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Ceighk fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 18:53
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Death and the Cat and the Maiden 974 words The thing about walking around as a skeleton is fellas come at you with a whole lot of baggage, and I don't just mean their gooey bits. There was me, hunting for cats by light of the moon, just minding my business, when this girl popped her head out the door of her spired mansionette and, catching sight of me, started screaming. Most of them do - grown men too of course - only this one, instead of running back inside to convince herself she's been stewing the wrong fungus, goes quiet and then gapes at me: 'Granny?' So I said: 'Sorry hun, you've got the wrong croaker.' That was my second run-in with a would-be descendant in a month, which was roughly how long I'd been alive. Seems like it's easy to have one of those faces when you don't have a face. I'd tried to explain to the first guy that more than not being his dead gran, I wasn't anyone's: whoever's dear departed once grew on these bones, I'm just a lodger, walking them about now they're no longer needed. I'm animate dead, not some dead guy reanimated. But it's hard to talk philosophy when you don't have a tongue, so the second time it happened I just went to leave. Only no sooner had I turned round than this girl dashed in front of me, arms outstretched, and declared: 'You're not getting away that easy!' I told her again that I'm not who she thinks, though all she probably heard was chattering and dust. But just as I was readying myself to barge her out the way, the sleekest, sneakiest tabby came picking its way through the snow and slinked right up the path to the open front door. I stared at it, transfixed, and as I did the girl linked her elbow round my humerus and guided me towards the house. I let myself be guided. The cat slipped inside. By the time I'd crossed the threshold it was nowhere in sight. Cats are tricky creatures, so I decided to play along with whatever the lass was projecting on me. I'd have to get tricky myself to achieve my goals. She draped me in a knitted shawl that went down past my patellas and sat me by the fire. Thirty minutes into her ramble about everything that had happened since the woman she thought I'd been had died, I started counting my blessings. Seems like their whole family had conked out over just a few years, leaving this girl alone in the big empty house. I thought: It's great to be an animated skeleton. Some people go through their whole lives having no idea why they've been put on this Earth, and with every death around them they just have to face the futility of it all, their fruitless impermanence. Me, I woke up for the first time ever to some veiled sorceress whispering in my lug hole about sacrificing cats at the stone circle outside of town, and except for wishing she'd picked a less devious quarry, from then on I knew my purpose. Speaking of cats, this one had slipped back in. It seemed wary of me at first, but the girl took a tin of fish from a small stack on the mantelpiece - the whole room was littered with empties - and enticed it onto her lap, stroking behind its ears while it ate from her other hand. 'You remember Partridge, don't you Granny?' she said. 'I know you never liked him much but he's been such a companion to me now you're all gone.' I'd leant forward and almost reached out to grab the wily beast, but there was something in the way it nestled contentedly into her lap that gave me pause. Cats around me were usually all ferocity and bite, but this one was positively docile. Instead I mimicked what the girl had been doing and, tucking my distals behind its earflaps, gave the creature a scratch. The girl stared at my eye sockets in total shock. 'Oh my, that's the first time you've made him purr, Granny! Here, let me set him on your lap. You can hold him.' With the animal handed over, the girl went on talking about how things weren't so bad if she thought about it; how it was time to start taking ownership of her life by getting out there and meeting people, even if everyone she'd once loved was now dead. She was still young - she couldn't let that hold her back. Eventually the fire died out, the moon went down, and the girl grew quiet. I thought she'd fallen asleep in her chair, but when I stood up to leave she reached out two hands to clasp me by the metacarpals. 'I know you can't stay,’ she said, ‘but thank you so much for coming. The fact you made friends with Partridge after all these years just means so much. You’re absolutely right: we need to find love where we can in this life, it's too short not to. I love you, Granny. Rest well.' She was crying when I left, but I went out with a warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest that I'd never felt before. It was the cat. I'd trapped it inside my rib cage while the girl wasn't looking, kept quiet and content with another tin of sardines. I took the creature out as I walked through the snow and held its furry body between the crook of my arm bones and the hand-knitted shawl. Looking down at him there, I almost started to think there was more to these little guys than particularly annoying prey. Almost. When I got to the stone circle I cut out its heart for the Dark God Shbinyuath. You can't give up on your purpose in life.
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Jan 9, 2022 17:35
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in with a prompt please, and i'll for 5 crits
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Jan 12, 2022 13:56
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Johan, Johan! 1598 words Prompt: Having only ever heard of these struggles in bedtime stories, the main character loses what's dearest to them when they discover that the uneasy peace that holds across the land will soon collapse and plunge the world into a chaos; it requires them to re-evaluate their current lifestyle.Refusing to back down, the main character, without thinking ahead, becomes involved in the situation to resolve it from the inside. Ah Johan, Johan, those were the days! When I was Spymaster for the Twilit Empress and you'd been sent by the Iron Republic to poison me – or stab me, shoot me, strangle me, bomb me, bludgeon me, or whatever else your devious little mind could come up with as long as I ended up dead. How our every moment was charged with the electric thrill of sex and death, mingled to the point of being indistinguishable. When I never knew if you wanted me alone so you could kiss me or kill me or both. From the moment I saw you on the night of the Aquarian Ball I had you all figured out. From your bearing alone I clocked your employer and had a 50:50 read on your target. The only question was whether it was me you were after me or the Empress herself. She and I often had that problem with men: I'd been bought from my parents at ten years old to serve as her decoy, and even today we bore a striking resemblance. That night you circled me like a planet on a decaying orbit, getting fatally closer every time you passed. Passably good at feigning interest in the conversations your trajectory brought you into, you allowed yourself one perfunctory dance with another before continuing on your course. Whether it was for its own pleasure or to throw me off I do not know, but the Spymaster of the Twilit Empress can see through such games, Johan. And while I was impressed by your decisive manner in tripping that servant and sending a full tray of delicate fluted glasses sailing inches from my head just to get a pretext to talk to me, it was far too telegraphed for a move so bold. You were a decent spy, Johan, but hardly my match. Then again, your finest quality for espionage was your relentless bravery, attested to by the fact you believed you had a chance. Some would say it bordered on stupidity, but I found it very endearing. I pretended to act shocked, and we recited our lines like characters in a cheap romance: 'My Lady, are you alright?' 'My Lord, I... yes quite alright, thank you.' 'Thank the Gods, I am glad you are unhurt. You know, I find music and good company is the best way to calm one’s nerves. Would you care to take a dance with me?' If you weren't trying to kill me you'd have needed a better approach, but your murderous intent was hot enough that I could overlook your cheesy delivery. Plus, it seemed like a good idea to keep you where I could see you. The rest of the night was an invisible duel in plain sight of a hundred ignorant spectators. You poisoned my drink, I pretended to slip and spilled it down your waistcoat. You poisoned my drink, I chucked it in a plant pot while you weren't looking. You kissed me for a distraction while you poisoned my drink, I flipped the situation and poisoned yours too. Really, Johan, you should try varying your strategy: as thrilling as it was, the game was far too easy. The next morning the Empress summoned me to her throne room. 'Cordelia, we have reason to believe that an agent of the Iron Republic is in our midst with the intent of doing me harm.' Her voice dripped with accusation. 'Were you aware of this?' 'Yes, ma'am, I was aware,' I said, staring at a patch of marble floor two metres from her feet. Growing up, the one-day Empress and I had almost been sisters, with no other children around. Now my only interactions with her saw me kneeling on the cold floor of the throne room, not allowed to even look her in the eyes. 'When did you learn of it?' she demanded. 'Last night, ma'am.' 'And you didn't tell me?' 'No, because there is no threat, and especially not to you. He tried three times to poison me and failed. I tried once to poison him and succeeded, though only with a sleeping draught. I thought it better to avoid a diplomatic incident, given our, uh, strained relationship with the Iron Republic.' Strained was an understatement. The Republic and the Empire were teetering on the brink of war: the slightest provocation would mean no turning back, and the execution of a so-called diplomat simply attending a party would be more than enough. 'You should've told me straight away,' said the Empress. 'Don't protest! Any more insubordination and I'll have your head. Now pay attention. Do you think he’s still out cold?' 'It depends on his constitution but I believe so, yes. And if not he's locked up tight.' 'Perfect. I want you to go in there and cut his throat.' The Empress's words made me forget about the taboo and stare her in the face. She looked older than I remembered and, despite all her finery, smaller. She looked like my reflection as a scared little woman in a mountain of jewels. 'You can't be serious,' I said. 'Cordelia, the Iron Republic has sent an assassin into my own home to kill me. I want him dead and I don't care who knows. And keep your eyes down, don't forget who I am.' I looked back down at the marble floor. I’d loved my job, once, and loved the Empress too. I’d been a secret keeper of the peace, using deceit and subterfuge for the safety of the people. Lately she’d grown cold, and her requests more brutal and dangerous. 'Do you understand, Cordelia?' asked the Empress. 'I... yes,' I said in a low monotone. 'I understand. I will do as you wish.' My thoughts raced as I made my way through the dark cloisters of the Dusk Palace towards the cell I'd taken you to in secret the night before, but I didn't get much time to think. I was scarcely halfway there when a dark shape fell from the rafters and tried to get the drop on me. Hello Johan! You were masked and cowled but I had no illusions – who else would it be? I stepped out the way with ease, then drew my dagger to match your own. We feinted back and forth a few times before I said, 'I'm impressed, those were tough locks to pick.' You flicked your blade to my left by way of reply, then dove back to the right, cutting through the air just an inch from my ear. I realised I had to be careful – you were a better stabber than you were a poisoner, and while I was the more experienced fighter, I felt more than a little distracted. Question after question ran through my mind. How had the Empress known you were here if I hadn't told her about it? Why was she so certain you'd been sent to kill her, when the only person you'd gone after since setting foot in the palace was me? Why was she so cavalier about letting the Iron Republic see that we had taken out one of their agents, when with a bit of time I could have made it look like an accident? And most pressing of all, how were you so unbelievably cute? I lunged forward to force you back through an open window then darted after you, emerging onto one of the sloped roofs that hung over the palace's covered walkways. We continued our dance as if we hadn't stopped waltzing since the night before, and the more I got into the groove of the fight the more relaxed I felt. Despite the bravado of your lunges your technique needed plenty of work. With every thrust I parried and advance I deflected, the pieces fell into place. 'Johan, Johan,' I sang as we spiralled across the gables. 'Do you really think you can win?' The next time you came at me I deflected your blade, then stepped through your broken guard to shoulder barge you into a large decorative urn. I could’ve killed you right then. You brought your dagger in from the side in an attempt to force me off, but you were much too slow. I grabbed hold of your wrist and pinned it hard against the slope of the roof, sending your blade skittering down into the gutter. ‘Look, my dear, I'm sorry,' I breathed in your ear. 'Whoever sent you, they set you up for failure. Someone wants me to kill you to start a war, and the Empress is in on it. Is that what you want?' 'Why are you telling me this?' you grunted. ‘Because a war would be a disaster. And for some reason I like you.' You relaxed in my grip. I pulled down your mask and we kissed, not for the first time, but perhaps the first time for real. We snuck out of the palace and spent the night in the hayloft of a nearby farm, pretending we were free, innocent lovers who hadn't just made enemies of the two most powerful nations on the continent. Eventually the conversation turned to what we should do next. You had an idea. 'You know how you look so similar to the Empress?’ you said. ‘Like you used to be her doppelganger or something?' I knew exactly what you were thinking. Johan, if I'd had any doubts about whether risking everything for you was worth it, I knew I never would again. Brave to the point of stupidity: like I said before, it's your finest quality.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:38
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week 493 crits “Deep Rich”, Excursion 385 - yeah ok ok yeah I like your use of forum code blocks for the robot’s log, it’s good use of the medium - if anyone crits you that it’s gimmicky don’t listen to them. The one thing is it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise what the CMD_CONSOLE4 tag signified. You might be able to make that clearer by putting the first one of those after the reference to the ‘response’ arriving, separating it from the robot’s lines, or just by explaining it better. I like the way you use audio files but would space robots use still use .wavs? I feel like there’s almost a joke here about it being the year 2500 and commercial tech still uses Windows XP or something but that could be heightened if so. On style, there’s a really nice sense of the setting and mystery to the start of this, but some of it can feel a bit flat. Avoiding the passive voice is one of those writing ‘rules’ that can often be more trouble than it’s worth as it absolutely has its place, but this piece demonstrates why it’s good to be conscious of its over use. While the events being described here are interesting enough until the ending, there’s a whole lot of unnecessary wases, weres and had beens, which make the picture feel a bit static. Rewording some of these would save word count and make things much more dynamic. The ending could definitely be clearer and more interesting. Is it just a joke about a cat walking on a keyboard saying random stuff? They do be like that, but I don’t think the story is funny enough to sell the comedy end: the first half creates a genuine sense of mystery, so a joke ending feels like a let down. Or is the implication from the tape labels that it’s an intelligent genetically modified cat or something? If so that could definitely be clearer and the implications of it should be explored in some way. If not then the labels are a big and unnecessary red herring. Also the mystery of who’s sending the messages is less interesting for the reader than what happened to the colonists, which could be hinted at more even if it’s not the robot’s job to find out. The Dead City Marches On - A Classy Ghost Hell yeah zombie city maintained by wagey necromancers, sick concept, extremely good visuals, made me think of gnarly anime like Dorohedoro (big compliment). The main problem here is that it feels like two separate fragments which don’t quite come together to make a story. Everything up until your guy losing his job creates a real sense of place, but also nothing important happens until the witch shows up - this would be fine in a longer story but at this word count I don’t think you had the space. Then the second part introduces a whole bunch of new plot and character details but speeds through them very quickly, so there’s no sense of setup and payoff. Your guy goes from laid off schlub to prospective venture capitalist in a couple of lines, after we spent several paragraphs earlier setting up stuff to do with their original job that doesn’t ultimately feel that important. It’s very disjointed and feels rushed. I’d also have liked to either see some more agency from the character rather than just happening to have the right skills at the right time, or a clearer sense of satire or pathos from the fact this society just swings from one bizarre solution to another at random. I feel like the ending wants us to be happy for Jimothy, but it’s all so arbitrary. I don’t mind that in theory, that’s how things like this work, but the story seems to want me to feel sympathetic towards his good fortune when I have no reason to be. Either we could’ve got to see Jimothy’s struggle so we’d want to side with him more, or the absurdity or nuance of the situation could’ve been taken seriously to give it some depth, but as it is it doesn’t really do either. With a bit of restructuring and some more time, though, there’s potential here. Final Exam - CaligulaKangaroo Kinda long paragraphs and short staccato sentences maybe aren’t the best combination. The short sentences create a fittingly terse, punky tone, but when half of them are just like ‘subject verbs object’ and the other half start with conjunctions that could easily be folded into the sentence before, the effect is needlessly repetitive. Sentences like this are the worst offenders: ‘I press it, opening a series [of] subfolders. One of which says “General Education Development.”’ or ‘Don’t know what a green gable is exactly. But I’ve used enough fake names myself to guess why this chick wants to go by “Cordelia.”’ it’s fine to use breaks like that for emphasis, but here it does the opposite, taking sentences that could break up the otherwise fairly rigid rhythm and unnaturally forcing them to match it. It’s jarring and works to the expense of the prose’s flow for no gain. On the plot, lots of the individual pieces of it are great, but I’m not really sure why the guy is in his mum’s classroom - which is a bit of a problem when that’s what ties it all together. You mention something about getting tickets from the recruiter’s desk, so I guess that’s why he came to the school, but why’s he in the classroom and once he’s there why is he just hanging about? Did he go in because he was sad about his mum? If so there’s so much drama to that decision that you don’t mine at all. Since the conflict ends up being about the test I feel like it could’ve been a lot more cohesive if he was breaking into the school specifically for that purpose, and has to try to focus even while the school is getting raided by scavengers. I really love the visual you create of sneaking around under fire to do an exam in a warzone, but it’s a shame that that feels incidental to the plot rather than the primary focus of it, despite it getting so much wordcount. Still, cool concept that I think you could improve a lot with another draft. Paper Hearts - Chernobyl Princess This is a very nice little story and well written but I can’t help feeling that it sets up a huge existential crisis for the paper guys that is not resolved or acknowledged by the ending. The Creator is still going to die fairly soon, and since they still need her the dolls have only really delayed the inevitable, which jars with Heinrich’s (somewhat cheesy) declaration that his plan might save the village. Is there some way that the puppets can set it up so that they can use the paper cutter without help in the future? The other alternative would be acknowledging that they are bringing a child into a doomed world but I don’t know if that’s in the spirit of things. The reliance on the creator is also confusing given what is implied about making puppet guys early on: if only the creator can make them using the paper cutter, why did the couple think they only needed paper? Surely more dolls would just turn up and they’d have no impulse to create them themselves? If dolls usually do just show up but for some reason this particular couple wants to create one themselves then that could be explored. I’m not asking these questions to nitpick - ‘making sense’ is overrated - but if you had the time to really think through the implications of your world there’s a lot of space to add some depth. On a different note, a guillotine seems like a very inconvenient way to make a paper doll, but props for the creative response to the prompt. Priorities - GrandmaParty This is structurally solid but feels very slight in relevant/interesting details. Mostly dialogue, almost entirely untagged, not too much description (and what there is is fairly generic), no interiority. You convey the information you need for the story to ‘work’ but there’s not much meat on the bones to sell it or give it a unique flavour. The whole story hinges on Davis being tricked to abandon his convictions for the sake of his family, but I’m not convinced of his thought process either for staying to begin with or for changing his mind in the end, and the reasons we are given through the dialogue are very cliche. He apparently believes the ideology about king and country without question, then he gets told war is more nuanced and reminded of his beautiful children, so he leaves. It’s all very clean and socially acceptable and discrete: reasonable motivation A is deemed more important than reasonable motivation B, so he picks one and goes, with the difficult tension between the two going mostly unexplored. A shade of unflattering human complexity here would go a long way. Is he afraid of death on his own behalf and using his family as cover? Or does he actually enjoy some part of being in war in a way he won’t admit to, which makes him reluctant to leave? I desperately want some nuance or idiosyncrasy to your guy’s motivations that just isn’t here. I think the ending needs a bit more detail too. How does realising that the captain was tricking him make Davis feel? Was the captain right that Davis would get away fine and the occupying army wouldn’t treat the castle residents too badly? I like the twist that the merc has been bought out by the enemy - like any good twist it surprised me but in retrospect makes total sense - but I don’t really know how to feel about it. Maybe it’s good that the castle will fall without a fight as less people will die, maybe it’s not, I dunno. As it is this feels a bit like a sketch, a solid foundation that needs something more interesting built on top of it.
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Jan 18, 2022 13:50
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also i'll go in
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Jan 18, 2022 14:05
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The Sacrifice 1198 words Subprompt: "this is the wise old wizardly mentor to a thousand young men and women, except magic isn't real and he's totally just faking it" What a strange feeling to see an unfamiliar moon. This one was smaller than I was used to, patina green and ringed like Saturn. I saw its smooth, craterless surface through the open door of a tent I had no memory of entering, hanging above the lights of a larger encampment down the hill from my own. The night air was warm and crisp, like a Mediterranean Spring. My body was different. It ached as much as my old one had but in all the wrong places. After everything that had happened to me recently, finding myself in a strange land, in some other man's body, felt like a natural progression. For some time now - I had no idea how long - I'd been visited by a parade of shifting phantasms: dead friends who transformed into strangers dressed up as doctors, or little creatures resembling my children who didn't recognise their own names. My belongings had taken on wills of their own. Things moved so often while I wasn't looking that I gave up on finding them the moment they left my vision. I knew, intermittently, that it was my mind and not the world unravelling, but still I felt myself to be trapped in an unruly, uncertain place. Now I was somewhere else entirely, yet things felt clearer than they had in a while. A small gong banged from outside my tent and the moon was blocked out by three even stranger men. They came inside and kneeled at my feet. 'O, Great Wizard Calazach Murzadain, Chosen of the Jade Moon, Speaker for the Thunder, Enemy of the Wretched,' said the man in the centre. He looked somewhere between a Roman general and an Aztec king, flanked by men who were clearly veteran warriors. When my mind began to grow weak, I'd tried to hide when I was struggling to keep a grip on what was happening. Unless speaking was an absolute necessity, it was best to stay silent. After a brief pause, the general continued. 'O, dreadful magister, esteemed warlock, I am but your servant. You are needed for the ritual to seal victory in tomorrow's battle. The Jade Moon is high and the men are assembling. We will accompany you to the sacred ground.' Though he knelt at my feet and called himself my servant, the general spoke with a commanding finality. This combination of being patronised to and coerced at once reminded me of something that I couldn't quite place, something from my life before. Whatever power, symbolic or actual, that the so-called 'wizard' whose body I was in possessed, I had no idea how to wield it, and the general and his men had all the weapons. My only option was to play along. They led me from the tent and down a winding path into the valley. Up close the encampment was a canvas city that thronged with cruel-looking soldiers. Most of them were heading the same way we were, but a few stragglers still hung around to drink, brawl, or goad oversized beetles into fighting each other in pits. Despite the undercurrent of violence, the atmosphere was almost festive. None of the soldiers seemed remotely scared. If my ritual was supposed to inspire morale I couldn't see that they needed it. 'How go preparations for tomorrow's battle, my Lord?' I asked the general, affecting my best tone of wizardly indifference. He shot me a quizzical look. 'We have prepared as much as is necessary. Gods willing it will be a slaughter.' 'And if the Gods don't will?' 'Some of them will get away,' the general laughed. We passed through a thick crowd then climbed the steps to a wooden stage raised a few feet off the ground, positioned to look out across a huge clearing between the edge of the camp and the treeline, filled with an uncountable horde of dangerous, scarred men. Their weapons glinted green in the light of the moon. They put me at the back of the stage among a line of soldiers carrying musical instruments. One held a goat on a short lead. The animal looked around and blinked in panicked confusion. You and me both, buddy. The general strode to the front of the stage and bellowed out across the crowd. I gathered that tomorrow's battle would be the final push to put down a rebellion against whatever order existed in this archaic, brutish world. As he prattled on about honour and bloodshed and the spoils of war, I tried again to figure out how I'd come to be in such a place. When I realised that was impossible I focussed on trying to remember the last possible thing I could from before I ended up here. Everything from my life before was a hazy jumble, but I managed to pick out a few key events that seemed important. I remembered being visited by someone I'd once loved but had developed an inkling not to trust. He pressured me into signing something, some sort of document that I didn't understand. I'd tried to resist but eventually relented, then regretted it as soon as I saw this person's smile. I remembered being taken from my home by strangers and put somewhere else, where I was kept by myself. After that an indeterminate amount of time passed, and then I'd died. The realisation hit me with a certainty that made everything else feel unreal. I'd been utterly alone. A wall of noise dragged me back into the present as the musician-soldiers erupted into a harsh, atonal cacophony. The man holding the goat led it to the front of the dais and tied its lead around a central post. Then the general looked back at me, holding out a wicked ornamental dagger and beckoning me forward. When I hesitated, someone at my back gave me a hard shove and I stumbled over to where he stood with the captive animal. He pressed the dagger into my hand and stepped back, leaving me by myself at the front of the stage. I looked out over the expectant faces of the thousand assembled soldiers, then down at the poor goat, straining at the end of its tether. Its eyes were fixed on a narrow clear path between it and the treeline, desperate to be anywhere but here. It wasn't hard to intuit what was expected of me, and therefore my options. I could either kill the goat or set it free. Both would be symbolic acts, but symbols had consequences even when you didn't understand their meaning. If I went through with the ritual, I could live out the rest of this body's life in the relative comfort of a warchief's pet wizard, whatever that meant. Setting it free would mean picking a fight with a few thousand armed men who more or less had me surrounded, and they'd probably kill the goat too. Our chances were impossibly slim, but at least this time I'd die on my own terms. I brought down the knife and cut the goat's tether. The music stopped. The goat started running. The green moon shone brighter than ever, and somewhere, not far away, thunder roared.
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Jan 23, 2022 23:40
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Jan 25, 2022 13:57
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600 Demons 1497 words None of the friends we had in the months before the demons invaded understood mine and Kathy's relationship. On the surface we seemed like totally different people: she was gregarious and punky, despite her corporate job, while I made websites from home and dressed like a square. But we'd had that dynamic since we met back in highschool. We were the one disgusting codependent teen relationship that made it. When her dad came home drunk and angry and she needed to get away, she could count on me to sneak her into my bedroom. Then the next day I'd count on her to take me to the craziest noise show I'd ever seen. I was her rock, and she helped me live a little. Unfortunately, the invasion came at a bad time for us. Kathy was out of town on a business trip - actually she was in a different country, and we'd been having a fight that stemmed from when we'd visited her step-mum at her tomato farm and I'd refused to eat her tomatoes. I didn't even text her when I saw on the news that tentacled creatures had been causing havoc in different places because she had said something very hurtful about my picky eating that I wanted her to feel bad about. The creatures had seemed like an ecological issue at first, a big deal for scientists but not for anyone else. I tried to phone her once I realised the severity of the situation but then she was the one who didn't pick up. But it wasn't all bad luck in the early days. It turned out the town we'd just moved to was uniquely defensible, with excellent sightlines and natural chokepoints. Within a week the army moved in and set up barricades, machine guns, and anti-air batteries at well-chosen tactical positions, and after that we never had trouble with demons inside the town. Only Kathy was still stuck outside. For the first week the soldiers let in everyone who came to the checkpoint on the edge of town, but then they got worried about whether we'd have enough food to go around and started turning people away unless they could prove they had particularly useful skills, like medics, farmers, or people who could fix anti-air cannons. After a while people stopped arriving at the checkpoint altogether, and I gave up hope that Kathy would make it back. I was very sad that we'd ended it on such a sour note, but I processed my grief privately - there was more than enough of it to go around. Inside the town we got used to a sad new stability, where we could mourn the loss of the world from behind the high walls of stacked up cars the soldiers had conscripted us to build in the first few weeks. Past the steady beating of the soldiers' guns to tell us the demons were still out there, there was never any news from the world beyond. Everything changed when Kathy came home, one year and thirteen days after the invasion. She announced her presence with a knock on my window, having scaled the apartment block and rappelled down from the roof. She had a M16A4 on a shoulder strap and a pistol on each hip and her arms were covered in bites and scratches and lesions from tentacles. 'Hey,' I said. I opened the window and grinned inanely. 'You're alive!' 'Hey bub.' She swung into the room and planted a kiss on my head. 'Yep, that's me. Alive and kicking. Alive-o-matic. Can't be stopped from being alive, not even by six hundred demons.' She hugged me, the corner of one of her pistols digging into my thigh. ‘Six hundred,' I repeated from her embrace. 'That's a lot of demons.' 'Anything to get back to you, baby.' Our first nights back together were an unbelievable dream. I rearranged my work rota to get some days off and we camped out in the bedroom. We rediscovered each other's bodies - she'd become wiry and lean where I'd put on flab, but neither of us seemed to mind. Every night she'd wake me up crying, sometimes more than once, but I was used to her having trauma that I couldn't fully understand. I just held her close like I always had. I don't remember what we talked about for those first few days, so it can’t have been important. On the last day of my holiday, I mentioned going back to work at the hydroponic farm and she suddenly grew more serious. 'Do you always work at the farm?' she asked. 'Yeah,' I said, 'I like it to be honest.' We were in the middle of lunch, sharing a couple of concentrated carbo-bars made from potatoes I'd helped grow myself. 'So you don't try and find people who are still out there?' 'What could I do?' I asked. 'You could organise patrols. Scan the radio. Listen out for people in distress and go save them.’ 'The General's pretty careful about stuff like that,' I said, picking my words carefully. 'They say we need people for the farms, they say it's better we focus on what we can do for the people in here. And we don't know if there's a chance of... contamination. People might be wary of you, you know. No one's going to notice you just because you're new, but you do stand out a bit.' Kathy clenched her fists so tight that she crushed her potato bar, cream-coloured gunk oozing through the gaps between her white knuckles. Then she got up, climbed out the window, and rapelled back up the line she'd left hanging down from the roof since the night before. Suddenly it was like she'd never been back at all. I took the stairs. When I found her on the roof she had disassembled her rifle and was cleaning it with a scrap of fabric. 'You're not leaving are you?' I asked. 'No,' she said without looking up, but I could tell she'd thought about it. I didn’t know what to say. 'Did you ever go looking for me?' she asked eventually. 'Even at the start?' 'You were so far away. Everything happened so fast. Even if you were alive I had no way of finding you. You could've been dead, you could've found somewhere too safe to leave... I just didn't know. I had no way of knowing. I'm sorry. I should've done more.' 'Did you even call me?' she asked. 'Of course I did! I called you on the second day, a hundred times. You didn't pick up.' She chuckled darkly. 'Phone got eaten by a Stumpfucker.' I didn't ask what a Stumpfucker was. She cleaned her weapon in silence for a bit, her eyes dry as polished stones. I sat next to her. When she finally spoke, she sounded like she was describing something that had happened a lifetime ago. 'When I was out there,' she said, 'fighting and killing and nearly getting killed, the one thing that kept me going was the thought of how you were when we started going out. I had this vision of running up your parents' lane in my pyjamas in the middle of the night, and then seeing a light in the distance, and under it was you, waiting in their driveway so you could boost me up to your window, so I could be safe. 'I thought you'd still be like that, that I'd run into you somewhere and everything would be OK. It was childish, really. But after a while I started imagining that maybe you wouldn't be looking for me any more, but you'd still be out there helping other people, guiding them to safety like you used to for me. With every loving demon I shot in the head I imagined I was getting closer to finding you.' I thought about her fantasy of me. Beautiful, flattering, unrealistic. 'I can't be that person,' I said. 'I wouldn't last 10 minutes out there.' 'You were too busy farming potatoes,' she laughed. 'I didn't even think you liked potatoes. I mean, it's a worthy cause.You are helping people, in your way. But there's a vision I had of you in my head, and then there's you as you really are, you know?' We stayed silent for so long that it started to go dark, the sun setting behind the wall of cars. Even at this height they blocked out any glimpse of the world outside the town. She was right to say I could've done more for anyone still stuck out there. We lay on the rooftop and watched the stars appear. I held her hand and thought about what I'd do if she left me before morning; whether there was anything I could do to start living up to her expectations, even in some small way. 'It's just tomatoes I don't like, Kathy,' I said, and she squeezed my hand.
