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Billy is a wonderful story of learning to love your gifts even in the face of peer pressure. Author K Wendt brings to life Susie’s friend Billy as he learns to be proud of his special talents.

Written for children seven years old and younger, Susie is the tale of one father-and-daughter love for baseball with a bit of self-assurance and self-esteem rolled in to give parents a fun way to start important discussions with their children.

She had a family to consider, and she had done he right thing. I did it, she told herself, for the good of society. Then she called out to her husband: "Honey, come in here and take a look at this." The man put on his best bright face and strolled into the kitchen. He put his hand on his wife's shoulder and gave her a whisper of a kiss on top of her head. He had always loved the smell of her hair, but now – now, it smelled more like disinfectant and alcohol than the tropical scent he loved.

We all think we want 20/20 vision, don't we? But in the metaphysical and psychological realms we often prefer our accustomed blindness. It's far more comfortable. Here are two stories that take a close, 20/20 look at these things.

"It was that most loathsome of all things: an uncanny, routine-disrupting inconvenience and anomaly." That's what, as the result of an unforeseen event, unexpectedly invades and upsets Elmore Wiggins' safely ordered life. For Elmore had never reckoned on the paranormal or the preternatural. But now that he's had his accident, he is "seeing" certain events in the near future - including his own (although he doesn't know it yet).

When you're a fast-failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, with a known termagant for a wife, an event like this - digging up a human hand in your potato patch - can be devastating to your small profits when the news gets out, especially since that ancient hand has peculiar "qualities." This discovery sets off a chain of inexorable events that lead Leonard Johnson to rash action resulting in a terrible kind of justice. A balance must be restored and a lesson learned.

The original Ferris wheel was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Roughly 280 million people visit theme parks every year and take approximately 1.7 billion rides. And there are slightly fewer than 10 Ferris wheel-related deaths each year. So the odds are generally in your favor. But Cody Jackson wasn't aware of any of this.

Two Tales of Horror and the Paranormal is a two-story bundle. In it you'll see that things aren't always as they seem - that there's a lot more to some humdrum, everyday lives than the people living them ever dared to imagine. And the implications are, well, sometimes frightening...

A new bride and party girl who marries merely to escape her former life. A naive, solicitous husband who sees no harm in an ordered life. A honeymoon hike on a mountain trail. And a tragic outcome. Murder, manslaughter, a misunderstanding gone horribly wrong, or sheer accident? Perception is everything, isn't it? In any case, justice has a strange way of working itself out. "Over the Edge" is a short story - a psychological thriller and a tale of horror.