His hands flew over the keyboards, one on each, macros and command lines firing out into the void. He used to tell his friends he worked in computers before people got savvy about it; how he tells everyone is a consultant, a word so bland as to mean nothing at all. Politician is another such word, and Dave does admit to sending spam emails but even he has standards.

The macbook pro pinged up a notice. A reply to the offer of a vacation in the Maldives, but the name was familiar. He paused to get coffee, instructing his computer out loud to search for that name. Proper voice activation cost money, but money was not an issue: spam emails existed because people responded. In Dave's experience a sucker wasn't born every minute as much as every kilobyte of data.

His coffee didn't grow cold – he was a professional, after all, if only in a profession most found morally abhorrent – but the list that scrolled down the screen gave him a moment's pause. She – he'd decided the other person was a she (you can make of this what you will) – hadn't replied to every spam, no. But every one about a vacation, with comments about her husband, hurling his credit card at the internet as if daring someone like Dave to sink into it.

He hadn't when it first came up, expecting a trap, and it had fallen off the radar. Now he wasn't as certain, and more sad than anything else. He checked the balance on his swiss bank account twice, wired money into another account. It didn't happen often, that the spam emails were real, but enough for urban legend. Enough for people to sink more time into them. He normally didn't make it a whole vacation, but in the face of such hope he felt half-compelled to answer it.

He thought he understood the high God must get on answering a prayer as he hit the enter key and put money in her account with the dates of the flight he had booked. Then he turned back to the other screens and bombarded yahoo email accounts with offers of free televisions for filling out a simple virus-laced survey.

It never occurred to Dave to think that such a thing would let him understand the Devil as well.

Learning To Teach

It looks human: all the clever monsters either do that or are human in the first place. Rotund, balding man in a tweed suit with thick glasses, sweat-stained armpits and a beard and moustache that almost covered the lack of a nose and rows of teeth that weren't human at all. I've seen monsters do many things over the years, but teaching elementary school hadn't been one until today. I half-wonder if it feels at home with children, seeing them as kin.

It looks up as I walk into the classroom and smiles wanly, teeth hidden behind lips. "Can I help you?" in an accent no one would be able to precisely place at all. "The parent-teacher interviews were last night, but I can make an exception."

"I imagine you can." It pauses at something in my voice. "May I ask where you got your teaching certificate from if not from the Unseemly School?"

The monster ceases putting papers into a brown briefcase, hands trembling. I've never been to the School but I know it exists: some creatures who watch us from Outside get fascinated with humanity in non-lethal ways and the school teaches them how to fit in. I figure I can sleep better at night without knowing who or what the teachers of it are.

"Your internet allows many things. I wished to learn from a place without agendas," it says, phrasing the word carefully. "You are all so different, burn with so many colours. Just as stars all sing different notes, so you."

I let out a breath. "And you eat what?"

"Small rodents. Mice. A deer once a month. For meat."

"And no humans? Not even small, juicy ones?"

It straightens a little. "No." It weaves no power into its words, doing the opposite: The truth, a desperate hunger to understands, bursts forth. It is/not a flower, too big to see, almost too much to feel. Somewhere there is a city of glass and butterfly wings that isn't a city at all and is too full to be so empty.

I make a sound and it falls back inward, still holding a human seeming. For something from Outside to imprint that firmly on the world takes terrible power and risk both. "You're here enough to bleed."

A nod. "Some day I hope to dream, if the children can show the way."

"Okay. Okay." I hold out my right hand. "I bind you," I said, and it goes terribly still. "I bind you to your word given now and against unbinding."

It blinks, the hint of something Other in its eyes fading, then reaches and shakes my hand clumsily. "You surprise me, magician."

"Sometimes I surprise myself too."

I walk out the back entrance and wrap trees and nature and birdsong about myself. It leaves an hour later, not seeing me. I wait another hour before I speak wards to earth and stone, enjoining them to watch and guard. I can trust, but only to a point. I let out a breath after, tired and sore, and walk away slowly, keeping my seeming about me.

I pass it a handful of minutes later watching the school from behind protections of its own. Layers of unreality shimmer to my gaze. I continue, not looking over, and am not certain if it does me the same favour in turn.

Flash Fiction Friday: Ribbon

A response to the monkey's prompt of It was her red ribbon. Second writing prompt done today, both in the magician series ....

