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In, against my best judgement.
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Apr 12, 2024 18:09
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:07 |
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The Three Victories of Ankylosaurus (811 words) Several feathered runners raced through the lush grass and surrounded the brute, without trying to hide. They swarmed around him, too fast to follow, a blur of black and orange, fangs and claws, cackling and jumping. Killers, but not his killers. He lowered his head and started shaking his formidable tail, slowly at first. He feared nothing, not anymore, not under his perfect armor, not while he could feel the unmatched strength of his squat body. Everything in the world broke or fled before him. His clubbed tail swung wider and wider, as he swayed on his short legs to give it heft, still keeping strength in reserve for a mighty, decisive blow. The runners kept out of reach, always moving, seeking the weak pots he did not have. He brought his small, tough-scaled head even lower, until the grass pricked the soft underside of his neck. Grudgeful fears rose in him from the darkness of his past; fleetingly he was again a tiny hatchling, unarmored, strengthless, hiding under the ferns from terrible shadows shaped like his enemies of today. A formidable bellow shook him. The killers stopped and raised their orange-crested heads, looking into the distance. Then they ran, as well they should. But the brute forgot his first victory soon. Dull hunger woke inside him, fear and wrath sank in the darkness of his past, as if they had never stirred him. The damp wind carried a delicious smell, and he made his way to the banks of a pond. There a cluster of lilies were wilting, and below them he could smell their bulbs, heavy and fragrant, full of taste. He pulled the stems gently, plowed the sodden dirt away with his hard heavy snout. Once he had got to the first one he gathered it in its beak, carefully, tilted his head back and crushed it between his teeth. The brittle skin tore away and a salty, starchy juice filled his mouth. The soft, tart inner flesh dissolved into a redolent pulp he barely chewed before swallowing. Bulbs were the best of food, and he could smell even more. At this moment the world started breaking. He felt first low, growling tremors shaking the ground in successive bursts. Then the sky grew darker, dirty. In the distance something howled. There was a mortal danger around him, but nowhere to flee or strike it. And so he kept eating. He could scarcely comprehend his own death, let alone the destruction of everything around him and the end of his race, but a beastly premonition told him something terrible, gigantic and unknown was coming. In his small, stubborn mind he resolved to eat all the bulbs before that. Whatever came to pass, it would be even worse if he had to leave them uneaten ; and he even felt that if he ate enough, he might be fine after all. So he kept at it, swallowing the full bulbs he hardly chewed, with mouthfuls of soggy dirt. Fast, dusty winds buffeted his hard scales, the agitated pound splashed over his eyes, but he paid it all no mind, eating fervently, devouring away the last minutes of his life. He hurried and, just as a deafening crack rolled through the air, succeeded at finishing the one last, stunted, rumpled sack of food. Around him a filthy, turbulent night had suddenly fallen. The muddy ground deformed and then broke under him, and there was no up or down anymore, only a flesh rending chaos that was both hot and cold. The entire world burst open like a gigantic maw. The brute choked on dirt and then on nothing, and his full stomach finally was of little comfort. Yet in his final moment he witnessed stranger and grander things than any of his species ever had. Strange multitudes floated around him. He glimpsed incomprehensible creatures, impossibly tall trees, whole chunks of bizarre landscapes thrown across immensity. And beyond all that devastation there were yet more incomprehensible sights : immense straight beams of a gray material, featureless expanses as flat as water in every direction, nests full of lights where featherless bipeds ran frantic. Even that enormous land was breaking, torn apart by invisible forces and streaks of straight lightning. The vast dull surface closer to him broke like an eggshell, and behind it there was nothing but fast stars, all fleeing in the same direction. Impossible visions confused his tiny brain. Finally the brute understood what even much smarter creatures failed to, that his world was but a trick, and the worlds beyond it were much larger and weirder than he could ever digest. However little he had known and thought was so pointless and illusory anyway, there was no value in retaining it. And as the last of his life gasped out of him, he was enlightened.
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Apr 14, 2024 16:05
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Quiet Feet posted:Thunderdome Week DCXII: Soundtrack Your links don't work, at least for me In with Rémusat by Barbara: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GrHHXq2mKok The music should be enough to give the gist : it's a song about mourning and flowers. Quick and dirty translation, all mistakes mine (but the last two verses contradicting each other isn't one) : quote:You didn't abandon me Kuiperdolin fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 20:46
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Song : Barbara - Rémusat Not a day goes by (302 words) The first time she saw the mimosas bloom from the window of her hillside villa, she thought of the last time she would see them ; and the last time she did, she thought of that first time, years before. She was forty-seven, her mother’s age when she died, and her last radiography had shown the cancer had spread to the other lung. But medicine had made progress; she still had some time. The villa was small and comfortable. She could spend sunny, calm days there, enjoy one last day after another. It would be a fine place to rest. All she could see from her window was the flock of short-lived pink flowers on their heavy boughs, and the sea far below. The first time she had bathed in the sea, a different one, it had given her a rash behind her knee; every time she scratched herself during the train ride back home, her mother had slapped her, seventeen times in all. The first few times, because scratching made it worse ; and eventually, out of principle. She remembered her eyes, smoldering with rage and indignancy before each slap, and with haughty triumph after it. She could hear her own children below, on the terrace, and she did not know what she could tell them. She wondered how much fear and pain her mother had hidden from her. Not a tear. The shadow of the house lengthened on the mimosa boughs, just a little. It would be hours before nighttime. But already the starless sky was taking on the rich dark hue that had made her wish to settle there, with her family and her regrets. It was her home now. Not her country, though; but then her country no longer existed. She coughed. The heady, indifferent, eternal odor of mimosas surrounded her.
