PvN

When I first saw John Sterling I knew he was a man to be admired. He was tall and muscular, sun-brown and salt-flecked, shaped more like a bear than a man. I was a kitten beside him. One swing of his paw would tumble me across the room.
I had never known anyone like him - all the men of my home town were small and lithe, with the kind of muscles that were hidden beneath the surface. John Sterling left nothing to the imagination. Even in his sleep he was intimidating - here was a man to command a whole fleet.
Here was a man it would be a pity to kill.
So, yes, I hesitated.
And that was when he woke up.

Burn Burn

Of course there was always something strange about Sandra, but nobody picked it until the day that she snapped. The day that she came to school naked, and ran through the halls screaming until the nurse managed to catch her. The day that, escaping the nurse's office, she got into the art room and doused herself in chemicals before running outside into the yard. I was eating a sandwich when she set herself on fire. Multi-grain bread with lettuce and cold roast chicken. When Sandra was burning, she didn't scream at all. She just stood on the faded hopscotch grid, flames dripping from her fingertips, looking at us all with the deadest eyes. I'd always thought that was a dumb expression, until the day Sandra snapped.
It wouldn't have been so bad if she was the only one, but only a week later a kid from the preschool down the road somehow eluded his teachers and, standing on the exact spot where Sandra had stood, at the exact time of day, he took his daddy's lighter out of his pocket and touched it to his sleeve. I had an apple that day. It was green and shiny and juicy and I only had one bite, and later that night, when I couldn't sleep because I kept smelling the kid burning again, my appetite returned and I wished I hadn't thrown the apple away. It seemed even more tragic than the kid's eyes - dead like Sandra's, dead like the eyes of a fish laid out on ice in the supermarket - that I'd wasted such a delicious apple. My stomach rumbled loudly, and then I felt sick, and I only made it as far as the door before I threw up.

They closed the school but people kept coming there to light themselves on the hopscotch grid, even when the school gates were padlocked and security guards were hired and policemen with dogs patrolled the fenceline. Somehow, at 12:24 in the afternoon week after week, somebody was there, ready to die, and nobody could stop it and nobody understood what was happening.