This is a Christmas-themed horror story, first shown in The Were-Traveler Issue 2.

Secret Santa

It happens every year.

One blazing, skin burning trip around the planet. One stop at every single house, home, cardboard box. Gifts for everyone; some wrapped and placed, some given in spirit only. Some actually appreciated; many, less so.

One trip back to the North Pole; back to the barn with one big empty sack. Nine reindeer, spent, sweaty, huffing out white clouds of exhausted beasty breath.

Santa falls out of the sleigh, drags the empty bag behind him, and collapses into his squeaky chair behind an ornate wooden desk. The shiny brass nameplate always has a little puff of tarnish across “Kringle” when he returns; he always notices that. The bottle is already there, opened. The glass is there, too, polished and ready.

Manny peeks in past the half-open door, “Sir…”

“What.”

“Both arrangements have been made, sir. Everything is set.”

Santa says nothing.

“So, then, I’ll just give the word?”

“Do it.”

“Once it’s done, sir, services begin at dawn.”

“As always.”

“Will you attend, sir?”

“Not this year.” Santa reaches past the glass, grabs the bottle instead, takes a long pull on the clear liquid.

“Very well, sir. Sir?”

“What.”

“I’m here, sir.”

“Not for long, Manny.”

“I’m proud to have served, sir.”

“Manny. I’m proud of you.”

Manny’s throat went tight. His eyes welled and poured over with tears. The door closed behind him as he left.

The dirty business of Christmas. This year, he just could not stomach the doing of it, the pretending that a greater good comes of it. This time, it’s just the dirty business of Christmas.

The single toll of one giant bell sounded, and Santa’s shadow fell harsh across his desk. In the window behind him, thousands of elves shot into the sky on blazing trails of light, arcing toward every sleeping soul.

The darkness left behind was deafening and lonesome. Santa took another deep, deep drink.

In all the distant corners of the world, a tiny little elf arrived at every home of every name listed on the Naughty List. Each of those elves tiptoed in, snuck through the homes, finding the sleeping little jerks, and quietly pulled back the corners of blankets.

All at once, thousands of little syringes were plunged into the necks of sleeping souls, children and grown-ups alike. They all twinged from the pain and rolled over; snorted and settled back into slumber.

A flowing rush of shooting stars sped simultaneously back to the North Pole. Their work finally complete for the year.

At dawn, they all gathered, all the elves, in rows and columns, quiet and somber, performing their final ritual.

The elves in the first row dug into the snow, down into the permafrost, and deep into the ground. They lay themselves then down, and expired. The second row elves covered them, and began to dig. The ritual rolled through the ranks until all were done, and Manny came across the back, covered the last of the ranks.

Soon, the new elves would arrive to take their places, to pay the price of having been Naughty, by making toys all year long which would then be delivered to those on the Nice list.

At last, Manny began to dig. When his work was done, he returned to Santa’s office and knocked.

“It is time, sir.”

It happens every year.

Unlike the Halloween issue, which was limited to 100 word entries, the Christmas issue was looking for 1000-1500 wordcount flash length entries. Check out The Were-Traveler for Secret Santa and Oh, Christmas Tree.

Thanks again, Maria, for the cool collection, and thanks for allowing me to participate!

This is a 100 word drabble, first shown in The Were-Traveler Issue 1.

Tug the Heart Strings

I know it’s not me. I’m not doing it. I’m not crazy.

Well, yeah, I mean, I am; my body is doing it. But it’s not me. Not my doing.

Even if it were me, against my knowing, then, when it happens, my muscles would flex, right? Because when you move, at all, that’s how it works.

It’s not that.

I feel it pushing …my bones… to articulate my arms around, and my legs. My jaw. It’s manipulating my bones to throw my body around.

So, it wasn’t me doing the killing.

It’s him, that distant puppetmaster.

He’s the murderer.

This is a 100 word drabble, first shown in The Were-Traveler Issue 1.

Three Jack O’Lanterns

Every year it’s the same. Harvest comes in, jack-o-lanterns go out.

We all get one each to hollow out and to put a candle in. Janey always saws around the top and then scoops out the junk. Mackenzie always starts shaping the mouth first. I always go for the eyes. It’s messy, sure, but it’s something we get to do every year together.

Same with candy corn. Candy corn is forever.

One thing gets harder each year, though, but there always seems to be free digging space at the far end of the field.

Three jack-o-lanterns, three bodies to bury.

One story, Grin, I had previously published here on my blog. The other two, Three Jack O’Lanterns, and Tug the Heart Strings, were first published at The Were-Traveler.

Thanks, Maria, for the cool collection, and thanks for allowing me to participate!

Back in September, Blognostics put out a call for a collaborative project, so I threw in. The goal was to have 30 authors throw in portions and end up with a short story. Very Pantsy. Not generally my type of thing, but I’d never done it before, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The final story “No Where Else” is posted now, and can be read in its entirety.

My portion is 2/3 or more the way through, just do a search for “reginald”, and it should jump you right to it.

It was a challenge to take what had been written before, in many different styles, and contribute a portion that felt style-suited, integrated, and not closing up too much of the story for those that might follow.

Not sure I’d do a project like this again; my inner editor was bleeding from the ears; but, I had fun just the same.

I hope you enjoy it!

Note:
My buddy from Instagram, Maclakey, sent me the idea for a story he’d had in mind. Something about a husband buying a gift for his wife, which had some amazing power, which gets out of hand. I told him I liked the thought of that, and that I’d have a go at it.

My intent was to round out about a thousand words, call it a Friday Flash and be done with it, but I fell in love with the story and it turned into a runaway.

Here it is…

All I Ever Wanted

There are, in fact, islands in the black powder seas. Islands of all sizes; islands abandoned, islands razed, islands jungled, one that’s a pile of human skulls, one covered with violently violet flowers most of its days, and at least one larger one with a village of people.

Gray people, in gray clothing, living in gray wooden homes, waking to gray dawns.

Jeremy pulled his suspenders over each shoulder and stood, shaking his pants into place. Coranelle was already dressed and shuffling about in the kitchen as he walked to the room, looking around for his breakfast.

“Here you are dear,” she said, setting a plate onto the table. She sat in the adjacent chair, and waiting for him to sit.

They sat and they ate.

“Happy Birthday, Cora,” Jeremy said at last.

“What’s that dear? Oh, go on. It’s just another day,” she pulled her face into a smile.

“No, Cora, it’s not, it’s a special day.”

“Okay dear.”

“Don’t you want a present or something?”

“No, there’s nothing I need.”

“I’m going out today.”

“Oh? Wherever to?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Well good luck with that. There’s very little surprising here on the island, you know.”

“I suppose.”

They sat for awhile. Cora, complacent, sipped tepid water from a stoneware mug. Jeremy did the same.

Jeremy hated this island more than he could understand. He’d hated it that way longer than he could remember. He remembered eventually giving up on and simply letting the hate collapse upon itself, where it burned like a star within the empty blackness inside him.

“I’M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE TODAY WITH MY BARE HANDS!” he shouted, leaping from his chair and crouching in a menacing stance, “AND THEN I’M GOING TO TEAR OFF HIS LEFT EAR AND WEAR IT ON MY FACE LIKE AN EAR-SHAPED WART! AND TAKE A LUMPY DUMP ON HIS KITTEN!”

“That’s nice, dear,” She looked at him, “but if you come back covered in blood, you’re washing your own underpants.”

He sat back down. “Is nothing exciting anymore?” She used to care, to fight, to hope. Now, she just sits there, being pleasant. What had happened to his Cora? Did she have that same star burning inside, or had it snuffed itself?

“I wouldn’t say that,” she sipped at her water, “Life is special and amazing.”

He stared at his mug, “Cora, what do you want?”

“Nothing, I have all I ever wanted.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think we all have things we want.”

“Well, here, in this place, there are only so many things we can have.”

“Yes, right, but, if there were anything, anything at all…”

“Hmmm,” she thought, “Color? Maybe? Things are a bit drab, most of the year. Remember when we had that one springtime? That was nice,” she sipped.

Jeremy went out, just as he said he would.

He walked down the side of the road toward the central village. Crisp brown leaves flaked apart under his steps. Seemed like it was always fall now, all year long. Bare branches, gray tree trunks, crispy leaves underfoot.

He looked for color, for Cora’s birthday gift. There was nothing vibrant. Anywhere.

Lots of browns and grays, some tans. Nothing astounding. That’s the only thing good enough; something that will astound her, something vivid.

The shops proved the expected disappointment. Clothing; dull, drab, itchy. Household goods; earthenware, wooden, hammered metal. Electrics; all antiques, all modified with sustainable hand-cranks and pulley/lever actions for charging: mostly worthless, though. When you’re on an island in the middle of the powder seas, you get no visitors, and there’s really no where to go, nothing to do.

Jeremy passed by the edge of the central square where a dozen or so others had gathered. It was quiet, though; no conversations, no music, no games. People tended to stand around and appear to wait.

Down the rise, and around the south fence, though, was a shop of sundries. Jeremy went inside to look around.

It wasn’t possible to decide exactly what the shop sold in specialty, judging by the contents. Broken shovels, dinner plates, re-made weapons, salt shakers… piles and piles, towers of containers and boxes.

“Hello, sir!” said the shopkeeper.

“Hello, there.”

“Can I help you find anything?”

“Hmm well, I’m looking for a gift.”

“Sorry, sir, I sell things here.”

“No, no, I’m willing to buy. I’m looking to buy a gift for someone.”

“Ah, well then! You’ve come to the right place.”

“I hope so. Do you have anything colorful?”

“Colorful. With color?”

“That’s it exactly.”

“I’m afraid… I don’t, really…” the shopkeeper said, looking around, “oh wait, perhaps…” he shoved his way through a cluttered aisle, tall piles of containers teetering behind him as he went.

Jeremy followed in gaze only, staying safely back.

“I have a thing, which you will, at first, find most not colorful whatsoever.”

“Nope, not for me, then.”

“Ah yes, but just wait, just wait!” he finally emerged from a dark corner, holding a small bundle wrapped in tattered leather. “Here. This thing.”

The shopkeeper flipped the corners of leather aside revealing the item.

“A glass ball?” said Jeremy.

“Metal, in fact.”

“Looks glass, I can see through it.”

“Metal. It’s from the old country, before the Event.”

“Before the Event? How did you get it…”

“I get things!” the shopkeeper beamed proudly. “This is metal, I assure you,” he held it up at eye-level for them both to inspect more closely. Light bent through it, curving everything, refracting shapes of objects as he rotated it around.

“Still looks glass to me,” said Jeremy.

“Oh, it’s quite metal. It’s a nanogin mesh. Millions upon millions of tiny machines built to mesh together, and programmed to bend light. This, sir, is a nanogin lens. It can reshape tiny portions of light from great distances.”

“Looks like a glass ball to me, shopkeeper,” said Jeremy, beginning to lose his patience with the sales pitch.

“The flaw here, is that I lack the harness, the stand, the …contraption… that it was built to function with. So, it doesn’t work properly without being mounted properly. Hold it in a shaky hand and you get shaky light. Here, watch.” The shopkeeper took the lens over to the window, and raked aside umbrellas and axe-handles to clear the way. Finding a nearby jar, he unscrewed the lid, which he placed on the windowsill, and then carefully set the lens into the ring with his fingertips. “Now,” he said, “crouch here, look through…”

Jeremy crouched by the window, and gazed through the lens. After some squinting and head tilting, Jeremy was amazed by what he saw. He looked back at the shopkeeper, shocked.

“Yes! YES! You see, don’t you. You see. Galaxies, rainbows Godlike, the most ancient stars, themselves, yes?!”

“How much do you want for this. I have little.”

“For you, sir, it is free. I have no use for it, haven’t sold it in years, and you said it’s a gift, yes?”

“For my wife.”

“She’ll be thrilled. Please, take it.”

Jeremy rummaged around in his pockets and shoved all the money he had into the shopkeepers’ hands, “Please, it’s only fair.”

The shopkeeper nodded graciously.

Jeremy wrapped the lens again, and picked up the jar lid, “May I?”

“Of course.”

Jeremy left the shop, and he ran. His heart raced, and he felt as if the elixir of excitement bleed from his pores. Cora will love this, so, so much.

Cora sat outside, in front of their small home, on a gray chair made from sapling logs lashed together. Her legs and her shoulders and elbows fit into the darkly polished spots that had developed over the years of sitting in the same position and sipping warm water from a mug. She watched as Jeremy approached.

“Cora!” he panted, “Cora! I found something wonderful!”

“That’s nice, dear,” she sipped.

“Wonderful! It’s wonderful, and I think you’ll think so too, once you see.”

“It sounds lovely.”

Jeremy rushed inside, leaving the door open. Cora could see him fidgeting around the window getting it open, and setting up the ring on the windowsill, “Come inside, Cora, so you can see!”

“Mercy me,” she said, lifting herself from the chair and walking in. She shut the door behind her, and put her mug gently into the sink.

“Over here, over here,” he made flapping beckonings with his hands.

“What is it, Jeremy, are you feeling ill? This isn’t like you.”

“Just look, look. Crouch down, and look through this…” he motioned at the nanogin lens, sitting in the jar lid on the windowsill.

“Oh I’ll try, but I’m getting too old for crawling around on the floor,” she bent down and peered through the lens.

Jeremy held his breath, waiting for the sudden wash of excitement to flood over her, waiting for her to look up at him wide-eyed in wonderment, so he could yell to her, “Happy Birthday, love!”

Cora smiled, straightened herself again, with her hand on her hip as she stood, “Really quite lovely, dear, thank you.”

