Ishtar Rising by Natalie Gibson

of the animal. She said that they had a lot of calls about those. He thought she even sounded a little pleased that they would now have a dead one to examine and determine what it was. She did not, in his opinion, express the proper amount of sympathy about the loss of his car. He had just hung up when his driver's side door was torn from it's hinges. He could see it sliding away from him on the highway, sparks kicking up from it's contact with the road. What could rip a car door off, he wondered in that frozen moment. Then there were more glowing eyes, multicolored this time, and singing. Everything else melted away. *** Tara Kay's old beat up Chevette slid to a stop in front of the stone house she had lived in with her parents. Papaw gave it to them when he had grown too old to take care of all the land and cattle. They had let it fall into ruin. It was condemned after the cops who hauled Kay's parents off to jail saw the condition it was in. Papaw had built it for his new wife after the war. Mamaw had married him after only having known him for two weeks. She always said that was how love was. Sometimes you just know. He had built the frame with lumber and the occasional sapling thrown in when he ran out of money. For a while there was no Sheetrock, just cardboard interior walls. The exterior walls were what really made the house special. The whole thing was bricked in local rock that Papaw had plowed out of the acreage he planned to use as his vegetable farm. Tara Kay lov