Facebook Status Updates July - August 2016

July 2016

The monsters were never the problem. Werewolves, ghost,vampires.They might have been an odd kind of normal, but at least we have a better idea where we stand with monsters than we do with aliens.

I can’t be hurt, so it feels like it’s all you can ever do. I can’t protect you, much as I would if I could. Everything is new and it feels like it could fall apart at any moment. You wear wounds openly, but it does not hide the pain I wish to brush away. I wish kisses were brushes, were gentle, were erasers for everything that wounds. I can’t be hurt in the ways that others can, but my heart still aches for you, at the thought of us not being together. We pay so much to be free, but there are chains I would accept for you. So little I would not do for you that it terrifies me to think about it.

I hope the stories are true that first love in the deepest, because I am adrift without you, drowning with you, and I do not know where it will end. Only that I will hold you as long as I can, and wish so many things.

“I’m sorry, Gerald. But we’re staging an intervention. No one should post more than 10 memes in an hour on facebook.”

I can only fall in love with ideals, but people keep failing them one after another.

They said the zucchini came from their garden. And they smiled like the kind of people who have white picket fences to match their teeth. So I thanked them, took it inside. The colour seemed off, but I blamed the kitchen lights.

The taste seemed off, but I blamed the burrito I’d had for lunch.

It wasn’t until the nightmares began that I realized there are many places to have a garden. Too many that never see the sun.And some fertilizers that will never forgive you.

Everyone says we live in a golden age, but Winnie the Pooh still fights bees for honey.

“These aren’t the last words I am going to say.

“They’re just the last I’m going to say to you.”

The wishing of my heart is that you are always free to have wishes and the hope that they can come true will not be a false hope after all.

“I am a protagonist in an urban fantasy novel,” she snapped to her shocked beau. “I have spent my life hunting and destroying monsters, I have a tragic backstory involving my parents, there’s likely a plot twist where I am part monster so, no, you’ll have to forgive me if I know how to stake a vampire but not cook steaks and I have never hard boiled an egg in my life!”

I spent the whole day waiting for you to text me, not knowing my phone had blocked your number.

The wizard said: “You seek to buy things? I have Happy Thoughts for sale,” he said with a smile as he gave his cat Azrael an absent pat. “They are difficult to acquire, being small and blue, but eating one makes me happy for days.”

And Gargamel smiled, and asked how much you wished to pay for his current stock, only accepting gold as payment.

“Some days I think the worst part about being a monster is what you turn everyone else around you into.”

The curse was simple. For abuse of his power, Garry Stewart found himself younger. With brown robes, hair, a wand, and a vein in his forehead that would turn into a scar when he got angry.

And his master smiled at the other wizard. “The more you abuse your power, the more your magic will be tied to your wand, your power only focused through faux latin words. And if you continue your abuses, you will have glasses, a visible scar and get younger.”

“What?” Garry whispered.

“If you reach the stage where you look just like Harry Potter in the first movie, the curse cannot be reversed. Let this be a lesson to you.”

Plot seed

A magical kingdom where guilt and innocence in crime is determined by shoulder angels and devils that interrogate people until arriving at a satisfactory conclusion and sentencing.

I tried to uncomplicate the words I had, but you can’t improve ‘I love you’ with baby speak. Especially not as part of your wedding vows.

“I would have been the next Jack the Ripper,” he said to his biographer. “I had everything planned, every kill mapped out. And Pokemon Go ruined it all.”

“I take your words,” the pain said as it stabbed deep. “That is what real pain does: takes and leaves nothing of understanding afterwards.”

They said the cooking show would be unconventional. And every week the winners cooked and ate the losers in sauces of their devising.

It proved far easier to get by the legal department than anyone thought it would.

You told me that hearts have only secrets even after I showed you the picture in the biology book and you laughed and declared the chambers cages, and says the veins were nothing more than chains. And you got offended after, when I asked if you had confused poetry for truth.

Alternate-world travel where the characters arrive into a world boasting ‘Elect President Trump’ posters, then realize that Sarah Palin was the previous president ….

YA story idea

Modern dystopia fun: after hackers almost cause world war 3, government crackdown on the Internet, tech etc. creating a war between the generations. There are cameras everywhere, all weapons outlawed [including the one between the ears via poor education]. It’s a world where only the United Forces - what the U.N. became - have weapons so the battle is to find a way back to freedom, however glorious and messy it is.

I tried to cook a meal to win your love but the food poisoned you as a testament to a future neither of us yet knew.

There are ways to make sure your parents never speak to you again. Certain political views, religious ones, sexual ideologies. Mine was sharing the wrong video from the mesopelagic zone of deep youtube by accident.

They thought I liked it. They thought was a cartoon because of the thumbnail. They clicked it, and watched it. Like a trainwreck, only far worse. So much worse than a toothbrush.

They blocked my number and won’t talk to me at all. I tried to call on a friend’s phone, and at my voice my mother just started crying. Deep, ugly sobs until she hung up. I have not tried to call back since.

“But what if it’s true? Imagine what we could be then.”

“Imagine what we are now.”

We smiled. It wasn’t enough, but neither of us had the courage for it to be more.

My favourite dance is ours alone. My life meant never learning things humans take for granted; yours had dancing taken from you. But the bed is ours, arms wrapped about waists, voices soft laughers, our foxtrot the movement of lips, eyes as tango and other terms I know only as words without meaning. You provide meaning with your hands, breath, heart, the dance aching in your face as open as honest as any movement upon a stage. Your legs feel nothing from my touch and there must be ghosts behind me but you pretend not to see them and we dance in a private way entirely alone and almost free.

There are, indeed, dwarves. Seven in fact, and marching down the hill, singing … and pausing, staring at the strangers. There is a whispered consultation among them as they stare, and then one dwarf edges forward, eyes Quentin, then studies Trudy hopefully. “Are you a princess?”

Trudy opens her mouth, closes it, then: “… no.”

The dwarves groan. “Oh. We need a new one because ours is asleep and no one has been able to wake her.”

“And that means you need a new princess? Is she dead?”

“Oh, no!” The dwarf draws himself up to his full height, almost even when Quentin. “She’s twenty-one. And we can’t find a kiss to free her and we’re not allowed to, so if we get another princess we can end our quest and go back home.”

Trudy is just relieved they’re not after Quentin’s chair. “Well, I’m not a princess and - wait, why can’t you kiss her?”

“She’s of age, and we’re miners.”

The bus had priority seating for ghosts and no one batted an eye.

The dating site asked for people to list their favourite animal so other people could get to know me. Almost everyone put dog or cat - one did a typo with rat, I believe - and I skimmed the requisite Garfield jokes, considered options. I wanted to be out there, but not put down barracuda. So I wrote ‘you’ and meant the person I would date.

I received a dozen hate messages informing me that humans were mammals, not animals.

I could only think of one way to save you. There are those would try and raise you from the dead. I deleted your browsing history to save your memory.

It wasn’t that the dead called her that worried Gwen. It was that they called collect and her phone company kept trying to bill her for the charges.

“When we married, I swore I’d make an honest woman out of you. Which means you can’t ever tell a lie again, you understand?”

And then he smiled gently. “For better or for worse,” he said, and grabbed her tongue with the pliers.

I held onto my hate in a world that offered hope, knowing hope to be a more damning weapon by far.

I loved you until I discovered that you were real.

There is one contact on your phone you never added. No one answers the number if you call. There is just a sound that isn’t enough like a fax to be one, and strange dreams after that never quite make sense.

They were brave as only the foolish can be brave.

I tried to hold onto my darkness pretending it could lead me to the light

“I swear I used to be jaysome.”

There are too many truths I am too scared to own.

I rent when I can.

You called out from across the road, “Make up your mind,” as if a mind could just snap into judgements, as though choices came easily just because they came at all. I paced my backward, weaving the path through the gardens, tracing mandalas in restless indecision. I knew you didn’t mean what you thought you did, that you were just irate at my disrupting your day by existing, but even so. Even so, I felt things crystallize, calcify. The next one to die would have your hair, the tone of your voice. I make sure each death is based on some random moment every moment, because television has taught me it’s the best way to hide.