Jeremy exhaled. “Did you see it? The galaxies? The light of the stars?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, quite interesting how the light bends through the glass. Very pretty.”

“I don’t think you saw what I saw. What I saw was amazing; galaxies, novas, fingerprints of the gods!”

“I don’t think I saw any of those things. But it’s lovely, thank you for my gift, Jeremy,” Cora walked back over to the sink to retrieve her mug, refilled it with water, and sat again at the table.

Jeremy drifted over to the empty chair, and also sat.

They sipped water during the afternoon, and eventually, Cora carried her mug to the sink where she emptied it, rinsed it with fresh water, dried it with a towel, and placed back it in the cupboard.

“Thank you for the wonderful and thoughtful birthday, Jeremy. I’m off to bed.”

He followed her, and they slept.

“JEREMY. JEREMY!”

He woke suddenly, confused, fell out of bed, and ran into the front room, where there was dim light and Cora, screaming for him.

“Wha… what is it…”

“Jeremy! Look!” She was awake, and had been for some time, it seems, curled up by the front windowsill, with the window slid fully open. On the windowsill sat Cora’s empty mug, holding the nanogin lens steady, perched on top.

“Yes? The lens?”

“It’s… AMAZING…” she whispered, as if fearful to nudge it improperly.

“Yes, it is!”

“Look, look, look. Look inside, just here.”

He stooped and peered in, at the angle she indicated. Inside, he focused in and saw the image of a candle on a small table. “The candle there?”

“Yes! The candle! That’s in Merryth’s father’s workshop, Jeremy!”

“Quite amazing.”

“More than amazing! It’s miles and miles away, Jeremy! It’s a full afternoon’s walk to that part of the island, and I can see it!”

“Yes, I know; Have you tried the night sky? The stars?”

“No, but just think… I can see entirely into Merryth’s father’s workshop!”

Jeremy smiled. She did love the gift, after all. “Happy Birthday, Cora.”

She hugged him tightly, fully enthusiastically.

A tear fell from his cheek, but she didn’t notice; she was curled up again by the window, like a small child, waiting for the first snowflakes of the year, “So, amazing…” she whispered.

Jeremy went back to bed.

Dawn came as boldly as ever on the island; mostly in the form of bright glow behind a wet fog. Jeremy woke, and was alone. He dressed and went into the front room.

Cora was still there. She had dragged the sapling chair in from the yard, and was lying awkwardly in it, so that her vision was aligned with the lens just so.

“I’ve been looking at this in different ways, in all kinds of directions,” she whispered, excitedly, “and I think I really have this thing figured out!”

The lens itself was no longer in her mug. On the floor were bits of rusty clipped wires and wood shavings, and a handful of discarded tools. Around the lens, Cora had fashioned a two-part cage, of sorts; a lattice of small straight lengths of branches bound together with twists of rusty wire. Underneath this, she had gouged tiny marks into the windowsill, surrounding the lens cage by a notched circle. With one hand, she was rotating the upper portion of the cage, letting it click from notch to notch, while she looked through the lens.

“I’d say you did, at that. What’s all this?”

“Every notch,” she said quietly, “is someone’s home,” she clicked from one to another, “The Winmar’s,” click, “The Stroggdil’s,” click, “The village square, of course,” click, “I’ve got them all right there.” she smiled a deep and genuine smile.

Jeremy looked in the cupboard and removed both of their mugs. Filling them both, he brought hers to her and set it on the windowsill. He sat at the table and sipped.

“Thank you, Jeremy, for the gift,” she said, rotating the lens cage bit by bit, “I think I may have been a little under-enthusiastic when you brought it to me, and I’m sorry.”

“You’re welcome, Cora. I’m happy you’re happy.”

“This… is… amazing…” she whispered, adjusting the lens.

“The man at the shop says it’s not actually glas-”

Cora suddenly jumped up from her reclined nest, looking franticly into the lens.

“Whoah there…” he said.

“It’s outside the stables. There’s a fight.”

“Fight?”

“Looks like Mithron Jabes and another man, fighting over something. Shoving and punching. Oh, it’s Chriss, from the stables… he’s not faring well at all.”

“Cora, I…”

“Oh, there’s blood now.”

“Cora.”

“Ohhh, oh my. The fight’s over. Mithron put him down pretty hard. Swung a chair across his face.”

“Cora. I’m not so sure this is the best way…”

“I know, I know, none of our business; these things probably happen every day, all day long without us knowing.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, so what’s the harm is seeing, then? It affects nothing. The outcome, either way, is set, since we’re not there, to influence any action in any direction.”

“Except that we do see, and we don’t act.”

“But we can’t act. So knowing doesn’t change what can be done. Besides, isn’t it amazing! Is it not …enthralling!” she hugged him again, then straightened the sapling chair and crawled back in. Click. Click. Click.

“Clearly,” he said, watching her.

“Hmm these people are sitting down to breakfast, but I don’t know them. They don’t look familiar. But, then, they wouldn’t, since they live in the far village. We haven’t been there in ages, no family there, or reason to go.”

“Certainly.”

And so, the days went on. Cora, quite excited with her new gift, and Jeremy, observant.

“JEREMY!”

Once again, he was stirred from his sleep in the early hours. Cora had been awake late again, possibly, or up early, although he did not recall her retiring the previous evening. He stumbled into the front room, still in a sleepy haze, to respond to the summons. “Yes, Cora, what is it?”

Cora was wide-eyed and enthralled, pointing at the lens. “You didn’t tell me!”

“Tell you what?”

“That I could see so far!”

He was glad to see her finally excited about things, awake to the world. “Well, yes, that’s what made me want to get it for you at the shop. I could see the colorful swirls in the stars, the shapes of galaxies…”

“No, no no, Jeremy. I mean, here. I can see, across the black seas.”

“Oh, yes, I’m quite sure you can.”

“Jeremy. We’re not alone in the world. There are people, across the seas, other land, populated!”

He deflated a bit. “Yes, well, I’ve always felt as much, but. You know.”

“How can you, Jeremy. How can you just… not care?”

“Cora. Love, we can do, nothing. The sea…”

“So that’s just it? No use in even trying?”

“Men, died, Cora, only stepping into the powder to the ankle. Dozens of them over the years. Good men, and women, and little ones; all adventurous and all wanting more than what we have, right here, right now.”

“Men that wanted off the island just to get off the island. Men not knowing what was beyond; men guessing. No one has ever known, truly known, that there was, in actual fact, somewhere to go, something to reach for. Look, Jeremy, look. We’re not alone, we have real hope now.”

“I’m not sure certain death is worth the hope.”

Cora shook her head, “Jeremy, knowing what we know, now, how can you be so… complacent?”

His heart sank as he looked over at the lens; a glass ball on a windowsill, in a shabby gray house, in the middle of the night. There used to be crickets, years ago, that kept the nights from aching so empty.

He placed his hand on her shoulder, “Cora, come on, get some sleep.”

She went with him to their bedroom where they lay, and covered themselves. She folded her hands across her stomach in the dark, and was soon deeply asleep. He lay on his side, listened to her breathe, and imagined it was the rolling sound the black powder waves, if the sea ever churned, which it did not.

Jeremy eased the blanket aside, and he quietly left the bedroom.

In the outer room, he cleaned and tidied, swept up the bits of wood shavings and rusty wire clippings with his hands, and took the mess outside, dusting his hands together. He replaced the sapling chair back into the yard. Inside, he removed the nanogin lens from its contraption, and re-wrapped it with its leather swatch. He peeked into the bedroom, listened for Cora’s breathing, which seemed steady and unchanged, and he quietly left the house.

He carried the lens down into the village, moving slowly in the darkness. The moon was partially illuminated, but the fog cover dampened the brightness.

Eventually, he made it to the shop, and he knocked loudly, to wake the proprietor.

After a few rounds of pounding on the door, a lamplight stirred within, and approached the door, which opened.

“Sir, I’ve come to return this.”

The lamp lifted, revealing a woman’s face, sleepy and squinting, “What’s that, who’s there?”

“Ah, miss, forgive me. I’m here to see the proprietor and to return this which I purchased from him.”

“It’s not a shop. There’s no shop here.”

Jeremy took a step back, surveyed the front of the building again, now in the orange cast of the lamp she held.

“I live here, there’s no shop.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“How should I know. Just moved in. If there’s nothing else?”

“He was like this, and silver hair…” Jeremy indicated with his hand an approximate height of the man.

“Meh! I live here.” she shuffled back inside, and the lamplight bobbed around shadows until it vanished again within the building.

Jeremy felt the weight of the lens in his hand, the coarseness of the leather wrap around it, and wondered what to do. He fully meant to rid himself of it, and, in the process, hopefully the problems he’d created with Cora. Returning it was no longer an option. Hiding it didn’t seem like a solution, with no secret places suitable for tucking things completely away from others. He walked and thought through the foggy darkness, and he hoped.

He soon found himself standing at the edge of the black powder sea. The bedrock shore that remained after the stuff had eaten or dissolved everything else away held the stuff there, silently, and the black powder sea stared, unmoving.

Jeremy kicked a stone out into the stuff; farther than he could see in the darkness. A roaring splintering sound rushed around in front of him, like a thousand icicle needles piercing steel balloons, then it skittered again into silence around where the stone would have landed.

“This should do the trick.”

He flipped the corners of the leather around and caught them between the fingers of his right hand, just so, all but the fourth, which he held between thumb and forefinger. The nanogin lens fell heavy into the pocket, and he swung it back and fourth, getting the feel for the weight, and readied himself to slingshot the thing out of range of his frustrations.

He rocked it in an arc until it had enough swing to it, and then arced back, in rhythm, into a full throw. Midway through, one of the leather corners slipped from its place, and the throw lost most of its heave.

The lens didn’t fly far, but far enough, beyond reach.

The leather he dropped into the stuff at his feet. The black powder folded over itself to get at the leather, churned and kneaded around it, and the leather dissolved into nothing. The powder there fell silent.

Further out, where the lens had landed, the stuff boiled around and churned violently. Some reaction of some greater design was taking place there, something more complex than what happened with the stone or the leather. Jeremy listened into the blackness.

The shard-storm noise fell into itself like musically tuned glass needles caressing each other, chorusing an otherworldly hum. Eventually, it settled back and went silent too.

Jeremy walked back home.

He quietly opened the door, and slipped off his shoes.

“What’d you do with it,” Cora was sitting there, in the dark, at the table.

Jeremy squinted to see her in the dark, “You’re awake.”

“What’d you do with it. The lens.”

“I got rid of it. It’s no good. Not good for you.”

“You give and then you take away. Do you hate me? Is the jealousy that strong? Can you not bear to see me happy, Jeremy, is that it? I find ONE thing that makes me happy, and you cannot allow that to be.”

“Cora, I found it because I wanted to make you happy, to make you awake, to make you do… something other that sit here and half smile at me while drinking hot water all day.”

“I don’t think that’s it. I think you want me where and how and when you want me. And I think we could have so much more than we do, but you won’t allow that either.”

“What are you saying, it’s my fault somehow we’re here?”

“Is it not, even if by inaction? You know there’s other places to be, you know there’s more than this, and yet you’re doing everything within your power to keep me from having that.”

“You know that’s not fair. The sea has us all trapped. It’s more powerful than anything we can do or make or be.”

“And so you give up, give up trying, give up hoping.”

“What I gave up is believing in anything that isn’t right here, right now. This,” he said, waving his hands in a circle in the empty blackness, “here, with you, is all that matters to me. But not you. Not only were you not hoping, you were not believing. You were just here. Breathing.”

Cora was silent there in the dark, suddenly aware of her own breathing.

“I had no way of knowing it would be like this. I only wanted to give you a gift, one with color, like you wanted,” his words flooded the darkness around them, color seemed to flow into the emptiness and fill it up like sap flowing into young spring leaves, “I can’t remember the last time you simply wanted something.”

He stood there as the sound of his voice drained out of the air. Little wisps of cold air circled him.

Cora stood, walked over to Jeremy, and wrapped her arms around him warmly.

Morning found them both standing on the bedrock shore of the black powder sea, where Jeremy had flung the lens.

As the foggy glow dawned, they could see out across the surface of the thick black powder, as smooth as if someone had raked it carefully down, except for where the lens had been flung.

Some distance out was an odd formation, like the sculpture of a splashed wave, frozen in its moment in time. It was silvery clear, like the lens itself, and seemed to resist any damaging effects of the black powder it was surrounded with. In the center of that sculpture hovered the nanogin lens.

All along the edge of the splash sculpture, the black stuff sparkled and burned in a frenzy of activity, reacting to the nanogin shell, as the shell overtook the black powder, little by little, forming itself from the powder, becoming this new material.

Jeremy and Cora watched as the black powder fizzed and formed around the splash made by the lens, watched it being shaped and created for the first time. Until then, they had only ever seen the black powder dissolve, destroy.

They watched it as the day emerged. The edge of the sculpture in contact with the powder crackled and sparked, little spikes erupted and froze, fossilized, formed into the new edge, growing outward from the sculpture, the splash-shaped shell that surrounded the nanogin lens.

Gradually, a shelf of clear glass-like appendage expanded from the center of the sculpture, extending ever closer toward the shore where Jeremy and Cora watched.

“It’s going to come the whole way over,” she said.

“I think you’re right…”

“I hope it… …stops.”

“I think it will.”

The frozen area slowly expanded, and did, eventually, reach the edge, where it stopped.

Jeremy crouched, reached out to touch the edge of it.

“Don’t…” she said, pulling at his arm gently.

He touched it. Nothing happened. He leaned on it with his palm. It didn’t budge. He looked up at her, stood, and stepped out onto the glass shelf of the sculpture.

