The Midnighters

1.

Different types of people perceive the world differently. For instance, a pessimist may see the world as frequent series of pain and anguish stemming from some higher power or other depending on their philosophical views; an optimist, however, may see the world as an exquisite greatness that, despite the occasional heartache, exists for the benefit of everyone. The difference between them exists much more deeply than one may think: young Morgan Rouse serves as its personification.

While most seven-year-old children were climbing monkey bars and mastering the art of riding their bicycles, Morgan Rouse was lying shivering in his small racecar bed beneath half a dozen of his grandmother’s homemade quilts, asking his mother what it was like out there.

“Out there,” his mother warned him, “is a very difficult place.” She paused and sighed. “People don’t care about one another out there….”

As if unconcerned with his mother’s retort, young Morgan looked out the window—at the mother jaybird singing happily as she looked proudly upon her freshly born offspring. Her song blew through the cloudless sky and was highlighted magnificently by the sun burning uninterruptedly down upon the world—her song made Morgan both forget his illness and remember what he couldn’t have. He sighed.

His discontent wasn’t isolated to one day. At the end of every week, despite his father’s ritual gift of miscellaneous toys or games, young Morgan Rouse was still sad. So too passed the next week, and the next; the following month, he remained unsatisfied, and the next month and the next. As he grew older, he remained both confused and saddened by his inability to have friends. He wanted to play—to be out there with little Molly Ruskin next door, or even twelve-year old Beau Freemont from the adjacent street. He wanted to see the sunlight. He wanted to go out there.

He hadn’t spent a day out there since he was old enough to remember things fully. His only link to the outside world was a blurred image of a child who looked nearly identical to himself walking happily with its parents through the busy sidewalks of some museum or theme park and carrying a melting ice-cream cone. He remembered the child having a smile on its face. Sadly, however, young Morgan Rouse hadn’t been outside since then—in fact, his mother had even quit her job working with the other little boys and girls to keep a careful eye on her baby. She stayed with him, and he stayed inside: every day, his discontent grew and became more deeply rooted and everyday made him want freedom just a little bit more.

 

2.

Mrs. Rouse—Laurie—didn’t know what else to do with her son. She knew how much her baby wanted to be outside with the other children, but those children weren’t like her baby. The doctors had said her baby was sick, but she knew better. He wasn’t sick. He was special. He was a special little angel, and those other children weren’t. They weren’t special—they weren’t handmade and hand-signed by god like her little baby Morgan had been. She loved him so much more than he could understand. Why couldn’t he understand?

She had gone through a lot for him. When she had married the first time, she was in love. She was vastly, intensely in love. To her, the relationship was the type that would last forever. Her dreams broadcasted a picture perfect combination of man and woman living forever in a nice home with good-paying jobs and a little golden retriever puppy running between and around their feet as they walked. She had even wanted to give her husband a child or two. Even more than success, that had been her greatest desire—a family. She had seen her other childhood friends move off to college and get married; she had seen them come back home, smiling happily and have children and families of their very own. She wanted a family more than anything, and she had thought the same about him.

He had only punched her once or twice when she first saw the spots of blood cycling through her dirty panties; after he’d struck her three or four more times, the stains had become much more frequent. Within a year, the beatings had become everyday occurrences, and despite the frequent trickling of blood that came and went at the most inopportune times, still she loved him more than anything. For that reason, when she noticed that small twisting cramps writhe within her abdomen, she knew that their problems were over. She knew that that would make him love her. She couldn’t wait.

She married a second time under the pretense that her three miscarried pregnancies were the closest she would ever come to actually conceiving a child. She was on the rebound and so when he left her, she was all alone in a world that seemed to hate her almost as much as she hated herself. She hated herself, both for her failed marriages and for her dead children. She sank to the lowest of the lows; within a month, however, she had met Morgan’s father and had known that he was the one. She knew it, as apparently did he, and the two were wed the following month.

Walter James Rouse—Jimmy to everyone except Laurie, who called him Walt—had met Morgan’s mother at a bar. She had been there drinking away the most frightful parts of her life: he was there for the first time trying to see what exactly he had been missing while all his other friends had been out partying their high school years away. The two clicked immediately and were soon married. Before long, they were celebrating their own little miraculous bundle of joy. Nine months later, Morgan was born and, despite being twice as busy as before, the two parents were positive that their lives had both expanded and improved.

