Fullfulling My Needs

[Ezekla]

What I'm Okay With - Black
What I'm Craving - Green

WHAT I NEED: A minimum of 300 word posts, correct grammar (spelling, punctuation, sentence structure), a definitive story or plot line. These are non-negotiable.

Basically, any of these are general one-on-one themes. I prefer to actually plot-line with my partner. So if any of these sound like something interesting and you can CONTRIBUTE to the plot. Let me know!

Historical Romance
Alternate History Romance
Master/Slave
Barbarian/Warrior Woman TAKEN
Gladiator/Slave
Were-Something/Human TAKEN

Possible Small Group, or One-On-One-On-NPC :D
Modern Day Slave Underground Ring UNDER DISCUSSION

Story Ideas

Make Me Proud

In a world where kingdoms abound and everyone is forging alliances or making war, a King of the mountain lands is attacked in his home. His young son is killed, and as the King lays on his death bed, he demands that his daughter take the place of her brother. Her hair is cut, and she is dressed in her twin brother's clothing. No one, but her father's right hand man, knows the switch has been done, and the kingdom buries its King and Princess.

Now, every other kingdom sees the weakened mountain lands being held by a young boy, and rushes to send their daughters to the court. Whoever can get their daughter married off to the young King, is sure to rule the lands.

He's the bastard son of a nobody island king, but finally, his father has given him an important job. And he doesn't want it. Escort his youngest sister to the mountain lands to woo the new king. See her married, or don't come home. Should be no problem, except when he meets the new king he finds an instant friend. Even more so, why is he attracted to the young boy?

Pandora

The Inspiration Behind It

ANGELSPIT - Wreak Havoc (lyrics) Wreak Havoc by Angelspit

The ruler of Hell had created the 'box' in the beginning. And as time has a tendency to do, he received numerous names and titles, the same as the box. However, he was unable to ever discover a way to get the box to Earth. Since he: Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, and the Prince of Lies could not openly take part in the happenings of Earth, he finally entrusted a human woman with the box. She willingly made the deal and the woman so famed now as Pandora was given possession of Hell's treasures.

The myths and stories that flew around this average, mortal woman were colorful and delightful at best, though far from the truth. She wasn't a guardian for the spirits of Hell...she was the box itself. The first demons, Lucifer's own children, were housed inside of her. To make matters worse, it wasn't for their protection, or even the protection of the human race. They were placed inside her with the intention that Lucifer would be capable of using her to instill acts of chaos, violence, war, and pain throughout the world.

When the times would come and he would call on his children to act, Pandora would lose any sense of herself as the beings who laid dormant inside her (for the most part) took over. She would awake to a scene of destruction, the cause her very own hands. She didn't last long this way, before completely losing her mind and throwing herself off a cliff face. Little did she know that her 'responsibility' would be passed along immediately to her young daughter...and her daughter after her...and her daughter after her...and so on.

Now, it's 2015 and Phoebe has made a home out of the small cell that has been her very own since she was thirteen and her father had been called by the police. She had been found in a back alley where a drive-by shooting had taken place, killing six people and wounding three others. He'd ended up taking her to the same institution that had housed her own mother for the last years of her life.

No one believed her about what happened. She rarely spoke anymore, and when she did it was most always the same thing, "The Devil made me do it."

**I am looking for a male character to play either her psychiatrist or an exorcist. I'm open to ideas on where this can go and have a few of my own if you are interested.**

The Before

The year is 2045 and man has made some amazing discoveries. In 2015 a new planet appeared, or at least what man thought was a new planet. It seemed to come out of nowhere. NASA was quick to send up a space shuttle, only to discover that this new 'planet' was really a large ship. The ship was inhabited by an entire race of people, what mankind mistakenly considered barbarians. They were rough around the edges, seemed uneducated. They still relied on medieval methods of construction and farming. So men from Earth brought some of these aliens home. They sought to teach them, only to find out that the people they'd found were in fact much more advanced than they had seemed.

These people, in the course of a year, had completely invaded the Earth. They had mechanisms to destroy electric systems and shoved mankind back into a later age. Over the next decade, mankind learned to coincide in some sort of compromise with the alien race. However, the peoples of Earth had one things they did not...they had women. As the stronger of the two races, they simply took the women they wanted to repopulate their own dying race. The people of Earth protected their women as best they could. They hid their daughters in cellars and attics. They dressed them as boys. They married them off at young ages.

The following are journal entries from the female lead. I will still be looking for a partner. I'd consider playing either the female, or the male 'barbarian'. There are many ways this story could go and I'm up for discussing it.

