Planting and Raking… Homeowner joys

May11

Today, I planted three of my 6 butternut plants I started from seed. The ground where we’re planting them is all rocks and sand, so I dug a big hole for each and filled it with composted manure and peat moss, watered well, and prayed it doesn’t snow again.

This was going to be a longer update, but after planting and raking (first mowing was a bit late)… I’m going to fall down now.

ALso? [personal profile] kelkyag? Thank you!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/337043.html. You can comment here or there.

To the Gate, a story of Fairy Town for the April Giraffe Call

May11

For flofx‘s Commissioned Prompt. Fairy Town does not yet have a landing page.

After “Spring”

Anton Barren moved slowly in front of his students. “Fade, look around. Do you see a doorway?”

“None.” He was back to sounding bored. That was good. Anton didn’t want the girls to freak out. He didn’t want Fade to freak out, either… or himself.

“How about an arch or a gate?”

“Over there.” That was Lilah, bouncing a bit. “Mr. Barren, what’s going on? Why are the animals looking at us?”

“I chose an imperfect time to bring us here.” He had chosen an imperfect locale, more accurately, hoping for a small amount of danger to shake them out of their complacency. This was not going to be a small amount of danger, not if the Animals were looking at them the way it seemed they were.

He focused his sight. He could see their shadows, if he looked hard enough. There would be a cost. But he would pay it. He always did.

“The bobcats…” Anya whispered. “Mr. Barren, the bobcats…. they look hungry. And it was a long and cold winter, wasn’t it?”

“Coldest in decades,” Lilah answered. “I was shoveling snow every day and… oh. The deer looks hungry, too. I thought deer were herbivores.”

“Deer are. These are not, exactly, deer.” He reached for their hands, school regulations be damned. “Fade, take Anya’s other hand. You can worry about cooties later.”

“I’m not five.” He could sense the boy moving to obey him, complaints aside. “How bad is it?”

“If we are lucky, even a little lucky, it won’t be too bad. Lilah, where did you say you saw this gateway?”

“It’s an arch. About … mm… thirty feet? To my right.”

“All right.” The deer seemed to be milling closer in their interrupted dance. The bobcats? Probably pacing back and forth in front of them. “When I give the word, children… run.”

“But I don’t understand. I thought they were celebrating.” Lilah did far too well as complainer.

“They are. But every celebration needs food. Now run!”

They ran, Anton herding them in the direction Lilah had pointed, while the bobcats gave chase, lazily, not wanting to catch them yet, and the deer shifted their dance, running ahead, cutting in front of them, only to double back. The Animals were playing with them. Anton could only hope that they would get distracted in the game and forget the gate.

“So, let me get this straight,” Fade panted. “You brought us into another world. To be dinner for a bunch of animals. What kind of Biology teacher are you?”

“The kind that believes in realism?” Lilah joked. She was closer to the mark than Anton wanted to admit.

“The kind that believes in field experience,” he countered. He couldn’t see the gate, but, then again, he never had. If he didn’t know where they were, he had to rely on younger eyes than his to see. “Lilah, that arch…?”

“Just ahead, Mr. Barren. Just ahead. Hee, I always thought that was funny.” Her breathless giggle sounded a bit hysterical. “Barren, the guy teaching about life.”

“Ironic.” Fade’s mumble sounded like he was losing energy quickly.

Anya hadn’t paused, but she was watching Anton’s face far too clearly. “No.” She shook her head, and a bit of panic began to cross her face. “No… it’s not irony. It’s just honesty. The Fae call themselves what they are, don’t they, Mr. Barren?”

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May11

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Poll Poll Poll

May11

Theme Poll!

The Theme poll is up for tomorrow’s (wow) Giraffe Call.

“Origins & Creations” is winning by a tiny margin (one vote) over “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know” and “Monsters.”

I will close the voting tomorrow morning when I open the call!

I don’t exactly have a clear margin on The April Continuation Poll, either; “The Empress is Dead” is winning with 2 votes over 1 for almost everything else.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/336352.html. You can comment here or there.

As Safe as Houses, a story of Fae Apoc for the April Giraffe Call

May11

AfterHousewarming, from stryck‘s commissioned prompt. Dodger is from When the Gods Attacked..

“We need a place to stay.”

“We don’t need a place that talks to us.”

“Better than a place that bites us. Or a place where the other people stab us.” They were keeping their voices at a low hiss, hoping that Bethseda was busily distracted talking to Sana and her children about her garden.

“What’s to say she won’t start biting?”