 

3.

When young Morgan was only two years old, his mother and father had moved him to Seattle. They told him later that schools were better there. Their jobs were better. Life itself was better in Seattle, but to Morgan, Seattle was prison—he didn’t know anyone in Seattle, and for all he knew the kids in Charlotte had been just like him. Maybe he would’ve had friends there; maybe he would’ve had actual kids sitting beside him as he blew out his birthday candles year after dying year. There were so many things that may have gone differently for young Morgan Rouse if only they’d told him the truth.

To Morgan, however, the truth was something completely different. To his parents, their child was on a level so much higher than his peers that he deserved to be withheld from them, even if interaction was the only thing he wanted—to his parents, the stories they told him were simply the easiest way to break the news. Young, innocent Morgan Rouse never got the news.

He was ignorant in a world where ignorance is bliss. He looked in the mirror each day and brushed his hand against his twin’s cheek; he smiled, and looked so proudly at what a big boy he was becoming. In fact, Morgan was now eight years old—“eight and a half,” he would have corrected, had you misrepresented his age—and as his body grew, so too did his mind. As his mind grew, so too did his curiosity. Young Morgan was beginning to wonder things.

For instance, although his mommy told him that a fat, jolly man named Santa delivered gifts to every little boy and girl all over the world, he thought about Christmas and wondered why Santa had forgotten him last year—whether it had been because daddy had threatened to leave. He considered Halloween, and wondered why the other kids dressed up as monsters and walked around the neighborhood ringing the doorbell at every house except his own. He wondered why a big yellow school bus dropped off the other kids, and why his mommy forced him to stay inside. His mind raced day in and day out with the realities of the world: what does snow really look like, and can reindeer really fly. Why did they really make him avoid the other children, and why had god really messed up his face.

He didn’t understand god, but his mommy often mentioned him. She once told him that god was the reason for everything happy; she’d said that god was an essential part of every little boy’s life. She had said that, without a proper understanding of god, no little boy would be able to move on with his life and become a man.

“…and you know what that means?” she asked.

“What mommy?”

“That means you’ll never have a wife. You don’t want that now, do you?”

Morgan thought about the prospect of a beautiful little girl like Heather Renee from down the road. “Is my wife going to come over and meet us?” he asked honestly.

To him, the only world worth acknowledging existed within the off-white walls of their old, Victorian two-story: to him, although he didn’t know it at the time, his mother was god. She was his beginning and his end, and as he stood there, both overwhelmed with hope and annoyed by delay, she swiftly ended the conversation.

“Have you seen your father?”

 

4.

His daddy was outside drinking gasoline. Before his mommy had found out about it, his father had made him promise never to tell anyone about his gasoline—

“What’s gash-oh-leene?” Morgan had asked. His daddy told him that gasoline was what cars used to make them feel better, and that although every grownup drank it from time-to-time, his mommy wouldn’t like it. Morgan wanted his daddy to feel better so that he wouldn’t leave them, and so he never told. Although Morgan didn’t understand what the gasoline did, he liked to look at the decorations on the labels. This time, his daddy was drinking out of the clear bottle with the black label and white words. Morgan had always liked the bottle with the pirate on it.

Still, he didn’t like it when his daddy drank gasoline because it made him walk funny and smell bad. Even the one with the pirate made his daddy yell and say things that hurt Morgan’s heart. For some reason, his mommy hadn’t liked his daddy’s drinking when she’d found out about it. They’d fought that time. They fought a lot, as Morgan remembered, and mostly because of his father’s drinking. The state of their marriage was a far cry from the beginning—from the time in which both had sworn that their lives were going to improve. They’d held on to that thought until the doctor had come back with the results of Morgan’s very first examination.

Morgan, of course, was too young to remember; had he been able to stretch his brain that far, however, he would have heard perhaps the only grain of truth that anyone had ever spoken on his behalf. His beacon’s name was Dr. Moslovich. Of course, like the truth is so opt to do, it had gotten hideously contorted over the years. Neither his mother nor his father remembered much of what the doctor had actually said that night except for the negative part—the part off of which both parents had shaped their current perspectives on the world. But to them, Morgan was special.

 

5.

The years came and went. Morgan was now nearly fourteen years old. He was now being taught his school work by his father during whatever time his father had off but had gotten to the point where spending playtime with his mother had now gotten dull. He spent his playtime alone. Alone and thinking of all the things his parents had told him.

