THE PRINT EDITION OFFER!
I’m looking for a couple of good readers who have Amazon accounts and will review the print edition (or the Kindle edition) and I will get you a copy for free! All who respond between now and Wednesday will qualify! So order your free copy today!
I’ll post the link here as soon as it’s hot. For now, below is the updated table of contents and the first TWO pages of the first story.
For those who read Grimms American Macabre, that was only 185 pages, this one is over twice that. With more stories and better line spacing, easier to read, too. I only removed two, but added seven. 30 stories instead of 24. Enjoy! (Don’t worry, yours won’t have that pesky “not for resale” across it. I don’t know why they do that.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
NATURE
When we mess with it … Plastic Monsters …………………………5
When we don’t understand it … Path of the Moon……………….18
When we abandon it … Sisters in a Tree…………….….…………39
When we make a mess of it …The Revolution…….…….………..49
When it makes us hungry … Night Goes On…………………..…56
When we are not sensitive to it … The Weeping Tree……………58
When we can’t help … our nature … Once Upon a Bug……..….63
EXPECTATIONS
Taking advice from a stranger … Running Away………………..66
The truth is just beyond the climb … The Cave Monster…….……82
When wanting doesn’t mean getting … The Love Spell…………106
When we seek without knowing … Wisdom of the Forest……….128
Magic would happen when they met … Ocean Blue…………….139
When all we want is a fresh start … The Wanted Man………….156
When enough is never enough … Tarot Girl………….…………171
SCARY
When families take a wrong turn … Ghost Mom……………….190
Where having fun isn’t really fun … Tourist Trap………………197
The dog as an unwilling decoy … The Sleepover………………218
Blood is thicker than, well, anything … The Neglected
Daughter………………………….……………………….224
Bring your passion to us … The Myeengun……………….………249
Check your loyalties carefully … The Cat’s Not Dead…….……..269
If you don’t want to know, don’t ask … Luck of the Draw…..…..281
DISRUPTIONS
What it means to be enlightened … The Fairy Light…….…..……285
When fighting is a last (lost) resort … King Fluffy the Great of the Worm Empire (or) How the Other Half Lives……………295
Being an American has consequences … Scream for Ice Cream…298
When you ignore nature a little too long … A Giraffe’s Tail….…310
Learning lines during life’s interruptions … An Actor’s
Method ……………………………………….……………326
When your new pre-schooler is just a bit precocious … The First
Day…………………………………………………………338
Desires lead to unusual resolutions … Grampa Ghost……….……344
When a girl creates her own solution … Princess Wolf………….358
Our regrets are not gifts to others … The Lonely Old Lady………361
THE GRIMMS HISTORY SECTION…………….………….…..364
About The Collection……………………………………..366
Grimm Ancestry & the house….………………………….369
NATURE
PLASTIC MONSTERS
Monette Bebow-Reinhard
The red balloon with Happy 30th floated down and landed gently on the rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean. An enormous and oddly-shaped whale-like creature opened its huge mouth filled with jagged teeth and swallowed the balloon down in one gulp, as though it had been waiting days for the sky bubble to land.
Dr. Jake, Maribel and the science team watched the event on their closed-circuit television. Their varying expressions demonstrated the multitude of public responses to this amazing event. Dr. Jake had led the team on this creation of a plastics-eating sea creature with funding from Plastics Inc. He led the loud cheers at this sighting of success in action. Five years ago they launched the creature into the depths of the ocean, and had, until now, been kept a secret. They’d planted it into the deepest depths of the ocean, there to evolve into its ultimate purpose — aiding in the cleanup of the Atlantic Ocean.
Initially the creature had a tracking device, but that had stopped working in the first year. Slowly the oceans began to be, as the media reports noted, “mysteriously cleaned of plastic debris.” There had been a few sightings by boaters who believed they had spotted a “Nessie,” but this was the first time their creature had been caught on film above water. No doubt it was theirs. The creature had blended shark and whale DNA, with a little octopus and an added chemical that made the thing crave and exist on anything plastic. It ate a balloon!
They got a call from Sid over at Maritime Authority. “You promised it would stay in deep waters. Now we have to release all your information about this creature because people are talking. I need a statement. We’ve been getting tons of calls from people acting like it’s the second coming of Jaws.”
Dr. Jake handed the phone to Maribel, who was better at public relations. “Tell the press the creature eats only plastic. And yes, the oceans are getting cleaner as a result. Yes, yes, we will now release all our data on the project. Let me stress, they only eat plastic.”
“They?”
Maribel glanced at Dr. Jake, who was waving at her to hang up. “Well, since the oceans are cleaner than we expected after dropping the one creature into the ocean, we suspect it has found a way to … ah … reproduce.” She nodded at Dr. Jake with a reassuring smile. “Alert the news stations that they have nothing to fear. It is a scientific experiment at cleaning our oceans of plastics, nothing more.” She hung up quickly and slipped her hands over her eyes.
Dr. Jake picked up the phone. “Gonna have the Navy keep a watch on it. Why did you say that? There’s only one.”
She wrote up a quick press release with full disclosure on how they of “Clean World, Etc.” had seeded the Atlantic Ocean with the creature they developed using extensive testing in the lab. After depositing it in the Atlantic, the team lost track of GEM143. They simply thought they’d failed, and moved on, until the reports came in that the oceans were all getting cleaner. And then this.
“Let’s just hope there are no drawbacks,” Maribel muttered. She didn’t write that in the press release, of course. But in her mind, this was a bonafide sea monster, the kind of which legends are made.
**
Bebow Books at Grimms Etc. 
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