Another journal

This short story wasn’t to any markets’ taste, but I think it’s a meal you may enjoy.

You’ve probably found when looking into the gaping, dripping maw of an ancient beast of the sea that there’s a moment where your fear is so powerful you can feel your self split, groping along all possible paths in every alternate universe for one in which you are not here, in this moment. Don’t be tempted to let that experience define you, it’s what you do after, once you’ve realised you are well-stuck in this probability, that matters.

I’m not too proud to admit that the first few times I found myself having to make a choice on how to behave after coming face-to-nerve-twanging face with the horrors of the unknown I did what any small animal would do before a monster. I screamed, or my knees collapsed beneath me. I even ran, once, little good that does when the very world around you ripples in the wake of something that incomprehensible. Eventually though, the unknown becomes expected and, if you encounter it enough, familiar. A looming mass of flesh pushing from the sea can be a comfort, not a horror, if you see it often enough.

Living in L—— I did, we all did. If you want to be more than a tourist in a seaside town you have to just get used to some things. The smell of the day’s catch that city folk wrinkle their nose at when it drifts to their wrought iron patio tables at the tourist restaurants, the way a house ages before its time, salt-crusted shingles and sand-scarred plexi windbreaks, grocery stores filled with cans and dry goods, the only affordable fruit the small hardy things that don’t need to be trucked over the mountains. Your habits change, your recipes change, you learn not to look the beast in the eye when it decides to wild on the cliffs, the same way you do with the neighbour’s wretched little near-sighted dog who can’t recognise anybody until they’re close enough to smell.

And I wanted to be more than a tourist. I had as much right as anybody to settle there, since I’d grown up just on the other side of the range that kept L—— from getting any bigger than the mid-sized town it was. Small as it was, there were a half-dozen motels, a handful of bed and breakfasts, and even one actual hotel with a lobby and rooms linked by carpeted hallways instead of fenced bits of sidewalk. Even in the winter, there were a wealth of stores to support the tourist season. Milk might cost twice as much but I could walk a few blocks to buy it rather than drive twenty minutes or more. It was, for me, a city.

There was a nice café in walking distance as well. And I mean the kind of nice where, when summer is done you can find townies sitting comfortably, having morning coffee or a sandwich lunch, enjoying pastries and specials off-menu in the warm centre of the shop while the spill-over wing to the side waited the rainy season empty, chairs upended on four-tops.

Determined to become a known entity, my first winter there I visited the café three times a week, always on the same days and ordering the same handful of simple things. It pushed the limits of my wallet but the rainy Wednesday I walked in and saw my order already up I knew I’d become a regular and the expense felt worth it.

It was the next year, my face now familiar through the seasons as the person who owned the cottage with the green trim down past the sculpture park, that I was allowed to graduate from regular to townie. The girl behind the counter brought me my bowl of thick chowder with extra crackers—I like my soups to be practically solid—and gently set beside it a small plate with some sort of empanada steaming soft and lonely in the centre of the dish. I say empanada but that was just my first impression. It was as much a pasty or a karipap, a flaky and golden-brown circle of crust folded over and sealed prettily along the edge with a fork-pressed twist. I looked up at her while I crushed the crackers in their packets, curious.

She told me that it was on the house and she thought I might like to try something new, calling it a “seasonal special.” I let it cool to a safer temperature while making inroads on my chowder. The pastry was sealed perfectly, no leaking gravy giving me a clue as to the contents.

When it felt safe to pick up, I did, gingerly, my fingers sending a cascade of buttery flakes onto the plate. I love empanadas or, more truly, any culture’s hand pies. That all humans have, at some point, decided to wrap their favourite starches around fillings for crunchy treats on the go is something beautiful to me. Eagerly, but carefully, I took a bite and was rewarded for my earlier patience by a filling that was hot but no longer the searing temperature of savoury lava. With all hand pies it’s the second bite that really tells you what it’s all about. There was a rich oiliness of meat that surprised me, having become accustomed to the lighter textures of the type of fish found in local waters. It was paired with something dustily herbaceous, and I guessed it was a blend of the wild sage and mint that competed for what dirt they could wrest from the razor-sharp sea grass. But, other than that, this was very much a meat that relied on its own juices, salt, and time for flavour.

Looking into the empanada as I chewed, admiring the proportion of gravy to meat, I saw it was the kind of dark flesh that chars almost purple-black, bordering a rich red. Despite the clear presence of those richly-tinted myoglobin proteins there was undeniably the flavour of the sea to it. I liked it very much and spent the rest of my meal alternating between my chowder and the pastry, ending up full enough that I grabbed a coffee to keep me from a post-meal nap.

In my satiated bliss I forgot to ask the server what the meat was from. As I walked past the sculpture park to my cottage with the green trim I resolved to remember to inquire on my next visit—and to possibly see what other seasonal specials were now available to me.

The coffee, sugary as it was—made with the small café’s dedication to its syrup collection—was enough to keep me going not only past my body’s desire for a siesta but into the parts of the night that are rightly the next day. When I finally let myself lay down, I was certain I’d see the sun rise but almost immediately slipped into dreams. And with them, I saw the beast for the first time.

There are things I can’t tell you and things I won’t tell you, for my safety and for yours, respectively. I’d thought myself inured to the gut-dropping realisation of how small humans are against the deep and the things that dwell there. As I’ve said, this coast and its waters were as much home to me as if I’d been raised there. Normally, confronted with expanse beyond easy comprehension, at the most I feel a momentary doubling as if a quick measure were being taken, a comparison. And, on realising that I am but a mote in the eye of the sea I move on easily.

Thrown as I was into this apparent dream there was no subconscious preparation, and my reaction proved my confidence a liar. I’ve already described my initial and subsequent reactions to the beast and won’t bore you with them again, but I do want to impress that even semi-prepared with a life familiar to the unknowable I was humbled. I woke with my alarm at my usual time feeling hollowed out, my mind unable to piece together what I’d seen.

Even the most core-shaking dreams can only haunt you for so long and, despite a sharpness to the edges of the world that I could (and did) associate with too much coffee, my day passed easily. I did find myself staying up a bit later than I often preferred, not afraid to go to sleep but not eager to either. But, eventually, sleep I did and no dreams found me there.

The next day was another one for visiting the café, and this time my bowl of chowder was accompanied by g?i cu?n and a shallow dish of dipping sauce. Like all summer rolls the thin rice paper skin showed the contents as easily as that of a glass frog. I identified those familiar local vegetables that grew hardy in my kitchen garden, and thin strips of the same rich meat that had filled the empanada. Tasting the sauce with a fingertip I identified the familiar sweet-salt of hoisin, which seemed like the perfect accompaniment.

As before, I made inroads on my soup before delving into the local specialty. A mix of corn from cans and fish from the day’s catch, the café’s chowder is a reliable and filling dish with an almost indulgent creaminess that slides luxuriously around flaking meat and sweet bursts of corn. Thickened with crackers added at the table, it becomes the kind of meal on a spoon that can sustain a body until a late supper.

In contrast, the g?i cu?n was a light thing, refreshingly cold, the vegetables within crisp, the delicate skin of the roll barely containing the filling and giving way easily under teeth and tongue, the mingled meat and greens spilling across the tastebuds. That rich, dark red meat played well with winter vegetables, their marriage made all the better when dipped in hoisin. I asked for another when the server came by with my regular coffee to-go, and she demurred at first—like all the specials the summer rolls were made in limited quantities, just enough for the café’s regulars. I let her know I understood but after I’d stood to gather my things she came up with a small paper bag and held it out, smiling.

It turned out to contain two summer rolls and, as it was a Friday, I set them in my fridge to savour over the weekend.

The day wound on in a regular fashion. This time my to-go drink was a plain house coffee, poured from the same carafe that filled diner cups with the sweet-burnt perpetual stew of brew that is anathema to any coffee connoisseur but which I find comforting and nostalgic when lightened with one too many single-serve creamer containers. As my regular bedtime approached, I found myself eagerly anticipating my dreams, despite the initial horror that still wrapped down my spine and through my guts with the cold slap of kelp.

Despite the coursing spark of excitement running parallel to that cold chill, I fell asleep easily and found myself once more on the cliff, once more beholding the beast. Despite my best efforts, I did not comport myself with more acceptance or dignity than our first meeting. I woke to the soft brush of winter light painting empty colour across my room, feeling disappointed with myself. The malaise of failure hung over me through the morning, compounded by seeing the bag from the diner in my fridge while preparing breakfast.

I took myself and my recriminations to the beach, which was a pleasant stroll down the street and on through the bush. There were several better-built beach access points for tourists, but if it wasn’t raining there was little need for wooden steps to the sand when decades of feet had beaten an easy track along property lines and between the trees. It was a more pleasant way to encounter the ocean, watching more and more sand mounding up below shrub and tree, supplanting the rich earth that allowed some plants to grow surprisingly well even as the elements did their best to stunt them.

The sheer pleasure of the winter wind pushing your body along the beach, like a cold but firm hand, can focus your thoughts to little else than the experience of existing there beside the water. Sand and salt in your teeth, the weak tea of winter sun magnified against the water and pale sand so that you must squint or be blinded, you find your senses filled in a way that slows circuitous thought until it can be straightened and followed.

My own worries disappeared as they arrived, mirroring my footprints filling up with water and smoothing themselves out as I walked. Perhaps I was unworthy, to cower to cringe as I did. But worthiness can be earned, the same as I was able to prove myself a member of the community to the town itself. I did not arrive in town expecting to be heralded as a lost son come home. I had to earn the right to be given a nod hello, for advice to be given at the nursery, for directions to the hidden hiking path that afforded a breathtaking view and a source of sweet water trickling between rocks on its way to the ocean. And, of course, I had to earn the right for this newest blessing—to be given access to the truth of the town.

Proving myself worthy of this gift was another thing to be earned. As much work as you do in curbing pride, you will again and again have to pull up the invasive plant of ego that threatens the life of good sense as thoroughly as English ivy or Himalayan blackberry. And, like those plants, it can, in turns burn you as it is cut away or tempt you with transient sweetness as an exchange for being left alone.

Fortified with these thoughts, I returned home and made myself a dish to accompany one of my leftover g?i cu?n. While the rice cooker perfumed the kitchen with the florals of basmati, I put together a simple peanut sauce, pulsing the roasted legumes with sesame seeds to meal while the coconut milk and curry reduced over heat on the stove. Once everything was combined, with fish sauce, local honey, and my personal favourite spices, my mouth was watering in anticipation.