Just last week, during their last big fight, his mom had told him of how little his dad loved them. “He’s just here because he feels guilty,” she said. Morgan cried. Soon thereafter, his father had come in and reminded Morgan of all the times mommy had lied. He promised that he wouldn’t leave, and that he loved them both very much.

That morning, however, Morgan had awoken to something entirely different. Beneath the disfigured life that he shared with his two parents, and despite the disfigured truth that his mother had so badly torn apart, he began to uncover the truth of his disfigured body.

 

6.

He’d lost hair before. That was normal, he thought. It had been normal when he got chewing gum stuck in it as a child, and normal as the side-effects to the vicious combings he gave to it after stepping out of the shower. He was sure, however, that it wasn’t normal in the morning, lying atop his pillow and stuck randomly in the neck of his shirt. He grasped his thin, straight, blonde locks and looked intently at them. He thought for a second longer and simply dropped them into the trash bin—he didn’t mention anything to his parents.

That was on a Saturday. By the following Tuesday, however, the shedding had grown much more severe. He was finding his hair in piles, and his parents had begun to notice balding spots throughout the boy’s head. He’d even gotten so worried that he’d begun going to his mother and asking for her help. She simply replied that it was the shampoo they’d bought, and that it would go away on its own.

That night, as Morgan slept soundly in his bed, his father arrived home from what used to be work. It had then become work and a drink with the boys. Now, it was a few drinks. Unfaltering, however, he lurched his way clumsily up the stairwell and into his room where he found a bed that was entirely empty. He flipped on the light just as his wife walked in the doorway behind him.

“We need to talk,” she said. She walked past him and sat down.

“I told you not to hound me about this,” he retorted immediately. “It’s just a few drinks, and it’s not like you don’t drive me to it, right?”

“It’s not that, Walter. It’s my son.”

“Your son?”

“…he’s sick, Walt. You know that.”

Sighing, Walter stood up and began to pace around the room. “I know that. We know that. What do you want me to do?”

“It’s getting worse. We’re going to have to do something soon.”

“I know…” he began. He soon popped up with an idea. “Next week. First thing. I’ll be getting my bonus…”

“And what? He’s never been outside,” she reminded him. “We can’t just take him.”

“But that’s what the doctor told us to do with him. When he was born. He told us to just isolate him from the world. You don’t remember that?”

 

7.

That night—the night in question—the doctors said it was as though god himself had reached down and stopped the storm. God himself had stopped the storm, but not before all the power in the building had died, and not before they had had to rush emergency generators down into the basement in order to maintain the patients surviving via electrical-dependent machinery. Morgan was one of those children.

That night, shortly after his mother had collapsed from giving birth, the power had died. Not just the power to their room, but the power to the wing—the power to the entire hospital, in fact. There were no elevators and no incubation machines to keep the baby healthy; from the looks of him, however, there wasn’t much they could do about his health. He was a sick one: one of the “midnighters” as the nurses called them, so named because of their vast likelihood of dying before sunup. By the time the power was turned back on, the baby’s purple, sticky flesh radiated under fluorescent bulbs. The doctors were nearly certain that he was going to die, and thus Doctor Eevan Moslovich became ER Doctor, Maternity Nurse and Spokesperson. He broke the news to them. He became the beacon of truth from which all optimists inevitably flee and to whom all pessimists, both homegrown and newborn, inevitably flock. Morgan would some day come to realize that Moslovich, who had died of heart failure on the anniversary of Morgan’s tenth birth, was in fact his god.

 

8.

On earth, however—more specifically, to a certain fourteen year old child—the wastebasket full of his once-glowing hair was his god. It was the one incarnate in which prayer seemed appropriate, and therefore it was the shrine to which Morgan offered prayer every night before he fell asleep. Although his prayers had gone unanswered, he became more certain of the fact that he was undoubtedly alone. For that fact, he could have thanked his parents.

His parents had, although however poorly, weighed their every option, and both agreed that each was to the point it sounded bad. To the Rouses, each idea concerning the immediate future of their child sounded equally bad, and so on the day of what would have been Morgan’s first boy-girl dance had he attended public school, an answer came. The question was its own answer, as is generally the case, but the irony was peering at them much more morosely this time.

