Archives

Shadows in the Old Park

Now on Patreon for all to Read!!

🌳

As I work on my landing pages, I’m trying having each of these links on their own post, but since I’m a bit behind, I scheduled these out.  Let’s see how this works. 

🌳

This went a little left turn from where I’d planned. 

I was picturing Sprucewood Nature Center, by the by, even though it’s not quite… wood-y enough. 

🌲🌲🌲

The twenty-acre forest had become thick and overgrown in the decade since the world had fallen apart.

Vic remembered it from elementary school field trips, middle school solo explorations, high school one-on-one adventures with just the right second person – or at least the person that had seemed right at the time.  Several persons, several times.

Free to everyone to read!

Shadows in the Old Park -a story for Patreon

This went a little left turn from where I’d planned. 

I was picturing Sprucewood Nature Center, by the by, even though it’s not quite… wood-y enough. 

🌲🌲🌲

The twenty-acre forest had become thick and overgrown in the decade since the world had fallen apart.

Vic remembered it from elementary school field trips, middle school solo explorations, high school one-on-one adventures with just the right second person – or at least the person that had seemed right at the time.  Several persons, several times.

Now, you couldn’t step between the trees except at the path, and the path had been blocked with a parked truck.  It looked safe.  It looked like a good place to hide out.Vic used the back wheel as a step-stool to look over the beast of a vehicle, only to end up looking at the tip of a rifle. Continue reading

Beepocalypse 2: Up

First: The Testers

Written in part to prompts from Wyste and Lilfluff

🐇

The elevator doors opened into a white room with only one door out of it.  Three people in masks and white suits were waiting to greet her.  The air smelled of antiseptic and some floral-like scent Kelly didn’t recognize.

“Come this way.” The voice – from the central of the three people – was muffled but understandable.  The figure pointed. Continue reading

Better World

Written to @shutsumon’s prompt (or at least as much as I remembered it):

a secret revealed only by blending blood and moonlight

🌕

The stone was a gate.

Everyone knew it was a gate; it had been passed down from generation to generation since Before the Smash.

The thing was, nobody knew how to open it.  It was suppose to go to a better place, a safer place, a place without the monsters and demons, the wild storms and the poisonous animals. But whatever had opened the gate had been lost, taken through with it. Continue reading

Meet in the Middle

This isn’t so much a story as it is a vignette or a scene. 

It’s written to 🐝’s prompt

write about good friends??

🛣️

>>So what’s in the middle?

>>Nebraska, I think.  But that’s, well, that’s ‘as the crow flies,’, and neither of us are crows.  Plus, not a lot of state parks there, hrmmm.  Got it!  How about Mark Twain National Park?

They had never seen each other in person.  An entire nation – the width of an entire continent – divided them.  But looking at maps online, chatting across the internet, they agreed. Continue reading

The Testing

Part two of The Testers.

🐝

The testing seemed to go on forever.

Kelly didn’t remember it being that long when she was 15, or before that when she was ten, but this one was supposed to be the biggest, the most important, so maybe that meant it was the longest, too.

She answered questions on things she couldn’t remember ever learning.  She performed first-aid on a very creepy dummy that seemed to breathe and sweat and bleed.  She sewed together two pieces of fabric.

The screen continued to ask her questions through all of it.  Some were personal: when was the first time you had sex?  Do you sleep with your partner-parent?  Where do your children sleep? Continue reading

Ba(n)kers

This story brought to you by the fact that I kept misreading Lilfluff’s prompt “a baker” as “a banker.”

🍞

The old bank smelled delicious.

Of the village that had stood here before everything had collapsed, seven buildings remained and seven new ones had been constructed from the wreckage of the old.

In the center of everything, the bank was an anchor, not a window broken, not a tile out of place.  It had withstood storms before.  It would withstand more than that in the future.

And in the middle of the bank, Geraldine Atwater and Clementine Smith had built their ovens.

They kneaded bread on the old marble counter-tops and stacked it for display on the check-signing stations.  They took deposits of money or trade goods or ingredients and gave receipts in bread and rolls and pastries, anything they could figure out how to make with what they had.

They’d gone back to the old traditions: The brewery hadn’t stood, but they’d rebuilt it, and they used the yeast from the brewery for their bread.  The area was littered with millstones and old museum replicas of mills.  They’d used them as a blueprint for a new mill, right next to the bank-cum-bakery.

The area had never stopped farming.  They had to borrow from the Amish and the Mennonites to get things back to an old-school way, but they traded with everyone they could still reach, and in the end, Gerry and Clem had enough for their bakery, and the town had enough to eat.

Today was a special day, and today they were baking up a storm.  The ovens had been fired since three hours before dawn and now, the bread for the village and the rolls for their sandwiches baked, they were twisting up the braids and the swirls of a grand confection.

Today marked three years since their first loaf had been baked in their new oven.  And it marked three and a half years since the day they’d all stepped out of the Great Storm.

The bread sculpture wouldn’t show the storm, though.  Four feet tall and seven feet long, the sculpture would show hands.  All of their hands, the whole village, the Amish, the Mennonites, the crazy hermits up the hill.  Hands, and a mill wheel, and the framework of a building being pushed into shape.

“Should we call it Thanksgiving, do you think?”  Gerry twisted the gnarled knuckles of Eli Schneiderman’s old hands into the dough in front of her.

“Nah, that already means something.  Call it…. Call it Friendship.  No.  Community Day.”  Clem added a line of cinnamon to the millwheel.  “The sweetness of a true community.”

The Testers

Written in part to prompts from Wyste and Lilfluff, clearly not finished.

🐇

“And when you turn twenty,” Thomas whispered, “the Testers come and they take you away.  And if you’re very very lucky, they take you to a good place, and if you’re not, they take you to a bad place.”

The younger children shivered.  Kelly was supposed to be watching them tonight, but she was letting Thomas tell his stories, even if they weren’t at all helpful.

She’d be twenty tomorrow.  She remembered when they’d taken Aaron.  And before Aaron, Jennifer, and before Jennifer, Keisha and Min and Lad and Petyr Continue reading

Find Me?

Written to kelkyag‘s prompt. 

🌱

She had a lot of earth to work with.

Estella had walked half a day in each direction and not seen another living human.

She’d found more than a few who weren’t alive anymore, and done what she could for them as she went, wondering all the while why she had been left alive when nobody else seemed to have.

The radio made static and sometimes a whimper, but nothing she could consider company.  The power was still running, more or less, but the TV was showing Please Standby on all stations and the internet – well, it was there, but she found only bots on twitter and only advertisements on Facebook.  Reddit was a ghost town. Imgur’s last photos were of The Event – dozens, hundreds of photos, and then nothing.  Not even a downvote.  Continue reading

Tootfiction/Thimbleful Thursday: At Arm’s Length

She’d learned early that the thing to do was hold your-gloved, armored-arms out and push. The things weren’t clever, weren’t strong, were just persistent. With your arms held in the direction of the things, you could plow through. Facemask down, coat on, push.

The first time had been a surprise. She’d come out the other end pleased to survive. After that, she pushed everywhere. Need food? Push. Need a new hideout? Push.

When she pushed and someone pushed back, she was briefly stumped.


Written to March 30th’s Thimbleful Thursday prompt as an experiment in tootfiction – 500-character-or-less fic.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1304631.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable