Bethanie's Brain

Ah! A Friday Snippet on a Saturday! Well, why not? In case you missed them, the first snippet in this story is here , the second one is here and the third one is here . Oh, and a warning: this one is a wee bit gory. Maybe not the best thing to read right after a snack... ******************************* Jonathan crept around the big white house, slow and silent like he was stalking an animal that would spook at the slightest noise. For all he knew, that’s just what the black-haired woman was. Overgrown evergreen shrubs offered cover, though they slowed him down. A giant pine tree shaded the bushes out and they thinned near the back of the house, where there was a small parking lot. He could hear the flock of ravens, croaking, hissing, feet scrabbling on the cracked asphalt. Just before he got to the corner of the house, a smell hit him. It stopped him in his tracks. It was bad. Really bad. Dense as the evergreens, sweet and cloying – something had died. Days ago. A hand to his m...

Here's another, more snippet-sized, bit of the Mutagens story. I just re-wrote it, but I'm still pretty zonked from the battle with the Evil Pollen Pixies, so things that suck or don't make sense, well - I blame the Zyrtec... ;-D In case you missed them, the first snippet in this story is here and the second one is here . . ******************************* Einstein was worried. He’d called warning after warning from his perch on the lamppost. ‘Get away! Get away!’ his raucous voice urged. He did it again while Corva waited in line at the water monger’s stall. ‘Get away! Get away!’ She ignored him. She needed food and she needed water and she didn’t have a lot of choices about where to get them. It was the market or stealing, and she'd already pushed her luck stealing the eggs. The market was safer. At least, it had been until she’d noticed the tall boy with the bow and arrows. She was sure he was following her. She finished trading her eggs for a beat-up two-li...

In case you missed it, the first snippet in this story is here . This week's snippet below is actually intended to be the first scene of the story, so probably I should have posted it first. But I didn't. :) It needed some work and, since I was hoping to keep my Friday Snippets to around 500 words, it's a whole lot longer than I would have liked. But I couldn't find a good place to break it up, so here it is, out of order and way too long for a snippet, but whatever. ******************************* The Landis brothers. What a couple of freaks. Jonathan wished to God he’d never met them. Their five-gallon jug of water sat heavy on his dining room table, and he was just about done being polite about it. He gave the jug of water another shove in their direction and tried – for about the third time – to explain why they needed to take it and leave. “Like I told you,” he said, trying to sound testy. “I’m not interested.” They had stopped by late in the afternoon, Coli...

Welcome to my very first Friday Snippet! (*bites lower lip* nerves, nerves...) This is from a story called 'Mutagens' that I started a few years ago after having to edit a paper on childhood cancer. I had to do a fair amount of background reading on teratogens and mutagens and oncogenes and such like. Naturally, my imagination chewed on the science-y stuff, twisted it up with a bunch of other stuff bouncing around in my mind at the time - terrorism, homesickness, being a mommy - and next thing I knew I had this story idea burning a hole in my brain. This part is actually a bit that I cut when attempting to force the thing to be a short story, which it adamently refuses to be, so it will probably go back in in some form eventually. Anyways, here 'tiz: ******************************* She took James up onto the roof to play in the warm afternoon sun. So late in September the heat felt good, even though the light had taken on that glow that said in no uncertain terms that i...