That day, and for the first time since he’d started his job, Walter had decided to stay home. He didn’t drink. He didn’t work, and perhaps the biggest surprise to everyone, he didn’t fight. Laurie, so surprised by his actions, woke up especially early and begun a family-sized breakfast for the three of them. Intending to surprise Morgan, she tapped lightly on his door and asked him to join her. After no response, she knocked yet again. She did so two more times without answer before finally deciding to let him sleep in.

Going about her plans, she put Morgan’s breakfast in the oven and began to enjoy her marriage for what seemed like the first time in an eternity. Rather than doing her traditional housework, she strolled out, into the gorgeous, heavenly, angelic sunlit morning and began to garden. She toiled effortlessly through her chores and decided to return inside and cook lunch.

Walter also found himself dilly dallying away in a new rut, but rather than complaining, he began to think. What if, he thought, this is the perfect family? What if I’m in heaven and this is god’s way of telling me? To that image, he smiled. The beautiful chorus of his wife’s voice shook him back to reality—it was time for lunch.

This time, Laurie strolled back upstairs and tapped again on her son’s door. She heard what she thought was a shuffle under the covers, and so she knocked yet again. Not hearing a response, she knocked one last time before reaching for the knob. She turned it and it didn’t budge. Once again, she twisted it and heard nothing.

Unaware that her husband had locked the door, she walked across the hall to her own room and began to shuffle around for the key. She found it lying beneath a layer of dust at the bottom of a nightstand drawer and walked back across the hall. She inserted the key and opened the door.

 

9.

Before Dr. Moslovich had died, he had taught a series of seminars at the local University to help promote healthcare in under-privileged neighborhoods. Although the Rouses weren’t needy per se, the clinic of one Dr. Simon Morley was the one nearest their home. Dr. Morley had completed a degree under Moslovich and had taken over there when the resident physician retired. That afternoon, Dr. Morley was introduced to an adolescent Morgan Rouse under conditions severe enough to have jogged the adolescent’s parents out of their Shangri-la states long enough to provoke concern. That day, Morgan heard the truth.

 

10.

Times change drastically as a child grows up. The change is difficult for the parents, sure, but most dramatic for the child. One minute they’re entirely helpless, the next they’re growing up; two seconds later they’re a varsity member of the lacrosse team, a member of their homecoming court, and before they can blink their eyes their graduating. In less than an hour they fall in love, get married, undergo a mid-life crisis and within the following day, become bedridden. It isn’t long before their life becomes a task, and it’s that much sooner that they finally die. Of course, this isn’t the life of most fourteen year old boys, but for Morgan Rouse, it was the future that his family had withheld.

To Morgan, however, the truth was manifold. It was manifold, but at the same time it existed only in conflicting stories coming from the mouths of people he didn’t immediately know. Sure, he knew his parents, but why would they have lied to him? And why did it take some doctor to describe what he’d been feeling all along? Had he truly been by himself since he was born?

That afternoon, Morgan had locked himself in his room and had made no effort of coming out. Despite the sobs echoing from behind his door, his parents weren’t entirely sure that he was still alive. He was, of course, and he stepped out long enough to lurch down to the kitchen and enjoy a nice, long dinner with his parents. They tried to tell him the things they’d withheld, but despite their grandest efforts, Morgan himself could not be consoled.

 That night, Morgan cried himself to sleep in the arms of his mother, who fell asleep squeezing him almost as tightly as her husband was squeezing her. For the first time since their journeys had become interlocked, the three of them were at peace. In each of their minds, however, they were delivered unto entirely different parts of existence, and to each their own level was the most fitting. Laurie saw with pride the day that she walked away from her first husband, and with unabashed amazement the day she was introduced to Walter; Walter, on the other hand, witnessed the unraveling of his family partially if not mostly by fault of his own, and although such a realization would have been sad on any other occasion, Walt pledged at that moment to take his vision and begin to change their situation as soon as the new day presented itself.

To Morgan, however, the night was beautiful in a way that the other two could only imagine. You see, dreams don’t simply come and go. They do, but at the same time they brood within us for as long as necessary until we finally free our minds enough to be carried away to them. That night, Morgan was shown the world for the first time, and to him it was something more beautiful than even his imagination could have given him.

 

11.

