She woke scratching, raking nails over cheeks, digging them into her forehead. Sitting up, she threw off a sheet and scratched ferociously at her bare stomach and legs. She scratched and rubbed around her eyes, over her ears and neck, and she hadn’t even opened her eyes yet. When she tried, they resisted. She touched her eyelids, felt something dried and crusted on her eyelashes, rubbed and finally got them to open. She was in a room, a blocky chair across the room from her. A bright, white slice of light came through a slit in curtains. Flakes of something dark lay on the sheet. Dark was ground into her nails and into the creases of her knuckles, turning them into dark lines on pale skin. She was covered in it. She started, flailing her arm out, and struck something hard that crashed to the floor. A lamp turned on. Light filled the room.
The spots on the sheet were brownish red, almost familiar but not enough to name. She looked at her arm. Furrows of white marked where she’d scratched tracks into brownish red. The same furrows marked her stomach, her legs and everywhere she had scratched. She brought her fingertip slowly to her mouth and tasted dull, salty copper. She jerked, scrambled up out of the bed and stared down at the dried blood that covered it. ---- From the unpublished short story, "Declaration"

WHEN I GET EVERYTHING I WANT (a story written during the Write-a-Thon)

Anger didn’t drive me downstairs at a run, even though it had often enough these last few months. The house across the street was burning, and I feared our house would be next. It was just after dawn. A few minutes earlier, the trumpeting of elephants had woken me up, but of course, there are no elephants in New Town.

2nd Excerpt from WHEN I GET EVERYTHING I WANT:

We don’t have a zoo. The circus never comes here. There isn’t a rail yard or a shipping depot, or anyplace else nearby where any kind of animal might arrive, even by accident.

That morning I thought I was dreaming when I heard the sound of elephants, but the beasts trumpeted again and then again, so I put on my glasses, got up, and looked out the window at the street below. A long line of elephants sauntered down the cracked cement. Each one had a tall, black top hat on its wide gray head. Walking beside this parade were two teenagers, a boy and girl, holding hands and laughing.

A breeze pushed the curtain away from the window. Standing there barefoot and wearing only t-shirt and shorts, I could smell the beasts. One of the elephants did what elephants always seem to do in a parade, and I could smell that, too.

I thought maybe a circus really had come to town. Maybe someone somewhere thought it might be a grand idea to bring joy and laughter to this place no one wanted. And I smiled. I can still feel that smile on my face. I can still feel the relief of it. The joy. It’s important to know about that smile because for just an instant everything felt all right.

As one of the elephants stepped under the oak tree out front, I heard a roar overhead. It started from somewhere behind our house and quickly built until I had to clap my hands over my ears because the sound was so loud it hurt.

Years before everything had gone to hell, I had lived near an NFL stadium. Flyovers by jet fighters were frequent. This painful roar sounded just the same. Leaves on the tree suddenly shredded and fell to the ground. Bits of dirt kicked up, and then the roar was retreating, getting quieter as it sped away from the house.

The elephant under the tree had sprouted parallel spots of red on its side that were widening by the second. I heard a sound like air being let out of an enormous inflated toy, and the elephant sank to its knees and toppled over. The house shook. I felt my heart break as if it hadn’t been an elephant that had just been shot, but a lover.

The teenaged girl cried out and ran to the side of the beast. She sank onto her knees at its head and grabbed hold of its ear, and shouted at it to get up, but the elephant didn’t move. Blood soaked the dirt around the tree.

I heard the roar of a fighter jet again, faint at first and then getting louder as if whoever it was up there was circling back for another shot. The boy hadn’t moved, but between one instant and the next (I swear I had my eyes on him when this happened), he was standing bare handed and then there was the largest gun I have ever seen in his hands. He rested it on top of his shoulder, and I saw that it looked more like a bazooka then a gun. The fighter was heading straight for us.

I had no time to do anything but drop to the floor. I put my head down, my hands over my head and heard a loud whoosh and hiss, then felt a chest-piercing bang and an explosion so close and loud that the room rocked. Heat washed over me. When the heat lessened, I pushed myself up and peered out the window.

The house across the street was burning. I assumed the jet had crashed into it, but all I saw were flames shooting up. The roof and the front of the house were already gone.

3rd and final excerpt from WHEN I GET EVERYTHING I WANT:

The boy pulled at the girl. “Come on,” he shouted. Crying, she looked up at him. He snapped his fingers. And they were gone: the boy and the girl, all the elephants, even the dead elephant vanished. All that was left was the wide, dark stain on the dirt. With the elephant’s body now gone, I could see a red pool of blood on the pavement.

I thought I must be crazy, but there was the blood, which hadn’t been there the night before, and there was that fire. The fire was so hot I wondered how our house could keep from catching fire, too, and so I acted as I have always acted when something dangerous happened – with conviction and without thinking. I ran down the hall, shouting for Denise, but she wasn’t in her bedroom.

I pounded down the stairs shouting for her to get out of the house, yelling that there was a fire. I reached the first floor and came into the kitchen to see Denise wearing her old red robe and sitting at the reclaimed library table we had set up in our dining room. The table was filled with food. There was a turkey with all the trimmings, and I realized with a start that the room smelled a little bit like Thanksgiving. There was a bowl of spaghetti noodles smothered in marinara sauce, and a large hamburger on a plate with tomato and lettuce sticking out from under the bun. When I had gone to bed last night, we had one half-eaten box of cereal and two apples in the kitchen. We didn’t even have milk for the cereal.

Denise sat at the table, acting as if she hadn’t heard me. She leaned forward, her hair still tangled from sleep and falling across her face. She was holding her hand up and staring intently at the upturned palm. The air shimmered and flexed above her palm, and something appeared on it. The thing was crimson red at one end and shaped a bit like a rose, but there were no petals, and the shape wasn’t quite right. It did have a long, brown stem sticking out of it. Denise shook her hand as if to fling something sticky off her palm, and the red lump with its brown stem vanished.

“Dammit!” Denise said. “I can’t seem to get roses.” Denise looked at me. “I think if I can make roses I can make anything.”