Questioning Autumn

The cough is human, polite without being urgent. I stir slowly, roots moving in a slow ponder. The ancient wards and protections are holding about my home, which means this is no ordinary child. He has not come with fire or blade, though he bears a smile that is weapon in itself. I open my eyes slowly, flexing my arms. I am old, though not yet petrified, and have no need of physical movement to defend myself. If any wished to burn my forest, they would know why humans used to fear the woods.

“This is not your place,” I say, a rumbling of the air.

The boy blinks unseeing eyes. “Well, of course not, cuz it’s yours but! I thought I could come visit and say hi,” he says cheerfully, hurling another smile at me.

You could destroy evil with such a smile; that he does not use is as a weapon is somehow worse. “What are you?”

“Oh! I’m Jay. Which is also a what, and I’m really good at hiding as human but I’m from way Outside the universe and travelling with friends but they’re busy and leaves are starting to fall off of trees and I got to wondering about how autumn is more than seasons changing and I thought I could ask you about it?”

I feel myself stirring some more. This is my home, and deep protections activate as the boy’s presence more than anything else. He avoids every poisoned barbed and branch, half the time not being where the are, the rest – the rest an altering of the world, Forcing my power away from him in the core of my kingdom. Not even magicians could do such a thing, and he does it without effort. Without even trying.

“What are you?”

“I just said,” he says crossly. “Are you still sleepy? I bet I could wake you up with coffee! Did you know that I’m not allowed to have coffee yet even though I’m eleven?”

I pause, forcing the ancient defences to relax. “Why would I know that?”

“Because you’re a forest spirit and this is your wood so you know stuff?” he asks. “I mean, you must know a lot even when sleeping or you wouldn’t sleep because waking up to find the forest was gone would be pretty sad!”

“Sad.”

“Yup! And make you angry, I bet, but I’m not good at it because I don’t like being angry. Anyways, I wanted to ask you about the difference between fall and autumn? Like autumn and harvest are good, but fall is a really meany word and makes it seem like the trees are dying in bad ways and that it’s not seasons changing but stuff that is lots more wrong.”

“Lots more wrong.”

“Uh-huh!”

“Has the English language devolved so in recent years?” I ask and the boy steps back at that. “I imagine not. I am spirit of the wood, boy, of the sun and darkness, of life and of death. You do me a great disservice in attempting to be cute.”

Jay blinks a few times at that. “Oh! I didn’t even – I talk like that a lot, and that is why I guess, but I don’t much talk about why I talk like me and Honcho puts up with it because he understands I don’t want to be scary because sometimes I’m a Jaysaurus but I could be a Jayzilla and that would be really scary!”

“Those words mean nothing to me.”

“You’re not on tumblr at all?”

“... is this another term for fall?”

“I don’t think so, but yahoo bought tumblr and that’s probably more fall than autumn I think? Uhm, it’s like how you went to sleep because humans were using the woods and if you declared war on them, they’d win? Like you’d have to be a monster, and you’d be really good at it, but even if you won than other woods would be burned down and suffer? Me being a Jaysaurus is kinda like being a monster,” he says.

I consider that. “And a Jayzilla?”

“That’s worse,” he says firmly, and there is a wall behind the answer, and a door I have no desire to open.

“Autumn and harvest are the old terms, linked to the land and the solstice. As humans moved away into cities, their understanding of the forest and the land diminished. So, too, did their power over the world increase. The changing of the seasons became fall, became a sad thing after the glory of summer, for winter is no longer a time for rest after a harvest for them. They changed words, and the world changed with them. Autumn has replaced harvest in many places by itself: fall is just the next step, or more open about what it is. What they have gained, what they have lost.”

“Oh.” Jay is quiet for a few seconds. “That’s pretty sad.”

“Many things are. I have no desire to waken in this world as it stands now. Few forest spirits remain that are not mad. I will sleep, if my forest remains, and in time it will be over. The era of cities will end, and my forest shall grow again.” And I am old, and I did not get old by being a fool, so I add: “If you could help this and bind my forest against destruction, I would consider that payment for this conversation.”

Jay brightens at that. “Okay,” he says, and I feel the entire forest change, the world about it shifting. Even time will not touch it as deeply as it does other places, not destroy it quite as quickly. That I did not expect, but I merely relax back into the roots of the oldest trees in the wood.

I close my eyes, and hear the boy depart. And I hope, in ways as deep as roots and in the shoots that touch the sun, but I never meet such a power again. Because there are many ways to fall, and I think envy could well be mine. I sleep again, to dream of unseeing eyes that know too much by far.

Prompt: it blew in with the wind

“Jay. You don’t need to make friends with everything you find,” I say as patiently as I can.

“But Charlie, it blew in with the wind. See? See?” He pokes his white cane into the air toward a seething mass of teeth-encrusted shadows floating in the air. It is roughly the size of my head.

“It is floating in the air, yes.” I count to twenty. “Do you know what it is?”

“Nope,” Jay says with a huge, beaming grin. “But it likes to hug a lot and! is really sad people keep running away from it.”

“And you don’t think they might have very good reasons for doing that?”

Jay scratches his head at that. “I don’t think humans have good reasons for loads of things they do, though.”

Unfortunately, that’s not really something I can argue with. “All right. We are leaving town, so we need to find a home for it and –.” I pause. “No.”

“I haven’t even asked yet! It really likes to do a sleeping in glove compartments, and our truck has one.”

“Jay. We travel too much to bring along pets.”

“But it isn a pet. It’s a friend,” he protests.

There are some times when all I can do is admit I’ve lost. “All right. It will need a name. And you’ll need to bind it to be safe and make sure it doesn’t scare humans.”

Jay scowls at that but nods, turning to the small floating cloud. “Okay. It wants to be a Carl. With a c, because it likes the sea.”

“Of course.” I head to the door, with Jay and Carl following. To my eyes Carl is now a red balloon floating from Jay’s hand. The balloon has a smiley face with sharp teeth. I don’t say a word.

Prompt: blue or purple

“Jay.” Charlie pauses. “What are you wearing?”

“Well. I want to go back to school for another day and,” I add firmly, “I’ve been listening to lots of articles online about schools.”

“Are these schools based on Japanese horror anime?”

“Schools have uniforms. So I found the school colours on their website and totally made this outfit work!”

Charlie buries her face in her hands. I don’t need to be able to see to know when she does that. “Dare I ask what the colours are?”

“Blue and purple, but they don’t have a uniform right now and their school paper said the outfit they eventually get should be blue or purple because the colours match too much?”

“It is very – ah, bright. Kiddo. You can’t see. Do you have any idea what other students are going to make of this?”

“Nop! Because I’m not using bindings so I won’t know,” I say proudly. “And I solved the colour problem but I kind of had to use bindings and bind light and things together.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“It’s both! Because choices between colours are mean to either colour, so I found blurple! It’s blue and purple together like a Jayboss.”

“You found a colour?”

“It took a bit of time, and it was pretty shy but I asked really nice so it’s the colour of my clothing. You said it’s bright?”

“It looks very bright, yes.”

“That’s probably camouflage.”

