A Feast for the Senses

Warning: Strong Language, Mature Themes.

A writing prompt focusing on the five senses.

Caronia is a feast for the senses. A bangling, rambling, smoking, conniving, gamboling, gesticulating, flatulating, festooning, simmering, careening stewpot of the known world. If you can’t find it in Caronia, it isn’t to be found, and if it can be found, it can be bought, and if it can be bought it can be bedazzled and then sold again at four times the price. I tell the willing rubes that I was born here and know this saucy wench of a city like the back of my own cod, but only the latter is truthfulness. I came here like all the rest with gimbals in my eyes, searching for the city of spangles and thrice-fried dumplings, and found all I was looking for and none of it. Once you shiv yourself in between her bosoms, Caronia both loves you and shits down your throat. She feeds you perfect cherries on lotus blossoms with one hand and crushes your walnuts with the other. But she’s mine and I’m hers like a bubo shaped like the Mother Mary.

Fowl/Foul Peace/Piece: (3 min)

Theme for this session's prompts was horrid homonyms.
A foul moon hung in a sky of bloody clouds. Out of the night a single white goose flew and landed upon the countess’s windowsill. It was Roving, the white fowl of the east, and often it was the herald of peace, but not tonight. This night when the countess retrieved the bird it was sickly and thin. Feathers dropped from its wings like pieces of fine silk and fell to the floor as she placed it in a basket. She had to summon her marshal from the green lands. The peace was broken, war had come.

The Little Mermaid Where the Mermaids are Feral and Eat Humans (4 min):

 Fun and Frisky Recent Writing Prompt.

The little mermaid sat on the sand and tears streaked down her face. She thought that it would be so much easier to catch men and eat them on land, but without her voice and her siren song, it was proving difficult to lure lone men to their deaths. She had never really cried before or felt the salty sting of the tears on her face for the ocean’s waters had always washed them away as soon as the tears left her eyes. She was marveling at the sensation when she heard a horrific noise akin to a giant squid being macerated in the jaws of an orca. She turned and saw a man stumbling down the beach towards her. After a few moments she realized that he was trying to sing. The sound hurt her ears. He got closer and then peered down at her with blurry eyes. “Well now Love, what are crying about?” A smile curled the corners of the little mermaid’s mouth. So tears will also attract men, she thought, and lunged.

The Person Finally Arrives at Their Destination but is Disappointed or Surprised by What They Find There

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt in which the heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

I sprinted away from the grinning, stripy, half-cat through the trees, wincing as the pain in my ankle increased exponentially. Finally, unable to run any longer, I stumbled to a stop in a clearing and sat on a felled tree. Elevating my ankle onto the tree, I decided here would be an okay place to rest until I found my adventure. Maybe, my ankle would be better in the morning. A man hiked out of the woods across the clearing from me. He was tall, dark, and handsome. Now this would be okay, I could do with a little prince charming, I thought. He saw me and stopped.

“Oh no, you must get away from here, run!”

“What?”

He doubled over in pain and then fell to the ground. I tiptoed over to him, and heard a growl. It was then that I noticed the large, white full-moon above the trees. And then I noticed sharp teeth.

The Person Struggles to Get Back on the Road

Part 2 of 3 of a multi-part writing prompt in which our heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?” asked the caterpillar.
“Definitely not. I better go before the lawyers come.”
“Suit yourself.”
I struggled back out the door and left the labyrinth behind me. My ankle still stung, but I had to get going or I would never get to my adventure. The woods ahead were dark and deep, but there was a well-kept path between the giant gnarled trunks. A little ways along I even found a good walking stick to help keep the weight off of my ankle. Time wore on and the path wandered until finally giving up the goat and disappearing altogether.
“Uh oh.”
“What’s the matter?”
I looked around but saw no one.
“Who said that?”
“Why, I did.”
I finally spied a pair of eyes and a wide white-toothed smile in the crook of a nearby tree.
“Oh no.”
“What’s the problem?” asked the Cheshire cat becoming more corporeal by the second.
“I’ve lost my way.”
“Impossible. All the ways around here belong-“
“-To the queen of hearts, I know, I know. Crap.”

