Chapter 3

We just sat there, speechless, as she looked at her papers.

There was a lot for the two girls to emotionally unpack when they arrived back at Bethany’s. While it had not been Maya’s intention to tell Bethany of the thoughts and feelings she had felt for Tyler at the party, she had found herself doing just that.

This is impossible. My first dress. How could they do this to me? What a fool!
tradition that a boy gets a dress for his 13th birthday.
Jack and his friends made fun of the “pretty boys” as they were called.
On Sunday they could be seen going for a walk with their mothers.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

The following morning my mother first picked up the Twins and all our schoolbags from Niamh’s house, then on to Ciara’s. Ciara squeezed in the back while her mother sat in the front passenger seat. As we were about to pull off, Aoife remarked that Ciara didn’t have a seat belt on; there were only three belts in the back of the car. Saoirse unclipped herself from the middle seat belt, yielding it to Ciara, unclipped my belt, snuggled in beside me, and clipped us both into the one belt.

“Sorted!” she announced and my mother pulled off again.

The dial tone buzzes in his ear like a trapped wasp. Caden taps his fingers against the desk — once, twice — before the receptionist finally picks up. "First available is Thursday at two," she says, the words clipped. He books it without asking questions. The phone clicks back into its cradle with a finality that feels heavier than it should have. Petra's number glows on the screen beneath it, untouched. Data first. Then emotions.

Ashton wondered why he had even bothered to attend his prom. He was going stag, which said a lot he thought. Always there but never the main person. He looked around and saw all the people that in one way or another had made a mark in school. Bill the star quarter-back. Mary the head cheerleader. Peter, the star baseball pitcher, accompanied by his date Eric who’s batting (almost) always amazed people. Charleene the student council president. Wolfgang the school paper editor-in-chief. Martin this year’s valedictorian to be. Ashton had interacted with all of them and was constantly in their shadows. Perhaps that was his problem. All the others had focused on one thing they were good at. Ashton had let himself be spread out.

Tessie, Goody A New Maid

From the time I got up this morning till now, today has been one shitty day. I ended up having to get my car jumped because of a dead battery. The service I paid for to handle such occurrences taking their sweet time to get here. Thus I arrived late for work missing an important meeting, my immediate boss livid that I had missed it. Then my computer failed a little after eleven A.M. requiring the IT guys to replace the hard drive. Three hours of work that I had performed this morning lost in the process. Then the final touch to my horrible day occurred.

Chapter 1

I should have known that I was too old to try to pull that dead stump. I wasn’t the young buck any longer, although it would have been hard to describe me as a buck in my youth. It was about the time of the third pull that I felt something was wrong, with my left arm and chest suddenly painful and my strength going, I fell onto my back and looked at the scudding spring clouds.

After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

The Garden Party
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

“Maybe you should go down to the strip and find yourself somebody to do the job,” I suggested. “You know, just like Richard Gere did. Find yourself a Julia Roberts.”

“If I thought that would work, I might,” he said, the man who had just introduced himself as Jerome. “Now do you want the money or not? Will you do it or not?”