Tag Archive | giraffecall: mini

Visiting an Uncle

Feb5

For lilfluff‘s prompt.

Evangaline was doing interesting things.

They’d had a feeling she would, of course. She was strong, had always been strong, hadn’t fought the spark, the way some of them do, did, and she was still young. It helped to come into it young.

Rosaria approved. Asta had been an engaging woman, certainly, but she hadn’t been that flexible. They’d felt, not that any of them would have said so, that she was filling the time, filling the place until her successor was ready. And now that Evangaline was there, well…

…she was shaking things up a bit.

She was asking about boys. Rosaria understood, especially with Stone showing more and more of the spark, much as he was trying to hide it. But when she started asking about the boys, they started running into questions that they weren’t certain they wanted to answer. Especially her generation. Especially Ramona.

They would have to tell her eventually. So Rosaria volunteered – the girl trusted her, and she trusted the girl. She visited Evangaline one Sunday, and invited the girl to go driving.

“We’re going visiting,” she told Eva, as she directed her down the old backroads. She got lost, sometimes, on the new highways. The old roads were safer.

“Family? Eva asked. “I thought we’d covered every cousin in a day’s drive by now.”

“We have,” Rosaria assured her, “and we’ll save those further out for next summer, or let them come to us. No, today,” she sighed, “we’re going to visit an Uncle.”

Eva stopped the car. “An Uncle.”

“An Uncle,” Rosaria agreed. “Or someone that could have been. Ramona’s son Willard.”

Eva started the car again. “Ramona only has a daughter, Aunt Rosaria. She had a son?”

“She did,” Rosaria sighed, “but he left the family.”

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Fated, a story of the Aunt Family for the Mini-giraffe-call

Feb4

To [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt.

Modern era, another branch of the tree.

“Damnit, not again.” Karen threw the pregnancy test in the garbage and leaned against the bathroom door, sighing.

The phone rang as she was getting her nerve up to leave the bathroom. Of course. She picked it up without bothering to check the Caller ID. “Aunt Becka.” She knew she sounded inhospitable. She wanted to sound a lot more than that.

“It’s not always a blessing, I know that, dear,” her mother’s oldest sister began without preamble. “It was for me, but it wasn’t for all of us. But when it’s not a blessing…”

“It’s a responsibility. Yes.” She grumbled at the phone. “I didn’t ask for this, Aunt Becka. The family has other lines. Let them be all aunt-y. Leave me out of it.”

“The power doesn’t work that way, dear, I’m sorry. Enjoy being free of it for now, I suppose. I still have a few years left in me.”

She hung up with a scolding click, leaving Karen to stare at her phone, and wonder who there was left to appeal to.

She’d asked her mother, who had told her, simply, “You’re the last unmarried niece your Aunt Becka has.”

That all her other sisters and cousins – nine of them – had done their damndest to get pregnant before they even finished highschool and married at, in three cases, the expense of college at all, while Karen had finished school, that didn’t seem to faze anyone, least of all the Aunt Magic.

She didn’t know if it was bad luck or the magic messing with her, bad biochemistry or just a bad hand at love that had left her thirty-four, childless, and without a relationship that lasted longer than three months, but she hated it either way. Her oldest cousin’s oldest daughter was already pregnant! And she…

…would be the crazy lady in the corner house with no love and no children, raising cats and reading tarot cards. And, because everyone assured her that she had no skill at this sort of thing (her sister Letty had had that, and their cousin Edna, but they had run screaming from the power with babies at seventeen and nineteen, respectively), she would just be a vessel, a stupid vessel for the stupid family power. A coma patient could do that. A BOY could do that.

In the corner of the bathroom, a photo fell over. Sighing, Karen picked it up. Her Great-Aunt Ruan smiled back at her, her arm around her long-term beau Johias.

“Well.” Un-married and childless, that was the rule. Smiling slowly, Karen dialed the city’s adoption agency. No-one said she had to carry this stupid power around alone.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1323390.html

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