A Person Sets Out on a Long Journey, but the Journey is Interrupted

Part 1 of 3 of a multi-part writing prompt in which our heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

They say every journey begins with the first step. Well I took that first step, twisted my ankle and fell into a mud puddle. Some adventurer I was. As I sat on a rock rubbing my ankle a brightly colored caterpillar sidled up beside me.
“Good Morning!”
“Don’t know what’s so good about it.”
“Awe, don’t talk like that, Miss. The clouds have gone away and soon the sun will dry that muddy water in your hair right up.”
“Great.”
The caterpillar began whistling a jaunty tune.
“Um, can you not do that,” I said putting a little weight on my ankle to test it and being rewarded with a stabbing pain. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“Fine, fine.”
I began limping away.
“Er, don’t mean to be nosy, but where are you off to?”
“I’m trying to get to the castle beyond the goblin city,” I said.
“Oooh dear.”
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just that, well, you can’t get there from here.”
I hobbled back over to the caterpillar.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s copyright infringement.”
I looked around at the setting and the glittery, high stone walls.
“I see your point.”

The Other Person Goes East, Looking for Something They’d Lost

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made into an homage for Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel Something More Than Night.

I didn’t want to take the sword, but Gabriel isn’t a Seraphim you argue with, so I took it and stowed it before my jitters could unmake a sound principle of physics.

“Where are you off to?”

Gabriel looked beyond me to the rising of a hundred million suns. “I must fortify the essence of religious sanctity, make pure the rivulets of undying devotion, and find my car keys.”

“I thought you said that this wasn’t a time for jokes, Sir.”

Gabriel turned his gazes back to me. “Who’s joking?”

With that he vanished and took a small child’s wonder with him. Having no intention of actually braving the deeps, I decided to camp out a while in the dark matter on the metaphoric end of the spectral universe.

The First Person Goes South, Taking Something They Shouldn’t Have

Part 2 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made an homage to Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel, Something More Than Night.

Gabriel gave me that look he has, you know, the one that begets fusion and melts crusts of planets. I didn’t like that look.

“Sir?”

He put a talon on my shoulder or what would have been my shoulder if I actually had shoulders. His mere touch buzzed through me like lightning cutting through atoms to make ozone.

“We need you to infiltrate the Deeps, Thuriel. We must have the first strike.”

I’m not much of a hard hitter by way of angelic beings, I’m more of a weaver of mathematical improbabilities, so Gabriel’s words unnerved me. They caused a gaping maw of fear to open in my representation of guts, but I plastered it over with indignation.

“Uh, why me, Boss? I don’t even own a flaming sword.”

Gabriel reached into robes glowing with the light of a thousand dying planets and withdrew a sword swathed in flames brighter than the plasma in the center of a baby star.

“Here, take mine.”
.

Two People Standing at a Crossroads Taking Care of Business

This is part one of three writing prompts, and an homage to author Ian Tregillis's latest novel Something More Than Night.

We stood at the crossroads of interplanetary dissonance and quadrilateral harmony. It was nice there. Despite the nomenclature, interplanetary dissonance can sound quite beautiful at times. But Gabriel wasn’t there for the ambiance. He was all business, though his feathers beat in time to the pulsing of the nearest quasar.
 
“Thuriel, what have you to report?”
 
“The outer reaches of mortal trimaterial thought processes are secure. There will be no breech from there, Sir.”
 
“What of the motes of carbon between the toes of the Precambrian era?”
 
“Tight as a cheerleader’s sweater.”
 
Gabriel raised an angelic eyebrow at me. “You’ve been spending way too much time on the mortal plane.” He shook his head and somewhere a newborn nebula was blown back into disparate particles. “But this is no time for jests. The demons are poised and ready to strike and we must bar them from objective reality in any way that we can.”

