One morning Sorcha woke up as usual at the ring of the alarm clock… it was school day, so she was not turning it off and lingered in the warm bed like she loved to do on weekends. She loved easy comfy slow life and if she could… She wouldn’t go ever to work but she couldn’t, so she resigned to get up…
Her hand tried to reach her painkiller meds on her night table – her first breakfast – and she couldn’t reach them… her arm was not long enough! “What hell happened to my arm… am I stiff than ever this morning” she complained and looked at her hand. She wanted to jump… her hand did not look like her hand, and she screamed ”that’s not my hand.” But she could not jump… her body was heavy… she then touched her belly, and it was soft but bulgy… barely she reached her back… Hoh… it was hard like a shell and so heavy that although she tried many times, she couldn’t turn…”Oh gush it’s getting late… I should call the school that I don’t feel well today so they can call a substitute”
“I must have taken too many meds last night and now I’m hallucinating, and I don’t feel well but I must find the strength to call the school… they are going to be very upset with me If I just don’t show up… I know that my students will be happy to have that substitute… the one that laughs and talks like a horse. She is a better entertainer than me, but I do have to call… why didn’t I buy a cellphone… because I am so lazy, and I didn’t want to learn how to use it and now I can’t reach the living room phone… if only I could call an ambulance… that would be a good excuse for not going to work…”
“They-students- friends- are all right to say that I am slow like a turtle. I am slow in my chores… my work… in finishing my dinner… are you done?… Are you coming slow poke?… who is talking… I sense danger… predators? I retract my head and legs into the inside of my shell… I’ll make my heart stop beating; thus, they think that I am dead while I am still very alive…”
“Oh, the phone is ringing… maybe it is the school call… by now they should know that something is wrong… somebody will come… oh I am so hungry… somebody will be bringing food but how I am going to eat? I have no teeth… a Bick will do… I should have one… I know… any human carries animal DNA… many are cats or birds… my ex was a Scorpion if you stepped on his tail, he would sting you… some are still lizards and me? I knew what I carried when I suddenly looked at me in the mirror and that student… that pecking girl that has chicken in her few days ago, she said ‘Miss you like a turtle’… the bitch knows… that’s… but somebody will come… turn me around so I can go back to the water.”
© 2025 – Michel Croteau
NO MORE!
She stood on an obsidian ledge, looking down on a lake of molten lava.
This place bordered the main realm of Hell. A servant of Hell brought her here as a baby. Other slaves raised her. Now they expected her to go to the Hell Palace and play slave and maybe whore to Lucifer.
None of this is right. I don’t belong here. I NEED to see the SKY.
She closed her golden eyes.
This woman stood a height of five feet and five inches. Her deep dark red hair laid to her hips in waves. Her eyes had a slight slant to them.
Her nose small and her lips had a lush appearance to them. Her slender frame seemed undernourished, slaves only ate enough to get by. Her body laid covered in a red body suit and a dog collar around her neck.
She reached inside herself.
There existed a flame. Only a smoldering coal, she concentrated on it.
BURN!
Something internal felt her anguish.
That coal began to ignite.
The flame grew…her body responded.
The lady drew in a sharp breath. A spectral flame rose up around her. It blazed red in color and hot.
It pulled in internally and in a flash of light; a large, exotic looking, red feathered, bird stood in her place.
Large ruby colored talons and a beak sat on plumage of dark red, crimson, and gold. This harpy sized pretty bird had been called a Rock, the first shift in her kind’s line of succession. This beautiful bird could fly easily in Hell as well as sing divinely for the masses…
This isn’t enough. I must…go further…further than all of them.
“ANA!” The shout made her look back. A large blackened skin shadow being led others from down the path behind her.
A voice within her directed her attention back to the lava lake. “For you to ignite, you must have faith. To touch the sky, you must first fall. Only then will you rise, Sky Queen.”
She swallowed, her throat noticeably moved.
Ana’s wings extended.
She leapt skyward and flew over the sea of lava…
“DAMN YOU, GIRL! GET HER, THE MASTER WANTS HER, NOW!”
The men ran up the path. A total of six men total, minus their leader called INK. These men held net guns.
All at once, over the lake by a hundred yards, Ana the Rock…dropped like a stone.
My Leap of Faith.
