beloved companion the composer? Why did it hurt so much? Was this what beauty does?

She kept walking into people, something that had never happened to her before. Each fresh note made her stagger, seemed to rip a hook into her soul, twisting the barb. Each note removed another layer of protection, until she felt naked in a hurricane of sound only. It hurt, and yet the beauty was not lost on her.

She wanted to write YES!!!! I HEAR IT NOW! I UNDERSTAND YOUR GENIUS! but there was no one at her back, no notepad and no composer. At that moment, she realized how truly alone she was within this storm of music.

She removed the earphones and pondered the device. For the first time she remembered the composer's wry smile and his kind blue-green eyes. She missed them. Balm for a wound was good, but being whole was better. Her hands squeezed the music player so hard it cracked. The noise around her became muted. She could not stop squeezing and each subsequent crack was softer than the last.

A vaguely remembered sentence surfaced briefly in her consciousness. You cannot go back.

And then, We are all on a path through life.

The shards of plastic and fibreglass were slowly turning to dust between her palms. She scattered them. Do we not all create out own path? The wind blew them into a line. Bits of copper glinted briefly...

If you want to make it
to this crazy world of mine
The secret's in the shine,
the magic's in the shine...

She began to follow the dust of the shattered music player. She could no longer hear her footsteps, but a path was being created.

After a while, her shoulder blades itched.

Blotches and shadows of people past through her, but she could no longer feel them. Sometimes their lips formed O's or their tongues brushed their teeth, but no sound accompanied the motions. She had become a ghost to their world.

She crossed a bridge that looked like a piano...

Soon her feet no longer touched the ground... She was flying home to wry smiles and kind blue-green eyes.

The secret's in the shine....

(t.y.m. - but this one hurt a lot to write, somehow.... i'm still recovering from it, emotionally)

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: After the Party

"Chaos is entirely a state of mind. So is order, for that matter."

"Hey, you're nuts."

"No, I'm not. It just never occurs to most people that all they have to do is flick a switch in their mind. They want to change things the long way round, because it's the only way they believe in."

The conversation was the only real thing in J's mind, although it may not have taken place at all. The voices were familiar, but no names or faces would claim them in his memory. It could have taken place between the large animal print cushion on the couch and the red kettle with the broken switching mechanism.

For some really strange reason, he could only think in objects as he lay there patterning his cheek to the ridges of the carpet. Even when he tried to think people, they quickly slipped back to expressing themselves as things. Ronda was a pale woven basket with a few strands of rafia at the top fraying. Selbourne was the DVD player that would never accurately play the same disk you inserted, however many times you checked the label beforehand. Ashley was this thin elegant vase with a bottom of water too far away from the stems of the flowers she was supposed to nourish.

Chaos. Order. Flicking a switch.

The words tasted like the heavy syrup of sambuca and smelt like somebody's saliva. They dried on his tongue without his ever using them. They throbbed inside his skull, happily jamming with the hammering on the front door.

It could have been thirty seconds or as long as an hour before he reached the door, but the woman's beauty was something that pierced even his post-inebriated state, but the golden translucence of her skin and the ears that protruded and ended in points not unlike those of Mr Spock must have been the booze still adding little bits to the picture.

She said, "I know this is an unusual request, but can I come in and clean your apartment for you?"

J blinked and glanced over his shoulder. He could not find it in him to deny that it needed cleaning. He sought and found a line half-remembered from a movie. "A fine lady like yourself?"

"This is awkward, but actually I have to do it. One of your guests last night stole something of mine and I have until noon to find it."

"What time is it now?" J asked.

"Eleven."

"What if it's not in there?"

"I can feel it."

J took a step back. He had seen stranger things. He made several half-hearted attempts to help her, but she seemed to have such a better grasp of what she was doing and proved totally unshockable, even in the face of several very strange discoveries.

One was that roughly half of the coffee table seemed to have turned into a tree. Roots frays bits of the carpet and the floor was actually lifting in a lumpy halfmoon shape. He could not immediately think of a way of fixing it, but the woman with the pointed ears ignored it.

There was a swarm of five miniature mermaids patrolling the aquarium. J opened his mouth to say 'Wow', but the word never quite got to his tongue. What he really wanted to verbalize was, 'See, THAT's why I drink."

The woman did not even glance at them. She was homing in on something that J now recognized as the epicenter of weirdness, a charred figure - was it a statue or a corpse? - that occupied the center of the couch.

"I found it," she said.

J looked over his shoulder at the mermaids - their tiny breasts actually bobbed - and then forced his eyes to return to the dead body. Yes, it really was a dead body. How was he going to explain that one to the landlord, to anyone?

"That?" he asked.