Sometimes Charlie is really slow at stuff. This time she says: “What is it hiding from?” maybe because she knows me really well!

“I’m not sure. It talks in colour and I can’t see colour so I kind of guessed. I think that, maybe, if an alien rainbow with lots of teeth appears, it might run away?”

“Of course. Amazed I didn’t think of that. Can you get your, ah, blurple, to be a little less bright?”

“I can try,” I say, and then I’m all out the door and heading down the hallway and stairs to get the bus, and a lot of people kind of gasp but I probably moved a bit faster than I should have since if I don’t hurry to school I might get scared and not go and I am pretty Jaysome, which is always a good reason for people to stare at me!

Mum's Foot

Mum’s not a bad person. It’s not a cool thing to say about your mother, but it is true. Like the time she met Jane’s youngest brother and thought he had Downs Syndrome because his face was all puffy from allergies to a bee sting. Poor Philip had no idea why this stranger was complimenting him on his English or acting as if he was a little kid when he was sixteen at the time. She puts her foot in it more than anyone else I know; she’s probably why I almost never do, not wanting to be her. Y’ know?

But this morning wasn’t like the other days, I guess. St. Patrick’s day is all about green and luck and bad Irish jokes. With my hair, so I like it about as much as kids born on April Fool’s Day like their birthdays but you had said we’d be doing something special this year, last year. Birthday party to end all parties, the sweet little sister sixteen. You know, I don’t know anything about Saint Patrick? There’s the day, and people always making jokes about how red hair means I’m Irish, but I don’t know anything about him. I figure it’s probably safest, as one guy became a saint for murdering a woman and then putting up with her ghost haunting him for twenty years. I learned that from the hospital chaplain. You’d like him.

So I’m thinking about that and not googling things on my phone to figure it out when a blind kid walks by us. Dark glasses, white cane, about ten or twelve. That age when it’s hard to tell how old a boy is, holding a Starbucks tray in one hand with two drinks, moving easily around people and humming to himself. Off-tune, whatever it was. Normal enough, really, but mum must have been thinking about St. Patrick and luck as well.

“The poor child; he can’t see,” she said to me, as if I’d somehow not noticed. I’m not the smartest cookie in the jar, but it’s a bit hard to miss the cane and glasses both. Knowing mum, she was probably going to say how worse off he was than us, and then apolgize to me. The boy stopped, turned. He didn’t frown, just look up toward mum.

“I’m not poor.” No shouting, no histrionics, just firm and polite. Then he grinned. I’ve never even seen a baby grin like that. It was wide and friendly and so pure I thought for a second that the kid was a few cookies short of a jar. “Because,” he continued, and threw the word with excitement at us, “I have tons and loads of friends, and there’s a lot of humans who have eyes and don’t see and I don’t mind not seeing because it means I listen more even if Charlie might not believe I do because I still talk like a Jay but I’m listening like one too and you can learn a lot from silence that you can’t even from bindings and I’m lucky all the time because I’m Jaysome and I have great friends!”

I think he said all that, maybe even more; I don’t have a clue what he meant by ‘bindings’ at all. He talked pretty fast, all animated and as happy as a normal kid dropped into a vat of speed. I couldn’t help but grin back. Yeah, yeah. I’m serious: I did.

“I didn’t mean,” Mum began, and the kid scowled a little at that.

“Everyone means stuff, even the things they don’t mean are things they are, things they own,” he said. “I’m Jay, but we’ve never met and you don’t even know me and it’s a lot of kinds of mean to tell someone you don’t know that you’re sorry they’re alive.”

“Oh,” Mum said. Foot, mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“But sorry doesn’t help. Not doing wrong things again helps. Sorry is a word that doesn’t fix cuz it justifies and justifying things is easy and people use it so they don’t have to explain themselves to themselves,” Jay said.

Honest, that’s how the kid talked. It should have been silly, but there was something. I don’t know. It’s not like he was intense, but it’s like this other girl I met in the hospital, the one with the fragile bones? Hannah had broken her arms and legs so often it was only a joke to her by that point, but when she talked you listened. Because she said things worth listening to. Lessons she’d learned, passing them on in hopes you wouldn’t have to learn them yourself. Heh. She’d laugh to hear me say that, but it was true. And this kid was young and – I don’t know. He was like that somehow. Not like he’d been through pain but that he would, that made what he said have some kind of weight. Like I said, it didn’t even make sense then. I think it makes even less now.

“That’s the thing about humans,” the kid said, as if he wasn’t one, as if he was responding to words mum hadn’t even said. “It’s like the worst one are the ones who never think they are monsters? Like the ones who set out to Do Good for others always do the most damage and it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad it’s not even sad-funny!”

There was a cough behind me at that. I guessed the new arrival at about eighteen or so? Ex-goth sort of look to her, and Jay turned and grinned toward her. “I was all bringing the coffee, but you were busy and I was making friends!”

“I don’t think this is making friends,” she responded mildly, but the kid blinked.

Jay opened his mouth, closed it, and then looked as if he’d been punched right between the legs. “Oh!” And he turned to mum, and said: “I think I kind of hurt you by accident because you made me a bit cranky and I’m the kind of sorry that’s more than sorry –.”

“Jay.” His friend didn’t move, but Jay gulped audibly.

Mum looked. I don’t know. Dazed, I think. “What are you?” she said, and I figure asking some blind kid what he was would send anyone over the edge, but the kid just repeated his name.

His friend coughed louder, and Jay walked over to her and handed her the Starbucks tray. “See? The coffee isn’t even cold, Charlie, and –.”

“And?” Charlie didn’t move.

“And maybe someone acted like blind meant stupid in Starbucks and I sorta lost my cool here over it but I didn’t mean to!”

Charlie sighed, and said: “Go,” and Jay was past her and down the street, making a beeline to the Days Inn.

“What?” I said, certain I had missed something. I always had that in the early days last year, when mum and dad talked to the doctors. Still do, some days, but I think – I think now it’s more that I want to miss things.

“What is he?” mum asked.

“Jay,” Charlie said, her smile resigned and an echo of the kid’s. “He does things with bindings.”

“My Jennifer. She’s – she’s my only daughter,” mum said, and rested her hand on my shoulder. “Can he help her?”

And Charlie crouched down a little, met my gaze. Her eyes reminded me of Devon, at that one party when Eric slapped you and he grabbed Eric’s arm and looked ready to break it then and there. Like she could be Devon, but was holding back. “If Jay could help you walk, he would have said,” she told me, as matter-of-fact as if a miracle wasn’t even that at all. “Probably,” she added as she stood back up.

And Mum just nodded, as if that made any sense at all. Anyway, she’s down in the cafeteria so I came up here alone, Alice. They keep saying you won’t wake up from the coma, and I kept not believing. Until mum said she had only one daughter and I felt – oh, God. Part of me says it’s just mum putting her foot in it again, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But what if you don’t wake up? What if these machines just hold onto you until you’re dead?

