McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

New Storyline... authors wanted

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NothingWicked:
The boy slid across the ground, sending a spray of stale grim into the shadows, and came to an abrupt stop. Gagging on the dirt cloud around him, he got up slowly using the wall he'd crashed into to steady himself.

The girl had stopped swinging and watched the boy's flight, masking her now fading panic with a air of mild concern. She hopped off her seat and started toward the boy, "That was special, you could've actually hurt-"

The boy turned back towards the playground when his grin slid off his face. She was gone. 

LizW65:
He looked wildly aound the empty playground, panic rising like bile in his throat.  He'd heard stories -- didn't believe them, of course -- of people who slipped between the cracks in the city; disappeared, never to be seen again.

She was just playing some game, having him on.  She'd be back any minute now, laughing at him for his fears.

"Very funny."  His voice sounded loud, unnatural in the silence.  Her black sweater, that she'd tied arund her waist, trailed from the rusty chain of the swing, dragging in the dust.  A wind -- dry, warm, carrying with it a fetid whiff of decay -- swirled the dust around his feet, making the sweater flap like one of those birds he'd seen during their field trip to the Zoo.  Ravens, he thought they were called.

Then he heard the sound.  Faint, high-pitched, insistent, out on the very edge of hearing, he thought he'd imagined it at first.  Then he thought it must be some malfunction in his iPod, but when he removed the buds from his ears he could still hear it.  He turned his head this way and that, searching for the source.  It seemed to come from the direction of an old road that curved off to his right between two ruined structures.  Metallic, almost too high-pitched for human ears to hear, not mechanical in origin.

Organic, if he'd known the word.

The fine hairs rose on the backs of his arms as he stood silent, head to one side, listening.

Behind him, unseen, the swing recently vacated by the girl began to move back and forth of its own accord.

meg_evonne:
To the beat of the creaking, empty swing a child's voice kept time with a very old nursery rhyme song...   A child unseen, yet the words were coming exactly from the spot his friend had disappeared.

".... Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three.  Climb up my apple tree

"Shout down my rain barrel, Slide down my cellar door
And we'll be jolly friends, forever more."

The boy stumbled backwards, his feet shuffling as the air dropped from it's already chilly temps to below freezing.  His breath puffing clouds of fear.  His eyes wide in terror.

"Playmate, won't you come and play with me, and we'll be happy friend for ever more."

Benchleyfan:
What was really eerie was the voice sounded....wrong.  Not male or female, but an odd mixture of both.  It sent shivers down his spine. Suddenly, he wanted to be anywhere, but here.  "I don't feel like playing, thanks anyhow."  He hoped being polite would count in his favor, but doubted it.

The wind picked up, dust and trash whirled around him.  A dim shape could just about be made out at the edge of the abandoned playground....

thausgt:
What the boy had taken to be a large bundle of rags in a long-sealed doorway shifted, then released a yawn. The man levered himself up to a sitting position. The lengths of dirty grey hairs escaping from the tea-cosy he wore as a hat flopped as the man turned his head, first facing the boy, then the still-forming apparition, then back at the boy.

"The surest shield is impeccable manners," the man said, in a rich, creaking voice from the wiry tangle of a beard. "In this world and most all the others." He raised a warning finger. "But the sharpest sword is a rapier wit."

The boy stared at him. "I'm pretty sure you're speaking the King's English," he said after a moment. "But I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about."

The man tilted his head a fraction, allowing a stray bit of sunlight to fall across his eyes. Slowly, they rolled upward, around to the side, then back to match the boy's gaze. He let out a sigh, then nodded his head at the... being. "Perhaps you should claim to be ill? 'Tis a bad year for the flu, you know."

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