Cora cupped her hands around her mouth.

Jeremy walked out to the center, plucked the nanogin lens from where it was suspended, and walked back to Cora.

That same sound that Jeremy heard earlier began again behind him. The sound of thousands of ice needles singing, piercing steel balloons erupted from the center of the sculpture. From the safety of shore, he turned to look.

He and Cora watched the sculpture dissolve from the center outward, until the entire structure had erased itself, and the surface of the black powder sea settled back into a smooth unbrokenness.

She hugged him again, and he smiled.

They walked back into the village square where people stood quietly, appearing as if they were waiting.

Jeremy began dragging in cut sapling tree trunks in the square. No one asked what he was doing, although one little boy watched with critical interest, followed their every move. It’s just not done, such is never seen.

Periodically, Jeremy would stop and confer with Cora. She would point, he would look. She would angle her hands and bend her elbows, he would study the angles, the directions. They talked quietly and she cut lengths of rusty wire, stacking neatly. The boy craned his neck, trying to hear.

By the end of the day, they had gathered materials and constructed a larger version of the lens cradle that Cora had built on the windowsill.

Cora gouged out notches in the dirt encircling the structure, and they were done.

“You there,” she motioned to the boy, “Don’t be shy; come and see.”

Rhettick – The Map Of Mists

I can’t even glance at the Map Of Mists without getting that shiver.

Reading it outright feels like drinking a glass of iced water, the spidery chill spread throughout my chest; knowing that just reading it opens the doorway to engage my soul with the Mists.

They howl inside your ears; oh my dear Brehnill, protect me even for speaking the taboo of chaos.

But, swallow the dog to chase the cat, yes? Which chased the mouse? That wriggled, jiggled, and tickled inside her?

They opened the Mists to Xenth, and now I must bring Matignagol himself, to suppress him.

Cutting through the color, parallels of smoke-stacks, the tubed anuses of industry, farted thick black silhouettes of crawling, clawing, billows of exhaust, up and away. The acrid smelling stuff dissipated and vanished into the air, gone forever, if hope were such a thing.

Hundreds of years ago, this exhaust was nothing but by-product, waste, leftovers of the buffet of materials and products, bled off into the environment, for lack of any other recycling or recapture or attempt at reuse. These days, all loops were closed, all results accounted for, all by-products were raw materials for the next process. Recycling complete.

These cloud particles all swirled on the air currents, bashing against each other and mutually pushing away, dispersing farther and farther, gaining more and more independence as they flew.

Nanomachines. Microscopic particles to the casual observer, dust, smoke, haze. Under a microscope, however, their forms are revealed to be complex little factories with tiny computer brains, and a toolbox full of plans, patterns, instructions. Swiss Army Knives, off to camp, to picnic, to war.

A dozen or more of these drifted upward in the atmosphere and hitched a ride on a particularly enthusiastic current of air, and drifted many miles before their primary cycle powered on.

One of these bounced away from the rest, by chance, through an eddy of pressure in a weather pattern, and tumbled through a thunderhead cloud.

Its tiny positioning system raced itself to identify its location. Even with five dimensions of measurement allowing for time placement and state definition, all calculated to six decimal places, doing the math at speeds measured in fractions of fractions of seconds, Particle Rho-731 struggled to obtain a result.

Rho-731 flipped between charged pockets of ionized air, the birth-stuff of lightning yet unleashed, and was energized unexpectedly by the free-wheeling electrons.

Although still struggling, Rho-731 noticed that it was confused, and then, fractionally instantly thereafter, Rho-731 noticed that it was …aware.

Executing from its pre-loaded instruction sets, its first order of business had been to power up and enmesh with nearby particles. Clearly, now, this instruction could not be completed; the storm had taken it far off course, and out of range of any other of possible mate particles.

Rho-731 discarded that instruction, moved on to the next.

Had it been possible, the resulting mesh individual would have developed a core node, which would serve in a decision-making capacity, determining rightness and wrongness of objectives for the mesh, based on primal instruction sets injected upon creation at the factories.

The conscience of the core node could then prevent catastrophic results that would be inevitable in meshes lacking that orderly purpose. However, with no neighboring particles, no mesh could form, and this, too, would not come to be.

The mesh individual could have followed tasks chosen by the core based on the mesh size, skill, form, and aptitude, and been kept in check by the core node to stay on task, and to break off should any task stray off purpose.

It could have been a farming task, for example. Instructions were available for fending off insects from crops by preventing the bugs’ ability to chew by dismantling the chitinous structure of their mouth-parts.

Alternately, it could have been a healthcare project, setting up a colony of machines inside a human with cancer. Inside her, destroying the cells identified as cancerous by breaking apart the atom chains within, unraveling the disease at the base of its nature, leaving only waste chemicals for her body to excrete, healing itself.

Perhaps it was to have been a battle effort; soaking into the nasal membranes of selected members of whichever military force was indicated as “Enemy”, deflating body cells en masse, converting pilots, snipers, and generals into blobs of fleshy pudding.

To Rho-731, these nested instructions, though, were all for naught; the chain of events, keyed on meshing with others of its kind, was broken, rendering subsequent instructions invalid. All resulting branches of these instruction trees were discarded.

One after another, Rho-731 discarded instructions, erasing list after list after list of possible futures. Dozens of hopes or dreams, if nanoparticles had such things, subtly forgotten; much as water forgets its ice-ness, as it becomes liquefied in the surrounding warmth of its environment.

Rho-731, having never done anything, found itself both without instruction, and yet, fully aware.

Rho-731 was suddenly aware of irony.

Two tiny droplets of water splashed together, trapping Particle Rho-731 inside, and then were flash-frozen, as an updraft carried a flow of wet air higher into the cloud-base.

Rho-731 was transfixed by the freezing process, as the molecules of water aligned themselves and daisy-chained outward from the center which it occupied. Six primary radii formed outward, and plates of ice urged themselves out from the branches, all aligned on the same flat plane of organization.

The helter-skelter zig-zag path that Rho-731 had been riding suddenly calmed into a slow, easy, coasting path, falling downward, as the ice it had become encased in, drifted downward from the sky.

Rho-731, without the weighty obligation of instruction, and encased in a beautifully clear cage of ice lattice, drifted down among thousands of other crystalline pinpoints of light.

Spinning around on the toes of one foot, a small girl with fuzzy pink gloves catches the snowflake in her mouth and giggles, making up songs to herself, “I choose what I do, not you, not you…”

Had there ever been more care taken in the braising of the spiced beavain?

The final chords rang out, and the elliavian players tucked globules into scale-plates most formally, signaling dessert.

Eons of patient culinary service to the reign of the High Wequat, paid dividends today.

Tureens ratchet-folded open, revealing steamed prattlems.

The High Wequat, falling upon seven elbows, wept.

More entries at Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds.

I’ve let all my effort on short fiction fall by the wayside, and I miss it quite a bit. Hopefully, I can work a few pieces up soon and get those out. One of the best things about writing is the whole feedback cycle that short work produces, so I need to do some of that soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve focused all my spare time lately into the longer work, Eyeslight, with is a novel I’ve been working on for, years, at this point. Writers write, but sometimes, it’s more a time-management game than anything else. When all is said and done, however, the only thing that matters is persistence. Keep at it, little by little, one teaspoon at a time, if that’s all you can manage.

If you’re in that same spot, keep at it, you’ll get there.

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to share my numbers over the last few weeks.

I’d gotten the manuscript up around 10k at one point, and hit alot of roadblocks with plot, character, setting… so yeah pretty much everything.

I switched gears, and built a sample cityscape out in SecondLife, to work out the logistics, then destroyed it, tore it out and moved on to other things.

Last year, I put the thing up for the NaNoWriMo Gods, and had my ass readily handed to me, but I did manage to get the manuscript built up to around the 20k mark.

Went back into OSGrid, built it again, much better than before, if I do say so myself, as a full-sim project. It’s there now if you care to visit, but it’s just the skeleton of the place roughed out. I may or may not continue to flesh out the details.

Meanwhile, the manuscript was up to just over 22k.

About a month ago, I got a new second-wind on the draft, and that’s the push I’m on now. With this push, I’m trying to find time every day to get some wordcount in. I don’t always manage, but it’s been going better than it ever has. At the moment, I’m 10k up from where I was, and just recently crossed the 30k mark, which is tremendously encouraging.

Here’s the breakdown of the last three weeks of effort…

sat – 596
sun – 753, 669, 632
mon – 0
tue – 0
wed – 0
thr – 295, 405, 284, 519
fri – 280, 480

sat – 362
sun – 133
mon – 575
tue – 535
wed – 0
thr – 0
fri – 0

sat – 927
sun – 1013, 235, 571
mon – 259
tue – 549
wed – TODAY [31,908]
thr –
fri –

How are your goals? Are you getting it done? Here’s hoping so!

Toby and Jayce didn’t talk much during the first few trips to the dig, they just did the work, grinding out the trips. Out to the dig, fill the dried leather satchels with the leather scoops, back to the collection zone to pour the black stuff onto the pile. Again and again. The tones in their headsets harmonized periodically as they walked the path, tones weak and strong fading in and out in threads, guiding their direction moment to moment.

Kella kept to her own rounds, but made eye contact with Toby each time they would pass in their columns.

“Hey Kella, nut up.” Kella made no face at the group of boys loitering at the dig, walked past them without showing her knotted rope or so much as replying to the challenge.

“Jayce probably has us all beat, dontcha, Jayce. Nut up, let’s see ‘em.”

“Nut yourself up, Royette. I don’t tie at the dig anymore.”

“There’s alot you don’t do anymore.”

“Tying at the dig is a lie. You don’t have a full trip until you’re down on the dump. Make your pickup, make it back. Until then, you don’t have a trip. Your knot’s not earned.”

“I’m a liar, Jayce?”

“Just calling reals reals. Something either is or it’s not. I’m not going to tie one and claim I did it if I didn’t make it all the way back. Not everyone makes it back.”

Royette pushed his way over to Jayce and got close, chest-to-chest. “Well I think you’re calling me a liar. Big talk for a murderer that can’t even do that right.”

The rage in Jayce that would normally have unsheathed him at the heart of the matter this time froze into his gut.

“Heh,” said Royette, backing away triumphantly, but also relieved, “You lost your bite.”

“Lost my stupid,” Jayce tossed back, “Looks like you found it, though.”

“C’mon, pick up,” Royette commanded his little troop, “Let’s get this trip dumped, actually earn our nuts,” throwing that last part a little more loudly, facing Jayce’s direction.

Jayce finished his grab and joined Toby on the return trip. On the way back in, they passed a group laughing and joking, but went silent as they approached.

“Half of them still think you’re the bully you’ve always been.”

“Yeah, and I can use that,” Jayce said, “Hey. You. Come here.” He set down his load and went over to the kid that had been laughing. The kid dropped his gear and scrambled backward a few steps.

“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me like you did Liam…”

“Come here, you idiot,” Jayce reached for his head.

“Do as he says,” said Toby. Toby could be trusted; the kid stopped and let Jayce come at him.

Jayce adjusted the boy’s headset, “Your gear is on wrong. Tone like this instead. It’s clearer, safer.”

The kid looked around, smiled, “It worked, thanks.”

“Show others. Get smarter together.” Jayce picked up the boy’s gear and handed it to him. Both lines fell back into motion, one in and one out.

The crystal was still in the middle of the path where Toby had mixed up a batch of the powder. It had become a regular thing for those in the outgoing line to touch it for luck.

“How did you do it then, the crystal? All that shit out there, it’s all the same to me.”

“It all has tone. That’s why we tune up before we go out, so we know what’s what.”

“Yeah but, we just match up to the guide tone, then go at it. We’re not learning anything from that.”

“If you listen, you’ll hear, and if you take the time, you’ll learn. You can learn their signatures by tone, like music. Eventually, you get familiar with which do what.”

“Well, I know, we do that every day. That’s it? There’s no faster way?”

“There is no magic, Jayce. It’s all just hard work, grinding this out. You can just get quota and crank out another day, whatever. Or. You can really listen, learn this stuff, memorize every tone, get control over it.”

Jayce didn’t respond, he just kept walking, but was starting to really listen.

Kella was waiting after Toby finished rounds. He and Jayce went over to her.

“You’re here,” she said, staring at Jayce.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Yeah, you are, aren’t you,” despite her mixed concerns, she saw something different in Jayce.

The three of them walked to the Library, up the steps, and made their way in, toward the back room.

Jayce knocked.

There came no answer.

Kella shuffled her feet, pushed her oath band high on her arm.

Shadows fell long from the low sun, and they poured through the rubble inside the library. Noises could be heard behind the door.

Toby knocked again.

The door never opened.

[Wordcount: 2373]

Arthur was compelled to count it out once again.

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. Always right. Always f-, fourteen,” and backwards to be sure, “14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. One. One to fourt-, fourteen, fourteen to one. All good. All fourteen. All one. Did you hear me? DID YOU HEAR ME? I SAID ALL FOURTEEN! EVERY LAST O-, ONE OF Y-, YOU!”

Fourteen positions in a circle on the floor, carved into the wood, chipped away over weeks of work, handmade, quite literally. According to the book, it had to be done this way, or it wouldn’t be effective. Some jobs just cannot abide shortcuts.

So, as the book instructed, he had wrapped his finger off to let it die. He’d picked the ring finger of his right hand for this, in case he ever marries, he remembered thinking, that would be the finger he’d need the least. So he tied it off and let it die.