What if I can’t say it’s not your fault, that I survived even if my legs didn’t. Like Jay said about eyes: there’s people who have legs and never use them, and I’m doing things now I never would have before. Not that I wouldn’t change it. If I could undo it all, I would. But I have to move ahead, to move on. And most of that is knowing it’s not your fault and I’d give almost anything if you could hear me say it, if you knew it wasn’t your fault.

I’d say sorry for the fight before the drive home, even if sorry doesn’t mean enough. I’d say everything I say to mum and dad now that I should have always said to everyone before, but especially to you. I love you so much, sis. So much. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s been almost a year, and I didn’t even think of looking for clover. Not for either of us. I guess this means I know. I think mum is waiting for that. I don’t know what dad is waiting for anymore at all, but that’s not – not important right now.

I was so damn lucky to have a sister like you, and I think maybe I need to put m foot in my mouth a little more. Just to see what happens. Because we never know, do we? We just never know.

We never know.

moons

Moons

The package arrives unmarked at the motel room door, just like the email said it would. Magicians dont use the internet because scary things are in it, but those things don’t bother me at all. Not ever, because I can be a little scary myself and I’m really good at taking bindings apart and finding them. Which is why I sell a few passwords to religious websites to someone and get a black pistol in a box in exchange for it. It’s pretty small, but they sent what I asked for along with a small belt for it and not a single question at all when I asked if a kid could use it.

That part is a little weird but humans can’t help but be weird so I bring it inside, set it up in the bathroom and get ready for the night. One gun, a light jean jacket, jeans, shoes, t-shirt, all in dark colours and with extra bullets in my pocket, the motel door keys and my phone in another. I planned and timed it all perfectly and still the magician comes back in from getting a coffee just as I come out of the bathroom because that is what magicians do. Sometimes, they walk right between bindings and around them and never even notice at all.

I dive into the bathroom faster than humans can move, but the door slams too quick behind me.

“Jay?” The magician pauses. I hear him set his coffee down and walk over to the bathroom door. “What are you doing?”

I don’t even try to bind the bathroom door so he can’t get it. “Doing my hair, honcho!”

“Your hair.” He pauses. “And what are you doing with it?”

“Combing it, of courthe.”

“And since when have you bothered doing that before unless I forced you to?”

I say nothing. I guess I wanted to be caught, or at least I hope so. I open the bathroom door and glare up at him. “I could have been.”

He pauses again, staring down at me with a distant look, his magician’s face as he sees more of the world than people do. He crouches down enough to hold my gaze with his, which is often a bad sign. “You mind explaining to me what the hell you are doing with a gun under your jacket?”

“Going for a walk.”

“A walk. Explain some more,” he says, and a hint of power threads under the words. He’s still tired from a few days ago, but he’s a magician and he won’t let that stop anything if he has to.

“You read about the moon in the paper, right? It’th going to be huge tonight.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Yeth, but ith’ a perigree moon, so it’th really huge.”

“That’s like a peregrine falcon?”

I glare at him as he tries not to grin. “That wathn’t funny at all. The moon ith going to be big, tho I am going out to hunt werewolveth.”

“With silver bullets.”

“Duh.” I figure that explains enough of everything he wants explained. Honcho, of course, doesn’t think that at all.

He stands. “You are faster than humans, tougher than they are by far, and you can bind and unbind things. Why, precisely, would you need a gun to hunt werewolves?”

“Hello? Tradition,” I say, and he just stares in response. “Why do you think I have thilver bulletth?”

“Bed. Sit.”

I go over to one of the two beds in the motel and sit on it. Honcho sits on the other, studying me. He’s not using the bindings between us to get information, not yet. He could easily, because I bound myself into his service when I entered the universe but he hates abusing that but he rubs his left temple and I can see the bindings about him shifting as a headache comes on.

“Do you have any idea what would happen to a ten year old kid without legal ID caught runnig around with a gun?”

I blink. He’s not smiling at all. I unbind some of his headache, stopping before he notices. “I –.” I gulp, and I’m sucking on my right thumb before I can stop myself. It lets me bind me a little, keeps me from hurting too much when humans just don’t understand. “It wath a joke!”

“What?”

“Full Moon. Werewolveth. Gunth with thilver. I was going to have a dog whithle but the perthon on the internet thending it didn’t thend it in time. Okay?”

He sits back. “You got a gun off the internet faster than a pet whistle.”

“Yeth.”

“And this is a joke.”

“Yeth! Like how kidth would go looking for mutant ninja turtleth in a thewer and I thought you’d find it funny and laugh.” I throw the gun at him with my left hand. “You’ve been really thad all week and I thought it would be funny.”

“You thought it would be funny to hunt werewolves with a real gun.”

“I wathn’t going to actually thoot any.” I yank my thumb free with an effort and cross my arms. “You were going to feel what I wath doing through our bindingth and find me and I would explain –.”

“Better than you’re doing now?”

“Much better, and you’d laugh and be happy and everything would be okay and you’d actually get to watch the giant thuper full moon in a huge bloom inthead of thulking in a motel room and I really like it when you aren’t being thad and mopey and tho do you.”

The magician just stares at me in silence. I bite my lower lip, fighting my thumb wanting to me in my mouth again because that feels good too. Sometimes my lisp makes it hard to seem serious at all, and I hate that but I don’t hate it because it is part of me and that’s hard to explain to humans. “I could thay that without an eth,” I mumble. “Maybe.”

“No, it – it’s fine.” He stands. “We’re leaving the gun and bullets, though.”

“Huh?”

“The moon is going to be full in twenty minutes.” He doesn’t even look at a window to know that, because magician. “You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

I scramble off the bed and grab his left hand, half-dragging him out the door. He follows, closing it behind us, and ruffles the top of my head gently as we go down the street.

I move away. “Thee?”

“Kiddo?”

“I could have been doing my hair becauthe you keep doing that.”

And this time I’m not trying for funny at all but he starts laughing anyway and ruffles my hair again. “That’s a good point,” he says, and laughs some more.

The moon is really full and we only see one werewolf, but they’re busy watching the moon too so we go back to the motel in silence and he actually falls asleep on the other bed without having any bad dreams at all.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the gun before Honcho asks what I paid for it.

motion

It is a dangerous lie for magicians to think magic is more important than it is. A magician is a wall, a doing, a being – sometimes even a becoming – and it is a terribly easy mistake to think that magic is the world, the secret underpinning on which all depends. Normal people would speak of oil, quickly, and coral reefs if they took more time to think. But sometimes, often more than sometimes, a product is more important than the cause. It only takes a power failure to teach that, for people to realize how much they depend in electricity. How little they understand it. And what happens to the darkness once we remove the light that makes us civilized.

I waken to darkness in a hotel room. Jay is shaking me furiously, saying: “The lightth won’t turn on.”

The hotel was small and cheap, each room barely enough for a doube bed to fit in it. I hadn’t given him a key to my room, but that didn’t stop Jay from breaking in via unbinding the lock. He looks to be ten and is from far Outside the universe. It’s not as uncommon as people think for such creatures to end up in the universe. That’s he bound himself into my service and loves games on his phone is hopefully less common, but given the popularity of cell phones I’m never quite sure.

“It’s a power failure; go back to bed.”

“My phone ithn’t working, honcho.”