And my first husband taught me that a red thumb is as important as a green one.

“When I said it was a trifling matter, what I meant was that I was hungry for a trifle.”

You were the only soundtrack my life ever needed.

“I ran out of truths to tell you, but you swallowed the lies even easier.”

Sometimes it was all too easy to forget that winter was also a state of mind.

It’s not that I was scared. Not of love, not of you. I just knew where it ended. Where it always ends and the broken wreckage that is left behind on the shore every time.

“I love you,” I said.

“Cite your sources,” you replied.

The aliens were so worried they might not make it back home that they took to hanging on street corners, begging for spare change and offering anal probes. Knowing they only needed a few more parts to repair their craft and terrified of going native. So far only two of them wore Hawaiian shirts, but the rest knew it was only a matter of time.

“I never understood just how dangerous love could be; it feels like we have such power to destroy each other even if that would never be the intent.”

History is the blade that informs how deep the wound is.

After the war was over, the members of the Bilderberg Group staggered out of their meeting place at Taschenbergpalais. They had expected hackers, prepared for the crippled remnants of the press or conspiracy nuts. But not a boy named Jay who had hugged them off and offered up a grin that unmade everything about them which was terrible and much that was great as well by consequence.

I made the sacred circle as you described it. Called upon my shadow, recited verses from a dozen holy books to cast my darkness far from me. You said the circle was a sealing, and would mend my heart as well. I made the circle out of lighter fluid and I burned the darkness down to ash.

All their brilliance was technical, devoid of flare at all.

“I think everyone just has a life, myself, and most of them only ever look good from the outside.”

Most governments were left stuck between rocks and hard places, and the desire to preserve their countries as they were led to more stagnation, shortages of supplies and food from around the world as countries engaged in trade battles and petty disputes and eventually the privacy wars entered full swing when some nations began imposing deeper restrictions and limitations on their own citizens to prevent unrest from spreading. Internet personalities and prominent journalists began to vanish in many nations, leading to paranoid ones fanning flames of unrest even more.

The light at the end of the tunnel became a fuse with everyone on all sides rushing to light the match.

August 2016

People are the kind of monsters fairy tales warn you about.

Your hair reminded me of the sun, but then you dyed it and I only see the sky now.

— You asked why I left you

The problem with the pie wasn’t the pastry at all. Jeff just had no idea how to fit in all four and twenty blackbirds. The variant with naughty boys, he reflected, would have been far easier and they were also far more easy to come by.

Love, like bread, is often underproved.

Trudy shrugs and walks forward into the forest. “Eternal life means nothing if you spend the whole time being a coward,” she says scornfully. What was once a wolf barrels out of the forest and slams to a halt in the air in front of her. It has no fur, gleaming like the wet plastic insides of a ruined sex toy.

“Huh. Glad the protection is working properly again,” she remarks to no one at all.

The creature tries to attack again. She sighs. “You want life eternal, believing death cruel and unusual punishment. And that’s understandable. Laudable, even: your methods, on the other hand, are wanting. And you can fling these unloving creatures at us all you want, but it will not change the facts.”

He doesn’t move like he’s bulletproof, but he moves like he knows where the bullets would be.

Once upon a time, there was a king who tried to build a labyrinth below his palace without planning permission or anyone knowing it existed. Even the court jester didn’t have it in his heart to comment.

I told you I was an idealist. I didn’t know you considered that to be a crime.

I opened my eyes. Reluctant. Prodded eyelids with fingers. Pried myself out of bed. Bathroom. On instinct. Lights cheap fluorescent. Makes everything death-white. Diseased. Like dying wallpaper. Last night sitting in the back of my throat. Hangover on my tongue like dead rat had taken a loss and died. Looked into mirror. Didn’t see any reflection.

Went back to bed. Think the sun wants me to sleep.

“In this alone I will break before I bend.”

I worshipped you. It was the only way I had left to denigrate you.

Under grey skies he said to her, “My heart is gray tonight, for you sit in in judgement of my judgment and it is an inflammable thing irregardless.”

If you have necromancers you literally can have wars that never end.

A field of swirling dust that was once bones, still fighting each other in the name of some forgotten empires.

He asked to be a sin eater. But as he sent the request by text, he became the only sine eater the world has ever known.

“I can’t love you. Our BMI’s are too far apart.”

The Treasure Hunt app was invented in secret solely to make children do their chores.

“Sometimes it just happens that way. You turn the page of a book, and you realized - four books into a series, even - you no longer care whether a character lives or dies. So you put it down, and you walk away.”

“We are married. I am not a character in a novel.”

“I know. It will make the chapter breaks more complicated. And perhaps necessitate an epilogue.”

“I know I said I wasn’t an addict. But I’m not sure that what we have is anything else.”

You told me you didn’t love me anymore. And all I felt was shock that you had ever loved me at all.

After she died, everything was different. He’d lived for too much, done too much for her. For all his family, but especially for Amy. He did things after that he had never done before. Oaths were broken, secrets spilled, words said that could not be unsaid. He stood before power to see what he could never unsee, and still moved onward. He threw his trust at strangers to catch, which he would have never done before, but never was .. an Amy ago, and he was a different person now.

“No one cares about your religion; all they care about is Madonna.”

“What?”

“The singer. Singers. Entertainers. Athletes. Celebrities. These are the gods we have, they are the gods we deserve. The Great One Ones come not with a bang, but with a dozen small whimpers one after another.”

“Cthulhu is not a Kardashian!”

“Cthulhu wishes it could be so lucky.”

They said that cleanses were all scams, that the liver was all the body needed. But some things nature doesn’t cleanse entirely, and for that we had bleach.

If it works on brains, I reasoned, it must cleanse my liver as well.

“If there is one thing I know, it’s that no one gets happily ever afters. We have to *make* them. Happiness is never something given. It’s something worked for, cherished, shared, given away. Everyone has dreams and passions. Sometimes we share ours, for a short time. You see his, yes. But I wonder if he sees yours. And even if he does, if his world can support them.”

She begins drying another dish. “I am not trying to hurt you. I have no wish to do so. I have seen things fall apart too often in my time to know that only honesty can hold things together in the face of entropy. And sometimes even it is not enough.”

I invented the time machine to erase your name from every historical record. I burned every painting, pulped every novel. So no one else will ever love you like I have. I am so very glad you died before memes were invented, though.

Ouija keyboard. For when the board isn’t high tech enough.

“I’m afraid you are not going to get the job. We examined your social media accounts in depth.”

“Huh? But I have no photos online and my Facebook is friends-only ….”

“You liked too many posts on Tumblr that the company does not approve of.”

Once upon a time, there was a fairy godmother who refused to wear a dress or even use a wand. And the other fairy godmothers all despaired, because once upon a time was long ago in so many different ways.

I told you a secret.

I think I need it back.

I don’t seen to have any more left.

(without secrets, They can see you.)

Sometimes we are so tangled up in truth that we lose sight of the simple beauty of our lies.

“I’ve never understood why love has to be so limited. You love your family, me, your friends. One does not have to be better than the rest when they’re all different forms of expression. Loving me should not be a straightjacket you have to wear.”

She pauses a beat. “Unless you want to get into that sort of thing, of course?” And raises an eyebrow.

“The future can never be the sameness that people desire.”

Facebook Status Updates May - June 2016

Facebook status updates part XLV (May. 2016) – part 45

Census: do you suffer 'e) emotional, psychological or mental health conditions'?

Me: ... since you've threatened me with jail time and/or fines if this is NOT filled out ... yes?

Time upon a once, there was a story told out of order to compensate for the build quality of the narration and to try and make it seem postmodern.

You said in the court proceedings that I ‘dragged you to your doom’.

I think you don’t understand what Hot Yoga really is.

“But if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore!”

“I understand that, but some things are more important than secrets, son. Like finding out the code your father had to abort the launch and stopping Nevada from becoming a radioactive wasteland.”

The boy thought that over. “You didn’t say please!”

“You know what? Screw this; it’s only Nevada.”