A Group of Friends (3 min):

Writing prompt part 4 of 4.
Hera stood guard while the others:  Jeth, Miso, and Skutcha played behind her. She wanted so much to run and spin like they did, but it was her night to watch, so watch she did. She would protect her friends from the Unseelies, here in this place where the veil was thin. Laughing broke out behind her and she stole a glance back to see Miso had toppled over into a BarraBush and now all that could be seen of him were his legs. Smiling, she turned back to face the dark wall just in time to see a blur disappear behind the gnarled stump.

“Skutcha! Skutcha I see Unsee!”

She was afraid to take her eyes off the darkness, but Skutcha didn’t hear her over the laughing.

“Unsee, unsee!” Hera shrieked again as another blur peeled from the darkness and rose into the air.

Finally the laughter behind her faded and she heard Jeth’s voice.

“Hera you squeak? You squeakie?”

A Disagreement Between Two (3 min)

Multi-part writing prompt part 3 of 4.

Rictta nudged Slats. “She sleeps. Eat her!”

Slats held out a boney arm and stopped Rictta from darting forward. “Not her.”

Rictta hissed and gripped Slats’s arm, flinging it out of the way. “Why no? Why not? Eat her!”

Slats placed himself in front of Rictta and grabbed the other fairy’s neck. Rictta immediately began snarling and thrashing, but Slats held him firmly.  “Why? Why! I say no, why! Eat you!”

At this last Rictta stopped flailing and went still, fear in his crimson eyes.

This is Not the Way Out

Post group inspiration inside the Maynard parking structure.

Silence echoes all around, but the too-bright lights scream in my eyes,
“This is not the way out!”
Surrounded by crumbling concrete splashed with faded paint. Blue arrows point in any direction,
but this is not the way out.
I spin round and round watching as the filthy, tattered tarps block out the view of the outside world,
and this is not the way out.
I am relentlessly pursued by unblinking eyes boring into the back of my skull. They follow me, follow me, hound me, and I try to tell them
this is not the way out.
Around each corner a new obstacle awaits, but every one is the same. Though the signs say exit,
this is not the way out.
I finally pay the rickety gatekeeper and emerge into the night. He waves me on smiling, and his teeth speak to me.
“This is not the way out.”

A New World: Progress is Made (Part 2)

“I felt it was prudent, seeing how you always react to bad family things. Thought maybe it would lessen the blow on the owner’s children.” Alex statement caught me off guard, but I knew where it was going.

“Owners children?”

“Yes, apparently the old owner sold it to his brother…”

“But the brother didn’t want to deal with it, and lalala family fight?” a familiar story,

“Indeed. Looks like family issues are true even here.”

I rolled my eyes “Lot less murder about them though. What are you tapping?”

He looked down, as if he had forgotten it was there. “Oh yes, this, it’s a laptop I picked up while you slept. It’s what you use to interface with stores from a distance, and something called the internet. It’s quaint, like what the roots might have looked like a thousand years ago. Want to try?”

I snuggled into my chair. “No thank you.”

“Also, I was looking around, apparently you aren’t allowed to walk around like that.”

I raised an eyebrow “not allowed to look like a 7 foot tall feline ape hybrid? Thank you for the update Alex, I wouldn’t have known.”

El'Tash: Elliott's Story (part 1)

Warning: Graphic Violence

Part of our group is starting a Pathfinder campaign in an original setting of the DM's (Suleman's) creation. Here I shall record the events of the campaign from the perspective of my character, Elliott Durand.

     The air crackled and took on a static charge. A light breeze began to blow through the darkened chamber, though nothing stirred, too heavy to be moved by a simple brush of wind. Sparks danced along the metallic surfaces of the room, coalescing towards a focal point in the middle of the room. A moment later, reality itself seemed to tear apart as a roaring rift opened near the ceiling. From its flashing lights a dark, humanoid shape tumbled, crashing into the floor.

     “Owww…” the shape said, though the howling wind of the rift drowned the word out. After being unceremoniously dumped on the floor, the figure was left in total darkness as the rift vanished as suddenly as it appeared.

     Shuffling about, the figure rose to its feet. Its clothes rustled as its arms moved about, trying in vain to cast a spell.

