She's twelve years old and she's desperately in love with the fourteen year-old boy who lives next door. He knows her as his best friend, but he's too preoccupied with this own travails to return her affection. After all, since his mother went missing three years previously, his father has become more violent and abusive with each passing day. Dorry longs to save her young love interest, but she feels powerless to do so. Young Dorry loves the fourteen year-old boy next door, but his abusive father is an endless distraction. She'll do anything to save her lover. An insightful short story.

Like an onion, his plan for her conquest is multi-layered and complex. First, he must educate himself, then he must use that education to accumulate wealth. Finally, he must find a way to enter into her life as an equal. In the meantime, however, he can always jog alongside her in the park, just another stranger on the trail. He loved her from first sight and determined to have her, despite his poverty and her wealth. Fortunately, he is a very clever young man.

A fleeting shadow skirting the storm-swept shoulder of an isolated country highway, she hitchhikes along the loneliest stretch of pavement in the most deserted hollows of the countryside. When the downpour presses, he insists on giving her a ride, despite her demurs. It will be the most fateful companionship he will ever know. Two people meet on a dark and lonely highway, one is dead and the other alive. For now.

He is Hate Equinox. She is Loathing Solstice. He is dark of eye and complexion, while she has ivory skin, white hair and a diamond blue gaze. Though they both come from the same community of pagans, they are polar opposites. Growing up together in public schools, each strives to outdo the other, but neither manages to successfully dominate. In time, they graduate high school and then attend different universities, enjoying a parting of ways. Many years later, however, their fates converge and the sparks fly. Given the conspiracy of proper circumstance and much time, mortal enemies may...

He's tall, lanky, flabby and sloppy, and his taste for women is low and vulgar. Bernie has one thing going for him, however, for he is prodigiously endowed as a man and he has a thing for ugly women. They dote and fawn over him and Bernie wallows in it all, much to the disgust and morbid curiosity of his co-workers, who have labeled his penchant for love's baser side -Bernie's Thing-. Nobody knows how he does it, but all concede Bernie's success when, once every month, he arrives late at work with a new and noxious female companion hanging from his arm. Many women will say -size doesn't...

He is the scourge of the night, every bachelorette's worst nightmare. He has already killed many single young ladies, and he will certainly kill again. Tonight, he lingers outside the house of his next intended victim. Watching. Waiting. When he sees her climb the stairs to her bedroom, he knows her time has come. Demonstrating expert skill and terrible discipline, he steals into her home to rouse her from her dreams. This victim will not go as easily as all the rest, however, much to his sinister delight. Every matchmaker claims there is someone for everyone. This old adage is never truer...

The Korengal Valley of Afghanistan was one of the most dangerous places in the world during 2008. There on a daily basis, brave Americans confronted the grim realities of a determined guerilla resistance, as they opposed an all but invisible enemy exercising a ruthless determination to achieve their objectives at all costs and without heed to civilized rules of war. Using improvised explosive devices and ambush tactics, the stubborn jihadists of the region worked fanatically to sap the American will to fight by bleeding its forward forces white via use of the most brutal weapons on hand....