Loretta BR
Bio
Stories (5/0)
Elizabeth
“Is it this big white house on the corner? Huh. Not what I was expecting.” Doug and I pulled up alongside the curb and I turned off the car. We were meeting a potential new client today. She didn’t have her own means of transportation to come to our office for her free initial consultation. Although she would have – she offered to take a bus, two trains and a cab to get to our office. Not that we were so far away from each other. Our office was only about 15 miles from her home, but there was no direct route. It seemed silly to make a 60-something year old woman go through that much trouble for a consultation. Plus, we needed the work, so we didn’t mind making the trip.
By Loretta BR3 years ago in Journal
Beautiful Graveyards
“The cemeteries up here are beautiful, wow,” he awed as his eyes spanned the landscape on our four-hour drive home from my wedding on this county road. We must have passed four of them already on our way back from the wedding. He wasn’t wrong. The cemeteries weren’t barricaded by tall iron fences like they are back home. Here, the landscape was open, a patchwork of weathered gray headstones collected in pockets between the mountaintops and the road. Maybe they were just particularly picturesque today. The dense gray mist that hung in the sky dripped into blurry blue mountaintops that blended into brightening shades of green as it wept down the mountainside toward the grasses that nestled the headstones. The grave markers were not adorned with sprays of plastic flowers, either. Here, they were surrounded by clusters of wildflowers, the magenta pinks and pale orange colors popping against the gray mist. Pear trees were planted to protect some of those who lie beneath its cover, the petals of its white flowers dusting the emerald grass cover of their graves.
By Loretta BR3 years ago in Fiction
Black Ice
It came crashing down in a straight line, as if there was a glass shield between me and it. The black wall, speckled with the glowing green light of the foxfire, turned into a wall of inky black water without warning, falling before me and splashing out beyond, spreading itself outward into a crystal black bog. The foxfire floated atop it, casting splashes of light that illuminated its vast expanse.
By Loretta BR3 years ago in Fiction
Foxfire
I couldn’t hear anything. Nothing. Why couldn’t I hear anything? The fire enveloped me. I couldn’t feel the flames licking my flesh from every direction, as if it could not stop itself until it reached my very core, scorching my soul. I was blinded by its light – streaks of gleaming white and pale yellows, searing my eyes. I knew I was burning, but why couldn’t I hear it. Its crackle and pop grew hungrier in the moments before the beast lowered his head and rammed his skull into my chest, sending me back into the starved flames. But now, my body the midst of its flames, it was a vacuum.
By Loretta BR3 years ago in Fiction
The Minotaur
“You must pick one,” he commanded. I cowered before him. He was massive. Broad and thick with densely wrapped muscle enveloping his body. So substantial it was as if he were made of stone, but for the ease of his movement. His features were exaggerated. His nose, round as a saucer. His ears pointed, but folded, with that familiar flop of a canine’s, surreptitiously designed to alert him to the sound of a brittle leaf crackling underneath a distant footstep. His cheeks had that child-like fullness to them, a heaviness that left him with the slightest hint of a droop at his jawline. One might almost mistake him for precocious, bearing such childlike features. But his years were belied by his eyes. His large, cavernous eyes were silky black. Not demonic, they were not void of expression – but so dark it was as if they trapped the memories of 100 midnight skies within them. And the horns. Shorter than I imagined for a Minotaur, but thick and scarred. Honed. He stood 10 feet tall, and when he spoke downward toward me his voice was so heavy and so deep I felt the soft earth beneath my feet tremble from the reverberation of it.
By Loretta BR3 years ago in Fiction