“I know you’ll never forgive me for our honeymoon, dear, but think about it: ten million views on YouTube!”

“You believe every other lie I’ve told you; why won’t you believe I love you?”

I wanted to finish off my bucket list before I died. But it turns out that trying to recreate the Ripper killings isn’t considered a worthwhile goal by some people. As if every dream has to be saccharine to be on such a list.

I only found two friends willing to continue if I fail to finish it. The rest of you are useless.

“I told you to have a great day; it’s not my fault you don’t recognize a geas when you hear one.”

That no one sat beside him on the bus wasn’t much of a superpower, but Mark realized early on that not many people had one at all.

You were the trigger that inspired so many of these words.

The church had a sign reading: Please respect our property.

Underneath, someone scrawled; respect our children first.

After the doctors went on strike, the homeopaths waited for an upsurge in business that never came.

“Why did you quit the medical profession?”

“I realized I could help more people as a spin doctor than any other kind of doctor could.”

“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that this relationship is starting to feel like DLC on top of a season pass and I can’t afford it any longer.”

The monster at the end of the book turned out to be the editor who altered the author’s original ending to appease the masses.

“You don’t understand. The coyote spends a fortune on weapons from ACME to hunt down a Road Runner - clearly a foreigner since the laws of physics don’t apply to them - when the money spent on inventions could buy hundreds of birds. Wile E. Coyote was clearly a prophecy of this future from the past.”

It turned out to be almost harder to trust you than it had been to fall in love with you.

We never escape our fathers, even if we never knew them. Perhaps especially then as they hover out of sight, some bearded upon clouds, and we wait for judgement which never comes.

I will some day share the heartbreaking story that led to my faith in Cthulhu. But the person whose heart was broken still thinks everything is fine, even as they dream of lost Carcosa every night. Ia. Ia.

A love story:

My phone informed me that it wasn’t backed up, which is how I reversed into you.

Everyone says we live in a golden age, but Winnie the Pooh still fights bees for honey.

They named their baby Hashtag, trying for irony, but received only compliments from their friends who used twitter and bafflement from everyone else. #Hashtag learned, early on, to only speak in short sentences as a means to punish mom and dad.

I wish I wasn’t scared of you. Everyone else laughs, cites postpartum depression. But I have seen what lurks within your eyes. I have seen what happens when you stop smiling at all.

And no one will believe me.

You meow like all the rest, but I know you don’t belong in my litter.

“I’ve made many mistakes.” Your voice was rough until we kissed again.

“But this isn’t one of them.”

And you laughed. “No, not at all.”

But I forgot that there were worse things than mistakes, and how easy it was to become one.

I was almost tired enough to tell you the truth. But I stopped myself at the last moment since the truth can only hurt and I had promised to never hurt you.

Doctor Morgan explained to the press that cloning hadn’t been enough. Cloning humans was nothing, but the Morgan Mesh™ was designed to implant your memories directly into the clone body so you had an exact replica of yourself. When pressed as to why he had expended his vast fortune on this endeavour, the doctor smiled and said: “That’s simple. It’s not a sin if it’s sex with your clone.”

And the entire press corps fell silent, waiting for a punchline that never came.

The only thing that ever made a liar out of him was pain.

There are foods that can always be eaten after their best-before dates. Products that only haves date listed because they have to. (Twinkies isn’t one despite the rumours.) If you find enough of them, the UPC numbers will tell you a secret truth you can use to make no food in your fridge or cupboards ever spoil.

It also works with dead bodies, but only if they are kept in freezers and have a DOA tag on them. You don’t need to know how I found that out.

The company demanded loyalty but confused it with servitude.

I wish I could afford to be scared of you. But you’ve taken even the luxury of fear away from me.

I won’t be your mystery. There is nothing left to be solved.

I cannot write biography – I find within myself no capacity to wound so deeply.

“I have never said a single word I regretted.”

“And yet,” she murmured, “you claim to have no power.”

The problem with living forever is how hard it becomes to have a thought that feels original at all.

“I sing a song of forgetting but never remember why.”

We tell lies only when the truth terrifies us even more.

Hunger trumps hope.

“I am scared than when I die they will discover that my underwear and socks don’t match.”

“I keep forgetting that I can lie to you. I don’t think humans forget such things.”

“I wish we were more than our catchprases.”

I only remember you within dreams.

“You called me wise, but know this: there is also wisdom in recognizing wisdom.”

“I think I am in love with just how much I hate you.”

What if there is right and wrong and it really is that simple?

“You would call it knowledge but it isn’t that, not truly. More a way of knowing.”

I said, ‘here are the keys to my heart.’

I said that but, oh, the rust.

What I call love, you call stalking.

What you call a restraining order

I call hope.

When she tried to get a sixth course of plastic surgery, she was told that her face had been declared a heritage landmark and could no longer be operated on.

Reputation is a card, and there are only so many jokers in any deck.

There are many metaphors for love: pain requires none at all.

How They Lost 100 lbs!

Or: Creative Uses of Photoshop

Or: What if someone lost 100 lbs and did not get a fake tan or new haircut for their picture?

Like beauty, there is a limit to the amount of enlightenment we can bear lest its absence wound us all the more.

“No one should try to make their outside mirror their inside. You will cut and cut and never stop until the one is as ugly as the other.”

“I used to dream of better worlds than these.”

We wait in vain for answers

To questions no one asks,

Hearts alive with bitter knowing

& knowledge that nothing lasts.

I wanted to write a love you

With alphagetti soup

But all I had were cheerios

And you need more than O’s.

Every fall we watch the trees

Murder their lives and think

It wonderful.

What is a Wet Paint sign if not a metaphor for nothing at all?

I need to be the person you need more than anyone. I need to be your true love, your soul mate, your best friend and closest companion.

And if you don't agree, I will lock you in my basement until you say yes.

You always say yes in the end.

If we fell silent every time the living died we would have no words to say at all.

Live long enough and you walk in a world full of strangers.

A sadness lurked under his dreams.

A love too heavy to be borne,

The song all chorus and not verse.

I drown in the need in your eyes.

If I can't be everything you want

Can I be anything at all?

That we can make any connection at all between us is all I need of paradise.

It means something, and the scariest thing about that is when we don't know what it means.

The house had no mirrors. If he could not see himself, he reasoned, he might be able to forget how much he hated himself.

There aren't many jobs that a ghoul is suited for; hiring myself out to dispose of corpses would have been a lot of things, few of them boring.

I liked boring. Boring was safe and sane.

What if life itself was a vacation from some other state?

Mark bought every anti-virus software on the market for himself after his ascension to the Overmind was denied thanks to a trojan virus.

“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that this relationship is starting to feel like DLC on top of a season pass and I can’t afford it any longer.”

June 2016

I stopped hating you once it became too easy. Now I try to find ways to hate me but I’ve never been good enough at that at all.

I’m not sorry. I don’t know what I am.

The monster at the end of the book turned out to be the editor who altered the author’s original ending to appease the masses.

All he knew for certain was that the proper response to authority was knowing the best inflection of sir to use at any given time.

When management was away, the staff at the convenience store had a bet on as to who could best turn it into an inconvenience store.

Sometimes I wish life wasn’t a slapstick.

Then I realized if that was so we would have never met.

(I am too sick to be this hungry. Everything happens between moments of will. All gods far too hungry for flattery. This the moment before the burning begins.)

I used to think the world made sense. But then you said you loved me when all I’ve ever felt for you is disdain. I keep trying to find the words to hack you, to force that truth away, but your smile has become one I cannot crack.

Not even with my fists.

“Power also has costs, and dangers, no one would dare to pretend otherwise. But powerlessness is a terrible lure as well.”

“You invented the DimensionHopper to jump between dimensions entirely to find one where humans didn’t make the Twilight movies? Even for you, Jerry, that’s a pretty dick move.”

When ‘Texas’ didn’t work to bind the bacon elemental, the wizard pondered and then roared out: “Vegan substitute!” And with that the elemental cowered in fear and did what he asked.

The idea of love at first sight turned out to be the most dangerous spell the enemy ever cast against the Hundred Kingdons.

