Feline Stewardship?

I am consumed with these sorts of thoughts lately...

---
The cat bashes his tail against my shins. He is convinced this will make me feed him treats. He fluffs his tail up, whips it back and forth, and thwacks it insistently on my legs. If he were a tom, he’d probably spray with excitement as I finally reach for the pouch of treats. As it is, he looks ridiculous with his tail vibrating and snaking. He marches in place on my feet.

Fifteen pounds of feline fury crouches over the food dish. He tracks the fall of the treats. His pupils are blown wide. He meows. Only two treats are forthcoming, and two is more than enough, but, of course, he does not feel the same.

Ah well. This is why I am in charge: I have the thumbs it requires to open the cabinet with the treats and to open the Ziploc package itself.

----

Not much of a freewrite. But it wasn't the only thing I worked on today, writing-wise. Maybe tomorrow will feel more profitable. Profitable? Profit-full, perhaps? Whatever the word is, I want to feel rich with writing, for the first time in months.

On a vaguely related note, I was reading bits of "A Cookbook for Poor Poets And Others"--a cookbook about frugal cooking, among other things-- recently, and I suddenly realized that the title might not mean what I had always thought it meant. I always thought it meant poets who were bad at poetry, but I now understand it also means/could mean poets who have no money. I supposed you could be a poor poet who is poor, as well...which would definitely explain your using that cookbook!

Still, I like the idea of a poet writing exceptionally bad verse. (Not that I would seriously want to read it. "Bad" poetry is painful to read.) I suppose my child's brain--my mother has had that cookbook probably longer than I have been alive--latched onto the idea that being bad at poetry meant you had to compensate for or automatically be good at some other area (like cooking.) But, sadly, poetry and cooking are not a linked skill set, inversely proportionate or otherwise.

...I feel rather silly that my post-freewrite ramblings are at least equal to if not greater than my actual freewrite.

~later

Diseases are icky.

I know, I've been missing for a couple days. I've been severely lacking in motivation to do anything constructive...in fact, I've done a pretty good job avoiding the things I want to accomplish.

Today, though, I have a small piece of a freewrite. This isn't the whole thing, but I'm really struggling to process how I feel about the part I'm not posting. I'll probably have to write more of it before I've resolved the problem (and still I might not post the rest of it.)

---
Harry had an unreasonable fear of gangrene. He’d never experienced it, nor had he ever known anyone who had. And, as a receptionist in the office of an obstetrician, the likelihood he would encounter gangrene in the workplace was very slim.

Harry wasn’t the adventurous type. He considered an evening in to be the best sort. He had a record collection, focused on pre-World War II opera divas. While he had cd doubles of some of his collection, much of it couldn’t be found on cd. Harry preferred to use his record player, at any rate. He felt closer to the singers. His interest in movies was also pre-World War II; he liked the silent, black-and-whites much more than what passed for cinema these days…though he conceded the creation of the DVD was probably a good thing. He didn’t have to worry about wearing out his vhs tapes anymore. Harry also had a cat, Burt. Burt was quiet, middle aged, and seemed to enjoy the opera as well. He was a good lap cat. Burt didn’t complain if Harry to the same album over and over.

Harry’s taste in clothing tended to button down shirts and sweater vests. Occasionally his co-workers teased him about being an old man before his time, but largely he didn’t mind. He had a comfortable, safe life with a comfortable, safe routine, surrounded by the things that gave him the most satisfaction.

But Harry still feared gangrene. He feared it so much that any slight deviation in his health was attributed to it. Suspicious moles, stubbed toes, a scratch gained while riding the subway…all of it pointed to gangrene. He had not one, but two physicians. They were both on his speed dial. He had a small library of medical texts and a special book with nothing but photographs of the various stages and permutations of gangrene.

He spent two hours before work each day examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, comparing himself to the pictures in the book. Burt assisted and encouraged. And then, after dinner but before his bath and his time with his movies and opera divas, Harry would spend another hour on a quick check for gangrene which might have developed during the work day.

---

I too have a fear of gangrene, but more in a general "that's really gross" way, not a "holy crap is that gangrene on my body?!?!?" way. I believe it's hardwired in the species to fear visible grossness. You know, the whole deal about not wanting to eat a delicious meal if it's being served up on a garbage can lid (whether or not the lid is used, clean, sterilized, or new.)

Maybe I should write more about the scary things that, were I a different person, could rule my life and change the way I behave. Nightmares are always rich soil for creativity, even if they are unpleasant.

~Later

What a Crock.

Quick freewrite. I've been thinking about this all day.

---
Mass Hysteria

It happened like this:

Once upon a time, there was a planet, occupied by men and women. The men did manly things, like shooting guns and playing sports and earning money, which they brought home to their wives, who did womanly things like have babies and cook dinner and knit wooly socks. This system worked rather well for the men and not so well for the women.

So, gradually, women started joining a massive Cult of Ideas. No one knew who founded it, exactly, but women all over the world joined it with the belief that chores and wage-earning and everything that made up their lives should be shared equally between men and women. They went through great pains to keep this society secret from men, because the men were sure to try to nip this rebellion in the bud, seeing as the current status quo was just fine for them.

This Cult of Ideas crept into the lives of the women over many, many years, and it became less of a secular idea and more of a religious one. Its members started praying to a universal Goddess to help them change things and make it all even between men and women. (By this time, men had become even more stuffy and unwilling to change the way things are, because the way things are is the way things always have been, and who wants to break up that sort of history anyway?)

And so it came to pass, on this planet inhabited by men and women, that a wave of mass hysteria swept the planet, and the men of the planet panicked like nothing else. You see, for a very long time, “mass hysteria” was a purely mind-over-matter issue of panic and delusion. Men knew this, and they also knew that it was a woman thing, having its roots in the womb, center of all of those uncontrollable, dangerous emotions found in women. Men didn’t have hysteria.

But, possibly through alien experimentation, maybe through the power of the years of women’s prayers, men all over the world suddenly developed wombs of their own. The men panicked like there was no tomorrow. And the women laughed themselves sick before they did anything else, like try and help the men adjust to this abrupt anatomical phenomenon.

----

This idea may sound completely cracked out, but it's not half as crazy as this show I was watching today, an anime in which a little boy lives in a jungle with his mom. And one day his mom inexplicably adopts a strange little girl who eats everything (like statues and people everything) and the stuff she eats gets sent to a different dimension...inside of her. And she can spit the stuff out again if she really wants. It's insane but insanely cute. Plus, it has the bonus of having one of my favorite voice actors in it.

Anway! Back to mass hysteria! I've always thought it was kind of a strange term. Sexist, yes, but also weird. And anyway, these days "mass" is always about cancer...or church. But mostly cancer.

My brains are going to explode out of my aching skull, and I'm still not free of yesterday's ailments. I should go to bed, maybe?

~Later

What's in a name?

For some reason, I seem to write about names a lot. Here's a short snippet entirely devoted to it.

---

Prudence Chastity Maheux, age seventeen, was counting down the time until her eighteenth birthday, when she would legally be allowed to change her name. She didn’t know what her parents had been thinking, naming her that. Maybe her mom had still been high on painkillers when she put that down.

Since age ten, when she had realized it was patently uncool to share her names with the Pilgrims coming off the Mayflower, Prudence had been looking for a better name. Her parents had been calling her Prudie since she could first talk. No amount of argument could convince them that her new nickname (adopted age twelve) was Chaz. It was the most cool, smallest part of her soon-to-be-ex name. Still, she reflected, Chaz was a little bit too boyish for a forever name.

Prudence had been collecting names over the past seven-and-a-half years. She kept the list in a three ring binder. She’d write down names of movie and book characters, classmates, and celebrities. If she overheard a name she liked, it went into the notebook. She had several baby name books and she eagerly awaited the coming of new phone books with their thousands of intriguing entries.

She knew all about last names as first names, and names that bridged the gender gap. She knew some names that crossed from widely male usage into widely female and the converse. Prudence was of the opinion that many Germanic names were too harsh for what she wanted. French ones sounded too snooty. And the Celtic ones…Prudence couldn’t even pronounce half of them, let alone imagine calling herself by one.

Still, she had hundreds of names to choose from, and she spent a little time each day trying them out in front of the bathroom mirror. Otherwise, how would she know which one she was? Sometimes she liked one enough to try it out for a day or two, signing her new name on her school papers and refusing to answer to her (soon to be ex) name. Prudence had invested in some “Hello my name is” stickers and they were invaluable.


---

I always have a hard time naming characters. I can't imagine how hard it might be to name myself. I mean, I go by a nickname I've had for years, but it's derived from my full name. I don't know that I could find the perfect, right name for me starting cold from a list, even if I took years to suss it out. And as for legal name changes? I don't know that I could jettison my old name. My name has history and sentimental importance attached to it.