It was her red ribbon. This is why I make a point of not seeing ghosts. The ribbon hung from the back door of a home, the pale ghost staring at it and then me, her hair hanging unbound. She blinked her good eye and did nothing else, silent as all ghosts are. Nothing save waiting. An exorcist would banish her; a magician doesn't get that luxury.

The house is run-down, chips of paint the only proof it had ever been painted at all, thick vines and roots digging into the walls as if nature was hungry There are people who look old before their time; few people realize the same is true of buildings. .

I knock on the door, a solid rap with one hand. A TV stutters to silence. The man who answers the door is old and flabby but his eyes are flatly sharp and his hands curled into fists.

"Who are you?"

I nod to the ribbon. "Do you know that is?"

He snaps a fist toward my stomach, another to my head, fear surging speed through his body. I let the first blow hit to get a feel for him, step back from the second. I get rot and icy cold, small animals dying and the twisted anger of small men, all shrivelled needs turned into cancer inside his head, his anger tasting of burnt plastic.

"I could make you speak." I don't turn to the ghost. "I could make him see you, if you want."

The ghost drifts in front of me and shakes what remains of her head, parts fists didn't pulp.

The man begins to speak, offering money, threats, stumbling over each.

"Enough." I say, threading more power into it than I should; he staggers back. I turn to the ghost. "You brought me here. Choose."

She looks at him with an effort that hurts to see, then points to herself.

I let out a breath. "It costs, for the dead to claim the living, but sometimes that is all the dead can do."

I reach out a hand to the man's chest. He's ugly with twisted strength, the kind of sick will that keeps a body going long after it should have died, the anger at a world strong enough to keep the world at bay. I rip through all of it with a single act of will. I don't smile. I don't explain. I sure as fuck don't cry. I kill him, let his body strike the ground and watch his ghost rise out of it a moment later.

Few become ghosts. Most ghosts don't live that long. I am magician enough to make that come to pass, and take the strength of the woods pressing in on the house and give it to the girl. He never knew her. Now he'll know her far too well.

The ribbon shatters apart as I walk away.

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.

Today's act of editing

was changing

"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 turned into aphrodisiacs."

into

"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." 

via  a friend's comment on the line. The story in the series was written for a prompt, but I am tempted to make it canon in the series that most of the monsters are extinct or hiding because of being turned into aphrodisiacs and the like.

weirding plots

I am currently editing/fixing the early three scenes of The Weirding Road. Again. This time it's mostly formatting it as a proper novel and fixing/finding errors. I added one more scene last night and need to add at least one -- possibly three -- bridging scenes to next once, since Amaris ending up back at Zel's place makes no damn sense as it is written now. I have a sort-of feel for where the story is going and how the plot will get it there but nothing is really concrete yet.

Once this draft is finished, it's going to be working on the edit of Ghoulish Happenings (with breaks to work on the Magician Series of stories but nothing more) until I get the novel working properly. At which point I will continue my re-write of the sequel, which is going to be fun since I pared down over half the plots and characters and plan to center on the one character getting his appendix out, which is so deliciously normal it'll be great fun to write.

Monsters

I find the god hiding in the closet it had been born in. The god towers above me, composed of smoke-tinged fur, nightlight red eyes and claws of bleached bone; too big for too small a space. I step into the closet, which expands itself to fit me as the god's claws slide away from me. I'd be a poorer excuse for a magician than I am if I let a god kill me, especially one this small.

I call up light in my right hand. It comes up grey, a ball of dim fog that doesn't even try to be sunlight. I've been so tired lately, but Aaron was so afraid I agreed to come home with him. We met at a coffee shop earlier. He talked about his ex-wife, his daughter, letting me know whatever we'd have between us wouldn't last. I didn't much care about that: I've hurt enough people in my life that I figure I can hurt them a little less with one-night stands.

Then he mentioned the closet and her fear. So here I was, light flicking about my fingers and staring up at a god. I didn't try to smile. "Her name is Charlie. She's eighteen, and that is too old to be scared of monsters hiding in closets."

The god rumbles a reply in a voice as deep as the ocean, filled with something other than words.

"I know. Aaron's mom told him stories about monsters under bed and he made you. It's not hard to make a god, and his fear has kept you going for a long time. Of himself, what people would think if they really knew him. The monster in the closet." I snort. "Sometimes people are so damn literal."

The god snarls and lashes out again. I step aside, reach up and smack it in the nose. "No."

This time it growls, fear underlying everything. Still too far from words, but not too far from fear. There's nothing good I can make of knowing that.