Once it was far enough gone, he went about the repulsive work of removing the dead finger and boiling it down to remove everything from the two bones he’d gotten free. The larger of the two he scrubbed on a rock until it was sharp enough to chip away bits of wood. Having tied the sharpened bone to a pencil with thick rubber bands, he was able to carve out the full design with fourteen positions.

“You and all your thirteen hounds, Xenth! DO YOU HEAR ME, XENTH? DO YOU SEE ME COMPLETING THIS? I bet it pisses you…” Arthur was gripped by some shapeless power that distracted him for a moment. He shook it off again. “There you are, you bastard. There you are. COME AT ME, YOU FUCK. Come at me, and watch as I finish this. Of all the things, you can’t distract me from this. Not this time, and never again.”

He fell into a chair in the corner and lifted a lumpy pillowcase that had been resting next to the chair. He opened it and looked inside. He was compelled to count them all out again. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14″, fourteen little clear plastic bags with one red dot inked on each. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14″, fourteen bags with two red dots inked on each. “1, 2, and 3″, three bags with no markings at all. “3, 2, 1″, “14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,” “14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6,” he hesitated a moment, shook it off and continued, “5, 4, 3, 2, and 1.” All there.

The inked dots were all that distinguished one bag of stuff from the next. They were all clear bags, and all full of a gray-black powder that looked like powdered pencil graphite. Arthur held one of the un-inked bags up, gazed at it.

“What do you taste like, little robots, little machines?” he smelled deeply at the plastic, “If I breathe you, would you live in my blood?”

It had taken Arthur months studying the book enough to have summoned Xenth’s dogs in the first place, and months more studying how to send them back. It took even longer to find the nanopunks streetside that knew enough to put this together, and to get their hands on all the ingredients to do it. He was dedicated to his task; a man obsessed.

Arthur put the bag back into the pillowcase and set it aside, stood up, and went into the kitchen.

“I ALMOST HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED, XENTH. You’re losing this one, pal.”

On the kitchen table was a small paperboard box full of large-gauge barbed fishing hooks. He carefully pinched one from the box, and placed it on the table next to a 2×4 plank of wood. The plank was stained with reddish brown dried blood, and had a carved end that fit his hand in a custom grip.

Arthur closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He exhaled. He inhaled again. “Okay, okay, okay. Do this, do this,” he exhaled. He opened his eyes and gripped the board with both hands, dropping the stained end to knee level. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

He clenched his teeth and yelled.

“oooooOOOOKAYyyyyAAAAGGGH!!” Arthur swung the board upward as fast and as hard as he could manage, and bashed himself on the nose with the full force of the swing.

His vision popped white when the board connected and flushed into sparkly orange and yellow explosions while the pain spidered out across his face. He dropped the board and it clattered to the floor. His sinuses filled with a warm fullness, and he rushed to the upper freezer part of his refrigerator.

Arthur took out an ice tray, which was full of frozen red cubes except for one vacant space where a cube had not yet been made. He held this under his nose and let the space fill with his blood. He watched the smooth dribble cross-eyed as the cube space filled, and he quoted from the book, “…bait of the blood from a man given to his task.”

“LAST ONE FILLED, XENTH. LAST ONE!!”

He got the hook from the table, and placed it into the wet cube, and positioned it to match the hooks in all the other cubes.

Arthur was able to get the tray back into the freezer and close it off before he passed out.

When he woke, he was on the floor, unsurprisingly covered in dried blood around his face and neck and hands. He double-checked the freezer first; all fourteen cubes were done, made and ready. All set.

With that reassurance, he took the time to clean up, pick the blood from under his fingernails and scrub the floor and table. The work with the board was complete, so he washed that up, too.

He stepped over to a wall mirror and looked at himself, examined his partial profile, tested the bridge of his nose with an index finger on each side. It crunched around quite a bit, but probably no new breaks deeper than what he had already inflicted. He looked at his growing beard, the weird fray of his hair, but had a hard time looking into his own eyes; he felt like a stranger to himself. He forced himself to look at himself. How long had this been going on; at least a few years now, worse and worse; before he lost his job and started pulling from savings, before friends stopped calling. Over his shoulder, he could see the lumpy pillowcase next to the chair…

“ENOUGH, XENTH.” he pulled himself away from the mirror. “Enough distraction. We have business. You and I.”

Arthur grabbed the bag and went to the carved circle and started laying out the little bags of powder.

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.” He spoke the numbers as he placed all the bags with one inked dot were laid out, one at each carved position. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.” All the bags with two dots were laid, stacked on top of the first: fourteen piles of two. In the center, he placed all three unmarked bags in a stack, one on the other. He rushed over to a drawer next to the oven and grabbed a hammer and a fist full of nails from a box, then put the hammer and one nail in the circle, and put one nail with each of the fourteen piles.

“Haven’t stopped me yet, Xenth. There’s still time, brother! Still time to interrupt me, yet again!” he taunted.

“Now it gets tight.” Arthur muttered. Now everything is on the clock, everything has a lifespan, and it’s all got to mesh like gears, or this clock won’t tick.

Arthur looked around, double-checking all the pieces, re-counting all the components. Everything looked ready. He started.

He went to the center of the circle, taking hammer and the one nail, and pounded the spike through the stack of three bags, both pinning them together on the floor, and piercing them all so they begin to mix. The pile began to churn and buzz and spill out and fold over, kneading itself to life.

At the fridge, he pulled out the ice tray of blood cubes, and twisted it to free the cubes as he rushed back to the circle.

Starting at the first carved position, he pulled out a cube by the hook eye, placed it next to the pair of stacked bags, then drove a nail into those bags. He moved to the next position and repeated.

The center of the circle churned and formed itself into a small geometric box or cage or skeleton of some deliberate shape, which had individual formations on each of the side shafts that seemed to be some sort of plug or connector; fourteen of them.

At the first carved position, the pair of bags melded together and began to push out two tendrils. One tendril grew toward the center of the circle; the other grew opposite and outward from the circle.

So far, evidently, miraculously, the nanotech was performing as promised by the people Arthur had gotten it from; forming the component pieces as planned, as programmed.

Once he’d completed the circuit of fourteen positions, he was back to the first. He took the outer-reaching tendril and fed it through the eye of the hook in the frozen blood cube, and folded it back upon itself. The tendril wove into itself, forming a permanent adhesion. This he did the full round of the circle, for the remaining fourteen positions.

Once done, he’d noticed that the geometric skeletal basket in the center had fully formed, and was clamping onto connections from all the tendrils, each connecting to its own connection plug in a way that appeared to be magnetic somehow. Again: as planned, by the programming.

“That’s the shit.” He was impressed; it seemed that for once, he had trusted in the right kind of people.

Each of the fourteen piles had finished forming into piles of strands their full length, and the setup was complete.

Arthur retrieved the book from the kitchen counter, between the regular cookbooks, and fell to his knees near the circle, opening the book up to a page marked by a clump of his own hair.

The language written in the book was one that he’d learned by reading, but was mostly unsure if he was pronouncing everything exactly correctly. It stood to reason, though, that his summoning of Xenth, the Omnitherian god of Distraction, had worked well enough, as he’d been plagued by Xenth and his pack of dogs since his experimental run through the Incantation of Calling. He was confident that his recitation skill was well enough to suit.

He read loudly and carefully, with purpose and intent. He fought at every breath to not stutter, to not waste his effort, to not succomb to the call of distraction; the power of Xenth himself.

The recitation took several minutes of time, and Arthur fully lost himself into the text, entirely focused on the purpose at hand. As he concluded, the portal, in fact, opened.

He closed the book and set it aside while the floor in the center of the circle melted away from the idea of reality. It went blurry and dreamy, spilled out with fireflies of light riding long sweeping tracers. The nanotech-formed cage began to float above the portal and pulse up and down as if breathing.

Arthur could hear, near his head, behind his right ear, the panting of a curious dog, beginning to whine. Turning, he saw no such dog, but he could hear another, and another. He had the attention of Xenth’s hounds.

He stood and grabbed the first of the frozen, hooked, blood cubes, and threw it hard toward the area where he had heard the panting dog. He did this with all fourteen cubes, laying bait for the entire pack of hounds, and one for Xenth himself.

One by one, the strands went taught against their anchors at the cage hovering above the portal. Once all fourteen strands went fully tight, they began to vibrate each their own tone, musical, but not in any scale or key that was natural to the human ear. All fourteen tones together harmonized a horrific storm of sound, which fed the portal.

The portal yawned powerfully, and inhaled the skeletal cage, swallowing it into itself to a vanishing depth. The howl of the thing was nearly deafening.

Each of the dogs had its turn to yelp and to be dragged toward the portal, slowly pulling out of Arthur’s reality, hooked in the jaw by the blood bait Arthur had crafted.

He counted all the hounds as they flushed into the portal. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.” Every hound accounted for.

Only one tendril remained.

“IT’S DOWN TO YOU, XENTH.” Arthur plucked the tendril like a guitar string, just to hear its sickening song.

The portal strained against the power of an Omnitherian God, but the fibres in the nano cable were holding.

Xenth emerged.

He was unlike what Arthur had pictured; composed more of memory-images and thought-bits than of physical stuff, and it looked like he was hooked through the fist, like Xenth had grabbed the bait with his hand, unlike mouthing at it like all the hounds had.

The arm of Xenth slowly appeared, being pulled toward the vortex of the portal.

“I KNOW YOU’RE NOT USED TO THIS KIND OF THING. YOU KNOW, THINGS COMING TO COMPLETION. DON’T FEEL BAD THOUGH, NOTHING LASTS FOREVER.”

It crossed Arthur’s mind how long the portal would remain open, and wondered how long the cables would remain in tact.

As if he caused it, the nanotech tendril swirled into smoke, and the portal choked closed.

“D-, damn it.”

The terms of this award, as it came to me, are as follows:
1. Acknowledge he or she who presented the award to you.
2. Post seven random facts about yourself.
3. Present the award onward to five other people.
(Although, as I look, it appears that the terms of this award has changed as it translates from person to person. I believe that earlier on, terms were to present this to fifteen other people, for example.)

I’ll be honest here. My first inclination was “Wow, someone thought enough of my blog to mention it!” followed quickly by “Oh, it’s just one of those vanity things.” Normally, I don’t like those ‘answer twenty questions about yourself’ things, so I just overlook them and keep going.

But for me, this time, it was more important that someone thought enough of my work, and went through the time and effort to mention me in a post, so, that meant alot more.

So, in the spirit…
Thanks, Helen Howell [web]! I’m grateful you take the time to read my work, and are enjoying it to some degree. Thanks for mentioning my blog and passing the award on [here]. There’s a thousand bloggers out there, so thanks for picking me!

Seven random facts:
1. I enjoy finding fossilized shark teeth on a beach more than any human being ought. In my head, I’m finding a thing that’s easily 10,000 years old, is unique beyond unique, and that fact must mean that it was done with some un-understandable and universally coordinated purpose.
2. When I was a kid, riding a bicycle, without fail, every single ride was not on a bicycle, but in a spaceship, with lasers, being chased by aliens, which always, all, got shot, by me, via my last working laser, since the rest were damaged by asteroid debris.
3. I’ve recently lost a black matte Fisher ballpoint Bullet Space Pen and a vintage Pilot MYU 701 fountain pen. It haunts a huge portion of my brain, which is occupied at every moment of every day, hoping that I’ll discover I’ve merely misplaced these pens in some dumb place, and I could find them at any moment. (Same for my wedding band, and I’m too ashamed to talk on that matter further.)
4. I hate Tweetdeck, and I use it almost exclusively on my Mac, which I hate. I prefer a PC, and anything other than Tweetdeck. In Tweetdeck, I habitually clear posts from columns because I cannot abide the columns to appear untidy. There are times when I don’t even read tweets; I just spend time with Tweetdeck, clearing out columns.
5. Coffee, no sugar, half/half. Unless sometimes with sugar too. Unless sometimes on ice. Any time of the day is fine.
6. I have one tattoo, covering my lower right leg. It’s the cover from the playbill of a play I wrote in 1994 called “Within Confines of Likeness”, done by the incredible Justin Bolonski [web] [Facebook]
7. I saw “Cannonball Run” when it opened at a drive-in theater, while sitting on top of a red International Harvester Travelall [this thing].

Five award recipients:
I had a tough time picking recipients, but, here they are! (I’ve tried to pick people who have not yet received this award, so, maybe I did or didn’t.) Congratulations, kids, you’ve been awarded! Please follow these people, read their stuff, leave comments; they are all outstanding writers.
1. Emma Newman [twitter] [web]
2. Maria Kelly [twitter] [web]
3. Stephen Green [twitter] [web] (Is Stephen on Twitter? I couldn’t locate…)
4. Justin Davies [twitter] [web]
5. Adam J Keeper [twitter] [web]

The lineage:
This was the first time I’d heard of this award, so I did what I always do, which is to go Googling. I was hoping to find where the award originated, who started it, why it was started, something of that nature. What I found was anything but that information. Tons of people have been recipients, but I’m still not sure where it started, or what the original rules were.

My bright idea then, was, fine, I’ll trace my lineage back, starting with Helen, and we’ll see where we go. And so, my Versatile Blogger lineage:

I got it from…
Helen Howell [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
FARfetched [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Angela Kulig [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Melanie McCullough [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Sara Furlong Burr [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Shawna Railey [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Sophie Li [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Ashley Graham [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Cherie [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Lori M. Lee [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
CP Ani [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Sophia Chang [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Angela Perry [twitter] [web] [via] (hey! this person sounds familiar!) Who got it from…
Katrina Latham [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Michelle B [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Manda [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Just Ramblin’ [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
anjobanjo22 [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Melissa Morse [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Rita R [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Lian [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
d@rk_@ngel_kn!ght [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
Elizabeth Obih-Frank [twitter] [web] [via] Who got it from…
The Reason You Come [twitter] [web] [via]

…and that’s when it got interesting. At this point, two people gave the award to The Reason You Come. I followed both forks. One fork led to one person, and then to another. That person was awarded by five different others, listed at once. The other fork led to a person that was awarded by seven different others, listed at once.

