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Three 50-Word Fics on Marriage #microfiction #weblit

Feb14

“Honey, I’m home.”

She shucked coat, mittens, and boots in the entryway and chased him down for a hug, snow still melting in her hair. She nuzzled her frozen nose against his armpit with a happy sound: “You’re warm,” she explained, muffled by his shirt.

“Gee, thanks,” he smiled, unperturbed.

~

She pushed back against him urgently, hungrily, as he rested his hand on the base of her spine, and shoved her face into the pillow to better muffle her pleasured screams.

After sixteen years, the sex was still hella hot, but the neighbors were not so hot on the noise.

~

She didn’t realize she was slipping until she was halfway in the October-cold creek and scrabbling with no purchase, didn’t realize that she hadn’t caught herself until she was almost out again, hauled up by the handle on her backpack by her quick and vigilant spouse.

“My hero,” she shivered.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/6204.html. You can comment here or there.

Mythic Thursday 50-word Fic #weblit

Feb3

He hadn’t expected the hooves; the searing, bone-breaking pain of toes, heel, and arch bending themselves all into hard, cloven, three-toed lumps. Next to the crippling agony of the feet, the horns curling out of his skull were nothing.

He’d asked to be a god. He hadn’t specified which one.

Drake-athon! – Feb. 19th & 20th 2011

Carry On Tuesday Short Story: “Children’s Hour” #weblit

Feb1

Children’s Hour

It wasn’t universally recognized, of course. On a colony like Roan Oak, you were lucky to get people to generally acknowledge the direction the sun rose from every morning; you couldn’t normally get more than twenty-five out of any hundred people to agree on what year it was, and often a marriage group couldn’t settle on a last name so they all used something different. But the Children’s Hour was more regularly recognized than most “actual” holidays were, and, possibly, more enjoyed.

It was certainly louder than anything but the Spring-has-come festivals, a cacophonous clatter that echoed from one end of the settlements to the other. For, in that time when the sun had begun to set but there was still light out, across all the scattered villages, miners and carters, teachers and shopkeepers, farmers and craftspeople all put down their work and went outside.

And all of them, the gruffest miner, the sternest teacher, the most curmudgeonly shopkeeper, every single one of them, (of those who took part, of course, because there would always be some who did not participate), they all played. The brought out the balls, big and small, the bats and the nets, the mittens in winter and the sprinklers in summer, the toy trucks and the dolls, and, for an hour as the sun sank below the horizon of their new world, grown men and women acted like children for just a little while.

The children, too, played, of course, most of them enjoying seeing their parents and mentors acting silly, “acting like children,” (the children would say they were acting nothing of the sort, but they’d mostly learned not to disillusion their elders, and, by the time they, themselves, were grown-ups, almost all of them forgot that particular complaint).

Some said a teacher had started the trend, wanting to connect her students and their parents; some, a doctor, who wanted people to be more healthy, to be more active outside of repetitive work. A few, who were the closest to right and the least often listened to, murmured that it had been a miner, who just wanted an excuse to kick the ball around after work.

The miner’s wives, both of them grey with age by now, smiled to themselves, and kicked the bases into place for a Children’s Hour game of baseball.

For Carry On Tuesday; today’s prompt was:

    the first verse of Longfellow’s poem The Children’s Hour
    Between the dark and the daylight
    When the night is beginning to lower
    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
    That is known as the Children’s Hour

This story takes place in the same place as my flash fiction The Colony, sponsor for $15

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Drake-athon!

100-word ficlet: Runaway #weblit

Jan30

Things were getting hot on land, so they took to the water: they stole a small pleasure yacht from an unguarded marina and vanished into the ocean before their pursuers could catch up.

The sea was cruel, but they were fast, and when they couldn’t beat her, they could trick her. She tried to kill them with her wild waves and sharp winds, but they clung to her back, like a cowboy on a bull. She bucked and kicked, but they held tight; in the end, she gave them what they’d come for.

Their pursuers never found them. Nobody did.

Based on eseme‘s prompt: “the Ocean!”

Um. 🙂

50-Word-Story: Damnit #weblit

Jan27

The fountain was broken.

It was the final insult for Derek Tanner, as he flopped, parched and exhausted, on the cracked tile.

He had crossed the trackless dessert to find the lost city and ransack it for its treasures, and he would die here, for want of a crescent wrench.

Friday Flash: Evolution

Oct29

Evolution

Alae shrugged into the long feather cape, settling the weight over her cotton-like tunic. She stroked the perfectly-replicated parrot feathers, garish in their natural colors.

“They used to grow these on birds, you know,” she told her escort.

“Pfft, next you’re going to tell me they grew the rubber backing on trees.” Eka had no interest in ancient cultures, nor in the natural world. She liked the slick lines of the machines and the smooth comfort of plastic, the sameness of synthetics.

“Well, no, but they did make a lot of things out of products they had on hand.” She held out her hand for the scepter and, solemn-silly in her own ritual garb, Eka handed it over.

“Seems inefficient,” she complained. “It’s hard to get any level of replicable similarity from different batches of plants.”

Alae shifted the scepter – made of real wood, and inherited from her grandmother, like this position, like the cloak, vestigial holdovers from a landbound time – from hand to hand, studying her escort. She looked so gorgeous like this, her hair beaded with synthetic turquoise, her eyes lined with imitation khol.

“You’re not that much of a machine,” she said gently. “You enjoy beauty.” She was beauty.

“Of course. I put up with you, don’t I?” She pushed the scepter aside, smirking at the knob on the end, and leaned in for a kiss, her beads clattering. “Organic unpredictability and all.”

Her kisses were electric and riveting, sweet and intoxicating like simulated mimosas, delicious and habit-forming. “I love you too.”

“Of course you do.” She touched up Alae’s make-up with a maternal thumb. “Garish, archaic, and lovely, your majesty. You look suitably regal.”

“And inefficient?” she teased, to cover the warm flutter Eka’s compliment made in her belly.

“Queens aren’t supposed to be efficient. They’re supposed to be proud and aw-inspiring and traditional, to fit a ceremonial role.”

“Vestigial.” She quirked a small and entirely non-regal smile. “Like hair. Something we’ve evolved out of the need for, but can’t stand to get rid of.”

Eka chuckled. “I like my hair.” She shook her head to make the beads clack, and her smile grew thoughtful. “You know, your majesty,” she mused quietly. “They used to think the coccyx was vestigial, too…”

375 words. Originally meant to be 250 (2 hours’ wordcount goal) but it wasn’t quite done, so I went on for another hour. Still micro.

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