leangreenlimabean

It was a cool, crisp morning, and the bright winter sun was already warming the air. Brighton was a very small town, and yet it bustled with activity at this hour as the locals waved hello and chatted on their way to their respective workplaces. The aroma of freshly baked bread wafted down from the bakery just around the corner and the smell of coffee lingered in the air just outside the town’s only café, Sally May’s. It was a Friday morning, and if someone had been walking down that street, past all of the shop keeps sweeping under their doorways, past the baker and his bread, past the baristas and the slowly melting snow on

Dear Writer’s Block,            It’s not you…it’s me.              You know, it’s really funny. Writing this letter to you is harder than I thought it would be. I’ve been with you for so long that I barely know how to form a creative thought anymore—to let the words flow out of me onto the page, like they used to. It is frustrating, knowing that I have let so much time go by since I’ve actually written something that isn’t for a job or for school, since I’ve written something for me.            But it’s not your fault, Writer’s Block. I was at a time of my life where

The sun was low in the sky when Saleh could finally see the village in the distance. The homes were all lit by now, all of them tiny suns in a sea of desert sand. Columns of smoke rose from every chimney, accompanied by the faint smell of cooking on the wind. His stomach rumbled longingly, and he urged his steed onward. The reptilian beast, covered in dusty reddish-brown scales from its smooth, triangular head, to the very end of its heavy tail. Its long, slender neck craned over to look at its master and hiss, tasting the air with its pinkish forked tongue. "Come, Rangi, old girl," Saleh said, reaching to pat the great beast on its side. Sh

The Changeling            From the moment my parents brought her home, I knew my little sister was different.            I know what you’re thinking. Everyone thinks their little sister is a stranger sometimes, Emmie. It’s perfectly normal. That’s what everyone says. But I knew it, as soon as I saw her eyes. They were never the same color twice and constantly shifted, sometimes changing as quickly as her many peculiar moods. “Her eyes will settle, that’s just what babies do,” we were reassured by friends and neighbors. My parents took comfort in that, but I did not.              No one batted an eye wh

Dad met me at the baggage claim, gathering me into his arms immediately and telling me how much he missed me. I realized that it had been three months since I’d seen his face, the longest I had ever gone without him. I missed him too. Due to the previous day’s events, I was out like a light after I put on some comforting ambient sounds (rain, because it reminds me of home and it’s rather soothing) and lay out on the pullout bed in our hotel room some hours later. At some point, my brother, Ted, finally got to the hotel to join my dad and I in the nice, but somewhat cramped, room. A quick note about my brother: he’s

I realized that there is a reason people avoid getting hungover at the airport: flying when your head is pounding and you’re a moment away from losing your lunch is a fucking horrible experience. The lady sitting next to me on the Appleton flight kept staring at me as I sat there, pale, clammy and breathing like someone in labor. DON’T PUKE DON’T PUKE DON’T PUKE OH GOD DON’T PUKE is a pretty accurate description of the torturous journey. The flight was only a half hour to Chicago O’Hare, but it felt like hours. To ease my headache I kept my sunglasses on and tried to drown out all noise with my noise-canc

The Great Spring Break: Day 1 (Part 1 of 2) I’m a terrible packer. When I say I’m a terrible packer, I mean that no matter how many things I take out of my bags to lighten them, the damned things seem to just gain weight instead. To make matters worse, I’m also the biggest procrastinator, and I always find myself packing into the wee hours of the morning and feeling like death when I drive up to the airport. My justification for this is that if I wait longer to pack, I will not have the time to overpack. This method is total bullshit, of course; if anything, I probably stuff more things into my bag because I’m too

CHAPTER 2 Danny couldn’t seem to sleep. It was the same dream that he had been dreaming for months: The strange man, whose face was always cast in shadow, the letter he hid inside the old desk, and the mysterious trunk he carried with him into the night. Danny could no more stop the dreams than he could stop breathing, and lately, he was losing more and more sleep, and his headaches only seemed to worsen. He was finding himself dreading the moment he began to drift into unconsciousness. But then, something changed. The man turned and faced him. Danny found himself standing in the room with him, the same dusty, cluttered old room h

Chapter 1 “For zee last time, children cannot sit in zee bar area.” “Like I keep telling you, I’m Scott’s niece, and I can sit wherever I want!” Francis, a pale, beanpole with an unfortunate case of bed-head and the waiter on duty that Friday afternoon, was trying in vain to reason with Zanna--her jade-green aura pulsing with irritation as she sat determinedly on the barstool--as Danny walked into the small diner. Suzie’s was the best all-hours, breakfast, lunch, dinner, you-name-it kind of café in Maplehaven, and Danny’s favorite. It was small and rustic, all the chairs and stools made ou

PROLOGUE It was done. The letter was finished. The man sat back in his chair, sighing with relief, and carefully lay the feather quill upon the desk, now dry of ink. He looked at the letter, illuminated by candlelight in the dim room, the final product of many poor attempts that lay in crumpled piles of paper all around the office.  It didn’t seem long enough for the great secret it contained, but it would have to do; it was time to bury the past in hopes that the future would be safer for it. As his gaze fell onto the worn, wooden chest before him, he wondered if that was just a fool’s dream. He was only delaying the inevitab