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Jan 31, 2022 01:14
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in and all three please
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Mar 10, 2022 00:26
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Grey Rabbit 1600 words By the entrance to the bunker lay a willow hoop threaded with white flowers, its outer circle bisected by additional rods until it looked something like a pentagram. Three crocheted animals were stitched to its upper arc - two dogs, one black and one white, flanking a grey rabbit. "Environmentalists," Mike said, prodding it with his boot. Sadie rolled her eyes. Mike was better than some of the others at the station, but he still wasn't great. He hadn't laughed when Julia had called the job they were about to do 'tramp hunting', but his diplomatic explanation had amounted to about the same. He had explained that people living in a disused missile silo wasn't good for anyone, and certainly not for those doing it. They were there to assess the situation and "encourage any occupants to vacate the premises". Beyond the doorway, a passageway sloped down into the hillside. Sadie followed Mike inside. Silhouetted against the torchlight and bulked out by his stab vest and custodian helmet, Mike was a policeman-shaped anonymity. Sadie then realised that anyone standing behind them would see her as exactly the same. Her first week in uniform and it still hadn't sunk in. Maybe it never would. After her probation she had wanted to go into a specialist role safeguarding vulnerable women, but she was losing faith in the idea. The woman who led that task force had cackled about tramp hunting like all the rest. As she walked her flashlight lingered on spent needles and children's toys draped in wet leaves. She caught the eye of a plastic doll's head, half-drowned in a growing puddle. Dripping water spattered the flat-headed mushrooms that sprouted from a cleft in the doll's temple, giving it an unearthly kind of beauty. For a moment she wanted to take it with her. They came to a shaft where a switchback stairway led down into the earth. "This whole place is a health and safety," Mike said as he descended. "Needs to be fenced off before someone cracks their head and blames the landowner." "Who's that?" It turned out being a police officer was a lot more about knowing what belonged to who than it was about rescuing delicate useless things. "RAF. So technically they should be the ones turfing people out. But they don't." The stairs ended at a room with a doorway in opposite walls. Neither had a door, though there were neat bore holes where the hinges might go. A sign to the left said 'LAUNCH CONTROL CENTRE' while the right declared 'MISSILE ACCESS'. Somewhere in the facility, a woman was singing. "Do you hear that?" Sadie asked. "Yep. Bingo." They took the doorway labelled 'MISSILE ACCESS' and passed through a small room shaped like an airlock to find themselves on a metal gantry, halfway up the wall of a huge chamber shaped like a vertical cylinder. Somewhere below, dark water lapped at the walls like an underground sea, while the space above vanished into darkness. The song was coming from above. Sadie couldn't make out the words, but it had the structure of a sad folk ballad - slow, plaintive verses that invariably looped back around to a distinctive refrain. Images flashed through her mind unprompted. Heather on the mountainside, lichen on a carved stone, solemn dancers in a forest glade. The song wasn’t in English. "What language is that?" she asked. "Foreign. Do you see her?" Mike peered up into the gloom, his flashlight picking out the undersides of platforms and cables. "No. Looks like the gantry goes up to the left." "Yep. Might want to get your spray out. I don't want to get dropped on by some mentalcase." "Shouldn't we come back with a psych?" Mike ignored her. At the top of the stairs, a wider platform jutted out towards the centre of the room. A shape on the far railing resembled a control panel, except instead of switches it housed a strange wooden box the size of a chessboard. Wooden slats formed a maze on its largest face with an exit on the top edge. Slots were cut down the centre of each passageway, and in the maze’s bottom corner a model of a grey rabbit was flanked on one side by a black wolf and on the other by a white animal that could have been a wolf or a dog. "loving hell," Mike breathed, gazing upwards. A woman in a silver dress hung from the ceiling in a makeshift harness of cables and vines, slowly moving her arms and legs as she continued her strange, sad song, louder now than ever. "Show's over, love!” Mike yelled. “You've got your audience, now you're wasting our time!" He turned to Sadie. "Can you see another way up?" Sadie couldn't. "How’d she get up there?" "No idea. But she's coming down. Now. We've got better things to do than rescue drugged up bimbos from their own art installations." Sadie wasn't convinced by his read of the situation, which was too strange to be the work of an overenthusiastic undergrad. She took a closer look at the maze. The two canines chased the rabbit, but if it only kept running it had a clear shot for the exit. She tried to move it. It should have been able to slide through the slot, but the rabbit felt locked in place. She looked at the white animal and decided it resembled a dog. "Sadie, pay attention!" What if the dog wasn't chasing the rabbit but herding it, rescuing it. She moved it towards the rabbit, and the rabbit slid towards the exit. Then the woman in the air moved too, inching closer on her tangled cradle as if the mechanism in the maze had set into motion whatever concealed framework she was suspended from. "What did you do?" "I just pushed it." Sadie stared at the maze, trying to make it make sense. She noticed the wolf had changed position too, but it had taken a path that led away from the other models. Mike reached over to grab the wolf but gasped in pain when he touched it. Drops of blood splashed on the wooden board. "She's done it now," he muttered, sucking his finger where the model had cut him. "You hear that, woman?" he shouted into the darkness. "Get down now and I'll let you off with obstructing. Take any longer and I'll count that as assault. And for God's sake stop singing!" Sadie would deal with him later. For now the most important thing was getting the woman down safely. Who knew why, but shepherding the rabbit towards the exit had moved her closer to the platform. Presumably it was set up so that if the rabbit reached the end of the maze she would be able to get down safely. She didn't want to know what would happen if the wolf caught the rabbit first. She moved the dog, which moved the rabbit, which moved the wolf and the woman. The rabbit was past halfway through the maze, and the woman was close enough that Sadie could see her face clearly. She was beautiful. But her song had morphed into something else entirely, unearthly and incomprehensible. Images flashed through Sadie's mind: A woman in a silver dress strapped to a circular stone. A man wearing an animal skin, holding a stone dagger, standing over her. "Shut up!" yelled Mike, visibly incensed. He rummaged in his pockets as if checking something was still there and Sadie caught a glimpse of a brown object wrapped in cellophane. Heroin. Would he really frame this woman out of spite for a cut finger? Mike caught her looking and flashed a predatory grin. He would. Sadie moved the dog again, but regretted it when she realised what she had done. The wolf hadn't been heading away from the rabbit at all. It had been taking a shortcut, moving so it could cut the rabbit off before it reached the exit. There was another path the rabbit could take to avoid it, but it was behind the dog - or was it another wolf? - and as much as she strained against the mechanism there was no way of moving the carving backwards to let it pass. All the white creature could do was chase the rabbit to its doom. Mike drew his pepper spray and leant over the railing, licking his lips like a waiting animal. The rabbit was three inches from the exit, but if she herded it forward, the wolf would get it. The woman was two metres from their ledge, but if she helped her reach it, Mike would be there. The woman's song intensified again. Every synapse in Sadie's head flashed with images of prehistoric violence. She glanced at Mike and for a second he looked like the ancient druid in her vision, his pepper spray a sacrificial dagger. Then she saw how the wolf hid its blade. She ripped the wolf from the maze and sunk it into the side of Mike's neck. He gasped in confusion as he teetered over the railing, then plummeted into the water below. Sadie freed the dog and the rabbit from the board entirely, and the woman stepped gracefully onto the platform. She kissed Sadie on the forehead. She had stopped singing, but somewhere, in Sadie's mind, maybe, the song continued. "What do I do now?" Sadie asked. The woman took the carving of the rabbit and tossed it against the wall of the silo. A tunnel opened where it collided. Through it Sadie could see stars.
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Mar 13, 2022 23:52
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Ceighk posted:Grey Rabbit Forgot to add my subprompt: "Buddy cops investigating a decommissioned missile silo must finish a game that becomes real when you play it."
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Mar 14, 2022 00:16
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great prompt. in.
