I had a really nice post written up about my weekend and the lack of Lynnie lately – and tomorrow, likely – and then the laptop went boom (temporary boom).
So, hi, still alive, will post more tomorrow night.
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dailyprompt: “day’s work for a day’s pay,” and comes after Tanglers
“It’s not a bad life,” Spring protested weakly into the phone. She had it pressed between her ear and her shoulder – an old-style analog phone with a big headpiece, easy enough to manage – while she danced into the high-heeled sandals. The litter of indecision sprawled across the tiny bedroom – six and a half pairs of shoes, three dresses, two pairs of pants, and a half-unraveled sweater. “A day’s work for a day’s pay, and I get to meet all sorts of interesting people.” Like her date tonight. A star mapper, but so very interesting.
“I know honey, but…” Her mother had mastered the motherly “but;” it conveyed paragraphs in a single syllable. But it’s not how we do things. But it’s so common. But how can you go about your art when you’re tied down to a day job? But, and this one was most important and never quite said aloud, but it’s not the way your brother and sisters do things. Sometimes Spring loathed being the youngest of four, the least predictable, the least well-behaved, after three so very exemplary examples.
“But it’s fun, mom.” Would she spend her whole life having this conversation, again and again? She pulled out her trump card as she buckled her second sandal on. “I get all sorts of opportunities to mess with people. Important people. Famous people, sometimes.
As she’d known it would, that stopped the argument. “Well, honey, if you’re happy where you are, then I guess that’s what matters. Are you working tonight?” She still managed to make “working” sound like “streetwalking,” of course.
“Not tonight, mom.” She hung the pendant Winter had given her over the dress Summer had helped her pick out, feeling happily wrapped in her family. “Tonight I have a date.”
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Meeks has updated the Ayla sketch (LJ Link) and cleaned it up a bit more!
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From dailyprompt: “eight line poem” and “I want to be alone.” Originally, I had put placemarkers in for names to fill in later, but, as the story went on, I liked keeping it that way.
“I want to be alone.” [3] stared down at her notebook, the pencil limp in her hand.
“Now, honey, you know it don’t work that way.” [2] cuddled her briefly.
“It oughta,” she sighed.
“Now don’t let the bosses hear you talking that way,” her teammate scolded. “They’ll start thinking you’re defective, or, worse yet, se-ditty- itious.” She drew the word out like it was sexy, naughty, instead of terrifying.
“I know,” [3] agreed quietly. They all knew what happened to defectives. “It’s just sometimes, I can’t hear myself think.”
“And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be,” [2] nodded firmly. “That’s what we’re for, peachie, to hear your thoughts.”
“But…”
[1] and [4] had remained quiet until now, [4] because, as junior, that was his place; [1], as senior member of their Four, had left girls to girl business but now, when [3] refused to complacently back down, he spoke.
“What do you have that you can’t share with your Four?”
It was a catechism question, a trap for defectives, the root of their training. [3] answered dutifully. “There is nothing I have that I cannot share with you.” Except the burning poems inside her head that kicked and beat at her skull, wanting to get out. Except the whispers of music that went away the minute someone else spoke to her.
That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. They were too close for her Four to not notice that she was defective, but close enough, loyal enough, that they could keep it quiet as long as she could hold together. And she could, given everyday situations. The problem was days like this, where the pressure of the poetry and the pressure of duty pounded at each other like hammer and anvil, and her in between, soft and squishy like the peach that [2] nicknamed her.
“Come here,” [4] spoke up, startling them all.
The habit of obedience was well-ingrained into all of them, and she was across the room and sitting next to him on their wide, Spartan bed before it had processed that he, of all the people in the world, she didn’t have to obey.
And then, with the gall that only a spoiled, pampered junior member of a well-off Four could manage, he kept giving her orders, in a voice so gentle it was like a recording of the ocean, calm and inexorable, pulling her under. “Lay down with me,” and she did, letting him spoon her. “She’s not alone,” he told their teammates; she barely heard [2] grunt in acknowledgement.
He pulled her against him, one hand on her hip, his chest against her back, his breath warm on her neck. She waited, wondering what he was up to; they all waited, although she could hear, faintly in the background, [2] moving around, picking stuff up.