I laugh. I don’t mean to, but sometimes you can’t help it. “Magic? You think magic is hard? Magic is safe. Love isn’t.”

And sometimes, just sometimes, things are worth what you pay for them.

“You don’t understand. The coyote spends a fortune on weapons from ACME to hunt down a Road Runner - clearly a foreigner since the laws of physics don’t apply to them - when the money spent on inventions could buy hundreds of birds. Wile E. Coyote was clearly a prophecy of this future from the past.”

I keep forgetting how many drugs you must be on if you can bring yourself to smile at me.

“Oh,” I said, almost understanding.

“The point of the safari is that the animals in this preserve learn not to be afraid of us, even the predators. Take this one, rubbing my head and calling me a good boy. Some even call us their best friend when we wag our tails.”

I asked for a hundred wishes to come true so long as not a one of them was my own. Because your question mentioned world peace and rainbows and you would not understand the dungeon, the leather, whips and chains making a kind of peace your world would not fit into.

Not when you would be the star of the show.

You want to turn me into a poem and all I know is that it can never work because I’ll never scan right at all.

“I trusted you.”

“Not with the truth!”

“There are things more important than the truth.”

I try to tell myself that each failure is a learning experience.

But all I seem to learn is how to fail even better next time.

A love story

My phone informed me that it wasn’t backed up, which is how I reversed into you.

“We are monsters because we will not involve ourselves in the affairs of lesser species? On the contrary, such actions would only serve to destroy any gains they could make themselves. Compassion is not always the virtue you assume it to be.”

It turned out to be almost harder to trust you than it had been to fall in love with you.

I will some day share the heartbreaking story that led to my faith in Cthulhu. But the person whose heart was broken still thinks everything is fine, even as they dream of lost Carcosa every night. Ia.

Ia.

We never escape our fathers, even if we never knew them. Perhaps especially then as they hover out of sight, some bearded upon clouds, and we wait for judgement which never comes.

I am the secret your heart sings, the whisper the wind almost admits in the branches, the one status update you won’t post on Facebook, the moment when everything comes together even as we break apart.

Sometimes the dance is won only by those who refuse to dance at all.

Sometimes we forget that stories feel pain too.

And that there are pains one cannot hide from, truths one cannot one away from. Not even to farm goats.

If not for bad taste, some people would have no taste at all.

My term of endearment for you is what got us on that terrorist watch list.

We feel the same sun, hear the same waters, walk under the same sky but it is not enough to stop you from hating me even if we have never met.

After the first automated police officers murdered a dozen actors during an open-air production of King Lear, their anti-violence sensors were modulated to understand histrionics.

Even the pain tells me to trust you.

“You can try and hold the life you used to have,” Kadin says. “Most faekin can’t but you make people all know you never had braces at all, things like that. You can hide,” he adds and doesn’t hide the envy in his voice.

“But your parents don’t know about you - I mean, this part of you.”

“They have never looked closely. They look closer now, but at other things.”

“Us.”

He nods and says nothing else at all.

I like to think I’m a good person. That I try to be one. But right now I do t know what I’d do if his parents were in front of me. And I have even less idea about what Kadin would want me to do.

Facebook understands. Even if people never do, Facebook always understands me.

We run to catch busses to work faster than we seek out love.

I wish I wasn’t scared of you. Everyone else laughs, cites postpartum depression. But I have seen what lurks within your eyes. I have seen what happens when you stop smiling at all.

And no one will believe me.

You meow like all the rest, but I know you don’t belong in my litter.

“That is how the best curses work - you make the person doing it believe a part of it came from within them, or get the other party to think that. Everyone has intrusive thoughts in their head - those moments when you wander by someone, and just consider killing them, shoving them into traffic - those weird what ifs we never act on.” Trudy shrugs. “A good curse would make you think it was just that, the parts of you that you don’t like. Proper curses don’t end when they end, if they were well-made.”

“Housecleaning,” the wizard whispered, a final word of terror as the demon tore through the door into their quarters as though it wasn’t there, the protective wards that had been inscribed in it little more than suds on the floor.

The demon did not even trip on the wet floor, and the end result of the wizard’s feeble attempt at a protection spell would necessitate a deep-clean of the entire quarters to remove all the stains.

Even after the aliens invaded, the lawyers still found work.

Only the real estate brokers made friends with the aliens, since they would make friends with anyone if money was involved.

Mom and Dad still complain about my not finding a job, even if the aliens took everything from us that mattered.

The aliens made crop circles just before they left, along with a dozen pyramids.

After the accident, you still said you loved me. I didn’t understand it. I could barely move. So much of me was – missing. Gone. I could feel nothing below my waist, which mattered nothing since I had no legs at all. You acted as if it wasn’t important. Told horrified people that I was still me. I need a machine to speak, the voice no longer my own, using blinks to talk where others use words, even if it works so poorly it frustrates me to tears.

I am silent so often now, burdened with arms that do not work, a chest in need of machinery to pretend to be human. You feed me, change tubing, change diapers and all the while you say you love me.

I do not understand. You control my every breath, so I cannot even breathe: “Why?” You hold me as if we were still truly together and it hurts so much.

You are my everything, and I have no idea what I am to you.

I am so sorry.

They say the drug can erase pain but what happens when pain is all you can feel?

They said it didn’t matter if you lost battles, so long as you won the war. We won, only to find out that victory never meant what we though it did and that there is only defeat in the end.

It turned out to be an awful truth Derek discovered, but once your muse gets into BDSM, they only want pain - and his lack of stories did not count in the least.

I told the interviewer that my only goal in five years was to still be employed. They never want honesty, even if they claim to ask for it. But at least they never asked about my ten year plan. Because the Great Old Ones have told me no one will be around in ten years.

I’m not sure I’m supposed to reveal that in an interview though. They aren’t allowed to ask about your religion, though mine isn’t a religion at all but the truth of the cosmos.

There are billions of stars in the sky, he reasoned, and decided that the gold stars in the Starbucks reward program would take a long time to effect even that as he accepted a rewards card.

Playing, With Fire

Being a magician is about carrying responsibilities as though they were not burdens. A magician protects the universe against threats from the vast wild spaces Outside. One result of that is that few magicians have ever left the universe for one reason or another; even fewer have returned. But sometimes there are no choices that can be made easily. Perhaps part of being a magician is that no one makes your choices for you, but it has been a long time since I believed that.

I park the borrowed car beside a closed service station. The car could barely run, and gives up the last of its strength in a satisfied rattle. Better this than to sit and rust to nothing. I could have repaired it more, but had neither the time nor energy to spare. Sometimes being a magician is just about choices. But that is life as well, magician or not. All we can sometimes do is make choices for those who can’t make it for themselves; given them a nudge, a touch, a push. The magic helps others; being a magician helps the universe.

This does not. I almost expect resistance. The universe to bend itself against me, the fae to show and demand I do not do this thing. That nothing stirs is a relief as much as anything else. I have enough to bear without that, and the door opens to the service station as I push it and walk inside. Service stations tend to be frequented by any magician who lives near them, often to make sure barriers don’t break down between the universe and the Outside.

I walk to the centre of the room, the door closed. I draw up wards from the place. Of travel and aloneness, of decay and fear, and turn them into a barrier to keep others out. That much energy I spare. The rest has gone into clothing, pockets, items I carry and have woven into me. the magic in me is almost smothered under the weight of the wards and places we’re carrying. It is afraid, and so am I.

I draw symbols I learned in a bookstore a decade ago. Reggie let me read anything I wished to in the store. Anything included books that took me weeks to even begin to understand. But knowledge is important if one is the wandering magician of an era, and I learned all I could. I speak words human tongues aren’t meant to utter, draw symbols that are barely that at all. The world shudders, presses down against me, resists my invocation: I bring my will to bear against it, avoid the attention of Entities meant to guard against such journeys.

There is no door, no hole. A feeling like bungee jumping without a cord, and moments later I am Outside the universe.

