shalanna

Rain pounded on the tin roof as the castle's owner struggled against his captors, but to no avail. Thumping and crackling, thunder and lightning shot across the sky as they dragged him inside the dungeon. Soon he found himself in an ornate metal cage hanging off a stake welded into the stone wall.

A farmer shook a pitchfork as the cage's door clanged shut. Children surrounded his knees, shouting, "Sorciere! Sorciere!" and "Kill the witch!"

"The church wants this property," he gasped out in disbelief. "They simply want me done away with. I'm no witch!"

"Your wife bounced when we threw her in the pond! She floated like a duck!" His face brightened. "That's how we knew she was a witch! They're readying for the burning now!" His face fell and he gripped the bars in panic as the children surged out, presumably to see the exciting fireworks show.
# # #
"It's not exactly that we're READY for this." Jorge figeted with his paper napkin. "It's just that we're running out of time, and if we don't do it soon, we'll never bother with it."
"I don't believe in that." Jill crossed her arms. "You ought to think for yourself and decide whether something's really the right thing to do and worth doing, not just say, well, we should do this because somebody expects we will, and we're running out of time."
Frannie pushed her shake away. "It's more like y'all're just bored. Besides, I actually liked the squid. He was really friendly."
The explosion ended their conversation with a bang.
# # #
*shudder* Awful, ain't they? Well, at least I didn't try to dramatize the bad dream from the other night about how the mentally disabled/developmentally delayed are being trained to handle the dead because "it won't bother them--they won't know what's happening" or the one about the submarine in the toilet.

And I'm not even TAKING the pain pills.