On My Way Home

A quick poem inspired by a Skazat Poetry Slam.

A perfect night,

Once threatening rain; no more.

Walking against the red,

A jaunt in my step.

Where are the fairies on the corner?

Their domain was once vast,

But now only vestiges remain.

Perhaps the cruel without imagination,

Tore them down.

Always a party here,

Lights and a whiff of cannabis.

Is it fair that ditch lilies are acceptable,

But wild weeds must be mown?

Now the fireflies come out,

Advertising phosphorescent sex,

While old women discuss doctors,

And broken bones.

Fading, already forgotten,

Will I remember this when I reach home?

.

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.

Yesterday My Forehead Had the Number Nine on It, Today it is Eight

Timed writing prompt.

I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy!

My eyes are closed and I’m doing deep breathing exercises and trying to calm my mind. This is not happening. Breathe in. Yesterday was just a bad dream. Breathe out. I open my eyes. The number eight is still drawn on my forehead as if in ash. Yesterday the number was nine. No it wasn’t. I turn on the tap and fill my hands with water and splash it on my face over and over. First it’s cold, but soon it is hotter than I can stand and I have to stop and turn it colder.

I take the nubbin of soap and work up a thick, white lather in my hands then press them to my dripping forehead and scrub and scrub and scrub. Minutes, pass. My face feels raw. I stop and rinse my face again and again and again. Finally, I turn the water off and glance up at the glass. My face stares back at me, the smeary grey number unchanged. I press my palms against my eyes until I see flashes of light in the darkness. When I take my hands away and blink until the afterimages fade, the eight is still there.

Only it’s not. Of course it’s not. It wouldn’t make any sense if it was. It didn’t make sense yesterday and it doesn’t make sense today.

“I am not crazy!” I scream at the mirror.

“I am not crazy!” the mirror screams back.

Chairs and Pears, Pairs of Gears, People Upstairs

One of our weekly writing prompts.

Granny’s house is a strange place. The main floor seems normal. There’s a rocking chair in the living room with an orange and gold afghan draped over the back and a sofa that has ugly flowered upholstery. The kitchen is tiny and there is always a bowl of yellow pears in the middle of the miniature table. Her bedroom is also on the main floor and not too interesting except for the cuckoo clock on the wall that ticks and grinds and makes all sorts of noises, and then on the hour, the little wooden cuckoo explodes through the painted doors and screeches its mechanical coo.

But these are the normal things. It’s the people who live upstairs who are strange. The first thing that’s strange about them is that Granny tells me they aren’t there even though she has pictures of them in frames on the mantel. The second thing that’s strange about them is that they never seem to sleep. When I visit Granny I sleep in a bed upstairs, but even when I wake up in the middle of the night the people are awake and staring. They don’t talk much, the people upstairs. That is the third strange thing about them. When they do speak their lips don’t move. I think that is also strange.

There’s also a cuckoo clock upstairs, but there are two cuckoos in it, one is white and one is black. The white one cuckoos on the hour, but the other only cuckoos when someone dies, like when cousin Emma was sleep walking and fell down the stairs. I only heard it cuckoo then.

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.”

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.”

Weekend A Posteriori

Warning: Strong Language

I wrote most of this piece in one sitting at our normal Tuesday Night Group Meeting. This is a departure from my normal writing style - I was extremely ill with strep throat at the time, so my mind was in a bunch of places. Things really turns around at the end. Enjoy!

I wanted to know what it felt like to go.

I wanted to know who he was. I hoped in some weird way that I could coax him into showing me. But, I had no idea how. Why did I keep thinking about him? I just looked up and there he was - he was willowy. How far can a tree bend?  I asked him something about Chicago in an unnatural screech and he didn't hear me. It was really loud downstairs. There were lots of other unnatural screeches. But he smiled, and it split me down the middle. 

There's this type of beech tree - ironwood - that's also called "muscle wood", because the trunk looks like a really smooth, toned bicep. Don't ask me why, but I just couldn't stop thinking about this tall, scruffy-looking boy's lanky limbs and ironwood trees. It's one of the most erotic images that comes to mind, actually.

But then I thought, shake it out - there were probably too many birds in that tree already. 

And still, I don't know. I wouldn't have minded standing just a little bit closer to him I guess. Just one more bird. If that's cool, I mean. 

The Inscription

A short prompt that was to simply write an inscription found in a fictional book.

You have in your hands the greatest of treasures. The pages are likely old and worn by now but truths they contain will never fade. Read it. Understand it. Live it. You don't want to sit on the sidelines for the rest of your life. It is a short life. Make the most of it. These pages will show you how, the same way they shared with me the secrets I needed to know. Don't believe me? Just read it and find out.

That Road

This flash fiction story exploring second-person narrative was inspired by the car ride home from Context 2013. It has previously been entered into a contest and posted on MicroHorror.com.

And when I remember the future, we will follow that impassive road, weak with hunger and faint with thirst, with sore and blistered feet we will follow it to the very end.

We will begin not at the beginning, but at a crossroads. You will want to go right and I will want to go left. In the end we will go straight through. I will notice a swarm of vultures circling the streets of a Midwestern town. You will wonder aloud what could possibly attract so many of the carrion birds to the suburban locale. I will tell you that you don’t want to know.

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.