Journal Entries

October 30, 2045
I turned twenty today, and have filled three of these little blank books with my meaningless words and drawings. It’s 10:00 am. I know it, because the sun is shining at just the right angle to slip through the cracks in the boards and let a little light slip in. Mya is up and dancing in the rays, absorbing every drop of sunlight. Her tiny fingers are outstretched to catch the shifting dust motes, and I have about an hour and a half to write before the darkness comes back.
I can count on one hand the number of times, in twenty years, I have been outdoors. The memories of it flood me and I scribble the grass and the trees as best as I can remember. The black and white sketches capture the fading, dusty visions.
I wait for my family to come in from the fields. My brothers may come down, mud streaking their cheeks and dirt under their nails. They’ll stay in the darkness with us for a while and complain about the heat of the sun, the hard, tough soil, the rain and the wind.
Not that I don’t enjoy the moments of conversation with them. Conversation I can’t quite achieve with little Mya. Still, I wait for my mother. She’ll be down soon after the boys, warm food in her hands and a lantern slung around her wrist. The soft light brings everything into a sharper focus, and Mya’s red hair shows a dull shine. For a bit of water and soap, a handful more sunshine, and it would glimmer and glow like a flame. Mother says my hair is the same, but I don’t know.
I’m twenty today, and I’ve never looked in a mirror. I’ve never seen my red hair, or my porcelain white skin in a mirror’s reflection. I’ve never seen the color of my eyes, or what my smile looks like.
I wait for my mother to come down to us. She’ll eat with us and tell us stories. Not tales of the field or the hard work that leaves her bent like a cane. No, her stories are of the before. Before men, and their superior thinking took on the cosmos in search of other life. Before they found it and brought it home with them. Before the war, and destruction. Before girls were hidden in cellars. Before the dark.

November 3, 2045
I haven’t written for a few days. Mother has me teaching Mya to read and write. We practice her letters on scraps of paper, and I draw pictures with words beneath them. Mya has little interest in any of this, and even when I try to make it a game, she would rather me just tell her the stories.
Oh those stories. I don’t have any of my own, so I take them from mother, and tell them again and again to Mya. She’s heard them since she was born, and still, she isn’t bored by them. It would amaze me I suppose if I didn’t feel the same way.
I told her today about the space ship. I told her how it took off in a fiery blast to outer space, with a handful of men aboard. They were on a mission to check out a new planet, one never seen before. It was almost as if this huge place had just appeared out of thin air. I told her how the ship landed there, and found out it wasn’t a planet, but in fact, was a much, much larger ship than our own. I told her about the men they met there, and how they called them “barbarians”.
Oh of course Mya asked the same question she always does. “What are barbarians?”
I still don’t know how to answer her. I could tell her we thought they were uneducated, ignorant, almost-human-like people. I could tell her we brought them back here to teach them, educate them, make them more like us. I could tell her we completely underestimated them.
None of those make a good end to the story, so I ignore her until she gets fed up asking and moves on to her pillow pile in the corner with her dolls and bears and other such stuffy creatures.

November 4, 2045
I remember hearing footsteps bang across the floor. It was the middle of the day, not long after the sun had passed by its point of allowing us some light. So, I shouldn’t have heard steps, nevertheless, running steps. The cellar door creaked open and in the flash of light I could barely see the outline of my brother’s head.
He whispered in between gasping in great lung-fulls of air. We were to be silent, there was company.
With his message delivered the door slipped back into place. I knew from up there, the kitchen, the door was invisible. A rug covered most of it, but the rest looked just like the slats of wood that made up the rest of the floor. No one coming in would just spot it and say, “A-ha, so that is where you are hiding them!” No, the issue lay with Mya.
Keeping myself quiet was no big issue, but keeping a bouncing five year old silent is another story all together. Especially, when I had no idea how long I would have to keep her quiet for. So I told her it was time for our quiet game, and we cuddled on her pillow pile and pretended to be princesses hiding from the evil dragon.
Heavy boots clomped across the kitchen floor, making dust sift down onto us.
The dragon was at the door to its cave, and we were hiding in the back of it.
I heard chairs scrape as they were pulled out and weight shift on them as people sat down. Glasses clinked and my mother’s voice could be heard as a soft hum of noise.
Smoke curled through the cave as the heavy breathing of the dragon blew past us, and we sat there silently, waiting for it to pass by.
It seemed forever that we were there, and I was thankful that in waiting for the “dragon” to leave, Mya had fallen asleep. I didn’t dare move, and my arm was asleep under her. My own eyes closed and I fought to keep them open until at last the room above us emptied and my mother slipped down into our “cave”.
She told us it was safe again, and when I asked her who it was she ignored me. “They asked a lot of questions, but it’s fine. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.” That’s what she said. Fine. Three times fine. Everything’s fine, and so she was back out the door and I suppose out to the fields while I sat in the dark and thought about my mother’s lies.

