Anthology Insight #2 ?>

Anthology Insight #2


I have written a number of short stories, many of which have been published in anthologies. Every few weeks, I will pick one and shine a light on it. 

I actually have two stories in the Prime Shadows collection. The one I want to highlight today is called, Blood Messages. It’s a creepy little tale that comes with a message: Be careful who you choose to bully.

Here is a snippet:

Tyler Scott was a picture of hurt and despair and an increasing measure of suppressed hate. Not yet seventeen, he was too tall and too thin, and his hair was too long and too much of a shaggy, brown mop to be thought of as cool. His cheeks and the back of his neck were covered in angry red boils, and his earlobes had been stretched by long use of black tunnel earrings.

He sat on the floor in the middle of his room with his stereo blasting the nu metal sounds of nostalgia in the form of Linkin Park set at high volume. His overly long limbs were all folded in, and he rocked slowly back and forth.

His eyes were closed. For the most part, his expression was neutral. But every once in a while the muscles of his face would give an involuntary twitch.

Those twitches bent his face into a snarl of anger for a tenth of a second. Then a grimace of disgust for another tenth. An expression of hate. A moment of pain. Then back to anger again. All unconscious signs of the turmoil and torment that tortured him.

He was surrounded by the wreckage of his life. His laptop was twisted, the screen broken and the keys no longer in place. His school notebooks were torn, the pages scattered. The posters of the late nineties and early two thousands bands ripped from the walls and left in piles.

It was as if he sat in the middle of a disaster zone in small scale. As if a tornado had burst through the walls of his room to destroy everything he held dear.

But it wasn’t a natural disaster that had caused all the damage. It had been Tyler himself, in a fit of rage and despair that had been building for weeks and had howled for release.

For Tyler, it had been a choice of either lashing out at a stranger or confining his mad outburst to hurt only himself. So for some fifteen minutes, he had hurled himself about in his room, tearing everything down and smashing all he could reach.

Then, long after Gandalf the cat had fled in terror from Tyler’s apoplectic display and he’d demolished everything he could, he had collapsed onto the floor and cried as if he was still a child.

It took long minutes for his tears to dry up. When they did, he gathered himself enough to sit amid the ruin he had created. Even then, the remnants of his frenzy kept his blood boiling to the point where his temples throbbed and the palms of his hands itched.

Of all the things of value in his room, he left only his stereo and his phone untouched. Even his desk had suffered, with the top buckled from the impact where he’d angrily struck it with his chair. The chair itself was in splinters. He’d even torn the cover off his pillow and emptied it of the misshapen corners of foam rubber that had filled it.

The phone sat on the floor in front of him. Its screen was dark, but if it had been on, it would have displayed Megan Sanders’ last hateful message:

“Kill yourself Freak. lol”

 

You can read the rest of this story here on Amazon.

 


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