Taryn is the winner of Vol 2 – 33 and Vol 3 – 15. She is a writer and lover of all things furry, fine, and feathered. She can currently be found in the Shenandoah Valley of her home state Virginia, playing temporary mom to the adoptable dogs at the animal shelter where she works, chasing down birds (was that a black and white warbler?!), acting in community theater, and of course holed up in her apartment writing her YA fantasy series, The Fenearen Chronicles, along with short stories, creative non-fiction, and most recently, a slew of flash fiction.
Follow her on Twitter and at her blog.
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Reincarnation
“Energy is not created nor destroyed, all that there ever was, so there is now.” Dr. Howard scratched the words ‘Conservation of energy’ across the dusty blackboard. Physics, the only class I ever failed.
The sky is above me. But it’s not all puffy clouds and soaring birds. Smog paints the stratosphere in jaundiced hues. There are power lines and buildings framing my spotted vision.
Last time the sky was cerulean. And I wasn’t alone. There were men all around, sporting musket holes, and trading groans.
But the time before, the sky was black. So were my robes, my hair, my blade’s sheath. I never saw the arrow coming, but I did feel it burrow into my chest. Blood welled, leaking with each shuttering thump of my foolish heart.
“The atoms in your body were forged in stars, breathed by mammoths. All that you are will never disappear. It will merely change shape.”
Warped sirens. The cold pull of blood-loss sinking me into the asphalt. I’ll be the headline on the 6:00 news. ‘Twenty Year Old Stabbed in Broad Daylight’.
Knife, musket, arrow. Burning in the heart of stars, raining, freezing, digesting, growing, decaying. I feel it all.
All that there ever was, so there is now.
♦♦♦♦♦
Siren Song
Dulcet tones carry across the restless waves, whispering promises of a love doomed to never be. I pace along my rocky hunting grounds and wonder what the doomed men see me as today. Do the loyal sailors see their wives stranded alone? Or am I a long-lost love, or a beautiful red-headed fantasy? Whatever mirage my song has thrust into their minds, it is working. Soon their ship, and their bodies, would be broken on the rocks at my feet.
As the men, now nothing more than slaves to my call, force their vessel ever closer, I wonder, not for the first time, if they truly deserve such a bloody end. Who were these sailors I had ensnared? Perhaps they were vicious mercenaries, or simply trying to provide for their families. Ought I grant these unfortunate souls their freedom? But as the ship and her crew shatter and drown, I know it matters not.
Because I am so hungry.
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Flash! Friday 