November 6, 2045
There are soldiers in our home. Their tents are in our fields. Their boots stomp across the floor above us and send down showers of dirt and dust. I am forced to keep quiet at all times, to keep Mya quiet as well.
A scrap of paper fell through the crack in the floor yesterday and I had to wait until this morning to read it. My mother says she will get us food and water as soon as she can. Our stomachs growl and protest and Mya is restless. Hell, I’m restless.
I hear the rumbling voices of the men above me, in a language I wouldn’t understand even if there were not thick wooden boards between us.
We have enough water left for tomorrow at least, but it is stale and dusty. I’ve covered the bucket with a blanket, but it was probably too late. The bottom of the bucket is surely nothing but mud now.
I can’t drink mud. Neither can Mya.

November 7, 2045
There are no more notes from my mother. No food, no water. Mya spiked a fever last evening and she still lays there tossing and turning in her pillow pile. I cover her mouth with my hand when she moans or cries out, her fevered dreams tormenting her. I have given her the last of the good water, and used the undrinkable to keep her cool.
I wish my mother were here. I don’t know what to do.

November 8, 2045
The men are still here and Mya is worse. I keep watching the stairs and thinking that all I need to do is walk up there and get my mother. Mother can help. She’ll know how to make Mya better.
I have to make a decision, and I’m not good at decisions. I don’t know what I’m about to do.

Operation: To the Teeth

America has been invaded. Take a moment to understand what that means. The big dog, the country with an unrealistically huge ego, has been invaded. The government has fallen. Men of all ages have gone off to the South to fight. The dollar has no value. There are no laws, no rules, and everyone is fending for themselves in a race to the border of Canada (a neutral country in this fight).

This has the potential to be a multiplayer thread, but could possibly work with maybe two committed players.

