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A Voluntary Offering

Oct8

A Voluntary Offering

This story is the third one to my Squish-Squash, Pumpkins and Gourds Prompt Call. 

After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways, Community Service and Time Passes on Patreon and then Weird. 

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Whitney was no longer sure how long she’d been working on Crossroads Park, cleaning it up, replanting it, giving voice to its ghosts and names to its skeletons.  She still went to her day job most weekdays, even if she found her boss was giving her more and more assignments that focused on the park – she hadn’t mentioned it, because it was convenient and did leave her a couple hours of free time a week she otherwise would’ve been spending researching said park – she spent most evenings in the park, cleaning up old messes of landscaping and planting new things, and, in some areas, taking care of the annual maintenance that her new plantings required – and she spent most weekends wandering around the city, learning more about it and, by connection, about the park.  Continue reading →

Weird

May6

I’m having a writing retreat day!  Tell your friends!  Tell your foes!  Tell everyone~
See more about Katydid and Whitney here – http://www.lynthornealder.com/category/verse/fairytown/ 

~*~

It was one of the weird days.

You’d have thought that, considering that she’d set herself to restoring a park in a city that was known for the magic flowing through it and the oddities in its shadows and in its sunbeams, a park that was a crossroads at the center of that city (if you read the right map), a park where the ghosts and the spirits were as likely to advise her and help her as the local gardening groups were, possibly more so, where a giant but see-through cat followed her around for the treats (along with the slightly more mundane cats, who were interested in  more mundane treats), well, with all that, you’d have thought that Whitney didn’t have weird days anymore. Continue reading →

Ladies Who Garden

Apr11
Ladies who Garden

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It was Whitney’s second spring working on the Crossroads park, so she had gotten used to some of the more surprising help – not just the fae and ghosts, the strange-people and the occasional mysterious work done between when she left one night and when she returned the next, but vagrants and rebellious kids, cops and neighbors of the area and, once, the entire local chapter of the Pagans motorcycle club.

She was, still, a little bit confused when seven women – all wearing pastel straw hats over their well-coiffed grey hair, sporting gloves with flowers on them that nevertheless looked as if they had seen use at some point, and carrying brightly-coloured caddies full of gardening tools – walked up to her while she was taking a water break.

“Gwendolyn Marcus.”  The lead woman – yellow hat, yellow gloves, pink caddy – held out a gloved hand. Continue reading →

Time Passes

Feb14

Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and  Community Service here on Patreon.

🏞️

There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park.  The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug.  The whole thing was the hard part.

That was before she got to the really hard part.

There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story.  The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.

But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading →

The Fairy Road

Dec24

To [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt.
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The park in the middle of the city had always been creepy.

It was only a city block wide, but it had been allowed – some said by design – to become overgrown and wild, so that there were only two clear paths through the whole thing, an X crossing the park, the center a circle where, once upon a time, a merry-go-round had stood. People hurried through the center now, even in the middle of the day. The ghosts of the children were too densely packed there, and too loud.

Whitney cut through there every day. It took five minutes off of her walk, if she did it right, and that meant she could catch the 6:30 bus instead of the 5:30 bus and still be to work on time (instead of fifty minutes early), which meant another hour of sleep or reading or drawing in the morning and being able to actually stay up in the evening; on the way home, it meant she could take the 5:15 instead of the 5:45 home. She walked the park from the Northwest corner to the Southeast corner, which to her was a matter of practicality, but to our story means everything.
Continue reading →