The Lightning Bug

Inspired by actual events on the way home from post writing group festivities.

   As she walked along the moonlit street with the cool breeze in her hair, the vestiges of a night of comrades and jocularity clung to her like fine, silken spider webs, but the further she tread from the noise and warmth of the restaurant, the more they faded. Dreary thoughts wormed their way through her placid joy and stole her smile by measures. I need to do this. I should do that. I mustn’t forget to... Did I forget to? The mundane maintenance of the tedious machinations of life slowed her steps as she climbed the stairs of the too bright parking structure.

    Trudging up the last few steps, she spotted her car and took a few steps towards it before something odd caught her eye. A lightning bug hovered just below her waist in the middle of the lane, deep enough in the building that it was far from escape out into the night. She wondered how it could have gotten there, for surely fireflies weren’t prone to simply wander into parking structures. Perhaps someone’s car alarm had gone off and the blinking headlights had lured it, or maybe it hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup truck parked obliquely next to her. It was such an incongruous sight that it gave her a moment’s pause. She watched it in fascination until she eventually overcame her initial bewilderment then continued past the misplaced insect.

Want

Just a little something I came up with on my way home from writing group Tuesday night.

I wanted to work in words the way that fine smiths wove metals. I wanted the sorrows that I wrote to spill tears of molten honey from the golden eyes of angels. I wanted the joy in my voice to ring out like a wedding chime and its vibrations to fill a reader’s heart until it burst with delight. I wanted my scribbled passions to rise like the wanton sun on a summer’s morn and sear the ears of all who heard them. I wanted the foreboding of my prophecies to shiver the nectar-laced dew from the flowers’ silken petals. I wanted to paint beauty with my words more breathtaking than the pallid orange and steel grey of storm clouds breaking over an autumn sunset.

“Aye child,” my fairy godmother murmured, inclining her head just a fraction of an inch such that a single strand of her impossible silver and gossamer hair whispered across her face and her dragonfly eyes shimmered in the moonlight. “But what are you willing to surrender?”

Perspective

Warning: Mature Themes, Strong Language

Writing exercise from the Short Story Masters workshop at Context 2013.

Cape flowing behind her like a mighty red sail on the ship of destiny, Red strides through the grim forest. Each step speaks of confidence and - dare I say it - love. She is magnificent and the Wolf must slink in the shadows of her wake.

I wonder why I ever walked down that dark, horrifying path to begin with. After all the gruesome things that happened that day, I was always on that path. I could never escape.

When she walks down that dark path, justice will finally be served. Wolves everywhere will rejoice and hail the day that Red fell and they feasted on her wicked flesh.

Pond

A brief story from a prompt I wrote for last year.

Her skin was pale yellow, like marble stained with butter. Her eyes flitted back and forth, tracking the little green particles around her as the two men in suits stood above, watching her. They had gold in their eyes, not green, and suits as dark as river stones. They looked at her like she was meat, or a jeweled statue.

There is a difference between a "Pocket-watch" and a "Pocketwatch"

Warning: Strong Language, Mature Themes

I stumbled across a prompt online that I really, really like. (writingprompts.tumblr.com) The prompt was, "Convince me that the Universe wants to be noticed." I laughed. And then, wrote. This is a snippet, a sample from a five page prose. Enjoy! :)

If you dig into a pocket,

you may find a pocketwatch...
...or a cookie.
but that's another story.

because I dug into this pocket.
a...
faux pocket on the back of some blue jean jeggings.
a...
careless, nervous, airless gesture
a...
slip of the mind, the thumb, and BOOM.

a fake hole turned--

Devastator: The Moving Castle

I was listening to Epic Music and this idea came to me; I know not if it will bear fruit but I have the beginnings so I hope I will be inspired to continue it

One moment it could be seen, then in instances it would disappear.

The Moving Castle.

A monstrous creature of steel which bit into the earth, leaving vast chasms in its wake.

Sana saw it when she was a child when it saved her and her people from an attack from a rival tribe, but it then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared; leaving behind a single crystal.