Excerpt from Prom Nights from Hell...

The music is pounding in time to my heartbeat.  I can feel the bass in my chest—badoom, badoom.  It’s hard to see across the room of writhing bodies, especially with the fog from the dry ice, and the flickering light show coming down from the club’s industrial ceiling overhead.

But I know he’s here.  I can feel him. 

Which is why I’m grateful for the bodies grinding against one another all around me.  They’re keeping me hidden from his view—and from his senses.  Otherwise he’d have smelled me by now.  They can detect the scent of fear from yards away.

Excerpt from Tasting the Sky...

My brothers were ready.  They held each other’s hands tightly.  Mother had secured my baby sister between her arms.  My father strained to see the road from behind the mound of clothes and blankets he carried.  But in spite of my desperate attempts to obey my parents’ commands, my three-and-a-half-year-old hands were unable to lace up the one shoe I had put on.  My right foot was still shoeless.

“Yamma, Yaba!  Help me!”  I cried in a hushed voice, lest I attract attention and we all die.  But no one answered.

At that moment, a new wave of fleeing villagers rushed by.  As they disappeared, everything faded into stillness.  And my family was gone. 

Excerpt from Born to Rock...

For some reason I was incapable of standing up to the girl.  I definitely wasn’t attracted to her.  She wasn’t exactly my type, with the black clothes, black hair, black lipstick, black nail polish, and black tattoo.  The only thing that wasn’t black was the nose ring (gold).  Not only did she adore punk bands with names like Purge and Sphincter 8, but she had to look like them too.

Don’t get me wrong.  On the weirdness scale at our high school, she was no more than a seven.  But Melinda wasn’t the girl next door, unless you lived at 1311 Mockingbird Lane, and your neighbors were the Munsters.