Being a writer has its perks, like helping the police to solve a murder. It is not a good thing when you are a writer with an ability to talk to ghosts. From what Jenna heard, from a spirit no less, that it was her destiny to help the Tazewell County Sheriff with their case. It was an unusually hot day in October, even for Virginia standards. Jenna sat on the porch swing, enjoying her husband, Troy’s day off. Their childr...

A friend of mine that’s oft described as strange and a bit droll, shared with me this tale about the Devil and his soul. He said Satan appeared one day and looked him in the eye, and said “Do what I now demand, or tomorrow you will die! I will take your soul and cut your miserable life in half, unless you can now find a way to make me smile and laugh!” My friend wanted to verify what he thought he had heard. He asked Sata...

“Dad, come on,” she began as she held out a plate of food to her father. “You have to try and eat something.” He looked up at her with his tired, over-worked blue-gray eyes. “Charlotte, I can’t. I have to focus on my research. This is very important.” She stared back at him, unresponsive, and he sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.” “What wouldn’t I understand, dad?” She questioned him, growing resentful at his stubbornness....

A Time and Place by Rumple deWriter It had all ended. The last hymn faded into silence. The last prayer spoken. The last condolence given. Mike still couldn’t cry—not yet. Back home he fell into an uneasy sleep filled with the same dream. Flames and smoke boiled from the windows in the back half of the old, wooden church. Framed against the stormy, night sky, the fire so dominated their minds no one noticed the parking lo...

I. As I gazed....her countenance changed with her mind As she plann’d how to thrall me with beauty, and bind My soul to her charms, and her long tresses play’d From shade into shine and from shine into shade, Like a day in mid autumn, first fair, o how fair! With long snaky locks of the adder – black hair That clung round her neck……………  - Thomas Hood.  “Father, father, father, quickly, there’s an English officer at the do...

Crisp, brittle dune grass scratched against my jeans as I hiked up the slope. Molly followed behind on her leash, head down, her soft, floppy ears drooping even more than normal. I reached the top of the dune and scanned the horizon; nothing but more dunes as far as I could see in one direction. Pale, sickly sunlight filtered through the thickening clouds that had drifted in from the coast in the last half hour. It didn’t...

Over the years I have paid homage to Japan in many of my poems but the following piece from 1995, seems particularly significant to me now in light of recent tragic events. It is based on an old Japanese folk tale about the Rashomon Gate in Kyoto. The city slumbers ill at ease As winds assail the maple trees, The kiri and the mountain pine. The shrouded moon so dimly shines Upon the houses as they keep The people safe in...

And so, I had finally discovered the truth about Alice’s dreams. Neither of us wished to talk about what had happened, and yet how could we not? Eventually, haltingly, she told me that sometimes they weren’t as bad, that sometimes just the man in the hat was present and that often times he was sweet and others he was cruel and that as she got older, they’d gotten worse. Sometimes she found ways not to go to sleep, hoping...