I step back, raising hands. I have nothing in them, but a magician's hands are never empty. The god goes still, eyes flaring. "I don't want to hurt you. I could: Aaron has let me into his life enough to bind you here so you would never leave. Charlie would go to school, her parents leave and no one think of you again. I imagine the dying of a god is a long and slow thing."

The god stares down. No attacks, just a waiting silence like a deer in front of a car.

I walk back out of the closet to the sharp smell of nicotine. Charlie is standing in the doorway to her bedroom, all punk hair, black dye and clothing, her eyes a challenge the world falls short of. I told her to stay downstairs, in the way of magicians, and she is shaking a little from strain, trying to seem casual as if making it up the stairs had been easy.

"You didn't knock over anything. My closet isn't that big." Her voice is rough and low, trying so hard to be tough.

I almost say she'd be surprised, but I don't think it's true. I wait, which is almost a lost art.

"Dad brought you home. He doesn't do that with most of them. He told you about the monster, and he never does that." She puts more into the never than she knows, her sadness so big a wound that no one ever sees it.

We all hurt each other; sometimes I think that's all that keeps the world turning.

There are enough currents under anyone's surface for even magicians to drown in. Maybe especially magicians. Look deep into someone and all you see is pain, but not what gets them up each morning, what pushes them past it. We see the broken window, but not how much of the glass remains. We're all stronger than we think we are. Sometimes that's the worst thing about being human, magician or not.

"Your father made a monster when he was young. A god in the closet, of shadows and red eyes and claws like dead glass."

She pulls back, breath hitching sharply.

"It is only doing what it was made for; that is what gods are. And it will die alone in there unless it does something else, unless someone lets it out."

"How?"

I open the closet door without touching it; that steadies her at some level. Charlie walks toward it, slow despite everything or because of it: I don't know, and I'm not sure she does as well. I thread power into the doorway: her need, her father's, the hole her mother left in their world. I don't know if the god makes it easier or not, but it is in the doorway a moment later.

Charlie stops. The god takes one step out of the closet, claws sliding along the floor. Stops in turn.

"Choose." I thread no power into my words, no magic into my actions. I can be a door, when needed.

They step in tandem. Shadows leap out of the god to engulf them in a whisper of alien words, each a terrible crushing on the world. I stand, force myself not to look away as the god slides into her. To my eyes, she eats it: just opens her mouth and draws the god inside in a rush of claws, shadows and everything. To hers, I imagine it's something else altogether.

She lets out a breath. Shuders. Another breath. Shudders. Turns. "How?"

"Magician."

"Why?"

I just smile to that. I hope it looks enigmatic.

Charlie runs her fingers through her hair, fingers shuddering a little. "I feel – I don't know what I feel. Like I've put on weight and don't give a shit, but not like that at all." She blinks, shakes her head, the rest of her body following. "You need a shave."

"Pardon?"

"Dad needs to call mom. You need a shave and new clothing. I can pack while we shave."

"Where are we going?"

"I don't know. Might be fun to find out," she says, and a hint of red flares in her eyes.

I smile to the both of them and head to the bathroom, not surprised to find my feet seem to know the way without me.

Ashes

I am a magician and it means many things, but less with each funeral I attend. I'm not sure if it's worse if I'm not present. I'm watching the service from a puddle two blocks away from the funeral home because even if you are a magician you don't show up at the funeral of your father after you killed him. Not that anyone would know, but my mother and sister must suspect. They knew why dad left us long before I did.

I never set out to kill him when I left home. I certainly didn't set out to find him, but both our paths pushed us together until running away was no longer an option. Shoved up to the wall and you make a choice: particle or wave, live or die? I must have wanted to live a little more than he, or I was simply stronger. A purity of fire consumed him past bone, left nothing save the memory of ash behind.

All his magic, all the terrible things he'd done with it, and in the end it all just fell apart. Even if magicians don't get old, our magic does. I watch the entire service, half-suspecting someone will wake my father up and ask him what happened. No one does, not even Jill and the stories claim she once brought a turkey back to life in the middle of a Thanksgiving dinner. There is some magic in most families if one looks hard enough. Not often enough to be a magician, but that's often blessing more than anything else.

I stand, knees cracking, watch the image in the puddle dissolve to nothing. I could keep it open or even step through it, if I had need. I could pull strength from the world with that need, and from other people as well. Magic isn't power, but you can get away with murder with it and power seldom allows that. The chains of power make it harder to hide, at least from history, but those of magic make it so easy to just fade away.

