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Bring Down the Walls – a bonus story for Patreon

Oct9

I mentioned a story about renovations…

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The renovations started in June.

They closed on the house in October — Judy had a feeling about the place; Steve thought it had good bones — and lived with the ugly panelling, the wonky ceilings, the strange toilet all winter long.

As soon as the weather was consistently warm, down came the hideous panelling.

And behind the panelling, they found a note, written in sharpie across the drywall.

September 20, 1970:  I hung this panelling with my own two hands. -K. Thomas Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall: Liv, Liv, Liv

Oct9

Oh was exactly what Abigail didn’t want to hear.  She pulled clean-Liv towards the fountain, biting her lip, wishing she had a weapon, any sort of weapon, even a fork.  

How had Liv gotten so far away?  How had she let Liv get so far away?

This Liv didn’t listen to her, and the one whose hand she was holding was trying to get away, and – “I am not cut out to be the responsible friend,” Abigail muttered.  She shoved aside a clothing rack and hauled Liv in toward the fountain.

Dirty-Liv was naked, in the fountain, which was easily deep enough to serve as a bath, and she was staring at –

At Liv.

“Fuck.” Continue reading →

Beauty-Beast 25: Kitten

Oct3

First – Previous – Landing Page – Next

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He was startled and then terrified to find Timaios’ hand at the back of his neck.  He was going to be hauled off to a cage.  He was going to be locked away like the miserable bad thing that he was.  He was –

“Ctirad.  Look at me.”

He didn’t try to the fight the order.  He looked up, unable to control his expression and barely even thinking of trying. “Sir?”  A surge of misery struck him.  That was wrong, that wasn’t what he was supposed to call his master.  “Timaios?”

The hand was still on the back of his neck.  Timaios was crouched next to him, looking down at him.  “Ctirad.  My kitten.  Were you telling me you wanted to submit to me?  To kneel at my feet for dinner?”

“Yes?”  He fought against the misery and, once again, lost.  He lowered his head, only to find Timaios’ other hand on his chin, keeping him in position.  

“Ctirad.  Why?” Continue reading →

Dream: The King’s Castle

Oct3

Story based on a dream I had

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The King was raving.

Not that anyone would ever say that; he was the king.  You didn’t mention he was raving  — or hallucinating, or having fits — if you wanted to hold on to your head, your soul, and your volition.

But the King had gotten it in his head that one of his trusted advisers and lieutenants had betrayed him, and was going around the castle, using The Voice that filled every corner of that huge edifice, declaring that when he found that Lieutenant who’d betrayed him, he would kill them, rend them, destroy them.

And because this wasn’t just any King or any edifice, all of his lieutenants were running around shooting one of their lieutenants in turn, which was getting more than a bit exhausting and very bloody.

And me?  I was staying out of the way and trying not to be seen.  When you are a human in this place, in The Castle of the King, you do your damndest not to attract any attention save that attention that brought you there – and since the one that had brought me there was currently chasing his lieutenant around trying to shoot him and complaining that the man wouldn’t hold still for it, well, I didn’t want his attention either.

And that worked fine until the King called a general assembly.  You didn’t not go to those, but even sitting in the back, I felt someone come up behind me.  Not my paramour, such as he was; no, he was in front of me, eyes glued to the podium and the throne at the front.

No, this was another human-like person, and he had a hand on my shoulder.  And then, while the King talked about traitors in his midst, a bag came down over my head.

I was going to die.  I had never known anything so clearly as I knew that.  I was dying, here, too far from home, with a burlap sack over my head to hide my shame.

An image flashed into my mind. No, a vision.  I did not see visions, I who did not belong here.  But there it was, a creature all scales and plates, green and blue as the sea it was crawling out of, our sea, the sea the Castle of the King hulked overlooking.  

It was coming.  And it was the reason the King was raving.

I lost consciousness, only then understanding that that was why the bag was there.

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Patreon Posts!