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Apr 5, 2022 12:29
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The Remainder 1500 words One month from the end we were gathered in Airlock Bay 4, that being where Kinglsey had run after yelling about McCuttler wanting to space himself. Now he was really going to do it, McCuttler told us, if only Kingsley would take his foot out of the 'goddamned doorway'. 'Come on McCuttler, don't do this,' Kingsley said, boot wedged in firmly. Kingsley always talked like he was speaking to a sulky five year old who ought to be sitting still through a long car ride. In a way it was comforting how little our encroaching deaths had modulated his tone, but mostly it was annoying. 'Think of your last few weeks. Think of what you can live for.' 'Live for! Like what?!' yelled McCuttler. 'Another month of drinking synth-soup and hearing Lewandowski's pornography echo through the grey hallways? Another month of losing at mahjong until we all burn to crisps like marshmallows thrown at a bonfire? Jeez Louise and no thanks mister, I'll just go now.' 'Hey, man,' Lewandowski rumbled from behind me, sounding hurt. 'I'd have turned it down if you’d asked. And what does losing matter anyway? It's not like any of us can spend the money.' McCuttler wrung his hands in wordless frustration. 'Well I don't care. I don't care! I want to go now. Not in a month, not tomorrow, now. What's it to you? I've thought about this, I've made up my mind. Just let me go.' Kingsley looked about to pipe up but I put a hand on his shoulder. 'I think it's McCuttler's choice,' I said. There was nothing any of us could say that would refute his logic. The only thing separating his death now from those of us who completed our immutable flightpath into Jupiter was, on average, 91 bowls of soup, 76 games of mahjong, 244 hours sleeping, and 483 hours spent struggling in vain to find some way, however minor, to break up the repetition of it all before the end. Tension left Kingsley the way air leaves a balloon. Then McCuttler barged him backwards, slammed the door shut, and quickly depressurised the airlock. When his eyeballs exploded they left a symmetrical stain on the thick quartz porthole, like a Rorschach test or a butterfly. Mahjong wasn’t the same without McCuttler. Playing with three was a hollow reflection of playing with four, and the unanswered question of his suicide filled the ship like a haunting. Why don't you follow me? asked the ghost in the North seat. I had no answer, and despite his protests, neither did Kingsley. He slumped over his tiles and played moves that made it impossible for him to win. 'If only the asteroid hadn't hit the med lab,' said Lewandowski for the third time that day, swapping a West Wind for an 8 Bamboo. He just wanted the drugs. Lewandowski's capacity to be sated by pleasure alone had made him remarkably resilient given our situation, tempered only by our limited entertainment options. 'I'd rather it hadn't hit us at all,' I said. The cruel joke was that our ship had managed to seal every breach so effectively that we had been living in the surviving quarter for nearly a year, but it couldn't even manage a distress signal as we slipped into the nearest gravity well. 'Your turn, Kingsley.' Kingsley groaned. My gaze drifted up to the skylight. Jupiter hung above us, its storms distant enough to appear serene. It was only between turns that I noticed how it had swallowed up the viewport. The neat clicking of the tiles and the constant mental buzz of arithmetic dulled even the blind fear of annihilation. The closer we got to the end, the more we slipped into worlds of our own — Lewandowski into his tapes of slapping flesh, Kingsley into fixing a broken radio, and I into the view from the rec room skylight. To work in space is to witness the uncaring majesty of the universe from an air-conditioned box, furnished like a waiting room. I thought I was used to it after six years fixing vending machines in the cosmic abyss, but when everything else fell away, I realised I had just been forcing myself not to notice. What I lost from the game, I gained from Jupiter. I spent every waking hour gazing into its silent, churning mists. When the ship's lights dimmed in artificial night I slept in its amber glow, on the narrow blue couch next to the soup machine. 'We're picking up signals from the Kuiper belt,' Kingsley told me, eight days before the end. He held a radio that buzzed like a cave of hornets, pacing erratically like he hadn't slept in days. 'Sounds like noise,' I said. 'To you, yes. But nothing this frequency should be coming from that direction. The fact there is noise is incredible.' 'What are you suggesting? Intelligent life?' 'Well, I wouldn't put it so bluntly...' Once I would have been thrilled to find what might be an alien transmission. Now the thought of aliens that behaved just like we did, talking on their radios and zipping about in spaceships, seemed boring, irrelevant. 'Look at that storm,' I said after a minute. 'It's only been there since yesterday, but it must be a thousand miles across. Can you imagine? Something that huge, twisting into being then unravelling like it was never there.' When I looked for Kingsley he was gone. A couple of days later, something happened in Kingsley’s cabin. He didn’t want to talk about it. He started working in the rec room. He set up his apparatus on the table and flitted around it like a hummingbird, stringing spools of tape through an expanding array of struts and reels. His movements would have seemed feverish even if I hadn't spent two weeks watching the glacial roll of Jupiterian weather — but I had, and that made them unbearable. 'Is this really necessary?' I asked as he turned the thing on, its speakers shrieking like a braking steam train. 'There's a pattern! Can't you hear it?' he shouted over the noise. 'One you can decode in three days? Before we and the evidence are annihilated?' He didn’t answer. I stared into Jupiter, trying to ignore him. I was glad Kingsley was able to occupy his time, but his fixation on proving that the remotest parts of the solar system could be a home for conscious beings was depressing — as if it all couldn't just Be, uncomprehending and unwitnessed. A few hours later, Lewandowski stumbled in to get some soup. 'What's the racket?' he mumbled. He had always been the last to let our situation bother him, but with three days to go he looked ruined. 'It's coming from the Kuiper belt,' said Kingsley. Lewandowski dried his eyes. 'That far out, really? Could be a refraction. You get all kinds of effects in a magnetic field like this. Weird the decoder in 3b couldn't untangle it, though.' Kingsley loosened his jaw. 'That thing works?' 'You haven't tried it? Yeah man, let me get it for you.' Lewandowski came back with the decoder and began hooking it up to Kingsley's radio. 'Are you sure you want to do this?' I asked Kingsley. I worried that a mundane solution to his mystery would leave him with nothing to live for, half suspecting he had forgotten about the decoder on purpose. Lewandowski flipped the switch. The static congealed into an oldies pop song. We live in a beautiful wo-or-orld. Yeah we do, yeah we do. 'Shut it off,' said Kingsley. 'Shut it off!' The storms raged on with indifference. That night we all slept on the rec room floor. Jupiter was now so close that we couldn’t see its edges. Sometime soon its pull would overpower the ship’s artificial gravity and make up become down. Lewandowski shifted next to me. 'I've been inside for too long, man,' he said. 'I miss the sun. I miss the breeze on my face.' I knew what he meant. The ship’s conditioned air was cloyingly still. On the last day of our lives, we returned to Airlock Bay 4. We had expected to fry while passing through the hot upper atmosphere, but the heat shields held — another perverse miracle. Now just a few kilometres above the clouds, the sky was a hazy yellow. On the horizon, distant plumes danced higher than our ship, writhing vortices in orange and white and red. Any of us might have proposed what we did next, though I was the one to say it. When we puncture the clouds, we will open the airlock and be swept into the hurricanes. We will live only for minutes, but for those minutes we will feel more alive than we ever have before. When we die it will be with the storm in our hair and in our lungs, and our bodies will be torn apart to scatter forever on its winds. On this we were all in agreement.
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Apr 11, 2022 01:35
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Week 505 crits Picked some stories that interested me to crit them, focussing primarily on style. Dead Man’s Jazz - man called m Honestly, the first paragraph here kinda slaps. Real sense of voice: I love the sort of tough guy affirmations your narrator is doing, stringing together cool sounding nonsense in a way that sounds tongue in cheek but without pushing it to the point of being totally ridiculous. I can just hear an old timey noir radio guy or an 80s Stallone impersonator saying this through gritted teeth. There are moments later on where the voice comes back, but in general you do lose it when you’re depicting action. It’s hard to get the balance between making action clear and giving it a voice, and erring on the side of clarity as you do here is definitely not a bad idea, but I do miss the personality that came through early on. There are also a few stylistic clangers, like when you start three sentences with ‘Sure,’ in very close succession. Do you ever read your writing back to yourself out loud? I find it can help with picking up stuff like that. Anyway if you want to write like this you should maybe try reading James Ellroy. Better This Way - hard counter The first thing that strikes me about this stylistically is that it is wordy. I don’t mean that it uses long sentences or complex language - there’s an old school literary quality here that works, so that’s fine. But there are a whole lot of words that could be removed without affecting the meaning. A sentence like ‘The only uncertain claim I felt compelled to make was that I was personally coping well with the situation’ is like 90% waffle. What is interesting here is that this does actually jive with the theme of the writer being unable to express himself without resorting to pleasantries, but I’m a bit unclear about how this is meant to function. Based on the ending, it seems like we’re meant to see this letter as a final success at telling his family how he feels - if this is the intent, the waffle seems at odds with that. Though it does point towards an interesting conflict: perhaps the writer is aware of his tendency to waffle and is trying, but struggling, to overcome it. However there is no real signpost to the reader that this is something you are consciously playing with and they should be paying attention to. It’s the same with the twist that the whole thing is a letter, presumably to his family, despite the fact he writes about them in third person. It does kind of make sense that this guy would use that as a strategy to say what he couldn’t say otherwise, but I’d have loved if that was drawn attention to so it could be explored and didn’t just seem like an oversight. Final note on style: if you’re gonna write sentences this long, more punctuation other than commas and full stops could really help the rhythm and clarity of your prose. the plane was on time - derp Yeah this is good. The lack of paragraph breaks here does a few things you wouldn’t be able to do if you’d used them, as does starting so many sentences with connectives. There’s a real plunging sense of inevitability here, of being caught up in a process - both a physical movement and a thought process - and being powerless or unwilling to divert it. There’s a sense that if there was ever a pause the spell would break, but there isn’t so it doesn’t. It also allows for this gradated movement from one topic or mood to another: if you broke it up it would feel like ‘this is the character’s love for Japan’, ‘this is (separately) the character walking through the airport’. This way the two blur together and can’t be disentangled. Reminds me a lot of Krasznahorkai - now I think about it isn’t there a bit of War and War in an airport? - but not in the sense that it’s derivative, just a similar feeling of a torrent of words rushing past you. The Dance - Tars Tarkas Doing this sort of subjective 3rd person perspective for a creature with - we presume - radically alien subjectivity is always going to be a question of compromise: the challenge is to get the right balance between something that sort of approximates how such a creature would ‘think’ and something that is both legible as a story and beautiful to human ears. You have clearly thought about how to achieve that, but as it is it never quite pops. You acknowledge that there are things about the world that a mayfly would not understand, but in describing them you rely on language that is so literal and matter of fact that it doesn’t create the impression of a non-human perspective. Look at this sentence: ‘There were multiple ledges at regular intervals, each packed with mysterious items the giant rummaged through’. You’re avoiding using certain concepts because the mayfly wouldn’t understand them, but almost every concept you invoke instead - giants, items, regularity - feel very human. Elsewhere, the perspective slips away altogether. A sentence like ‘The imago form burst through his subimago’s exoskeleton as the mayfly left his immature stages behind’ is entirely in a scientific register. This feels like the way an entomologist would describe a mayfly, not the way a mayfly would conceive of itself. I’m not saying you should avoid human concepts altogether - obviously that’s impossible, so it’s a question of compromise. But if you’re going to make the story harder to understand in order to represent a non-human consciousness, you have to do more than replace one set of human concepts with another, less obvious one. If anything I think a perspective that was more stylised, more clearly a poetic impression of the creature’s consciousness rather than an attempt to represent it directly, might work better.
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Apr 13, 2022 17:22
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Week 506 crits Stone Blow Heart Hammer — Thanks Emily Dickinson. I forgot your name, Mrs something - Mrenda This one didn’t grab me - it feels a bit too static, and not quite beautiful enough in language for how oblique it is. I respect how committed it is in going for whatever it’s going for, but I’m not confident I understand what that is, which makes it difficult to judge or critique. There are moments where the prose is enough to carry it, but overall for me this feels like a totally language-driven piece where the language just doesn’t quite click. Or maybe I’m missing something. Immersion Therapy - Nae This is nice. Strong conceit that manages to use the language of surrealism to tell a story that feels complete, has characters etc., and can approach its theme with an efficiency of emotion that a naturalistic approach would lack. My main complaint is that I wish it was a bit more daring with the main character and their problems - we’re literally rooting around in their viscera but all her trauma feels a bit too clean, I was disappointed not to find something thornier in there. Also a minor quibble is that the doctor ends by saying ‘this part is going to hurt’ referring to the reconstruction process, but since you’ve already set up that placing the objects on the table hurts, that line feels weak to me: it feels like the question posed by the doctor saying ‘the pain comes later’ has already been answered. One Walks the Anexium Pathway Again - JetSetGo Really have a hard time getting into this one. We’re not really given enough about who this guy was or what he’s going to become and the language isn’t poetic or nuanced enough for me to just be able to enjoy not knowing anything. It all just feels a bit too blunt and on the nose in terms of form while not resolving into much in terms of content. Like Yesterday - ChairChucker I really really really almost really like this one. It’s fun, it’s breezy, I love the conversational but unreliable voice and the way it veers between the mundane and the absurd in a way that nevertheless does imply some kind of internal logic. All the ideas here are good and funny, and the style is good on paper in that the main choices you have made feel correct, but it relies on a sentence-to-sentence ease of reading that just isn’t quite there yet. I just feel like it needed one or two more passes in editing to make it the breezy, witty read that it needs to be to work. Sentences like these: “I didn’t remember murdering anyone, but the memory’s not what it was, these days. I mean, it’s weird, it’s like, I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but I can remember my prom like it was yesterday. Like, a yesterday that I actually remembered.” The joke here is fine in concept, but the delivery is so awkward that when I read it I end up imagining how you could move the ideas around a bit so it would land, and this is distracting. Still, I found a lot to like here. The Hyena; or, the Bar Exam - Tyranosaurus I like this a lot. Law is a classic subject for this kind of thing - reminds