"How many people have you killed?" The voice is high and cracked, as much whistle as speech through ruined teeth. I turn without a smile to meet a gummy smile that doesn't pretend to touch the cold eyes above it. Making brown eyes seems cold takes work but Mary-Lee mastered it a long time ago.

They say many things about her: that she is the oldest magician in all the world, that she was the first pharaoh, that she walked with gods and caused Atlantis to fall. Most of it is nonsense, and not a single story mentions how bad she smells. Layers of grime and age and wear cake clothing and face. Armour? Magic? I don't know and don't want to.

Her gaze has a weight I don't dare lie to. "Fourteen directly."

"You count the monsters." Her laugh is a rattle of death-dice in the back of her throat as she peers up at me through cataracts. "You're a good boy."

"No. No, I'm not." My voice is cold, even to my ears.

Mary-Lee does not even blink. "If you want to be punished, you will need to find someone else to do it: I do not waste my time on such things."

I rock back, cheek stung from a slap I never see: all her magic has fallen inside her, become her body. I imagine that if I peeled skin away there would be nothing under it save colours I had never seen.

"No one deserves to be punished," she hisses, "just as none deserve reward." She weaves hard-won experience into the words rather than power.

It suffices. I say nothing, don't reaching up to my cheek. Her mark burns and fades slowly.

"Magic is not something a magician does, boy. It it something they are, and you were more it than your father has ever been. That is why you won for all that he was tied to the city, regardless of his methods for avoiding consequences –."

"He murdered people and used their lives to pay the costs the world required." It sounds less than it was when I reduce it to words. I wonder how much Mary-Lee knows, what she knew, why she never acted.

"As I said, a method. There are worse ones." I don't doubt her; have no desire to find out what they are. Today seems to be a day for willed ignorance. "He acted, you acted. Destroying yourself serves no one."

I want to ask what she is doing, then, or becoming, the oldest magician in all the world. That she is speaking to herself as much as me seems true, but a magician learns quickly not to trust mere seeming. "Thank you for the fortune cookie."

She laughs, the sound distressingly young in so old a face. She does not tell me I will understand when I am older, just laughs and turns to walk away.

"Wait." She slows, not stopping. I can't keep the words inside after that: "Why didn't you stop him?"

"All actions are an exercise of power."

"Mary-Lee." I don't make it a threat, not entirely. Even today I'm not that stupid.

She doesn't take it as one at all, raises no protections I can sense. "It mattered that you acted, not that I did. He was your destiny, you his. That much I knew, and now it is done and the chain is broken. I would not have you wrap its remains about yourself."

"Why not?"

"If you have to ask, you know the answer." She does not smile. "What makes you think I do not tell all magicians this lesson, boy? Or that I do not exist save as a warning?"

"Because if you did, if that was true, you'd never tell anyone."

She laughs again, softer, more real. "Perhaps I wouldn't at that. But if everyone knows I wouldn't, what then? Eh?" She turns back and walks into shadows that gather about her like wisps of a dress and is gone between moments, leaving behind no sign she was here at all.

I want to say something before she goes, but I don't know what. I spare the puddle one last look, but it remains a puddle only as I walk away from it. I need a drink. I need several drinks.

My feet take me to a coffee shop instead.

Thoughts on YA literature in the future

So. I showed this to a friend, who commented on how it hadn't aged well, which got me to thinking about comic books. These stories were, after all, written for kids. I can well picture writers going to their kids, "Well, what do you want superboy to do?" and then writing out the replies as stories. The intent was to entertain children in an age when children were the audience of comic books. Shocking, I know, but it did exist. Granted, I do wonder what the artists thought upon getting these scripts ....

All of which gets me wondering about children's fiction and how it shouldn't age well. The genre is written to entertain children and what children like alters from decade to decade, often depending on what adults believe the children want, marketing and so forth. I imagine most children's stories of this era that class as pop culture would fare as poorly in the future.

weirding woes

So. Here I am, ~5000 words into the story, and I realize it is only going to work if it is first-person from Amaris' pov. Which will involve getting both more and less into her head as a character. On one hand, I get to make her prejudiced (as only makes sense in the setting) which I only realized today is Kind Of Important.

I am pantsing this story, so that shall be my excuse :)   Now off to redo 9 pages....