There is nothing so simultaneously simple and satisfying as a sauce over fluffy rice. The slippery, glutinous gravy of western-style chow yuk, toothy comfort foods like tuna rice, the full-mouth nostalgia of localised favourites like mole or gochujang, or even the bachelor tradition of a can of chili, rice is the perfect friend to any possible mix-in.

I was no stranger to the magazine-simple three-step peanut sauce that only asks for creamy peanut butter from a jar, but my cupboards and my desire supported a more classic preparation. And I felt that the summer roll, and the implications of it, deserved the care. Even sat overnight in the fridge, it was as good as fresh, if not slightly better thanks to a day’s worth of flavours melding within the softening skin of the rice paper wrap. It paired perfectly with bites of saucy rice, which I washed down with the cloudy cider a neighbour had sold me. Like many people in L——, the wooded streets were full of small business owners who supplemented the whim of seasonal income by turning their hand to tradecraft. That bottle of fresh-pressed cider was one of a case that had been part of a deal made with a farm on the other side of the mountain range. Barter can’t pay the electric bill, but it can soften a price in a way that pleases both sides.

Washing up after my meal, I let my mind run lazily over the ways I’d found myself folded into this economy of partial trade. I didn’t have much to offer myself, but there always needs to be someone ready to turn the extra goods into folding cash and my cupboards that winter were rich with the results. Flakes of sea salt that were too low grade for restaurants but the right quality to sell to a cousin who then made their own small profit. Myrtlewood utensils with flaws in the handles that only showed up on shelves in the off season, at a discount. Salsa blends that hadn’t been a hit during the last spring’s farmer’s markets.

I found comfort in thinking of how the threads between myself and the town wove more tightly as time ticked on and I could feel them tightening slowly and inexorably, their weight as much a comfort as the satiation of a warm lunch. I can confess that my mind was not fully occupied by my various Saturday activities, knowing as I did what the night would bring.

As I finally lay down to sleep, I prepared myself for disappointment. To assume one could know the unknowable was a level of pride I must disdain. Slipping into sleep, I felt that I had made a sort of peace with my upcoming inevitable failure. This, I found, was in itself a type of pride.

When you confront the shifting cat’s cradle of terrible possibility that halos an ancient beast of the sea, you may be reminded of Christ’s crown of thorns, the artful blood and symbol of pain seen every year in passion processions. You may be forgiven this embarrassing cultural mistranslation, though you’ll not find time to dwell on the gaffe as the fractal of it slices you cleanly into quivering pieces. You can be assured there is no pain and you find yourself somehow whole, but instead the aching memory of pain, of every kind of pain, echoes through your nerves with the pulse of hangover. Other things will happen as well, while also not happening, and the truth of both will slowly pull you to strings. The eternity of it, the echo of it, will fill your marrow when you wake.

I did not overcome my pride, nor my fear of failure that weekend. Nor for many weeks after. If you’ve ever had a particularly bad cold, the kind that changes how you breathe, you’re familiar with how your state of being becomes “somebody who is sick.” You can’t fully remember what it was like before you took ill, what it is like for your lungs to do their job quietly. You are only able to eat between gulps of air denied you by your nostrils. This becomes your identity so fully that you aren’t aware of the progress of healing that is happening silently within your body.

Then one day, you wake up and you are breathing easily. You may not be at 100%, but the cold has left you and it’s the body equivalent of tidying up after a particularly raucous party.

And so, for me, one day I found myself on that now familiar cliff—which was not a cliff—and I beheld the horror towering above me, spilling around me, filling my veins. And the beauty of it, which I realised had been tapping around the edges of my perception since well before my unworthy eyes had first fallen on the beast itself, it consumed me as fully as any of the terror had previously. I’m not ashamed to say I wept. Nor am I ashamed to admit I backslid, that it took many more meetings, alone and with others, to allow myself to accept its truth. But nothing worth the effort comes easily. A new recipe requires practise and patience and allowing for failure, but when you finally perfect the dish, you can taste the time put into learning it, allowing it to change you. And my soul, my self, was no different, when I joyfully stepped into the loving mouth of my creator.

Last year I participated in an “Ominous October” writing challenge, to write a ~5k story around a theme a week of October. I only got the first two weeks done (because I had other creative projects going on), but I enjoyed it. Here’s my story for the theme “Undead / Strange Town.”

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Everything was better once the mill burned down, of course. For whatever one’s idea of better was, anyway. But the point was, when that final abandoned shell was alight, the flames reflecting on the surprisingly calm faces of the residents gathered around the unexpected autumnal bonfire, it felt like the last page of a book turned, cover snapped close with finality. Without a mill, they weren’t a mill town any more, were they? The path was wide open for a New Town Identity, something they’d been attempting for a decade with the grim determination of an ex-quarterback who’d switched college majors three times over six years and found himself at forty with two marriages behind him. Because really, what was a town without a gimmick?

Up the highway, quite a bit up, was a Dairy Town. Now there’s a great thing for a town to be. You’ve got cheese, ice cream, every shop on the three-block main street dressed up quaint effigies of holsteins for Halloween in thematic outfits, while scattered through the town itself were bronze bulls of a different sort, the kind painted by local artisans to add photo-op colour to historic points of interest. They had a great online presence and a nice bit of tourism from the folks travelling through who realised that they might as well stop to water and walk around in a place that also gave out free cheese samples.

Down the highway, that was a College Town. The place that used to be a mill town was bracketed by College Towns, actually, but it did just go to prove that whatever your Town Identity was, it didn’t have to be unique. As it was, each of those college towns was its own sort of college town. You had the hippies and farmers and people who were determined to talk to dolphins at one, and the kids who liked to play with their chemistry sets a bit too much, or who somehow found running fulfilling at the other. So the place that used to be the mill town really had their pick of possibilities. And with the mill gone, so conveniently, they could now freely choose what to become.

The problem was, of course, that even with the mill gone the place was still full of ghosts. Most anywhere is, to be honest, but in a town that had been focused on an industry quite well known for its rather intense selection of tools, not to mention the way the land to grow all those trees had been got in the first place, the ghosts were pretty thick on the ground. Or air. Ether. One couldn’t walk the charming main street (four blocks long, due to how the highway split the town, thank you very much) without slogging through the miasma of lives long past. It added a rather negative vibe to the annual harvest festival—which was in summer, and full of summer fruits and vegetables, none of that dark winter-welcoming nonsense, thank you. It’s hard enough to stuff oneself on strawberry shortcake and zucchini noodles in the blare of wet June sun as it is, but doing it under the soul-weighing stare of several unnamed spectres can turn the stomach.

Which, of course, is not particularly great for the tourism.

After the mill burned down and the town felt it could steadily start down the path of claiming a new identity, the first tack they attempted was “recreation.” There were trees! And paths! And something like a pond and river that hadn’t flooded its banks in decades at this point—only the old-timers really remembered the smug satisfaction of the torn-away floating docks and pleasure boats, the only reminder of frivolously spent money a waterline smudged evenly well above head-height on every half-million-dollar manse that had been built too close to the riverbank. So, there was plenty of nature to recreate in. Especially after the town itself re-created a goodly bit of it, which included a makeover of one of the more rural parks that had all the subtlety of a desperate trophy wife remortgaging her youth under the knife.

The benefit of recreation, the former mill town figured, was that one didn’t need to have the town explicitly as the goal, the end-point of whatever RV-charioted quest a person was going on. Straddling the highway as it was, something that had been to its benefit in the old log-hauling days but now served only to make it a righteous pain to get from one side of the town to the other, it made for a nice little stop on the way. Why not stop for an extra night under the now thinned-out shade of trees that had outlived the logging? While you’re here sample the local cuisine, which was not much to speak of yet but a stack of small business grants sat tidy on the desk of the Chamber of Commerce, ready to serve.

If you’re just pausing on the way, not making the town your destination, then the ghosts aren’t quite as noticeable. They haven’t time to sink in, catch in your hair like the bitter liquor smell of campfire smoke. Right as one is about to get the jeebies, if not the heebies, about the undeniable presence of the unsettled dead, it’s time to roll the awning up, dump the black tank, secure the loose items on bungee-corded shelves, and hop back onto the highway that so conveniently rolls right past your temporary turn-off. You won’t remember the ghosts, some miles down the road. You won’t remember much of the town itself either, which is fine. The money you left behind doesn’t need anybody remembering, as long as the checks clear.

If you live in the town, there is no denying the ghosts, is the thing. They remain quite undeniable.

The place that used to be a mill town did try its best to deny them, focused as they were on re-sculpting their selves into a semblance of a Nice Town To Stop In For A Night. There were towns that were Ghost Towns, the kind that have a nicely sized, rosy-cheeked population happy to strut around in cowboy couture for the tourist, play-acting an era that more or less existed before a boom went bust. And, of course, there were the actual ghost towns, the ones that really are quite empty, buildings shuttered, windows soaped, the mail delivered begrudgingly to the single municipal building housing an employee only because the retirement age keeps rising. Having come a bit too close to the actuality of a ghost town between the mill closing down and its convenient collapse into ash thirty years later, the whole concept was just too close for comfort for the Chamber of Commerce.

The populace of the town wasn’t quite as strident in their denial, being as they were rather more preoccupied with the day-to-day and less so with Five Year Plans and Tourism Initiatives. You couldn’t harvest a grass field without the combine cutting down a score of wafting, wandering spirits, though the process seemed to affect them as much as if one took a pair of scissors to a blob of mercury. They’d coalesce, seemingly no worse for the wear, whatever sticky gobbets of soul-stuff that had been caught up in blades lazing its way back to reform with the rest that had scattered among the seeds. The filberts weren’t free of ghosts either, they’d fall from the trees right along with the nuts as the shakers throttled the sturdy trunks. Others would get swept up and sifted out with the leaf litter. Very few ever made it as far as the nutcrackers, thanks to the local orchards modifying their sorting machines to strain out spirits.

It was disconcerting for the harvesters, but as a town that relied less on seasonal workers and more on a centuries-stratified system of social caste, it was a discomfort easily overridden through practise. Nobody in the far-flung states that planted grass seed to staunch erosion (often caused by logging, in a lovely sort of karmic loop) found foreign phantoms popping up with the shoots, nor did any ghosts gum up distant candy machines, or get enrobed in chocolate on their way to joining a discount Valentine assortment. As none of it seemed to affect any of the harvests themselves, the whole thing was easy enough to shrug off. It was like sparrows in seed barns, you did what you could to keep them out and dealt with what ones got in.