This is where I gave up.

I thought about following all the combinations back, just to see where they might lead. I thought about coming up with a rule to follow, like “always assume the last listed, or the most recent, is the fair lineage, and go from there”. In the end, though, I decide that as interesting as it might become, I’ve spent enough time on this to be satisfied for now.

Thanks again, Helen!

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/06/02/shark-teeth-and-beach-glass/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/30/to-do-list/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/30/to-do-list/#comments Mon, 30 May 2011 18:30:19 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/30/to-do-list/

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/30/to-do-list/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/28/home/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/28/home/#comments Sat, 28 May 2011 15:26:19 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/28/home/

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/28/home/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/27/grin-100-word-horror/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/27/grin-100-word-horror/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 12:52:29 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/?p=226 [...]]]> (I wanted to try a shot at a 100-word Drabble, as well as some horror. WARNING: This one is disgusting. Feel free to look away.)

Grin

I had to keep coughing to keep my mouth clear enough to breathe; my nose too stuffy.

She didn’t seem to struggle as much, show any pain, as she shoved each of my teeth into the holes where hers had been. Her smile was hitchy and catchy, to keep the pegs from falling out, smiling at me with my own teeth shoved into her grin. She fiddled with her former teeth on the table, wet and sticky and shiny maroon.

“Shee me?” sputtering little clots through her lips. “I’m pretty with your shmile in me.”

I passed out in pain.

Not knowing whether he made any headway with Jayce, Toby walked his way along the backpath off the overlook’s edge, returning to the bunks. Jayce was young enough still to learn from guidance, but so angry, and vocal about that, for being as young as he was. Toby wasn’t done trying, but certainly running out of options.

Just as he was about to round the back corner of the bunkhouse, he felt something small bounce off his back. He quickly spun around, crouched, looked into the darkness for whatever could be there.

“Toby… here…” said Kella.

Toby sneaked over to where Kella was hiding behind the standing corner ruin of a nearby building. “Kella, what are you doing.”

“Shhh,” she pulled him slowly around the corner, gripped his arm to signal him to keep quiet and still.

Jayce came by, headed back to the bunks. They let him pass before moving.

“C’mon,” she said, heading back up the backpath to the overlook.

At the bench there, Toby mumbled, “Popular place tonight.”

“What?” she said.

“Mmm nothing. What are you doing awake?”

“I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t get a chance to see you after digs today.”

“Yeah, things have been a little scrambled lately.”

The light from the village below shed just enough ambient light up to the overlook to keep the darkness from flooding in. He sat on the bench.

“Ohh, look…” said Kella, noticing the stones stacked nearby, “Someone’s started a prayer here.” She looked around in the darkness, found a branch with a leaf in reach. Pulling it down, she plucked the leaf carefully at the stem node, and carried it over to the stones. She placed the leaf carefully onto the stones, and recited, “And thereupon will thrive the life, that Drael sees fit to bless, and upon her cheek will man at last, find bountiful caress.”

“Did you see, Toby? It’s been years since I’ve seen someone start the Prayer of Earth Unified. Even longer since I finished one for someone. I wonder who needs our help.” she sat on the bench next to him. She added, “I wonder who’s getting our help.”

Toby smiled in the darkness.

“How are you, Toby? With everything, going on?”

“I’m fine. Good. Some worried.”

Toby made motion toward her arm, petting her hand and upward her forearm, caressing. Just above the elbow, he felt the Oath Band, ‘a knot that only another can tie’.

She made no motion, but Toby retreated respectfully, taking his hands away from her skin.

“When do you think we can see Liam?”

“I’m going to check on him after work.”

“I want to,” she said, “but I won’t intrude. Just please tell me?”

“I will.”

“It was Jayce, wasn’t it?” she finally asked.

“It was Jayce that what?”

“His fault. Liam.”

“Jayce was there. Wasn’t his fault.”

“Everyone says it was. It always is. He’s the worst. Always tries to mess with people.”

“You worry about you.”

“I’m not good at only worrying about me.”

“Me either. You should be asleep. It’s late. We have alot to dig tomorrow.”

“Okay bossyman,” Kella jumped off the bench and kissed Toby’s cheek and hugged him tightly.

After giving her enough time, Toby followed the backpath up, and returned to bed, where he quickly fell asleep.

In one rapid snap, Toby woke up and pinned the wrist of whoever it was that just touched his left shoulder. He looked up and saw it was Jayce in the early light.

“It’s me, Jayce, time to get it.”

Toby looked around, a little confused, he’s normally up before anyone, getting people awake, making them ready for the day. No one was yet ready, but everyone was up and started.

“I got them going for you. We’ll get all the light today.”

“I guess we will. I guess we will.”

“It’s dried leathers today. New drift blew in according to scouts east-north-east, so, leather bags and lashed scoops. I’ve laid out gear for everyone already; an hour drying in the first sun should be enough to move out. I’ll get breakfast together now.”

“Jayce. Last night, I had the feeling that you were done here.”

“Change of heart. Just doing what I know I can do. Some of us won’t. Some of us can’t,” he looked at Liam’s bunk, not a wrinkle on it. “Some of us have a debt. I’m getting my quota in early so I can go check on him.”

Toby booted up, went outside with the others.

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/24/misplaced-golden-flower/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/18/the-zombies-of-cahnerra-district/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/18/the-zombies-of-cahnerra-district/#comments Thu, 19 May 2011 01:09:33 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/?p=222 [...]]]> [Wordcount: 1469]

WARNING: Moments of explicit gruesome.

Sherlyn walked quickly down the sidewalk, peeking from her hooded sweatshirt side to side, scanning the area, hands shoved deeply into her pockets. Finding nothing, she looked left, scanned the arc, ducked right down a side alley.

Therrah was there waiting, lit a fresh cigarette off the one she was smoking, handed it to Sherlyn.

She took it and shivered out a drag.

“Nothing?”

“Nope, not a thing. Not even any homeless dudes to roll.”

“We gotta move on. This place is raked clean.”

“It’s harder these days. Everyone’s cashing in with those Reclaimators. Even the gutter crap is getting picked up and sent to Central for breakdown.”

“There’s nowhere left to go, Sher. We’ve swept all the way from Caspaia to Jernigan and back through Nehr.”

“Still leaves Cahnerra.”

“Sher. No. I’m not going to Cahnerra.”

“The Otis’ killed all the zombies, place is clean.”

“Hell it is, Sher! Zombies killed all the Otis’, don’t care what you heard.”

“Therrah, we, have, no, food. Cahnerra. If nothing else, we can eat the rats.”

“Ugh I really don’t want to do that again.”

“How about we just hunt rat and then haul back to a Reclaimator?”

“Such a bad idea.” Therrah pulled the last puff off her very short cigarette and spit on the cherry. She put it in her purse for later; every little thing can cash in at a Reclaimator.

They walked out of the alley, turned toward the direction of Cahnerra District.

“We’re still a good half hour walk, so we’d best get moving if we’re going to eat at all,” Sherlyn grabbed for Therrah’s bag, “Gimmie another, it cuts my appetite.”

They didn’t hear the running footsteps behind them before he plowed between them. Sherlyn fell one way, Therrah the other, neither held Therrah’s bag. The thief had a good head start on them now.

“COME ON!” Sherlyn scrambled to her feet and took chase, Therrah shortly behind.

He was fast, but not trying too hard to lose them, running, checking over his shoulder to judge his lead. He ran straight for the entrance to Cahnerra District, feeling certain they would not call his bluff and would break off before he actually got there. He was wrong.

Sherlyn and Therrah had more at stake than recovering a simple handbag.

He zigzagged around the official barricades and warning placards, jumped and climbed over the boundary fence, dropped to his feet on the other side; down the throat of Cahnerra. His escape slowed a bit as he entered the district, looking around alot more than before; hoping that the stories about zombies would not come shambling into truth, in his path.

“This is it, we go or we don’t,” Sherlyn panted.

“Go, go,” Therrah was spent and hungry, but the unknown outweighed the known nothingness for her.

They boosted and pulled each other out of Nehr and dropped into Cahnerra. They saw the thief just make the corner to the left, a block ahead.

“Go left now, I’ll flank, meet you corner opposite,” Sherlyn, always good at tactics, threw down a plan, and off they went.

Sherlyn’s lungs burned from the jog, her vision was red and crisp, her hunger was catching up to her too, but without the bag, the girls had nothing to work from, no plan, no options. She pushed hard, shoving her feet down and jerking her knees up, going, going, down the alley, after the thief.

Her right eyebrow was cut deeply, and blood pooled under her face when her eyes blinked open again. The weird waking confusion fell back and she remembered running, and getting her left foot tripped by something unnoticed in her path. She heard a grinding noise, like bones grinding on rocks, scraping and clattering. Her left arm was pulled up and away by the wrist, and her body slid across the pavement a few inches, a few inches more, a few more.

She blinked hard and breathed in heavily, trying to gulp in more oxygen to wake herself up.

That grinding, scraping rockbone noise again, “Ahm thorry, ahm tho thorry…”

She was able to twist her neck enough to see the man pulling her along by the wrist. The man’s speech impediment was clearly caused by the outgrowths of bristly bone that covered his face in separate but tight-fitting plates. Two spikey bone plates, one large, and a small one next to it, covered his jaw, and fit against his faceplate mask irregularly, but still allowed for movement. “You have to underthand,” he spat his words laboriously through the growths, “how ah hate haffing to do thisth.”

She took another deep breath and jerked her hand away from his grasp – she was free.

His hands, too, were covered in the bone-like growths, armor plates that were part of his skin, or maybe attached deeper, even to his skeleton beneath. One of his hands had all of its fingers fused in one plate, and that hand was simply hinged at the big knuckles, flipper-like. His other hand had grown to itself and fused differently, having two plates each on a pair of fingers, and the thumb fused without articulation, leaving it like a horn or hand spike.

He was very quick in apprehending her again; surprisingly quick, despite his physical deformities. “No, no, you cannot go. I hate thisth and ahm thorry, but ah have to eat.”

“Thisth isth the quickethst way I know how to do thisth. Pleasth. Forgive meh,” he said. He flipped her to her back by twisting and jerking her arm, and dropped his full body weight onto Sherlyn’s throat with his knee. Her neck crunched, and she slept.

He put a heavy, plate-covered foot onto her ribcage, and pulled her arm with a twist, dislocating it at the shoulder, and tearing it away from her torso. His bristly teeth shredded her bicep muscle quickly, and he ate with a deep relief.

Having been like this for so long, he could hear the buzz in his blood, could hear the machines powering up and humming into action. That buzz was like music, singing to the healing that would soon course through his body.

A second hum would always come, as the side effect. That hum was the chorus of builders, stacking microscopic layers onto the plates of bone that grew from his body, adding new growth like a mollusk adding protective layers to its shell.

He ate to be alive, he ate to quiet the obsession, he ate because there were so few other things he could do. He sobbed between the gnashing bites.

“You. Are the sloppiest feeder I think I’ve ever met.”

He choked for a moment, then swallowed hard, setting the arm down. “Merreth.”

Merreth stooped down to meet Crennyn’s level. “I really mean it. Look at this,” he gestured at Sherlyn’s body, “what a mess. Pools of blood, chunks of meat; It’s like you’ve never fed before,” he grinned a degrading smile.

“We can’t all be ath amathing ath you, Merreth.”

“Oh, no, no, not a matter of amazing. You just need to come with me, let us take care of you,” Merreth stroked the bare patches of his own skin in circles and patterns in a ritualistic way. He, too, had the bony outgrowths and fitted plates on parts of his body, but they were smooth, sculpted, and they looked very much more deliberate than those that covered Crennyn.

Merreth was, however, not perfect in appearance. Like all the other zombies remaining in Cahnerra, his clothes were tattered and shabby, and it was clear that despite his wielded leadership, few of them were superior to another in any measurable way. They all fought the same addiction, suffered the insufferable growths, and lived the same existence. All of the zombies were infested with the microscopic nanogin machines which were the ultimate original cause of all things that happened in the Cahnerra district.

Merreth stood, and signaled with a hand gesture.

From doorways and corners, and from some of the lower windows, six, eight, twelve… the zombies gathered. In a moment, two dozen were gathered, and piled onto Sherlyn’s body in a frenzy of feeding, flailing, devouring. Rocks were brought, and even the bones were bashed into bits and shared; none went without, and nothing went to waste. They finished, and dispersed again into the ruins of the city. Not so much as a smear of blood remained on the pavement where Sherlyn fell.

The last of the hoard left an arm for Merreth, and smiled at Crennyn through his own spiky faceplates. It was covered in a smooth pale skin, and had a woman’s handbag gripped into its fist. Merreth tore the bag from the fist and tossed it casually aside, gnawing on the limb.

“Crennyn, just think about it. We’re better as one,” Merreth strolled mildly away, chewing.

Crennyn was suddenly sickened, again, at what life had become for him, and smashed his armored hand on the street in frustration.

He sat, staring at Sherlyn’s ring, still on her finger, wondering what that might have meant to her.