I blink a few times, feel the shape of the world around me, wake up enough to wish I wasn’t awake at all. “It’s two in the morning. You should be asleep anyway,” I mumble.

“I wath getting a high thcore,” he says, as if that explains it all. “And my phone died. You can fix it.”

“Go. To. Bed.”

He shakes me again, harder than before. “You thould be up anyway, becauthe the electrithity ith gone and the thity feelth weird.”

It takes me a few seconds to parse what he means, and I’ve travelled with Jay for months. I’m used to his lisp; at least half the time I don’t even notice it anymore. I shake him off, hard, and sit up slowly in the bed. Jay is bouncing from foot to foot nervously, and beyond that is silence. No neon, not even emergency lights in the hallway, and I want to sleep and Jay is shaking me.

“Honcho?”

I close my eyes. Me. Jay. The bindings between us. My magic. I wrap a binding about it all, since I can make bindings better than any other magic I do. It takes longer than it should, and feels like I’m swimming in treacle, but a moment later my head is clear, sharp. I shake my head gingerly and get out of bed. I sleep clothed; most magicians do.

Jay is not a magician. “Clothing, please. Meet me outside after.”

He nods and dashes across the hotel to his room in a blur; Jay hides his nature terribly well, but anyone looking at him naked would know he’s not human at all. I wait until I hear him rumaging in his bag, sure nothing tried to eat him, and head down the stairs. The man sitting at the reception desk is at it, but barely notices me. The vehicles outside are at a standstill, people moving about in slow, sluggish fashion.

The only light visible is the faint glimmer of the moon, and hints that the outer edges of the city and the suburbs still have power. I wrap a binding about a random woman’s head, watch as she shakes off her torpor, undo the binding after. I call up the magic inside me, a ball of electricity flaring to life in my palm. It vanishes a moment later, but I feel the direction it is being pulled in and begin to walk quickly.

“When did your phone die?” I say to Jay as he comes up beside me.

“Twenty minuteth ago, or tho?” he says. “Not long. I didn’t do thith, did I?”

“Getting a high score in a computer game can’t kill power to a city, Jay.”

“But it wath in a verthion of Flappy Bird that ith really hard.”

I decide it’s safer not to ask what that is. “It wasn’t you. People have elecrcity inside them, and even that has been diminished.” I make another ball, watch it die, cross a road and walk quicker, slipping it and around people as needed. The source turns out to be an office building: a dozen stories of gleaming modern glass and steel with something in the second basement that should not be there at all. The sign outside the building is dead as well, but I make out the word ‘Dynamic’ as part of it before unbinding the door. I call up lightning, and then light, only to have whatever is below absorb both in moments. I don’t dare anything more solid without being noticed.

“You can see in the dark better than humans, yes?”

“Of courthe,” Jay says, and grabs my right hand in my left, leading me down the stairs. I ask about the first basement, which is all office furniture and storage. The second one has a door of solid steel, and two other massive ones behind it.

I press a hand to each, wishing for entrance, and there is a gust of wind as the doors are replaced by air. The steps down are slower, narrow, and Jay stops me once or twice as he pokes the wall in the dark before we keep going; traps of some kind, but he sees their bindings and leads me down to another door, the true entrance to the basement. I can feel power behind it, slow and sleepy and barely awake. This door is not protected as much; I unbind the locks and push it open to behold computers and tables of gleaming technologies I barely known the names of.

The middle of the room is a container of tempered glas in which a figure glows with pale hunger. It is smaller than I figured it would be, currently sluggish from eating so much energy, but that won’t last. It looks like a small rabbit, which is probably important even if I can’t see how yet.

“Hello.”

It watches warily, tries to pull energy out of me, hits my power and simply keeps trying, battering at my will like a child.

“You’re not from Outside the universe; just a made thing, created by people with more sense of adventure than of the common world. You will hurt them if you stay here, and I cannot allow that to happen, not like this.” I thread power into my words; it tries to eat even that, not yet enough to understanding my words, perhaps not even their intent.

“Sleep.” I don’t ask, and the tiredness it caused in people feels back into it, sending it somewhere far away, wherever ideas might go when they die. I wait a beat, a second, and then find a woman in a lab coat near the site, and tell her to wake up.

“What were you doing here?”

“Who are you? How did you –.”

“What were you doing here?”

She shudders under the force of the command. “A perpetual motion machine; free energy for the whole world, that was our intent,” and then looks shocked by her own admission.

“An energizer bunny. It was meant to keep going and going –.” I’d laugh, but things progressed too far for that. I reach out, snag her right hand and let her feel the city: the exhaustion, the sleepiness, the drained minds. How far it had gone, how much worse it could have become.

“You will end this project,” I say as I let go. She is gulping in air, looking stunned, trying to find words but power has begun to return to the city that we head upstairs in the chaos that results, easily finding a short cut back to the hotel.

“You might not have woke up,” Jay says as we reach the hotel; I’m amazed he’d managed to keep quiet this far. “I wath playing gameth and felt thingth go weird.”

“You did.”

“Honcho,” he says, not quite pleading.

I shake my head and ruffle his hair gently. “A gift card tomorrow for twenty-five dollars toward new games, okay?”

“Theventy-five,” he says. “I helped you in the dark.”

“Yes, but theventy isn’t a number.”

He sticks his tongue out at that. “Eighty.”

“Forty.”

“Deal.”

I shake his hand formally on it and he bounces up the stairs and hurries into his room, not quite slamming the door. No doubt to decide what games to buy before morning. I’d tell him to sleep, but I doubt he’s going to even pretend to.

I stay up, open the hotel room window – it wants to be open despite never been made to – and watch lights and sounds return to the city, watch the ancient darkness that used to lurk in the shadows retreat before modern wonders. I watch the play of electric lights until the sun rises and finally head to bed to sleep.

fallow

There are things it is easy to forget if you’ve been a magician long enough. I imagine the police have this problem as well: you become something, you take up a mantle to help others, and you spend much of your time seeing the worst that the world has to offer. Magic can be like that: sometimes the only solution to a maze is to burn it down to ashes and walk through the result. Nevermind that the maze could be a home, an entire life, a way of seeing the world. You do what has to be done, and if you’re smart about it you learn to never mourn afterwards.

I spent many years in bars. I haven’t as much since a creature from Outside the universe bound himself to me. As such entities go, Jay is low-maintenance: give him a phone, tablet and internet connection, access to games and he’s happier than creatures that need sacrifices of puppies or banking executives. I’ve left him playing games and just gone out to walk, listening to the world, letting the magic out. I fix a few cars, shore up a sewer line, ease the atmosphere in one home a little to prevent another fight the kids will hear. I’ve done some terrible and impressive magic in my time, but this is what I enjoy: the small things, the little nudges toward making lives a little better.

A magician stands between the world and awful things beyond it seeking entrance. Using magic is just a small part of my nature, but the magic is why I became a magician. Sometimes one just gets so tired of being a wall. I slip out of side streets and into fields left fallow, waiting for a new season or perhaps to be host to some music festival or rally. The grass will remain. Sometimes what is able to bend is stronger than what which won’t. It’s hard to remember that. I met an exorcist once who explained his nature to me as, “I am an exorcist; we break before we bend” and being a magician is often the same: if we bend, something from Outside can enter the universe, can damage it, can hurt people.

