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The Hidden Mall: Normal ⛲

Jan11

First: The Hidden Mall – a beginning of something
Previous: The Hidden Mall: Ropes & Vines

The Hidden Mall has a landing page here: http://www.lynthornealder.com/verses/the-hidden-mall/

⛲

Abby and skinny-Liv slept in beds bracketing Liv-1, who had been tied down probably more thoroughly than she needed to be.  Abby had thought she’d have trouble falling asleep – a strange bed, a strange world, and with no idea what might be out there – but she was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

She woke to a streak of light coming over her eyes from a window far overhead.  The vines seemed a lot closer than they had been the night before, but they hadn’t made it over her or – she glanced over – to the Livs’ beds, and both Livs were there.

And awake, too.  “I have to pee,” whined Liv.  “I mean, I really  have to pee.”

“Let’s see how good the bathrooms are here.  I seriously need a shower,” Abby sighed, “but that’s not happening any time soon.  How are you feeling, Liv?”

“Other than having to pee?”  Liv considered. “I want to see the Beavers.  But it’s not.  Um.  it’s not urgent. Peeing is urgent.  And eating.”

“So we can’t tell,” Skinny-Liv mused, “if she’s getting better or if the compulsion is just overridden by biological compulsions.  Come one.” She unbuckled all the restraints and dropped them in her bag.  “So, Abby, you found something that wasn’t trying to kill us, in terms of settings.  Not bad.”

“it’s still a ruined mall, though.  I mean, like you said, thy planted kudzu, and it’s going everywhere.”  Abby tidied up the area, not sure, as she did it, why she was doing it.  “Everyone have everything?”

“We slept in the mall,” LIv whispered.  “We slept in the mall.  In a dead mall.  That’s kind of weird.”

“Yeah, but everything is weird right now.  Here’s the ladies’ room.”

“What, do you think some guy is going to walk in on us?”  Skinny-Liv wrinkled her nose.  “Never mind, it’s probably a mess.  Men’s rooms usually are.”

“I want to go home,” Abby admitted in a small voice.  “I can’t, I mean, I don’t know how to get us there.  So uh.  I’m gonna do things as normally as I can.”

It was hard to pretend to be normal when they picked big fruits off of a kudzu to eat for breakfast, or when they wandered out into the mall and bathed in a big fountain.  They took towels from housewares and picked up a bigger backpack and a little camp stove and propane tank in sporting goods, cooked some of the fruits, and made a lazy circuit of the mall.

They had almost decided this mall was a benign one when Skinny Liv made a choked sound.  At first, Abby thought they’d come back around to where she’d left her bag, but no.  They were next to a Cinnamon Hut; they hadn’t gone by one of those yet.  And that backpack was too worn to be hers.  Too… She took a step forward.  It had the same patches.  It had the same broken zipper with a twist-tie.  It had

a semi-skeletal hand holding onto it, emerging from the vines.  The hand had bones showing through flesh; it was definitely no long alive.   Abby, driven by something between horror and curiosity, moved forward.

“Abby… don’t.”  One of the Livs pulled at her arm.  “Abby, you don’t want to-”

“I want to.  I – people keep telling me I don’t want to know, but I do.  If all of me but me have died, I want to know how.  I want to know why.  I want to know if I’m gonna fall over from a brain tumor in twenty minutes and leave both of you alone in here, and, if so, who’s going to help you?”

“Abby?”  Something about the voice told her this one was her Liv.  “Abby, I can take care of you, too.  It doesn’t have to all be on you.  Do you want – do you want me to look?”

Yes.  “I can do this.  I think I can do this.”  She used a towel she was still carrying to push aside the vines a little at a time.  They writhed and reached for her, grabbing at her.  “And if Abby is here, what happened to her Liv?”

“Probably ran off.  It’s – when something is eating your friend and you can’t stop it and she tells you to run, when it starts to eat you, too… We’re cowards, Abby, sorry.  Her Liv probably grabbed the nearest back door and ran.  And Abby? We should, too.  We should go, because those vines are acting a lot more energetic now.  We should go.”


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Jan11

A story for my Apocalypse Bingo card. 

💥

Therosa had been walking through nothingness for well over a week, and it was beginning to wear on her.

Certainly in a physical sense: unlike most of the places around, the rubble hadn’t been cleared, cars had been left where they stopped, and junk was scattered about.  It was as if the Thing had hit yesterday and not nearly fifteen years ago.