But, if I were a Prudence Chastity, I'd make the effort.

~Later

The Dream Experience

So, for today's freewrite, a regurgitation of the dream I had whilst napping away the early evening hours.

----

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up smack in the middle of an alien invasion. I had been shopping in an antiques mall, hundreds of booths and corridors and staircases that looped around in a dizzying display of merchandise. I was stopped by an elderly gentleman who had apparently heard me whistling Beethoven and he wanted to know if I could sing. He gave me some sheet music and I embarrassedly admitted that my sight reading skills were bad. Nonetheless I sang for him.

And then things went wrong. People with clear torques around their necks started to crowd out the people without them. They started chasing me, relentless. They were going to collar me, make me one of them, an alien. Or, at least, under alien control because they were coming today. I ran and fought and tricked. I punched through walls and ceilings trying to get up and out, but the aliens were swarming near me. I asked the numerous cats lazing about for help, and they obliged. They collected, out of the antiques, necklaces that could serve as a fake torque. I had to slow down in my flight to try them on. I finally got one that fit and I made my way back to an alien, because no one had witnessed my deception. But there was a flaw in my plan: my necklace was not clear, but red.

The red necklace scared the other aliens. From what I could gather without revealing to myself, I was someone higher up in the invasion plan than the aliens had been anticipating seeing so soon. Still, sweating every inch of the way, I made my stately, deliberate way to the exit…and then I ran into my mom and I had to rescue her without raising suspicions and I was so, so afraid for her, much more than I feared for myself. I managed to get her to safety, and the aliens finally caught up to me.

They were going to hold me until their leaders arrived and, by then, I was so tired that I couldn’t fight any more. I basically laid down to die. I was so tired and sad because, really, there was nothing I could do anymore. And then I woke up…which I had tried to do earlier without success.

----

Ugh. I'm sick of alien invasions.

~Later

Returning to the Regularly Scheduled Program

I'm doing daily freewrites again. Just a reminder, these tend to be word vomit with terrible grammar, structural, and continuity problems. The following is no exception.

---

I was waiting for Jessica in the Krogers parking lot. It was the middle of a particularly nasty February Wednesday and the wind howled and clawed at the car. I looked at the dashboard clock. Eleven thirty. I’d been sitting in the car listening to the radio for a half an hour now. I sighed and shifted position. Jessica had said she just needed to pick up a new toothbrush and a couple other small ‘personal’ items. I now suspected she was waiting for a refill of her birth control prescription. Jessica didn’t like to talk about that sort of stuff with me, and I was fine with that. I didn’t like talking about it either. But still, if I’d known this quick errand was going to take so long, I would have brought a book.

Maybe I should go in, see if she was stuck in line at the register. No, I told myself. That was a bad idea. Better wait. She didn’t like to be caught in the act of anything personal. Even though we lived together, slept together in the same bed, and, occasionally, had shower sex, Jessica still wasn’t comfortable brushing her teeth in front of me. I can’t imagine what it would be like if she found herself with a prescription bag, confronted by me in the checkout line.

I was trying to respect her, but it was hard. She made it hard. Hell if I knew why. Maybe it would just take some more time. I looked at the clock. Eleven forty. I needed to go in and check on her. I didn’t want to be stuck waiting all morning. I sighed, looking at the dismal parking lot. It was rainy with standing slush on the ground, and the wind was fierce. I checked my windbreaker, zipped it up as far as it would go. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and unbuckled my seatbelt.

The wind heaved against my door as I tried to push it open. I sidled out and the door slammed, missing my fingers by an inch.

“Stupid wind,” I said.

I kicked the car’s tire and locked up. Jessica had insisted we park as far away from the entrance as possible.

“Just think of all those old people,” she had said. “They’re all lame and stuff. And besides, they can’t drive. You don’t really want to be so close to one of them trying to park in the handicap spot, do you?”

And so we were all the way across the vast, flat plane of tar. I snorted. It was ridiculous how all the new stores had such huge parking lots. It was like they expected the entire city to come in all at once. I’d never seen more than a half dozen cars there at any one time. I trudged through the slush and felt cold water seeping into my sneakers. The footing was shitty. The wind threw water into my face, stingingly hard. I skidded every few steps, and two cars tried their best to run me down. The whole parking lot is empty: why in God’s name did they need to come so close to me?

I made it to the front entrance and I stood there, just inside the doors, letting myself drip and enjoying the heaters blasting air onto the top of my head. I shook myself off, to the apparent disgust of an old lady on her way out. Screw you, grandma. You’re parked right next to the door. No wading across the parking lot for you.

And then, I began to look for Jessica. She wasn’t in any of the checkout lines near the entrance. I made my way to the back. Maybe she was at the prescription counter. I grinned as my sneakers squeaked. The noise echoed up to the huge empty ceiling and bounced around. The whole store could hear my every footstep. It would be even better if I’d picked up a shopping cart. I never failed, by random chance, to get the worst-repaired, most rusty, rattling one. But it was dumb to use a cart when I wasn’t going to buy anything.

Jessica wasn’t there. And, in fact, the pharmacy counter was closed. The blinds were drawn, and the lights were off in the pathetic little waiting area, with its square yard of carpet and two folding chairs. So I wandered the aisles, looking for her. Not in the snacks or greeting cards. She wasn’t sniffing shampoos or comparing razors. She wasn’t picking out Tylenol or vitamins. I spent a little time looking at the display of overpriced beer. That wasn’t even a good sale price.

I made a loop of the store. She wasn’t anywhere. And then, I heard her. It was her, definitely, by the photo counter. Oh. Crap. There was no mistaking it. That was her special “I’m having sex and loving it” noise.

I went over to the photo counter. There wasn’t anyone there, but the blinds on the photo booth were quivering. Fuck.

I didn’t wait around. I sped out of the store and crossed the parking lot in record time. I fumbled the keys, fished them out of the slush, and got in. I didn’t want to wait around and talk, so I left her there. I started the car and drove off, leaving her in the store with her…whoever. I didn’t pay much attention on the drive home, and I nearly got sideswiped because I was too busy thinking about Jessica in the cramped little room full of chemicals and the evidence of other peoples’ lives.


---

Okay, so for some reason, I just couldn't get with the first person past tense. Still, it must be an awful thing to find your girlfriend is cheating on you like that...I can't decide if Jessica was cheating with a pharmacy tech or a photo counter person.

~Later

Pushing Boundaries with Naughtiness

Apologies for the non-writing over this week. I've been stricken ill by some terrible plague and have, honestly, been shivering in a recliner all day every day while watching movies and waiting to die.

To celebrate the possibility that I may be recovering, I give you porn. Gay porn. Well, okay. It's not particularly explicit: I've seen pg-13 movies with naughtier sex. But I'm hoping you, the reader, will find it as evocative as I do. Yes, it is fanfic. But if it makes you feel better, substitute two different man-names. There's really nothing fandom-specific in this story...I just like to think about ninjas getting it on, hahaha.

-----
Sasuke thinks of other things when they do it. Sensational association games. Kakashi’s skin is smooth and he thinks of stones and frogs and water without ripples. Kakashi’s hair is soft and grey, warm mist and kittens and softly broken dawn and his breath is the strange air before a thunderstorm with teeth like lightning closing on his neck, quick strike and on to another area. Sasuke lets Kakashi roll him over on the bed.

He thinks, oddly, of vegetable gardens; freshly turned rows, tomatoes, zucchini, onions in soft dirt. Footprints as his toes flex and his feet arch and dig for purchase in the sheets. Kakashi’s belt buckle jingles, the burr of a zipper and the shush of clothing pushed aside lay train tracks, stretch for miles like scars crisscrossing the pale skin of the land. Horses racing, heartbeat-hooves thunder under hot skies’ intensity.

Kakashi’s eyes and he can’t breathe. Arresting, bright, full of love, for him, full like the ocean. Overflowing. High tide. Seashell nails clutching him, fingers digging into the meat of his shoulders as they writhe, grappling, vying to express this thing between them. Lights flash behind his closed eyelids and he wonders if he’s going to cry.

Sasuke sniffs, feeling water gathering at the corner of one eye, tries to focus more--and at the same time less--on Kakashi, what they’re doing together, to each other. He thinks he’ll go mad as his heart hammers in his chest and it might burst because it is full and squeezing in tandem with what Kakashi is doing and he’s just lying there. He should reciprocate, give back, do something. But his hand is shaking as he reaches and presses even closer to Kakashi and he knows that Kakashi knows. It is branded into his palm, radiating, burning into Kakashi’s skin, will forever be written there, an invisible seal of love and longing and things he’ll never say out loud.