“I don’t think this is like Hansel and Gretel, Clare.” Tobias flopped into the far-too-comfortable armchair in his room- his room! and sighed in exasperation. “Running water. Food. A door that locks. A bed all to yourself.”

“What’s the point of a lock when the house is alive?” Clare shook her head. “I mean, she says she’s not like those monsters…”

“Come on, Clare, you know we’re not that different.” That, he barely mouthed out loud.

“We are NOT like those things!” Clare didn’t have a quiet setting, not when she was upset. “I’m not!” she insisted, her hands clenching into fists. Tobias imagined what those hands looked like, under her Mask, and hurriedly crossed the room to force her hands open. Small lines of blood dripped down her fingers.

“So maybe neither is she.” He wrapped his already-stained handkerchief around one of Clare’s hands, and patted at the other one with a tissue. “What do we know about any of that?”

“The monsters came and turned everyone crazy. Crazy enough that a talking house sounds sane. What else do we need to know?” She batted his hands away. “What else do we even need to think about?”

“What we are. What she is. What it has to do with the monsters.” He shrugged, as always on the defensive when it came to Clare and… what they were. Whatever they were.

“Look. Dodger told us what we were. He told us to hide from the monsters. What else do we need to know?”

“Everything?” He stood to pace. Maybe he could think better that way.

“Well, I know that we’re not hiding very well from the monsters inside a talking house.” She stood up. “Come on. I’m leaving.”

“Claaaarre.”

“Look, don’t you want to know if we even can leave?”

“Clare, what I really want is a warm meal and a bed to sleep in. If she’s not going to let me leave, well, at least I’m not dying cold in an alleyway. Which in my book puts this place one hundred percent above any other place we’ve stayed in the last three years.” He stood anyway. Once she got her mind on something, there was no stopping her.

“I don’t like feeling trapped, Toby.” She threw the rest of her clothes into her backpack. “You know that. It’s why we didn’t stay in that shelter.”

“In any of the first seven shelters we had as an option. The eighth and ninth had the creepy people and the tenth had fleas. Clare, we’re down to sleeping in doorways – or this house. I like this better.”

A knock at the door startled both of them. “Excuse me,” the house’s voice called. “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/336003.html. You can comment here or there.

Apologies….

May9

Sick Lyn is sick again. Staring at the screen is hella painful for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Thus: Writing is slow, and Lyn’s Onlinniness is low.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/335234.html. You can comment here or there.

CaliNovel – End of Chapter 18

May9

She just laughed, though. “We can, with extreme provocation, be reasonable. Right now, however, I don’t want to be.”

She didn’t want to be reasonable. That could be bad. “No?”

“No.” She scooted back up my legs until she was pressed against me, my erection trapped between us. “Reasonable would probably involve getting to know you better before we went forward with sex.”

“And you don’t want to know me?” I think I was joking, but I can’t swear to it.

“I do want to know you. I just don’t want to wait any longer.”

“Is it my animal magnetism, or are you just really, really horny?” Why do I ask such stupid things? I was feeling a little uncomfortable, and not just physically. I’d never had a woman this direct about wanting to jump my bones before.

“Yes.” She leaned in and kissed me again. I could really get on board with this. I could. If only my brain would shut up.

“You bought me.”

“I did. Well, technically… yes, I bought you.”

“To have sex with.”

“Among other things, yes.” She kissed a line from my earlobe down my neck to my shoulder, every kiss sending little shocks through me. Except where she had to skip over the collar.

“So I’m your whore, bought and paid for. Your Kept Boy.”

She could hear it in my voice, I’m sure. She pulled back. “You’d rather not do this right now.”

“I’d rather not be a whore. A possession.” I think I sighed. I know my hands lingered on her back for a while. “I would really, really like to have sex with you, Keva. A lot. Over and over again. And I’m sure we will. But I was scrubbing floors this morning. I don’t think my pride can handle being a whore this evening.”
KEVA
Do you know how rare it is for a man to say no to a Californian royal woman? It had happened once in my life to that date, and he’d turned out to belong to my older cousin.

It occurred to me to be offended. It occurred to me to yell at him, or to tell him that saying no wasn’t an option. No real slave would say no to their mistress, after all.

What I actually said was “I can respect that,” because I could. He wasn’t, after all, a “real slave,” not in his mind, not yet. And he was being very polite about the whole thing.

“Yeah?” He sighed, his hands still roaming up and down my back. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t say I’m not frustrated.” If I was a bitchier woman, I’ve have put my hand between my legs and gotten myself off right there in front of him. But I didn’t know a man that wouldn’t upset. “But I’d rather have things good between us, I guess.”