The men stood in shock. Her move came across as unexpected.
Silence…
“The Master is going to kill me for sure.” Ink quivered. He had been told to deliver Ana to Lucifer as she was to be his new concubine. The nose dive meant that she broke her mental restraints that made her fear the flames.
A loud shriek echoed through the area.
All the men backed off in fear.
Ink stood his ground.
Something slowly began to rise. It started as a hump in the lava and continued to push up. Every move, it got higher.
She rose.
As her wings rose up, she cried out.
A Phoenix of blood red fire rose up slowly into the realm. Ana had doubled in size. Her body, now all fire. Once she came even with the ledge, she hovered there.
Ink marveled at what he saw. Others like her had remained Rocks for several hundred years. A success of the mental blocks placed on her mind…the fear of fire kept them from doing what Ana just did.
She had ignited.
Ana had become reborn…as a Phoenix, the mythological bird that had not been seen in about nine hundred years. She inhaled and blew out a large stream of fire at the ledge as a whole.
Ink ignited into flames. He screamed his last and crumbled to ash…the underlings had run away.
She took on full flight.
NOW to find the SKY.
The blood red being of flame soared across the lava lake toward a seemingly black wall a league from her position. A streak of fire trailed behind her by a hundred yards.
At the wall, she pushed through it. It looked real but really wasn’t.
The Hell’s Gate Funnel allowed many to push out onto the Earth by way of the Black Tower. This will assist me too.
Her direction changed to the direction of UP. As she did, her speed grew as did a burn pattern she generated in the space.
Demons on her path way up burned.
The Phoenix Ana burned it all in the name of Freedom.
As she passed into the portion on Earth Realm, she blew it all out and skyward. The tower collapsed into a massive dimensional Maw where the tower once stood. What didn’t fall down, blew outward as she gained altitude. What got left just swirled just below the ground like a whirl pool of void energy.
She paid it no mind….
THE SKY!
The stars above shined bright.
The air so fresh and pure to her.
Vast mists of clouds about.
The moon, oh so beautiful and white.
The Phoenix called in celebration. The burning Wings of Eternal Flame carried her along.
Ana had become FREE.
A silent call gave her direction as she soared about playfully at high altitudes…
…due north she flew…uuuu
…loving the sky…she embraced it.
© 2025 – The Eternal Flame
Bill’s lawn was the shame of his neighborhood. All his neighbors’ lawns were perfect… emerald, green… smooth and not a sign of weeds. Often his neighbors going by his house would give him a hint at how bad his lawn was glorifying their own.
“Bill, have you seen how beautiful my lawn is… come over some time to sit on my porch for a cup of coffee…” his closest friend and neighbor Jon would invite Bill hoping that he will see the difference between their lawns and then asking him for his advice on how to beautify his lawn and especially how to get rid of all those ugly weeds that disturbed the nice neighborhood.
Bill knew that the conversation always would end with Jon asking him if he knew how to remove weeds and Bill would answer that he had tried many methods like hand weed… Using a hoe… that he even made homemade weed spray…. mixing two cups of table salt with one gallon of white vinegar but he had lost the war with weeds, and he didn’t know what else he could do… Since he refused to remove weeds with chemicals.
“Why not… It’s the only way ”- Jon would reply – listen to me… a good herbicide will resolve the problem.”
“What about my birds and my bees? They wouldn’t like it!” Bill would protest… he enjoyed seeing his yard visited by many different birds and busy bees frolicking over his flowers.
The critics about his lawn would never end so finally Bill was tired to feel that he was putting the neighborhood down finally succumbed…and he went to the big hardware store outside the city. There an employee helped Bill to find strong herbicide, assuring him that it would work wonders… no more weeds for a long time and advised him to use it in the evening for better results.
Bill, after hesitating for many days, decided to use the herbicide and so following the instructions sprayed his lawn’s weeds and thinking the more… the better used the entire container in one application.
The morning after, like usual, Bill woke up early to make coffee and brought a cup to his wife who loved to have her first cup of coffee in bed. It wasn’t light yet and Bill sat on the bed from his left side with his eyes still closed without looking around when he felt being scratched on his back.
“Susette… cut it out… let me go make coffee first” he mumbled.
The scratching continued so Bill threw his right hand back to stop his wife but when he felt that he wasn’t touching his wife’s hand but something strange like a stick he yelled.