Sasuke’s world seizes. Stutter--stop--stutter--stop-stutter-stutterstutterstop. Stop. His hearing rushes out to sea and returns on a wave. He’s bitten his tongue, and all he can say to Kakashi through the copper taste is “drapes” because the connections are gone. He can’t find the words. Kakashi takes it as approval, because he replies in kind: “toaster oven.” They laugh breathlessly, plastered together on the bed. Kakashi offers him a tissue and Sasuke takes it, holds it, wonders what to do with it. Kakashi takes another and wipes Sasuke’s face--he cried after all, then--and Sasuke dabs at the mess on his front. He brushes the hair out of Kakashi’s eyes and draws him close for a kiss, lets Kakashi’s sweat transform his lips into something else. He tingles, pulls back a fraction of an inch, and they breathe the same air. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

-----

Have I disappointed you by posting something old instead of writing something fresh?


I have, for the moment, decided against putting this under some kind of content filter because it is (very much) a fill-in-the-blanks piece of writing. If it were a painting, it would be the sort where you'd be stepping closer and back to try to find the perspective in which it makes the most complete picture. To rephrase: I don't think it's got enough in it to qualify for filtering. Let me know what you think, yeah?

I had both a very easy and a very difficult time writing this. It's very easy to get into the sort of stream-of-consciousness this piece takes on, but it is hard to hone it and reign it in. Even now, months after writing it, I'm still tempted to trim and rephrase pieces of it. Have I overwhelmed the reader with too many random thoughts in between the sexy bits? I hope I have, mostly because I thought all of it was sexy, even the weird, disconnected parts. I have this thing about language...(And for some reason, I couldn't come up with a better euphemism for sex than "doing it." It's just one of those things, I guess, founded in my interpretation of the characters.)

Also, I seem to have a continual struggle with pronouns versus proper names, especially when I've got two men on the page. I try to be specific in who is doing what, but sometimes I fail in juggling all the he- and him- and his-es.

~Later


Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.

Ethel Fantasizes

This is a quickie. I may come back to it later.

----
Ethel had a crush on the weatherman. That is to say, she was enamored of his sharply handsome looks and the way he cheerfully reeled off more information on cloud formations and low pressure systems and general temperature and dew point fluctuations than the average news watching person could ever use. There had also been a special report one time, in which the weatherman had been coaxed into a kilt. That sealed the deal.

She had never met the weatherman, and really she had no intention of doing so. But she liked the figure he cut in his suit as he strode across the stage and gestured at the maps. You see, Ethel spent a lot of her time in front of the television. She was getting older, and she couldn’t get around as well as she used to. She needed more time between bouts of activity, and the couch in front of the television was both comfortable and easy to get out of when she was rested.

Ethel lived alone and she liked the noise the television made in her small apartment. She liked to pretend that she knew the people on the television, that any minute now they’d be ringing the doorbell and coming to dinner. It was lamentable that this would never happen, but such is life. Ethel knew where the line was between reality and fantasy, but it was nice to imagine.

And then the weatherman moved in across the street.

----

I can't make up my mind how pervy Ethel will be. I do think that she's going to dance around trying her best to avoid the weatherman so as not to let reality intrude on her fantasy. Also, I'm not really clear on how old she really is. Maybe she has chronic health problems that are making her aging more difficult. I think she's just this side of housebound, though she's not precisely frail, just has mobility issues.

I must away! I'm pretty impressed I wrote anything, truth be told. I do not feel well.

~Later

I have no attention span.

Someday, this might turn into song lyrics.

---


It was a long time ago, best of friends
Playing make-believe and believing
Nothing would ever end. But you moved away
to a different place and I couldn’t follow you.

High school, still in our small town
Playgrounds long gone, leaves fallen on the ground.
On to college, the memory of you surrounding me
Adrift in the air, I think of summers when we played.

Your fragrance haunts me, years after you’d gone
And I had moved away and moved on.
Walking in my new city, my heart stops at the crosswalk.
It’s turning the corner, your hair, your face.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.

I follow you, for a while, to be sure
High heeled shoes lead my heart to your door.
You go inside and turn on the light, staring out
Before drawing the blinds against the world.

It’s you and the doorbell is right over there
I’d push the button if I thought you’d care.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.


And don’t I still love you?
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know
And you don’t even know I’m there.
Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
Goodbye, good night, girl I no longer know.

----

This was much choppier than I had wanted. I got distracted after (almost) every line I pounded out. It was also a challenge to not have a specific incident as reference for the subject matter; I kind of picked and chose and formed a composite. Some of it is patently untrue. I don't know why, but I was thinking about how strange it is to bump into people, especially when you are somewhere you would not expect that person to be. I like to think I saved the narrator from an awkward and disappointing confrontation here.

I'm hesitant to call these song lyrics. Maybe they're in some sort of hybrid state? I haven't really jumped into full-on lyrics, but I like to think that I've started to shape the poem around the conventional bones of verses and chorus and funky bridge/ending-chorus-that-isn't-quite-the-same. It's hard to do lyrics with no music in mind! Can you tell I was listening to Coldplay as as I puttered? I was going to parody them, but I'm a not-so-secret sucker for their songs. Also, I imagine it would be difficult to make a parody that was more serious than what I might normally do. It would be more of an homage than a pastiche, really. (Frankly, I'd rather do something completely original and serious than a serious take on someone else's stuff.)

And now, a short list.

Possibilities for parodies:
1. Exerciser (Womanizer by the infamous Britney Spears): a song about gyms and fitness and women who engage in these activities.

2. Eighteen Gays (18 Days by Saving Abel): ...doesn't the title cover it all? Possibly about eighteen men the narrator has dated, possibly a song about how he has eighteen gay friends and therefore cannot possibly hate gay people.

3. Something to the tune of Hit Me With Your Best Shot (ala Pat Benatar)

That's all I've got right now.

~Later

Fairy Tales

I may have to come back to this.

----
The Crown Prince of Halidon was searching for a bride, and all the eligible princesses in the land came to call upon the Halidon royal family. The prince was very handsome; he had hair as dark and shining as the wings of a raven, and lively, bright grey eyes, and dimples that showed whenever he flashed his dazzling smile. He was fair-skinned, tall, and strong and the crown sat perfectly upon his brow. In addition to his good looks, he was blessed with a keen intellect, which helped him run the country smoothly even while his father was still king, and he possessed a wonderful sense of humor. His laughter made women--in particular his mother’s ladies-- swoon. In short, Halidon’s Crown Prince was the catch. And all the princesses knew it.

Now, the crown prince’s mother was not such a nice person. She was, at heart, a bit of a schemer, and so she schemed to find the best princess for her only, beloved son. While the prince held court and hunted and did other princely things, she was going over the princesses’ pedigrees. She decided, after weeks of scrutiny, that, lovely as they may be, none of the princesses of their kingdom would do. They were all too common, and therefore a foreign match must be brokered. So the call went out; the king reluctantly dispatched messengers and sent them to all corners of the world.

Meanwhile, the prince had fallen in love. She was the second daughter of a baker and about as far from a comely, elegant, meek princess as it came. She was very strong from kneading and rolling dough--he’d seen her engage the blacksmith in a friendly contest of arm-wrestling. Though she had lost, the prince was convinced it was because she was not yet a full-grown woman: The baker’s second daughter was only sixteen, but she‘d nearly made the blacksmith lose the match in an apoplectic fit.

She had no pedigree to speak of: daughter of a baker who was a son of a baker who was the son of the baker before that, and so on down the line. As to her looks, well, her face was well enough when it wasn’t covered in flour, and she was tall. Her hair was a fiery red and her eyes were kind. But she was soft and round like a dumpling, unlike his willowy suitors. The prince was entranced. When he dared himself to sneak close enough to smell her, she exuded the smell of apple pie and he longed to be close to her every day and feel her strong, plump hand in his.

Unfortunately for the prince, she didn’t know he existed, because the Crown Prince was too chicken to approach her. He spent much of his time around her trying to talk himself into asserting his princely rights, which would allow him to sweep her off her feet and bring her to the castle forever and ever amen. But…he hesitated, and not just on account of her strength. He wanted her to like him, even though he knew plenty of happy couples who hadn’t met before the wedding. The prince needed to be assured of her love for him. After all, the Halidonian people were long-lived and he didn’t want an angry wife for the century or two it might take for her to calm down.

And then the worst thing so far happened. The baker’s second daughter got a cat, and the prince quickly discovered he was allergic. If he were any less manly, he would have lay down and wept. As it was, he spent a lot of time brooding at the edge of the castle moat and sighing at his reflection. If only there were some way he could get closer to his beloved apple dumpling without sneezing up a storm!