The ghosts were so undeniable that people causally built their life around them like a squeaky stair, but like the self-same stair, they were so ingrained into the daily life that what a stranger would do when confronted with this invisible issue never occurred to them. The Chamber could deny the ghosts, the recreators in their rented RVs could forget, but any outsider spending a sizeable chunk of time in the town would step right on the stair, sending it squealing. Maybe it’s apocryphal but the concept of the stranger stepping into the saloon, their dusty boots sounding a creak on the dry and tired floorboards that causes everyone to turn in worry—that’s because squeaky stairs and creaking boards were purposefully built-in. How better to know an outsider than having the house itself tattle on the trespasser?

It makes one wonder about the kinds of house rennos that silence all squeaks, shore up and square up all sloping walls that were set in place by a handful of folks piecing together a home from a Sears catalogue in an outsized premonition of the future’s flat pack furniture. It gives all the energy of a thriller heroine trying to alert the daring protagonist that “it’s a trap!” her words muffled by duct tape that one hopes is from a special theatre company that doesn’t hurt when ripped free.

When the town decided to branch out beyond recreation and began courting the addition of a new employer in the hospital industry, things started to get strange. Living in the town, staying within it for a couple of seasons, exposed outsiders not only to the breadth of the ghosts but the spaces the local population made around the ghosts as a matter of habit. Which wasn’t quite the fit one would hope for when trying to incite a college board to build a lovely brick satellite campus on the outskirts, next to the town hospital.

Why such a small town would even have a hospital is a surprise, actually. Other towns of comparative size relied on the helicopter closeness of nearby cities. It wasn’t as if the closest town was that far by highway (which, remember, split the town neatly in two and was quite easy to access). Once one is rural enough, thirty minutes is nothing, that’s about the standard just to get overpriced milk from a shop that doesn’t specialise in smokes and lotto. But thirty minutes, when you’ve got people working with saws and threshers and all the sharp implements that chew up nature and spit out building blocks, that’s enough time for things to go rather wrong. So, of course the town had a hospital. And a rather decent one as well! Decent enough it made sense for a medical college to break ground on a new campus, what a lovely thing, a win for all. The college could claim the prestige of expanding, the town could add a rotating drip of residents with a bit more money to spend, and the students and staff itself could practise medicine then spend their precious off-hours in the second growth forest so carefully tailored for recreation. A particularly nice option for those who weren’t quite cut out for the city. Except, again, for the ghosts.

Doctors aren’t baseball players, they haven’t room in their lives for casual superstition. Particularly superstition that seemed to have little predictable pattern, as one did need to breathe the full year of the seasons to start to see the shape of it. Only dipping into the freshly painted bars rebranded as pubs and added overly complicated burgers on weekends, they’d be confused by things like like open pockets in an otherwise thick weekend crowd, jukeboxes loaded with playlists nobody breathing had selected, or bar rags kept in briny buckets that rimmed the tables with like a margarita glass thanks to regular wipe-downs between customers (a favourite trick of all eateries in town for ensuring the only souls occupying a four-top had butts to warm the seat). If they bothered to ask, if a local bothered to answer, if the blossoming medical professional bothered to listen to the consonant-dropping drawl, the answer still wouldn’t have offered them a satisfactory explanation.

It wasn’t as if the town had taken the traditional path of creating a divide of tourists and townies. The presence of tourist season is a heady mix of end of the school year exam rush, harvest season but the harvest is other people’s dollars, an injection of new blood that stays long enough to observe like a migration of exotic butterflies, something that would be annoying to deal with on the daily but are fun enough for the short time they stay. These baby doctors, they were staying for months and months at a go. The caste stratification of the town, as previously mentioned, was as worn in as an old mattress that caved in at the centre—not comfortable, but familiar and difficult to get out of. What happened with this sparkling satellite campus was that it stacked a new class smack on top of the old.

It turned out that not only did this new class of people, with money to spend and little time for the near-monthly holiday parades of the (four block long!) main street, did not mesh well with the already extant populace, but they also did not mesh well with the ghosts. You’d think, working at the hospital as they did, that the whole lot would be familiar enough with ghosts, that they’d be used to running their rounds while wading through a spiritual swamp, thick and steamy with (un)life. They were, it turned out, rather not. And, as students who had invested quite a bit of money in being students and who had the horrifically packed schedules that higher learning deems the correct way to run people through the laundry press of education (because what better way to create a class of caring medical professionals than churning them through the kind of days that could be considered a type of psychological retrofitting designed to strip compassion and empathy for others until a body was honed to only survive and prescribe?), it really came down to one simple thing. They hadn’t any time for ghosts. They didn’t have the time, nor want to make the room in their schedules or lives, for the ghosts that haunted the streets and shops, parks and populace.

It had been so long since anyone had acted as though the ghosts weren’t even there that the town’s residents, both ethereal and physical, were quite taken by surprise. It took the first full semester after the ribbon cutting at the shiny new satellite school, with its fresh baby trees and under-grown local flower bushes barely visible against the clean white concrete and classic red brick, before anyone quite realised what was happening. The ghosts were agitated. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce was satiated. The dual-pronged approach of Recreation and College Town put their piggy bank to a place where they could order new banners (at cost from the local sign shop) for the summer harvest festival. Actual twenty-footers, that could stretch nearly across the two lanes of main street, printed nice and bright. There were other nice things they threw into their shopping basket, most of which were signage-related, though they did also buy a new copier-printer. Fat and happy as a pig before slaughter, the Chamber waved away the inquiries that had begun trickling in from local businesspeople regarding the ghosts.

What ghosts, they said, despite their lives being as shaped around the spirits as anyone else in town. What problems with the new residents, they asked, concerned that the little thing about the quality of some of the outlying area’s well water had reached the delicate shell ears of the medically-inclined new members of town. Everyone had known the Chamber wouldn’t be a helpful place to turn but they’d all felt it was best to try the official channels first. Due diligence, after all, is sometimes worth the effort. Like a person calling to see what is wrong with their router box and being told to turn the device off and back on again, it was worth trying even though one knew the result would be the same as if they’d been asked to spin in a circle three times widdershins.

With their due diligence done, the town was now free to find their own solution. Not the whole town, of course, even at the cosy population of a cool dozen times one thousand they were too big to truly do a thing en masse. As it was, quite a lot of that census included the people who didn’t live in the town proper and had quite enough of their own problems going on. So, the folks who had the time and the gumption got themselves together, at one of those places that is sort of a meeting club, sort of a bar, the type of place with the tinsel backdrop on a stage that’s a bare eight inches higher than the rest of the floor. You see a lot of old man bands on that kind of stage, folks who don’t have it in them to be bar bands but do like to get together and sing rock standards. That kind of place. Always named after some sort of animal, or with an animal for a mascot, their signs a mishmash of letters making an unmemorizable acronym. They’re good places to meet, especially if you want to be sure no outsiders will wander in. Because who goes to places like that except for the club members and folks who’ve rented the space for an event?

And they schemed. Well, they got close to scheming. The first time the invested members of the town got together they didn’t even plan, they sort of just hashed out what was going on, comparing notes like students a week before exams. Well, you’ve got that answer but my notes say this, they can’t both be right? Comparing observations and just getting the lay of the land. The land lay as thus: they did quite like the infusion of money so expertly inserted into the town from the baby doctors, that was a fact. It wasn’t just the Chamber that had made a good time of it. They couldn’t treat this new, ghost-ignorant class like the unwanted beaux of a single mother in a children’s cable romantic comedy and scare them off. All that said, it didn’t feel right for the ghosts to be so ignored. Or more, it didn’t feel right for how the town felt about the ghosts to be ignored. A person not in it could say that the town itself ignored the ghosts and they’d be right but also quite wrong, as one doesn’t make that level of effort to work within the bounds of a thing that one is ignoring. It’s the squeaky floorboard situation again, a purposeful shape made around a thing that acknowledges its existence while also choosing not to interact with it.

The second time the group got together—something that was easier than expected, because it was a large enough crowd of folks that one would expect schedules to misalign like a bad bite—the second time they started to sketch a plan. It wasn’t a very good plan, because no first plan holds up in the light of day, withering to dust like a movie vampire staked through the heart by logic. But they kept getting together and planning and finally scheming and eventually, the shape of a Good Plan started to form. Much like the ghosts themselves, who seemed to have changed their schedules to include these get-togethers and were showing up in larger and larger numbers each time but seemed satisfied enough with being gently herded onto the stage and out of the way of everyone else, the shape wasn’t incredibly solid but it was there and undeniable.

The primary problem that every previous plan had was: even if they got this batch of burgeoning medical professionals to acknowledge that the town had ghosts and there were accepted ways to deal with them, the school year would end, or residencies would change and then there’d be a whole new crop of well-educated idiots who’d need to be trained all over again. Any solution had to have a perpetuality to it, something that could keep puffing along on its own momentum eventually. As the town had well-proved, once a system had enough momentum, it slotted into life like a good pair of glasses, something you could forget existed but couldn’t live without.

The town historian had died the previous year. Nobody had spotted his ghost among the floating masses, but also nobody was particularly sure what the process was, as some townsfolk you saw again and some you didn’t. But of all people to join the haunting host, the man who’d run the tiny town museum would be highly likely to find his way back. And, if folklore (not the town’s folklore, just the general sort of thing one picks up out of the air like a radio signal), was correct, unfinished business had a large part in tying a spirit to a place. The town historian had left behind an estimated thirty linear feet of unsorted archives, which was a very rough estimation because the file boxes were scattered around his modest one bedroom, with more piled on various empty flat surfaces across dining room, living room, bedroom and, unfortunately, bathroom.

Some celebratory town birthday was coming up, one of those round numbers that end in a zero or a five. The tiny historical museum had spent the last year putting the more upsetting old taxidermies into heavily mothballed storage, replacing them with photographable dioramas and those informative mini-games that are the keystone of any all-ages educational facility. Due to the historian’s death, they’d also found themselves having to process all those linear feet, a task that had been particularly onerous due to them having only just finished processing what they thought were all the backlogs of previous historians and donors. They’d asked him, the dead historian (when he wasn’t yet dead) if there was anything at his house maybe, it seemed like there were gaps maybe, in the boxes they were going through. The dead historian had waved a hand at them, neither confirming nor denying and mostly implying that he’d get to it. Which, of course, he did not because Death got to him first.

A long-planned part of the birthday extravaganza was that all the old buildings, the ones that had been around notable amounts of time, would be getting tidy little plaques about their historical value. The more interesting ones would also have informative displays installed, in some sort of hope that the town populace would absorb the museum’s enthusiasm about history through proximity to educational signage. A nicely-designed pamphlet was due to be sent to the printers with a list of all these buildings of note, the kind of thing made with medium-grade paper and astringent smelling ink that could be purchased for a little bit more than you’d like to spend from the counter at the museum. During the week-long celebration, photocopies of the relevant individual pages would be available at each of these historic locations, the kind of thing somebody picks up and folds to put in their pocket or purse before they forget about it entirely.