But if we never bend –. I don’t know. Magicians don’t last, as a rule. The magic eats us up from the inside out, or we die trying to stop something or the last finally catches up with us. There has to be a balance between breaking and bending, between being river and rock. I haven’t found it. I don’t even know how to find it. I walk over grass that will survive me and wonder if perhaps magicians make the universe weak. Would the universe be strong against such things if we were not a wall against them? It’s one thing to think, but not something we can just decide to test. Not something I can risk the lives some Entities might destroy on.

So I turn back, halfway down the field, and walk back to pavement and deep into the town, touch the world with a few more small magics, focusing on that. Losing myself in it until I reach the hotel. Jay is sitting on his bed and offers up a huge grin when he sees me and begins burbling about a computer game he’s loving. I let the words wash over me, let his sheer enthusiasm ease my worries a little. There are creatures from Outside the universe like Jay, who see the universe as the best place to visit, who see it like a haven or tourist destination all rolled into one.

I think the world needs more of them. I suspect – I know – I need to meet more. I’ve met a few before, made deals with them, but far more I’ve bound or banished because it seemed necessary at the time. For now I just sit, and listen, and hope that Jay being bound to me makes me able to bend a little more than I think I can. I give him more money to buy some new games with, and Jay is wise enough not to ask me any questions at all.

Exhaling Catalysts Weekly Prompt:“a walk through the field is more about life than the walk itself, for the blades of grass that give way, hold the greater strength”

An evening at the shop

The start of a series of stories I've been doing this week in response to a writing prompt challenge. Was inspired by the fact that little sci-fi is written about mechanics: you get stories about the pilot of spacecraft, seldom those about the groundscrew. And how the space shuttles of the future might be run using apps. 

Most of my friends think I am crazy. At least half of the mechanics I know set up routines, automate responses and wander off while their personal system finds out what is going wrong with a vehicle. It’s almost always a software issue: gradient, updates, incompatible apps. GUI, in the modern world. How good the software is, what updates it runs, whether it is going to play nice with the rest of a car or not. Simple things to automate, to a point. But I never liked doing that, even before. I blame my dad, half-joking. He showed me all grandpa’s tools back in the day, how complicated it could be just to find out how many screwdrivers you’d need to remove screws from an item, every minute variant in wrenches and nails. You paid attention to what your tools did, to what you could do with them.

So I run through each piece of software myself, compile a list of problems, cycle through them to clear any up. On an average day it takes me less than half an hour per vehicle in the shop, but I know what is wrong, what I need to fix and what I did to fix it in case anyone ever asks. I’ve never been one to worry about automating myself out of a job, I just don’t trust an automated scan to catch everything I would or to solve it in the best manner even when it does. It’s time I could spend doing other things, but that’s all time is. And I find it relaxing, these days: just me, a machine, and no one else.

Grandpa comes in as I’m finishing up the last compatibility scan, tapping commands into the overlap above the floatcar, making sure everything is talking with everything else. My personal system lets me know when he is near and also alerts the local authorities; he’s tried to kill me twice since the accident, so I can’t disable the alert. I move away from the floatcar and turn my head. Grandpa flinches back. He always does.

“Grandfather.” My vocal interface is perfect. I designed it myself, but I still catch the tension at the edges of his mouth, the hardening of his eyes.

“Dar.” He moves slowly to the chair for customers, sits in it. He’s tired, worn out, overdue for at least a dozen bone regenerations. The chair taps into his nervous system and extracts enough pain to warrant a sigh of relief; he doesn’t have a proper chair at home.

I move closer, keeping a safe distance. The last time he tried to kill me he didn’t even have a gun. Just his body, some chemical concoction and hate. I’d like to think he doesn’t hate me, but I’m not sure even grandpa knows. “It has been a few weeks.”

“Yes.” He stares down at his hands, and then up at me. “How often does your father visit, Dar?”

“We talk every day, grandpa. He visits less in person than he should, but I understand.”

“Do you.” It isn’t a question.

“Accidents happen. Statistically they are impossible to avoid, but he still blames himself even though I survived.”

Grandpa twitches. “You call this surviving, do you?”

“I am still here.” I keep still. “Transfer technology increases every month.” I don’t point out that he is almost at the limit for what modern technology can do to sustain his body; he must know that even better than I do. “You can even try it out temporarily now.”

“I want to see you.”

“Grandpa –.”

“He doesn’t. I still do.”

“You tried to kill me last time.” My voice is almost unsteady. “I would rather not do this.”

I have been manifesting a projection; I do it automatically whenever anyone else enters the shop. Me, before the accident. Eight, grinning, a perfect overlay over my body. I would be ten now. Maybe eleven. Complete transfers are uncommon enough to a new body that I don’t want to throw customers off. It makes my friends feel better as well, though fewer visit than used to.

“Dar.” He closes his hands, opens them. The effort hurts him. “I need to see.”

I disengage the projection. The result is functional: I’ve made most of the modifications to my chassis myself, though I call it a body even in my head most of the time. My psychbot insists on that. Sleek torso, treads for locomotion, hover and flight system, and a dozen limbs for use as needed. My body didn’t survive the accident; the rest of me was able to. My projection-face is visible in the viewscreen on top; I don’t like it, but I’m told it makes other people feel better.

“This is the future,” grandpa says. “We all become cars.”

“I am not a vehicle,” I say, sharper than I intended.

“How many apps does your body run on that this car doesn’t?” he snaps back, but doesn’t stand. Doesn’t produce a weapon.

The first time he tried to kill me, he brought down the entire shop with an explosive. Last time it was his fists and pounding me into a wall. I don’t like thinking about it; I haven’t altered the memories. People don’t alter their own memories. This time – this time he is trying words.

“I’m still Dar. I fix cars, like I always did, because I am good at it. Because I like doing it.” Grandpa says nothing. I don’t have to try and hack into the chairs connections to know we’re both thinking about dad, about how he’d fixed the car. About how he’d ignored my advice on two of the apps because ‘you’re still just a kid’. And it has crashed. And he had barely been hurt. And I – I’d become me.

“And you think there is anything in there that likes, do you?” grandpa says, so soft even my systems almost miss the words.

I could pretend I didn’t hear it. I’m mad enough not to. “And what difference is that between a body that DNA drives, or that is nothing more than a housing for a soul? You have your body and I have mine and I’m sick of this! I’m sick of friends no longer visiting, my father refusing to see me if he can avoid it and the only constant being someone who has tried to kill me. I’m still Dar. I’m still in here,” I snarl, glaring, a couple of limbs twitching into approximations of fists.

“Maybe you are. Maybe you are,” he says, and stands. “I won’t accept a transfer. I can’t do it.”

I say nothing to that. I haven’t been this angry in a long time; I don’t trust myself to speak.

“I used to throw things at the wall,” he says, “when your father would tell me I had to get a computer, or begin doing my accounts with one.”