He said nothing, did nothing. He was there, close as a second skin, close as they were always supposed to be with at least one of their four, but he was junior, with nothing he could make her do. The words stopped rattling haphazardly in her skull and began lining up peaceably, forming themselves into an orderly eight-line poem.
“Write,” [4] murmured, and, at the desk, [2] began writing.
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Originally posted here in response to this image prompt
The planet had been, to all of their sensors, bare of tool-using life. There was nothing there that showed up using anything more complex than a stone axe. No smelting. No radio waves. No large gatherings of populations.
(Not that it really would have mattered. They had nowhere else to go, after all).
They had landed in a place that looked clear, on a body of water their initial survey told them was potable, near some purple and green vegetation that, even if not edible, would be useable in building materials. They had landed… and stared, open-mouthed, at the landscape around them.
They had seen ruined cities. They had seen corpses. All of that, they had left behind. But the ruins on this planet, where nothing was left using tools; the corpses stacked by the side of the city, like someone had been trying to be tidy; the strange architecture, built to fit those strange shapes, those twisted spines… it was like stepping into their own nightmares, twisted into alien forms.
The worst of all wasn’t the vegetation growing over the things that could be houses, the purple flowers that they soon found were flesh-eating and blood-hungry, the buildings that would never quite fit them. The worst was the statues by the waterfront, and the others, tucked in every place where a god might look, the strange and creepy edifices seeming to beg help from gods who, it seemed, had turned a blind eye.
They slept inside the ship that night, but they could not go home, and they had nowhere else to go. The next morning, they began to dig graves for the remaining corpses, to brush out the biggest of the residences, to plan their own statues to gods they hoped had followed them.
I think it’s in the same world as “Dancing for Joy” http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/43474.html and a couple others
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This is a story of Vas’ World – see here for a complete description; it comes immediately in sequence with the Vas Cycle, after Contemplating the Wall
From dailyprompt:
“Stand here, by me,” Vas ordered, and was gratified although not too surprised to see that his team obeyed him. In a crisis, he was still the leader. This, he reckoned, definitely counted as a crisis.
The tentacled tree-like-thing was holding his senior xenobiologist Suki about six feet off the ground, not moving her anymore but restraining her. Other branches were stretching towards their group, while Malia and Paz waved their axes threateningly. They were surrounded on three sides by the wriggling trees, while the fourth side was bordered by a long, clearly-sentient made wall. At least one of the sentient species here, Paz’s wounded leg could attest, used ranged weapons. Somebody built walls. And the trees seemed aware of the threat of the axe.
“They look like snakes,” Malia muttered. “Some sort of boa or anaconda…”
“Fiddleheads,” Andon countered. “See the feelers inside? I wonder if they’re edible…”
“Last time I checked,” Vas interrupted, before Andon could get too distracted with xeno-cusine, “we didn’t eat sentient species.”
It was the wrong thing to say, which he realized the moment the words were out of his mouth. Malia had a pet peeve about…
“That’s not what you said about the Anjou tigers,” she complained, right on cue.
…the tiger-like ruminant creatures from Anjou Three, whose sentience was not up for debate by anyone other than a few rabid cat-lovers, and Malia.
Vas was saved from yet another discussion on comparative intelligence and the ethics of eating cows with stripes by Suki’s worried scream. Ah, yes. They still had to get her down. He didn’t want to lose yet another team member, even an obnoxious one.
“Guys…” Suki choked out. Apparently the tree-like tentacle creatures were, indeed, also constrictors. “Guys,” she tried again, coughing. And pointing behind them. “The grass…”
“I can hear the grass,” Paz muttered nervously. “It’s growing.”
Prompts included: Stand By Me, I can hear the grass grow, and anaconda
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Originally posted by ysabetwordsmith at Support your favorite authors
I should do more of these more often.
From dailyprompt:
They are dancing again.
They dance for the full moon, for the changing seasons, for the first harvest and the last, for the first snow and the last. They dance for weddings and for childbirth, although they do not dance for death.
I cannot fault them; they have, despite that litany, so little to dance for. They came here so naked and unprepared, so bold and brave and completely not ready for what this place was; they came here and they died.