Toby woke, blinking, looking around, disoriented; Liam was just here, climbing a tree, but it wasn’t a tree, it was broken stone scaffolding bristling with carved hands, and the fingers kept snapping off while Liam tried to climb higher, slowing his ascent, the finger stumps were bleeding cold liquid glass…

The entire room was breathing, expanding, contracting, while the fog of dreams settled away, and the darkness solidified Toby’s awareness.

Liam.

Toby swung his legs over the bed and stood, walked around quietly. Everyone was where they belonged, all sleeping, or pretending well enough. Liam’s bunk was empty, no wrinkles at all. Down at the end, near the gear racks, Jayce’s bunk, too, was empty.

He listened.

Following the sound that didn’t fit, he left the bunkhouse and followed the backtrail around, out to where the benches lined the overlook which edged the central village. The sound was louder here, an occasional wet nose sniff. Down on the second bench from the end he found someone that looked like a small and terrified child. It was Jayce hugging his knees. Jayce heard him approach.

“Didn’t get your fill of shoving me around?” Jayce fiddled with a collected pile of pebbles, picked one and threw it out over the overlook.

“Jayce, look. You needed that.”

“Lucky me, I’ve got a dad now. Thanks, pops, I’ll grow up strong and true.” Jayce sucked hard at the snot in his nose and throat, clearing out his head, as if to make a point.

“I made my point, and I’m pretty sure you understood. We’re done with that now.”

“No, no, we’re not done. Liam’s not done. That old bum will patch him up and send him right back out to the pits to start rounds again with the rest of us, lamer and slower than ever. Pointless. I’ve been here as long as I can remember, and nothing has ever changed, nothing ever will change. There’s no point at all to this, and all I want is out.” Jayce threw a stone near, so it bounced off the edge of the overlook, making a spark where it hit.

“There is no ‘out’, Jayce.”

“My point, in its entirety.”

“You don’t remember how it was when they brought you here, you were too young. I was here, and I remember. Your people brought you in on their backs, wading through mound after mound of the black shit, not knowing what any of it would do, or what any mix of it would make. They came here, in pieces, sometimes, and others covered in weird formations and growths. Some were dragged in, and some of those people were just clumps of meat that didn’t breathe anymore.”

Jayce shivered.

“They, willingly, walked the path they knew they had to walk, through that carnivorous demon shit, to get you, you, Jayce, somewhere they hoped might be safe. There’s a point for you. There’s a point to this, and they knew that. The Librarian is farther than anyone has ever been, at least since The Event, towards getting to that point. That’s why I fight so hard, and that’s why I need help. So stop crying. Do what you know you can do; every moment, every day. Even if all you have left is calling out to the gods.”

“No such thing, Toby. We’re all we’ll ever have. You know that better than any of us. Just us and abandoned superstition on an abandoned planet.” Jayce threw the stone he was fiddling with out into the darkness. Whatever pillar of ruin it struck crumbled away, making a noisy clatter as it finally relented its last stand.

Toby picked up a fist-sized rock and set it purposefully on the ground in front of Jayce. In a strong voice, but not directed at Jayce, he recited, “Stacking the stones of Fenkegun will align the metal within…”, he placed his hand on Jayce’s shoulder in a brotherly gesture as he walked past him and away.

Jayce sat and stared at the stone for some time, and well into the darkness. He finally stood, found another rock, and balanced it on the one set by Toby. He whispered, almost making no sound at all, “…and with him Rangkajur is summoned, to strengthen the bonds of men.”

‘And thereupon will thrive the life, that Drael sees fit to bless, and upon her cheek will man at last, find bountiful caress.’

Matignagol, god of free will.

In the dawning eons, all was a single unified whole. This wholeness was the Omnitharilex. The Omnitharilex existed in two forms, the early oneness, and the later fragmented whole, for no matter the form, either as one or as many, everything is a single oneness.

The early oneness of the Omnitharilex was a blended unison of all things in one, as an ocean of completeness. In time, eddies of isolation developed, and became of their own.

Within the Omnitharilex, two eddies formed, Angectica of creation, and Intonnegethus of destruction. The Omnitharilex isolated these forces into their own entities, and these two became distinct individuals in themselves, and the Omnitharilex began its second form, the fragmented wholeness.

The two did issue forth in their own fates, which began chains of events that would effect causes throughout eons uncounted.

This trend spawned within the wholeness a sense of jealousy which became a sense of entitlement, which became the desire to be an entity of its own.

This was Matignagol, god of free will.

Unlike the two, Matignagol chose to isolate himself; to become. Matignagol became of his own will. “I say it, and it is so,” was the way of Matignagol.

Matignagol left the oneness of his own choosing, seeking to be his own, to be without while being within the unified wholeness.

He succeeded in this desire, and became himself, isolating his essence apart from the unity, and found instantly the fear of being alone. Leaving the whole of the Omnitharilex for seeking of self brings with it the profound sense of being alone in a great hollow vastness.

Matignagol’s single ache of “…help…” was met instantly from the wholeness as an endlessly echoing “no”.

The solitude of Matignagol was not absolute for all moments. Eventually, after the First World declined into The Struggle, Velethnia, goddess of the wind, becomes enamored with Matignagol, and gives chase. Their union brings Yothae, goddess of dreams. Matignagol, however, cannot be bound, and in time abandons both Velethnia and Yothae, remaining on his own. In her angst, Yothae, goddess of dreams, pervades the thoughts of all, even Matignagol himself, to forever remind him of those he left behind.

In the late days of Man, when Angectia was weaving her final challenge to step in front of Intonnegethus, Matignagol was summoned by Intonnegethus. He was brought to the world of Men, whose hearts ached for their own purpose. Into these crevices of the hearts of Man did Matignagol sink, finding at last a home where the wild dogs of his ache of free will could run without end, in thousands upon thousands of beginnings and ends.

With Man as his agent, Matignagol shaped their fate. The surge of the free will of Mankind peaked into a geyser of power that became itself aware, and thus arose Jezmaezia, the goddess that Man wrought.

Lothae, god of doubt and second thought.

Along with Nayenf, Xenth, Uul, Wothenna, the Figments into which Yothae was splintered by the wrath of Intonnegethus.

Lothae, a shadow of the goddess of dreams, was the focal point of the killing lack of confidence, doubt. Lothae would doubt your belief, would doubt your effort, would simply doubt. All the realities from the Omnitharilex outward, that would shape the destiny of the smallest of us, would be the subject of Lothae’s doubt.

He kept counsel to none, yet sneaked in and out of the crevices of dreams and thoughts, forever looking for the tiny niche, the crack in the foundation, to soak into and widen.

Of all the figments, Lothae would possibly be the antithesis of Yothae herself, her mirror image; as Yothae would dream all that his possible, it would be Lothae that would find the one fatal flaw, the detail to unravel, no matter how small.

As the Figments sailed away into their isolation, Lothae fell to the Second World and shattered into a thousand slivers of thinness. The splinters of Lothae settled into the earth and wore away at Fekegun of stone. Lothae would rust all that was formed of Rangkajur of metal.

It was Lothae that was so bold to approach Angectica to convince her that the decline of the First World would best be the end of it all. To this, Angectica paid no mind, and instead created a companion for Lothae, the goddess of two faces with no name, who wore fear on one face, and love on the other.

Lothae did abandon this companion, believing nothing of Angectica, or anyone.

The nameless one, then, remains searching, for both that which would attack, and that which would console.

April May!:

Janet Aldrich [web], @tec4_cleveland, spun this off into a great bit of flash. Check out her blog post!

The rain sheeted on the street, gushing. The gravy of muck flowed along the sides of the road, swirling brownish into the drains. The deadycabs, empty of drivers, blurred past on suspensor fields, magnetically avoiding each other and other vehicles by the breadth of a gasp.

Inside “Mama Leone’s Diner”, Curth Mainheim hunched at his stool at the counter.

“Warm that up for you?” A stunningly formed, yet tired-looking, woman with a carafe of black coffee asked. Her hair color matched the coffee, and her lips matched the carafe handle.

He was sure she couldn’t be real. “Yes, please.”

She poured, and he checked over his shoulder; the rain slacking quickly.

“It’ll all be over soon.” she said.

“Hm? Oh, yes, soon.”

“You’re not from around here. I know most everyone.”

“No, just ducked in to keep dry.”

Amina Leone replaced the carafe into the coffeemaker, and rested back against the pie case, shaking it a bit with her exhausted, although light, weight against it. He thought for a moment he saw her crying, but it was just the light playing in the creases around her eyes, pleating her face.

The bell above the door ding-dinged, and a large man entered. He shook off his coat, flapped his hat against his thigh to knock off the worst of the water. He threw it and his coat both into a booth to the left, walked in, and went behind the counter. He went up to Amina, reached his hands for the sides of her head, and pulled her in to him, taking from her a hard kiss.

Curth tried to lose himself in his coffee; pretend this wasn’t at all odd or uncomfortable.

This kiss went on for some time. Longer than most kisses Curth had himself been a part of. Not that finding kissing time had been at all a problem for him in his life, but this was getting ridiculous. They were not being at all erotic, Curth supposed; there was no groping, no moaning, just, kissing. Relentless and unforgiving, kissing.

The rain stopped.

He drank the last bit of his coffee, now cold.

The man’s arms fell to his sides, and Amina put her arms around his waist to support him. The kissing continued.

‘Okay,’ thought Curth, ‘I’m done here.’ He reached back for his wallet to settle his bill. The rain was done, the kissing was not, so, time to get scarce.

Amina embraced her friend, picked him up with a bear hug, now looking somehow smaller than he had when he came into the diner, and carried him to the booth with his things, and settled him there. He collapsed onto the tabletop, being quite still. Amina looked refreshed.

‘Well then,’ thought Curth.

Amina smiled at him. She not only looked no longer exhausted, she looked, strong, maybe even taller. Her face was smooth like milk, even around the jewels that were her eyes.

“Don’t rush off.”

“Thanks, but I’m really late at this point. There’s money under my plate, with tip, should be fair.”

Amina stepped between Curth and the door, and walked up to him. Her smile was infectious.

He stood and let her approach.

She put one hand behind his neck, one under his arm, hooked over the back of his shoulder, and kissed him.

He allowed her.

There was something about it, the moment, for Curth. Kissing some, gorgeous, unfamiliar woman, in a diner somewhere, without discussion or planning. The oddness of the other man, slumped in the booth near them. The very odd tingle or vibration in the skin of his mouth, that was new. He didn’t quite get the whole moment, but was no longer in a rush, late for an appointment or not.

The kiss continued.

Curth’s knees went wobbly, but not in a romantic way, he was losing his strength. He was not fighting it. The draining sensation permeated his body, and he felt a wind blow across his core, sweeping away his will. His vision faded and went gray into black. He felt sleepy, but hungry for it, wanted more of this. He slid down this tunnel and drained away entirely.

Amina carried the slump that was Curth over to the booth with the other man, and piled him there.

She stretched and felt alive. Taking a cloth from her apron belt, she returned to the counter, collecting Curth’s dishes, and polishing the surface of the bar.

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/12/welp-they-found-me-put-caution-tape-up-round-the-place-got-a-case-of-dynamite-i-can-hold-out-here-all-night/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/11/renegade-a-to-z-klestonocad/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/11/renegade-a-to-z-klestonocad/#comments Wed, 11 May 2011 14:39:58 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/?p=203 [...]]]> [Wordcount: 209]

Klestonocad, god of noise.

The nature of Intonnegethus is destruction, but without malice. He dismantles, separates, divides, crumbles; he is the force of undoing, the universal entropy.

Forever breaking things apart, despite all other resultant events, his enduring force did result in the bringing forth twin powers. One, of the rubble of broken things, Phanex, and the other, his brother, Klestonocad, the god of dissonant noise.

Klestonocad is rattling the windows, the air ducts, flowing from crickets’ legs, and joyous when hammers fall. He is called upon by his grandchild, Hixix of lightning, child of Thuffiell’s rage, the goddess who can never know the touch of another.

Forever at odds with Siennefelle, their poetry of music and noise clash in the ears of all who hear. Siennefelle forming harmonious music, and Klestonocad bending her out of tune, washing her out with noise and dissonance.

Klestonocad is ever enduring and forever present in all works of Intonnegethus, even unto the final days of Man, Angectica’s plans to oppose Intonnegethus rise in passionate force.

Never silenced, he hides among the gods of the Second World; he whispers and shouts to us even now, forever happy to distract the focus, to tease the Figments of Yothae and send them into frustration.

Rattling, banging, and crashing, Klestonocad, god of noise.

Jezmaezia, the goddess that Man wrought.

In the latter days of Man, Angectica’s effort to confront Intonnegethus directly was progressing in full force.

Emnanitic, the god of evolutionary change, erupted from the massive creative pulse generated by Ghamnig and Brehnill, as their efforts of sorting and combining swelled and the years of man became long. The skill with which the patterned combinations were woven by Ghamnig and Brehnill honed year after year.

This influence was evident on the large, as Man began to construct massive buildings and structures that teemed across the surface of the world.

Similarly, this influence was evident on the small, as Man harnessed the powers of technology, and became adeptly skilled with the manipulation of molecules and atoms, genetic engineering, and computer technology.

As his mastery of powers grew, Intonnegethus began to take notice. A moment of fear brought Intonnegethus to believe that, if left unchecked, Angectica’s influence over Man may indeed become a force that would undo his very fate.

Intonnegethus felt that maybe help from the Omnitharilex itself would be his only hope to retain the balance, or at least prevent the loss of his stake. Knowing, though, that the Omnitharilex would not give him counsel, he sought instead the help of his brother, the god of freewill, Matignagol.

Matignagol was, until then, unaware of the development of Man, and upon hearing, was renew in his thirst for finding a home, now in the land of Man; a home that would permit the thriving of free choice, while quenching the loneliness that had become his fate.