It had been, until the problem with the medical students, a bit of a battle as to whether the hospital was old enough to be counted among the historic buildings. Maybe, some had argued, in five years it and other buildings of borderline eminence could be inducted. After gatherings in the dimly lit meeting club—where the slowly growing crowd of ghosts on stage were generating enough glow that they lit up the tinsel backdrop as though it were sparkling seaweed in the ocean’s depths, sending disco droplets of light over the concerned faces of townsfolk—it was decided that the hospital was old enough. It was quite special, after all, for a town so relatively small to have such a large hospital. Especially a large enough hospital to attract something as important as a satellite medical campus.

With everything decided, the nicely-designed pamphlets had small adjustments made and were sent off to the printer. The sign shop owner, who would have been having a banner (ha, ha) year if it hadn’t been for the Chamber and Rotary Club’s constant discounts, pulled out substrates that nobody in town had ever ordered, due to their expense and possible lack of taste or dignity. They were, actually, a very good sign maker, despite the clip art logos from clients they found themselves working with. Parade plans were solidified and announcements about street closures were published in the weekly paper nobody ever read. The secretary of the hospital director had practised his signature over the years due to really being more of an administrative assistant (despite that title rarely being in use in the modern age as it encouraged higher pay and prevented coffee from being made), so securing last-minute permission for new instalments in the lobby and other key places around the campus was as quick as the click of a pen.

In the week leading up to the town’s big birthday bash, even the most aloof baby doctors couldn’t ignore the preparations. Signs warning of roads being closed and parking abbreviated for the parade popped up around all their favourite spots to lunch, flyers were stuck under the windscreen wipers of the kind of cars that didn’t have a dealer around for a hundred miles. All the hip little pubs had placards about the upcoming specials to tempt the palate, with enigmatic titles like “Miller’s Mighty Meal,” “Strawberry Summer Surprise” and “Log Cabin Lumpia.” Every old building around town bloomed with badges, hidden until the day of the event beneath little squares of white, as though the streets had suddenly filled with fourth-grade teachers who’d found a good deal on novelty ghost brooches and decided the uneasy undead were the safest celebratory accessories. 

The hospital itself seemed to be the central source of imminent revelations, the lobby now the proud owner of a large something that sat under a heavy painter’s drop, bracketed by empty easels that would presumably display information about whatever it was that sat beneath the sheet. The building itself not only had a yet-to-be-revealed badge at the front, but another at the back, right at eye height to the door most of the medical students used when passing between the fresh new campus and the place they practised their learning. There was even a plinth on the path between the buildings, newly installed with mud squeezing up through the grass around it, though it sat uncovered and empty.

The townsfolk were nervous, both the good kind one always is before a big event finally exhales and releases all the plans one has made into the air to come together as fate and planning have made it and the more uneasy kind when one has made a bet but is not certain of the odds. The ghosts, for their part, seemed mostly unaffected by all the preparations, though they did appear in such a volume they could barely be contained to the club stage during the last meeting of the conspirators.

When the day came, it came rather drizzly, which was standard for the season (or any season, really), but the kind that promised a solid 70% chance of sunshine once the morning got over itself. This was no bother to the residents, who were used to that sort of thing, and who appreciated the time to themselves to go about finishing their preparations. The building badges were revealed, the little museum unloaded a box of freshly printed pamphlets into the wooden rack at their information counter, every participating business pulled out the stack of Interesting History Flyers for their building, the restaurant openers swapped out the menu cards for happy hour specials for those themed to the event, and anyone involved in the parade hissed around on their walkies, getting floats in line.

The sun came out as the clock ticked over for the parade to begin, which also happened to be lunch hour for baby doctors, enjoying their pint on sidewalk patios while deciding whether or not the new specials were worth a go. They found themselves far more integrated into the populace than they tended to allow, as anyone who hadn’t claimed a space at the edges of the main road were crowded onto the sidewalk, though they did so in a way that left easy gaps for anyone in outdoor seating to see through. The soon-to-be medical professionals appreciated this. Although much of the town’s displays could be considered provincial, they were notably good at parades. First, announced in the semaphore of the colour guard, came the high school band, their brass honking in that way that makes one almost appreciate Sousa. They were followed by the nervous clopping of the equestrian team, who were doing an admirable job reassuring their steeds when the flutes hit a note flat. 

Then, after the swift machinations of people with brooms and dustpans clearing the road, some charming old cars with banners stuck on to celebrate various clubs, tossing candy to the packed crowds. The booming sirens of emergency vehicles on their day off could be heard echoing off the two-story facades of the side streets as they lined up to trundle down the four-block main street, surrounded by the swarms of worker bees in their ambulance blues and firehouse reds. Then, the high pony tails and sparkling suits of the high school dance team as a choreographed sea buoying a small float blasting something indecipherable while a separate drama played out on its tiny mobile stage—something that had the girls covered in winding sheets that contrasted strangely with on-the-beat hip pops. This was the harbinger of the business floats, which didn’t pass out anything more than penny candy and slightly off-cut coupons. They rolled along like a mobile Bayeux tapestry, telling a heroic version of the town’s birth and growth. The theme first spotted on the dance team’s float continued through the business floats, floating white spectres slipping around the smiling, waving, bastions of Business. Several of the baby doctors checked their phones that the date was, in fact, some time in late spring, and not anywhere close to a more appropriate autumn.

Everyone expected the children’s floats next, themed costumes and decorated bikes, determined parents pushing prams done up to look like combines, but in their place rolled an indefinable mass of somethings. There were heads and hollow eyes and a certain basement dampness, the lot of them weaving patterns like a jacquard loom as they made their way down the four-block main street. They were, in such a mass, heralded as they had been by the previous floats, undeniably ghosts. As with the horses, a group of people followed, spreading salt as they went in the same easy patterns they spread seed. Crunching the crystals behind them came the children, none of whom seemed to care a whit that close ahead lay the unmistakable and familiar spectres of death.

Of course, not all the baby doctors were lunching during parade time, as some had drawn the short straws when it came to rotation. For them, and for all the doctors who would come after, there was the new diorama in the hospital lobby, a tidy little miniature of the hospital itself, like a homunculus awaiting its own birth. As one walked around the display, different eras of the hospital revealed themselves, a time lapse controlled by one’s feet. It was a fascinating and charming jewel of a sculpture, created thanks to the singular talent of the bartender at the meeting club, who had turned skills gained through his passion for miniature trains to the cause. What was most notable, beside the realness of each brick and bush, were the semi-transparent figures floating millimetres above the tiny turf. A scrolling brass plate at the front of the diorama read “In celebration of our residents, living and dead” which was the kind of sentiment one was used to enough in hospital memorial sculpture, though it most notably came minus actual imagery of ghosts.

It was a classy and subtle bit of work, but the plinth along the path out back, where nobody but the medical students went, was not. Empty until the day, it was now the stage for a ghost, who seemed quite satisfied to simply stand there, staring at all who passed.

After the celebration week ended and the Birthday Bash specials had been mercifully retired, tinsel and banners removed from lamp poles, the ghost still stood on the plinth between the sparkling new Satellite Campus and the hospital. It perhaps wasn’t the same ghost, as none of the baby doctors quite had the eye to tell them apart yet. But there was always a ghost, no matter the time of day. And one couldn’t cut across the grass to take the long way, as the lawn that had been put in after the new construction hadn’t much of a root mat and a step off the path meant mud up to the ankle, if the weather had been wet enough.

In the end, the ghosts were undeniable. For everyone.

Last year I participated in an “Ominous October” writing challenge, to write a ~5k story around a theme a week of October. I only got the first two weeks done (because I had other creative projects going on), but I enjoyed it. Here’s my story for the theme “Changeling / Curse.”

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The scene was one that Mol was intimately familiar with thanks to numerous films and shows. A basement of a church or a rec centre, or whatever kind of public-enough place that had a side entrance to a big, rentable room. Sometimes the room had a bare concrete floor, sometimes the room had that sad speckled industrial carpet with pile of all of a quarter-inch, the barest layer of softness that did little to dampen sound or blunt a fall. There was always a table off to the side with a big ancient coffee urn, or a couple of those brown-paperboard containers like caffeinated box wine. There would be some sort of carb, doughnuts freshly picked up from the nearest 24-hour place hopefully and not sitting in a sad little kitchenette since noon. Or there could be those packets of black and white sandwich cookies slid out from their neat rows onto a platter, like what one saw at small town banks. There would be a circle of chairs, the folding kind. The walls would hold informational and motivational posters for whatever the space did during the day, their cherry candy colours washed green in the hum of the fluorescent banks.

Despite the entire space looking exactly as she’d pictured it, with any variances from her memory only heightening the familiarity, Mol stopped dead as she crossed the door, uncertain that she’d come to the right place. A body bumped her from behind, which was expected if one was going to freeze up in the centre of a doorway. Murmuring apologetic noises, Mol shuffled aside, crossing the threshold. An older lady—at least, older than Mol—patted her arm as she passed, in two gentle pats conveying a full sentence about how “we’ve all been there, dearie, no worries.”

Mol watched the woman beeline to the coffee (which was in a press pot decorated in delicate florals, another one in plaid waiting behind as backup), pour a cup and add an unsettling amount of powdered whitener. When she moved to the tray of pastries, Mol gathered herself and strode as confidentially to the table as she could muster, summoning all of her masks to remind her how a person should act in a situation like this. Pumping the top of the pot for her coffee, she watched the other woman pluck something filled with jam from the cut-glass platter. Like the airpots, the tray was a heavy looking thing that had probably been in service as long as Mol had been alive, objects pulled out for hundreds and hundreds of potlucks and meetings over the years. Leaving her coffee plain, Mol edged along the table to choose her own pastry and realised the woman was still there. 

Analysing the situation, she realised that the other woman had been taking her time at the table so that she could speak to Mol in a casual way. Well played, Mol thought, mentally shuffling through possibilities before going for the simplest. She smiled at the woman and asked what pastry she should pick.

The woman cocked her head like a bird, eyes flicking between Mol and the platter thoughtfully. “If you don’t like sweet, the cheese danish is actually quite good.” She nodded at Mol’s steaming cup of coffee. “But, if you drink it black so you can have a sweet, then the chocolate chip muffin is a classic that pairs well.” She hefted her cup, the liquid inside as light as an adobe wall, then jiggled the napkin-wrapped pastry with her other hand. “My choice is always cream and jam.”