This planet is not a nice place, and they are not the first sentient race that have walked over its shifting skin and been eaten by its trap, frozen by its winters, swept up by its maelstroms. I’ve seen others come, and I’ve watched them all die. The death of these creatures did not surprise me.
What surprised me was their tenacity and their adaptability. They saw that the ground would shudder with no warning, and they built shelters like boats to move with the shifts. They saw that their plants from home were twisted by the soil into something inedible, and they learned how to eat the plants that were here, thay have grown to process the poisons of this place.
They died by the dozen, and they learned with every death. With every adaptation, the planet had to work harder to shake them off its back; and with every shake, their grip dug in tighter.
No other species had lasted through more than two seasons, but these, they were still alive when a year had passed. And now it has been two years, and, while there remains only a tenth of the original population, they die much less frequently now, and they give birth more often than they die.
And they dance. They dance for ever success, every triumph, every survival. At first I thought they were mocking the planet, taunting it for failing to kill them. Then I thought this was part of their grieving ritual, for all those that the planet had succeeded in eliminating. No other race had lived long enough to even bury all its dead, much less construct rituals to mourn them. And these creatures, all these little sentient creatures, are so different from me, from my people. Their rites, all of them, are so mobile.
It took me a while to learn that they called this particular set of gyrations dancing, longer to understand that it was a celebration, a prayer to the higher powers they believe rule them and protect them, a hymn of joy sung with their whole raggle-taggle wiggly bodies. And this thing they did, this dancing, was a thing of joy, not of revenge or of grief.
And I do not begrudge them their joy, because this planet is a hard place, as none know better than I. If they have found, like I have, to take their pleasure where they can, than the better for them.
But I do wish they would learn that the mountain they dance on is my head, and the valley my throat. They’re giving me a terrible headache.
Prompt was “dancing on my head”
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The wind had finally died down. Sandy wasn’t sure what she’d have done if it kept up. Frozen to death, probably, or begun to lose skin and extremities to frostbite. Certainly she’d lost herself, but in the midst of downtown Rochester, how far could she have wandered? There were no cars on the street, not even a plow. The storm had come up suddenly – a light snowfall, the sort appropriate for Christmas Eve, had been picturesquely falling as she stepped out of the library to walk home. By the time she crossed Court by the Blue Cross building, the wind had picked up; by the time she reached Monroe, she couldn’t see a foot in front of her. She’d kept walking forward, figuring that holding still was risking being turned into a Popsicle. And now the wind had died down, and she could see… …nothing. Nothing but trees, and snow, and a lamp-post flickering its gaslight. She was SO going to be late for dinner.
Sandy took a deep breath, the thought of diner gnawing on her empty stomach. She’d gotten turned around. What could she do?
Well, all she could do was keep going forward or turn around and head back, since standing here would get her nowhere. The trees laden with snow looked like nothing she’d ever seen in the middle of the city before, even in its sparse parks. She turned slowly counter-clockwise, looking all around her. Tree-lined hills. Densely-packed pine forest. A narrow path, barely more than a deer track, through the trees. More forest, with a steep hillside in the distance. And the gaslight lantern again, looking fresh and new. Some sort of gentrification project, maybe?
The snow was thin, fluffy stuff, but it had settled in drifts nearly to her hips. Glad for the sensible boots and the nice synthetic pants, she waded forward. The lamppost, as she closed, held two signposts. The arrow pointing towards the cliffs read Away; the one further into the woods: Home.
Home sounded wonderful. Her feet were cold, her nose was frozen, and there were snowflakes crusted on her eyelashes. She wanted to be warm again, she wanted to eat dinner, and she wanted, more than any of that, to sit down.
She trudged into the woods, following the vague outline of a path under a canopy of creaking trees, thinking about Home. The half-a-house off in college-student housing that she shared with five other people was a home by sheer force of will – her bedroom was her sanctum, and no-one best bother with it – but she missed the feeling of a real home, something like she’d had in childhood, where she belonged. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her parents’ cozy house would always be Home.