Morgan’s happy sleep carried over. He was up before daylight, rushing around, trying to enjoy every second of a life that doctors said was on the verge of giving up the ghost. Giving up the ghost—that was a saying that Morgan learned in his dreams. But he hadn’t time to focus on such minor things; like most children, Morgan failed to realize that the beauty of life lies in the small things rather than existing in spite of them. Rather than enjoying his first sunrise, he was pushing his parents out the front door and into their car. That morning, they went to the pool.

Morgan didn’t notice that burning, almost hellish pain of pool water in his eyes. He didn’t falter from the burn of chlorine as he sucked it up his nose, nor did he hide his flesh from the depth of sunburn—that day, he was free. He talked to every kid he met that day—even some of the children who shunned him because of his inherent awkwardness. He didn’t mind—in fact, he actually convinced himself that perhaps their mommies had forgotten to teach them how to play with other little boys and girls as well. Morgan’s mind failed to compute those small, mundane details in order to focus on the big picture. Morgan’s days began and ended with the big picture.

That night, his family went out to dinner, and instead of fighting like they inevitably did each night without fail, his parents sat more closely than he ever remembered seeing them; they held hands and laughed, and occasionally reached over and kissed his nose. They loved one another, and that night, they loved him. Each of them freed his or her mind from the darkness that had been so triumphant since the happiness went away; each of them knew what it was like to be in heaven.

The next morning, he was up before them yet again. He was up so early that he showered himself, got dressed and was once again standing over them as they opened their eyes; once again, he ushered them to town. This time, however, he decided to get introduced to shopping malls. He and his parents walked for hours and hours—from the wee hours of sunup until they were getting booted out by night-security.

That night, too, the Rouses enjoyed a family meal unlike any other. That night they went for Asian, and unsurprisingly Morgan was taken aback by the difference between his traditional dinner and the dinner these people provided. As his overwhelmed mind was attempting to take in the vastness of everything he’d experienced, he thought about how sheltered he had been from everything—from all of the experiences and all of the cultures—and for the slightest second, Morgan felt the deepest detestation towards his parents. For one second, his brain reminded him of how much he had missed out on, and for that one second Morgan Rouse tasted the bitterness of hate for the very first time; before he could grow accustomed to it, however, he was overtaken by a feeling of freedom and decided to make the most of his chance to enjoy the life of which he had been deprived. That night, the family went home and fell asleep together once again. That night, they loved one another. That night, his parents loved him even more.

 

12.

The days went on without end as Morgan walked on beaches and went to movies—as he went to high school and met the coolest people in the world—and every afternoon he came home to a loving family and to the most beautiful life anyone has ever known. He met a young, brunette girl named Samantha Rivers and immediately fell head over heals in love; he loved her with all of his soul, and gave her his everything. He underwent the passing of time and the ups and downs of love, much as he had done while coming to terms with his own future. His future was vague, but at the same time, however, the life he found coming home from the hospital was great. Beautiful. Heavenly. He was given everything he’d ever wanted, and all from the grandest viewpoint of all—

Of course, had Morgan’s spirit recognized any one of them lying on the bed, he may have known better. He may have recognized what exactly this was, and where exactly his life had gone. The life of Morgan Rouse didn’t go unlived…well, not completely anyway. For the seven hours between the time he fell asleep clutched in his mother’s arms and the time the sun rose on his dead, lifeless body, Morgan Rouse was given the one gift he wanted. He was granted life for the price of his own. The following morning, the same saline tears from the night before lay frozen on his cherub face. As his mother leaned down to kiss him, she tasted the icy harshness of death along with the spicy burning of guilt. Morgan Rouse was dead at age fourteen.

But Morgan’s life was a special one. You see, Morgan, like so many other optimists in the world, seek to extract from life what they put into it; in his case, he tried to remain happy all the time, even while being crushed beneath the reins of slavery. The following morning, Morgan Rouse was found lifeless, stiff, but with a smile on his face; that smile was the smile Morgan reached out and touched in the mirror even when he noticed the balding spots atop his head. That smile was the smile that he saw beneath the monstrous, cancerous lesions at the corners of his mouth and down the back of his neck; in the mirror, that smile was all he allowed himself to see—in whichever mirror he saw himself, Morgan Rouse was surrounded by heaven.