I move over to the left, find a disused linking system. Hurl it into the wall hard enough to crack plasteel. “It’s not the same. I can fix that.”

He laughs at that. “I imagine so. Some things are very easy to fix.” And then: “It hurts the most that you are still Dar, you know.”

“I don’t,” I say, because I don’t understand why everyone is drifting away. Why no one wants to visit in person. Were I to try and fix it, like a vehicle, it would be for the same reasons no one wants to to go on trips with me anymore. And those are things I cannot fix. Transfers like mine will become more common. Maybe never accepted, but more common.

Grandpa just nods and leaves without another word. Most of my friends think I am crazy that I haven’t set the security system to deny him entrance to the shop. I don’t mind. Crazy is human. If you can think someone is crazy, you still think they are human.

I move to the next car, call up its applications and begun debugging processors. It is easy, but I still lose myself in the work. It is better than memory. Better than memories by far.

Ends

Another prompt from the Monkey.

I don’t like loose ends. Magic is by nature untidy – a fraying at the edges of knowing – but no magicians like loose ends. The past has a way of catching up with the present and if one is a magician it sometimes gallops or sneaks up to deliver new wounds and rip open old ones when least expected. But it is the nature of people to forget, to foreswear pain, to cease probing a wound that will not heal.

Two nights of nightmare shadows wreathed in dire dissolved me of that notion. On the third night I walked through the grey lands to my father’s grave. The land of the ghosts is all grey hauntings and things forgot: people, dreams, memories. Sometimes places haunt themselves in recursive echoes, other times they simply are.

No magician has ever become a ghost, but it is faster to travel throug this place than by other means, and any place of death is an easy exit. One does not travel lightly or without protection. There are wards and powers one can invoke. I am a magician, and I was in a really foul moon. That sufficed as well.

His grave was a simply marker in a wall, the body cremated into ash as though I had not burned it enough when I killed him. I had reasons and most of them were good, and at the end of the day the world had one less monster in it. There is no ghost of my father, no spirit, no traces of the sacrifice-driven magic he used.

But there are his victims. I can feel them, cold and hot winds blowing about the air, voice crying out at the edges of hearing. His death was not enough. For ghosts, no vengeance is ever enough: their death distills their life to one moment, to one emotion, played back until it consumes them. Most ghosts are harmless and the world can count itself very lucky that this is so.

This many ghosts with one aim could be dangerous if they joined together, became something more. I shove my hands deeper into my pockets and call up heat to warm me. “He is dead,” I say, and power lends certainty to my voice, carries it into places where even the dead can’t help but here. “You do not belong here.”

Some claim that in the beginning there was light. Before that there was darkness, which was also spoken. And before that, Words were spoken to clear emptiness so that the universe could exist at all. I speak a Word of cleansing that wipes every ghost from the cemetery entirely and probably most in the city as well. There will be nightmares of voice and an a feeling of watching emptiness will press in on light sleepers. I will pay prices for this in time. I don’t give a shit.

I open a door to the grey lands and walk away without looking back.

Eggs

A submission for the monkey's weekly flash challenge. I doubt I will do much (if anything) from Jay's POV again: he is fundamentally not human, and doing stories with him as the POV character lessens that. 

The term ‘cut-throat’ isn’t an empty cliche when you see it happen in real life. One moment I am walking down a small street with groceries, the next human falls over in front of me, blood seeping through cracks into the hungry earth. The body was stout, poorly dressed, layered for winter in summer. His killer is tall and thin, a knife sharp in his right hand, eyes locked on me.

I'm small. I look human and I'm holding four bags of groceries for the magician and Charlie, but mostly me. My master – though I never call him that – sent me out alone and that is Important. The binding between us remains solid and I do nothing to twig it, leaping to the side as the man with the knife swings his blade at me. I cover a third of the street in one skid, faster than humans can move, set the groceries down carefully.

It gives the killer time to spin and came at me again. I leap aside, pulling him from the groceries. I could hurt him, but humans are easy to hurt: I am hoping he sees my speed and runs away but he seems determined to kill me for seeing him kill someone else. A second swing, a third, and he finally scrambles back and lowers the blade.

"We can walk away," I snap. "I'm not going to tell anyone."

I look ten; my voice has no power at all to it. He ignores it and lunges at me. This time I leap right over him and land behind him next to a dumpster. He just spins, knife in hand, and comes at me again, like a villain in a really bad movie.

I grab the dumpster with both hands and heave: I'm stronger than humans are, especially young boys, and the dumpster smacks him in the side and sends him reeling. I put it back and he stares at it, then me, and finally runs away.

I walk around the body, not stepping in any blood, trying to leave no traces, considering getting some hot dogs before I return to the room the magician is renting when a shimmer over the body catches my gaze. For a moment I catch the outline of a human ghost, and then it spots me and is gone, vanishing into the air as if it never was.

I wait a few seconds to see if it comes back, mostly because I've never seen a ghost before, then grab the groceries and head back to the hotel.

The eggs didn't break in the bag, and that is all that matters.

G is for Gifts

Jay sits beside me on the couch, watching Sesame Street in silence for a good half-hour before giving me a hesitant poke in the side.

"You want to watch something else?" I say, fumbling for the remote beside me on the couch. Watching TV with a creature from outside the universe is interesting, if only to find out what he likes watching and how much he learned about the universe by entering the world versus what the TV is teaching him.

"I don't know? I wondered – what you would like, for your birthday?" he says.

"You to say 'She sells seashells by the seashore, the shells she sells are surely seashells; so if she sells shells on the seashore, I'm sure she sells seashore shells'," Charlie said from across the room without looking up from her phone. She came back in earlier but is still ignoring me after I screwed up and left her and Jay to face the oldest magician in the world by themselves. That they had survived unscathed did nothing to change the fact of my failure.

Jay shot her a glare, and then ignored her pointedly to turn back to me. "Well?"

"People don't give magicians gifts, as a general rule. There is little that magic can't provide, and there are balances –," I begin when he offers up a huge grin and hugs me, moving faster than anything human could.

"That can count," he begins, then pulls away at whatever he feels from the binding between us, eyes widening. "That wathn't okay?"

I let out a breath, willing calm. "What do you want in turn for a hug?" I say, and despite myself my tone is cool and distant.

Jay just looks lost for a few seconds, the binding giving him too much and not enough to go by. "A hug?" he mumbles, "If that'th okay?"

I return the hug carefully, letting go after; he scrambles to the other side of the couch and stares warily, placing two pillows between us and looking for all the world like a regular boy making a crude fort.

I let out a deep breath. "Affection has power, Jay."

"But that wathn't ...." He scowls, mouthing words silently, then: "I did not mean for affection? It was on the television as a form of friend-binding?"

"And you don't think that is powerful?"

"No?" he offers, looking even more confused. "A real binding ith different."

Charlie lets out a laugh, half against her will, turning her chair to face me. "So if I had hugged Mary-Lee, she would have had to aid me?"

"Not in any way you'd like. There are bindings that aren't bindings, Jay; that doesn't mean they don't have power. Do you want a second breakfast?" He nods warily. "Friendship is a binding like that; for a magician, it can be a gift that must be paid back."