She doubted a signpost had that level of distinction; she doubted it cared about her home at all. Gaslamps weren’t know for their empathy. With any luck, the path would lead her somewhere that could get her back to Rochester; that would have to suffice.
The snow lessened the deeper into the forest she got, the path clearing under the heavy roof of boughs overhead; many of them, Sandy noted in some confusion, still had a full head of leaves on them. That couldn’t be safe, if all the snow started to freeze. She sped up, hurrying from gaslight to gaslight down the smooth path, trying to ignore the gnawing rumbling pain in her stomach. Home, the sign had said; it had to be nearby, right? Maybe not her home, but someone’s home. As the impatient thought was born, the light ahead brightened and swelled, as if she was coming over the edge of a hill into a city. Her pace picked up, and up again as the lights brightened and she was certain she could make out the edges of buildings, and again, as she heard a train whistle. Civilization! She bounded down the hill, driven on by visions of a thick mocha latte drowned in whipped cream.
She skidded to a halt halfway down the hill, tripped, tumbled, and landed on her back in a snowdrift. “No, no, no.” She shook her head, staring at the grey, starless sky. If she didn’t move, she didn’t have to look down at the little Dickensian scene below, didn’t have to acknowledge what she’d seen. There was a train. If she didn’t move, she wouldn’t get to the train. And the snow down the back of her neck was melting into a thin trickle of unpleasant coldness.
She levered herself to her feet, refusing to look up at the village just yet. The path was nice, predictable, something normal in this middle of this mess. She put one foot in front of the other, trying not to worry that they’d burn her as a witch before she could get to the train.
At least, she mused, looking unwillingly up at the black-and-sepia-garbed villagers in their nineteenth-century-finery, if they burned her as a witch, she’d be warm.
Warmth. The place might look archaic, but she could hear the train. The train had to get her someplace warm, assuming she could afford a ticket. Sandy wondered, faintly, if they’d take Visa.
She walked slowly now, keeping her eyes on the gaslights flickering down the street, the train station at the end of the road looking like something out of the miniature village set her roommate Cathleen had set up in the living room, the whole town having that posed-and-designed sense to it, right down to the spruce garlands.
The Victorian-clothed townsfolk didn’t seem inclined to burn her at the stake; they barely seemed aware of her existence. She hurried, still; she didn’t want to miss the train.
The ticket-seller at the station noticed her, at least. “One ticket, sir?”
Close enough. “One ticket, please.” She didn’t even care that there were no destinations listed on the board behind his head, just departure times.
“That’ll be one tech, sir.” He held out his hand.
Tech. Sir. There were at least two things wrong with that sentence, but she blamed the “sir” on the pants. “I’m sorry,” Sandy asked, wondering if the cold was ruining her hearing. “One what?”
The man looked impatient. “One tech, sir, or move aside.”
There was no-one behind her, no reason for him to get all that snippy with her. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what a tech is.”
“Then you won’t be taking the train, now will you? Get out of the way and let the paying passengers through!”
“What… okay.” She melted under his glare and shuffled aside, defeated. She didn’t know where she was, and the train had been her last, however irrational, hope at getting home, or at least someplace warm and civilized. And she didn’t have any of the local currency. If she couldn’t buy a train ticket, she probably couldn’t buy a room or even any food.
“A tech,” piped a voice somewhere near her knee, “is just that. Technology.”
At this point, Sandy wasn’t sure things could get stranger, but she was still very slow about looking down towards the high-pitched voice. There was a good chance she was going insane, she realized, but that didn’t mean she had to go without a fight.
“Usually,” the voice continued, “something like a cell-yoo-lur phone works, although something as simple as a flashy-light will do. The more gizmo-like, the better.”
If her imaginary friend was going to keep talking, eventually she’d have to look. Slowly, Sandy looked downward, while trying to frame an intelligent question.
“Why?” is all she managed, and then, in a squeak that sounded completely undignified, “what?”
She rubbed her eyes, much to the amusement of the person (or thing) at her knee. It – probably he – was standing, smirking at her, wearing a little red wool cap, which he tipped at Sandy cheerfully.
“What’s the matter?” the creature teased, smiling with a mouth full of shark teeth. “Never seen a gnome before?”
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