Operation: To the Teeth

The sun is setting on the century and we are armed to the teeth. The lyrics of Ani DiFranco’s gritty music filled my head, setting the theme song for the backdrop that I was coming to know so well. There’s an order to things. A specific set of gradual occurrences that succeed tragedy, grief, destruction, invasion. Yes, it had been an invasion, as difficult as that may be to believe. That was the first occurrence: the doubt.
   We didn’t feel the ground shaking, hear the pat-pat-pat of machine gun fire, or see the rolling tracks of tanks rip the ground to shreds beneath their tread. I was washing dishes at the sink, staring out the small window that overlooked my backyard, a swing-set, the cornfield. My children were playing in the sandbox outside, performing acts of God and moving mountains with little effort or thought to the consequences. My husband was watching TV.
   That’s how we knew it. The electric flashed and the TV shut off. That in itself wasn’t much to be concerned about. Two birds could sit on a wire and knock our electric out. The flash only lasted long enough to knock the dish out briefly and then the TV was back and blaring. A long steady beep screamed from the speakers and I waited for the words, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.” Instead, I heard a mechanical voice telling us, the people, to hold for the President of the United States.
   The video feed was not from the Oval Office. There was no comfy leather chair, no stars and stripes to fill the background. There was our President, worry and anger battling for the right to carve lines in his face, to spread from his thin pressed lips and to spiral out from his wide-set eyes.
   Doubt always comes first. No one believes it. The ego kicks in and the first thought is always, “Who would dare?” “Who would do this?” “Why would they want to?” All those questions are followed by the immediate reaction of, “We’ll be fine.” “They’ll call in the military.” “No one can beat us in a fight.”
   This is by far the longest part of the entire affair. The season of doubt washes across the country like a second-coming of the black plague. It eats everyone alive, but takes forever to go away. In its wake, we were left with anger, hatred, and fuel for a fight. The men disappeared. One by one they went off, recruited by their country or simply egging for a fight. Who knew? Who cared? We needed them and they went.
   And now we’re here, and those gradual occurrences are coming at a faster rate. See, once the doubt is gone, once the men have run off to defend their egos, their families, their possessions, their homes, their freedom…everything else falls into place very quickly.
   We’re tossed back into a medieval society, with no electric, no running water, no heat. Our money becomes far more useful as kindling for a fire, or toilet paper. It’s a barter and trade society again and it’s like we’ve been thrown back, back, back. I’ve got the best commodity around. Everyone can take it, but it can’t be stolen. It’s like my own, personal Sphinx riddle and it is a tragedy of its own that my daughter carries the same currency.
   Every right women ever fought for is gone. There is no one there to protect them, and so they are victims and protectors all at once. They become prey even as they provide. So we learn our purpose again:
   The men come in broken and we heal them.
   The men come in broken and we feed them.
   The men come in broken and we lie down, spread out legs, and let them break us.
Yes, women have found their place again, but at least we found a system of money that works. So we lose a piece of our soul, but our children are fed. They need to be strong for this world we’re making, breaking.
   I should have done as the others. I should have skirted the cities on my way North. The North has become a beacon of safety, a haven for the lost. I wonder if they’ll have closed the gates by the time we get there. I’ve never seen Niagara. I’ve never seen much of anything. My tiny life in my tiny, rural town was all I had ever known. Finally, after years of staring at the pages of travel magazines, I had the opportunity to see the world around me.
Regardless, I was foolish, but I wanted to see it. I had a postcard shoved in my pocket. I’d grown up surrounded by fields of corn and soybean, by deep rooted forests and gravel drives. I wanted to see buildings that touched the sky, that reached their sturdy fingers up to stroke the underside of the clouds.
   I remember pulling the postcard out and staring at it as we approached. I must have been around the same distance as the person who shot the original photograph. None of it was there. Rockefeller, Chrysler, Trump, Empire. They were all gone. I looked at the crease that was a white bolt of lightning through the middle of my postcard. It touched the top of the World Trade Center and drove right through the middle of the towers. Those had been gone long before today, another tragedy from another time. It seemed a million years ago.
   The purple mountains majesty was blocked by billowing columns of smoke and ash. There were no amber waves of grain, only the charred remains left behind by a foreign army. We never saw it coming and from sea to shining sea lay the remains of capitalism, democracy, America the beautiful.
   I feel a weight shift and briefly, for a moment, I can breathe again. Then there is another weight, and the hair is prickly and sharp as it rubs against my chest. He’s wider and my thighs are crushed down against the cold concrete of a dilapidated Macy’s store. Sweat is beading on his chin and dripping down onto my forehead like some sort of Chinese water torture and I’m floating away again. I’m lying here while men I don’t know are pumping away inside me, pouring their anger, disgust, and hate into me, using me for a moment to feel like maybe they’re in control again. They’re not, and perhaps because I know it, and they know I know it, they push harder and harder every time.
   I have no idea where my husband is. The only men I see are my own countrymen, running and fleeing to the North as quickly as we are. I don’t even know where my President is, or if he even is anymore. I know that I have three more to go before I get a loaf of bread. I know yesterday I earned a scoop of peanut butter that someone had shoved into little baggies. It’s the new drug deal of our century and I keep it shoved inside my bra for safety. I know that tonight my children will eat well and I only have three more to go, or two now. I think this one is done.
   Ani’s words drift through my head and I hear another girl crying nearby. Her tears form the melody to the tune and when a hand smashes my face to the side, holding me to the floor, I sing, “We’re all working together now…to make our lives mercifully brief…”

Loss of Faith

UNDER DISCUSSION

It's a modern day Job (we're talking Biblical Job here). This man/woman (character can be played as either, but I'll refer to him as a man for now) has been blessed beyond compare. He's not highly religious, but he believes that God helps guide him quite a bit. That doesn't mean he's a Bible thumper, or a in-the-pew-every-Sunday kinda guy, but he believes.

He's got a beautiful house, a prosperous job, an amazing wife, young, beautiful children. He's healthy as an ox and he's the kind of guy that everyone loves to be around.

But the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and once again God and Lucifer find themselves arguing over mankind's fate. Lucifer is convinced that without the abundance of blessings placed on what he refers to as God's "favorites", those people wouldn't follow God either. So our modern day Job is picked for the test. God gives free reign to Lucifer, with the exception that his angels are allowed to work on his behalf as well.

*****

Both "teams" will be vying for control of this man, but are unable to actually influence his behavior. I want to play this as a "choose your own ending" kind-of story.

The character can be male or female.

At the end of each post by me I will pose two options. One option will be from Lucifer, the other from God. The player will not know which option comes from which side. The choice they make will decide the outcome and what happens to their character. How the character chooses to deal with the consequences of their choices is completely up to them.

