LOVE SEEDS

SAMPLE MG FANTASY:

"The butterfly wing kisses between my clasped hands stopped. The wish buzzed down. Tiny particles of soot floated around me like dust bunnies. It smelled of mildew mixed with old fire ashes. I closed my eyes, braced myself between the walls of the chimney, and laughed in triumph.

Yes. Yes!

The brush stuck in the back of my pants, under my tunic, scratched me, but I didn’t dare move in case the wish escaped. I listened. The too tooting of steam cars  nearby, slid over the garage's rooftop. If it weren’t for the yelling of the vendors and the huff of machines, I wouldn’t believe this instant real. I'd be transported in heaven.

A high-pitched voice came under me, “Oh Noor, are you going to let it go?”

I opened my eyes wide and almost lost my footing. “What’re you doing here, oh Aayan?” I asked my little brother.

“Watching my wish.”

“Did I catch your wish?”

“Uh, huh.”

Oh, no!

Aayan turned his round ebony eyes in my direction and blinked a few times. The soot was everywhere, raining down on him, accumulating at the top of his lashes.

The tickling between my hands decreased even more. With the infrequent movements, my giggles had dwindled away and sounded more like hiccups by now. The crushed wings smelled of fresh grass and tree sap. Oh, so divine. With the smell filling up my nostrils, guilt filled up my heart and kicked at it.

“What did you wish for, oh Aayan?”

“Peace.”

“Then we can’t let that one die, can we?”

He shook his head, and his dark locks quivered.

I swallowed hard and leaned an ear over my clasped hands. Tiny dying breaths escaped from the dark slit between my thumbs. I needed this wish so bad. They were so hard to catch. I looked down at my brother and sighed. I couldn’t snatch it from him, though. So unfair.  This wish had to go. 
I stared at my fingers. The little wish didn’t struggle anymore. Maybe I had swooshed it. It had felt like a tang of genuine adventure at first, catching a wish, my first wish. At first, it had made me feel like a super hero, or something. I shook my head. So what? I wasn’t eight anymore, like my brother. At twelve, I considered myself pretty responsible for my age. At first sounded so far away a few minutes later when Aayan was looking anxiously at me.

“So, will you let it go?” Aayan pleaded.

I shrugged. “What! Are you kidding?”

But what if I opened my hands and it jiggled between my palms; little head rolling sideways and little chest hardly pushing up and down. I couldn’t do that to Aayan. My mom had said never to catch a wish. Of course, I never listened. Everybody knew that: wishes belonged to the top of Heaven, not in the dirty hands of a diesel chimneysweep, and a dirty machine sweeper at that. I brought my cupped hands under the feeble ray of light crossing the length of the chimney.

“Fly, little wish, fly. You’re not mine.”"

THE EVIL TEENAGER WIZARD

SAMPLE YA FANTASY:

"The wizard targeted borderline teenagers. Duke knew it. He knew it from having escaped once before. At the end of the show, the wizard would do something to the kids’ hormone levels that would take over their personality. Duke narrowed his eyes at the thought. In exchange, he would give them a magic gift, a gift that gave him the right to mess up their minds and churn their brains into an emotional mush.

Never! Duke gritted his teeth. You’ll never get to me!

The kids in his sixth grade classroom had no clue. They didn’t stand a chance. They thought the man in front of them only did magic tricks. Duke wanted to rip his fake white beard, his googly eyes glasses, and his creepy two inches nails. He looked ridiculous. What did he think they were, three? The six tweenagers didn’t mind the costume that appeared pulled off from a wreck at the bottom of the sea. The old world was full of useless disguises. They smiled and clapped at the right places, striking two round shells together, like the courteous Oceaniopians they were.

Duke remembered the wizard by his real name: the Evil Teenager Wizard. The wizard almost got him the year before and inflected him with a mild case of randomly pocking facial hair. Duke spotted a bristly turf every morning and cut it with a pair of scissors, but nothing else to get upset about. Duke was almost immune.

“Hocus Pocus,” said the wizard.

Things had been appearing out of thin air from the wizard’s ears, nose, and mouth for half an hour now and he also had crossed his hand through his hat a few times. Duke’s suspicions confirmed when a strange odor of green grass and sweat floated around the old man as he came closer. The wizard was out of this world. He didn’t even live under water like most people.

Duke plugged two knuckles up his nose to block the stink. Nobody mowed grass anymore, not since tsunamis had flooded most of the earth. Duke had a patch of grass growing in his mom’s lab. She was in a coma because of this patch of grass. He had to escape this year again. He wasn’t ready for cutting the emotional lifeline that stitched him to his mom’s dwindling life.

He needed to escape, and fast, and be next to her when she would wake up.

“Watch me and be amazed,” the wizard said in a mysterious voice that sounded as creepy as Duke’s little sister when she plugged fake vampire teeth in her mouth and screeched.

Instead of letting the evil wizard take hold of his attention, Duke looked up through the pod’s integral glass window. He watched the waves coming and going with bubbly fingers above their heads. His six other classmates focused on the magic tricks, completely absorbed like rag dolls sitting on poufs around the stage. Only Cassiopeia, a girl with ocean blue hippy clothes watched him from the corner of her eye. Duke smiled weakly in her direction and she opened her lips to uncover a range of pearly teeth."