Tara-E-H

The hinges of the door squeaked loudly as a cool gust of air blew in from the late October evening. The waning sunlight dimly illuminated the dusty sheet-covered furniture and the peeling wallpaper in the front foyer. “Wow, check out this place!” The voice echoed loudly throughout the entire house. “Hush! Do you really want us to get caught?” Small puffs of breath. All I could think about was my hunger. The dust flew in the living room as a sheet was removed from the old grand piano. “Wow, I wonder if it still plays!” Soon the discordant notes from the old, very out-of-tune piano shook the entire house. W

 Prompt: You get a phone call. You drop everything and start running. What happened? “Are you quite sure?” I had never heard my voice go quite so high before. “Yes, Miss Cullen,” said a man with a heavy Austrian accent on the other end of the phone, “your haus is not safe heah. They have the place surrounded. Hide behind the refrigerator until I retrieve you.” My hand shook on the receiver. How could they have found me? I had just started adjusting to life on the outskirts of San Francisco. I had learned to respond to my new name and had become a familiar face to my neighbors on this normally quiet block.

      “Look, this will only take ten minutes, I promise,” Sita said without removing her gaze from the dimly lit road in front of her car.     Hua shifted in the passenger’s seat. “I don’t believe you,” she pouted. “You’re probably just making up another excuse to spend the night up here in your office doing work!”     Sita pulled the car into the dark parking space and turned to her girlfriend. “Hey, you might be applying to grad schools next year. Mark my words, soon you’ll understand what I’m going through,” she said, cutting off the engine and throwing the key

     Baltimore looked different in the twenty-first century, Edgar Allan Poe thought, though not necessarily in a bad way. But despite the mystique of moving a century and a half forward in time, none of the important things had changed. People still died. People were still buried alive. And Poe still never felt like he belonged anywhere, even here in Baltimore, the city that felt most like home to him. So here he sat in the early morning hours of a Saturday, getting wasted once again. Alone in the swirling sea of people around him in the crowded bar.       “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” said a deep voice behind him as Poe felt