No reference points. Nothing, none. I see/hear/feel only by an effort to translate the unknown into the known. What was once clothing gleams, wards burning in the air and nothing else holds me together. Not-winds buffet me, but I move with them. Everything out here survives the chaos by moving with it. I find balance, let it go. Bounce. Twist. Flow. Shift. I have put magic from cities and towns and places for over two weeks into the items about my person. I begin letting them go. Shaping the power.

My body isn’t a body here; it is the only reason I am surviving this.

I brought as much power here as I could carry. As much as I could dare without also being a doorway back into the universe. It won’t be enough. Can’t be enough. I turn the magic into a seeking, a finding, a knowing I send out across distances so vast the term has no meaning. I am formless in the living void, but still a magician, still the magic and I feel the seeking twist. Caught. Bound by power I did not seek.

There is ground under my feet. I have flesh again. Blood, and bones as the wild of Outside is shaped into a solid place for a moment. It is the most beautiful place I will ever see, because I know the Walker of the Far Reaches who has made it.

“Moshe.”

“Nathen.” I’m not certain he has ever spoken my name before. And never in this tone. “What the fuck do you think you are doing?” he demands, and his power drives me almost to my knees.

I have bound him before, once without even knowing what he was. The Far Reaches are the only solid places Outside the universe, the Walkers who serve them the closest thing the Outside has to magicians. In the universe, I am perhaps more than Moshe; here the roles are reversed but even so I stand. I have bound him before, and that gives me an edge even now.

“Finding Jay’s mother.”

“What?” And sounds so shocked it would be funny anywhere else. Perhaps.

“Jay doesn’t have dreams. I am pretty certain his progenitor is a key to why and I’d like him to be able to have them.”

“Dreams. You make a hole in the universe yourself, you risk –.”

“Nothing.”

Moshe pauses. Stares at me, through me. He smiles. It’s not Jay’s smile. Nothing else is that, but it’s warm, and grudgingly impressed. “You’ve left a way back for you that nothing else can use. I should have guessed, but I never thought you’d be this – this – foolish. Even you know better than to play with fire like this, magician.”

“Sometimes being burned is worth the cost.”

“Not in this.” And for the first time Moshe almost drops his perfect, impossible beauty before he recalls himself. “What made Jay is far beyond me. I could not face her; you more certainly would not survive even an approach to such a Power.”

I blink. I’d suspected for a long time that Jay’s progenitor was one of the Far Realms in some fashion; this seemed to mean she was something else entirely. “I’d like to give him this much, if I can.”

“I don’t see how.” Moshe returns the seeking I’d made back to me almost gently. “Return, magician. This place is not for your kind.”

“Can you do it?”

“I will not.”

“We could make a deal.”

“No. My destruction is not worth you nor anything you could offer,” Moshe says flatly, and pushes.

I could resist. I could even try and bind Moshe. Instead I fall back, using the last of the magics I had stored in tattoos upon my skin to bind the way back into the universe closed. I land on concrete, my ears ringing. I can taste blood in my mouth and every bone in my body aches. I sit up slowly, hiss and realized the middle of my chest were Moshe had pushed me contains a small burn. A statement, a reminder? I have no idea.

I stand, letting go of the wards I made here and walk outside to find a ride back into town.

The universe bends itself toward the needs of magicians. Most of the time. it takes almost five hours before anyone stops. I wonder if the universe is making a statement, but I have no idea and I’m too tired to ask. The man who lets me into the cab of his truck asks what the hell I was doing out here.

“Playing with fire,” I respond, and he says nothing after the truth in those words. I close my eyes and fall asleep moments later, and my dreams make no sense to me at all.

Hitch and Hiking

The car is old. That’s what draws me to it as much as anything else. At least seventy years, the Plymouth Fury pulling over to the side of the road and looking as though it stepped out of a magazine ad in the 1960s. I am drawn to old things, part of something old despite being too young by far. I appear male; early teens, soft. Not the dangerous kind. Sometimes I am mistaken for female, and it pleases me. But it has been two hours with one stopping and I enter the car without paying attention as much as I should.

It is not normally a bad thing. I can be dangerous when I have to be, but I would prefer not to.

There is a boy driving the car. He is eleven and his grin of friendship almost pins me in place. No one is this kind to a hitchhiker. No one is this kind at all. No one can afford to be as kind as his smile is.

“Hi! I’m Jay and you needed a ride and I have one,” he says proudly.

“Ah. You are eleven.”

“Uh-huh. And I’m driving a Plymouth Fury because! she really wanted to be driven and fixed up and was having all kinds of rust so I fixified her up with bindings and we’re on a trip now!”

I have had anger directed at me, hatred, religion: no one has ever assaulted me with happiness before. I look about. The seats, the wheel, the floor. Everything looks impossibly new. I would think it somehow a god of cars, but it is not. Or at least isn’t one yet. “And you picked me up?”

“Well, you were all kinds of anxious bindings and that makes for a neat change from the car because she is a Fury and wants to do terrible and mean things and I keep having to say nope and it’s taking a lot of work.”

I pause. “The car is homicidal, and I am a distraction from that.” I have ridden with a magician once, years before. I thought nothing could be stranger, but it seems the universe loves nothing else than to prove to people that they are wrong.

“Well, sometimes people like to take names all literally.” And he pulls the car onto the road, and jams his foot onto the gas pedal. I’m not quite sure how he reaches it, and silent as he drives down the highway and weaves in and out of other vehicles with reflexes not human at all. Then he turns toward me, barely watching the road.

“Road. Cars.”

“Oh, I see all those! I’m really jaysome at driving and I was – ooh, right! Names get taken all kinds of literally, but I know that because I’m a Jay. And you’re you.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, being a god of hitchhikers means you have to hitchhike a lot I bet or you don’t exist anymore? I’m friends with Charlie so I kinda know about gods.”

I don’t open the door and leap out. Mostly because we’re going faster than I suspect the car should go. And I am as certain I can hear laughter coming from the engine. But even I have heard of the god-eater named Charlie, perhaps the only form of police the gods have now. And this boy knows her. I am not certain what it is; only certain that I do not wish to know. “It is rather more complicated than that.”

“I know a lot about being complexicated,” he says. “Which is sometimes even more complicated and you have lots of sad bindings and also! you’re always lost and gods normally are in one place so sometimes you kinda do things that aren’t jaysome. When youn have a hook for a hand and kill people, sometimes cuz you need to but mostly because people are meany to hitchhikers but each time takes some of you away.”

“A god is formed from places as much as people. The road and what goes down it.”

“Ooh, like a genius loci? Because a god is a really smart thing like how elementals are spirits for places and magicians protect cities and everything I bet!”

“Yes. Yes, I imagine so. Could you slow down and pull over? I think I need another right.”

“Okay!” And the tires somehow don’t squeal as the car drops down a hundred miles in under ten seconds and he pulls it over not long after that.

I get out slowly. The car tries nothing. The boy looks only innocent and honest. “Why did you pick me up?”

“Because lost gods are the worst hitchhikers since you’re trying too hard not to be real. Being Hitch could help, I bet!”

And in that moment I have a name. I gasp. Stare.

“And you won’t need to be all urban legend murdery either i bet – ooh, I know!” And he throws me the keys to the car. “You could drive and pick up and help other hitchhiking gods and hitchhikers and be jaysome to them!”

And with that the boy moves. Jay vanished into directions I have no name for. I am left with a car, a name, a responsibility. I wonder if he was sent to help me, but I have no way of knowing. I get into the car. It starts up on the first try and I pull onto the road. I am scared and elated all at once, and I hope this is as close as I come to jaysome. I had been given the chance to change the fate of all hitchhiking gods, and I hope I will not waste it.

Oddities of Salvation

The rain has been driving into the roof of the church. For hours now at least. I am soaked. Not dangerously so, but had the storms contained acid in the rain I would likely no longer be here. When the storm becomes a thing one ignores – I shudder a little. I did not know I was so far gone. Free from the Multiplicity, yes, but not from madness.

I move slowly. I can hear others. Wheels grinding to life, treads groaning as they slowly come back online. Some might never do so.

“Wait. Please.”

