On my fourteenth birthday, my father took me to a prostitute. When we left, he slapped me on the back and said, now, my son, you are a man. He didn’t ask any questions. So, I didn’t tell him how the woman failed in her attempts to excite me. How she got frustrated then angry then contemptuous. I didn’t tell him how she called me all the same things the boys at school did – the reason he brought me there in the first place, I suspect. I didn’t tell him how I begged her to stop. How I covered my ears as tears threatened to fall. How my hurt and sadness turned to anger when she went to open the door so she could go tell everyone, my father, about my…difficulty. How I jumped from the bed, grabbed her and covered her mouth with my hand to make her stop. How she bit me, so I threw her to the floor, and she hit her head. How I pounced on her, my hands around her neck, while she struggled to free herself. How, as I saw her terror, her weakness to my strength, I was able to do exactly as she'd wanted. He'd wanted. No, I didn’t tell him any of that. I just thanked him for his gift.

For centuries sailors have heard voices in the crashing of waves and the rumble of deep ocean swells. They claim the voices belonged to the ghosts of those lost at sea, reaching out to their loved ones and trying to find their way home, or to sirens, whose haunting songs beckon mariners to a watery grave. Niall had lived a lifetime on the sea and knew this to be nothing more than nonsense and superstition. After all, ghosts can’t speak, and there’s no such thing as sirens. And if you hear the voices in the waves (may God have mercy upon you) you can know they come from something far more dangerous and dreadful than monsters or men.

You don't realize how dirty you can get on an adventure until you find yourself in the thick of it. I was no stranger to dirt or sweat when I went on my own sort of adventure, but there is something about the security and constancy of home that encourages bathing and hygiene in a way that is absent out there in the wild world. Mind you, you hardly care what you smell like while running for your life, but I digress. Suffice it to say when I stumbled into a modest little motel covered in blood and all sorts, I was made keenly aware of the issue by the expression of the young man behind the counter. Before he picked his jaw up from the floor, I managed to compose myself and calmly say, "One room, one night, please."

“I loved her. Wasn’t that enough?”

I could hear his voice waver over the phone. I knew he was sorry and I could feel his grief. I should have said something to make him feel better, to assure him it wasn’t his fault because ultimately, it wasn’t. I should have been a better person. But I was broken and angry and alone.

Through gritted teeth, I choked out, “No.”

No one really knew when my baby brother started to float.

My mom swears it was the time she was feeding him peas. He had knocked them on the floor, and after going to get a paper towel to clean it up, she returned to see him floating a few inches above his highchair, giggling gleefully.

Dad says that it happened first in the middle of the night. He went to check on my brother only to find him suspended above his crib, still sleeping peacefully as he revolved in slow circles.

I remember it as the time we were playing in the sandbox. I had just built the perfect sand castle, complete with four walls and a moat that wrapped around the entire thing. All of the sudden he started to rise above the sand, bobbing and tipping until he crashed down right in the middle of my creation.

The funny thing is, none of us thought of it as odd. It was just something that he did. He couldn't float more than a few inches off of whatever surface he was on, so there was no reason to tell anyone else. They would just make a big deal about it and "whisk him away to perform experiments" as my mom always said.

This is the way it has been for the last 8 years. He couldn't really control it and it doesn't happen very often anymore so we all just kind of pushed it to the backs of our minds. But now things have changed.

It was the night before school started and I was fast asleep, dreaming of seeing all of my friends and starting my first year of middle school. All of the sudden there was an agonizing scream and I awoke to my brother pinned to the ceiling above me.

His eyes were rolled into the back of his head and he was flailing around helplessly. Saliva flew from his mouth and he was breathing in huge rattling gasps. I had never seen him float so high and I was terrified, unable to comprehend what was happening.

He screamed once more and then his eyes snapped into focus, locking onto mine.

"He has a hold of me Max", my brother breathed in a terrified whisper. "He said he has blessed me with a gift and now it is time to come and show him my gratitude."

His eyes were wide with fear and I could tell he was struggling, trying to move his arms and legs but they remained splayed out on my ceiling.

Hundreds of questions were racing through my mind but before I could ask any of them, he jerked violently to the right and slammed against my wall. We were both screaming now as he skidded across the ceiling and crashed into the other wall.

He continued to be whipped around my room, as if he was a puppet attached to terrible, invisible strings. His eyes had rolled into the back of his head again, but his screams were still coming nonstop. His shirt had torn in the back and blood streaked my ceiling.

Finally he was returned to his original position above my bed.

His breathing was ragged and his arms and legs were dangling down towards me.

I reached up to try and grab him but stopped when he opened his eyes.

"Don't let him take me" he pleaded weakly, and started to sink into the ceiling as if it was a pool of liquid. He reached out to me, but before I could do anything he was pulled fully under and disappeared from sight.

The international store was as dim as a cave, dust collecting in every worn crack and crevice, as if it were falling apart from the inside-out. The people matched, cigarette ash on calloused hands and ages of words, conflict, conflicting words, etched into their faces as heavy wrinkles. As a child, the store was a respite from the majority white town my mom and I grew up in, and I would dash through the store as my mom warned me to stay close, run my little fingers through the loose produce-- garbanzos, peanuts, green almonds. I found out that the same people I now worked alongside saw me there when I was a tottling child.

Fate. What fate is? Especially when you are meeting that person?. Life brings to our lives the idea of falling for the perfect one or better it gives us the illusion that we are falling for the right one, when the truth is that falling for someone, it does not need to be the perfect one but the relation itself makes it look like the correct one. If this is how fate works, then my story is another boring romantic kind of drama movie that happened to be written. Because what is coming to this story, is a poetic life of Romeo and Juliet only in the 21st century and without the need to die. Dive into this world and see what happens or let it be another forgetful love story. Shall we begin?

The blood dripped from my hands. My mother lay dying, and it was all my fault. My friends had always told me never to bargain with Harold, but I didn't listen. Now, I paid the price. My mother's body was limp and cold, and the light was gone from her eyes. From that day on, I knew I would get Harold back for this -- even if it killed me. And it almost did...

Cliques are everywhere, inescapable. Even in death, even in other worlds, they exist and are clearly cut. Cassandra stepped out of the stuffy shuttle after everyone else had gotten off. She’d showed up to the hub of this world and now to her exit the same way; dragging her feet, letting out breathy sighs, and rolling her eyes at anyone who dared speak to her. Once she had a clear look at the gate, she threw her head back. Through the slats, she could see everyone in their own groups. There were the clear-cut cliques with their hair almost all matching and their shirts equally as edgy as each other, and there were cliques that weren’t so clear-cut. Girls and boys mixed together, each looking drastically different. Before Cassandra’s shuttle group there stood a tall, slender woman. Her chrome skin gave her an android-type appearance. "Welcome to the afterlife."

"No! No, no, no! Change your gun to the Sidearm Pistol!" I bellowed. My brother didn't react to my advice. Not even with a twitch to show he'd heard. Alas, I couldn't blame him.

Who would take the advice from a girl from within the mirror seriously? That too, someone that claimed to be his sister. Also, did I mention he can't hear me?

I sighed.

Life within the mirror was genuinely dull.