What Hurts the Most

The Inspiration Behind It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qH4qyi1-Ys

A young girl struggles after the loss of her first love...that is until she discovers a way to go back in time and change the events. Will death let go of him that easily though?

***

I'm imagining the girl going back, changing events that led to his death, only to have further events play out and him die again. The process would continue to repeat itself, again and again, until they possibly figured a way out of it. He would have no memory of his death, yet she would remember it all.

I'm leaving this pretty open, because I'd like to really develop the idea with a partner.

Killing Me Softly

She never knew what her father did for a living...until he died. Next thing she knew, four mercenaries had moved into her home in the country, and whether she liked it or not, they were there to stay.

What she doesn't know is that her father wasn't killed, but was taken hostage in Africa. He had told his men that they were to protect his daughter, should anything ever happen to him. He wasn't counting on them falling for her, one-by-one.

The Silent Siren

"Without your voice, no man would ever want you," Aphrodite sneered, her lips twisting up into a smile.

Elene held a hand to her chest and put on her most innocent smile. "My dear Aphrodite, with or without my voice...I would still wanted more than you."

Aphrodite in her anger took Elene's words as the challenge they were, and striped the voice from the siren. "You have three days...Three days to win the heart of a man." She paused, spinning the bright light of the siren's voice in her hand. "After that, you forfeit your voice...to me."

Turning on her heel, Aphrodite left Elene sitting there on the shoreline. She turned once, calling over her shoulder. "And by the way...you're mortal now...my dear."

Our New Daughter

Over two years ago she was kidnapped off the street and no one had heard from her since. Finally, years later a large slave ring is exposed, one that has gathered girls from all over the world. The girls have gone through extensive training, have been tortured and raped, have gone through extensive plastic surgery to make them "perfect" women...and some have been trained to fight. Those that reached that last level of training, the fighting, have been blinded, to enhance their focus on all of their other senses.

After the slave ring was broken, the girls were taken to a large hospital in America. Here, doctors are working to treat the girls, find their families, and get them home. Some of the girls are highly drugged and therefore are no where near ready for release yet. Her parents are found and contacted and the first time they see their daughter is through a set of two-way glass windows. She's like a brand new person...a new daughter.

[Ezekla]

Potential Group RPs

Modern Day Fantasy

They've always been there, these fantasy creatures from our little tales, our horror flicks. Somewhere in the backdrop of our world, they slide quietly through, unnoticed. It's in the code, really. They can't stand out, or draw attention to themselves. This doesn't make them any less real though.

However, someone has discovered their existence...and this someone is kidnapping immortals of all different races. Will the clans be able to work together to find their lost brothers and sisters?

*****

Please respond in this thread if you are interested. I have a pretty definite plot in mind that would allow for most any kind of fantasy species (vampire, were, siren, phoenix, elf, dragon, mage, witch, angel, demon, etc etc etc).

Operation: To the Teeth

Operation: To the Teeth

America has been invaded. Take a moment to understand what that means. The big dog, the country with an unrealistically huge ego, has been invaded. The government has fallen. Men of all ages have gone off to the South to fight. The dollar has no value. There are no laws, no rules, and everyone is fending for themselves in a race to the border of Canada (a neutral country in this fight).

This has the potential to be a multiplayer thread, but could possibly work with maybe two committed players.