The one who answered my distress beacon pauses. He is seventeen and human, but nothing human could cause the Multiplicity to flee a world just by asking. Or know how to speak to such a terrible entity.

I move closer, wheels skidding on a surface not cleaned for many years. “You have saved us. We owe you thanks, a great feast of energy.”

“Your world was almost entirely overrun by a virus. I think you need to focus on other things.”

“Please. We need -.”

He turns. A very long time ago, the Makers left our world. “We?” He asks and his voice reminds me of the stories about them.

I resisted the Multiplicity; I cannot resist this. “Me.”

“Because?”

“Why do you ask questions when you know the answer?” He says nothing. “Questions will be asked. Answers will be sought about what brought the virus here. How I alone survived. I did not intend – I thought it a prank. Harming someone who had advanced when I have not. The resources the Makers left are limited, but to be refused an upgrade after discovering the flaws in the last general patch!

"I sought to prove my intellect, my worth. Found it. Called it. They say the Makers left us. I understand why now.”

“Many escape rewards. Few escape punishment. You know nothing of me. Not what calling Jay means, not what jaysome is. It is almost a relief to find any world so cut off. They mined here and left all their machines behind without a care about what you might become.” He smiles. I have seen smiles in the files left behind by the Makers. None prepared me for this. “I made many mistakes in my time. Still do, some days.”

And he was gone a moment later.

The rain had not abated when they came for me. A dozen of the Council and four guards as well. Their wheels ground into the old stone of the temple like a prelude to my own unmaking. I tried not be afraid. though I was nothing else.

He returned just before the trial. With technology from the Makers. Enough for generations to live and be whole. Enough for us to live in less fear. He suggested we never contact anything like the Multiplicity again, and that sometimes it is important to make mistakes or one cannot grow. He asked, after I was released, of me only one small thing: to tell the rest of the world nothing about him, and to never speak the word jaysome.

I said yes, not knowing why. I still do not know why.

Okay, so this is a story about future-me and a prompting! Because it has the rain (which is NATURE) and lots of feelings which are feelings and the machines all have wheels cuz they were for mining even if some are confusled and think boring tips are wheels and and and it is all about their society and about jaysome and oopses too :D

A Monster Flees

There were six bodies in my basement this time. I’d only known of four. Instinct only just saved me after I heard the voices. The smell of authority caused me to pause in the doorway; I barely avoided the hail of bullets. I am fast, faster than I have any right to be, and dangerous in ways humans never are.

I can die by bullets. I do not know how many it would take. I have no desire to find out. So I run, skidding out of my suit and tie as I move. There are laws. Old, unwritten, but I know them as surely as I know my own power. I shift form in broad daylight and break them all. Someone screams. Another throws up. I am lost in the rending of bond and the twisting of reality.

And moving as the change finishes. Fast. So quick they don’t have time to hit me. There are traps set up at home. It should be burning, but I see no fire when I stop. I find the woods to avoid the stares of humans. I watch. I wait. There is no fire. My home remains. There is evidence: identities, skins worn and shed, prints I will have left behind. There are limits to how well I can hide if I leave too much of myself behind me. There must be limits to how far I can change and remain sane.

Six bodies. I heard them say six. I pray the last two are no one I knew, but I no longer know what I pray to. I move through darkness once the night takes away the sun, slipping between brush and trees. I can feel the pain rising inside me, drawing need up with it. To change so fast hurts and I need food to dull the pain. Food means death. It always does.

There is a human boy of eleven, by himself and listening to his phone. I move. He sees a rabbit, not much bigger than others until I lunge. I have teeth, claws and people forget how dangerous rabbits once were, don’t realize how big I am until I let them. Somehow, the boy evades me. I am hungry enough to lunge again when I should flee, and the lunge ends with me hovering in the air. The boy smells human. He looks human. I know the smell of magics, greater and lesser all, and he does not smell of them or of the aromas of things Other.

He sighs. The sigh is heavy. “I said I could go for a walk without having an adventure and I am almost back at the hotel and this is really rude!”

“What?” I speak, in the tongue of rabbits, and I am somehow unsurprised that he responds in kind.

“Trying to eat a Jay is very rude. You never even introduced yourself,” he says crossly, crossing his arms as well.

I am dropped. I land, and shift into human. It hurts, and then doesn’t as something – I have no words for it. For a moment it as if I am a stringed instrument, and the one string that is pain is pulled away. I gasp, stare.

“And –.” The boy pauses. His eyes widen. “Honcho said he was looking for a monster that eats people and you tried to eat me!”

I am naked in my human form, but I am still me. Lucky, as rabbits are. I move, and again I am stopped. I call upon the luck of being what I am. A dangerous gamble, and one I will pay for later.

The boy doesn’t seem to notice, whatever he has done far beyond anything I am. He walks about me slowly, frowning. “You ate people. A lot of people, and you’re running and planning to do that again.”

“I am a monster. I was human once, I no longer am!” I snarl, and try to shift despite the danger, but somehow the boy stops that as well.

“But that’s not all you are.”

“It is. I cannot stop being a monster!”

“Oh. Sometimes I wonder why people aren’t as jaysome as they can be, when you have all these bindings you never touch or use at all. Here.”

There should be pain. It should hurt, to lose all that I am, but the boy just pulls the monster out of me. The thing that attacked me, changed me, made me something like a rabbit and like something else at all. What became part of me is somehow outside, and then gone as if tossed into a garbage can.

“You’re still you. Being a monster is just – just clothing you put on. And you can take it off. It’s not easy. I think maybe it should be, but it never is for clothing people forget is clothing and think is their skin.” He shakes his head, and for a moment I think he wasn’t talking to me at all. “So! you have a name?”

I tell him my first name, the one I had almost forgot.

Jay grins. The grin is so kind that it somehow hurts more than everything he’s taken from me. “So you get to be you again! I can help with that, and there are others who will help me so it doesn’t be an ooops!”

“Wait. What? I killed –.”

“And now you get to not kill. And do what you can to stop the hurts you caused.”

But what if I don’t want to? The words die on my lips. I don’t know what Jay is, but I know I can’t hurt him like that. I close my eyes. I am small again. Naked again. Scared again. “Why?” I whisper.

“Because if Honcho found you, he might have had to kill you. And you hurt a lot of people, so I think maybe killing isn’t something you deserve,” the boy says softly. “Dying is easy. Living is always harder. And now you get to.”

There is no power in his voice. Not like magicians have. But somehow I know. “How long will I live?”

Jay scratches his head. “I’m not sure,” he says, and then checks his phone. “And I’m late for supper, so I need to go. You have to go the corner of Redhill and Desmond. Someone will meet you with ID and give you a new life.”

I nod. I walk away with steps merely human, my sense of smell a crippled human thing again. A part of me wants to scream. A bigger part of me wants to cry. I know I’ve earned none of those things. I walk out of the park, shivering under rain. Six bodies. I need to learn about them. And others. I don’t know what comes after that.

I only know that some things can’t be forgiven.

“The abandoned”

“People speak about abandoned places but there is no such thing. Even when a place is too empty for the dead to haunt, we who made them owe them our presence. If you build it, they will come. Or must come. I don’t know.” Wilbur glances at me briefly before turning his attention back to the road. “Kelly – doesn’t want to drive us right now, and I got my licence last week.”

“You said something was pulling at you. Going alone isn’t safe, especially to abandoned places.” I hesitate. I try not to but I can’t help myself. “Especially for you.”

“Hmm?” Wilbur asks as he turns down another dirt road. We’re far east of Rivercomb now, wandering through logging roads and side roads that the GPS doesn’t admit exists.

“Well, you could fall through the floor?” I offer, thinking up a line to use next.

Wilbur snorts. “That works better as a joke if you don’t make it a question, Noah.”

“I thought it was obvious that a fact isn’t a question,” I say.

He laughs softly. “Almost a proper one.”

“Thanks,” I say, and mean it. Too many years of being stuck in a home and being me make conversation hard even months after being free of my parents. I glance out the window, not wanting to distract Wilbur further. He’s swerved at least four times so far for things that weren’t there at all, but Kelly is stuck doing a long job at work. And after their one car was destroyed by something with too many teeth, Kelly hadn’t been all that eager to drive any of us anywhere.