“Even though you were just saying you’d rather fuck than get to know me?”

“Even though.” I scooted back so that I was sitting on a ledge in the tub instead of on his lap. It gave me enough distance to get some self-control. “I don’t have any wish or reason to upset you, Patrick.”

“You know, if you got angry, you’d be easier to hate,” he complained. His eyes seemed to be fixed on my collar bone. I could have slid under the water to make it easier on him, but that would have put my eye level somewhere around his stomach. I’d rather be looking at his face.

“That’s the point, yes.” I smiled at him and hoped he’d smile back. I got a sort of half-twist of his lips in response. I guess it was a start.

“I’m not going to like being a slave.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m just asking you to get along with me.”

“And obey you. And serve you. And be your possession.”

“Well, yes. But mostly the first one.”

“It’s a lot easier to get along with a pretty girl than it is to bow down and serve one.”

“I’m sorry.” On some level I was. “But I think we’ll manage to work it out.”

“You have a lot of faith in yourself.”

“At least half of that is faith in your sense of self-preservation.” I stood up. If I didn’t get out of the tub, I was going to have a hard time not pushing things. “Enjoy your bath. When you’re done, you know where your room is.”

“You’re pissed.”

“No.” To my surprise, I wasn’t. “I’m respecting your desire not to have sex with me tonight.”

“When you put it like that…”

He was smiling. Good. I smiled back at him. “Have a good night, Patrick. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Enjoy yourself… Keva.”
PATRICK

All right, I’ve done brighter things. But she wasn’t mad at me, and she wasn’t punishing me. That went a long way towards making me feel better about myself.

The next couple days were… weird. Being angry and rebellious had been easier. At least then, we both knew what we were doing.

Now… well, she might have had a clue, but I really wasn’t sure. I didn’t even really know what she wanted from me. So I let her show me around the house – mansion – compound – whatever, the parts I hadn’t seen and sometimes parts I’d washed. I didn’t rub it in too much that I’d washed that floor or scrubbed that tile; she seemed more pissed about the cleaning than I was, for one, and, for another, I didn’t really want to think about it.

After two days of this dance, she started calling in [babyslave] and having me run errands with her.

“You’re serious. You want me to run around with a toddler. Should I carry her?”
That got me a kick in the shins. “I’m not a toddler. Your ladyship, you want me to run around with this lunk? Should I carry him?”

“Nobody’s carrying anyone. Patrick, you could learn a lot from [babyslave.] [Babyslave.], you can think of him as extra muscle for the harder errands. But I want you to help him understand how things work around here.”

“Did I piss you off again… your ladyship? I mean, I could go back to cleaning floors if you want…” Words can not express how desperately I wanted that to not be the case, and how shitty that made me feel. I might have kissed her feet to avoid being sent off to wash floors again. In front of the kid, no less.

“What I want is for you to run some errands. Follow along with her – and learn.”

I wasn’t relieved enough to not complain a little. “So I get to be your fetch-and-carry boy now?”

“No.” Now she really was getting snappish, and I realized, kinda belatedly, that the kid counted as an audience. “I want you to be her fetch-and-carry boy.”

I didn’t think I could salvage this, but I could try. “As you with, your Ladyship.” I tried for a little bow and, at the very least, didn’t massacre the idea. “For how long?”

She either thought my bow was ridiculous or wasn’t too angry with me. I’m not sure which. Either way, though, she was smiling again. “For the next week. Come back here by dinner time tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I did my best to make it not come across sarcastic, and I think I mostly managed, because she kissed me before she sent me on my way.

“You like her.” [Babyslave] waited until we were out of the room and into one of the back halls to comment on my love life, or whatever it was. She looked like she approved.

“Well… uh. She and you are the only people that haven’t been total jerks to me here. Well, and Cass.”

“It’s not like it’s something to be embarrassed of. You got a good mistress. That’s a good thing.” She turned and grinned up at me. “A lucky thing.”

“I’m still a slave.” I tugged uncomfortably at the damn collar. A good mistress wasn’t how I’d been thinking of Keva, not really. “I should be trying to escape.”

“So you can get beat again? That’s stupid.”

“So I can go home.”

She shook her head at me. “Americans.” It sounded like an insult. “You can’t go home. Enjoy being here.”

I wasn’t going to yell at her; she barely came up to my waist. Maybe Keva knew that. “Well… K… Lady Keva is nice, I guess. And you’re fun. What kind of errands are we running?”

“I don’t know yet. We need to go find [Chatelaine], the Chatelaine.”

“What’s that? It sounds like some sort of dessert.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.” She was giggling, so it can’t have been too bad.

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