Mol picked up the suggested muffin and smiled, though she didn’t bother engaging her eyes in the movement. To her surprise, the woman seemed to notice and laughed, her eyes crinkling.

“Well, I know it’s not cream, love. It’s a bit of a joke just for me I guess.” She sipped the coffee, her eyes twinkling. “I did look up what was in it once, and sometimes it is a milk-derived thing but,” she glanced at the tidy jar of packets, “not this brand.”

Realising she hadn’t moved her body since picking up the pastry, Mol made a small turn towards the expected circle of chairs. It was still a full ten minutes before the meeting was set to start and people that looked like regulars were gathered at various points along the basement walls, though two had already claimed chairs and were chatting with their heads close together. Shuffling through her mental cards again, Mol selected an action and tilted her head back to the other woman, using her chin to point at the waiting circle.

“This is the C.C.A. meeting?” A beat before adding an improvisation. “Or am I stealing snacks from the wrong group?” Mol decided not to smile, but kept her tone light.

“It is! And good of you to ask, because we have had folks wander in—though that was after they switched from Wednesdays to Thursdays and some poor souls from a monthly group spent a full half hour with us before realising how rather wrong they’d gotten it.” The woman looked at Mol, fully and openly but in a nice way, like how one looks at a cat or an interesting building. She felt assessed but not judged. With a decisive nod, the woman gave another smile. “You’ll do fine, love.” And with that she turned and strode off to a group gathered by a bookshelf, biting into her flaky pastry and shedding bits of it in her wake.

Mol found an empty spot along the wall and sipped her too-hot coffee between nibbling on the edges of the muffin. She felt herself go into neutral, where her body could continue eating in a normal-person way while her brain idled along on its own. Over the rim of her paper cup she looked at the others in the room and wondered if she’d seen any before. It was a small enough city, and people coming to a C.C.A. meeting would probably have similar daily paths, it would be logical to have encountered some of them in the natural rhythms of life. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to find any faces familiar in that seen-you-at-the-grocery-at-9pm way, or if it would be better if everyone was a stranger.

Someone with a clipboard made their way to the circle of chairs with purposefulness, and Mol watched the various clusters of people begin moving toward them like drops of ferrous fluid pulled to a magnet. She topped up her coffee before following, knowing she’d want the cup to give her hands and mouth something to do while listening. The muffin, half-finished, shedding crumbs, she wrapped up in a napkin and slipped into her bag. The woman who had talked to her was sat between two of the people she’d gone to talk to, which was a relief, Mol wouldn’t need to wonder if she was expected to sit beside her. Finding an empty seat, Mol eased her way between the gap of two chairs and sat down, tucking her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup perched on her bag that she’d slung around to sit in her lap. 

Once everyone was settled, the person with the clipboard stood. They looked exactly like someone who held a clipboard while standing in a circle of chairs in a basement should, at least based on most media. A causal but collared shirt above pants that weren’t slacks or jeans, lightly tinted glasses, a few leather bracelets. Clearing their throat with a smile, they nodded in a way that encompassed the entire group.

“Welcome to Cursed and Changed Anonymous.  These weekly meetings are casual support and discussion sessions where we can freely talk about daily difficulties, share milestones, and generally have a place to chat with others familiar with similar situations.” Their eyes flickered around the circle, “I see we do have some new faces tonight, know that you don’t have to introduce yourself tonight, but that it can help—both because it can feel good to say a thing out loud and because you might find others here who have found themselves in your shoes.”

Mol had spent most of the bus ride to the meeting trying to decide if she’d introduce herself and hadn’t landed on a decision. She carefully uncrossed her feet from where she’d hooked them onto the chair, feeling the soles align flat with the ground. Even if she wasn’t expected to stand, if she took the plunge she wanted to feel grounded. Before she could pull a trigger on making a choice, someone a few people down the circle waved a hand and stood.

“Hi, um, I’m Benny.” Benny ran a hand through his short, messy hair in a practised motion that Mol envied. It carried exactly the right nervous weight. “I’m a late bloomer in the cursed department, I guess. I had a girlfriend who was into some weird stuff with books—” at this, one or two people along the circle let out knowing sighs. Benny half-stretched his hand out to them, in a gesture of recognition. “Yeah well, you can guess then, um, the short of it is that we are no longer dating but I am definitely carrying a curse for two, ha.” He looked as if he were going to say something more, but the shadow of a hand appeared at his throat and his mouth closed with a reflexive snap, teeth clicking together before he sat abruptly.

The person with the clipboard’s eyes flicked to Mol, slipping off quickly and exerting no pressure. It was fully up to her if she wanted to share with the group. She mentally gave herself a little shove, enough to tip the balance. Because she’d prepared her body it was easy to stand, hands still clutching—not gripping—the paper coffee cup.

Mol realised the woman who had talked to her at the refreshments table was just inside her peripheral vision along the curve of the chairs. Putting on a familiar posture of “telling a story” Mol looked around the circle with a smile balanced somewhere between shy and welcoming. She let the words she’d practised on the bus ride slide easily from her lips.

“Hello, I’m Mol and I think I probably fall right between cursed and changed. I’m getting a little tired of straddling the line and thought this might be a good place to find support.” She was careful to aim her words and gaze at nobody in particular, so it felt like an even distribution of attention. Even so, she remained aware of both the person with the clipboard and the woman from the refreshments table.

She let her gaze drop to the floor. “In the evening I get whisked away to, I guess, fairy land. Only the time discrepancy is inverted from standard so I live there for anywhere from days to months, mostly. Then I wake up back here, and its the next day.” Mol felt, more than saw, a movement among the circle. She looked up, used a small smile. “Yes, like that Star Trek episode,”

Mol dropped the smile. “But actually. Not every night, but most nights. Since it truly is happening, I have brought things back with me.” Another movement along the circle, in her peripheral. “I’m about 35, days counted here. When I count all of them, I’m about 120.” It was off-script, but she added “I’m tired.”

She sat back down, perching her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup resting on her bag. Mol couldn’t decide if she felt better. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t said it out loud before, but she’d hoped that telling other people who’d also been touched by curses might feel different.

Nobody else had newcomer introductions—or if they did then Mol had brought the vibe down with hers—so the person with the clipboard moved them along the agenda.

“Does anyone have any wins, losses, or observations from this week?” They nodded to a willowy man who raised his hand with a grin. “Yosh?”

Remaining seated, the man spread his hands wide and simply said, “I’m learning to control it.” Cheers broke out from several points in the circle. Nodding, he continued “It’s not—” at this he spit a pearl into his palm. “It’s not cured, obviously, but—” a ruby this time “—its better by far.” More cheers and someone clapped, while Yosh tucked the two gems away into the zip pocket of his pullover.

The rest of the meeting went like that, people sharing things that had went well or things that had gone badly, then hearing encouragement and support from the rest. Mol joined in where she felt it was appropriate, cheering along or hissing in frustration, though she kept her lips pressed tightly when advice was asked. There were more than enough folks chiming in with help and she felt a depth of ignorance about how to manage video conferencing when one always appeared as the viewer’s true desire.

A chime sounded from the pocket of the person with the clipboard and they raised both hands, the paper on the clipboard flapping as it was brought aloft. The group, which had been offering words of encouragement to a woman who was debating when to disclose her curse to a new partner, wound down their chatter.

“That’s it for the evening, folks.” They stood and nodded to the group. “We’ve got the room for another half hour, socialising and discussion can continue while we put things away.”

Mol slid out of her chair and made her way back to the refreshments table. After she threw her empty cup into the trash she gazed at the airpots of coffee and arranged possibilities. She picked one up, and began to gaze around the room in a purposeful way, sending out the signal that she was looking for the next step in helping put things away. She was unsurprised to find the woman she’d talked to before standing beside her.

“Is there a kitchenette?” Mol hefted the airpot, which felt empty.

“Sure is, love, follow me.” The woman picked up the other airpot, and wove her way through the milling group to what Mol had assumed was some sort of reading nook, separated from the main room by a cheery floral curtain on a tension rod. The woman twitched the curtain open, revealing a narrow counter with a shallow sink, and the oldest fridge Mol had seen, all cowering under sets of mismatched cupboards.

Mol hefted the airpot onto one of the few empty patches of counter. Most of the cracked yellow formica was taken up by a catering-sized coffee maker, flanked by bins of tea and coffee on each side as though it were some sort of beverage dignitary.

The woman popped open the lid of the airpot and dumped the last tablespoons of coffee down the drain. As she angled the pot nearly horizontal to get its mouth under the spigot, she said “Angie.”

“Mm?” Mol had been mentally inventorying the contents of a wooden bookshelf stocked with cans and bags rather than books.

“My name is Angie, I realised I didn’t introduce myself at all when we were chatting earlier. Mol, isn’t it?” She swirled the open airpot around before dumping the contents into the sink, stepping back to avoid the splash. “If you don’t mind my asking, when did it all start, your plane-hopping?”

She held out her hands and it took Mol a moment to realise Angie wanted the airpot she’d set down. Mol handed it over, buying time with a tilt of her head, as though she were considering.

“I don’t mean, how did you get cursed, you know, that’s personal, I just mean, how much of your life has been spent getting tossed around like a hot potato?”

Mol shrugged, “about fifteen years.” She had done the math, some years back. She’d spent 95 years of life on a different plane, which averaged out to something like six and a half years for every year her curse had been active. Feeling impulsive, she added “it’s not every night, there was one year where I was only taken one night, but I was there for about eight years in a go that time.”

“Well that sounds quite worse, honestly.” Angie gave the airpot one last shake and bustled past Mol, back to the refreshments table. Mol followed, assuming that was what she was supposed to do.

At the table, Angie spread out a napkin and placed the remaining pastries on it. “I hate when people cut things in half, look at this, two half doughnuts, who is going to want those things?” She nodded at Mol, “grab the tray, love?”

Mol did and Angie scooped up the coffee caddy and baskets of napkins and spoons, then the two of them navigated the thinning group back to the kitchenette.

“It’s not fair, actually,” Angie began as she set the caddy and baskets on top of the bookcase-pantry. “I’ve been asking you questions but not told you my situation.” She took the heavy cut-glass tray from Mol and put it into the sink, where it sat angled, only the bottom third fitting into the shallow basin. She turned the water on. “I have a similar situation, and I’d like to think I sensed it on you but it’s just how luck shakes out, doesn’t it, love?”

She swiped the tray with a sponge and moved the spigot back and forth to rinse it before simply pulling it out to rest across the sink, faintly dripping. “I’m a changeling, more or less, emphasis on the less. I’m the one that ended up in fairyland.”