------

I realize it is extremely unfinished. I also realize that no one has a name yet. I didn't want to get distracted by a lengthy name-hunt while trying to write the actual narrative. I could look up name meanings for hours before finding ones that are right. Also, I was going to make the girl younger (like 14 tot he prince's approximate not-quite-thirty)...but I realize it'd probably creep people out, however accurate it may be for the quasi medieval setting.

My thoughts on aging in this fantasy world are this: I imagine the people of Halidon visibly age until somewhere around thirty, and then age less noticeably for a few more decades and so on, so it's really a more gradual process on the adult end of things (as opposed to an aging process where a person is a baby/child/teen for a prolonged period of time before being considered an adult.)

I vow to make there be lots more purple prose should I work on this more.

~Later

Groundhogs!

...I'm not sure where this came from. It's kind of insane.

---
They say the town of Kilcastle--current population 2301--was saved by a pair of groundhogs in the days of its founding. The story goes like this:

Back when the settlers were sweeping west in a grand motion to conquer all they saw, they moved into a nice, grassy valley with a river, called the Little Grass Snake, running on its western edge. There was plenty of game to hunt, and fish practically leapt into the boats. There was more than enough timber to go around , and so the settlers built themselves a little town comfortably close to the edge of the river.

The valley was also home to a lot of groundhogs. All the construction and increasing hubbub of human habitation drove most of them out of the town proper, but two stubborn groundhogs refused to be scared off. They maintained a series of tunnels beneath Maddock Barrow’s general store. And, though he tried with poison and shotguns and all manner of clever traps, he could not get rid of them. Why, sometimes this pair of groundhogs had the nerve to enter and exit the building through the main entrance intended for human customers! Eventually, Barrow gritted his teeth and admitted that the groundhogs did his stock no harm and he put up with them.

In fact, the groundhogs became a bit of an attraction. All the children came to see the “tame” gophers and, generally speaking, those with a bit of pocket money might purchase a small candy upon which they feasted while waiting for the gophers to appear. In time, the children named the gophers Mariachi and Pip.

Pip was the female--or at least, the one they presumed was female, given groundhogs tend to look alike. And she was named Pip because she would “pip” her head around the corners of the long display cases before venturing forth across the open floor of the store. Mariachi received his name for the unusually shaped patch of fur on his side; if you squinted, it looked like the sombreros the children had seen on a traveling band of musicians. None of those musicians had spoken a word of English, but Mariachi had cocked his little head at their speech, and so Mariachi was christened.

As the little town grew and prospered, Pip and Mariachi enjoyed a celebrity status among the newcomers. Of course, there were some who did not like the gophers being in the general store. These dissenters soon discovered that the store could do without their patronage, but that they could not do without the store’s wares.

During one spring, the rains were unusually hard. But the river did not overflow its banks. The land could still be farmed. It was dreary with so much rain, and the well-traveled paths had mud deep enough to suck the boots right off a grown man, but nothing truly awful was happening from all the water. So the inhabitants of Kilcastle shrugged it off as best they could and carried on.

But then, one night at the end of spring, Maddock Barrow, proprietor of Barrow’s General Store, was wakened in his bed on the second floor above the store by an unearthly screeching. He ran down the stairs, nightgown flapping, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. He rubbed his eyes when he saw the pair of groundhogs whistling ear-piercing notes and scurrying away from the stairs that led to the storage cellar. Hr had never seen them behave like this before. What was going on?

“Now Mariachi, Pip,” he said. “I’m going to take a look downstairs, see what you’re making a fuss over.”

And he peered down into the cellar and was shocked. The whole place was flooding! Barrow’s first thought was for his stock down there, but then he thought of his neighbors. Were they flooded too? He dashed outside to try and figure it out.

A huge wash of water filled the street. Maddock Barrow put on his gum boots and followed the water up the street toward the river and there, he saw that several huge trees had come down from upriver and were diverting the flow of the water right into their little town! Barrow ran door to door, pounding and yelling. Soon the whole population was roused. The women and children gathered a few belongings as quickly as they could and headed for higher ground. The men worked hard; one group worked at digging ditches to help direct the water away from the homes, and another group worked together to try and move the blockage. They also sent their fastest horses and the best riders among the young boys to the neighboring towns for help and as warning.

Three days later, the crisis was over. The trees had been moved, as many homes as possible had been saved, and everyone was safe and dry with roofs over their heads and food to eat. The townsfolk tried to hail Barrow as their savior, but he was modest. Mariachi and Pip were the ones to thank. They were the ones who had saved the town. And so the gophers were treated like kings for the rest of the days of their lives, and no one ever again complained about gophers in the general store.

Over time, the townspeople erected a statue, and groundhogs became incorporated into many store signs. The town of Kilcastle has held a celebration in honor of the valiant groundhogs ach year on the anniversary of the eve of the flood. They even have a play, “Mariachi and Pip Save Kilcastle,” put on annually. But, though this is the official name of the dramatic work, every child of Kilcastle knows that it is, really, truly called“Mariachi and Pip Save the World.”

-----

I know it was kind of rushed but, frankly, I want to go to bed. At least I got the idea out there, right? I suppose it shows that I've been reading several books that take place in the days of the Wild West lately. But also, it's kind of cool to think about all the weird things that crop up in the histories of towns.

~Later

Food as sex?

Ugh. This is what I get for reading fanfics and being hungry at the same time.

----
The reverse of the skin caught on her tongue, rough as it slid down her throat. The fragrance in her nose was delicate and floral and warm and sweet. Juice dripped down her chin and she chased it with a finger. The flesh was tender, falling apart in mellow slickness as soon as she touched her teeth to it. She worked her lips around it and sucked it into her mouth: the fruit slid off the core. She licked her fingers and swallowed the mouthfuls of juice, then closed her eyes and exhaled through open lips and a dropped jaw. Pear scented air circulated through her throat and mouth and up into her nose. It was ecstatic. She chewed the pear down to the soft fibers of its core, no more than a few strands holding the stem to the remainders of the blossom. She licked the leftovers and her fingers once more before rising to wash her hands and face.
---

Here I am, sitting around and fantasizing about how the skin of a pear feels when you eat it. I don't know if I'm the only person who exhales through the mouth in order to better taste a food, but let me tell you, it's kind of a strange habit to try and articulate on paper. I seem to remember a Carver story where a couple uses the eating of food as a substitute for sex. I suppose this snippet is along those lines, except...the eating of food is pleasurable in itself? I mean that the actual physical sensations and actions involved in eating are pleasurable, I guess.

Heh. I think I just made some food porn. Not particularly demanding, but I did have trouble varying the length of my sentences. I notice a tendency to get stuck writing heaps of medium-length ones, and then when I go through them I groan because they all read like clunkers.

~Later

Storytime!

The fruits of my labors!

---
While bending over to heft a ten pound bag of sugar into her grocery cart, Sarah had a wardrobe malfunction. Her beautiful, wonderful, perfect right breast squeezed out of her bra and out of the top of her shirt. She dropped the sugar and it exploded over the floor.

“Oh shit,” she said.

She blushed terribly as she tried, frantically, to stuff herself back into her shirt before anyone saw. Goddamn sugar for goddamn holiday cookies for the goddamn holidays. Why the hell was it on the bottom shelf, anyway?

“Hello there.”

Goddamnit. Sarah yanked the edges of her neckline together. Sugar ground into the skin of her hands and into the cashmere. Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit. She looked up, briefly. She froze.

Whoever he was, he was cute.

“You look like you need a hand,” he said.

Sarah stared at him. Whoever he was, he was cute, a twist on the tall, dark and handsome. He had bright green eyes, dark hair, and a seasonal sweater, very Fair Isles.

“Aww crap, that came out wrong. Sorry,” he said.

His mouth twisted into a smile. He had dimples, she noted. Dimples in his square, classically handsome face. This was so bad.

“Can I offer you my coat and a walk to the restroom?”

He held up the coat in question. It was long and large and probably and excellent cover for her mishap.
Sarah nodded and tried to force the lump in her throat back with a smile of her own. It didn’t go so well, judging from the concern suddenly visible on his face. She concentrated on not crying. He draped the coat over her shoulders and she sniffled. When he placed his basket into her cart and then made to steer the cart, Sarah’s eyes watered.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Let’s get you to the restroom, yeah?”

And suddenly, everything was simultaneously so much worse and better than it had been. Sarah and Dimples crunched through the sugar in formation. She stuck it out as everyone within eyesight stared at them, no doubt due to her cart being the loudest, squeakiest cart in the entire store. She put up with it, still red with embarrassment. Dimples was the nicest man on the planet. He was superhumanly nice…and he’d seen her beautiful, beautiful goddamn breast in the baking aisle. Sarah wanted to kill whoever had made her scoop-neck sweater. She vowed never to wear it again as they approached the customer service desk.