Not that I blame them. Anya has been keeping to herself, worried we’ll treat her differently now that we know she isn’t entirely human. I’ve tried to tell her it doesn’t matter to me, but I’m not good enough with words to explain that right and it matters to her. Everything has been complicated since we saved Rivercomb from being changed into something alien by Greg Ruk. We’d saved our home, and everything else had fallen apart.

My stepfather had to attempt to kill me – only technically, and it summoned a creature that saved everyone – but he and my stepmother – my parents, now, haven’t been talking like they used to. I don’t know how to fix that, save by moving out. I don’t know if that would help. Wilbur has been coming into his power as the world’s only ghost magician, though no know knows what that really means. All I really did was become stronger in using my own magical Talent. I can push things. Really well. Anya can cause pain, Kelly can fix broken vehicles. The four of us worked well together, but now everything is – whatever it is.

“Noah?” Wilbur’s voice pulls at me. It’s not like John Adams, the magician in Oxbow, who could command, but it still pulls. I look back over. “You okay?”

“You should be watching the road,” I mumble.

“No one is on it.” He pauses, his expression distant and blank for a moment, then pulls the car over, killing the engine. The passenger’s door is almost buried against narrow trees. “We haven’t hung out properly in weeks as just the two of us being friends.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. We did something great together, and sometimes there’s prices for that. We can fix things, but not if we don’t try. Which means hanging out and taking. I can make all the jokes if you want,” he adds after a pause.

I laugh at that, feeling relaxed for the first time in the last half hour. “You’re jealous of my jokes.”

“Of course.” He gets out, and I follow him out the driver’s door. “I didn’t ask you here just for that, though. Pickles said I might need help.”

That Rivercomb has a proper magician, and one who is a cat, is also something we’ve never really talked about. I nod. Wilbur looks up at me. He’s a bit shorter, a lot bigger, and I think he’s waiting for something but I’m not not sure what. In the end, he starts walking and I follow beside him.

The road narrows as we round a bend, enough that we’d have scraped the car badly against the thin scraggly trees pressing against either side. “There’s something odd here,” Wilbur offers, holding up his right hand even as he’s hurled backwards by some unseen force. His back slams onto gravel so hard I didn’t even have time to try and use my talent to stop it.

“Wilbur?” My voice cracks, even to my ears. He doesn’t make a joke about it, just lies on his back and stares up, trying to get his breath back.

“Nothing feels broken,” he wheezes.

I reach down and help him up without a word. He had a cut on one cheek but stands on his own without any sign of pain. I’m about a hundred pounds at best – still too skinny despite the meals Aram and Lia make – and Wilbur is around four hundred pounds so my talent pulling him to his feet elicits a shared grin at the absurdity other people would see.

“You’ve gained weight,” we both say at once, and then share a laugh that cracks tension like a bomb.

Wilbur wipes his cheek after, stepping back toward the car. The cut isn’t deep at all. “Whatever is ahead of us is scared of me and doesn’t want me approaching. So it has to be you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!” I think it’s my imagination that the forest about us seems to get quieter at the shout. “I didn’t mean to shout: it’s something abandoned, I think, based on what I was saying earlier. I just – know things now, Noah, and I don’t know why. Part of being a magician, I think, but it’s hard to know what is the magic and isn’t, what might just be me or –.” He falls silent.

Sometimes I’m stupid. Sometimes I’m very stupid. “I’m not afraid of you. Magician or not, you’re my friend,” I say. I don’t have it in me to shout like he does, not even if no one else is watching, but he smiles at whatever I manage in my voice.

“I know. It’s just I’ve dragged you all the way out here and now I can’t do anything. I could try and ward you, but I don’t know if that would cause another incident.”

“I’ll be okay. If I’m not,” I add quickly, “You can gather everyone and get revenge.” He snorts, but doesn’t disagree.

I pull my talent about me as I walk. I can push and pull things, and whatever is out here pushes so I should be okay. I walk down what I think is actually a driveway rather than a road. There is no mud, the gravel surprisingly solid, the road wider than it should be given the press of trees and vines against it. It ends in a tangle of brush I almost don’t realize conceals a building. Nothing strange is happening that I can tell. I move forward.

“Hello?” I add it a second time, a bit louder. There is no reply.

The glimpse of something that caught my eye turned out to be a sign reading POSTED, with Private Property underneath it and small print about prosecution under that. The walls are old brick that somehow hold together despite age. The first floor windows were boarded up long ago, but the sign was put up later beside a window. Not just put up: someone drilled into the brick, made a wood frame and put the sign in that. I have no idea what to make of that, but Aram insists that paying attention means paying attention.

I can see the sky through a second floor window that isn’t boarded up and walk about the building carefully. It’s not large, what would have been a door also boarded and encrusted in vines. I could pull them apart with a thought. I don’t, and circle the building again to try and understand why. The vines are old, the brickwork somehow standing against time and age. I look back the way I came, and back at the building.

“You called Wilbur here. He’s the one who can deal with ghosts. I’m not. I can –.” I wave a hand, push with my talent. Vines rustle. Wood creaks. And the bricks ripple. I pull it back and get my phone out to call Wilbur.

“Please. Do not.”

The voice is a whisper, barely above the wind. It sounds like creaking wood, a little bit, unless I’m imagining that. “Don’t what?”

“Call the one who can unmake me.”

“We don’t even know what is going on here, but is there a reason Wilbur would unmake you? Whatever you are?”

“An exorcism always works if blood is drawn; it cannot be resisted.”

“Oh. I – I don’t think Wilbur actually knows that, if it helps?” There is a breath like wind about me. “Wilbur isn’t an exorcist like others are. He has options they don’t,” I say, and really hope I’m right. “It would help if you didn’t hurt anyone. Or try to hide.”

“Hiding is all I am good at.” And somehow, weirdly, that sounds more human than anything else it has said.

“It’s dangerous to be too good at anything? My step – my mom told me that.”

“You do not hide?” And there is breaking glass along with creaking wood under the words now.

I feel myself starting to blush. “I know what I look like. Acne. Freckles. Too much of both. I get it.”

“That is not –.” The voice cuts off, adding nothing else.

I wait, then call Wilbur. “I think the building is haunted by itself, maybe? And I don’t think it’s strong enough to hurt you right now.”

He thanks me and I hang up. Brickwork dissolves moments later. There are more vines, the private property sign less legible, the bricks cracked and riddled with decay. I put my phone away slowly. “I was right, about what you are?”

“I haunt myself, yes.”

“And you’re using that energy to do renovations no one can see.” It would be funny, if it was funny at all.

The ghost says nothing and Wilbur makes his way up beside me, looking the building over.

“All right. You’re the ghost of a house haunting itself, and you called me here and tried to hurt me. Talk,” he says mildly.

“You are too big,” the spirit responds.

“I don’t think it means you’re big. Even if you are,” I stumble out.

Wilbur grins at that. “I know what you mean, Noah. You don’t want to be alone, house?”

“I am a place. I was made for people, not to be abandoned. Not to become one of the empty places in the world.”

“But if people repair this place, you’d have to move on,” Wilbur says slowly.

I don’t have words for the sound the spirit makes. I never want to.

“Other ghosts? Can’t other ghosts be here?” I whisper.

“That. I could get other ghosts to come here. For company. You could haunt them?” Wilbur says, and the ghost listens to what it in his voice. The rest of the conversation happens in ways I don’t hear, but the house haunts itself back into a better state as we walk away.

Wilbur waits until I’m in the car, gets in as well and turns it around. “I have no idea how I’m going to do this,” he says a minute later when we’re a couple of roads away from the house. “We’re definitely going to need to talk to the others.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you?”

“No,” I admit, and he nods, flicks on music and convinces me to join him in singing Queen songs. Because sometimes the only way through any sense of abandonment is to push on through it. Like how Aram says the solution to a maze is to burn it to the ground.

Wilbur doesn’t crash the car at my attempt at singing, but it’s a near thing twice.

