This story comes from (checking the prompt link twice) this Reddit r/writingprompts prompt and was posted there first.
Content warnings for surgery, bionic parts, and um, non-consensual body modifications?
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Waking felt strange. There’d been times when Jo had woken up quickly, woken up scared, woken up slowly in a warm sunbeam, woken warm and comfortable – although the last had been rare, in the last few years. Continue reading
Based on a prompt found here.
🌳
Between the blink of an eye, in a heartbeat, in a breath, in things that stopped mattering, the world stopped – or at least we did.
People froze. I froze. Animals froze. Insects froze, I think.
It was – when I thought about it clinically, it was fascinating. My body didn’t hunger, didn’t ache, didn’t have any needs. My eyes didn’t dry out. I’d been sitting in the park. The others in the park seemed the same – stuck in a single moment. They didn’t fall over, even if in mid-jog. The squirrel hung in mid-climb. The ducks stopped in mid-nibble.
Nothing moved. Nothing but plants. Nothing died, nothing rotted, nothing breathed, nothing but plants. Continue reading
Reegatia’s people were all women, or at least they were all ladies.
It had come about because of a misunderstanding with an explorer who had “discovered” the people that he – the explorer was a he, at least – had called The Ladies of the Jungle.
There were three things wrong with that, possibly 5, and it was a title only 5 words long in the Imperial language, one in the explorer’s native tongue – Pialejiarnna.
But the end result – because the explorer had returned to his own people with drawings and notes and more notes, had come back and then returned with even more notes, more drawings, and a few of the weird new Daguerreotypes, and then on his fourth voyage had brought back four of the Pialejiarnna – was that the world believed that Reegatia’s people were all women. They were the Ladies of Pia, and the fact that they called themselves the Ineguruhh was a fact only known to those that considered themselves in the know; the etymology of that term had been hotly debated in certain groups but, unfortunately, nobody had ever asked an Ineguruhch. Continue reading
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
“There’s a problem with the milk.”
Cara raised an eyebrow at intern in her well-practiced “do tell?” expression. She’d brought double PhDs to their knees with that eyebrow.
The intern was uncowed. Cara didn’t know whether to write the skinny grad student off as an idiot or be impressed by the stainless steel guts that demonstrated. “The whole milk, to be exact. Not ours, that is, we didn’t develop it; it’s in the dining hall.”
The intern hesitated. “That is, as far as I know, it’s a dining hall product and not one of our developments; if the Facility is using its dining hall for non -consensual, uninformed testing, I quit.”
“Not the staff dining hall.” It was not the most robust denial, but Cara wanted to see what this one would do.
The intern relaxed minutely. “Then there is a serious problem with the whole milk.” Continue reading
Early in Cloverleaf-era
Sometimes, Cya thought her power had a sense of humor.
She’d learned how to craft specific Find requests, because, if she wasn’t looking for something or someone specific (“nearest unbroken Bleach DVD;” “Leo”), her power had a bad habit of leading her on wild goose chases.
Like today. Like “nearest cache of intact, unclaimed books in an accessible-by-me location, with at least two times the number of unique, intact books as the hours I drive to get there.”
Almost every one of those clauses, she’d added on after learning the hard way that her power could be painfully literal.
Today… today she was staring down at a 45-degree incline that had once been the floor of this library. From the looks of things, it had been tolerably sheltered from weather – this area wasn’t as cold or as wet as Cloverleaf, but it still did get precipitation – and peering down and over, she was pretty sure she’d be able to get more than the required 16 books out of here.
But first, she had to get down there, gather the books, and get back up. Continue reading
So Chanter-Greenie asked for a continuation of Under Water, and it turned out I already had 500+ words written on that, so voila!
Aelia screamed. The secretary screamed some more. The man gasped, screamed, and spat up water all at once.
“Call an ambulance,” Aelia repeated. Her voice at least sounded like her voice. “I’m Aelia Hartman. I know I look – funny, sure – but this is the guy who just tried to drown me. I fought back. He’s breathing but I’m worried about him. Please call 911.”
The secretary, staring, pulled out her phone and dialed 911. Once she had gotten through the phone call – full of shaky words and not a small amount of gibbering – she looked at Aelia again. “Are you really-”
“Yeah, sorry. I don’t know what happened.” She poked the man in the chest. “You. Stay there. You need medical attention, and also, I think you’re a murderer.” Continue reading
After Fated, for my Fourth Finish It Bingo Card.
At the third adoption agency, Karen acknowledged that her family and the power were definitely getting in her way. Before she called the fourth – they lived near a big enough city, but there was still a limit – she visited her Aunt Becka.
She brought Aunt Becka’s favorite sweet rolls and a fresh box of her favorite tea.
And while they ate rolls and gossiped about the family, she swirled her mug and studied the leaves at the bottom.
Everyone had always told her she had no skill for it, no art. She looked at the leaves and saw a cradle.
