This comes from a conversation I had with Inspector Caracal & Lilfluff on Mastodon.
Content warning: Attempted murder.
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The school pool was empty, which meant, technically, Aelia should not have been in it.
She needed to swim off some stress, though, and she needed to make sure she was in decent shape when the match came. They’d lost against Rotterville-Hampton the last three times, and that was just not happening again. Continue reading
Written to the Thimbleful Thursday Prompt from yesterday, of the same name.
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“It’s a cloned heart, freshly made in our lab.”
Dr. Hischa was very proud of the heart in a box. It was displayed like the crown jewels, held up for the cameras and, more importantly, for the patient. “This heart isn’t the heart of a donor. Nobody had to die for it. It’s your heart — but your heart as it was when you were a teenager.”
The patient, a woman in her eighties, coughed out a laugh. “Hopefully early teens.”
“Had wild teenage years, did you?” Dr.Hischa remained jocular, but a very observant viewer might have noticed a slight twitch.
“That’s a good word for it. Wild.” The patient chuckled.
“Well, now you can be young at heart, ah-ha-ha, again. Won’t that be wonderful? Now, let’s just…”
Prepping included reams of paperwork; recovery included weeks of testing and physical therapy. When the cameras once again turned on Ms. Palorin, she was lounging sideways on a chaise, her children and grandchildren eyeing her uncertainty.
“So, Ms. Palorin-”
“Oh, call me Milly.”
“So, Milly.” Dr. Hischa’s smile was strained around the edges. “How are you feeling?”
“I have to say, I haven’t felt this good since I was a teenager the first time. I feel great. This is the bee’s knees. I can run up stairs. Want to see me do a cartwheel?”
“Mom!” Her eldest daughter, sporting pinched face and frown lines, threw up her hands. “Mother, you can’t! Act your age—”
“-not your shoe size, nyah, nyah. I know, Catherine. But right now I feel like acting six. Or maybe sixteen. This new heart is wonderful, Dr. Hischa!”
“It’s wonderful that you’re feeling capable of being more active again, Ms. Palorin. Now, of course, the rest of your body will still require some care. I do recall from your chart that your broke your hip two years ago, so cartwheels might be a little over the top…”
“Pshaw! Besides, I said call me Milly. ‘Ms. Palorin’ sounds so old, and Mr. Palorin has been gone for thirty years—”
“MOTHER!”
“Oh, Cathy, it’s not like it’s not true. Anyway. I’m having a blast with this new heart. I think I’ll go out and see what the kids are doing these days. What do you say, Susie?”
Her granddaughter, of about the age to be called “kids these days” grinned widely. “Of course! I can show you the new dances, too. It’ll be wild!”
“Ms. Palorin, your hip—”
“What? It’s not like you can’t just clone me a new one. And then,” Milly laughed, “I can be young at hips again, too, and think how much fun that will be!”
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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/
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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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A story for my Apocalypse Bingo card.
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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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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
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.
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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…
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.
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…
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.
Post 1: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/12/25/lexember/
Post 2: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2018/01/05/conlang-extra-lexember-syllabary/
Today’s topic is… Shelter
The basic unit of shelter is vil, but this is used almost exclusively for what we might call a shack, although vol, to house (or be housed) is still used for almost any case involving giving someone a place to live.
Tiltek is a rock shelter, originally, but now means a sturdy or comfortable shelter. Continue reading