Blood and Kisses by James H Longmore

Author:James H Longmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror books, horror collection, horror anthology, horror short stories collection, supernatural, occult, horror fiction
Publisher: HellBound Books Publishing LLC
Published: 2017-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

A Proud Father

It is hard to think of those extraordinary times as anything else but inherently ordinary. It was all we knew then; the fear, the overbearing feeling of hopelessness that a war harbors, the sickening omnipresence of destruction and death that pressed down on our town like some malevolent cancer.

And I remember her, she was just eleven years old the last time I saw her; a rare and welcome spark of effervescent life amidst the grim desolation that cast a dull, gray shadow over everything I held dear and all that should have made me feel safe within my childhood.

As I sit here now in the sunshine, sipping on scalding, tasteless coffee and listening to my adulthood friends as they share mundane snippets of their life, I can’t help but feel a weird kind of detachment. Sure, I join in with their well-worn jokes, smile at the trials and tribulations of their everyday lives – even chip in when expected with cutesy tales of my own beautiful wife and three precious children – but I feel as if I am never really here. There will always be that part of me that is adhered to those formative years, as a prisoner is chained to the walls of his dungeon.

Her name was Angelia and she was quite the prettiest and most perfect girl I’d ever known, would ever know. Angelia was little more than a year older than I but with a malnourished frame that made her appear far younger. She had the longest, blackest hair I had ever seen – a perfect complement to her dark olive skin – it shone with an unearthly iridescence and in the scarce sunlight miniature rainbows danced within its sheen. Angelia had beautiful, deep brown eyes that in the right kind of light seemed to be almost black and I often imagined that they could gaze deep in to the depths of my soul.

We’d been friends since before the war. We used to ride to school on the same bus and our apartments sat opposite each other in our block, separated by the gray concrete hallway that was the alligator-infested creek and river of molten lava of our games.

When the war began they had closed our school because the hospital had been bombed out of existence and they needed somewhere to keep the corpses that were beginning to pile up out on the streets. Then one clear and starless night the school itself had been shelled, reduced in a fiery instant to smouldering timbers that poked up into the smoky sky like charred, accusing fingers. After that, they just had to leave the dead folk to rot where they fell.

It was around that time when most of the tenants moved out of our apartment block in panicked droves, taking our playmates with them, desperate to flee the ever-encroaching shells and staccato rattle of automatic gun fire and Angelia and I had been left with only each other to play with.

Luckily, Angelia’s father didn’t

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