Except the bodies.  Scavengers had pulled out a lot of them, but there were cars with the windows closed and intact remains still inside; there were a few here and there, as if a giant had trampoline-jumped, throwing people up into the air so that they landed willy-nilly.  Some of the buildings had faces pressed against the windows, faces that made Therosa reach for her gun, until she realized they were mummified, gone.

And there was nobody, nobody alive.  There were hardly even animals visible, just the bleached bones of people and of society, crumbled bits of buildings and the long cracked main road she could sometimes see through the rubble.

She kept walking.  She had never gone longer than four days of walking without seeing someone.  Not necessarily friendly someones, but people, living people, and the evidence of their passing.  Where had everyone gone?  Nowhere she had been had everyone died, even if the death rate had been between horrendous and mind-blowing everywhere.

She scavenged a few things here and there, not deviating more than twenty feet from her path.  There had to be people here somewhere.  There had to be something that was going to jump out at her, or shoot her, or-

She was picking up a dropped backpack – a kid’s backpack, pink, with Minnie Mouse.  There, in front of her, mostly covered by an old rug and only visible from this particular angle, was a trapdoor.

She was so going to get shot.  Or worse.

She moved the rug aside and opened the trap door.

A ladder went down into a room she was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to be there, not in what had been labelled as a law office.

She made sure the door closed solidly above her but didn’t lock and put her flashlight on its dimmest setting.  There, the shelf was just out of whack. She moved it aside, wincing every time it made a noise.

And there was a giant vault door, hidden behind a pretty decent curtain.  Heart in her throat, Therosa began to open the door.  If nobody had survived, if nobody had made it down here, there would be viable supplies.  She could live down here.  She could settle down.

The door stuck and jammed in her hand over and over again.  Finally, she went back to the shelf and got a bottle of WD40, which she applied liberally to every possible surface that might need it.  Using a rag to protect her hands, she turned the handle again.  Nobody had opened this thing since the end and probably a few years before that.  Visions of cans and cans of food filled her mind’s ey.

The door swung open.  Therosa found herself face to face with as many people as could physically fit in the narrow corridor in front of her.  The one in the front was ancient-looking; just behind him was a slender teenaged girl and an infant.  They were all pallid; they were all dimly-lit and the light made them look almost green.

“Is it safe to come out?”  The old man’s voice was a croak.  “Is it safe now?  Is the war over?”

💥


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Funerary Rites Twenty-Two: Baggage

Jan10

First: Funeral
Previous: Home

🔑

Senga looked around.  The place was not as bad as she’d expected.  It was dusty, but the broken furniture had been moved.  The grand ballroom stood open and bare of furniture, one of the two wide staircases blocked off.  There were no bloodstains, no place on the wall where – where – her grandmother’s portrait was gone, which was not surprising, but one of her mother had replaced it, which was far more startling.  She had never seen her mother looking so formal, so comfortably formal, even when the ballroom had been open with the giant parties her parents had thrown.

She turned in a slow circle.  She remembered the way that corner had seemed so small, so cozy and hidden, even if you could see right into it from the front door.  She’d sat there when there were parties, long past her bedtime.  And over there, they’d laid out vast spreads of food, back when this house had bragged a staff second to none.  

Behind her, the rest of her crew had opened the grand front double doors but were waiting.  She understood. “Enter Monmartin Manor, and make it yours.  As Crew, this house is every bit as much your home as it is mine.  As family, you can hold this home with me.”

Chitter gasped softly.  Allayne  squeezed Senga’s hand.  “You know you didn’t have to go that far.” Continue reading →

Weaver of Threads

Jan10

A long time ago, M.C.A. Hogarth posted something in her LJ about tropes she’d like to see.  One of them – which I have tried more than once to write – was about the young male (it might have been a mage?) recruiting the older female fighter? 

Anyway, I was looking through my archives and I found this first chapter, or so, of Fiametta, a Strand-Worker living up on the top of a mountain. 

⛰️

There were those who had called Fiametta cruel. Back when her hair was still red, more than one man had accused her of enjoying the pain of others. She’d never denied it, finding that a simple smile made them far more uncertain than any argument would, and so had a reputation as a bit of a wicked woman.

She remembered, fondly, her favorite of those complaints…

read on… Continue reading →

Weaver of Threads – an unfinished story orig. posted on Patreon

Jan9
Jan 9, 2018 at 8:59pm

A long, long time ago
I can still remember how
Maggie’s Ell Jay made me think
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make words sing and dance
And maybe make them think, too, for a while.♪♫♪

Ahem. 

A long time ago, M.C.A. Hogarth posted something in her LJ about tropes she’d like to see.  One of them – which I have tried more than once to write – was about the young male (it might have been a mage?) recruiting the older female (fighter?  Maggie, do you remember?)