me of some fragments of The Trial - and the image of all the law students munching through paper in lieu of an actual exam is great. If you were going for a specific satire here I’m not sure I understand it, though if anything I’m glad I didn’t. The image is evocative and presented with enough confidence to make me think that there could be a ‘deeper meaning’, but it doesn’t resolve itself into too neat an allegory or too obvious a joke. Strong. Your Body Changes in Strange Ways - Flerp Hmmm. Not sure what to make of this one. I’d be open to being convinced that it’s good, but there’s a couple of things I’m not sure about. I don’t really understand the ending - not getting a clearer sense of what he turned into didn’t work for me - and I feel like on a metaphorical level it’s advocating for a kind of arrested development in a way I’m not really sure what to do with (I imagine the connection between being queer and remaining in childhood is unintentional, but I find it hard to read any other way). I dunno man. It’s well written though. Caracole - derp Parts of this don’t read like a poem so much as a Thunderdome story with line breaks, but honestly that’s fine by me - poetry is much harder to critique. To put it less flippantly, while there are moments where I feel that this, as a poem, could be doing more with compression, metre, imagery, etc, the benefit of not doing that is that it is able to feel coherent as a story to a degree that most modern free verse poetry isn’t interested in being. So overall I do like it, and there are moments where the language does feel truly poetic - specifically this stanza: I know it’s her I open wide I take her whole she and I are of one soul my tongue slides on mucin slime I wait to drink her holy brine into me a probing thrust palate, throat campanilla The story here is pretty simple, but passages like this really elevate the surreal, gross, slimy texture of it all. A Poor Player - hard counter The start of this is competent, but as it goes on the annoying dialogue, nothing-y characters, and boring non-progression of it start to add up, until it culminates in a gotcha twist that doesn’t manage to make any of the rest more interesting or say anything about any of the themes that are raised. Also not to get into too much of a debate about what surrealism is, but I really think Bethany’s definition is just… wrong, and in an annoying way rather than an interesting one. Surrealism isn’t about the exaggeration of a medium, that’s pastiche. Bob the Bike builder’s Homosexual Bike - M If only the average Thunderdome story was actually this gay or British. Strange and New - ThranGuy This one is great other than the fact it kinda bungles either the ending or the setup for the ending, in that it comes out of nowhere and I don’t entirely get what it’s meant to mean. But yeah, other than that it’s sick. I love the idea of ‘post-consensus reality’ literally unravelling America into different psychic regions, and the idea of a road trip across that is really fun. Tough thing to pack into sub 1k words, but you give enough little details about the setting to make me wish we could spend more time there, and it’s a cute play on modern discourse without being too cute (it’s not a million miles from the too cute border, but that’s fine). But yeah, as it is the ending doesn’t work for me in relation to the rest of the story. If it’s just meant to show they’re androids, it’s a bit distractingly weird and I don’t think the idea of androids has been adequately set up - I took the guy’s paranoia as being specific to that region. If it’s something else then it’s maybe not weird enough, as it feels a bit too android-y to make you think ‘woah what’s this shocking new development’. If it’s meant to be that the paranoid guy has turned them into androids with his paranoia then that’s way too cool an idea for me to almost not notice that’s what it might be doing. But regardless, you manage to use the space to develop a compelling world, several fleshed out characters, and a complete-feeling story that still leaves me wanting more. It’s good. i am become something new - Muffin Hell yeah this one is good. There were a few more language-driven stories this week, but of them this is the only one where the language really sings for me. You do a really good job of knowing what elements of this story should be ambiguous and what should be clear. It’s absolutely clear that the character is describing a ‘biblically accurate angel’, which gave me a structure with which to start getting into the language, but you leave so much more of the context to be inferred. I love that I don’t know whether this person is having a psychotic break, having a religious vision, literally transforming into an angelic being, etc., but whatever they are doing their exegesis is ridden with so much anxiety and pathos and energy. I kind of love it. The Machine - Shark Waifu I like this a fair bit. I love the depiction of the writing process, of pouring your heart into something and being unable to make it into what you want it to be, then rediscovering it the next day and realising you succeeded more than you realised. I specifically love the way you use repetition in the prose to show the repeated efforts to write the same thing. I felt it was maybe a bit too clear in its allegory to be truly surreal, and maybe a bit more blunt than it needed to be over all, but this was still a strong piece to me. Skinny Dipping - Bad Seafood Lovely little moment, great sense of place and yearning for the fantastic within the mundane. Not quite as much going on as some of the other entries - not every story needs conflict but it could have benefitted from some texture or nuance - but I still very much enjoyed being in this strange little vignette. Blue, blue, blue - Sebmojo The interesting thing with this story is that there is a lot of texture here, but it revolves around two central ambiguities that it has no interest in answering - why are the characters floating and what is it that the narrator is agreeing to do. I like the idea of depicting this totally generic argument that suggests the whole shape of their relationship, as if we’re seeing only the commonalities of a thousand arguments that have taken place again and again over the years. Part of me wishes there was a little more in the way of specifics to latch onto, but the absence of that creates this at first eerie and then later strangely euphoric quality that is really compelling.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:11
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in with dragon attack
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Apr 19, 2022 12:26
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The Time of Monsters 1989 words You don't need a skald to tell you the story of these hours. You can hear it in the call of the two-headed raven perched on the rooftop, or read it in that which was ripped from the Jarl's horses and scattered about the stable by unknown hands. We have all seen the signs, and though I am as trained in augury as I am in the saga-trance, you do not need me to translate them. There is only one message and it is thus: Our World is Ending. What else can be said? The Earth-Father is dead, and I know who killed him. I was in this very seat when I saw her. Hardly over twenty, her eyes were like ice at the end of winter - refrozen so many times that they had turned into clear glass. She placed a coin by my tankard and asked me to tell her of Fenda's slaying. I obliged, and let the saga-trance take me. 'Just as the heavens are rich with pleasures no mortal will enjoy, so too were Earthly joys denied to the immortal Gods. Having set men and beasts to live and die, but unused to seeing delight in others that they could not have themselves, the Gods grew envious of their creations and started feasting on Earth in mortal forms. But for as long as they stayed in the mortal realm, the Gods could die.' 'Good,' she said once I was done describing how the Earth-Father, seeking to punish Fenda for insubordination, followed her to Earth in the shape of a stag and split open her stomach on his antlers. 'But you left out what Fenda did to outrage him.' I shrugged. 'It's not for every audience. She coupled with her brother and gave birth to monsters.' The woman let her ice-cold eyes bore into me. 'I want you to travel with me, skald.' I laughed. 'Another would-be saga-hero who wants to get me killed. What do you want to do, steal the Earth-Father's golden horn? I hear he feasts four days ride from here.' Her expression remained icy. 'I mean to kill him. And I don't care about a saga, I just want his death to be witnessed.' She placed a heavy pouch of coins on the table. 'This is for your word. You get another for following me to Flastag.' I weighed the pouch in my hand, staring back at her with a disbelieving grin. 'What's your name?' 'Aefre.' 'Aefre,' I repeated, testing its weight on my tongue. 'It'll do. Your death may make us famous yet.' Would I have gone with her if I'd thought her capable of doing what she planned? Would I have tried to stop her? I don't know. The dream of every skald is to attach himself, lamprey-like, to an agent of tremendous change: to tell their story and say 'I saw them do it'. No one can say I didn't succeed. In the morning we set off in lonely single file, along a narrow track sliced through the snow. Other than a low fog, the weather was typical of the bitter cold that has passed for Spring of late. My ostensible muse rode ahead of me, and with the surrounding landscape obscured by mists I had nothing much to look at but her back. More than once, her bag seemed to shift by itself. I wasn't surprised that Aefre was a good hunter, but I quickly realised 'good' was an understatement. At one point she took out her shortbow and shot a rabbit from horseback that couldn't have been more than a distant grey blur. Then she did it again, twice. 'My mother trained me,' she muttered when I asked her where she'd learned to hunt like that. Around midday we cracked the ice of a stream to refill our waterskins. 'The heavens must be bleak for the Gods to find this world preferable,' I said as I plunged my hand into the freezing current. 'They come to take pleasure at our expense. Besides, it wasn't always this bad. The Earth-Father is growing old, and the land freezes as he weakens. Some skald you are not to know this.' 'Of course I know it. But if it's this bad now, how do you think it'll get if you do manage to kill the old gently caress?' Aefre was already back on her horse. 'I don't think about it.' It was good that she wouldn't make it, I thought. The Earth-Father may have been growing old, but he was still the most powerful of the Gods. And while his divine children regularly left mile-wide paths of razed villages and shattered families in their wake, no one who had ever tried to collect their blood debt had come close to succeeding. When we cooked the rabbits that evening, I caught Aefre slipping loose bits of meat into her pack. 'You have an animal in there!' 'Don't be ridiculous.' 'Yes you do. It squirms on your back all day, and now you're feeding it rabbit. Either your bag itself is a living beast, or...' As if in response to our bickering, a head pushed its way out through the opening. It was the shape of a small dog's but with the glistening skin of a slow worm. As the creature shrugged off the rest of the fabric, I saw that its two small legs ended in clawed feet and it had bat-like wings on its back. Aefre studied my reaction closely. When I reached out to stroke the creature's nose, it pulled back its lips to reveal two rows of sharp, narrow teeth. 'I think he likes me,' I said. 'She. Well, I think, anyway. You're a strange one. Usually people find her disgusting.' 'What is she?' 'One of Fenda's children. I like to imagine we're sisters, of a sort. We share an enemy.' The creature jumped onto Aefre's shoulders and stared at me as if in agreement. That night, I drew Fenda's rune in the snow then pitched my tent over it. I dreamtI met a woman in the forest. Her white robes were stained with blood from the stomach down. 'You stand on the verge of great change,' she said when she saw me. 'Just remember - every king wears a crown.' When the Gods visit Earth, each of them indulges differently. Domentis builds great palaces on the steppes of Kalar, where beautiful women serve him rare meats. Pellea, the wild huntress, stalks man and beast through the forests of Ghaire and roasts them together on a roaring fire. Invariably, whether through sick perversion or a simple lack of care for our existence, there are human victims. We saw the site of the Earth-Father's feast from the top of a rise. Falstag, once a flourishing village of 300 souls, had been annihilated. The road that had led to it faded out into a mile-wide meadow of grass and bright flowers - a circle of colour in the dead, icy landscape, ringed with groups of people dancing in worship of a strange central structure, too distant to clearly make out. Aefre tossed me a coinpurse. 'As promised. Watch from here if you want, or you can follow me to the Earth-Father for the good of your story.' I nodded to the dancers. 'The moment we cross into his territory, that lot will do everything in their power to stop us. It'll be dangerous.' 'Stay close and I'll protect you.' 'And if we make it to the Earth-Father?' 'I'll kill him. But if he does kill me, he might let you go.' 'If you put up a good fight,' I said. The Gods could be no less vain than men when it came to having skalds turn their deeds into legend, but only when those deeds made a good story. If he squashed her like a bug, I would be next. 'Don’t worry about that.' When I first met Aefre, there was no way I would have followed her into such a maelstrom. But after seeing her skills with the bow, her kinship with Fenda's daughter, and the icy steel of her determination, she had started to convince me. The dream I’d had after carving Fenda's rune had only made concrete a feeling that was already there. I wasn't sure if her madness had infected me - skalds are almost as prone to delusions about the powers of their would-be heroes as the heroes themselves - but nevertheless, I went with her. Entering the meadow was like stepping into a summer like we haven't had since I was a child, all warm air and the smell of pollen. Whenever we were spotted by the Earth-Father’s worshippers, they ran at us wielding spears threaded with wildflowers. Fenda's daughter lept from Aefre's shoulders to circle overhead, swooping down on any of the dancers that came too close as we galloped past. Occasionally we had no choice but to fight, and in those moments Aefre was incredible. I had never seen someone shoot arrows so fast, or swing a sword with such deadly precision. 'You have a God's blood in your veins!' I called to her during a lull. 'Regrettably,' she said through gritted teeth. Finally I got a sense of the wrong that had been done to her and her mother, the transgression she had trained her whole life to set right. With every confrontation we got closer to the structure in the centre of the meadow. I realised with a sick sense of vertigo that what had looked from a distance like a huge organic sculpture had actually been shaped from the timber skeletons of the houses of Falstag, bent and rearranged by some unimaginable force. On the long grass under its twisted canopy, a table was laid out for a feast. In the middle of the long side, an old man in an intricate golden crown sat dining on a leg of turkey, surrounded by endless platters of exotic fruit, meats, and intricate, steaming pies. None of these sights gave Aefre a reason to slow down. Screaming like a banshee, she charged at the Earth-Father with her sword outstretched, making as if to lop his head off with a single stroke. She didn’t get that far. The man looked up at her and within barely a second he had transformed into the shape of a powerful stag, his golden crown warping to form antlers that were now firmly in the path of Aefre’s horse. Momentum carried the horse forward, and with a flick of his powerful neck the Earth-Father drove his antlers into its chest, sending Aefre past him. I saw her struggling to stand and called out to her: ‘It’s the antlers! The antlers are the source of his power!’ At the sound of my voice, the Earth-Father spun around to face me. ‘‘The skald intrudes on his own saga!’ an echoing voice boomed from the stag’s mouth. ‘How indecorous. I’ll make sure you suffer.’ The distraction was just what Aefre needed. Pulling herself to her feet, she leapt at the Earth-Father and tore at the root of his horns. Light tore through the muscles of her arms as she strained against the stag’s efforts to shake her off, but eventually, impossibly, she succeeded, and she ripped them from his head with the sound of cracking bones. The most powerful of the Gods fell to the ground defeated, and in Aefre’s hands was a crown. When the fight was over, I left her and rode North - to here. The signs of the Earth-Father's death were already creeping into the world around me. The sky was heavy with portents as if everything was coming undone. No skald could tell you what will follow from here. Just know that somewhere out there, the Earth-Father's daughter roams the dying world in her father's crown. And where her feet break the snow, pale green shoots push their heads through the soil.