“Oh.” Mol had no script for this, and thanked a too-long lifetime of experience that for keeping her face neutral with a trend toward sympathetic. She could feel the open door of the kitchenette nook behind her, heard the slowing chatter of people getting ready to lock up.

“Well, you know how time is there.” Angie looked away from the tray to stare at Mol. “I grew up, came of age, went travelling and thought I’d see what happened to my mirror-half.” Her voice was still cheery, but hollow.

Mol melted her face toward sympathy, softening the brow, the area under her eyes tightening with concern. “More time, or less?”

Angie broke eye contact, waving her hand dismissively. “Less.”

“Ah.”

“Well!” Angie made shooing motions at Mol, “better to come back a week after my fourth birthday than four hundred years in the future, I suppose.”

Mol let herself be herded out of the kitchenette. In the main room, the chairs had been folded and slotted into a rolling rack along one of the walls. Only crumbs remained of the leftover pastries Angie had set out.

Using the napkin to sweep straggler crumbs into the trash, Mol gave the other woman a small smile. “Looks like someone did want those half-doughnuts.”

“Hm,” Angie squinted. “My working theory is it was the picky bastard that cut them in half in the first place, coming to finish off what they’d mangled.”

Fishing her headphones out of her bag, Mol shook her head to both agree with both Angie’s theory and in memoriam of the halved pastries. She slipped them around her neck, their bright retro style underlined by a thick wire that plugged into her phone.

“Here then,” a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled on it waved in Mol’s peripheral. “No commitment,” Angie added with a smile as Mol took it. “Just know you can ring me up if you need.” Her eyes narrowed for a moment as she thought. “Or text!”

“Wonderful, thank you so much.” Mol smiled, let it engage her eyes. “And maybe see you next week?”

“Oh absolutely! A pleasure to meet you, doll!” Angie swanned out ahead of Mol, who folded the paper carefully and put it into the front zip pocket of her bag.

Taking one last glance around the room, Mol pulled the headphones on and brought up the transit app, queued to her return journey, before she stepped out the door.

The bus ride home, Mol played through the evening again, deciding what was worth remembering. Once comfortably home, inside the two-bedroom she could only afford because her patrons gave her gifts with great market rates, Mol put her things away. Everything had a place, less because Mol was a tidy person, but more because she was not by nature good at remembering small things and that was compounded by her curse. Knowing you’d put something in a logical place yesterday was no use if, by your memory, that yesterday was four months ago.

She set out what clothes she wanted for the next day, along with a printed to-do list she modified with a green pen. Mol had a folder of pre-printed daily lists, which she liked to think of as her “landing itineraries.” Even without a guide she could get through a weekday without too much disorientation, but it helped to know what she’d wanted to get at the grocery store the next day or that it was compost pickup that week.

Flipping through the folder, Mol found the page for two days from now and stuck the slip of paper with Angie’s number to it with a piece of sparkly washi tape before adding a contextual note. She flipped ahead to the next week and added the C.C.A. meeting to evening activities, writing “(maybe?)” below.

Mol finished a few more notes while the kettle boiled, then enjoyed a cup of lavender tea with a well-battered paperback before running through her evening routine and slipping into bed. As she did every night for the past fifteen years, Mol wondered if she’d be taken while she slept. For the first time in a long time, she hoped she was.

?

A week later, in the mundane world, Mol was back in the basement, waiting for the meeting to begin. She decided to forgo a pastry this time, having neglected to note the partial muffin in her bag and only unearthing it, quite squished, either three days or six months later, depending on one’s perspective. Mol felt an ease in her bones as she poured a cup of coffee from one of the old airpots. Doing anything a second time was always smoother, and she always processed situations better with a purpose in mind.

When Angie arrived, Mol put on a pleasant smile and raised her hand in a small wave. She had texted Angie the day after they’d met, as her itinerary reminded her to do. Mol preferred texting because she could always scroll up to see where a conversation had left off, no matter how many subjective days or weeks had passed. Luckily they hadn’t said much to each other beyond initial pleasantries, which was a relief.

Mol waited by the refreshment table while Angie mixed her concoction of coffee and whitener and stared thoughtfully at the plate of pastries before picking the same kind of jam-filled she’d taken the previous week.

“I’m glad to see you again,” Mol said, sipping her still-too-hot cup.

“So am I,” Angie smiled. Her eyes crinkled in concern as she added “how has your week been, love?”

Mol had anticipated the question and gave a half-shrug as a reply, receiving the expected pat on the arm in return.

Angie caught the eyes of somebody behind Mol and brightened. “I’ve got to go make the rounds. Excuse me, doll.”

“Oh, of course, I should probably grab a chair soon anyway.” Mol got one more pat on the arm before Angie slipped off to a group of people who could have been the same as the previous week. She hadn’t taken notes about who Angie was talking to before the meeting, though she had found that those kinds of details weren’t easily recalled and were rarely worth the effort.

Although people were still circulating, Mol made her way to the ring of chairs and sat down, once more tucking her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup perched on her bag. A couple more group sessions and she would have worn a groove in her memory for the C.C.A.. Mol wasn’t sure yet if that was what she wanted, but relaxed into the confidence of having been there before and knowing that she wouldn’t need to introduce herself this time around.

The person with the clipboard was possibly wearing the same clothes they had the previous week. Mol wondered if they had outfits they wore on specific days, or for specific occasions, or if their closet was simply like a cartoon character’s, filled with identical causal collared shirts in an inoffensive colour palette. Good for them, if so. While Mol pondered this, the chairs around her filled in.

There was only one new person this time around, with a story about a ring they couldn’t remove. Mol let her face show support and interest, eyes open and brow lightly creased.

After, as everyone shared moments from their week, Mol let their words filter through her, reacting at appropriate moments but forgetting the content once the next person began their anecdote. So far, the same as the last time.

Near the end of the meeting, during a pause, Angie cleared her throat. Mol leaned forward, pillowing her elbows on the bag in her lap. Angie’s eyes were bright but in a different way than they normally were, now shimmering with the impression of wetness.

She took a breath. “This will mean more if you know my situation, which some of you do,” there were murmurs of agreement in response. “But I have a meeting set up with my parent-sponsors next week and I plan to ask them about returning.”

Mol observed the group’s reactions in her peripheral vision, keeping her focus on Angie and her face supportive-neutral. The rest of the circle’s feelings seemed to run the spectrum, from enthusiasm to a wariness that bordered on anger, which Mol found interesting. She had been piecing together Angie’s situation from their single conversation and other observations, and this development could mean a lot of different things.

A few members voiced their support for whatever she decided to choose, and strength in meeting with the people who’d snatched her from this plane. Angie almost glowed under their attention, drawing their words in like ballast.

“If I’m not here next meeting you’ll know what their answer was.”

Mol wondered at a life that could be dropped so easily, even as she acknowledged that everyone had different brains and approached the world from a myriad of perspectives. She let the rest of the meeting wash past her and timed her steps to catch up to Angie at the refreshment table, where they each grabbed an airpot at the same time.

Angie offered Mol a smile. Once they were in the confessional booth of a kitchenette, Mol let the words come out quickly, and they sounded nervous, spontaneous.

“Can I get you coffee or something after? I know it’s kind of late, but I thought you might want a friendly ear?” She crooked the corner of her mouth up in a partial smile, hopeful.

From her body language, shoulders relaxing from an almost invisible tensing, it was what Angie wanted to hear. “You sweetheart. Yes, I’d love that actually.”

They finished the routine of cleaning up the table and Angie led Mol out the door and down the street to the kind of cafe that attracted late-night student study groups. Mol asked Angie to order for her from the giant, cramped menu, payment card in hand, ready to tap the moment Angie finished. While they waited for their orders Mol wondered how many days a person would need to try every drink listed in quirky font on the board behind the register. A month and a half, she thought, counting the columns and multiplying them by the number of items in one of the columns. Roughly, anyway.

Once they had their drinks, Angie led Mol out a back door that led to a charming garden patio strung with fairy lights. Mol perched on the wrought-iron chair and glanced around. The closest person was at the opposite corner of the garden, headphones on, their face lit by the glow of a laptop screen. She turned back to Angie.

“Want to talk about it?”

Angie sipped her coffee—something with carmel syrup from what Mol could smell—before answering. “You know, I wanted to go back almost as soon as I got here.” She waved her hand. “Not just because of the time thing, seeing a replica of yourself at four and realising that if you stuck around you’d get the horrible privilege of watching a changeling raised in your place in real-time.

“I was just homesick. I’d built up the idea of normality in my mind and worshiped it, almost. It didn’t matter how comparatively kind my parent-sponsors were, or that I had a lover who liked me for more than just the novelty of my humanity. I wanted a ‘human life’ and I wanted it so badly I burned every bridge to get back to what I thought was home.”

“Oh no.” Mol hadn’t meant to say that out loud but decided it was a fine and normal reaction, so she focused her energy on toning down the amount of shock that showed on her face. She tried a drink of what Angie had ordered for her and immediately had to re-divert some of her energy to pretending to sip the chocolate-mango latte while not letting it pass her lips.

Angie patted her hand. “Oh no pretty much covers it, love.” She brightened momentarily. “How do you like the drink? Fun, isn’t it? It’s like a little flavour vacation.”

Mol nodded. “That is a great description.” Angie’s hand was still on her hand and Mol briefly calculated the next social steps of disengaging before she caught a particular tilt of Angie’s head.

“Burned bridges can be rebuilt though, if you have the right materials.” Her grip tightened on Mol, fingers beginning to bracelet her wrist. Mol kept her body very still, her other hand still firmly gripping the to-go cup of chocolate-mango latte.

Angie smiled, and Mol wondered if Angie was the kind of person who would eventually get pointed teeth after living in a different plane for long enough. Angie seemed to like aesthetics.

“You, my dear,” the grip tightened more, “are the perfect building materials. You know I learned about you from one of my tutors? Not because of your curse, but because you’d married into some royal family and your coming and going was of particular legal interest when it came to inheritance.”

“So, your plan is—ransom?” Mol held Angie’s eyes. “Some sort of influence-based leverage?” She leaned forward, which Angie didn’t seem to like paired with the unbroken eye contact. “Do you honestly think, after I’ve spent 95 years over there, even if it has been spread out over goodness knows how many centuries, that I’m little more than a token?”

Mol clenched the hand holding her still very-full drink, aiming it at Angie. Chocolate-mango latte erupted, sticky and fragrant, from chin to lap. Reflexively, Angie let go of Mol’s wrist as she fruitlessly swiped at the sixteen ounces of liquid soaking enthusiastically into her clothing.