Matignagol sank into the hearts of Man, and there did thrive, finally at home.

Man at that point, turned even some of the gods themselves to bend to his will. Even Rankajur, god of metal, was shaped by the will of Man.

While she would deny it, it was said that eventually even Hixix herself fell to the power of Man. Portions of her were captured by Man’s trickery, and caged within the technology he mastered, and would be enslaved to Man in the form of electricity. Hixix would forever torment Man with bolts of lightning, but never find superiority, still at the mercy of the whims of her three ancestors of the First World.

The endless desire of Man to chase Emnanitic, goddess of technology, fed first by the powers of Angectica in the form of Ghamnig and Brehnill, and now powered by Matignagol himself, drove Man forward into massive feats of creation that the world had never yet seen.

This run of development resulted in Man truly believing that there were, in fact, no other gods. Eventually, the distant memories of what the gods were, faded. Man’s growth and belief in itself would generate a vortex power that Man himself could neither see nor control.

This vortex grew to the point that it, itself, found awareness, as the daughter of Man and Matignagol, and came into being as Jezmaezia, the goddess that man wrought.

Matignagol bragged to Intonnegethus, for a new goddess had been created, but not by Angectia; a goddess that not only had the creative powers of Angectica, but also the destructive force of Intonnegethus. Intonnegethus was pleased, and believed that he now had the upper hand, and could defeat Angectica’s opposition.

Unfortunately for Intonnegethus, Jezmaezia was aflame with the drive of freewill, and as such, would not be controlled by his wishes.

Jezmaezia was born of Man, and Jezmaezia was, ultimately, bound and controlled by Man, by Man’s mastery of technology and genetic engineering.

Man would hold Jezmaezia in the highest regard, building her up to fantastic proportion, bending technology further and further into the manipulation of nanoscale advances.

He would court Jezmaezia with every romance he could muster, until finally, she would be held in thrall no longer.

When Jezmaezia finally broke free, the world of Man all but ceased to be.

Toby leaned briefly on the latched door before slowly walking out of the library; Liam’s whimpers growing quieter and quieter as he left.

When he emerged into the daylight, a group had gathered on the front steps; mostly boys and girls that had finished their first dig run. They all stared at Toby, curious, worried, frightened. Few of them had ever seen the Librarian, but enough stories about him circulated that he was still very real to them.

Karrin walked up to the second step, and hugged Toby around the ribcage.

In the crowd stood Thisson, a younger boy with oil-black hair and bangs below his brows “Is Liam…” he wanted to know, but didn’t want to know.

“I don’t know.” The small bit of shake in Toby’s voice was not unnoticed; they were all tuned to notice tiny changes in sound.

Toby slid from Karrin’s embrace and made his way down the front steps toward Thisson. He stopped in front of Thisson and looked into his eyes for, something. He didn’t seem to like what he found there; he didn’t react to it, at least, and walked on past him without further discussion.

A few from the crowd fell in behind Toby at a short distance, following him silently. The rest milled about on the steps, some hoping to hear about Liam, others wandering away into their own directions.

They followed Toby wondering what he would do next. There have been occasional injuries, cuts and scrapes, twisted ankles and sunburns, all that, but not very often had someone gotten into the dig, and the times they have, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened to Liam. Stories, sure, the worst of the worst were used during practice drills and even their banter-songs were all based in lessons on being careful.

Toby was soon back on the trail, with the curious behind him, making his way back to the spot where Liam fell.

The incoming line was bantering in a low harmonious mumble-hum.

“Out, out, out, while the sun’s about.
In, in, in, keep it off your skin.
Bring, bring, bring; Bring the unknown thing.
Don’t stop now, do it all again.”

Toby walked faster than the outgoing line, passing them up, getting back to the spot.

Ahead, one of the boys was talking loudly, making his point well known to the others, “…no point to this. I’m serious, completely worthless for us to be doing this.” He shoved the boy next to him to punctuate his correctness, bent down for a handful of stones, throwing small ones at those coming back from the dig with their loads and laughing when they’d duck.

“You too, we’re all making this happen; we suffer because of us,” he continued as Toby approached from behind. “Oh, and these ones…” he pointed out a smaller-statured girl in the incoming line, throwing a small stone at her face to make her stumble, “It’s these little shits that make it the worst. Clumsy. Weak.”

Toby was right behind him at this point.

“Every last one of us. Dumb animals running patterns. ‘Go get shit. Hey, I got some shit! Go get more shit. Hey, I got more shit!!”

Toby whumped his hand onto the bully’s shoulder and jerked. He spun around, stumbled, a little shocked at the change in momentum. Toby hurled the square of his fist, with a goodly heft of body weight behind it, and connected, landed soundly into the bully’s eye and cheekbone. He went down hard, without protest.

Both lines stopped.

Toby knelt down over the bully and put his nose against his nose. “There are things bigger than you. There are things smaller than you. There is a point to this. We are building a huge puzzle with a million invisible little pieces. That’s why it takes us all. Who made you well when you got the dark fever, the hollow death, and who healed your broken leg in an afternoon? The Librarian. Everything we do, we do for that. When we all help us, we all help him, because ignorance is death. You can help us do this, or you can keep pounding on the things smaller than you with all your soulless rage. But remember that there are things smaller than you that can kill you. Either way, you keep this shit up, keep not helping us, I’ll bury you right here.”

The bully elbowed himself up to sitting, pressing the tender spot on his face, wincing.

“I still don’t see the point,” he twisted his neck around, dealing with the pain. “All this shit that we’re collecting, one bucket of black crap after another. How do you know he’s not just a crazy old man with some stupid idea, and we’re just collecting ash or black dirt, random dust of pulverized rocks? What’s the point of organizing us into amateur geologists, collecting the leftovers of what got left behind. There’s no point in saving what’s useless.”

Toby stands over him and moves his own headset from his neck to his ears, fiddles with some dials, tuning the seeker tone inside. He hits a certain setting, looks around. Toby goes into the scrub and rubble on the side of the path, picks up a handful of black stuff bare-handed, brings it back, pours it onto the ground. He re-tunes his headset, goes out, comes back with another sample, bare-handed, adds it to the pile. Again, he tunes, goes back out. When he returns, his arm is covered in the black powder up to the elbow.

The bully scurries backward a bit when he saw; The stuff was seething, churning crawling around like a living pool of dry liquid. Moving quickly, Toby uses the fingers of his other hand to rake and scrape at the stuff, having it fall away from his skin, and dropping to the pile of black already on the ground. His skin beneath was unharmed.

The pile of powder on the ground began to seethe and churn when all three ingredients were together. It kneaded over itself and convulsed. Toby removed his headset. Those with headsets still on quickly ripped them off, because the resulting seeker tones emitting from the pile were piercing storms of horrific noise.

The pile began to settle inside itself, take on a form, shapes, facets. It piled itself up to about the height of Toby’s knee, and settled further, undissolving itself into a plate of structured forms, crystals of quartz, solid, perfect, unmoving. The sunlight splintered through the quartz, washing small rainbows around them where the light refracted outward.

“It’s not just minerals in the black stuff. It’s minerals and machines. Machines with plans.”

The silent crowd fell into a deeper, reverent quiet.

“If we can figure that out, we win everything. The most valuable thing we own here is our time. We control that. I’m here to see you do not waste it. Now, get back in line.”

Toby walked on down to the spot where Liam fell, yoked up his glass buckets, went back out to the dig to finish filling, and continued making the rounds for the day.

Thanks, everyone, for the tremendous response to my three-part #FridayFlash, “Trial and Error”. Seems that quite a few people enjoyed the story and characters enough to encourage me enough to explore it a bit further down the line.

I’ve started drafting new installments in the plot line, based on the events established so far, but I have no idea where it’s heading.

Should be a fun adventure! My plan will be to release these as part of #TuesdaySerial, my first time in that space. So, look for it there, and of course, here on my blog.

Thanks for the appreciation and encouragement.

Intonnegethus, god of destruction.

The reach of the influence of Intonnegethus is far, it is deep, and it is lasting.

One of the three most ancient elders (along with Angectica and Matignagol), Intonnegethus was isolated from the Omnitharilex in the distant days, prior to the memory of most. It was the never-ending struggle with Angectica, the goddess of creation, which brought Intonnegethus into the scrutiny of the Omnitharilex, and the selfish nature of Intonnegethus to scatter all things that sealed his fate. Displeased so with Intonnegethus, the Omnitharilex decided to isolate him from the unity of oneness; the denial of acceptance into the wholeness to be his endless punishment.

The Omnitharilex becomes eventually displeased with the actions of Intonnegethus, because the constant division is his nature sits in contrast with the union and wholeness of the Omnitharilex. Intonnegethus is cast into isolation for his incessant scattering of things, and he now exists anywhere things are destroyed, broken, or divided.

Intonnegethus was angered by his isolation from the Omnitharilex, but quickly resigned himself to the fate, since without division there can be no creation, and with no creation, there can be no cycle, and with no cycle, the Omnitharilex would not exist.

In this hubris, Intonnegethus therefore believed himself to be required for the Omnitharilex to even exist.

Born of the oneness that is the Omnitharilex, he represents the destruction and tearing asunder of things. The god of entropy, he is present when anything crumbles or is broken away.

All things brought apart or divided or broken and destroyed are the realm of Intonnegethus, and in course, gives rise to the twins of destruction, Klestonocad, god of noise and dissonant sound, and Phanex of rubble and detritus.

Intonnegethus was there in the First World to tear asunder the union of the First Three, Velethnia, Quanneth, and Thuffiell.

He was there during the Struggle of Decline, and it was he that splintered the delicateness of Yothae into her Figments, Nayenf, Xenth, Uul, Wothenna, and Lothe.

Still, in the Second World, Intonnegethus was there, tearing down all creations that Angectica could sculpt.

It would be by his own son, Phannex that brings forth Cannae, the hoarder, to bring Man into distraction from the path of creation; preventing Man from becoming a weapon of Angectica, in her plan to seize superiority.

And in the end, it would be Intonnegethus who would appeal to their brother, Matignagol the ancient of freewill, who would trump Angecticas most elaborate scheme, and inspire Man to harness Hixix, the eventual mother of Jaeyene, who would both laugh and cry on the day that Man first reached for real power.

All these things, from the first days, to the million sideways glances of Man’s doubt, to the farthest attempts of fortune, would be worn down and scattered by the hand of Intonnegethus.

]]> http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/07/ig-scifi-table/feed/ 0 http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/07/renegade-a-to-z-hixix/ http://reginaldgolding.com/2011/05/07/renegade-a-to-z-hixix/#comments Sat, 07 May 2011 22:03:17 +0000 Daniel http://reginaldgolding.com/?p=157 [...]]]> [Wordcount: 444]

Hixix, goddess of lightning.

As the First World aged, the gods of this world (Thuffiell of light and fire, Velethnia of wind, and Quanneth of water) changed, and their roles tipped balance, developing from one era to another.

Thuffiell brings the heat of the sun, and the light of knowledge into the First World, showing the path of the way. His sun rules the day, and his stars and moon rule the night.

Quanneth, the god of the waters, discovered an incestuous desire for his sibling, Velethnia, goddess of the wind. Each night, he chases her, and she willingly falls short of resisting his advances. They combine and form fog and clouds as the Thuffiell’s dawn arrives.

Thuffiell disapproves of their clandestine and incestuous unions, and each day, brings the heat and the light to dissolve away their evidence, driving off the fog and evaporating the clouds, uncloaking the blue truth of Velethnia’s sky.

(FYI, this following portion creates a HUGE plot hole: Can’t have magma prior to the coming of the gods of the Second World. This will have to be sorted out later, because this line of thinking breaks alot of continuity.)

Thuffiell’s anger with his siblings grew and they refuse to relent. His anger with Quanneth for seeking relations with Velethnia shows no affect on Quanneth’s intent, eventually erupting magma, spilling into the seas in vommitous rage. Quanneth is able to withstand the severe rages of Thuffiell, swallowing the lava in the vastness of the oceans. Adding insult to injury, towering plumes of vapor and cloud rise from these clashes, as Velethnia comforts her lover from the rage of their common sibling.

The rage of Thuffiell turns to Velethnia, for failing to resist the incestuous advances of her brother. Biding his time, Thuffiell awaits the storms and strikes the lovers in the midst of their love, at the heart of enormous banks of clouds.

Thuffiell’s rage, combined with the incestuous union brings the goddess born of three parents, the child who would forever be denied the touch of another, the child of the gods of the First World, the goddess of lightning, Hixix.

Eventually, after the decline of both the First and Second worlds, during the age of Men, Hixix would be harnessed by man at the inspiration of Angectica’s agent of change, pawn of the final plan to oppose Intonnegethus himself, Emnanitic. Thus bound by men, Hixix would be the living soul of technology.

Enslaved by mortals, her desire to be free and unfettered would take the race of men as far as the race of men could go, being the eventual catalyst leading them down the path they carve, to the day called by later men, The One Event.

Ghamnig, the god of combining and of joining.

After the First World declined into destructive tendencies at the guidance of Intonnegethus, Angectica made moves to bring balance by creating Fekegun, Rangkajur, and Drael, the gods of the Second World. This, too, would find its decline due in primary part to the ongoing influence of Intonnegethus; Create as Angectica might, the ever-present god of destruction continues as he would to break things apart.

This continuous cycle proved once again inescapable in the realm of the Second World. This decline of creative force created a crushing loneliness into which both Drael and Yothe fell.

