Excerpt: CREATIVE LICENSE

It was the porcelain ballerina that warned her.

The girl glanced up from where she sat, Indian-style on her bed. She stared at the book shelf, eyes wide as the ballerina slowly did a pirouette, her base squeaking out Music Box Dancer as she spun.

“What the--?” Maddie uncrossed her legs and scooted to the edge of her bed.

The ballerina began to chatter, trembling its way toward the shelf’s edge and Maddie sprang up and caught it just as the books nearby started to wobble and flop to the floor.

“Oh, GOD!” she shrieked as the entire house shifted and tilted around her, tossing her toward her open closet as the walls groaned and the floor—the poured concrete floor with its glossy parquet wood overlay—buckled and splintered, bits of laminate spraying the room.

Outside, the sun was snatched from the normally bright Florida sky and darkness flowed black as ink into her bedroom. She grabbed at the light switch, but nothing worked.

“Maddie!” her dad shouted. “Maddie—where are you?”

“My room!’ she screamed back. “Bring a light!”

A crash sounded and she heard a groan.

“Dad? Dad! Oh, God...” Frantic and nearly blind in the sudden darkness and debris, she felt around for something to help her. “I need a light...”

The house shuddered again, hurling Maddie against her closet’s back wall. She slid to the floor with a grunt as the door swung shut and the shelf above her head spilled its contents, raining down pieces from boardgames she hadn’t played since before her mother’s death. She looked up in terror at the wood shelf shimmying off its brackets. She grabbed at the walls in a mad attempt to propel herself back out...

But the world shifted again and she landed hard on her rear just as the final boardgame smacked into her head.

Followed by the shelf.

She slumped forward, limp, lips trembling, cheek resting against the broken box of an old Ouija board her family had never used but which somehow had come into their possession.

“Light,” she whispered, eyelids fluttering as her fingers twitched uselessly, “bring me the light...”

The ballerina slid from her open hand, righting itself on the displaced Ouija board to grind out The Lesson as it twitched sluggishly in a circle just above the words GOOD BYE.

Across a rabid and rumbling ocean something long-chained heard the girl’s request and decided Florida might be a nice change of pace. It was, after all, the best place to get two of the things it’d missed most for millenia: fun and sun.