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Apr 25, 2022 00:47
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in and yokai me
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Apr 26, 2022 10:23
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Yoruichi posted:Swamp youkai Carl and the Swamp Creature 1172 words We open to League of Legends gameplay footage projected over the interior of SWAMP CREATURE'S HOVEL, which is otherwise in darkness. Slowly, enough of the lights come up that we can make out our characters. The SWAMP CREATURE sits at a desktop PC while CARL is awkwardly using a laptop on a threadbare couch. They move their mice and press buttons. The projection makes everything look underwater. WOMAN'S VOICE (Offstage; tinny, as if a voicemail): Hey Carl. Look, I'm sorry, I'm at my mum's and I'm going to stay there for a while. It's not you. I mean it's, well, it's not anything you did. Don't be too hard on yourself, yeah, look, I'm sorry and I wish, I don't know, I'm just sorry. I didn't want to... Yeah. We can talk about this later, but not right now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. poo poo. SFX: Click, dial tone. Beat. CARL (voiceover): After Cassie left, I started hanging out with a swamp creature. Eventually, the projection resolves into a single word: DEFEAT. The lights come up to reveal the kitchen/living room of an old-fashioned cottage, except made out of mud and cluttered with nerd ephemera - Warhammer, anime statues, cheap ceramic dragons. CARL (gets up, stretches, then sits back down): Want to order pizza? SWAMP CREATURE: If you want. CARL: What do you usually get? SWAMP CREATURE: Usually I just open my mouth and see if a rat falls in. But you can order pizza. (It opens its mouth and looks at the ceiling. Nothing happens. Eventually it gives up.) There should be some menus on the table. Carl gets up and starts leafing through a pile of papers on the kitchen table, all soaked in dirty water. Eventually he manages to peel off a takeaway menu. The Swamp Creature has not looked away from its screen. CARL: They deliver out here? SWAMP CREATURE: Usually. There's a landline in the corner. Carl disappears to the back of the room and makes the phone call. When he comes back he is acting agitated. He paces around the room, looking at the Swamp Creature's anime figures. They seem to disgust him. He looks at the Swamp Creature, who is clicking around on a forum. CARL: Hey look man, I actually think I'm just gonna go. I should get out of your way. Thanks for having me and everything but yeah you know I've been going through a rough patch what with everything so this is really what I needed. But I'm gonna go. SWAMP CREATURE: I thought you ordered pizza. CARL: I did yeah I did order pizza but you can have it if you want. SWAMP CREATURE: Okay. CARL: When it arrives. Yeah. (Gestures at the front door:) So it's just this one? SWAMP CREATURE: Yeah. CARL: Okay. Okay. See you then. Thanks for everything man. See you. SWAMP CREATURE: Bye. Carl opens the front door. A horrendous torrent of brown water surges through the doorway. Carl stares at it for a second then forces the door shut with great effort. CARL (catching his breath): Sorry man I think I got swamp all over your floor and poo poo. SWAMP CREATURE: Yeah that happens sometimes. CARL: It's really gotten everywhere. Where it's drying I guess it doesn't look any different from how it did before though. So what should I just try again? SWAMP CREATURE: Just try and climb through it. Don't worry about the floor. Carl opens the door and pushes out into the deluge until he can no longer be seen. After several seconds he slides back in on his belly, covered in mud. CARL: Bro there's so much swamp sludge out there and it's so slippy and slidey that I can't get out. SWAMP CREATURE: Huh. I can usually climb out, but maybe I find it easier because I'm a manifestation of the swamp itself. CARL: I can't climb out I keep falling back down. When was the last time you even left this place? Now I'm covered in stinking swamp mud. I think your house is sinking into the swamp, dude. I bet in two weeks this whole place will be submerged in the swamp and there's no way anyone will find it and you'll still be here playing League of Legends at the bottom with the mudfish or whatever. God drat I need to get out of here. Sorry man you're a cool guy I mean a cool spirit and all but I just— SWAMP CREATURE: That's okay. Even when I do leave the house I'm forever tied to this swamp so I know how it is to be trapped somewhere. CARL: poo poo man I'm sorry I didn't mean it like that. SWAMP CREATURE: Like what? A knock at the door. Carl opens it - no water this time - and in steps a PIZZA DELIVERY GUY, clean and handsome. PIZZA GUY (placing a pizza box on the table): We didn't have spicy vegetable so we made you a regular spicy instead. The pizza guy exits, effortlessly striding up the slope Carl had so much trouble with. Carl stares after him and closes the door. Then he opens the pizza box and picks off a piece of pepperoni, staring at it with a forlorn expression. CARL: I thought I was vegetarian. SWAMP CREATURE: What? (Hearing something skittering:) Aha! The Swamp Creature looks up, mouth open wide. This time a rat falls in, which it swallows whole. SWAMP CREATURE: Sorry. What were you saying? CARL: I thought I was a vegetarian, but maybe I’m not. (To the audience:) Without noticing it I’ve become something else entirely. I’m no longer who I was, perhaps not even human. Receiving this pizza is just another decision that has been made for me, though you could say that letting such things take their course is a decision in itself. (To the Swamp Creature:) Do you want any? SWAMP CREATURE: Yeah sure. (Going to sit on the couch:) Want to watch some anime? CARL: Okay, while we’re eating I guess. That makes sense. I’ll stay until we’ve finished one episode, then I’ll go. I have to go. But I’ll watch this episode now, just this one, as long as it’s not too intense. The Swamp Creature takes Carl's laptop. The lights dim and the projection starts again, this time playing slightly sped up footage of a colourful magical girl show for young children. The sound is faintly audible. They watch it in silence for two full minutes. Carl eats the pizza, intermittently looking at the Swamp Creature as if he's about to say something but each time deciding against it. Finally: CARL: Do you…? Carl doesn’t finish his sentence, and the Swamp Creature doesn’t answer. It has fallen asleep. The anime continues. After a while the Swamp Creature slumps down onto Carl's shoulder. Carl is wary at first but then relaxes, shifting to get more comfortable. The remaining lights fade. Then the projection does too, leaving only the audio in total darkness. Finally that too cuts out. End.
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May 2, 2022 02:26
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In & card me
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May 25, 2022 14:24
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chariot Our Lady of Truth 999 words At the heart of the city, three buildings honour the city’s three Gods. To the East stands the Edifice of Granain, Lord of the Forest, patron of farmers, fishermen, and hunters. A flash of green among the stone, it is home to a thousand arboreal bowers where Granain’s followers give thanks for his bounties. To the West, the Temple of Alleian, Lord of Light. A place of learning, its glass halls throng with scholars looking to illuminate the dark places of the world. Between them is the Monastery of Brannia, Our Lady of Truth. From its sandstone towers, the Brothers of Brannia’s Order disperse to bring righteous Truth to the city. They right wrongs, punish liars, and always intercede on the side of the honest. Or so the story goes. *** ‘I guess it’s true,’ said Brother Kreutz with a levity that I couldn’t understand. ‘Some novices really do get lucky!’ We sat on the garden wall of a house that couldn’t have looked more normal for this destitute part of town. Its brickwork bulged like the fermenting gut of a corpse. Behind us, barefoot children raced on the cracked tarmac as if nothing was amiss. I fingered the copper pendant that marked me as a novice of Brannia - a book and a sword, representing the enforcement of Truth. ‘You’ve been with the Order for what, three weeks?’ ‘Two.’ Kreutz gave out a low whistle. ‘Two weeks! And already with a chance for initiation - if you play your cards right. Some novices never get a chance like this. At least you won’t spend your whole life mopping up blood.’ The inside of the house came back to me uninvited. My breakfast came with it. A woman, dead, eyes removed, body folded like a doll thrown from a pram. Upstairs, a teenage boy, alive but unresponsive. From the photos on the mantelpiece we assumed he was her son, mentally disabled and now borderline catatonic from the trauma. We had let him be. I swallowed my vomit. ‘There were no clues. You said it yourself.’ Kreutz wasn’t listening. ‘Sixth murder this month. And always with the eyes. Father Centus is going to beam. You ever seen him smile?’ ‘No.’ I had met Father Centus on my first day at the Monastery. Old men wearing novice robes had led the new intake into a foyer, where Centus explained that we would assist our Brothers until the day our deeds marked us as worthy to become full members. He had the air of a stern teacher, but with a kindness to his eyes that hadn’t reached his lips. ‘He has a lovely smile. You’ll see it when we bring him his killer.’ Kreutz was getting on my nerves. ‘What do you mean? It wasn’t the boy, if that’s what you mean. A reputable Alleianic Sister saw a tattoo of an owl on the killer’s forearm. He didn’t have one.’ Kreutz held up a finger. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a tattoo needle. I felt the world lurch. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘You’re going to frame him?’ ‘Not quite. You’re going to frame him. You’ll be the one to benefit, so naturally it falls on you.’’ I stood up shakily. After the horror of the morning this was too much. ‘This is a test. It has to be.’ I thought of the austere but gentle look on Father Centus’s face as he’d introduced Kreutz as my partner. For such corruption to fester so close to the heart of the Brotherhood of Truth… Kreutz was smiling. ‘Initiation is always a test. Not every novice has what it takes. This is your chance to distinguish yourself. You might not get another.’ ‘I’m not doing it.’ His grin didn’t falter. ‘You’re sure?’ ‘I’m sure.’ The club came so fast that I was unconscious before I thought it might hit me. I woke to the stone ceiling of my cell at the Monastery. Kreutz sat on a chair at the end of the bed, staring at me with an unsettling grin. ‘Where’s Father Centus?’ The effort of speaking sent shockwaves through my skull. The door opened and Centus walked in, flanked by two of the withered old novices. ‘Ah, you’re awake,’ he said. He looked me up and down as if getting a gauge of my character. ‘Perhaps it’s wrong that I had expected more of you.’ ‘What’s going on?’ I managed. I had to know what Kreutz had said to him, the lies he had told. ‘Let me answer that with a theological question,’ Father Centus said. ‘I apologise if it seems simplistic, but you appear to be operating under a misapprehension. When the Gods were creating the Earth, what did Granain do to commence the Third Separation?’ Why was he asking this? ‘He created the forests.’ ‘Very good. And Alleian, at the end of the First?’ ‘Created light.’ Every child knew the answer. ‘Indeed. So, the God of Light created light and the God of Forests created the forests. And yet you appear to think that the God of Truth should serve the truth. Do you see where you’ve gone wrong?’ The room started spinning. ‘Of course, you aren’t alone in your misunderstanding,’ Centus continued. ‘In fact, it’s a very useful one. So we’d prefer it if you didn’t tell anyone what you’ve seen. It is unfortunate that so few Novices are able to glimpse past the facade.’ The two old men, now flanking the bed, grabbed my hands and shoulders to pin me down. Kreutz stood up, holding the needle from before. It sank into flesh just below my elbow. Round drops of blood followed where it touched. As I watched in horror, my gaze drifted to the arms of the men holding me. Each of their left forearms was marked with the image of an owl. Centus’s face split into a wicked, mesmerising grin. ‘Welcome to the Order,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it’s not the role you imagined.’
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May 29, 2022 23:19
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hell yeah, in and flash me
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Jun 22, 2022 11:47
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Ceighk fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jun 29, 2022 |
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Jun 27, 2022 01:40
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Thunderdome Week 517: Working hard or hardly working? Look, I didn’t want to have to call you into my office like this, but this is getting serious. Thunderdome is a business, not an adult daycare. For every minute of your contracted hours plus any scheduled overtime, I’m going to need you at your desk, writing flash fiction. No more tabbing over to those weird webcomics everyone sees you reading when you think no one is looking. No more coffee breaks where you stand about in the rec room for twenty minutes, staring at the potted plants and wondering where it all went wrong. The coffee here is instant. The clue is in the name. It’s a simple ask. When I open my laptop at 9AM on Monday morning, there better be a story of up to 1500 words on the subject of ‘work’ waiting for me in my inbox. If you can’t do that, we’re going to have to consider your position. I don’t care what sort of job your main character has, or even if they have one. They could be an optometrist, a hitman, or a contracted dragon slayer. They could be stable in their position, seeking employment, or trying to sort their life out after getting fired. Just make the story relate to the idea of work in some significant way. You can do that… right? Good. I’m glad we had this chat. I think it has been most productive. Remember, we’re a family here. You can ask me for anything. Now get back to your desk. Signup deadline: 9AM GMT +1, Saturday the 2nd Submission deadline: 9AM GMT +1, Monday the 4th (Head office is located in the UK but these should be roughly the usual times) Review Panel: Me Nae ??? Employees: Mocking Quantum Chernobyl Princess Thranguy sebmojo something else Copernic PhantomMuzzles Albatrossy_Rodent Chilli The man called M Data Graham flerp Tars Tarkas Bad Seafood Hard Counter The Cut of your Jib Yoruichi Ceighk fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 19:03
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Application window closed However we still have a vacancy on the review panel if anyone is interested
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Jul 2, 2022 09:55
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Jul 4, 2022 09:27
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Week 517 Results Something something company meeting kayfabe something This week was characterised by a mushy middle with a couple of standouts on either side. This made judging extremely painless as we more or less agreed on everything from the start. Two entries stood out as our bottom choices. First, The Man Called M's Send in Bob From Accounting. M, I've not read all of your stories, but out of the ones I have this is one of the better ones. Keep up the improvement. DM. Confusing us both with... well, everything, we struggled to make much sense out of The Cut of Your Jib's Riley's Last Rind. Maybe there is something going on here, but if so neither of us could figure out what it was. Loser. At the top end, we started off strong with Copernic's Bronze Fade, an eerie, conceptual piece that wonderfully intimates deeper significances by focussing on the minutiea of a very strange job. HM. Using a similar technique but to all-too-mundane ends, Yoruichi's micro-flash tryptich Friday Night thrums with the indignities of daily life under capitalism and the yearnings its characters can barely express. HM. Finally, Data Graham's Barista thoroughly impressed us with the way it captures the repetitive physical processes of working in a fast-paced cafe, with a masterful ending that subtly recontexutalises everything despite nothing much happening at all. First time entering, first time WINNER. Data Graham, ascend to the blood throne. The newest intern is now the CEO.
