I Never Should Have Kissed Miranda Adams

I never should have kissed Miranda Adams.

I was...beguiled by her shoulder length mane of silky black curls and her pale white skin that was not so much sickly but radiant.

I was entranced by the way that she moved, always closer to gliding than walking. The way she spoke, lilting, florid and archaic. She was not beautiful, she was fair.

We met in the cornfields adjacent to my house.

I was strolling through, making my way back from school the day I saw her standing there, wind naturally pulling on her flowing yellow dress and black curly locks. She looked like a siren of the cornfield.

I felt pulled toward her as if by invisible force, until I stood right behind her. She turned in graceful slow motion and looked upon me.

"Hello, I'm Miranda Adams." She said looking straight into me with verdant eyes.

"Unless you have a name, I suppose I shall just call you boy." She said after seconds of my awkward silence.

That first day we sat amongst the cornstalks and talked. Well, more like I stumbled over words and listened. She talked of books: Vernes, Poe, Carroll. I spoke of King and Crichton, both she had never heard of.

She grabbed my hand to silence me after 25 boring minutes of explaining 'Christine' and together we ran through the endless maize rows like two children at recess.

As the sun set in the middle of our third game of "find me" she disappeared. But I found her amongst the corn the next day, and each day thereafter for three blissful weeks.

I was in love and when she took my hand each day, an unexplainable warmth shot through me. In the second week I made to kiss her, but she turned her cheek.

"You really mustn't do that," she said before collecting the hem of her dress and running off into the fields. I was crestfallen, but she was there again the next day.

On the third week I noticed a change. Her complection was less radiant and more palid. Her grace gave way to a stiltedness, yet she was still beyond fair in my eyes.

I held her on that last day and unable to contain myself I brought my lips to hers. Her eyes flashed wide, black fleks darted across her iris. What she did next, I didnt see coming. Wrenching herself from my grasp she keeled over and vomitted.

"I told you that you mustn't" she screamed before she gathered herself and sprinted off into the endless rows of corn. When I looked over to the spot she had wretched I saw something horrific. A bubbling black mass of goolike tar.

She wasn't there the day after and hasn't been since. She did impart something to me though. I have noticed little black fleks becoming more apparent in my eyes and I have begun to feel... a bit ill.

I understand now that I really shouldn't have kissed Miranda Adams.

-JamesMoniker