Sycophant
by Meagan J. Meehan
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Alban Lake Publishing LLC
Dawn Daniels has always been aware of the dark force within her; a possession that is both the bane of her life and her fierce protector, Dawn must find a way to accept her reality and embrace her destiny.
Excerpt 1:
I
knew there was something seriously wrong with me before anybody else even
suspected it. At first, the signs were scarce—vague, as educated folks would
say—but by the time I was seven I’d seen the pattern and figured that all the
dark stuff in life was my doing. Not on purpose, mind you, I didn’t ever harm
nobody on purpose until I was well into my twenties, but I’ve been a one-woman
wrecking ball since I was a baby. It wasn’t my fault; it was my momma’s will
for her baby girl.
Excerpt 2:
When
I was little, everything seemed okay because no one noticed the pattern for
years. My life with gramma was stable and loving and pleasant. We were happy,
so while we registered the misfortunes that continuously took place all around
us, we suspected nothing—hell, for all I know, gramma never did. But I wised up
right quick.
It started out slowly,
unassumingly. First, my gramma's friends started dying off. Heart attacks,
strokes, aneurysms; some were fatal and others were merely damaging, but all
were very sudden and severe. Granted, most of my gramma’s friends were around
her age or older and most people chalked it up to midlife health issues; such
things are to be expected, especially in poor coal country. But then Lena
Harker—the mailman's wife—took ill with cancer and wasted away before
everybody's eyes. She was barely thirty. Chris, the aforementioned mailman, was
never the same after that; he quit his job and spent the last years of his life
drinking himself to death. Two weeks later, gramma’s neighbor’s—a jolly couple
called the Parkers—three-year-old granddaughter tripped down the front porch
steps and snapped her neck; she was dead before she hit the ground. Two months
later, her mother—the Parkers’ only child—drowned herself. Some said it was an
accident, others speculated suicide. Either way, grief was the
culprit. The Parkers were never jolly again.
All throughout my
formative years friends, neighbors, and acquaintances had illnesses, had
accidents, went broke, went crazy, went missing—oddly, no one thought any of it
was strange. It seemed to be just a series of sad happenings over the courses
of several lives. That was possible, reasonable even. After all, I was just a
baby back then. Who would have connected the dots and realized that all the
blighted individuals had been in my direct vicinity right before disaster
struck?
Meagan J. Meehan is a published author, poet, cartoonist, and produced playwright. She pens columns for the Great South Bay Magazine, Blasting News, KidskinthaBlog, and Entertainment Vine. She is also a stop-motion animator and an award-winning abstract artist. Meagan holds a Bachelors in English Literature, a Masters in Communication, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Psychology. She is an animal advocate and a fledgling toy, game, and shoe designer.
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