Dropping the cup, Mol reached one hand into her coat pocket and set the other gently, but firmly, around Angie’s throat as she stood. From the corner of her eye, Mol checked that the person at the other end of the garden hadn’t moved more than desultorily tapping at the keys of their laptop.

“Let’s go home then, shall we, love?” Mol gripped the talisman in her coat pocket and they tipped, from nighttime cafe garden to a sunny verdant bower.

There were no convenient cafe chairs where they arrived, so when Mol let go of Angie’s throat the woman toppled backward, landing heavy on the soft moss-covered ground. The fall seemed to knock words out of her.

“But, you can’t control when you go!”

“Correction: I couldn’t.” Mol brought her hand out of her pocket and shrugged showily. “I don’t make a useful token of exchange, but as a daughter gone astray you rather did.” She considered putting on a mean smile, but decided the other woman wasn’t worth the effort of playacting.

Angie was sputtering, trying to speak, but Mol ignored her and looked up to the two figures waiting under a silvery willow. “There she is, as asked. A pleasure doing business with you.”

With everything checked off her to-do list, Mol stepped lightly from the bower, tapping the pocket that held her new talisman. With the freedom to come and go as she pleased, she felt no rush.

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

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Then who slayed the dragon, exactly?

Well, Neihm landed the killing arrow in the beast’s throat, but it was the work of the group to give her that opportunity.

Okay, and this is the group you were the leader of for the past five years?

Yes, a really great team, I loved ensuring that they felt supported on missions.

And how did you do that?

Well, any real team leader doesn’t lead so much as they support the growth of the team, right? I listened to their needs, helped them identify growth opportunities, managed payroll so that they didn’t have to balance money worries while also fighting monsters, that sort of thing.

Ah.

I think really there’s nothing quite like seeing that the role somebody is in doesn’t fit their needs and working with them to figure out what will. Like our rogue, right? He actually started out as a wizard, but as we worked together, I realized that he had a great memory for spells but showed active curiosity in how locks and traps worked. So, I set up an apprenticeship for him, and that great memory served him very well when it came to traps and locks, plus his wizard background gave him a real edge in perception. Probably one of my most satisfying experiences with that team.

More so than, it looks like, overthrowing a demon lord?

Well, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if he hadn’t become a rogue. And same for the rest of the team, really. As a leader it was really just beautiful to see how much they’d all grown not only in their own skills but in how they worked together.

So, you feel that, as a leader, it’s not that your adventuring party supports you—

But that you support your adventuring party, exactly! And it’s not as though I think they don’t have my back. It can be tough to be ‘the face’ of a party, the hero, whatever. It’s you who has to interface with kings and merchants and whoever is footing the bill. And that can be stressful! But being the buffer between my team and the sometimes not quite reasonable demands of our employers is satisfying. And if things ever got rocky, I know they would be there to back me up.

When running your background check we did find that you had posted some inflammatory broadsides about a local prince?

Yes, I did. On researching his quest query, we discovered some pretty nefarious stuff and after discussion with the team we decided that supporting his opponent would be the best move. They ended up becoming a regular client of ours, actually.

I see. And what are you looking for in your position with us?

Oh, just fresh opportunity. Like I said, I really like supporting a team, and I enjoy the folks I work with but it’s only a small independent adventuring party. Working with a bigger team would be a really fun challenge that I think I’d excel at.

That’s great. And do you have any questions for us?

Yes! Did you know that the average retention rate for an adventure staffing company this size is something like 65%? Which isn’t bad, really, when you think about how volatile the industry is, but what’s really interesting is that if you remove all management above “hero” it drops to 50%? And then, if you also leave out the heroes it drops to 30%? That’s like, spectacularly bad. That indicates a real problem within the very structure of your company.

I don’t—

No, you don’t. But that’s okay! Because your current employees do. And they hired us, well actually we’re working pro-bono, but they hired us to shake up the management structure some and begin union negotiations. And what is really lovely about that is you have this big group of people who maybe 30%, 40% tops were going to finish out their year here, that’s how little they cared for your company, all joining together towards one common goal. So, the possibility of real cohesive and modular teams is there, you’re just not utilizing it. But that’s okay, we’re going to help you out. That’s what I love to do, help folks who need it. That’s what being a hero is.

---

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

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It is eclipse season once more, my heart. You remember—each year, as the season spins up, one of the planet’s satellites occludes the sun a little longer, a little more frequently. Like all children I’ve done my share of annual observatory visits, memorised the tour and peered at the orrery that explained the phenomenon.

But you know I’ve no head for these things. The orrery is beautiful, and I know each capital city has its own, made by local artisans to reflect the attributes of each place. Our orrery was composed of granite marbles and chrome, visually one with the building itself, the mosaic floor a portfolio of stone patterns and textures, walls and columns dense concrete.

Once, when travelling, I visited the observatory of a small farming town and their orrery was a series of lacquered seeds and fruit pits, combining field and orchard. It was charming and inventive and it saddened me to hear other out of town visitors imply it lacked an appropriate seriousness.

Why should an orrery be serious? Eclipse season peaks as the largest satellite matches the sun for half a day, but the slow blinking of light in the weeks leading up to it is a manic thing, a wild thing. There are dances about it, and traditional cookies. I think you’ve tried those cookies, when you were last here. I made them, even though it was simple-summer and finding the ingredients out of season felt like a quest. How can something that is accompanied by a traditional cookie be so serious it should only be represented in the least fanciful materials?

Anyway, as I was saying, I love an orrery but they speak in a language I cannot learn. I remember when you showed me the little tide table you kept in your wallet, and explained how an ocean worked. That made sense to me, more than a device I could draw from memory. Every year we can pick up something similar from the town centre, a time table of occlusion. It’s a handy thing to have on hand when running errands, or before starting chores. I’ve been caught out in the dark walking home, my arms full of groceries (this is before you got me that little rolling basket) unable to get to the jacket I’d tied around my waist. It gets so cold during an eclipse. I don’t know if it is only in comparison to the moments before, or if there is something else about it. I had to walk home, shivering in the dark. Luckily the streetlights turn on automatically, but you know that the last stretch before my house is shaded by trees, with only one small globe at the crossing from the main road. It was quite an adventure. The tables aren’t perfectly accurate, but they’re good estimates and guides, and it pleases me to keep it in my wallet as you do your tide tables.

I’m writing this now, bundled up, as eclipse season reaches its zenith. Or is it the nadir? According to the time table, it should have ended over an hour ago, but still here I am under my warmest blanket, a lamp on and it not yet noon. Like I said, their accuracy isn’t fully guaranteed and I’m sure there is an expected range of inaccuracy. There is a word for that, isn’t there? If you were here I could just ask you, as I know you’ve said the word before, talking about your work and all those experiments you would check and recheck. Part of me wishes you were here now, so you could tell me what word I was thinking of and so we could sit under my heaviest blanket together. It’s a better warmth, the kind shared with another.

I know it’s for the best you’ve returned to your oceans and tides. You would find eclipse season fascinating. We could go on a tour of small towns and compare everyone’s orreries. Maybe there is one made with flowers, or even one that uses projected light. I think it would be fun to see what is out there, how different places interpret the same thing.

If you were here though, I think you’d worry that the time tables had been so inaccurate this year. You’d say “surely this is greater than any margin of error”. That’s it! That’s the word, or words. I imagined you well enough you answered me. Oh, my heart, maybe someday I will be able to go to you. I would like to see an ocean. Does your world have orreries? If so, what do they make them from?

Your beloved.

---

 

 

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

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It was Tuesday. It had been Tuesday for, as well as Mel could reckon it, something like five years. This would have been fine, they thought, if it was a solo or limited affect time loop. If it was only Mel, or only Mel and like a dozen people around the world, experiencing Tuesday, that would have felt surmountable.

But the whole world had been experiencing Tuesday for something like five years and had decided, after about a year of panic and then a year of recovery from that panic, that Tuesday was fine, actually.

That first year there had been spates of bank robberies, vengeance killings, strange pranks, horrible suicides by people sacrificing themselves in an attempt to reset the day. A lot of weddings, also. Money stopped meaning anything, what one spent on Tuesday was back in the bank on Tuesday morning. Even Mel had participated in an outrageous indulgence, purchasing a ticket for a first-class international flight. They’d had to buy it a couple of Tuesdays in a row, waiting for everyone else’s choices to line up for there to be pilots who chose to spend their day at work, for the airport to be intact, for the ground crews to also decide to spend their day at work. Mel was fine waiting. The airport was like a mall and it was as good a place to spend Tuesday as any.

All the social sites and forums reset each day as well, but Mel had gleaned enough over the months to know that they wanted to cross the international date line eastbound. Going west would just pop them right back into Tuesday. Going east let them enjoy the view, the food, the very nice accommodations. When they grew tired, they let themselves fall asleep, knowing they’d wake up in their bed, Tuesday morning.

They’d played, cautiously, with what defined “Tuesday.” It was some point of sunrise, the light gaining momentum as it spilled across the hills and they’d blink and they’d be opening their eyes on a fresh morning and another Tuesday.

Despite what was happening in much of the outside world, Mel spent those first two years more or less enjoying Tuesday. It was, in the old parlance, their “Sunday,” and what was a day that once held its own special dread of the work week to come now felt like a kind of haven. They did find it frustrating that any work they did on various craft projects was undone each day, calm hours cross stitching emptied from the aida. Eventually the frustration was filled with a sort of existential peace. It was the action more than the finished work that Mel liked anyway.

One of their mutuals on a fibre artist forum wrote a poem about Penelope and somebody with a better memory than Mel memorized it, adding it to the boards early Tuesday morning. Memorising the poem and sharing it became a ritual for Mel’s friends.

It was somewhere in the third or fourth year of Tuesdays that Mel’s manager called them and asked them to come into work. Mel hesitated, they’d always been very protective of their two days off in a row and the instinct wasn’t broken by years of Tuesdays. Mel’s manager then told them that “even if Tuesday forgets, I won’t,” the threat clear in her voice. Someday Tuesday would end and if Mel wanted to be employed that eventual Wednesday, then they needed to come in. And so, they did.

Mel’s manager wasn’t the only one who tried to claw back a semblance of order, playacting a normal week of days across a string of seven identical Tuesdays. Mel felt bad for her for a while, realizing how empty her Tuesday must be without the self-definition of her job. Mel’s pity lasted for a couple of months and then the habit of going into work carried them another year. They’d always been easily swayed into routine, and the pattern of going into work was a more practiced one than having a day off.