Oct3

Originally posted August 21, 2011 and, would you believe it, the only thing to show up in a Google search for “harvest” of my Dreamwidth blog.

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The Aramob had not been expecting resistance when they went against the Village. Town people were soft, and folded easily. That was the wisdom of the elders, that was what the young warriors preached. Especially water-towns, where their food came easy and they could waste their time in games.

Read On

This is Viddie (ViĂ°rou, but his mother didn’t want to call him Vitthie.), the son of Cynara and Leofric from, among other things, Addergoole: a Ghost Story.

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In theory, it should have been easy.

Viddie knew pumpkins.  He’d grown up eating pumpkin pie from scratch, and he knew all of the ins and outs of what made a pumpkin a pumpkin.

Read On!

This turned out a little strange…

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Sub-bureaucrat Azenia had her hands full and her lamp was burning far past closing time.

She knew, of course, that the over-bureaucrats liked it that way.

Open to all Patrons!

The Great Pumpkins- a bonus story of Fae Apoc for Patreon

Sep29
This is Viddie (ViĂ°rou, but his mother didn’t want to call him Vitthie.), the son of Cynara and Leofric from, among other things, Addergoole: a Ghost Story.

 🎃

In theory, it should have been easy.

Viddie knew pumpkins.  He’d grown up eating pumpkin pie from scratch, and he knew all of the ins and outs of what made a pumpkin a pumpkin.

He had a book with diagrams and a list of the appropriate – or close enough to appropriate – Greek and Old Tongue Words.

And he was in the grotto, kneeling in front of a little patch of dirt, alternately muttering words and spitting out curses his mother probably didn’t know he knew.

The vines were growing, sure.  They were even putting out little flowers.  But there wasn’t – right.  He needed to pollinate them.  He couldn’t remember if this sort of plant was self-pollinating, so he started another one. Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall: Cozy and Clean?

Sep27

Liv-clean opened the door and peeked inside.  “I think we’re still in the same world,” she murmured.  “And I don’t think it has anything to do with Beavers, but I think – well, come on.  I think it’s a store.”

“A store.”  Dirty-Liv grumbled.  “If it involves clowns, knives, or fish, I’m going the other way.”

Abigail was with her on that one.  “Let’s peek?”

They ducked in through the doorway and looked around.  It was – well, it really did look like a store would look, if it were inside several trees all at once.  There were large branches stuck out from the walls at strange angles holding clothing on hangers, and in the front was a desk like a register.

“Hello?” Abigail called out, at a loud whisper.  “Hello?”

“There’s dust everywhere,” Liv pointed out.  “Half the malls we’ve been to have been abandoned.  This one looks – a little less recently abandoned, maybe?  I can get clothes that fit.  Even if I do want a shower.”

“There’s a fountain back here,” Clean-Liv called.  “We could all clean up.  And maybe leave something for payment.  I mean, I guess we could just take things.  It’s not shoplifting if they’re not coming back, is it?”

“Cleaning up sounds great.”  Even if Abigail was still wearing her normal clothes, she still felt like she’d – well, fought an army and waded through an ocean in them.  “Is there any food?”

“Would it be safe to eat, if there were?”  Dirty-Liv sounded worried.  “We gave in to eating after a while, but I never have figured out if it was safe.”

“Well, you’re… you’re still alive, right, and it didn’t make you sick?” Abigail offered.  

“But what if it was like Persephone and the pomegranate and I’m stuck?  We never did find a door that opened into anything like normalcy.”  They could hear splashing from the other side of the small store, where Liv’s voice was occasionally obscured.

“Well… then you’re probably stuck, now, but we could find a nice, cozy mall to settle down in if it comes to it?  I don’t want to.”  She held up both her hands, stopped as she remembered she was still holding on to a Liv, and shook her head.  “Not that I WANT to stay in the mall.  I want to go home.  We all want to go home.  But maybe – well, maybe we should start thinking about a Plan B?”