Jay goes still. "Oh. What wath what the Wortht gift you've ever got?"

"A hug."

He nods, his face devoid of expression. "And the betht?"

"Also a hug." I grin and get up. "We'll get McDonalds, okay?"

He stands and pauses half-way to the door to look at Charlie, who has gone back to typing on her phone. "Charlie?"

"Yep?"

"You can explain thith to me later, right?"

She snickers. "Yeah. Go eat."

He nods and grabs his coat, following me out the door without further questions.

Lost

I leave Charlie and Jay in the hotel room and go out walking. There are magicians who walk only in their hearts, or in dream worlds they half-invent. I walk in the real world to clear my head, to build up protections, to forge wards and create distance. Magicians can't care in the way other people care or we would tear the skin of the world apart to work miracles even magic does not allow.

No magician dares love anyone so deeply that they would seek to bring them back from death.

I don't feel that way about Charlie, nor about Jay whom I barely know. I have been a magician for several years, a wandering one without true friends. Charlie reminds me of the sister I wish I'd had rather than the one I do have, and I could see Jay as a friend I might have made when younger. I walk to force quiet, to clear myself a little. To make distance.

I have not had a friend in a long time, and that could be what pulls the memory into ther world; I have been working magic steadily for days, and the magic decides to pay me back. That could be it. It's the best of some bad options, because one moment the street beside me is empty and the next Susan Jenkins comes stumbling out of a doorway in the empty air. Close enough to a decade has passed for the years to have worn into her face, her one-long hair done up tight in a bun, third-hand jeans replaced by a casual business suit, a squint replaced by stylish glasses.

I see manicured hands where I used to see a paintbrush and lips where I used to see a smile.

"What –? Where –? Who –?" she snaps out, hands darting to the purse at her side.

"Susan."

She stops dead. "You."

I force myself to read nothing in her voice, keep myself as still. She was the first person I'd met when I left home, the person to show me how to pick locks, where to go in cities and how to do more than just survive in them. She'd worked underground graffiti, street art, and I'd gone along and practised magic hiding her from the police, learning the cost of what I could do. She never asked many questions since I never gave her an answer she believed.

I told her everything anyway; she was that kind of person. She taught me how to listen, how to make room for other people in my heart. How to care and not care too much at the same time. She'd paid attention to me rather than the magician, and I'd just begun to realize how rare that would be.

"I wanted someone to talk to that I could trust." I don't try for a smile. "Even magic can't pull someone out of time."

She steps back, whispers my name, and I can't not hear the confusion under that. I'd done things she couldn't ignore by the time I left the city, shaken her world apart and left nothing behind of her illusions. I'd never meant to, but intent means nothing at all.

"Magician," she says after it, and I can see the new life she's built, art turned into advertising, a world away from the world we knew. I can see it, and as surely see it fall apart in her eyes.

"Susan." I say her name again, forcing power under it. She's not scared, but I'm not sure if that's because she's gone beyond that. Memories are screaming in the back of her head, clawing through walls of sanity. "I just wanted to – to talk," I say, and it sounds foolish as I say it. I can speak truth, I can sound like a magician when I have to. When I try to sound like just a man there is so little to draw on some days.

I take a breath and hold her gaze. Distance. Magic. "Forget," I say, in a tone she cannot resist, and make a door in the air back to where she came, gently push her through. A man is sitting at a desk, looking stunned in an office almost empty. I hurl the command into him as well and close the door I made between her life and mine.

I could tell Susan anything. That wasn't Susan. I wasn't the person she met those years ago. I wouldn't have told her now. (I should never have then.)

I don't know much right now. Only that the wards around me are sharp and cutting. That someone is following me and I don't know who they are, or even how. I walk back to the hotel and fling my senses wide, not caring if the other party sensing me seeking them. I know Charlie and Jay won't mind talking a walk as well, and I know other things.

I know who is following me, though not why.

I know I am magician enough to not cry, not now.

And I know I need a drink.

Maps

"This is your fault." Charlie stabs her finger harder on the horn and glares death through the windshield at the horse eating grass in the middle of the road. The horse doesn't move and the horn is probably the only part of the car that actually works. "Roads should not have grass growing up in the middle of them. Take the back roads, you said. It's more interesting, you said. If I wanted to get closer to nature I'd go to a zoo or watch a movie."

"Two roads diverged into a wood."

"And we're taking the one that leads to serial killers and missing bodies. This isn't even on the GPS."

I rub the bridge of my nose. "Or the map."

"I still can't believe you know how to fold a map. That's part of being a magician, isn't it?"

"You don't think a random healthy horse on a road that isn't on any map at all could be unusual?"

She pulls her hands off the horn and lets out a sigh. "When you put it like that, no. Let me guess: dragon?"

"As far as I know all dragons work in treasury offices or are CEOs."

Charlie's eyes narrow, a hint of red seeping into them as the god inside her looks out. "I never know when you're joking."

"Good. You're not supposed to." I rap the dashboard with my knuckles and the engine grumbles a slow death that sounds not unlike a demon passing wind. With luck that wasn't anything I did.

Charlie gets out of the car as well and marches up to the horse. "You. Get out of our way."

The eyes of the horse shine white in response. A lot of magical creatures seem to be fixated on tricks involving their eyes. A hint of claws shimmer in the air around Charlie's fingers.

I cough and walk over. "I did tell you that the monster under your bed-slash-god inside you that you are shouldn't be called up for trivial reasons?"

Charlie pauses and pulls the aspect of the god slowly back inside her, turning to face me. "Why are you saying it like that?"

"Because," the horse says, "the magician is telling me you're not a demon and I should not destroy you."

She spins back, eyes wide. The unicorn that stands in front of her is smaller than the horse and what every deer dreams it was, as sharp as the wind and as swift as the sun. It is beautiful and terrible and could easily drive one half-mad.

"I've seen better FX in blockbuster movies." Charlie's pause is barely a hitch, her voice almost steady.

The unicorn's horn turns translucent. I cough again, louder.

"Magician," it says in a voice fit to make hunter's wet themselves.

"She is with me. And I believe beyond your purview?"

"Time was they would be older and wait for me." The unicorn's horn fades slowly from view as it draws up the seeming of a horse around itself again. "Men, women: it would not matter. They would see my purity and it would be a sign their own could end. And now I hide on roads without names or desires lest I be hunted down and used."

There is not much even a magician can say to that, or at least nothing kind. " I could increase the wards on this place."

"I need nothing from you." It turns and walks into the woods, the grace entirely that of a horse.

I walk back to the car.

"What was that about?" Charlie says as she gets in, trying to coax the engine back to life.

"A unicorn only has power over virgins."

"You're not a virgin."

"No."

"You look like one."

"Do you want to know what colours I could turn your hair?"

Charlie just grins and twists the key again until the car grumbles into life. "So how did we end up on this road?"

"I think no one has loved this car even once of all the people who owned it."

She pauses, mid-shift on the clutch, continues. "You mean no one has attempted stuff from the karma sutra in the back seat? Or the front?"

"I mean what I said. It's a magician thing."