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WEEK 517 CRITS Bronze Fade by Copernic I like this. I like the focus on the minutiae of the job and company policy with intimations of a greater story happening beneath the surface. The idea of a company that you can pay to cease existing in a social sense is slightly absurd while still feeling real enough at its core, a sort of assisted suicide without the dying, with a 21st century twist. The conflict between our lives being increasingly logged and networked yet increasingly alienated could have been pat if you had oversold it, but you don’t, and the world implied here is far enough from our own to be interesting while remaining totally believable. You don’t give too much to grab hold of with regards to why the current client has chosen to do this and how they feel about it after. This is part of what makes it work but I can’t help wanting something slightly more. The ambiguity gives it this great sense of eeriness, and I wouldn’t want to ruin that, but at the same time I wish there was a moment that pushed it slightly further into territory I could get my teeth into, in one direction or another. Not much more, not so much that it would spoil the side of that that works, but something. Friday Night by Yoruichi I like this a lot. Feels like a quiet piece, despite touching on very serious subject matter, but not in a bad way. I love that we get a sense of three moments in time, mirrored tensions coming to a head only to suggest others that remain unresolved. A lot of the better stories this week depict the prosaic in order to suggest some absence beneath the surface, and this does that very well. It’s a hard one to crit without doing a line by line, as this sort of subtle, suggestive work really lives or dies on the strength of its prose and details, but a couple of notes nonetheless. First, I had to Google four terms used here to know what they were (louvres, credenza, Waka Ama, bokeh). I’m not saying don’t do that, but thought it was worth noting. Second, I’m not sure about the very ending. Having that story last almost positions Olivia’s revelation as a turning point for the whole triptych, something that relates to the lives of the other two characters in some way, but I’m not sure it does. Even as the capstone of Olivia’s story, though, I feel like the last line is just slightly too much — too extreme a 180 in her mood, and too blunt in the message we’re supposed to take from it. I’d be interested in reading a version of this story that makes the same turn at the end but is slightly more restrained in the execution of it, leaving more room for ambiguity. Others may disagree. Machinations by Chernobyl Princess So this story has a couple of things going on. It is about a complex network of factions squabbling over real estate. It is about a vampire and a fae flirting over a confrontational business meeting. Of these, I find myself caring about the latter a lot more than the former, but the former is so complicated that the romance doesn’t have much space to breathe. Neither do the characters, which is important because this is, at the heart, a character driven piece: enemies to lovers, two relative underlings (though still powerful in their own right) hooking up and turning on their masters. But I don’t know much about Sebastian other than that he hates his boss and finds Ellis hot, and I have even less of a sense of what motivates Ellis — particularly when it comes to wanting to save his rival who has handed him his own head on a platter. And while the supernatural real estate idea is conceptually cool, there is very little sense of what makes these creatures unique — the story wouldn’t change much if these guys were just from two different mafia families. With less time spent on exposition that doesn’t add up to much and more on how their relationship evolves over the course of the meeting, you’d have the space to make what works here shine. Was it a hat I saw by Phantom Muzzles This is alright! You do a good job of sketching out these characters who are trapped in a confined space with each other, each coping in their own way. I like the sense of a shared history you get from the rules they have created to avoid annoying each other, and the way Hannah tiptoes around subjects she knows will set Bob off while making concessions to his way of thinking in other areas. She seems resigned to Bob being incapable of returning the favour without constant prodding, but understands that his insane positivity is the only thing holding him together and she just has to deal with it. The ending is sort of interesting in that it both comes across as a joke and is actually sort of creepy. They have reached the centre of the earth and been granted their hearts’ desires, except it only gives them mundane, useless things. The fact it’s different for each of them suggests that whatever they are seeing isn’t actually either of those things, and they are trapped with it at the centre of the earth, likely forever. I definitely think this could be doing something more substantive, but I found it a fairly breezy read. Night Shift by MockingQuantum This is a lot of well constructed set-up for a fairly predictable twist. The characters are detailed and interesting, the prose is easy to read, the protagonist’s deliberation is totally believable and well rendered. The ending just needs one extra layer to it that I didn’t expect, something a little bit out of left field to catch the reader off guard. The animated darkness just feels like something I’ve seen a hundred times before, same with the twist of the scientist wanting to trap the security guy in with it. Being predictable is better than being so unpredictable no one understands what is happening, but at least one of those elements should have been something stranger. I read your messages in the Discord about wanting to write clunkier stories but with more flair, but for something like this I don’t think it’s an either or. I struggled for a long time from the opposite direction (dumb big ideas that I was in love with but couldn’t express due to poor fundamentals) so I don’t know if I’m the best person to advise on this, but I kinda feel like this needed to take the risk of being dumber. I kinda feel like a problem with the Thunderdome format is that if you’re DMing or losing, a lot of the time people will tell you ‘yeah that weird thing you did? it sucks, don’t do it.’ And in that specific case, they’ll often be right. But then you’re like ‘okay fine, I’ll stop doing weird poo poo’, except the right kind of weird poo poo is often what makes a story great, and the only way to figure out what works is to write the bad kind. Anyway I’m not really sure what I’m saying here except that maybe you should try and write more stories that you think people will hate just to see what happens. Barista by DataGraham Yo this is good. As someone who spent a significant amount of time working in this kind of job (sandwich artist not barista, but still), I love how you capture the mechanical, almost ritualistic rhythm of it, the steady sense of improvement over time as every step of the process gets ingrained in your muscle memory. I also love the shift at the end from seeing Shirley as an enemy to a comrade against the customers, while keeping her aloof. In some sense, very little happens in this story, but the last few lines do a whole lot to recontextualise a lot of what we’ve already seen — particularly the realisation that while the problems that seemed to be the biggest at first are actually just part of the learning process, there are other problems which will not fade away however skilled you are. Really strong, especially for a first entry. technology isn’t magic (but it can feel like it sometimes) by flerp Cute little story. The fact the main character went through his whole life without realising that his magic works by making things happen if he really wants it is set up well enough that you can figure it out before the character does, but that does raise the question of how he got to that point in his life without figuring it out sooner. I like the interactions between the kind of neurotic Damien and the more laid back Joey, but I feel like I don’t know quite enough about them to really root for them as a pairing. The magic seems implicitly tied to Damien’s negative thinking and Joey’s chill vibes solve that problem by making him relax, but that isn’t really brought to the surface to the extent it could be. The Sewer-Beast by Something Else This sure is a story about a sewer beast. This is a solid concept but there’s not much here to make me care specifically, except for feeling bad that child labourers are getting eaten by a sewer beast (a bad situation all round). I don’t really understand the plan at the end or where the sewer beast came from - it seems to be connected to the industrial plants in some way, but the significance of that isn’t really explored. I think part of the problem here is that there are a LOT of characters — not the only story this week with that problem. Flatback is heavily set up at the start but disappears halfway through, then we’re introduced to a bunch more kids without much established personality, who win the day by unclear means. Flatback’s setup isn’t really used for pathos either, which kind of just makes it feel like a waste of time. Could have done with either a more engaging mystery around the monster or the monster being an externality imposed on a more engaging cast, this doesn’t really do either. A Very Canadian Mystery by Hard Counter The problem with this story is that a lot of crazy stuff happens around the characters while they just sort of sit there. Two guys are looking for a lake but it’s not there. Good problem to solve, though I think you could have done more to highlight the absurdity that these geographers are being hired to sample lakes by someone who is apparently not at all interested in the phenomena of a lake totally disappearing. Then some stuff happens. Then the lake comes back. Establishing a load of peril and then resolving it with the ‘the peril turned out to be imaginary’ feels like a bit of a let down, and the interesting question all this raises — will Gus and Jerry risk ruining sasquatch society for their own gain by publicising it — is not really explored. The language also seems weirdly formal to me (‘afore’, ‘chary’, ‘holophrase’) but inconsistently so. Is this a Canadian thing? One-Stop Shop by Bad Seafood I was really into this until I realised it wasn’t really going to go anywhere. Great sense of place, nicely detailed characters, but it just seems to hit an equilibrium and then remain there. There’s some understated tension with the various customers, but it feels unfocussed. Then at the end it seems as if there’s some symbolic shift in Amelia/Coyote dropping her nickname but I don’t really understand what it signifies. Is she disconnecting from the town? Growing up? Feeling the need to fit in among strangers? I’m not sure. There’s a lot of focus on the different customers and what they are wearing, which seems to be given some kind of symbolic weight, but I don’t get what the distinction is. I love the vibe and texture of this piece, but I want something out of it that I can’t quite reach. Staff Support by Chilli This starts strong and resolves in a somewhat confusing manner. The dialogue between the therapist and the patient is good — I like the game of the therapist trying to prove that he’s not like other therapists to a patient he wants to make believe isn’t like other patients. You never quite know what he’s just saying to trick her into responding a certain way, how many levels of double bluffing they’re each on. This makes the transition into the characters acting rather than talking somewhat confusing, as we don’t know how much of what the therapist has suggested about himself is even true. The second half of the story - the confrontation with Carisa - then brings up a lot of character history that doesn’t feel entirely set up or earned. Carisa accuses Ross of always walking away, but we haven’t been shown that. The ending makes a few turns that are interesting on paper too, but haven’t been adequately set up: Janelle doing therapy for Ross, then the two of them agreeing that the intake process is messed up, then the lines about Janelle not being too smart for therapy. All of these are interesting moves for this story to make, but they don’t feel adequately supported by what we’ve seen so far. Send in Bob from Accounting by the Man Called M So I said in the judge notes that this was one of the better stories of yours I’ve read, and I stand by that. It’s clear what’s happening, you’ve dramatised scenes that progress in a logical manner without being bogged down by unnecessary flashbacks or infodumps, and you have character development of a sort. Some of it is also funny: the opening paragraph confidently declaring that the average accountant is “extremely suicidal” is very dark but it made me laugh. You still have a lot to work on, though. I think Nae is going to go more into what you get wrong about the accountant life, but as I see it the problem is just that by relying so heavily on a simple stereotype without thinking about the world as it actually exists makes the story feel hollow. I imagine that you don’t actually believe that literally all accountants are pathetically weak, so why should this be the case in your story? It can be alright to play on stereotypes in comedy, but it works so much better if you complicate them to mess with the reader’s expectations. Like what if your main character is an accountant and he sees that all the accountants at his office are physically weak, but he is moderately fit due to being kinda sporty at school. Or he was like a punk delinquent who showed incredible aptitude for accounting, but he doesn’t respect his co-workers who had it easy. So then when he sees the fight club advert he is like ‘well, I could beat up my boss, so I bet I could beat up every other accountant in the world’. He goes to the fight club and the most stereotypical, pencil-neck dweeb accountant comes in to fight him. Bob is confident — his stereotyping has been proved right, he can definitely win. But this guy jumps in the ring and proves that he’s highly trained in some obscure martial art. Bob takes a few punches and realises the battle is actually going to be much tougher than he thought, but due to his smarts and maybe something about him that has been set up previously, he gains the advantage. He manages to win, but only barely, and in the process he learns that accountants aren’t always the pushovers he thinks they are. The difference between this story and the one you wrote is that this story is set in a world where stereotypes exist in the sense that people believe in them, but they can then be proved right or wrong. Your story is set in a world where stereotypes are objectively real and can only ever be proved right. While I’m not offended on behalf of accountants, this is just inherently less interesting and less funny than it could be. Worse than that, it just doesn’t seem real, which is important even when your premise is this absurd. Life just isn’t that simple. Riley’s Last Rind by the Cut of Your Jib Reading back through this now, there is stuff I like here, but especially on the first run through this felt like a real muddle. There are some great details and great turns of phrase, but there’s so much of both that the important stuff gets lost in the soup. Like, objectively speaking, I can’t argue that you didn’t set up that the main character is a journalist — it’s right there in the third paragraph. But with all the pigs pretending to be other pigs pretending to be other pigs and everything else going on I totally forgot why your main character was doing any of this until him being a journalist is mentioned again at the end (and even then it’s not totally clear why he does some of the things he does in pursuit of his story, or why we should care). So as much as I want to like a story that ends on the line ‘Cannibal pig stalks Hollywood Hills’, this is just so stuffed with details and so always up to eleven in the prose that it drowns out the fundamentals. Still, I didn’t hate any of the stories this week, this is just the one that found itself at the soggy end of the muddy middle. Sleep All Night and Work All Day by Tars Tarkas I like this, but there are too many characters! By my count you have 10 named characters, plus the unnamed lumberjack who accosts him, plus the lumberjacks’ chief operators, plus the lumberjacks at the end. This is too many! For most of these, the name and their vague role in his life is all we are told about them, and even that is more than is relevant to the fun ideas here (lumberjack cult that you can never leave, flannel that gives you magical strength). Once it gets going, for the most part this succeeds as a light, breezy, fun read with a fun twist at the end, but the start in particular is bogged down in a whole load of unnecessary details that can be edited out. Shoot by Thranguy Cool, simple story in a high concept setting. Criminal for hire in a world without crime goes straight by becoming a real criminal instead. The prose is efficient, the setting well established without being info dump-y, and the move at the end is well set up and executed. The characterization is there, but it’s sparse — I wouldn’t have minded a bit more to either humanise the characters or make them more eccentric. The move of her knowing the truth about the death of his parents is efficient, but it feels almost like a placeholder, and while I do like that there doesn’t need to be this drawn out period of inner conflict where he’s deciding whether or not to throw his lot in with the radicals, the final paragraph feels like it either gives too much internality to the narrator or not enough: there’s enough there to stop the ending from being ambiguous, but not enough sell how the decision has affected him. But still, this is strong, and could have HMed if we hadn’t vibed with other stories more. You Don’t Have To Be Crazy by Sebmojo As with Thranguy’s entry, this is another well executed high concept that does what it’s setting out to do without quite doing enough to bowl me over. I love the kind of cargo cult office culture where only the rituals of work remain, without any of the purpose of it, and the characters repeating tired office cliches without understanding what they mean is nicely eerie. I think this concept could be used to do something slightly more, though. The visual is great, but I’m not sure what it’s saying other than that pointless office jobs are pointless, which is often true but not all that interesting an observation. It could be interesting to put this fact of reality in conflict with some externality — a character who really doesn’t give a poo poo in a meaningful way, or some circumstance in the wider world that is making it more impractical to keep doing this. There is a bit of that here with Yazmi, but possibly not enough. Alternatively, the hollow eerieness of it could be pushed further — again, it’s not that this isn’t present, but more of it could push this from being a story that I quite like to one that I loved. Ceighk fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 18:09
