JULIE ANN HACKER: Street Corner

STREET CORNER

Julie Ann Hacket © 2015

Penelope’s daintily sandaled feet stood in front of the gathering crowd where Latham’s prosy cadence resounded. He cajoled the street crowds with his twinkling blue eyes and reached to touch the pretty girls’ arms at the corner of Coming Soon Avenue and Never Mind Road. Penelope’s energetic pheromones wafted through the thick southern air landing at the base of his spine. After a ceremonious spin around his tailbone, the waves erupted into a spear of shock and entered his heart. She was the one. He leaned into her aura sending orgasms through the lower half of her body. Tingles buzzed her where she’d never felt them before. And when he got near her cheek to whisper his invitation, a wisp of his freshened breath fluttered across causing the tiniest hairs of her face to stand on edge. And she thought, Wow this man smells good inside and out. He was the one; the one who could teach Penelope.

***

Penelope stood in the doorway of the room where he always did “his planning.” How special I am, she thought. How crazy it is for him to invite me here. She bent backwards to take a peek across the door’s frame. Passersby strolled in the hallway nodding their heads placating her with lazy smiles.

A hand cupped the top of her shoulder; she jumped at the presumption of the touch. A quick glance confirmed a man’s hand, strong, almost too strong against her thin collarbone. “You can call me Latham,” he said in a stiff voice.

His hand seemed to grow five inches bigger; long and thick it brushed the top of her left breast as he pushed her to the right of room. Shag carpet cushioned her feet. “And you can call me Penelope.” She sunk deeper into its thick mat sighing with relief as if she belonged.

Latham swung to the side of a table made of a dismembered tree and sat in the attached highbacked chair made from its jetted roots. He twirled his long fingers through its sprouting tendrils as he rested his arms, one on the left, one on the right. “This chair needs me for life, and I need you.” She stared at him not knowing what to say or what it meant. The top of her cheeks crinkled in wonderment. Her feet sunk deeper into the plush carpet. She pushed back thoughts of what she knew to be true and allowed herself to believe everything he did.

“Finally, I’m in,” she whispered.

Vining tendrils swirled up his chest. Latham gasped in delight. They explored his face like blind worms searching for their next meal burrowing into his hair making their way to his scalp now heavy with dirty grease. How can that be, she thought, he was so handsome outside on the corners of Coming Soon Avenue and Never Mind Road. The chair’s roots worked intelligently untangling individual strands and pulling them from the hair’s pulpy ends. The pulp was their food. Latham’s eyes went white with torturous glory as each strand was plucked. His eyeballs curiously lined with red capillaries, they followed Penelope’s body as she attempted to jump up and down and twist her body to remove her feet from the carpet. Her mouth dropped at the sight of his hair falling off and matting the floor with bloody tendrils of stringy web. The carpet wasn’t shagged. It was his hair weaved into tight, thin, dreadlocks, and the stench of his greasy scalp, and reached the tip of her nose. She pinched her nostrils attempting to breath through her mouth. Her breath labored with fear. The tree’s intelligent roots flung Latham’s hair through the air’s thickness. Some strands hung suspended as if begging permission to enter any orifice it could find willing enough to allow their entrance. She clasped her mouth forcing herself to breathe the aweful pungent smell of his desicrated scalp hair through her nose. She sacrificed it to his evil aroma. Terror pulsated through her body. With each breath she took, the sticky strands clung to her nose one by one attempting to smother her. She picked and rubbed them away only to have them sting her palms, their venom turning her lifelines bright red; her fingertips numbing with each passing second. Her feet tugged against the bloody dreadlocks with each attempt to free herself. A relentless pull on the bottom of her soles kept her from escaping. The hairs from his head, the one’s god knows all the number of, suckled her life into the floor feeding the very roots that loosened them.

She looked to Latham for answers appalled at the newly formed gluttonous body that appeared before her. And, the telltale signs of all the others he had managed to manipulate into his purgatory revealed themselves through the evil witnessing of his apparent engorgement of those who came before her. He was galumphed in the most intricate of places forming deep crevices of cellulite. Lumps of fat hung from his face. His upper legs and crotch bulged with burgeoning lustful addiction to his new desire, Penelope.

A flash of memory scratched her mind in those last moments—an old man stood in front of her pointing to the place she must go, this place, the one her grandma spoke of when Penelope was a child. “This is what you get when you don’t do enough,” Grandma said. “Death will bind you to him.” Grandma pointed to the creature transformed by rotted roots. Latham. “How did grandma know,” she asked herself? The lifelines on her hands matched the lines in the whites of Latham’s eyes. She knew they were bound together in some strange game. A game of her death. Devoured for him to live.

***

Satiated by Penelope’s enamored innocence, Latham walked outside once again. His hair returned in full glory. His skinned smoothed. The corners of his smile lifted his cheeks into welcoming plumps of rose as his new invitation reached another at the corner of Coming Soon Avenue and Never Mind Road.

GIVEAWAY

FIVE ECOPIES of Julie Ann Hacker’s THE DEAD DANCE FASTER – UNSACRED AWAKENING (book 1)!!!

To win: go to the Official FB Event Page; find the post announcing  today’s giveaway; and comment, “I WANT TO WIN” in that post and you just might!!!

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AUTHOR BIO

Julie Ann Hacker is the Author of The Dead Dance Faster - Unsacred Awakening, the first book in The Dead Dance Faster series.She honed her writing skills alongside a few good people, notably her college creative writing and literature professors. She whetted her curiosity for life and its subtleties alongside her sociology and psychology professors, not to mention through her own personal life homilies, the greatest teacher of all. Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, Julie has lived her life near the Laurel Mountains where her imagination spurned and twisted stories of intrigue, mystery and suspense. Taking an "early retirement" from non-profit and religious ministry work, Julie now fills her days writing fiction and non-fiction. When not spending her 'free time' with family and friends, she also enjoys reading, knitting, biking, running, yoga and Starbucks. And, she loves to travel when she gets the chance.

THE DEAD DANCE FASTER -
Book 1 - THE UNSACRED AWAKENING

Jael stumbles upon a misguided trip back into her horror-filled childhood where she's forced to live its spiritual horror, and family saga in her present. A quagmire of secrecy and mystery unfolds. Her mind boggles under the dense, manipulative charade of reprobate thriller religion.

She discovers the intensity of a Screaming Ego’s lure and the seductive persuasion it can wield into the thoughts of one or many. Once she steps into this spiritual realm, she can’t avoid the shrouded mind of Pastor Thomas Jude. His fundamental authority of those whom have accepted and justified their own deep and miry entanglement of religious mystery will unfold before your eyes.

A family saga filled with horror, mystery, suspense, drama, fear, diabolical wickedness, truth & love.

Screaming Ego Books - julieannhacker.com