“Here, dear.” Aunt Becka reached for the mug, and pulled her fingers back when sparks lit up between them.
“Oh!” She chuckled, sounding more pleased than the old woman had sounded in some time. “So you’ve decided to own it, have you?”
Karen thought about her answer for a moment. You had to be careful; words you said around family had a habit of coming back to bite you a decade later. “I think it’s decided to own me. But that being so, well.
I’m not going to be jerked around by it.”
“Good for you, girl. Good for you. Now, as for that pesky problem you’re having with the family, here, I can show you how to get around it. I do wish you’d come to me quite some time earlier, but they have their ideas, don’t they, and they push them and push them.” She pulled out a small silk bag full of bones and tossed them across the table. “So. You’ve been pushed a bit. Here, there, your mother’s the worst but there’s three other aunts involved and, bless her soul, your great-grandmother. Want to learn how to teach them to mind their own business?”
Karen sighed. “I’m no good at magic. I never have been.”
“Well.” Aunt Becka raised her eyebrows. “And who told you that, mmm?”
“My mother, my grandmother, and Aunt Zelda, Aunt Laurel…”
“Mmm-hrrm. And exactly what do they have to gain by you being good at magic? I know you never wanted this, Karen. I know, sweet child, that you dodged the least quickly. But I’m not dead yet. I have…” She tossed the bones again and contemplated that. “Something like three years, three weeks, and three days left, although that could be Fate messing with me, what with the threes. Anyway. There’s time and enough for us to get you ready.”
“But…” Karen put her face in her hands. “It will let me have a child?”
“It will let you adopt a child. Clever, that. Nobody’s really gone that way again, although there was one, now who was it…”
Aunt Becka liked to play at being senile. Her hair was all grey and wispy and her eyes were often clouded over, her face more wrinkle than skin, but when she looked up at Karen, remembering something in the far past, there was no doubt that she was still all there. “[-]. Now she was a fun one, if her diaries and her sisters’ diaries are to be believed. When her sister passed, she took in all her sisters’ children. And the husband. Now didn’t the grannies fret about that one!”
Karen couldn’t help but smile at her Aunt’s expression. And at the thought of making the grannies fret, if she was being honest. “So it can be done.”
“It can. But first, child, you are going to have to learn. We’re going to start with something simple, the cards. This set is a pretty gentle one.” The box was hand-made and the cards were clearly hand-painted. The family didn’t even play bridge with store-bought cards, much less do divination.
Karen slid the cards out of the box carefully and ran her fingers over the top card, a portrait of a woman who might have been an Aunt, a long time ago. She had that look.
“Now. You’ve done these before, right?”
“Just for play, with practice cards.”
“Then clear your mind, shuffle the deck, and think about – let’s say think about four years from now.”
She’d said she’d be dead in a little over three years. Karen closed her eyes and shuffled, thinking of The Near Future. She focused on amorphous time-coming-up and thought about the way the trees changed in the summer.
The cards seemed to spark under her fingers. She laid out a simple spread in a hurry, because it felt like her hands were on fire, and set the deck to the side. When she opened her eyes, Aunt Becka was staring at the cards.
The spread was sloppy, but that was secondary. The card in the center was a supernova. The card didn’t even exist, as far as Karen knew.
And Death and Luck flanked it, and below it was Growth.
“Well.” Aunt Becka coughed. “The cards like you. That’s going to make everything a little more interesting. Tell me, who exactly said you had no power?”
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First: Visiting the Family
Previous: The Powers that Be
Uncle Willard let Eva’s words hang in the air while he opened up his sun porch to them and brought in a pitcher of cold lemonade.
There was something like a ritual to it, the clean glasses, the glass pitcher, the cold, sweet-tart fresh lemonade. In the winter, it woudl have been tea. Their family had things that they did, and they all did them more or less the same.
The thought made her smile, her lips just starting to curl up as Willard answered.
“I think Asta was a changing of the guard. She had a lot of things she did. None of them, well, were any use to me, but I think they might be of use to this nephew of yours.” He sat back in an old armchair and lounged, looking at Rosaria and Eva over his lemonade.
Eva wasn’t fooled by his nonchalant glance. This, too, was a test.
She was growing a little tired of tests.
“Let’s see. Asta left Aunt Rosaria free to pursue a different path, one that involved a family, which places Aunt Rosaria as the tale-teller. That’s not a small thing. She let the older generation get complacent, because she let them push her around, and yet, if you read her diaries, she was supremely good at doing what needed to be done, when it needed doing.
“So she wasn’t holding on to as much power, probably – the legacy has a feel to it, you know, and she passed down a smaller part of it. Then again, the whole thing about the legacy is that it comes from the family, and that’s been changing in the last few months.” Eva took a breath. “But Asta holding less of it left more of it in other hands.” She lifted her chin. “Do I pass, Uncle Willard?”
He laughed, cheerfully but with an edge. “You’re an Aunt, all right.”
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