emptymouthpiece

I was eleven and I had discovered the 1960’s for myself, consuming book after book from my mom’s nearly endless piles of trash/treasure/trash. The ramshackle library of our hoarders home had already offered up everything I wanted to learn about the two world wars and I was onto what I understood as a second U.S. civil war. Everything seemed so possible then, so alive, young...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 116

I used to find that girl pretty, I used to fancy her.

Felecia considered the thought as the vacuous girl went running and squealing for safety. She shrugged and turned her attention to the rest of the gathered peasants. They all seemed locked in place for eternity, none of them daring to speak or move, not until Josephine finally closed...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 115

It was dark but that didn’t mean much, once the sun cleared its zenith and began heading west it would soon vanish behind the western side of the big house and then into the dense woods to the west. The grounds could look like twilight at six p.m. or even four closest to winter. The family, well, mother and Nana...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 114

A small stack of half written aborted missives were as close as Felecia ever got in real life to explain what she saw. Bartholomew never read of her nightmare account with the unexplained phenomena of the seas. He never heard it either. No one did. Felecia tried to write about the horror out there in the sea and then she...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 113

Felecia turned and fled the cliffside, past the gazebo and nearly trampled Elle’s herb garden. She felt like she would never be sure of what she really saw. She had no one to talk to about it anyway. The servants were all Nana’s spies or likely to dismiss little Fee as a liar or a simple child for telling such...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 112

Sleep didn’t sneak up on Felecia, it hit hard and near instantly and the dream that followed was as sinister as any she ever had.

Felecia was nine and the worst was still ahead for her. Father and Clarence and Bartholomew were all gone for the second time together and this time was the long trip, the one father told...
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Tomorrow, the next day, and the one after that,

endless foot falls in this petty place from day to day,

until the last syllable of recorded time.

All of our yesterdays have been but the delight of fools,

on their dusty way to oblivion, to be snuffed out like the briefest of once burning candles!

This life is but a shade, a sore loser,

one...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 111

Ever since she cleared the meadow and got into the frigid woods nearer Rotary house time had seemed to stop nearly altogether, and yet it seemed to leak away more than ever. Felecia felt like she had been gone for days, she felt like she hadn’t slept or eaten in a week. By the time she found the last of...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 110

Great grandfather’s trunks were set out on the floor up against the third and fourth rows of dusty old shelves. Yellowed journals and old sea charts had been dumped haphazardly against the packed dirt walls and floors of the cellar. Ancient instruments and collections of Pacific Ocean specimens had been haphazardly stuffed onto already crowded shelves, leaving them exposed to...
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Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 109

Death came in stages at Rotary house, and so did the belongings of the dead. Back when it was Bartholomew and Felecia down there in the cellar it was Grampa’s things that were toward the front, trunks of his personal affects left to rot, his chosen decorations and household items, covered, catalogued, set on cinder blocks and lengths of old...
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