“Really… Susette… now you’re being a nuisance.”…and then he turned around to grab what he thought… was a stick… Oh… that was not a stick and the creature in bed was not his wife. He jumped out of the bed landing in a corner of the bedroom… unable to talk and thinking that he was having a nightmare he rubbed his eyes but no matter how many times he rubbed his eyes… that big green thing in his bed wouldn’t disappear… no… it wasn’t a nightmare so finally Bill found a feeble strand of voice.
“Who… what are you? … what are you doing in my bed?… And where is my wife?
“I am Locusta… your mate… Susette?… she was so delicious… I was so hungry after you fed me that stuff last night.”
“I did not feed you anything… I just sprayed the weeds so you must be only a vulgar bush oversized cricket of Tettigoniidae family.”
“Not anymore… now I am a praying mantis… can you see I have a triangular head with beautiful bulging eyes and praying hands?… ‘’So’’ – she added with her squeaky voice – ‘’come to bed with me and let’s pray together!’’
“No… you monster… you are going to eat me too!” Bill cried.
Locusta shaking her flexible neck sweetly responded: “No, my mate… I want your love first.”
Bill knowing that a praying mantis is a voracious carnivore thought that the only way to save himself was to run away… he slowly tried to reach the door, but Locusta grabbed him and mounted him.
The hungry female began feeding by biting off Bill’s head and the more Bill tried to get away the more Locusta enjoyed her meal.
Jon the neighbor that had Bill convinced to use a chemical herbicide to kill the weeds on his loan looked at him doing it one evening and feeling proud of his victory the morning after he decided to go visit Bill and congratulate him.
Jon knocked on the front door repeatedly, but nobody came to open it.
“It’s Sunday – he thought -maybe they’re still in bed… I’ll be back later.”
Jon impatiently waited until eleven o’clock… then he went back to Bill’s house, sure that he and his wife would be up for lunch. He knocked again on the front door, surprised that Bill and his wife were not enjoying the day on the porch like they used to do.
“Maybe they are in the kitchen preparing or having lunch… I’ll go knock on the back door” Jon decided… but there too nobody answered.
Jon peeked in the window and when he couldn’t see anybody in the kitchen first, he got perplexed ’’Where can they be?” then he got worried ”Could be that Bill got sick spraying the chemical herbicide?”
“I better go in to check what is going on” was his second thought.
The door was locked but Jon knew that Bill kept a spare key under the welcome mat and after debating if he should use it or not, he took it and opened the door yelling “ Bill… Susette where are you?
He entered the kitchen and noticed that there was no coffee in the coffee machine that Bill usually kept full. “That is very strange “ he commented to himself and kept calling his friend with no response.
There was no sign of life on first floor… ”He must be sick… maybe he is in bed… I got to check him out ‘
Jon proceeded slowly to the second floor… he felt like an intruder, but he kept going sure that something was amiss. The bedroom door was ajar, and he knocked on it gently… “Bill… Susette … are you there? … can I come in?”
Since it was not answering Jon peeked into the room just with his head and he lost his voice. A giant insect was occupying Bill’s king size bed.
Locusta turned her flexible head around and with her squeaky voice welcomed the overweight short guy ’’Oh come… come sweet cream puff… it’s been more than five hours that I had something to eat.”
Then she looked at him with her big green begging eyes and easily grabbed him and mounted him… in a matter of seconds she had her sexy lunch.
A couple of hours later Jon’s wife started to get upset… the husband of hers when he visited a friend forgot that he had his own house and family. ”I am going over and giving him a piece of my mind! “So, she did, and Locusta had her second helping.
The rest of the neighbors noticed that Bill’s lawn had no more weeds, and they were so happy that finally their ‘nice’ neighborhood looked sharp everywhere that they decided to go visit Bill to congratulate him… and locusta had a banquet!
Being the ‘Nice’ neighborhood deprived of all its inhabitants… the houses fell into disrepair and the weeds took over with such force that the place became jungle-like.
Locusta starved, having no more mates to mount and devour… so she started to shrink until one day she metamorphosed into a vulgar bush cricket of the Tettigoniidae family. Then she jumped out of a little opening left in a window and joined all the other weed creatures.
© 2025 – Michel Croteau