There were only two people there to say goodbye to Morgan Rouse as he was lowered into the ground, and those two people cried more for themselves than for their fallen soldier. They realized the disasters that their own lives had become, and took their loss as an opportunity to rebuild. Rather than trying to fix the outside, however, the Rouses decided to start entirely new from the ground up. They began by hanging a picture of their smiling angel over the mantelpiece that afternoon. The two of them then ate a small celebratory meal directly beneath the Jays’ nest that had flourished outside Morgan’s window. That night, they lit a fire and fell asleep together before it, each one lying on the uncomfortable wooden floor and each one holding the other with all the passion they had long withheld. The next morning, as the church bearer rang the bell to deliver his final condolences, he uncovered what happens to a complex when the structural epicenter is removed.

The weekend paper included an obituary that would have passed chills through even the harshest cynic; the community came together to mourn the loss of the family, despite the fact that the family had long since locked every living person out of their lives. Still, as Walter and Laurie Rouse ended their walks together, they were joined with their son, and unsurprisingly, the next morning, Morgan was shaking them both impatiently and asking them to take him on an adventure. The adventure. It had served fourteen years as Morgan Rouse’s only tether to life, and for the first time he got to enjoy it with no strings attached.

Life is a beautiful thing; some people, like Morgan, choose to enjoy it despite their destinies; others, like his family, are never able to capture what they’ve missed until it’s gone. Some claim god is at work, and who’s to differ really? Perhaps each person is his or her own god, to which I reply simply, “to each their own”. I’m not sure how I’ll find mine, just as many of us live uncertain of how to find ours; Morgan and his family find theirs walking hand-in-hand along the crowded, humming sidewalk of the zoo as stale, melting strawberry ice-cream runs down the palms of their hands and drips from their fingers.

To them, it’s heaven: sadly, as is often the case, it took each of them a lifetime to understand the importance of the small things. The zoo, the crowd, the ice cream: all of this defines heaven to the Rouses much as our own laughs and vacations and jokes are the reason for which we ultimately draw breath. The smallest things are the things in which we inevitably place our faith in humanity—for Morgan Rouse, these things were the things he constantly overlooked in order to seek out something better. There is nothing better, however, because we as people can be expressed only through the most miniscule of events—our births, our lives and our deaths all happen in less time than it takes the Heavenly Mother to bat an eyelash. To her, we are negligible, much as breakfast was hardly reason enough for Morgan to crawl out of bed each morning.

There is no breakfast there: there are no friendships, no Jays’ nests outside one’s window, and no television to watch when everything else seems worthless. There, everything is worthless…everything except the mending of broken hearts, that is. And it isn’t easy; by no means is it easy, but you have forever to get it right. By that time, of course, you’ve been replaced by an infinite number of people, all of whom are seeking the same thing within their own lives. Life goes on, one empty person at a time. So is life: an intermingled confusion of routines and agendas and schedules, knotted crudely together like electrical wires behind some complicated electrical plant, with the owners of each hoping to make enough wrong turns to lead them in the right direction—to the other side, where grass is greener and love is always good and everyone, everywhere, is happy forever.

Reviews

[Missphit]

I am so glad you mentioned this piece to me with your review. My only regeret is that i didn't come across it sooner. This was absolutely beautifully sad. I don't know what else to say.

[Rc R. Vagilidad]

Getting on with the splendid CLIMAX... whoo!! that was a great read!!

At first, reading these lines, shows a very intimate bigotrism (if that is the right word for it?)

"There were so many things that may have gone differently for young Morgan Rouse if only they�d told him the truth.

To Morgan, however, the truth was something completely different. To his parents, their child was on a level so much higher than his peers that he deserved to be withheld from them, even if interaction was the only thing he wanted�to his parents, the stories they told him were simply the easiest way to break the news. Young, innocent Morgan Rouse never got the news."

Can't imagine this story had awaken some sort of anointed emotions in me!! COOL...

[Erik Bergstrom]

Chas - I wish I would have read this earlier. Everything I could say has been said before by the other reviews. While the length of this piece intimidated me at first, I realize why you did it - Morgan's character is like and unlike many characters I have read before.

This sounds and feels more than just some scribblings on a page after sleepless nights. I don't know if you've edited it any since then, but right now as it stands it works well. There are a few missteps that I'm sure you and anyone else could notice after some close editing, and I would suggest going further with this story. It's too good to leave sitting by the wayside. Good job.

[Caroline Tigeress]

Intense, powerful, and utterly ruthless. Morgan's character is more than a person, but a concept that we can all identify with at various points in our life. Very good work.

[L. L. Jacobson]

Chas- below was me- sorry about that.