dreamszilla

Can Flavia marry her best friend while seeking sexual satisfaction elsewhere? The second story in Rozanne Charbonneau's trilogy, after The Train to Modena: Suzanna's Story . Image generated with OpenAI Rome, December, 1982 Carlo rolls off my chest and stands up to take me in. "Does all this belong to you?" he asks me, his eyes roaming over my curves. He grins, then heads to the bathroom, where he will rinse his prick in the bidet. I don't mind being objectified. My fiancé Marcello has never truly desired me and I find this more disturbing. But Carlo's compulsion to remove every trace of me today jangles my nerves. I have always been careful to wipe my lipstick off his cheeks, and never wear perfume on the days that we meet. I know better than to cause trouble for him at home. He tells me that he sleeps in a separate bedroom from his wife, and that they both want to obtain an amicable divorce for the sake of their five-year-old daughter. Any...

Cameron Spencer's character is having the best day of the rest of her life. Image generated with OpenAI Good Friday. A half day, then a long weekend. Sts. Peter and Paul University was one of the few remaining Roman Catholic universities that observed all the holy days - and many not so holy - and adjusted the academic schedule to accommodate them. So, Easter Monday would be another free day. Of course, this meant doubling up a few assignments occasionally, or even deleting others because of time crunches. But nothing could vex Professor Mary Peterson at this point, because she had been awarded the fellowship that would allow her to pursue the research that had been fueling her ambition for the last seven years. At last, her stature as a scholar was confirmed. Receiving the Trustees Fellowship Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Irish Studies was testimony that she had risen from being a talented disciple of her mentor, Paul Kevin O'Malley, venerable...

Kat heads to a baby shower, torn between Envy and Contempt; by Anna Braverman. Image generated with OpenAI Kat's high-waisted skirt was making driving unpleasant. It was cutting into her ribs and making her strain when she breathed. Damn these fancy clothes! They looked good on her, but didn't make her feel good. Or rather, they made her feel good about how she looked, but caused a constriction of spirit. She was not by nature a fancy skirt kind of person. Well, she felt she had no alternative but to dress up today. She was on her way to a fancy baby shower and she knew people would be dressed up. There was no way she wanted to spend the whole party worrying whether she was underdressed, especially since she knew that she was destined to stand out anyway and she was actively trying to minimize the surface area to which scrutiny could attach itself, like perfume to a knitted scarf. In reality, it was pretty damn certain that no one was going to be inclined to scrutin...

The ancient demon Harborym possesses eighteen-year-old Harold at the Burning Man festival, but struggles to tempt a Millennial mind; by Adam Strassberg. Image generated with OpenAI "I have lived eons before and I will live eons hence, yet each moment spent trapped inside this mortal's body is an eternity of suffering to me." The demon Harborym, the Dark Lord's renowned Master of Misery, was now mastered by misery himself. He cowered in a small corner of his possessed human's mind. He had become emaciated, pale, shrunken, long grown hairless and hornless, seemingly powerless and thus depressed. Harborym, a grand duke of demons, had been shamefully reduced to but a small incorporeal puff of temptations, just hovering about, fluttering there aimlessly in the back of Harold's mind. "The one thing we demons too often forget is that when we possess a human's body, they are possessing us as well. We are trapped together, entangled into one anot...

via American Short Fiction https://ift.tt/bV3KCls

Time Barrow's character has an incredible talent that he parlays into an underwhelming magic trick. Image generated with OpenAI I can do one trick, that's it. One. But I'm mighty sure it's one no one else on the planet can do. And it's technically not even a trick. I stood sweating in the 119° August heat on the back porch of a swanky Scottsdale home, a couple dozen 5ish-year-olds sitting cross legged on the well-groomed grass and yelling disappointed lines at me like, "Mister, don't you have any tricks that work?" This wasn't my first birthday magician gig, but as usual, the out-of-my-element discomfort made it feel like it was. Somehow, I just never mastered the ability to shuffle cards mid-air or palm them or guess the one you picked or get out of the way of my own disappearing sheet fast enough or... really, I couldn't do any of it... beyond the one. I squinted through the sun and into the face of a small girl, wispy red ...