“I’ll wait here for you,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after your cart.”

Sarah fled to the bathroom. She locked herself into a stall and slid, reluctantly, out of his coat. His cologne made her mouth water and the rest of her feel warm. She fixed her bra and sweater and, all too late, realized she was feeling warmth that had nothing to do with either the burning of embarrassment or the scent of his cologne. She unlocked the stall and looked in the mirror. And then she looked down at the coat in her hands.

“No, no, no,” she said. “This can’t be happening.”

She wetted down a paper towel and wiped ineffectually at the hives raising on her skin. The cool water felt nice, but it wasn’t doing a damn thing to bring down the swellings. She was allergic to wool and that coat that Dimples had offered was a hundred percent boiled wool. At least it wasn’t going to kill her…but it was really the icing on the cake.

“Well hell,” she said, and began to cry. Sarah bawled and drew great heaving breaths that shuddered into more sobs. Her face got all red and her nose dripped and she felt horrible. She bit the inside of her cheek and, slowly, calmed down. She washed her face with cold water and patted dry with more paper towels. She blew her nose.

Sarah steeled herself and left the bathroom at a forced march. She pasted a smile onto her face and greeted Dimples.

“Thank you for the coat,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

She handed the coat back and noted that her palms were getting itchy now too.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Are you all right? You looked…different before.”

Sarah flushed as he looked her over. No doubt the hives were looking worse. Oh crap. Before for him was sugar-bag before. Crap crap crappity crap crap crap.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’d like my cart back now, please, so I can pretend none of this ever happened.”

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean…it’s just…”

Dimples looked uncomfortable. Good. Sarah was so beyond uncomfortable right now. She took the handle of the cart and tried to pull it away, but he was still holding onto it.

He stuck out his hand. Sarah stared at it like it was roadkill.

“My name is Scott,” he said. “Scott Garland.”

“Seriously?” she said. “Garland?”

Sarah’s brain felt like it was going to explode and she itched at her hives without thinking. Scott dropped his hand to his side.

“Yeah,” he said. A little wrinkle formed between his eyebrows.

“It’s so…festive,” Sarah said.

“You mean awful,” he said. “Or unfortunate?”

“That too,” said Sarah. “Well, uh, I’m Sarah.”

She held out her hand, which was currently red and itchy as all get out. Scott blinked at her and the corners of his mouth lifted.

“Sarah,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

He shook her hand.

“I’m allergic to wool,” she blurted. “But really it was so nice of you and I didn’t notice at first.”

Comprehension took over his expression. And then he threw back his head and laughed.
“I am so, so sorry,” he said. “I really was trying to help.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said.

And, suddenly, it was, despite the itchiness and mortal embarrassment and the sugar that crunched in the tread of her shoes.

“This whole thing, it’s just been unbelievable,” she said.

Scott nodded.

“Not how I imagined my grocery shopping would go,” he said.

Sarah snorted.

“Me either.”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s not every day I find a damsel in distress in with the flour.”

And then he froze and looked at her before feigning nonchalance. Sarah blushed again, but it wasn’t so bad.

“Believe me, I’d rather have skipped that part and gone straight to introducing myself,” she said. “Or maybe I would have just given you the eye if we happened to bump into each other.”

Scott laughed again, and Sarah fell a little bit in love with his nice, white, even teeth and the way his neck came out of the collar of his sweater.

“Well, I’ve got to get going,” she said. “Cookies to bake and all that. But thank you again.”

Scott let go of the cart.

“Take care,” he said.

“You too.”

And with that, Sarah wheeled away from the nicest guy in the world, hoping she would never see him again, even if he was handsome and funny to boot.

---

I thought this was both funny and slightly painful...but mostly funny. I know there's probably no man on earth this considerate, but that's the good part about fiction. I swear I was going to write more and have even more stuff go wrong for Sarah, but I'm just too darn tired.

~Later

Excerpts

I'm not putting the whole free-write up here. Suffice it to say that I'm feeling down again.

---
I’m pretending she doesn’t exist
even though everything I do reminds me.
Missing people leave
Ragged holes in the fabric of our space and time
Seen only at night when between the stars grows
Wider and darker than we remember.

The abrupt leavings that tear through us
Leave our united fronts asunder.
I hated her and she didn’t care.
I loved her and it wasn’t enough.
I want to save her
When she is gone, gone, gone.

Pick pick pick pick at the unseen wound
Turn it over and over, unable to decipher its shape
I am heartbroken.
Rejected: it wasn’t me
She chose to leave and not say goodbye.

If I could I’d excise this love
Weigh it, measure it
Box it up and throw it out.
She doesn’t deserve it, wouldn’t keep it
And I have no one else to take it.
---

Ugh. I wish I could sleep all this crap away, but I even dream about her.

~Later

Further Arctic Adventures...now with less Arctic!

...this whole thing makes me think. Maybe I'll try for a different story tomorrow?

---
Eventually, the unicorn was placed in a laboratory, where an international group of scientists puzzled over it. They marveled over its perfect preservation and were shocked to find that, despite its being frozen for untold eons, no cellular decay had occurred: its cells were neither blemished by time nor burst from the freezing temperatures. And so they took the unicorn off the mortuary table and lowered it into a vat of restorative liquid. They hooked it up to a ventilator and a machine that mimicked the function of its heart. The scientists studied it.

The scientists took scrapings of its horn and hooves. They took hairs from the tail and mane, swabbed the mouth for remnants of saliva. They drew blood samples and, with a very fine hypodermic needle, took a portion of the contents of its tear ducts.

The tests on all these materials were contradictory and inconclusive. Depending on who looked under the microscope, they were either something unlike any other earthly result, or they pointed to an exceptionally average horse. The blood samples were poison one day and an effective cure for every disease the scientists had on hand the next. The hoof scrapings were pure silver and lighter than air; they were heavier and duller than lead, giving off no reflection at all. The horn…well, four scientists in a row quit after handling it. Of those four, one became a monk and devoted his life to God. Another was soon arrested for a series of brutal murders. The other two were never heard from again, though it was rumored that they had both ended up in asylums. Shortly after, the scientists were forbidden direct contact with the samples. But the experiments continued.

After the fourth scientist had quit, Stephen St. Gradie started having strange dreams. He dreamed of the arctic, of the glacier where he’d found the unicorn. Even in his dream he knew, logically, that the entire area had been excavated and nothing else had been found. But, whenever he closed his eyes, he saw it as it had been. But everything was wrong and twisted, as was the wont of dreams. The sun shone hot, hotter, blistering until the ice melted into strange shapes. The ice fields, as far as he could see, bloomed with strange flowers and plants made of ice. His tent transformed into a pile of stones and the unicorn came bursting out of it, its steps shattering the rocks into spalls of ice. St Gradie was afraid, and he ran, he always ran from it. He ran until he tripped and fell, and, just as the unicorn bore down on him and would have crushed him with its hooves, he forced himself awake.

Stephen St. Gradie dreamt the same sort of dream over and over. Always the unicorn pursued him, and always he ran, waking just before it could harm him. His sleep became so poor that he visited a physician. The doctor prescribed a mild sedative to help him sleep, and for a time it worked. But then, it happened.

He was sprinting across the strange, glittering fields of flowers, and the sun was hot on him, and he could feel the unicorn’s breath on his back. A vine reared up in front of him, too fast, and he tripped and fell. St Gradie scrabbled on the ground, trying to get up, to get away, to get out, to wake from this nightmare. The unicorn stood over him, pawed at his legs with its shining hooves. It lowered its horn, snorted, and pressed forward. Stephen was trapped against a wall of ice. He couldn’t move; the ice-vines held him fast. He gasped for breath, sweat rolling down his face. The unicorn’s horn was directly in front of his face, and the hot breath from its nostrils washed over him. The tip of the horn pressed against St Gradie’s eye, and he did not move for fear of losing the eye.

And then, a voice.

“I’m sorry.”

And the strange logic of the dream told him it was the unicorn speaking.

“Sorry?” said Stephen. “For what?”

“For this,” said the unicorn. And it pressed forward with its horn and St Gradie was blinded in the blink of an excruciatingly slow eye.

He woke screaming and clawing at his face. The maid came running and, when she saw the state he was in, sent for the doctor. The doctor sedated St Gradie and had the maid lay him back into bed. The doctor bandaged the furrows Stephen had dug into his flesh.

