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    <title>AKPCEP.com</title>
    <link>http://www.akpcep.com</link>
    <description>Discussion forums, writing, poetry, prose and art.</description>
	<language>en</language>
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  		<title>AKPCEP.com</title> 
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  		<description>Discussion forums, writing, poetry, prose and art.</description> 
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  <copyright>Copyright © Alexander King and the individual posters</copyright>
    <item>
       <title>Little Luca Sunday by Alexander</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=960</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ Little Luca is maybe just a few hundred in population, a quaint small town sat in the middle of nowhere. It could be the 1950s, or maybe not much has changed since then. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, for better and worse, and gossip spreads like wildfire. Jerry Henderson runs the town's only gas station and is married to the local schoolteacher, a tall and attractive woman named Molly. Jerry is a tall, rangy, practical man of few words, unless you count grunts from under a car hood every once in a while. Despite being in their mid-thirties they have no children, which has only recently become a talking point in the coffee shops and hair salon in town.

It's Sunday morning. Jerry wakes and upon opening his eyes, jum ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>Reflections of an Experienced Teacher by Villager</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=958</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ I'm about to finish my third year of teaching. That might not sound like someone who can describe himself as 'experienced', but the average teacher now lasts only three years before packing it in and looking for another career, so I digress. I have moved on to my second underfunded and underprivileged school, this time in darkest Manchester. It's been an education, if you'll forgive the pun. Despite growing up on a council estate, I've always known that I was relatively privileged; my parents remain married, there's always been food on the table, and I've no particular reason to grumble about abuse, neglect or other childhood trauma. Even so, knowing that life is different on the other side doesn't always prepare you for its reality. 

It ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>North American Legend, pt III by Spooky</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=957</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ He came out of the dark forest of cement and glass and his own thoughts.  Down at the end of a long alley whose character seemed well developed, a barrel burned with garbage fire, two warriors stood.  They both wore leathers, covered in steel and spikes, one with a disk of hair running parallel to his face, dyed bright red, like a centurion.  The other bristled with electricity, his hair the color of lightning and charged into long shocked spikes. The one with the lightning bolt of hair was rubbing his hands like a plotting fly and watching the other take occasional pulls off a bottle he was carrying.  They seemed nomadic to Deuce, this burning barrel and bottle their oasis.

When Deuce came out of the alley, he tried his best to make sur ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>North American Legend pt II by Spooky</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=956</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ By the time that he ran out of breath, he'd made it to the Towers.  The humming was still going strong, and all his hair stood on end.  He could sense the ozone here, could feel everything carrying that incredible potential, magnified by the steel skeleton with arms outstretched.  There were more, of course, they held one another's hands in vibrating glory in a long straight line along the side of the road, and he always suspected that they marched by cover of darkness, rooting up their girder-spun spider legs to buzz and hum and slither towards the horizon.  He'd stand at the one near the locked metal box that was cemented into the dirt and hummed in unison with them all.  He'd done it every day, pleased he'd made it even through the storm ... ]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
       <title>North American Legend by Spooky</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=955</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ The grass was on fire with color, big sheets of it flowing off like mirage, wicking away like candlelight into the atmosphere around him, where the color cooked up off the field and met the sky in an interplay of all the heat and damp air.  He walked determined, strides vast, each one a league, each one a mile or more.  Everything was vibrating at different frequencies; his eyes were somewhere between 30 and 80 hertz, his skull faster, his spine slower, and everything around him pulsed with intense possibility.  The world was crouched like a cat about to pounce, and he was it's playmate and prey, it's sacrificial calf.  

Over the hill here, and down into the depression, the only valley in his world, where the hole spat water into the gra ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>GLASS - Chapter One by Alexander</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=954</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ The boy surveyed his work. Three years of his thirteen crafting, bending, filing, sawing and polishing and the results lay before him like a sleeping dragon. Almost every corner of his father's library was filled with pipes, pistons, bellows and wires - grapevines and tendrils in a forgotten greenhouse. It was New Year's Eve, 1916 - 1917 would see the first successful Transmission.

Acidic smoke belched from a side-vent as the boy turned handles and frantically pumped footpedals. Some type of grit poured from an opening and was directed out of a window with funnels. An array of greasy bulbs slowly came to life as a low rumble emanated from deep in the belly of the machine. The boy wiped his forehead on his jacket sleeve and retrieved a se ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>Motorcycling... some thoughts by Villager</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=953</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ I was never the biker type. I never imagined I would even sit on a motorcycle, let alone be inclined to ride one. I wasn't much bothered by cars, either; A to B and all that. If it was cheap, reliable and comfortable, that was enough for me. It was only because I was accepted onto a university course 10 days before it started, and there was no public transport to speak of, that I need to get myself mobile. I knew it was impossible to learn how to drive and pass a test in that time, and my brother suggested a "125" (a small-engined motorbike with a top speed of 60-80 mph, if you don't  know much about bikes). There's no need for a test, you just do your Compulsory Basic Training; four hours' instruction, without running anyone over or fallin ... ]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
       <title>Disease by shaggy</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=952</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ The most assurance he had ever received that he was on the right path was purely accidental.  When she fell on his knife, and when the smile came across her face, he had not realized it was a spasm.  

He watched her face as the glare of life faded from her eyes.  He smiled with her and kissed her lips.  They felt cold.  And they smiled back at him, the imprint of his kiss still on them.  

He made love to her after her heart stopped beating.  It was exquisite-- no judgment, no complaints.  He was neither too rough nor too soft, and she opened up for him easily.  When he had finished, he lay beside her, caressing her breasts.

He wondered what it would be like if she made love to him.  Would he be as cold?  Would he be immediately har ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>Scars by shaggy</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=951</link>
       <description><![CDATA[ As he hid behind the debris, he took the moment to let all the emotions wash over him.  They had been hidden for so long that they came stubbornly; what is hidden is not revealed easily.  The death, the destruction, the betrayal... he rose it to his throat, and in a choked, silent, violent sob, it came out and he began to purge everything that he had kept inside.

He could not be heard.  And so as everything came out, it was hidden still.  He had no voice, no means of expression, only mental images that came unannounced.  There were horrible ones, indeed-- visions of flesh torn, screaming children... but most horrifying of all were the visions of happiness.  Horror came and went, and he was happy to leave it behind.  But along with the ho ... ]]></description>
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    <item>
       <title>Reflections of a qualified teacher by Villager</title>
       <link>http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=comment&amp;id=948</link>
       <description><![CDATA[  The past six weeks have been a first for me: six weeks of proper full-time work, with proper pay. The first time I have earned more than minimum wage, too. I have taken a job in Lincolnshire teaching English at an old secondary modern school. I've found success easier to come by than I had imagined, but it does come at a high cost to my time and energies. It is perhaps instructive that I am only truly discovering this at the age of 23, but I abhor the price that work demands from me. 

 It has been interesting. I have been lumbered with almost exclusively with Special Needs groups which makes every lesson something of a drama, but really I feel sorry for the children: teacher training in this country does not equip teachers to teach any ... ]]></description>
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