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Ceighk fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Dec 21, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 22:19
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fuckit, in and flash
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Aug 31, 2022 18:42
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Delivery 1495 words We had just made it past Birmingham when the thing in the boot started whispering to me. At first I thought it was a hallucination caused by four hours hearing the bolts of dad’s crappy red Citroen loosen as it rattled down the motorway, like when you stare at a broken TV for so long that you see faces in it. Then it kept speaking. ‘I know you can hear me. Come back here. Let me out.’ I tried to ignore it. That thing was the reason we’d spent all day hurtling down through England in the latest of dad’s increasingly desperate attempts to sort out his finances. He wouldn’t have brought me along, except mum had dropped me at his house at 9AM while he and Raven were getting ready to leave. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted past me as I stepped onto his driveway, in the direction of my mum’s rapidly closing car window. ‘Hey! What’s he doing here? It’s a school day, isn’t it?’ ‘For God’s sake, Andrew, it’s half term,’ was my mum’s reply. Half term meant three nights of my father’s custody. The prospect might have worried me if I ever felt much at all. He turned to me. ‘Alright, lad. Dump your poo poo inside.’ As I headed upstairs, I heard his girlfriend speak from outside. ‘You aren’t thinking of leaving him here, are you?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, he’s thirteen and he looks like he’s about to jump—’ ‘Christ alive, Raven!’ dad hissed. ‘Voice down. He didn’t take the divorce well…’ I didn’t hear the rest, but the matter had been settled by the time I got back to the driveway. ‘Okay, mate. I thought you’d be old enough to look after yourself, but Raven here thinks you’re not there yet. So you’re coming with us on a trip. See the country and stuff. It’s good for the mind, so I hear.’ My gaze drifted from his face to the crate in the back of his car: shoebox shaped, but old and wooden, carved with twisting, plaited vines. He caught me looking and shut the door. ‘You bring those superhero comics of yours?’ asked Raven. ‘Might be a long one.’ I shrugged. ‘Not feeling chatty today, huh? You okay?’ Dad was already in the driver’s seat, the door still open. ‘I told you, it’s too much grunge music, not enough sleep. All the lads are like that now. Isn’t that right, boy?’ I got in the car. The Scottish border to the south coast was already a long enough journey, but this was the first Monday of the school holidays in a car that wasn’t up to the task. Every time dad pushed above sixty, something banged in the bonnet like it was trying to get free. It only stopped being a problem when the traffic became so clogged that we never reached that speed. As we crawled into the Birmingham bypass, the frustration got too much for my father to bear. ‘Why is everyone out on these loving roads!?’ ‘Love, please,’ said Raven. ‘Calm.’ ‘Am I not allowed to be stressed? The fella I met was very loving specific that we had to get this to the docks before dark. Any later and the deal’s off.’ Raven laughed. ‘You think they’re scared to go out at night?’ Dad shot her a stare. ‘No, I’d reckon they’re not. You, though, if you piss them off, might well be. I didn’t get the sense they were patient folk.’ By the time the box started talking to me, we had managed to pick up some speed, but we were already far behind schedule. The sun had spread into an orange smear that flickered as the trees rushed past it. I gazed at the pulsing light, mind almost blank. ‘I don’t know why you’re not answering,’ the thing in the box said. ‘We’re in a very similar position. Neither of us wants to be here. We should work together.’ ‘Why?’ I murmured, so quiet even I could hardly hear it. ‘Because I can give you great power.’ ‘To do what?’ ‘I can transform you. Give you the wings of a bat, the muscles of an ox. Six more arms with a blade on each one. Kill your enemies and make cowards run in fear. You will ascend to the highest throne on Earth and claim it as your own. ’ I thought about it. It wasn’t something I had ever considered. ‘I don’t have any enemies.’ The box was quiet for a second. ‘Are you sure?’ The shrill chirping of dad’s ringtone cut through the car. He jammed it between his jaw and his collarbone as he drove. ‘No. Just passing Leamington. I’ll do what I can. Yeah, right, I understand, it’s very important. No, I’ll do it. Don’t worry. 90 minutes is fine.’ He snapped his phone shut. ‘gently caress.’ The car lurched forward as he stepped on the accelerator, hands white on the wheel. ‘Woah, woah,’ said Raven. ‘Andrew, slow down. This is too fast.’ He ignored her. The speedometer crept up further. The banging from before returned with a vengeance, accompanied by a shriek like metal being ripped apart. ‘Andrew, please love, be sensible.’ ‘Raven, be quiet and read the goddamn map. We can’t be getting lost.’ Even as he was talking, the car continued to accelerate. The noises from the bonnet came faster and faster. Eventually, with a crack and a stink of burning, whatever it was gave out. The engine stopped. Dad guided the car onto the hard shoulder, swearing under his breath. ‘Well that’s it,’ he said finally. The cars rushing past the window seemed impossibly fast. ‘I hope you’re happy, Raven.’ ‘Me?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re the one that got us into this mess. Maybe if you hadn’t — ow!’ He had slapped her, hard. She touched her face in disbelief, then unbuckled her seat belt. ‘Right, that’s enough. gently caress you, Andrew.’ She got out of the car, then leant back in to look at me. ‘Michael, come with me if you want. You don’t need this cretin any more than I do.’ ‘Bit young for you, isn’t he?’ my dad muttered from the driver’s seat. She ignored him. ‘Come on, Michael, get out the car. I’ll take you to your mum.’ Her face was hard to look at. I stared at my hands. ‘He doesn’t want you, Raven,’ my dad sneered. ‘You can’t trick him like you tricked me. Get gone if you’re going, and leave my son alone.’ She gave it one last try. I turned away. She left. Dad took a shoulder of vodka from the glove compartment. ‘They all leave, son. Better you learn that now.’ He offered me the bottle, close enough that its fumes seemed to burn my nose. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said when I turned it down. ‘Don’t want to end up like your dad.’ ‘What’s in the box?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that. Guy said something about an archaeology dig. Scary man. Wore a suit to the pub, black glasses and all. He’s killed, though, mark my words. I guess someone wants it out the country. I shouldn’t have got you mixed up in it, but I needed the money.’ ‘How much did they offer?’ ‘10 grand.’ I whistled. My dad laughed. Even after everything, the sound felt good to hear. When the AA towed the car, they dropped us at a cheap hotel. We got a twin room. Dad stashed the box under his bed, finished his vodka, and passed out. ‘Now’s your chance,’ whispered the box thing once he was asleep. I knelt on the floor and slipped it out from under his bed. When I hinged open the top, a creature about the size of a newborn baby sat up and put two hands on the rim. Wet, irregularly-shaped eyes glinted in the light of the window. ‘Well?’ it asked. I explained my ideas, using pages from X-Men for reference. I wanted to change my body but only in ways that wouldn’t get noticed. Invisibility. Teleportation. Maybe shapeshifting, but only if I could change back. ‘Should be doable,’ said the foetus creature. Then it scampered out into the night. When dad woke up the next morning, the box was gone, replaced by a backpack full of banknotes. ‘What the gently caress is this, Michael?’ he asked. ‘What did you do?’ It turns out lying is easier than you think. ‘Those guys rang after you fell asleep. I picked up. They said we could meet near here. You wouldn’t wake up, so I went and made the swap. It was easy.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Really,’ I said. Dad reached out and pulled me in for a hug. ‘Jesus Christ, son. You did good. You did so good.’ Later I would regret that I ever wanted to earn the respect of that man, who had done so little to deserve it himself. But in that moment, finally, I felt like I could breathe.
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Sep 5, 2022 00:35
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in with 2k, dealer's choice, plus a fact please
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Sep 20, 2022 18:52
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in with a
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Idle Amalgam posted:More gifts. Songs that remind me of winter(or at least the winter of my youth): Chasing Cars less than 1500 words “Yo, Bart, see that to the left — they’re the Northern Lights, yeah?” His cousin’s voice crackled into JP’s cab from the radio. “That’s West, idiot.” Bart’s own, newer pickup was further ahead, little more than a smudge of tail lights in the darkness. JP pulled down his mic from its spot above the windscreen. “Sure, right, but think for a second. We’re in the North already. So they can still be the Northern Lights. They’re just to the West from us.” Bart was silent for a while. JP knew that he ought to be keeping all of his attention on the ice-slicked ribbon of the road as it wound through the darkly lit pines, but he couldn’t help glancing out his driver’s side window at the pulsating blue light above the treeline. When Bart spoke again, he had clearly been laughing. “Oh man. Kid, you crack me up. Northern Lights to the West. Yeah, sure.” JP couldn’t understand why Bart found it so funny. But then, that was true for a lot of things his cousin said. It wasn’t just that even after a full year in the rural North he was still adjusting to a new way of life. That was part of it, but there was something else too — a persistent sense that Bart was enjoying a joke that JP had never been let into. JP had been sixteen when his mom died and he’d suddenly had to move in with his only living relative. Back in the city, he’d had friends, the internet worked, and while he’d never quite plucked up the courage to talk to girls his own age, at least they existed. Now he attended a high school with six students total, all of whom, like Bart, still viewed him as an incorrigible outsider. They played tricks on him about fictitious local customs, laughing when he showed up at school wearing Christmas antlers on November 11, all ready for what he thought was ‘reindeer day’. When he wasn’t at school, JP practised driving his cousin’s beat up old vehicles up and down his winding driveway, ready to finish getting his licence. Bart himself was always out on his “errands”. JP didn’t understand exactly what his cousin’s job involved, but the house was full of cartons and papers labelled with the name of a medical company — B&F Pharmaceutical — so he assumed it was something like delivering medicines to the outlying farms. This was the first time Bart had agreed to take JP with him on one of his trips. When JP asked if it was a problem that he only had a learner’s permit, Bart’s answer had been unusually direct: “Who do you think’s gonna check?” “Snow’s getting real bad now, Bart,” JP said into his radio mic. No reply. The haze between their vehicles had thickened until he could hardly see Bart’s truck at all, behind the thick white flakes spiralling in the glare of his own headlights. Another white shape darted into the road from the left. He slammed the breaks, but he could feel the wheels of the truck sliding beneath him. Something banged against the fender, hard. When he finally came to a stop just inches from the valley edge, he looked back to see the person he had hit lying in a heap on the verge. A woman: pale white skin, a thin white dress, barefoot — in this temperature? She must be crazy. “Oh gently caress, man. I loving just hit someone, dude. I’m going out to see.” “Wait!” came Bart’s distorted reply, but JP was already gone, pulling his thick coat about him. “Yo, lady, what the gently caress was that? Maybe loving look where you’re going next time, eh?” He squatted down beside her and shook her shoulder roughly. He didn’t feel guilty about hitting her — there was no way that was his fault — but he knew she’d be dead within a half hour if he didn’t get her inside. That was if she wasn’t dead already. Then there’d be real trouble. “Wake up lady, come on. Want me to take you to a hospital? Psych ward?” Her eyes flashed open. For a second they almost looked yellow as they reflected his car’s tail lights. “No hospital. No doctors. Run.” “Run? I can’t just leave you. You are, like, literally going to die.” Then there was a bassy popping sound from the snowy forest, like staccato thunder. With resounding cracks, the road beside them erupted into sprays of ice and asphalt. From there everything happened so fast that he didn’t realise what he was doing. Maybe it was because he had already got it into his head to help this woman, but before JP knew it he had grabbed her by the armpits, hoisted her into the passenger seat of his cab, and sunk the accelerator. “Not that way!” the woman objected as she buckled her seatbelt. “That’s towards them. Turn around!” Without thinking, JP pulled a messy u-turn and sped off back in the direction of Bart’s cabin. He grabbed his mic as he got up to speed. “Bart, man, I’m heading back. Something loving crazy is going on out here. I just let this chick into… Argh!” Pain shot through his wrist. The woman had clasped it in an iron grip, so hard he had no choice but to let the mic spring back to its socket. Her strength was incredible, her touch frigid. It was only then that he realised that she had never shown any sign of reacting to the cold. She wasn’t shivering, and while her skin was pale, it was a neutral white, neither the blue of pneumonia or the angry red tracks left by broken capillaries. “You did what?” came Bart’s reply, distorted by the snow. The woman smashed her fist into the console, sending out a shower of sparks. “No more radio. Just go." Something caught the corner of JP's vision. He looked out through the trees to see a group of figures in heavy tactical gear running through the snow, holding assault rifles. When they saw his car, they kneeled and began firing. "What the gently caress lady, are they police?" She shook her head. A bullet ripped through the passenger side window, exiting with a neat hole through the windshield. Cold air tore into the vehicle, alongside a shower of glass. A spotlight passed over him. Overhead, a black helicopter strafing in the night air, the snow in the light of its spotlight swirling like dust in an UFO’s tractor beam. On its flank, in bold white print, read “B&F Pharmaceutical”. A voice boomed from the helicopter’s sound system: “To the driver of the black road truck: Be aware that you are harbouring a dangerous fugitive. Stop now and we will let you go free.” “Don’t listen to them!” screamed the woman. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Some guy just brought me here. They did things to me, horrible things. I’ll die if they catch me.” He glanced at her as much as he dared while keeping his eyes on the road. JP knew that he had often, in the past, been accused of being overly credulous. But the fear in her eyes told him that there was no way this woman was lying. He floored the accelerator. The engine in Bart’s beat up old truck could give so much more, but it was something. A glance in the back mirror told him that a vehicle was approaching from behind and gaining on them rapidly. A vehicle he recognised. Bart pulled past him on the right, the two trucks barely able to fit side by side on the winding road. To his the left, JP was inches from the rock wall, tearing past them with alarming speed. Behind Bart lay a steep drop down into the valley. Bart wound down his window, shouting to JP as if his passenger wasn’t there. “They’re right, Cos. She’s dangerous. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.” “Yo, Bart, you work for these assholes? What the gently caress is going on?” The woman’s features sparked with recognition. “It’s him! They call him the Catcher, the one who brings them their test subjects.” Suddenly, the panic and confusion coursing through JP’s system was replaced by an ice-cold certainty. He was done with being hosed with. He would do what was right. He would ram his cousin off the road. As soon as the rock wall gave him space, he pulled back his vehicle then swerved right into his cousin’s truck. Their chassis collided with a shower of sparks, but the momentum wasn’t enough to make a difference. It didn’t have to be. With an animal howl, the woman dove through the shattered window and into Bart’s cab. The last thing JP saw before he went plummeting off the road into the icy forest was his cousin’s red blood dribbling down her snow-white chin, the truck careening wildly around them, white fur sprouting from her arms.
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Dec 25, 2022 17:36
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