St Gradie dropped back into the field of ice, pierced by that horn and seared by the pain. But, though it hurt terribly and he could not see, he came to a realization. The unicorn was feeding itself through its horn and his eye into somewhere beyond. But it didn’t make any sense, even in the dream. Why would the unicorn need to go somewhere? Why him? Where was it going? And then it was gone.

He opened his eyes and the field of icy flowers was gone. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen and his eye was once again whole. The tent was just as it had been, the ice with its slightly pocked surface stretching for miles in front of him. St Gradie peered into the tent. His two assistants were asleep, and the kerosene stove glowed with warmth. His bedroll waited for him, laid out in the heat cast by the stove, and he was suddenly unbearably sleepy. So he lay down, parka, boots, and all, and slept.

When Stephen St. Gradie woke from his sleep, the maid leapt out of her chair and ran from the room. He yawned. He felt remarkably refreshed, like he’d slept for years. Then a knock came on his bedroom door.

“Yes?” he said. “Come in.”

It was the doctor. He came in and sat in the chair at the side of the bed.

“How are you feeling?” said the doctor. “You gave us a nasty scare last night.”

“Ah yes, well,” said St Gradie. “Had a terrible nightmare you know. Just awful.”

The doctor hmmed into his beard.

“Well, anyway, I’ve fixed up your face where it got scratched,” said the doctor. “I recommend you get some more rest. We’ll talk more in a few days, how’s that sound?”

He stood again.

“All right,” said St. Gradie. “Sorry to be such a bother. I’m afraid my maid can be a bit flighty.”

“Nothing to worry about,” said the doctor. “Better safe than sorry, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

The doctor left the room. Stephen St. Gradie laid his head back against the pillows. Later. He’d rest and think about the dreams later. For now, though, he was ready to tackle the bathtub. He rang for the maid. It was going to be a good day. He could feel it.

----

Can you tell I don't approve of testing on animals?

More seriously, I tried my best to tone down the 'science is evil' mood that kept cropping up when I was thinking it over. I'm also considering the possibility of zombie unicorns. As to the weirdness of the samples' test results, I suppose I did a bad job of conveying the thought that maybe, just maybe, something can be all encompassing and nothing at the same time. (No, the unicorn isn't God. I'm not pulling an Aslan, I promise. I just think this unicorn is an extraordinary sort of creature.)

In other news, I'm in the process of selecting a book for the book review. I'm kind of busy with holiday preparations right now, so I haven't felt together enough to do a lot of reading beyond fluffy "romance" novels. I do love me some purple prose! But...is it worthy of reviewing?

~Later

Arctic Adventures part one?

Apologies! I was out of town for a couple days and was somewhere with no computer/internet access. But I have a little freewrite for today, so that's something. I may do more on this same topic...

---
On the last day of Stephen St. Gradie’s fifth Arctic expedition, his findings vaulted him from obscurity to worldwide fame. Had he found nothing on his dig, he would have retired and gone down as an eccentric has-been. As it was, however, he suddenly found himself the toast of the natural history and zoological science societies. For you see, Stephen St. Gradie had found something quite unexpected, and it all started with something small.

St. Gradie had been a solid (if unexciting) explorer in his day, looking for, largely, whatever hadn’t yet been seen and documented. The problem was that there were a lot of other, better explorers already ahead of him. He found himself constantly in second place. On the upside, he had become an excellent cartographer and many remote regions of jungles and mountains were mapped under his exacting eye. But really, what Stephen wanted, what any explorer wanted, was to discover something for himself.

In the last decade of his public career, St. Gradie became convinced that the two parts of the world that had not been explored to death were the bottom of the sea and the treacherous frozen polar caps. Since he was, at heart, a man devoted to the land (and since he had no feasible way to carry air down to the sea floor) he decided the poles were his destiny. He spent years preparing for the expedition: finding men to go with him, gear and supplies that would hold up to the extreme temperatures, a ship that would take them as far as they could go on the route he mapped.

The first expedition ended nearly before it started; their ship could not maneuver between the ice floes, and they spent so long getting the ship free that they had to turn back before they starved to death. As it was, St. Gradie spent months recovering, and the sensation in his hands and feet never fully returned. He was lucky, though, considering most of his crew lost fingers and toes to the cold.

The second expedition took even longer to organize. Stephen had lost a lot of credibility with the disastrous first attempt, and he had to make certain financial adjustments when one of his sponsors backed out. Still, there were many who did believe in him and did believe that he would find something of value in that frozen wasteland. St. Gradie’s second expedition turned up nothing. There had been massive storms, one after another, and they had been quite unable to leave their base camp for any length of time that might facilitate great discoveries. Still, on one of the very few clear days, St. Gradie did learn something valuable: there was another, wider break in the ice that went much further north.

The third expedition cost him all but one of his sponsors. It too, turned up nothing but ice and snow and frostbitten extremities, despite using the new route successfully. He didn’t see so much as a tree branch in the month he spent camped atop the ice.

St. Gradie’s fourth expedition was much smaller and was completely funded through his own money. By this time, the public eye held him as an ice-mad lunatic. Still, no one made to stop him when he pushed off and was gone for, all told, six months. He came back and, almost immediately, began to arrange his fifth and final journey.

On the fifth expedition, he found something amazing frozen in the ice. He and his two assistants had made camp some eight miles east from the ship‘s landing. They had been camped in the same spot for three weeks. When the weather was clear, in the beginning, they had ventured forth to explore the glaciers and crevasses and ice fields. Then, unseasonable storms rolled in, and they were forced to spend their time inside the large base-camp tent, making use of its kerosene heater, or otherwise they would freeze to death. The tent began to settle into the ground, in a combination of increased foot traffic of its floor, and the heat of the living space slowly melting the ice underneath it.

One day, St. Gradie noticed a lump in the ground next to the stove. He thought almost nothing of it; the icy ground was never even. This protrusion simply was in a spot that made each of his assistants stub their toes and trip while tending the fire. It was when he himself tripped over it that he took exception to it. He ordered that, as soon as the weather broke, they were to move the tent to more desirable ground.

Eventually, the weather cleared. But, as his luck was wont to run to the bad, it broke the afternoon before they were scheduled to start back to the ship. There was no sense in moving the tent for one more night.

The fateful morning dawned clear and cold. The assistants hurried to pack everything up again. They crated the stove and other essentials and moved all the luggage out of the tent. Then, they took down the tent as St. Gradie supervised. And then, while folding the ground cloth, one of the assistants tripped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Must be a rock.”

The assistant made to get up.

But St. Gradie’s keen sense of orientation told him something important: it was the same spot where the stove had been, the same spot that had been the cause of so many bruises and stubbed toes and barked shins.

“Don’t move a muscle,” he said to the assistants.

And, ever so carefully, he peeled the cloth off the ice. The assistant on the ground shifted his hands when asked, and eventually he was walked backward off the tent. St. Gradie knelt and examined the rock.

“It’s not a rock,” he said. “Is the teakettle still warm?”

He shoved the second assistant, who fetched the kettle. St. Gradie painstakingly poured the warm water over the ice while the assistants hovered.

The assistant who had fallen snorted.

“It’s just a narwhal,” he said.

St. Gradie got as close as he could to the tiny bit of horn and he studied it for long minutes. Then, finally, he stood. He brushed the ice off his knees.

“You,” he said. He pointed to the second assistant. “Get out my tools and heat some more water, quickly!”

“And you,” he said to the first. “You go to the ship as fast as you can and tell them to bring a sledge.”

“But it’s just a narwhal!”

“It most certainly is not,” said St. Gradie. “And I’ll thank you not to scoff at this major discovery! Now run!”

St. Gradie spent nearly a week extra in the arctic. He and his people had nearly starved to death; they lost two crew members to exhaustion. But it was worth it, in the end. St. Gradie returned home with a unicorn. It was frozen in a block of ice, but it was perfectly, exquisitely preserved. And it was most definitely a unicorn. The only question was: what would become of it?
----

Unicorns are awesome. Sometimes I find it interesting to think about what it might have been like at certain times in history, and the days of ship voyage and discovering new lands and things is definitely one of the most interesting ones, I think! There's also plenty of room for me to kind of pick and choose and go in a steampunk sort of direction. I'm really taken with the potential for weird details. I mean, come on. A frozen unicorn plonked down into a land of sci-fi Victorian technologies? It could be very cool.

I remember this book I read a long time ago-- "The Winter of the White Seal" or something similar. Anyway, it's about this ship full of whalers or sealers headed towards one of the poles, and they get blown off course and everyone dies except one man. He lives alone on a terrible little beach backed by a glacier for a really long time. His only companion is a seal that he half-tames...and then tries to kill when he gets really desperate. So then eventually the man takes himself out onto the glacier to die, and he falls through a crevasse/tunnel in the ice, and ends up on a much more habitable beach and, I believe, he eventually gets rescued.

