9/11 Short Stories

Stacy Schiff raises many important questions in her national bestseller The Witches. Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it ? Can an innocent person be guilty ? How did this idealistic colony arrive in such a dark place? (Only three generations after its founding)

Firstly, a circle of girls makes a poor choice of lying about being haunted by witches, which later

Discoveries show, that it all ended up to be a hallucinations due to Ergotism, contained in rye bread (Doc N). This poisoning caused one of the symptoms presented in most “witches”, hallucinations, which caused the person to see through the eye what the brain has created. Hallucinations occurred to a nurse with abnormal characteristics, as in, physical harassment, and long-winded false statements (Doc L).This poisoning was more common in women and children, revealing a more logical explanation as to why there were only women accused of witchcraft (Doc E and N). Thus, a contamination of a grain is the root of this growing legend.

"I started giving the three witches at the next table the eye again. That is the blonde one. The other two were strictly from hunger. I didn't do it crudely, though. I just gave all three of them this very cool glance and all. What they did, though, the three of them, when I did it, they started giggling like morons."

I’m going back to school the next day and I’m nervous that I’ve been gone for 3 days but like usual I lied to get myself out of trouble,

The rope hung from the tree, swaying in the howling wind. I step closer, and closer. My hands grasp the loop and raise it higher over my head. I climb up the stool, and step off.

The students are panicked but they are able to call 911 on their cell phones. The police tell them that they’ll be there as soon as they can. The students hear a teacher get shot on the intercom. A few minutes later police cars make it to the high school and bust open the principal's office and there’s a shootout between the police and the criminals. The police win the shootout and they end up shooting Dr. Moreno who confesses to the police that he was the serial killer.

It is six in the morning in Kyoto, Japan and I am currently just sitting here on a park bench all alone. The silence is a little bit disturbing but I don’t mind, I hate other humans, ew. The fog that lurks around me would frighten off any other normal being but for me, it is soothing to the soul. Call me anti-social, call me what you want, until humans become a bit nicer, I will always be like this. It has been an hour and I am still just sitting here enjoying the peace, I suddenly hear some quiet footsteps coming towards me, I look up and I see a short shadowy figure in the distance. As the figure comes closer, I can see her long red hair swinging side to side and her misty grey and black dress moving as she walks.

As soon as Day opened the door smoke billowed in. She quickly adjusted her mask and closed the door. The smoke covered everything like a thick blanket. For a while the sun and the smoke had fought, but eventually the sun had succumbed to the smoke, like everything else. The only light now was electrical, but unlike the sun they weren’t bright and happy. The lights held no warmth and instead seemed to make the world colder. It hadn’t changed overnight. It was the same cold and dismal place. Day started towards the market. People scarcely walked the streets and instead rode in Machines. The machines had made the world like this, if you could even call it a world.

My head spun around in confusion. What did he mean by deceiver if I let a celebrity get killed the media is going to have my ass! What do I do!

"Shinichi, I've got the information from your father's files and added some from recent newspapers., but he is still shrouded in mystery. The first time he showed was in Paris about 18 years ago. He stole for 10 years until one day, he disappeared. Many thought he passed away. Eight years later, however, he showed up again, but stayed in Japan instead of traveling around the world."

Rain fell from the cloudy night sky and pounded against the ground, and standing off from a two-story house was a man dressed in a traditional men’s kimono. He watched as the parents of Sarah and Samantha, Dennis and Caroline climbed into their Maroon Honda Pilot as they did every Friday night at 8pm until midnight, leaving their two 16 year old daughters all alone. His eyes followed the car intently as it drove down the road with several different colored leaves blended together on the road and the two back tires of the car. Once it turned the corner, out of sight, he turned back to the house. As he watched them through the bay window leading to the living room he went through the facts of his victims over in his mind. While they were twins, they were very different. Sarah, the older twin was very adventurous while Samantha kept more to herself. Along with the facts of the girls going through his mind he was wondering if he was going to kill them right away or if he was going to take them to a house that he had set up for his victims in one of the abandoned houses in the woods. The man was brought out of his thoughts as another car pulled into the driveway. He relaxed once he saw that it was just the delivery guy from the local pizza place, right on schedule.

There was no warning, shower of sparks, flash of light or puff of smoke. I just blinked and was gone. One second I was sitting on my bed and the next I'm standing on top of a strange stone wall. How and why I wasn't sure, but before I had time to figure it out, a witch appeared out of nowhere and leaned on her battered broomstick, alone in the dark. Her black pointed hat and long cape cast an eerie silver silhouette on the narrow cobblestone street. She swiftly searched the shadows and spotted another witch who was waddling along a ways off. Cackling wildly, she zigzagged across the sky and hovered beside her.

As the clock seemed to slow to a crawl I found myself barely being able to choke down my turkey sandwich. So, I discarded it. Electing to spend the rest of the period just staring out the window while making a sincere effort to avoid any accidental eye contact with the real witches of Mt. Harrison. It was excruciating waiting for time to pass, and I had hoped-to-no-ends that the bell would ring soon. Because every time I glanced away from the window, I thought—although it could have been just paranoia—that I saw about a third of the kids in the cafeteria looking over at me. They would quickly avert their eyes to avoid being caught staring at me, but I knew they

Through the sixteenth and seventeenth century, witchcraft persecutions were widespread throughout various areas of the world. Behind these persecutions, there were many different ideas about what a witch was, and what they were capable of doing. In many children's books, witches are seen travelling by broomstick, cooking forest animals in stew, or casting spells-- spells which may have been for evil or for good. In such books, the capabilities of witches appear to be endless. Therefore, this magic certainly appears to be fictional. However, long ago, there was widespread belief of witches who were able to perform such magic. This leads us to the importance of thinking about what type of people would believe in this unusual idea.