Anyway, I was looking through my archives and I found this first chapter, or so, of Fiametta, a Strand-Worker living up on the top of a mountain. 

7/5/2011 is the last save listed on it. 

⛰️ Continue reading →

Blue Highways and Autumn at the Ren Faire – Stranded Meta

Jan8

Everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere; every setting has its seeds in something.
Stranded – well, Autumn – came out of the book Blue Highways.

According to Wikipedia, this book came out in 1982. I don’t think I read it that early at all – I would’ve been six – but someone recommended it to my father, and I read it. I was probably in my early teens.
read on…

Autumn at the Ren Faire

I was playing around a little with Pinterest and Image Search today.
Here’s some pictures that are pretty close to Autumn’s garb at the Ren Fest, although her costumes are almost always in red, orange, gold, and brown.

read on…

Blocked

Jan8

Sophie woke up to a set of blocks in her bedroom.

She recognized them immediately.  The ones in the bedroom were small, the sort you’d stumble over.  She picked them up one by one and stacked then against the wall in the space room.  If she got them stacked nicely enough, sometimes they would just go away on their own.  If she didn’t…

There, in the hallway, with yellow and black stripes, blocking the whole traffic path, a bigger one, almost up to her hip.  She went around, down the stairs and then up the back stairs.  She’d move the roadblock later.  First, she needed a shower.  And some coffee. Continue reading →

Blue Highways – Other People’s Prose (A blog post for Patreon)

Jan8
Everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere; every setting has its seeds in something.Stranded – well, Autumn – came out of the book Blue Highways.

According to Wikipedia, this book came out in 1982.  I don’t think I read it that early at all – I would’ve been six – but someone recommended it to my father, and I read it.  I was probably in my early teens.

The story, as I remember it, involves someone making their van into something like an ad-hoc RV and driving around the county – specifically on the back roads, the non-highways, the ones marked blue on old maps.

The idea really spoke to me, lodged in my mind.  Sometimes I would fantasize  – who am I kidding, would? – Sometimes I fantasize about loading up a van and doing travel writing, meeting people in small-town diners and taking pictures of little waterfalls you can only see if you take the back roads.

Autumn started out that, that and my wish to be able to draw and the small fantasy of living in a Ren Faire that I sometimes still indulge in.  I mean, Autumn as a character in a story started with a three-word-Wednesday prompt (abrupt, kernel, wield; I have no idea how I got from there to

“I heard you did divinations.”

“You want the blue tents over in Psychic Alley.”

“Not that sort of divination, not those fake-Rom shams. You do the skin-painting.”

But Autumn, travelling around to small towns and solving problems –

– she came from William Least Heat-Moon’s stories, traveling around the blue highways of America, meeting people, being harassed by the police, building stone walls.

I can’t promise it’s a good book.  I read it probably 2/3 of my life ago. But it definitely stuck with me, and in sticking with me, it gave us the core of Autumn and her travelling, mystery-solving ways.

But here’s a fun map of where he travels – I didn’t realize it was so large an area – http://littourati.squarespace.com/storage/moon-files/moon_map.htm

And here’s the Wikipedia page on it – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways

This paragraph:

Stories that arose from Least Heat-Moon’s research as well as historical facts are included about each area visited, as well as conversations with characters such as a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist hitchhiker, a teenage runaway, a boat builder, a monk, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a rural Nevada prostitute, fishermen, a HopiNative American medical student, owners of western saloons and remote country stores, a maple syrup farmer, and Chesapeake Bay island dwellers.

That almost sounds like a set of prompts for Autumn, doesn’t it?

Continue reading →

BeePocalypse 3: The More Things Change…

Jan7

First: The Testers

Previous: Up

🐝

Slowly, very slowly, Kelly turned around.  It was Reyansh, and yet it wasn’t.  His face was more pointed, his eyes bigger and also more pointed, his skin looked iridescent, and he had wings sprouting from his back, bug-like wings that glimmered in iridescent blues.  “The Bees, their most potent attack was their most subtle.  They created something we’re calling a smart virus.  It mutates us, all in a hope of making our brains more susceptible to the Bee Hive’s commands.”

The green-blue woman filled in.  “Children born into this environment have almost no chance of surviving – they cannot withstand the immunization for the mind control, and second-generation physical alterations are almost always fatal in utero, if not soon afterwards.  They weren’t looking for a breeding population – or, we think, the ‘immunization’ against the mind control alters something that is meant to let us survive.” Continue reading →