That was a serious digression. Sorry. My point is that adventuring and stuff is very cool, provided you can suspend your disbelief enough to not focus on the lack of technologies at the time. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't seem like a big deal now (like, say, the Oregon trail) but it was a huge thing to do back in the day.

Consider this adventure story a two-parter. I've not yet written enough of the story to lay down my original inspirational scenes. This prologue, if you will, is just catch-up so I won't be scratching my head later trying to figure out how I got to where I'm going.

Also, I am not satisfied with the adventurer's name. I may have to re-spell it or something.

~Later

The Apocalypse?

...This quickie comes from me being really, really tired and dragging all day.

---

At first, Deliah was sure it was her imagination. The days were all the same; that’s how a person could tell time, because time did not change and days were the same length each time, twenty-four hours in a day and all that.

But then things got a little strange. Deliah passed it off as a dying battery when her watch’s second hand seemed to hitch every few seconds. She got the battery changed and didn’t think of it again until she noticed the clock in her office. It didn’t hitch so much as it paused as it ticked off the seconds. It ran on electricity. Deliah made a complaint to the office manager and the clock was replaced. The replacement did the same thing.

Next, the strangeness affected the timers that ran the cable television stations. A half-hour program would end and then, for a minute or two, blank tapes ran before the next program came on. But, as each day passed, the blank spaces grew longer and longer. Battery and electric clocks continued to slow down.

And then the atomic clocks went bad. The government tried to keep it quiet, tried to say it was merely an unforeseen quirk of the clock’s prolonged exposure to radioactive subatomic particles. So they built new clocks, and set them up in a grand televised special, broadcast live over every channel during one of the now-half-hour long gaps. The new clocks didn’t work right either. It was then that the nation decided to panic. Deliah sat on her couch in shock. Then, she picked up the remote and clicked through until she finally found one station that was, blissfully, clock-free. She sat in the darkness with the blank screen.

The scientists, after weeks and months of study, determined that time was, in fact, slowing down. World leaders all advised their people to try to keep going as normally as possible. Deliah found it impossible to ignore that a day, once twenty-four hours, was now taking up thirty-six. She found it interminable that she now spent twelve hours in the office each day. Her shower took forty-five minutes to complete each morning. Her commute warped from a ten minute walk to fifteen. She supposed there was an upside: sleeping and coffee breaks and really good movies all lasted longer now.

To cope with this, businesses switched from an hourly pay rate to a “pay for the day” scale: Deliah’s paycheck covered eight Old Hours’ worth of money, despite each ‘hour’ now being half again as lengthy. It was bullcrap, but if they kept going by Old Hours, they’d all go broke and everyone would be unemployed.

The only people with real job security were the scientists working on a solution to the problem. For months, they labored on it. Periodic news coverage showed the state of things to be grim, but there was always a new theory to test, new equations to solve.

Finally, after nearly a year--and Deliah was no longer sure exactly how long that year had been--the world leaders again appeared on television during one of the blank spots. It was time, they said, to face facts. The days were getting longer and longer, and they would never stop growing. There would come a time, not too far in the future, where the day would literally never end. At least, not for humans. At this time, the scientists explained, the day would stretch out so long that, by the time it ended, all the humans would be dead. The Last Day, it was cleverly coined. And they expected that Last Day to come…well…next Thursday.

Rioting broke out across the globe. Desperate, the humans tried to start a wave of babies to stretch out further than this strange ripple of slow time. But it didn’t work, because, no matter how strange it was, it was less than a week until Thursday, and babies take nine months. It simply wasn’t possible. Time was relentless and inexorable. Things calmed down in the interim and humans tried their best to go about like normal.

And then, the Last Day came. Deliah got dressed for work as always. A thought occurred to her. she stopped herself at the door. She took off her business suit and stepped out of her shoes. She put her pajamas back on and crawled into bed. And then, for the first time in her life, Deliah called in sick.


----

Wouldn't calling in sick really be the best way to deal with it? I know this was hasty and rushed (irony factor!) but I think I kind of got the concept across. I'm too sleepy to do any more with it tonight, at least.

~Later

I've been busy today. I almost forgot to A. do a freewrite and B. post it. I'm very, very tired now.


----

Magwyn climbed the stairs. The treads cracked like gunshots each time she put a foot down, wood and ice and cold all under the frozen sky. It was a stupid idea, whoever had decided that the middle of January was the best time to dismantle the tower’s indoor staircase. These outside ones were steep and dangerous in the middle of the summer, let alone when they were covered in sheer ice. If she were lucky, there would be enough bare tread, protected by the bulk of the tower, for her to put down the toe of her boot.

She reached the landing that marked the halfway point. Magwyn kept a hand anchored to the railing as she caught her breath. The land spread white and sparkling and soft before her. It was beautiful but deeply, deeply frozen. If it had been anywhere near the freezing point, all the snow and ice would have melted into shapelessness by now. As it was, the steady winter winds had carved fantastic sculptures through snow banks and bushes. Even the great waterfall, visible to the west, was solid, a vast, twisted hulk of ice dominating the landscape.

Shaking herself, Magwyn forced her legs to bend again and continue to the top. Soon she was scraping her feet against the bottom of the doorframe. She knocked twice on the door and let herself in. She unlaced her boots and left them beside the door. Magwyn fitted her feet into a pair of slippers. She draped her coat and mittens on the back of a nearby chair.

“Uncle Irving?” she said.

Magwyn looked around the room. A fireplace radiated heat to her right and a tiny kitchen to her left gave way to a living space cum workshop, taking up nearly the entire circumference of the tower. A drafting table overflowed with papers. A basket of smooth river rocks shared quarters with several dismembered umbrellas. Pieces of his prized fungus collection had fallen off the walls and were currently being batted about by a large white cat, who stepped neatly around what appeared to be about a half a bushel of walnuts. Clean, though wrinkled, laundry hung from the railings that lead to the inner stairs. Magwyn shook her head. She crossed the room and started pulling it down. She stubbed her toe on a large ump of ore that had been holding the laundry in place, and so she kicked it again out of pique.

“Uncle Irving, I’m not your maid,” she said. “Come on! You promised you’d have time today!”

A metallic clanging from above had Magwyn ducking out of instinct. A ladder with brass fittings descended from the ceiling, stiffly unfolding. The feet of the ladder slid into two grooves in the floor. Down came Irving, looking as rumpled as ever.

“My dear Magwyn,” he said. “Of course I have time for you!”

He pulled her into a hug, laundry and all.

“Put that down,” he said. “And come up to the loft with me. I have something interesting to show you.”

“It’s not something on the telescope, is it?” said Magwyn. “You had me looking in it all night, the last time I was here, and I couldn’t see right for a week!”

Nonetheless, she let Uncle Irving lead her up the ladder.

“But those meteor showers were extraordinary,” he said. “And besides, it’s daytime. Very hard to see the stars when our sun is in the way.”

They got to the top of the ladder into a second, smaller workspace. Baskets full of pieces of metal filled most of the space: gears, rods, plates, tubes, and wires all crowded around a desk. Something lumpy, covered by a piece of cloth, lay on the worktable. The sun, by way of a narrow skylight, sliced into the clutter and highlighted all the dust. Magwyn sneezed.

“Close you eyes and hold out your hands,” said Irving.
She rolled her eyes.

“Is all this necessary?” she said. “Can’t we just play a game of chess or something?”

Magwyn loathed chess.

“Just do it,” said her uncle. “I promise you’ll like it!”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

Something remarkably heavy landed in her hands, and she nearly dropped it. He could have warned her it was heavy, but no. Just like that time when she was six and he hadn’t warned her about the etching acids. Or when she was nine and he’d enlisted her help in finding and carrying a long-dead deer home. She’d smelled for a week.

“Tada,” he said. “Just wind the key in the back.”

Magwyn opened her eyes and sucked in a breath of air. It was a cat. A very real looking cat. She wound the key and, to her amazement, it opened its eyes and uncurled itself from its sitting position. She set it down on the floor and it began to walk around. He’d fashioned a clockwork cat. She could see into its gears as it walked around and waved its tail, then took off after a lone housefly. Copper and silver and brass and other metals she didn’t know all gleamed in its every movement.

“How did you do it?” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I had to make special alloys. But it’s not perfect. It needs to be wound every couple days. And it needs to stay warm.”

“Warm?” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been better to make it in the summer, then?”


----

Vaguely middle-ages, yes. Magical, possibly. It's interesting to think about a mechanical cat, isn't it? Yes, there are simulated cats out there today, but that's all made possible with computer chips. It boggles my mind to think about non-computerized mechanical things. Ugh. All my sentences are becoming the same boring length.