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Apr 28, 2024 20:32
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Yeah I'm in.
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May 7, 2024 15:36
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:07 |
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The Ogre’s Cakes (1036 words) In those days there was an ogre who roamed the country, devouring everything he found. He would eat men and cattle, spitting out only the biggest bones. He would empty grain silos in a single gulp. He would grab every cart at a town market and empty it in his enormous mouth, grabbing another one even as he chewed. He ate so ravenously he would often bite his own fingers to the quick, and they were covered with scars. And so the whole country lived in fear, and no one dared to cook anymore lest the smell attracted him. Once he ate all berry bushes in the Fairies’ Forest, thorns and all, and then he quenched his thirst by drinking all the Glamoured Lake and revealed all the treasures hidden underneath. Upon which the Chancellor of Fairies cursed him, that his mouth would close forever after he ate the three best cakes in the world. From then on when he devastated a village in search of food, or when he devoured a whole flock of sheep, he shouted at the fleeing folks : “Nothing can stop me! I will eat all I want, until I eat the three best cakes in the world, and the fairies’ curse closes my mouth forever!” This came to the President’s ears, and he came up with a plan : he would see to it himself that the three best cakes in the world be baked, and invite the ogre to eat them, which would solve the problem. As luck would have it, in the capital there was a confectioner so knowledgeable and talented, that he had grown conceited and been jailed for the crime of aristopastry. The president commanded him to prepare three perfect cakes large enough to interest an ogre, in exchange for his freedom, and the confectioner sent envoys to fetch the best foodstuff from all corners of the world and the country, for all a cook’s art is nothing without the right ingredients. Finally he toiled a day and a night with two apprentices, in the secrecy of his refurbished workshop. And meanwhile the president sent heralds everywhere, announcing that the three best cakes in the world would be on display in the capital the day after. Daylight came, and the appendices brought forth the cakes, on a very large trestle set up in the gardens of the Presidential Palace. Ministers, parliamentarians, journalists had gathered in front of the table, where a pulpit had been set for the president. The confectioner, exhausted, leant against a wall, apart from the crowd. By noon, at last, the ogre appeared, red-faced, slobbering, chewing his lips impatiently. He stopped comically in front of the table, leering at the three cakes, and then he started on the first one without listening to the President’s speech. The first cake was a sturdy chestnut flour cake, flavored with molasses and rum, spiced with cinnamon and anise, brown like fallen leaves, ocellated with roasted pineapple slices. It smelt of distant journeys and forgotten dreams, and onlookers felt the world became less beautiful the ogre devoured it in a few bites and moved on. The second was a humble peasant cake, barely more than a loaf of bread, nothing but the most tender wheat flour, the ruddier eggs, the softest butter and the finest sugar, but assembled so expertly, baked with such care and talent as to rival the most sophisticated fare. No yeast, no seasoning, nothing but the scent of childhood and oven. The ogre swallowed it whole. The third one, bigger than the other two, was a pear and chocolate cake, dark and sweet as an arbor’s shade. The dough used a mixture of almond and buckwheat flour, and it was so soft that a falling feather would have made a dent in it. Pears softened in syrup stood throughout the apparel, and small beads of hard, airy meringue swam between them. The cake was topped with a single wild strawberry, wrapped in spun sugar, on a bed of chocolate shavings inside a crown-shaped shortbread cradle. The ogre started tearing into it and shoving runny pieces into his mouth, so brutishly that the topper rolled under the table and he forgot about it. “Now your reign of terror comes to an end,” said the President when he was done. “You have eaten our cakes, and will be without a mouth soon.” “So I am,” he bawled, “ and yet I ate them.” In his fright and horror, thinking he could no longer eat, the ogre started devouring everything about him, first the president and his pulpit, then the whole buffet set up for celebrating the victory, then a ceremonial mounted guard. The terrified ministers and parliamentarians scattered. But the brave baker, who had seen the topper roll under the table, dove to retrieve it and set after the ogre. The creature had started rampaging through the capitol, swallowing entire monuments and trams full of people. It was only when he stopped to drink the river dry that the confectioner caught up to him, and, gathering his courage, brandished the last piece of his cake in front of the ogre’s fierce, shaggy head. The ogre looked at the topper with wonder and sorrow. He grasped it and put it in his mouth, without the confectioner. The shortbread crown broke between his teeth like bones, and crumbled into coarse, delicious paste. The spun sugar brushed his palate in a sweet instant and vanished. The chocolate shavings, thinner than silk paper, dissolved immediately, their complex flavors bursting all at once in his slobbering maw. And the last thing he tasted, in the wake of that concert of flavors and textures, ending it with a perfect note, was one mellow wild strawberry, picked among a thousand, so fresh and so rich he could feel its redness on his enormous tongue. Then his mouth closed, forever, and he could no longer eat anything or anyone. All was well with the world again. The people elected a new president, the confectioner returned to jail, and the ogre wasted and withered until he got so thin that a gust of wind carried him, and he disappeared in the bright blue sky.
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May 13, 2024 00:31
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