Then, one Tuesday lunch break, Mel read their mutual’s Penelope poem again. Someone had filmed themselves speaking it, over slowed video of a sweater being frogged. They’d done a great job with the sound, the popping rip of the yarn coming undone not overpowered by the words of the poem, but supporting them like a drumbeat. Mel watched the video three times in a row, then walked out of the store, leaving their apron on the hook in the break room. Tuesday morning the apron was back, folded on top of Mel’s dryer. There was also a very long text from their manager that Mel did not read before replying “Sry, day off.”

When Wednesday came, Mel wanted it to be a day shaped by their choices alone.

---

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

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Seb held up his hand and felt Aurok gently run into it. The small bird nibbled softly at the back of his hand before turning around and patting away. Turning his attention back to the parchment, Seb dipped his pen and continued outlining the flowers framing the verse. Although he liked adding the colours as well, Seb enjoyed this step the most, feeling the sweep of his pen follow twining stems. He was not so entranced by the process to miss the tapping sound of Aurok returning.

With the deftness of practice, Seb caught the bird before it closed in on the parchment. Aurok peeped cheerfully, nodding its head to duck within the warm cage of Seb’s curled fingers. Knowing what came next, the scribe hastily cleaned his pen and set it aside before placing the bird back onto the desk, an arm’s length from his workspace.

Merrily, Aurok strode toward the parchment. Seb caught it up again, the bird giving a high flute of excitement. Back to the scarred wood of the table, the bird’s steps jauntier, eager for the next part of the game. Once more Seb scooped up the bird, adding a small swoop to the path of his hand as he returned Aurok to its starting point. They repeated this cycle several times, until Aurok nipped Seb’s finger in a clear declaration of the end of the game.

Seb returned to his work and Aurok returned to its current project of tearing apart an old rag. Without interruptions, the outlining was done quickly. Seb tidied his workspace to make room for the paints. Seeing Aurok well occupied with its rag, he turned around to fill a dish with water.

The pleasant sound of splashing covered the noise of any crimes, and Seb turned back to the desk to see Aurok halfway across the parchment, the dainty claws of its feet leaving a trail through the not fully dried ink.

There was mercy in heaven, Seb thought, for Aurok’s path had not crossed the careful script of the verse. Quietly, he set the dish of water down and closed the distance to the desk. Aurok, focused on its quest, ignored him as it rummaged between the assorted jars and containers that accumulated on any working surface. Smoothly and swiftly, Seb’s hand darted out and captured the bird. Aurok showed no distress at this, nor in Seb wiping its feet, as it was far too engrossed in prising out the meat of a walnut half. Seb could not remember when he had last eaten walnuts and resolved that in the future he would pick up and wipe under the things on his desk rather than sweeping around them.

Its prize obtained, Aurok expressed no further interest in crossing Seb’s desk. The scribe spent the rest of the daylight incorporating Aurok’s inky steps into the design. The end result, he had to admit, was quite harmonious.

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Another year down! This is the fourth year I’ve completed Flash Fiction February and the fourth year I’ve put my favourite pieces into a wee collection and stuck it on Itch. And you can get it right here I’ve always likened the challenge to using a sketchbook, it’s an exercise, more often than not, to learn you can make some words come out at will. “Write 500 words from this prompt” feels very similar to my brain as “look at all these hairstyles and practise drawing them.” But, just like some pages of a sketchbook, sometimes you get something tangible from the practise.

Since writing flash tends to be a more contained practise than a sketchbook page, I am lucky enough to find ten stories every year to bring together, edit, illustrate, and share. My favourite part though, is that once I’ve got a new collection up, I take four favorites (of the ten favorites) from the previous year and share them on my blog. I really just like sharing stuff I’ve made. I like to think people read what I write. And after a year, picking four favourites really does bring the focus in on the most interesting or fun stuff.

Anyway! This year the illustrations were in the vibe of headpieces, with central images. Always a fun challenge to keep it: photocopy black and white AND somehow visually illustrate what isn’t often a visual set of words. In theory I could print any of these out into proper zines. Maybe someday I will.

Until then, here’s the pitch snagged from the collection’s page on Itch, where you can get it for a dollar:

Ten flash fiction pieces collected together with illustrations for each. There’s time loops,

There were probably better ways to spend a time loop than a job interview. Luz had done them. Made a lot of memories. Great stuff.

a smidgen of softness,

The cookbook was one of Cara’s most prized possessions. She’d found it at a junk sale, which seemed to be how it had entered every previous owner’s home. It fell open to the most-used recipes, some pages spice-stained, others clearly the victim of spills… On any of the most-used looking recipes, there was commentary from a half-dozen ghosts scrawled in any empty space.

and also time loops.

Check who is in front of you, is it the same group as every morning? Are they wearing the same clothes as every morning? No! How wonderful! The auntie two people in front of you is wearing a shawl not a sweater today, that’s great! That’s two things different this morning already!

This 7.7k+ word flash fiction collection is available as epub, mobi, and pdf files.

Content warnings: unreality, time loop death.

Based on The Pink, collected by the Grimm brothers. The original is an Aarne-Thompson type 652, The Boy Whose Wishes Always Come True.

 

One moment, I existed.

The moment before that I wasn’t even a thought. It’s a different thing, to not exist. It’s not all nothingness, that’s for sure. Nothing is something, if it’s the absence of it. It wasn’t all that jarring to suddenly be, but my mind was full with being around finite things, with just being. I wasn’t, then I was. I wondered if, from then on I couldn’t ever not have been.

The first words I heard were that I was so beautiful a painter couldn’t do my face justice. I didn’t know how to respond to that, for various reasons. Then the man who’d spoken patted a boy on the head and wandered off. The boy and I stared at each other. I wiggled my fingers and toes, not ready to look at them yet. I think we stood there a while, regarding each other. Something friendly broke through the boy and he took my hand and showed me around.

I learned we were children, of about the same age. He chattered at me about how he’d been stolen, his mother framed for negligence and locked away. The castle and grounds we walked had been asked for by the captor and wished into existence by the boy. It turned out I’d been wished for as well, to be a friend and playmate.

“I’m glad you turned out pretty,” he told me.

So we bided time, living a lazy existence not really worthy of itself. We rode horses, I gathered flowers while we walked the gardens, I took up needlework. I liked needlework, because I could pretend to create things, when I was really just transmuting thread into designs, flat fabric into dimensional, purposeful shapes. My work scattered around the house, marking the passing of time as a runner laid itself across the table, a cloth appeared over a basket of bread, doilies insinuated themselves under vases and knick-knacks.

I realised early on that my own position in the castle was on par with the aprons I made—we both were fancy things created to ease the wear of daily life on more valuable things. I listened to the prince talk and did not ask aloud why we lived here with his abductor when he knew his mother lived in punishment for the supposed death of her child. Sometimes the prince said he missed his father, but I don’t know if he meant it.

 

There were no servants. Meals appeared, rooms became clean when you looked away, dust never collected and the gardens tended to themselves. We didn’t see much of the man; he was always out hunting, or studying maps, or flowers, or something.

There were originally no books in the castle, because the prince didn’t care for them. The library had false shelves lined with sheets of pretty-coloured spines. The man had the prince wish him books, once, but their insides were blank. Perhaps the prince was being petty. Perhaps if the man had wanted specific books, the boy could have wished them. His wishes seemed to take care of themselves. I had a heart that beat, I ate and eliminated. My anatomy was a female’s, though the prince when wishing me, had been fully ignorant of what that might consist of. I was like the books though, empty. I never bled with the moon. The man asked once about it, I wouldn’t have known it was a missing function otherwise.

So we lived and existed. The prince told me he loved me and I told him I loved him. I doubt he meant it more than I did, but he seemed to believe what was said. The prince mentioned his father more regularly and the man became more anxious, spending more time hunting.

One day the man found me alone and told me to kill the prince. I told him I could not, that I saw no reason for it, as the prince had never harmed anyone. The man threatened my life and left. When he next returned from hunting and saw the prince and I playing dice, the man held my gaze, mouthing again his threat to my life.

He repeated his command the next day before riding out. When he’d gone into the woods I asked the prince to wish me a deer. He did it without question. I butchered the animal, cutting out its tongue and heart, setting them on a plate.

“You could have just asked for those,” the prince commented, turning the plate so a ray of sun lit the blood like jewels.

I shrugged and we went about our day until the man was due home. The prince hid and I held out the plate to the man as he entered, removing his gloves.

“You’ve killed the prince as I asked, then?” He did not take the plate. We regarded each other a moment before the prince emerged from his hiding place and swore at the man, whose face turned white.

The prince wished the man into a dog and fed it coals, but it did not die. Looking at the beast sobbing on the tile, the prince told me he was going to return to his father, the king. I hesitated joining him, for I’d never been off the grounds of our wished-for home.

But the prince wanted me, so he wished me into a flower, put me in his pocket and went on his way. I didn’t know of his adventures in travelling, or what kind of flower I was, or if the castle continued to exist after we left it. I found out most things later, but not what happened to the castle.

 

Being a flower was not like being a human and it was also unlike not existing. There was still an “I.” I was a flower. As flowers measure it, I was a flower for a very long time.

When the prince wished me human again I was standing on a table and the first words I heard were that I was so beautiful a painter couldn’t do my face justice. I looked at those seated along the table and lining the walls. At my feet sat a tired old man with a crown. The prince stood next to him. The dog who had been a man was not there. All the rest totalled more faces than I’d seen in my existence.

Four more strangers led in a woman whose eyes held nothing behind them. From the prince and king’s conversation with her, she was the falsely accused queen. The little family talked there at the head of the table while all the court looked on, straining their ears. I remained standing on the table, but no one seemed to notice.

The queen died some days later and the king soon followed. The prince became king and married me, I accompanied him on walks through the gardens, or stood by his side in court. I went back to my needlework.

 

I wonder what will happen to me after he dies. Will I keep existing? I have asked, but nobody knows if the castle we once lived in still exists even though it stands empty and the prince has forgotten it. If I stop existing, with the things I make with my hands still exist? Will the little cloths that cover the chair arms still protect them from dirt, the lace still keep the sharp legs of vases from scratching the woodwork? I worry that if the king dies, the things I have done will come undone.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

So, what’s the status right now?

• The outline of the second book is where it was last week, that’s fine, because:
• I’m about a third into the first write of the chapter that has to be inserted into the first book—which I’m not going to let Chase (my beloved first reader and editor) read until he is further along in going over the edits of the first book. Incentive, folks.

And!

As I may have mentioned before, once he’s gone over the edits and the new scenes are plugged in, I’m getting a couple copies of The Audacity Gambit printed POD, for another read-through. It’ll need a cover though, right? How about this:

This was fun to do and a great image test as well. I’ll probably revisit the visual theme.

So, progress continues.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.