My pencil flew across the paper. It bounced and danced as it depicted details of a fantasy world.
My wrist ached, but though it tried, it couldn't convince me to stop writing. I was in the zone.
"Just a few lines more…" I told myself, but then a few lines later I whispered,
"Just a few lines more…" and I knew I wasn't going anywhere.

(Author's Note: I don't write many short stories, but my local writing group had a prompt for the first line of a story, and I took it and used it, along with a germ of an idea taken from an Andrew Peterson song, Coral Castle,"'I don't need her love to love her all I can." I love the way it turned out, one of the few shorts I'm actually proud of. Enjoy! ~Kay)

*

Once upon a time there was a brick. This brick wasn't like other bricks, this brick was special. He was the eighty-first brick on a long road that everybody traveled on. He'd been stepped on by so many people he couldn't even count. This brick felt important. He made it easy for other people to travel. Horses and carts relied on him to get them where they were going. One day however, this brick was tired of just being walked on. He looked at another brick across the street, the brick he was looking at was fourth brick on the third row of a building.

Scarlet frantically rushed around the battle field. "Gaelen!?" She cried into the darkness, no response. "Gaelen!?" She called again. It had been three hours, three lonely, awful hours. The sun was just barely under the horizon, filling the field with an eerie, blue light.  "Gaelen!" Scarlet sobbed "Dear God, please don't let him be dead!" She whispered between tears. She looked around her feet. Hundreds of bodies lay everywhere and the blood flowed like a stream.

He was never late, ever. Every Saturday at precisely two o’clock we met without fail. But today, on the very day that I needed him, he was sixteen minutes late. Sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds to be exact.

I slumped a little in the booth, then straightened and began typing in a nearly empty document.

Twenty-three year-old Tiana Black waited patiently—

I hit the backspace button, deleting the last word.

(A writing exercise that had to use all the words in the title)
“Teacher, are you there?” Isabel whispered, tapping the rough tree trunk.
An eye blinked open and swiveled down at her. “Is it summer already?”
Isabel grinned and nodded. “It makes you thirsty. You really want a drink.”
The knothole of wood that was her teacher’s mouth shifted up at the corners. “My roots are deep enough for that. You just want me to make it rain.”

{This will be my last post on ApricotPie until after the summer. I may drop in from time to time during the summer and read and comment, but I want to be as 'unplugged' as possible. This story, "Deep Roots" is one of my favorite short stories, along with "In My Father's House" and "Nikolai." Short stories in general I tend to like better than my long ones. So without further ado, see you after the summer, and enjoy!}

A tall Zambian man showed me a handful of dirt, dead leaves, and broken roots. “The roots are so deep, we cannot pull them out.” He said.

Aw. Thanks for picking A Mysterious Jar, friends. :) ~Anna

No one ever caught Liam reading, not really. He would take a book under his arm, sit in the rocking chair in the living room, and fall asleep with it. When he woke up, he seemed to know everything about it.