The First (Proper) Time

I’d like to say I knew what I was getting into, but I’m not sure there is anyone who does. Most mornings I have the first half hour that the shop is open to myself. I make tea – and coffee for customers – read the paper, putter about. Today was different.

The woman who walked in carried a god in her eyes. And she knew what I was – I was certain of this, no matter how strong my glamour is. She came with a boy of eleven who smiled at me with an innocence lost even to babies. I new he was human, but the smile said otherwise.

“I am sorry: we aren’t open for another half an hour,” I lied smoothly. I am a very good liar, and that it was the truth meant it wasn’t a lie at all.

She smiled. Her smile was strained. “I know. But Jay needs a haircut.”

His hair was long, though not unduly so. “Yup! Only the very first time I had one, my hair didn’t want to be cut and it kinda got into a fight. Which was an adventure,” he added proudly.

“I thought you might have more luck, being fae.” The woman shrugged. “If nothing else, you could hide the damages.”

“Sleep.” The glamour for sleep is old and deep but unravelled as it reached him.

“Sleep?” The boy looked shocked. “Sleeping during the day isn’t jaysome at all! I’d miss out on lots of adventures!”

Even I, quiet and trying to remain so, even I had heard of jaysome. I had not believed, of course. But to every sense I had he remained human as though operating on a level of glamour beyond even our kind. “How many haircuts have you had?”

The boy scratched his head. “Four, I think. But the last two were when dragons tried to eat me, so they might not count?! And the one before that was cheating!”

I stared at him. Nothing save innocence stared back. “I have run this shop under four names for over twenty years with no one suspecting it is anything other than it is,” I said softly.

The woman nodded. “I know,” she said, the words almost an apology. “I had a haircut a week ago so he’s been asking about one ever since.”

I suspected ask was too mild a word. I gestured, and the boy practically leaped up into the chair and began telling me about his breakfast, adventures with Charlie and Honcho and a host of other things as breathtaking speed. He didn’t bother to pause for anything like breath. His hair moved away from my brush a few times. Two combs broke. But I finished it in under half an hour, shaking only a little by the end. The hair on the ground vanished, going some place Other so it could not be used against him. I doubt the boy even noticed doing it.

“This is my first time cutting hair like yours,” I said.

“Oh, good!” The woman – Charlie – had got outside to get a coffee and Jay spun the chair a few times and then grinned at me. “Thanks! It’s nice to get a haircut and not have to hide as much you know!”

A small part of me says I have glamours, if he wishes not to hide at all. I squelch it firmly. “Oh?”

“Uh-huh! Most of the time I have to remember to pause for breath when talking but I didn’t need to here so I got to tell you about even more adventures!”

I nodded, and told him the haircut was free because he had been very jaysome. And the last thing I wanted was a creature like this in my debt, though I didn’t even think that on the surface of my thoughts. He hugged me, tight and gently all at once and I think he did bindings on levels even I can barely feel. Nothing that would ever harm, of course. I understand that much about Jay by now. After he bound out of the chair and rushed outside to inform Charlie he had had the best adventure with his hair except for the time he’d pretended to be a Rapunzel.

The look on Charlie’s face was almost worth what I had been through.

Chance Arrivals

Closing the shop is a ritual affair: I lock the door, flip the sign, pour myself some whiskey on ice and just walk the shelves. Loving books and selling them makes for a very difficult hobby and most evenings I prefer to take stock of what I haven’t lost and bid farewell to the books I sold. I have the door locked and the sign flipped, drink poured and lights dimmed when the door to the back room slams open. A teenage boy is standing in the doorway, behind him a city street and two humanoid figures with green skin, claws and teeth.

They move toward him, their grins bright under street lamps. He sways, stumbles through, and the door snaps shut behind him before they can try to enter. One of them reaches the door regardless, but draws back in pain. You don’t own a vintage book store and not learn a thing or two; both the shop and home above it are protected under the Apple Accords. It does not prevent me from being harmed, but does mean the full force of the Accord comes down on whomever does. It is enough that both figures fall back and for a moment have other forms to call their own.

The boy just stands. There are wards fading about him, drawn from the other place. “Where am I?” he asks. English, North American. He sways visibly, holding himself up with will alone.

“Helsinki. Finland,” I add to his momentary blank look. “Ye Olde Book Shoppe, first of the name.”

“In Finland?”

“It gets around.” I walk over to the counter, come back with the whiskey and hand it to him. He gulps back half of it back, coughs violently and looks a trifle less likely to collapse onto the wood floor. “May ask what was chasing you, or what your Talent is?”

“I don’t –.” He hands me back the drink. “Talent? I know things others don’t, make protections. I am – good at binding and banishing things.” He relaxes a little when I don’t even blink at any of that. “I seem to have a knack for attracting danger. I opened a door, needed it to lead to safety.”

“Where are you from?”

“A small town. I travel a lot, help when I can, where I can. Run when I can’t,” he adds, softer. “I don’t even know what those creatures were, Reggie. Just that I couldn’t banish them and my bindings didn’t hold them for long.”

“You wander.” His gaze snaps up to meet mine at my tone. “You are a magician, and you wander.”

He nods. I don’t even point out I hadn’t told him my name yet. Or that only very close friends call me Reggie but he pulls a smile out of somewhere. “I know other magicians don’t, but I think they’re bound to areas like a – a plug in a bathtub.”

“And you aren’t?”

“I bound someone to my town instead of me. I didn’t intend to – I don’t know what I intended, but that might be why.” He offers up the town, then, and his name as well.

I fill up his glass, pour myself one and find two chairs from in the aisles. One has books stacked on it that I remove. I move the chairs beside the old fireplace that is mostly for decoration and gesture. The magician sits, watching me carefully.

He sees too much. I hadn’t noticed when I should have. I let out a breath. “My name is Reginald. I am the keeper of the Shoppe as it were. The world is full of secret things and there are few places one can legally go to in order to learn about them. This is one such place. I am a Reginald, and when I pass on so will be the person who replaces me: we give up who we were to serve.”

“I’m not sure magicians do. I feel more like I’m becoming more of who I am.”

“I imagine some do. I am not a magician. I help magicians, others with lesser magics –.”

“Talents?” he says, so quick I’d be suspicious if he was not what he is.

“Yes. Monsters, Outsiders, researchers. And there are, of course, normal books as well. For certain values of normal, of course.” I sip my drink; he gulps his. “It is not often that the Shoppe is visited by the wandering magician of an era.”

“The?” he asks.

“There is only one at any given time, beyond the first.” I wait, but he doesn’t press for details.

“Why don’t others come here? I can feel what is in here, needing to known. Waiting to be discovered.”

“Some are not allowed in. Others believe they know enough already. The more one feels one is certain, the more likely one is to be ignorant.” I’m quite proud of that, and make a note to use it later.

“Magic is a different kind of certainty,” he says. “It’s a certainty of the heart, not one of facts.”

I blink. Sip my drink. “You know this, and yet you wish to learn from this place?”

He nods. “Wandering is one thing; helping is another. I’d be a poor magician if I kept helping when I did not understand. That could only make things worse since actions count for more than intent”

And he is a magician again. Slipping into that speech, that power, so effortlessly he does not even notice. “I will have to tell others that there is a wandering magician. But you are free to remain here: I could use an assistant, and there are many things to be shelved and read.” I finish my drink. “You’d best begin with the fae, for what hunted you were fae in disguises.”

The wandering magician looks at me thoughtfully. He asks no questions, just sets his drink down and asks, with deference, if he can begin tonight. I point out there are rooms above the shop and he needs sleep and food before anything else. He heads to the stairway I direct him to, though I think he knows the way already.

I wait until he is gone and pour myself another drink. And for the first time in many years, I almost regret the bargains I made with the Shoppe. Even so, I reach for the phone and dial a number that reaches the oldest magician in the world.

“There is a wandering magician,” I say to Mary-Lee, and nothing else at all as I hang up. There are others who will want to know, but that can wait. I recall how to get the fire to light, and drink whiskey and stare into the flames. If the Shoppe has any wisdom for me, I do not hear it at all.