megstrayer

Alina knocked quietly on the door of the guest bedroom where Meredith had settled in.  The visions she had experienced nights before continued to weigh heavily on her mind, despite her efforts to push them into her unconscious, where they would be more efficiently and accurately deciphered.  Meredith opened the door with a subdued yet genuine smile on her face, looking and feeling far brighter and more alert than she had for a long time. “Good morning, Alina.” “Good morning, Ms. Meredith. It seems as though you are well. I am glad to see this, this is good,” Alina replied and patted Meredith’s bony shoulder. 

The delicate sound of piano music came from the speakers of a laptop in the corner of David Abernathy’s basement; airy, yet piercing, like a breeze on a winter’s morning.  He stood in front of a large table covered with laboratory equipment and rubbed the back of his neck with a heavy sigh.  He carefully filled ten glass bottles with a pale green crystalline powder he had just scraped from a tray, making sure his hands didn’t shake too much from exhaustion.  The powder had a strong smell to it, like copper mixed with a hint of floral perfume.  Once he finished filling the bottles, he put them in a safe in the corner of the r

Up on the mountaintop to which I drove Braving narrow and treacherous, rocky, starlit roads I whispered down my news, I did not care if the world could hear And then, in perfect unison, the wild dogs cried out - Their choir filled me with such pointed, monolithic doubt I asked myself over and over if I am meant to be here Just like how, back in town, when I'd watch the people dance In their white suits and gowns thinking I'd never stand a chance Not in these colors that shift between the harsh rays of the sun Sprouts embedded in my palms, I have only just begun to think at all To dim the lights down when I walk you through my hall With sou

Numbed by a combination of exhaustion and tension, Alina did not say much to Brian during the car ride back to her designated cottage in Lancaster County.  Her tired eyes stared blankly at the bright red brake lights blurring in the streaks of rain on the windshield as the car crept through traffic in the exit lane for I-76 Westbound.  Despite her glazed-eyed, slack-jawed expression, Alina’s posture betrayed a deep anxiety.  Brian, who paid close attention to all of Alina’s mannerisms at every opportunity, noticed this immediately.                “Is everything okay? You’ve been waiting for her transformation and you

Hello again, you've come so soon I see you were impaled by your own silver spoons So come to my arms, I mean you no harm - Through all of my bliss, I have still missed you. Who will defend the defenders? Who will play the role of your mentors and menders? The questions I sent, the provisions I lent you All came back marked "Return to Sender" So to see you now puts my wild mind at ease - I worried, without me, you'd have lost your keys Or lost your way as they'd say I lost mine But there's not much in names - we all got here just fine. Was it quicker for you than it was for me? All the false starts I had were pure misery. All that gold in

Clouds coat the sky like the warmth of dreams As I stand before the stump of an old maple tree And I pray that, by some grace, time will stand still I'll hold hands with the breeze and I'll drink my fill Of liquid mirrors, of fallen leaves, of moonlit snowbanks pierced with reeds And streaked with blood, and there, I will hide from the eyes of the stars - Their cold light, that stern glow, that merciless judge. Still, the cosmos and all it contains runs wildly, frantically inside my veins Those swirls and clouds show through my skin Spread too thinly to hide the storms within And the voice of every deity to which mankind has bowed Has echoe

Alina listened to the soft sound of rain against the large window of the dimly-lit dining room where she and Brian sat.  He watched her with a placid look on his stubbly face as she worked steadily on an English exercise out of a textbook – one of many books he had given her to study from since her move to Pennsylvania ten years ago.  Periodically, her face would take on a preoccupied expression and her eyes would drift around the room, looking at the tall bookshelves on which large amethyst crystals and sculptures of angels (true to Biblical descriptions – elongated, clawed, with many eyes and many wings) served as book-ends, or

“They were men once, long ago – they wrote our myths and built our tools  while we fought for dominance and established hierarchies and standards, founded upon nothing but the passions and aversions of those in power.  They were torn from this world under mysterious circumstances, only to develop elsewhere, adapting to another environment.  They shall return to us little by little in a covert and disorganized manner and, in its pernicious blindness and visceral aversion to all things holy, the world shall react to them as if they were monsters and keep them under its heel - that is, until the arrival of the Conduit, Ren-Marite. Sh