EXTRACT FOR
Short Takes, Volume 1
(Craig M. Sampson)

        All her life Michelle had only believed in and accepted what she could hear, feel, smell, and see. She had friends and other superficial acquaintances that went in for all sorts of, what to her were, outlandish and laughable beliefs and explanations for the little oddities that they all experienced in their lives. 

        She never considered that there might be anything of real substance or control beyond her concrete world.....at least not until this past year. To keep from alienating her old friends from childhood, Michelle played along with them.....just to prove to them how absurd all this talk of "the other side" and a world of spirits and entities and ghosts was. 

        This was the 21st century after all, Michelle told herself. For the life of her, she could not understand how intelligent, rational, successful people ever bought into any of this stuff. To Michelle, once you died...that was it....game over. She would indulge her best friends in a few parlor games, just to placate their feelings....that was all.

        But things apparently were not as simple and Earth-based as Michelle had always believed. As she wandered in a staggering gait, looking as if drunk as she stumbled along, down the busy 2-lane avenue just outside the safe and reassuring confines of her house in New Orleans, Michelle would have given anything to not have ventured where she had gone in the past few months. 

         Since she had agreed to go along with her friends' outlandish offer of joining them in some of their spiritual adventures, nothing had been the same. Her former solid disdain for another plane of existence had been shattered.....she felt she was losing her grasp on any sense of reality that she had previously known....there were now times-more often than Michelle liked to admit to-in which it was near impossible for her to separate what she had formerly known as real from what was now creeping into her consciousness as unreal....in fact, the unreal was now becoming her reality.......