Tuesday Town #1 Gnaw Bone

So it’s Tuesday in Gnaw Bone, tell us what you’ve found.

Here’s how it works: 

Writers:

Post your 500 words or less submission on your site.

In the comments section of this site, post a link to your submission

Readers:

Voting opens at 5pm ET today (this is a change from the original schedule) and closes at 5pm ET on Thurs

Read the submissions; follow the blogs or websites you visit, including this one.  Feel free to poke around the writers’ blogs for some other great material.

All:

Check back Friday for the announcement of the winner and the next town we will visit.

Happy Reading!

Blog Streaking with Thea and Friends

For the month of April, fellow author, Thea Atkinson is streaking through 30 blogs and flashing us a piece of fiction. I generously offered her a space today so she could expose a piece. My blog will be back to normal tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy and follow the links at the end to see who she flashed yesterday and who she will flash tomorrow. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know if you enjoyed the streak, and you are welcome to tweet it or share it on Facebook. You can also follow the chain through twitter with the hashtag #blogstreak

I am Anna

By Thea Atkinson

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com

I am Anna, and the sounds of this house whisper to me as I lie on my narrow bed in darkness. There’s no window in my bedroom to relieve my eye of wall; no moonlight streams in through clouded panes. This room is wholly blanketed in a perfume that dissipates by day but that leaks from the walls at night and rises to my nose with the stealth of a snake. It brings with it a spectral whispering that brushes over my body and makes each hair rise to its touch. From toe... to shin... to thigh... to stomach… the moaning washes over me, as if it were a blanket being pulled to my chin.

When it reaches my ears it swells to a whisper and circles my head with a ghostly life of its own, with essence, and movement, and body.

I repeat the same sentence to remind myself I am of this world and no other, that I am a solid body with a right to be here. I repeat it to block out the sounds of night in this room, to disguise the whispers, to fill in the brief silences between the guttural cries--to drive away the spirits.

I am Anna.

I scrub his floors and scour his fancy, indoor commode in return for billet, spare and cheap as it is. My employer just grunts at my efforts and scurries back into the mortuary, closing the door behind him with a deathly click. I gape and try not to look shocked at the naked bodies within.