~Later

Warning: May Contain Lesbians Invisible to the Naked Eye

Sometimes I cannot adequately convey my frustrations. Also, this poem is in rough shape. It may not be done. I can't rightly tell yet.

---
Invisible lesbians
Come from invisible isles
Have invisible names
Forgettable haircuts, paper coffee cups
Sedate sedans and understated smiles.

They’re there at the corner of your eye:
If you look for them in the street.
But face them straight on and they disappear
Away on shoes with quiet heels:
Unremarkable size eight feet.

The books about them are elusive:
In libraries they move from shelf to shelf
In stores they cower behind the books of
Dead white men. Those stories bore me, passing over
All the things a woman might have said or felt.

The world needs more lesbians: not invisible
Not hidden out of sight and out of mind
Not written out of fiction, not blotted out of scripts
But there and real. High budget. No nonsense, just
Human and woman and easy to find.
---

This poem really stems from three things: one, I am in a mood for lesbians. I want to read books and watch movies and look at comics that are all about women being together (and apart.) Two: I could not find a good film to watch tonight. Three: general frustration at the continued domination and exclusion of women's writing. (I'm thinking specifically of some short story collections that were completely composed of either Dead White Men's work or just plain men's stories, all on topics which women frequently, successfully, and eloquently write.)

I suppose it's my twisty sense of feminism speaking out. It's bothersome to want things to be available that are so (apparently) elusive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of lesbian material for me to consume, but I can't find it. And my point is kind of that it shouldn't be this hard to find in the first place. Accurate or not, I get the feeling that what I'm looking for is a fringe element of a subculture, which would make it an even smaller pool of availability than if I were just looking for some man-on-man stuff.

Ugh. Cultural stuff is weird. There's so much of it that I just don't understand, only so much of it that is accessible to me. This is why I shall become a hermit and live in a shack in the woods and commune with squirrels.

~Later

Scene from a Dream

This was, more or less, a dream I had last night. I wrote it down this morning, fleshing it out and doing things like naming the characters from it and cleaning up some of the nonsensical weirdness. I have no idea how much sense it makes to an outside reader, but it's a pretty clear scene to me.

----
Joan was sitting in the second row of the classroom. Unfortunately, this gave her the perfect view of the first row. Athletes to a man, they were currently mooning the classroom and tittering to themselves. This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because being in the second row meant that she was very close to the professor’s desk and the blackboard, and bad because she had absolutely no interest in the dozen or so pale and hairy butts in front of her.

Joan took a quick survey of the room. She was the only woman in sight, in a classroom auditorium that probably fit a hundred students. There were a few discomfited faces in the crowd, but many of the boys--really, anyone who would participate in this was not yet a man--had the giggles. Or, worse, they were whispering and pointing at her. Joan bit down on her tongue before raising her hand.

The professor, from the looks an ex-military good old boys type, waited a minute before acknowledging her.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sir,” she said. “This is inappropriate.”

There were rules about sexual harassment, and they made a nice neat fence between her and the first row. Joan felt secure for all of two seconds.

The professor rose from his desk and approached her. Up close, he was no less intimidating than before.

“And how, miss, is it inappropriate?”

His eyes pierced hers when they met, but he showed no signs of concern for the dozens of policies he was allowing to be broken. Joan fought down her temper and the urge to squirm in her seat. The boys behind her grew less rowdy, seeming to settle into their seats. The whispering back and forth swelled like a wave.

“It’s harassment,” she said. “Sexual harassment.”

The whispered wave broke in a froth of snickers.

“What makes it harassment for you?” said the professor.

The professor was calm. Very, very calm as if this were a sort of situation he’d experienced before. Joan’s temper flared. How dare he first ignore the situation and then, then! To be asked for an accounting of why being mooned by a dozen jocks was insulting! Joan pushed back from her seat and stood. She looked into the professor’s eyes and counted to three.

“Because I don’t want to see their stupid asses,” she said.

Joan bit the inside of her cheek, still furious. At the same time, a sort of shock set in. She’d sworn at the professor. He was going to boot her from the classroom. She sat again and swept her pencils and notebooks into her bag. Joan was scrambling to think of a way to make a quiet exit. She was sure everyone was staring at her. She was pinned to the spot.

“All right then,” said the professor.

He strode to the front of the classroom in dead silence.

“Pull up those pants boys!”

What? Joan looked to the professor.

“I said pull up those pants and sit down!” he said. “No one wants to see your stupid asses unless it’s on the field, whooping the other team!”

Joan sat, dumbstruck. The professor pulled down a whiteboard, covered in what appeared to be test questions. The front-row boys hitched up their pants, one by one, and seated themselves. Nobody said a word.

“My name is Harmon,” said the professor. “You may call me Professor Harmon or Sir. If you want to talk to me, raise your hand. If, and I say if, I call on you, you will stand while you speak. When I am done talking to you, you will sit.”

His eyes swept the classroom. He turned toward the board and waved at its contents.

“This,” Harmon said, “is your first test. Answer it to the best of your abilities as quickly as you can. Calculators are allowed. Get to it!”

Professor Harmon left the front of the classroom and went to sit at his desk. He pulled out a stack of papers and ignored the class. Joan was stunned. She slumped in her chair.

She looked at the board and felt like crying because none of the equations looked familiar, except maybe the first one. She dug into her backpack. She dug a little more and frowned. She rooted frantically in her bag. Joan pulled out a notebook of blank paper and a couple pencils. No calculator. She needed a calculator. She couldn’t solve the equations without a calculator. All around her, the other students were frowning and pushing buttons and scribbling down answers and solving processes.

Joan despaired. She sat, frozen, watching the time tick away from her. Ten questions stood between her and success. Ten miserable math problems lined the path to her academic failure. She snuck glances at Professor Harmon. He had his head down, pen working furiously over the papers in front of him. The clock ticked mercilessly as she stared at the board.

Half an hour went by as Joan’s eyes skittered all over the board, seeing no way out. Then, something miraculous happened: Joan noticed that question four was something she understood…sort of. She took a deep breath and put pencil to paper. She wrote, carefully, “4.” at the left margin line. She cringed to be skipping ahead, leaving vast blank spots for questions one through three on the page. Teeth gritted, she copied the problem off the board and started to break it down into manageable pieces. Joan almost jumped out of her skin when someone coughed beside her.

She looked up. The professor was standing there.

“Took you long enough,” Harmon said. “I thought I was going to have to kick you out.”

“What?” Joan said.

“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet in my classroom,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

Joan looked down at her paper, embarrassed.

“I’m not very good at math,” she said.

Harmon raised an eyebrow at her.

“Oh really,” he said. “Then why are you here?”

Joan couldn’t tell what he wanted her to say.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class,” she said. “It’s been…”

Joan counted on her fingers, thinking hard. She chewed her eraser.

“It’s been since sophomore year of high school. That was ten years ago, give me a break here!”

Professor Harmon stared at her. His jaw worked up and down a moment.

“Why don’t you just go home to your father, let him pick out a nice husband for you?”

That chauvinistic bastard. Joan was going to kill him.

“Because,” Joan snapped. “He’s dead and he can’t, and I’m here with you to learn!”

The professor smiled at her and Joan’s anger was overlaid with confusion.

“That’s what I’m looking for, here,” he said. “No excuses, no layer of politeness for the sake of being polite, no political correctness. Just straight-up honest answers.”

Harmon laid a polite hand on her shoulder and clarified himself.

“I’m going to break down the walls between you and me and get to the real you, because right now, the way you are, you’ll never learn a damn thing,” he said. His face was even more serious than before.

“But,” Joan said. “But…”

Joan didn’t like the idea that she was some sort of project for this man.

“Oh, you’ll nod and smile and agree, but you won’t learn anything.”

He was quiet, calm. He gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Good luck with the test, miss,” Harmon said.

He turned to go back to his desk.

“It’s Joan,” she said. “Not miss. Joan.”

Harmon’s laugh was sharp and loud in the classroom. Half the front row jumped in their chairs.

“I like you, Miss Joan,” he said. “We’re going to have fun together.”

Harmon sat at his desk again, shuffled his papers, and noticed that the class was staring at him.

“What the hell are you all looking at? Get back to work before I fail everyone in here!”

Joan bent to the task at hand and tuned out the rest of the room. She could do this. She knew she could.

----

I swear, it's always math classes that haunt my sleep. I remember that the first question of the test had something to do with the quadratic formula, except it was all jumbled and weird, as such things usually are in dreams. (And yes, I really did dream that the entire front row was mooning me. It wasn't a standing-up mooning, though. They were bent at the waist and bracing themselves with their elbows on the desks. Their butts were distinctly jiggly.)

~Later