“So far,” Liv-Dirty pointed out, “we haven’t seen anything like a nice or cozy place since the first weird one.  Not unless you count this, and I’m not really sure this counts as cozy yet.  We’d have to see if there’s sharks or bears or something first.  Come on back here, you two, there’s plenty of room.  And Liv, grab some clothes in your size.”

“You’re not actually my size anymore.   I know the clothes hide it, but you’ve lost a lot of weight.”  Liv picked up a couple handfuls of clothes and handed a couple to Abigail.

“I want to be happy about it, but believe me, you do not want the Mall Hopping Weight Loss Plan.  Come on back, the water’s – oh.”

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A Different Stripe

Sep26

Written to Anke’s prompt. 

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When you spend your time trying to learn as much as possible about the other people around you and working on finding the best in all of them – sometimes by viewing them by your cultural standards, sometimes by theirs, sometimes by some neutral third party – and then you find them using a kind of casual racism against creatures you think of as being the same as them, you tend to find yourself a little shocked or, if you are like me, a little stupefied.

I was, I’m afraid to say, used to the casual racism of humans towards the magical races, especially the categories we called The Small (or Tiny) Races and The Beast Races – Tinies, Pixies, Gremlins and the lot in the first category; centaurs, harpies, fauns and such in the second.  But I spent a lot of my time talking to Zizney, and thez, it seemed, treated all smaller races as, well, smaller but not particularly lesser, just curious. And the worst I had ever heard any of the Smiths say about another dragon was a sort of personal insult, along the lines of “messy and untidy scales.”

Now, I full well know the danger of extrapolating such experiences out.  Not only is one dragon different from another, a dragon is inherently different from a harpy, and so on.  “We are all people” is a good way to treat people but not a good way to try to understand behavior patterns.

But knowing the dangers of something is different from remembering and internalizing those dangers. So when I encountered Leeland, the dapple Bay centaur from down the street, passing by the new neighbors’ stable, I was stunned to hear him mutter “ugh, Zebra-centaurs.”

I was actually stunned enough that I stopped and stared at him.  He was several steps along before he stopped to look back at me.  “What?”  He flicked his tail at me.

“’Ugh?’” I quoted back at him.  The family moving into the stable was, indeed, zebra- looking, the stripes going up into the clothing they wore over their humanoid torsos. “Really?”  I didn’t even have the words for I thought you were one of the good guys, come on.

Now that I think about it, those would have  been the words.

“They’re not centaurs.  Everyone thinks they are, and, I mean, in English the word is just zebra-centaur, but they’re no more centaurs than zebras are horses.  They’re pushy.”  He wrinkled his nose and pushed out air in a very horsey gesture.  “And that’s the problem.  They’re going to come in.  They’re going to be loud and pushy and in everyone’s faces, and everyone’s going to say ugh, centaurs, and it’s not us, it’s them.”

I didn’t really want to interfere in intra-species – or inter-species – troubles, but I couldn’t help myself.  It’s what I do, after all.  “So you know these zebra-centaurs already?”

“I know about zebra-centaurs.  We’ve been through this before. They’re loud.  And messy.”

I lifted up an eyebrow.  “And all centaurs are brilliant scholars and great aims with an arrow,” I added, as if I was agreeing with him – with Leeland, who was a blacksmith.

“That’s not true!  That’s…”  He huffed at me.  “That’s not the same.”

“Well then.  Perhaps I’ll have your family and the new family over for dinner, and you can all explain it to me.  In detail.”

“…With tea?”  He looked at me out of the side of his eye.  I smiled at him.

“Yes, of course, with tea.”

“… I can handle loud and messy for that long.  Fine.”

I hadn’t solved anything.  All I’d done was planted a seed, and it might never take root.

But when you spend your time trying to learn as much as possible about the other people around you, sometimes you have to spread that back out a little, like collecting manure, and hope it doesn’t stink up the place too much in the process.

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I had been watching: https://youtu.be/DEaWFX5nzg0?t=174 over my husband’s shoulder. (Ignore the part on cats; they’re wrong). 

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