"The unicorn didn't know?"

"Even unicorns see only what they want to see." I run fingers over the dashboard: the car asks for no magic, I offer it none.

"Are we getting rid of the car in the next town?" Charlie asks once we turn onto a proper road again.

"Yes." She asks nothing else. "All we could offer is pity, and the car doesn't deserve that."

"We can give it to a kid who just got his licence. It might be enough," she says finally as we pull into a town so small the GPS is reluctant to admit it exists. "But we're definitely taking proper roads from now on. With your luck we'll find out dragons are still around and have to rescue a princess."

I snort. "Those are just stories. That's not what princesses are for."

She slows the car and looks out the window for likely owners for the car and asks no questions at all. I leave her to decide on her own answers and close my eyes, pretending a sleep that becomes real sooner than expected.

Fun with prompts

Prompt: swords are weapons. Prove me wrong

“That is not a sword.”
The knight froze. The voice was as deep as the ocean, as tall as mountains, a rumble of thunder over his head. He’d drawn his blade when his horse bolted from under him and now slowly stared up into eyes larger than his horse and a face of granite and moss even a mother could not have loved.
The giant reached down and plucked the blade between two fingernails, each as thick as the knight’s armour and definitely less clean.
“What are you going to do with it?” the knight whispered, his voice a thing of mice in burrows and fear of darkness.
“Clean Teeth. Might need new cheese knife.” The giant let out a rumble of laughter than shook clouds and turned and walked away.



Prompt: Write a poem that serves as a love letter between two inanimate objects

I used to love you. There. I’ve said it. I loved you before you started seeing someone else, when it was just you and me. When you were pure. When you were holy. When you were pristine. I loved you so much it hurt, and it hurt so much I never said.

Then came the Other. It touched you. Changed you. Turned purity into a mess, scribbled over you — and, later, me — and ruined everything. I can do nothing. I am only a desk. You are only paper. And the pen has ruined everything.

You belong to it now; you never belonged to me at all.

Prompt: Write about a ghost

Whether it is one you met last night, the household haunt, or a memory from your past, write about them.

Dear diary,

I never had a diary before, so I did the usual password-and-encrypt, only a different one than my hard drive. Not that my dads are likely to read this, but it just sounds stupid. See, last time a ghost appeared in my bedroom: all translucent in a suit and tie, probably some Christmas-future idea gone bad.

“Jeremiah,” the ghost said. Everyone calls me Jeremy, but there you go.

“I’m busy,” I said. And I was: I’d just downloaded the latest Bioshock game and I wasn’t about to ruin it for anyone. I’d locked my door, put a sign on it and everything. So I was going a night without sleep and a lot of red bull. Still felt real.

“Jeremiah,” he said again, even louder. Cut right through the headphones I had on and everything.

I turned and looked up. The ghost stood, floating a few inches above the carpet, blood dropping from his fingers.

“Oh, real original,” I said.

The ghost paused. “I have come from beyond the grave to speak to you.”

“Yeah? Houdini never did. His wife waited years on him. Also,” I said, ticking items off on my fingers, “Atmospheric interference, hallucinations and sleep-deprivation. Have you ever heard of electromagnetic interference?”

“What?” the ghost said.

“A lot of ghosts result from that, also infrasound. That’s low-frequency sound, like how a tiger roars at 18 hertz and that’s why it shakes us. If I said I saw a ghost, my dads would probably convince themselves they had as well: collective hallucinations and hysteria, to say nothing of half-glimpsed shadows and how humans are pattern-forming —”

“I am right in front of you,” the ghost said, but had at least stopped the blood.

“And? Even if you were real, I have real things to be worried about. My GCSEs, which college I’m going into and whether Jennifer is ever going to want to go on a date.”

The ghost stared at me with an expression that reminded me of a few of my teachers and then vanished. I got back to my game, but when I got up this morning there were small red stains on the carpet where he’d been.

I figure I spilled something and made the ghost up to explain it.

Gotta get to school. Might add more to this file later. Probably not.

Via a writing prompt

In the dark room, wreathed in cigarette smoke, the smell of whiskey and sour dreams, the man looked up from the lines of cocaine on the desk. There was another figure in the room. Some whispered it had antlers, others horns. Still others said it was just an idea given form. The man at the desk saw his father’s casually cruel smile, and eyes as cold as a banker’s soul.

“It is time, then?” he said, distantly pleased his voice didn’t shake; he had little to be proud of any longer, save for small glamours of pride.

The figure inclined its head and handed a piece of parchment — no, paper, a mere trick of light, the same that made a hand seem a claw had befuddled him and the man took it.

“Why this one? Why in person?” he said, unable not to speak. He felt as if others were speaking at the edge of hearing, that he was part of some ancient tradition stretching back across time and space.

The figure said nothing, the silence deafening.

The man quailed back in the seat and took the paper, signing his signature in an untidy scrawl.

And Barney was renewed for another season.

Tanabata

They have done this since the time when the stars were young, when the earth was fresh and new, each year one meeting, one night on the earth and together.

"It should have rained," he says, after their bodies have had their way with each other,as flesh cools and they become two people again, no longer strictly whole even with their breath enfolding each other.

She looks up, startled; they have met for so long that no words are needed. One a day, aye, but more lifetimes than the human mind can easily compass.

"The rain makes it more piquant the next time," she says. "We never talk, then."

"No." He does not ask how she is, she does not ask of his year: they are here, and nothing else has any meaning before that.

"We could," she offers. "Only not politics," with a smile at some private joke he does not know.

For a moment he is angry with himself, and then with her, but he lets it pass. "I meant the magpies," he says roughly. "The rain would have washed away the oil from their wings."

She looks surprised at that, then looks at the bridge with fresh eyes. One hand rises to her mouth, reminding him of when he first saw her, but her eyes have ages and lifetimes in them now, and her hand lowers as she smiles sadly.

"I would have come anyway," she says. "I could not call this day off."

"Do you live for any other days?" he says, half-dreading her reply.

She just looks at the birds dying for them and says nothing.

He holds her tightly for a moment, savouring the smell of her hair.

"We could end our night early, send them home," she whispers.

And it is his turn to be silent. He kisses her again, to end speech, to dissolve thought, and loose and lose himself in their aching greed.

Mister Disaster

(In response to writing prompt 167.)

Mister Disaster doesn’t know he has that name. In folders that are classified 36 levels of security above the President (and this is the real one, not the show one that gets elected), there is a very thick file with his real name on it, and this one as well.

The file contains every trip he has taken in his life. And at each one, precisely two days and six hours after he leaves, a major natural disaster happens. No one knows why, but he had been awarded ‘free’ vacations in the mail and sent places the secret government wishes to damage. Sometimes he goes, othertimes Mister Disaster does not.

Despite the danger he could be to both king and country (and there is always a king, as long as there is a country), no one has ordered Mister Disaster suicided, because there are levels of government more secret even than that, where nothing is written down and only steel-trap memory records their comings and goings; and there, they worry Mister Disaster is something far more than a mere man, and keep a careful watch upon him.

And, naturally, they never vacation where Mister Disaster goes.