She reached out and pulled something from the burnt fingers. "This," she said. A few bones tumbled to the floor, smudging the carpet. The woman blew on the object in her hands. Some black dust flew off it. It was a ring.

"Oh," he said.

"Now I will clean the place up for you," she said.

She slipped the ring onto her finger and its shimmering became part of the golden sheen of her inhuman skin. The very air seemed to vibrate around them and for a few moments the throbbing of his head was truly unbearable.

Slowly, the motion of everything wound down. The corpse was gone. So were the smudges, the tree part of the coffee table and every single beer can or glass that had lain scattered across the living room floor. And the mermaids. He realized that, brief as their existence had been, the aquarium would never quite look right without them again.

He blinked.

"Oh yes," said the woman. She touched his forehead and the hangover was gone also.

He spend the rest of the afternoon hunting for something - anything - out of place. Everything was as it should be. Yet, in some strange way, not....

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Flower

Holding onto the flower seemed to be the most illogical thing in the world - both practically and emotionally. Marianne had carried it with her every day of her life. The petals were white, parchment dry and brittle. It was not a particularly beautiful specimen. It came from her marriage bouquet.

According to Marianne, it lost its color on the day Frank first raised his hand to her. She would not tell him what it was originally.

Now, his ass stiff from too many hours on the hard edge of the sidewalk, damaging the flower was the least and most immediate of his worries.

The whitewashed walls of the house across the street betrayed nothing. Somewhere within, Frank Bain had a gun trained on the person of his estranged wife Marianne. Was she dead or alive? There had been several gunshots, one at three o'clock, two at four-thirty and another at a quarter to five, but at five oh five, the cops spoke to her. She sounded strained, emotional, but still very much alive. It was almost six now. There had been no more gunshots, but Frank could have used other means. There were so many. A hangman's noose, a sharp kitchen knife, his bare hands, a cocktail of domestic insecticides. All of those might be soundless.

He tried not to think about them, but the images flooded his thoughts, almost as if he was there in the room with her, listening to Frank Bain tormenting her with the possibilities, asking her to choose. Was he picking up her stream of consciousness somehow?

That had happened before, to the surprise of them both, somehow confirming that soul mate link they had been aware of from the first.

Don't die. His mind was pleading. Don't die.

Live. Take me with you. Live for me.

The words popped into his head. The voice was hers, although the acoustics echoing within his skull sounded odd, as if coming through a long, narrow tube or from underwater.

The very air around him seemed to come alive and it was as if he could feel every ant meandering across the sand, every blade of grass glistening as it unfolded, pushing up towards the sun. The flower in his hands was a deep, dark plum, the color of old blood and promises broken. But the whitewashed house across the street seemed to have given up its ghost.

That was the moment he knew, long before the SWAT team stormed the place and brought out both blanketed bodies.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Crows

"Look, crows," said the boy. His name was Aidan. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that advertised the amusement park they visited three days ago on his birthday. He had turned nine, which meant that he was exactly three-hundred and sixty-two days away from counting his age in double digits.

One thing puzzled him. His feet were bare. He felt sure he would have worn shoes in a place like this, with the wind continuously whipping up rust-colored leaves and the tarmac scattered with pieces of broken glass.

"Why are they so shiny?" his sister asked. She was five and her name was Courtney. Asking stupid questions was her number one occupation.

"Because their mommies always made them wash behind their ears," Aidan replied. He thought it odd, but quite peaceful that their parents were nowhere in sight. A little way off, some car wreck was burning. Aidan wanted to look at it. Later. Before their mother came back. She always made them turn the other way if there was an accident.

"I think they're scary," said Courtney.

"They're fine," said Aidan. "They're very smart and they live a long time and sometimes people tame them. The Indians believe they are very important."

"Why?" Courtney asked.

"Next time I see an Indian, I'll ask him. The only reason most people don't like them is because they eat carrion."

"What's carrion?"

Aidan sighed. "How must I know? Some junk I think... Or rotten meat." He peered at them. There were five crows. They pecked at something on the road.

"Why are they so close?"

She did have a point there. Most wild birds flew away when you walked up to them, but not these ones. They just kept working their beaks as if the two children weren't even there.

"I dunno," said Aidan.

"Palo says crows eat people's eyes," Courtney said. "Can you see what these ones are eating?"

"Somebody's eyes," said Aidan. He leaned forward. It was true. The orb, tattered with blood, was the size of a marble. The size of a little girl's thumb scrunched up and with the bone sticking out. Almost as big as a nine-year-old boy's big toe sticking out of his Ben-10 sock.

He walked. Closer and closer. Shiny black crow feathers passed through the soles of his feet, but he never felt them.