Operation: To the Teeth

The sun is setting on the century and we are armed to the teeth. The lyrics of Ani DiFranco’s gritty music filled my head, setting the theme song for the backdrop that I was coming to know so well. There’s an order to things. A specific set of gradual occurrences that succeed tragedy, grief, destruction, invasion. Yes, it had been an invasion, as difficult as that may be to believe. That was the first occurrence: the doubt.
   We didn’t feel the ground shaking, hear the pat-pat-pat of machine gun fire, or see the rolling tracks of tanks rip the ground to shreds beneath their tread. I was washing dishes at the sink, staring out the small window that overlooked my backyard, a swing-set, the cornfield. My children were playing in the sandbox outside, performing acts of God and moving mountains with little effort or thought to the consequences. My husband was watching TV.
   That’s how we knew it. The electric flashed and the TV shut off. That in itself wasn’t much to be concerned about. Two birds could sit on a wire and knock our electric out. The flash only lasted long enough to knock the dish out briefly and then the TV was back and blaring. A long steady beep screamed from the speakers and I waited for the words, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.” Instead, I heard a mechanical voice telling us, the people, to hold for the President of the United States.
   The video feed was not from the Oval Office. There was no comfy leather chair, no stars and stripes to fill the background. There was our President, worry and anger battling for the right to carve lines in his face, to spread from his thin pressed lips and to spiral out from his wide-set eyes.
   Doubt always comes first. No one believes it. The ego kicks in and the first thought is always, “Who would dare?” “Who would do this?” “Why would they want to?” All those questions are followed by the immediate reaction of, “We’ll be fine.” “They’ll call in the military.” “No one can beat us in a fight.”
   This is by far the longest part of the entire affair. The season of doubt washes across the country like a second-coming of the black plague. It eats everyone alive, but takes forever to go away. In its wake, we were left with anger, hatred, and fuel for a fight. The men disappeared. One by one they went off, recruited by their country or simply egging for a fight. Who knew? Who cared? We needed them and they went.
   And now we’re here, and those gradual occurrences are coming at a faster rate. See, once the doubt is gone, once the men have run off to defend their egos, their families, their possessions, their homes, their freedom…everything else falls into place very quickly.
   We’re tossed back into a medieval society, with no electric, no running water, no heat. Our money becomes far more useful as kindling for a fire, or toilet paper. It’s a barter and trade society again and it’s like we’ve been thrown back, back, back. I’ve got the best commodity around. Everyone can take it, but it can’t be stolen. It’s like my own, personal Sphinx riddle and it is a tragedy of its own that my daughter carries the same currency.
   Every right women ever fought for is gone. There is no one there to protect them, and so they are victims and protectors all at once. They become prey even as they provide. So we learn our purpose again:
   The men come in broken and we heal them.
   The men come in broken and we feed them.
   The men come in broken and we lie down, spread out legs, and let them break us.
Yes, women have found their place again, but at least we found a system of money that works. So we lose a piece of our soul, but our children are fed. They need to be strong for this world we’re making, breaking.
   I should have done as the others. I should have skirted the cities on my way North. The North has become a beacon of safety, a haven for the lost. I wonder if they’ll have closed the gates by the time we get there. I’ve never seen Niagara. I’ve never seen much of anything. My tiny life in my tiny, rural town was all I had ever known. Finally, after years of staring at the pages of travel magazines, I had the opportunity to see the world around me.
Regardless, I was foolish, but I wanted to see it. I had a postcard shoved in my pocket. I’d grown up surrounded by fields of corn and soybean, by deep rooted forests and gravel drives. I wanted to see buildings that touched the sky, that reached their sturdy fingers up to stroke the underside of the clouds.
   I remember pulling the postcard out and staring at it as we approached. I must have been around the same distance as the person who shot the original photograph. None of it was there. Rockefeller, Chrysler, Trump, Empire. They were all gone. I looked at the crease that was a white bolt of lightning through the middle of my postcard. It touched the top of the World Trade Center and drove right through the middle of the towers. Those had been gone long before today, another tragedy from another time. It seemed a million years ago.
   The purple mountains majesty was blocked by billowing columns of smoke and ash. There were no amber waves of grain, only the charred remains left behind by a foreign army. We never saw it coming and from sea to shining sea lay the remains of capitalism, democracy, America the beautiful.
   I feel a weight shift and briefly, for a moment, I can breathe again. Then there is another weight, and the hair is prickly and sharp as it rubs against my chest. He’s wider and my thighs are crushed down against the cold concrete of a dilapidated Macy’s store. Sweat is beading on his chin and dripping down onto my forehead like some sort of Chinese water torture and I’m floating away again. I’m lying here while men I don’t know are pumping away inside me, pouring their anger, disgust, and hate into me, using me for a moment to feel like maybe they’re in control again. They’re not, and perhaps because I know it, and they know I know it, they push harder and harder every time.
   I have no idea where my husband is. The only men I see are my own countrymen, running and fleeing to the North as quickly as we are. I don’t even know where my President is, or if he even is anymore. I know that I have three more to go before I get a loaf of bread. I know yesterday I earned a scoop of peanut butter that someone had shoved into little baggies. It’s the new drug deal of our century and I keep it shoved inside my bra for safety. I know that tonight my children will eat well and I only have three more to go, or two now. I think this one is done.
   Ani’s words drift through my head and I hear another girl crying nearby. Her tears form the melody to the tune and when a hand smashes my face to the side, holding me to the floor, I sing, “We’re all working together now…to make our lives mercifully brief…”

[Ezekla]

Updated with new ideas: Our New Daughter (serious craving), Modern Day Fantasy, Killing Me Softly and The Silent Siren. Please PM me if interested!