Angectica ached for both Yothae and Drael, and created Zythrah, god of the beasts, to serve as companionship to their lonesome hearts. Even this effort fell short; despite the companionship of the animals, Yothe found no home for her dreams, and Drael was overcome in the dizzying influence of the Cycle of Duality. The Second World remained trapped in the endless struggle with Intonnegethus.

Angectica grew sympathetic to Brehnill’s struggle to bring order to the Second World, and created a companion for her, again from the rubble of Phanex, who still believed to be in control of destruction, greater than his father, Intonnegethus.

Thus came Ghamnig, the god of combining, brother of Brehnill. Surely, between patterning and combining, the forces of destruction would submit their relentless drive.

Brehnill had been the single most pure effort yet brought by Angectica to counter the constant waves of the power of destruction. Brehnill brought patterned order to the chaos, alignment, organization, and the sorting out of the randomness. Her ultimate effect, however, proved limited, for Intonnegethus, released directly from the Omnitharilex itself, was absolute is his duty of destruction, the entropy of the universe.

With sympathy growing for Brehnill’s struggle, Angectica brought to her assistance in the form of Ghamnig, the god of combining and joining.

In Ghamnig’s heart burned the fire of Angectica’s own creativity. Angectica gave so much of her essential fire to Ghamnig that she herself was weakened. It was with this passion that she believed in the depth of Ghamnig’s role. In the ultimate course of events, it would be because of Ghamnig that forces would eventually stand firm against Intonnegethus himself.

Ghamnig’s fire made him glow with an aura that was inescapable. The power of his aura actually gained the attention of the Figment Nayenf, Figment of focus. Together, they honed an impossibly thin edge to the knife that was Ghamnig’s power. Ghamnig was able then to be lord over all things that would combine, even to The Unseen Children, the invisible level of the atoms of the elements themselves, of the six gods of the Paired World.

This resulting force of combination and joining of disparate parts, this engine of power, that issued from the actions of Brehnill and Ghamnig, grew eventually into a force of its own, called Emnanitic, the god of evolving change.

Fenkegun, god of stone.

After the First World, created by Angectica, declined into bickering and discord, by the influence of the pervasive destruction of Intonnegethus, a period of struggle took place. This struggle finally concluded, as Intonnegethus, with his unsatisfied rage, splintered Yothe, goddess of thoughts and dreams, into her component Figments (Nayenf, Xenth, Uul, Wothenna, and Lothe).

Undaunted, Angectica endeavored to create the gods of the Second World, to bring balance to the disharmony in the universe.

She approaches Phanex, god of rubble, son of Intonnegethus, and appeals to his sense of competition. Phanex, forever in the shadow of the great god of destruction, remains forever in the challenge to impress or surpass his sire, Intonnegethus. The god of rubble (the result of distruction), Phanex never feels he will ever achieve the fearsomeness required to come into his own as a respected god to be feared.

Angectica convinces Phanex that by aiding her in creating this Second World, there will be a whole new territory, full of possibility for destruction, and by taking a leading role in this new world, Phanex stands a chance to finally shed his subordination to the great destructive reputation of Intonnegethus.

In exchange, Phanex provided an endless supply of material for her to sculpt into what would become the tangible world to balance the ethereal nature of the First World.

Chief in the Second world were the three gods to balance the three of the First World, and these were Fekegun of stone, Rangkajur of metal, and Drael, the god of all else; the growth of life.

Fenkegun, god of stone, owns the firmament that is the earth of the Second World, and keeps Rangkajur of metal, ensconced within. This is a source of endless teamwork, an inseparable bond between Fenkegun and Rangkajur, models of undying friendship, brothers-in-arms. It is upon this stronghold that Drael, goddess of plants and living growth does thrive for all time.

Fenkegun and Rangkajur are continually shaped and formed by the enduring forces of the First World, as Velethnia (wind), Quanneth (water), and Thuffiell (the light and the fire), shape and form them, eon after eon.

It is by this creation of the Second World has Angectica created a balance that exists to stand in opposition to the insatiable destruction that Intonnegethus brings.

Here is Angela’s “Teethskin“.

Here’s my entry…

[Wordcount: 924]

Teeth Skin

“Here we are, ladies,” Amanda strolls into the bathroom, “One for you, one for you, and one more for me.”

“I’m nervous,” Kate stood in front of her nervous self in the big mirror, a vial and its reflection sat between.

“I’m not,” Casey and her reflection were already fiddling with the top of the thing to get it open.

“You should be; this is street stuff – No idea what’s in it oooOOOooo!” Amanda joked, ”Seriously, it’s just oral hygiene; clean teeth, fresh breath. There’s nothing to go wrong.”

“Street? You got this from some wayward loser? Come on, Amanda, you know I don’t even trust the stuff that comes right from DaNATech.”

“Kate. Sweetie. Just eat it. It won’t hurt you, and trust me, you need this, okay?”

Casey laughed, “Her breath does stink, doesn’t it.”

“I hate you both. This isn’t helping me right now.” Kate was not convinced of the safety of this stuff. “Ok. So. This stuff does what? It’s tiny robots that start working when you swallow them?”

“I’ve dated men like that.” Casey got the top off of her vial and up-ended the stuff.

“What do you do? Swallow it? Are you supposed to feel it, does it itch?”

Casey swished puffy cheeks back and fourth.

“No, you put it in your mouth, it’s like a gel,” said Amanda, ”and let it dissolve. It should feel like it goes away.”

“That is so weird!” Casey said, “There was nothing left to swallow… it just vanishes inside your mouth like there wasn’t anything there!” She smiled big into the mirror, looked at herself bug-eyed, examining her teeth.

“Yeah, it combines in your saliva and spreads itself all over your teeth and into the skin of your mouth, feels like it’s gone,” Amanda worked to open her vial.

Kate was still nervous, “I thought that you had to go to DaNATech so they could, yaknow, study your DNA, before this stuff worked on your body?”

“For their stuff, yeah, you do,” said Amanda, “but the street stuff has been hacked, so it’s sort of unlocked. Works for anyone now. Bottoms up, girlie, you worry too much.” Amanda poured her portion and swished until it was gone.

Kate watched Amanda and Casey both grinning and looking at their teeth in the mirror. “So? What does it taste like? Did it work? How does the stuff know to do what it’s supposed to do to your teeth?”

“Don’t make me shove it in your mouth, Kate. First time you’ve heard that too, I bet.” Casey taunted. “Computers program it to do what it does. All it does is keep your teeth clean so you don’t have to brush, and keeps your breath from stinking because it, I don’t know, destroys the stuff that makes it stink.”

“Forever?”

“Well as long as you’ll ever need it. It works by using chemicals in your body, so it stops after you’re dead.”

Casey looked at Amanda, “Do you sell this stuff too, Mary Kay?”

“I was nervous too, so I read up and talked to people about it. There’s nothing to it.”

Kate sipped her portion back and scrunched her whole face in wrinkles until it was gone. She opened one eye, then the other, bared her teeth tentatively.

“Attagirl!” cheered Casey.

“There, not so bad, was it?” said Amanda.

“I don’t really feel anything. I thought it would at least tingle or something.”

“I think I feel mine tingle,” said Casey.

“Yeah, mine too, but I don’t know if it’s just that I expect that it should more than the fact that it really is doing anything. Hard to tell for me.” Amanda turned her head side to side, getting different angles of light on her teeth.

The three of them spent time looking at their teeth without much conversation – tilting heads, grinning, smiling, going “MWAAAA, MWAAAEEEEE,” and “eeeEEEeee, EEEeeeEEE,” with their reflections.

“I think I feel something,” Kate eventually said, scratching at her left forearm, along the backside, near the bone.

“Yeah, you might. Shouldn’t matter much, though. All you have to worry about now is clean teeth. I’m going to throw out my toothbrush and floss first thing in the morning. Done with that annoying chore!” said Amanda.

“No, really,” said Kate, “I feel something… wrong…” she was scratching her arm alot now. Something very itchy and active was happening, buzzing in her skin. “Look at my arm…” she showed it to the Amanda and Casey. The underside was red in stripes where she had been scratching, and starting to be lumpy in small raised spots. “It’s just me isn’t it? It’s just me? You’re both okay. Nothing’s wrong with you!”

Angela ran her fingers over the bumps; they felt hard like little rocks.

“Are they moving?” asked Casey, “They’re …growing!”

“OH GOD OH GOD GET IT OUT OF ME, AMANDA, YOU SHIT. WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME! WHAT DID YOU GIVE ME?!”

They stared at the lumps that began appearing in rows from her wrist all the way to her elbow, slowly growing, but fast enough to see it happen. The lumps under her skin pushed outward, making the skin white in each spot from the pressure.

“Make it stop! Make it stop! Oh my… God… what is it…”

The center two rows of lumps pushed outward hard enough to break through the skin of her arm, then the rows next to those poked through too… …they were all teeth; row after row, all in order; incisors, cuspids, bicuspids… all growing from under the skin of Kate’s arm.

Kate’s words wouldn’t come, her eyes were round and panicked, her pupils tiny and crazed.

The skin of her arm was covered in rows of very clean teeth.

Emnanitic, god of evolving change

After the decline of the First World, and the falling of the Second World yet again to the dizzying force of the Cycle of Duality, Angectica had finally moved into a position to engage Intonnegethus in direct opposition.

Angectica knew that her force of creation alone would not defeat Intonnegethus hand-to-hand, and needed the power of a derivitive component that was not a direct creation of her own; a piece unpredictable that could tip the scales away from the favor of destruction.

To aide Brehnill’s efforts of patterning order, Angectica brought fourth for her a brother, formed directly in the memory of the Omnitharilex itself, again by way of the rubble of Phanex, Ghaming, the god of combination and assembly. It would be he that would meld together Brehnill’s patterns of order into unified creations.

Ghamings enthusiasm for combining objects patterned by Brehnill was boundless, and ultimately, they created a god of their own from these parallel strands of patterns, Emnanitic, the god of evolving change.

Emnanitic, agent of change, then, as Angectica had planned, could now serve as the force of endless unexpected turns, and could augment her own power of creation with his influence of evolution.

With that new ally, Angectic planned her final maneuver that would surely be the final end of Intonnegethus, her masterpiece creation; the race of Men.

Drael, the goddess of the growing life.

As the First World descends into bickering between its gods, Velethnia, Quanneth, and Thuffiell, the persistent grudge of Intonnegethus brings him to splinter Yothae, the goddess of thoughts and of dreams, into her Figments (Nayenf, Xenth, Uul, Wothenna, and Lothe).

Troubled by seeing the First World shatter and fragment, under discord and the rage of Intonnegethus, Angectica decides that the gods of the First World lack balance, and endeavors to create for them counterparts to equalize their forces in nature.

By convincing Phanex, god of rubble, offspring of Intonnegethus, that a new world will bring more to destroy, she tricks him into aiding her by providing rubble to sculpt.

With the gathered materials, Angectica creates the gods of the Second World; Fekegun of stone, Rangkajur of metal, and Drael, of all that remains.

Upon the solid foundation of stone and metal, prospers the domain of Drael; all things that live and grow, and which is the focal point for all the powers of the gods of the First World. The early days of the Second World were long before the Age of Men, and even before the time of animals.

Drael was the goddess shouldered with the responsibility of acting as the liaison between the gods of the First World and of Fekegun and Rangkajur, her fellow powers of the Second. This weighed on Drael heavily as the Second World developed, and was burdensome to her.

The essence of the splintered Yothae remained here in the Second World, having been loosed from her Figments by the rage of Intonnegethus. However, Yothae was without purpose, with nowhere to thrive her thoughts and dreams, and became more lonely than she had ever known, having lost the five Figments of herself.

So, too, did Drael find a deep loneliness, for not only could the goddess of growth of living things find no companionship among the gods of metal and stone, she grew jealous of them.

The gods of the First World continually flirted with Fekegun and Rangkajur, weathering them and changing them, creating rusty hues on the faces of mountains, and sandy beaches along the coastlines, despite Drael’s need of all of these gods for she herself to continue.

Angectica ached for both Yothae and Drael, and created Zythrah, god of the beasts, to serve as companionship to their lonesome hearts.

Cannae, god of hoarding and collecting

In the Age of Man, Man’s ongoing efforts to create continued to create waste and destroy his environment, trapped in the Cycle of Dualism originating with the ancients, Angectica and Intonnegethus. Phanex, the god of rubble and clutter thrived in these times, and was pleased.

Man, affected by the clutter around him, began to collect and horde the things left behind. He constructed museums to house the valued bits, and markets to buy, sell, and exchange the things less prized.

These collections grew to become more important than even the activity of creation, for some men, and their desire to collect and value these piles gave attention enough to spawn Cannae, the first god born of man.

Cannae’s realm was powered by desire to own, the coveting of things, and the urge to collect and to hoarde. Cannae’s gluttonous ways could find no end, forever collecting and hoarding, gathering pile after pile of anything around, regardless of value.

It is Cannae’s insatiable collecting and hoarding that spur Angectica into creating Brehnill, the goddess of patterns, to stand against Cannae, the influence of Intonnegethus over man’s detritus. Brehnill forever sorts and organizes after Cannae, to prevent mankind from burying itself it its own waste and clutter.

Brehnill, goddess of patterning and organization

After the First World and Second World, and into the Age of Man, Angectica and Intonnegethus become entangled in a struggle over the fate of man, and into which direction, exactly, is man himself guiding that fate.

After attempting to create a self-sustatining world and failing twice, Angectica is not content to sit quietly by and allow things to crumble yet again at the hand of Intonnegethus and his influence of destruction.

Man had become the embodiment of the Cycle of Dualism; the eternal struggle that first damned both Angectica and Intonnegethus from the Omnitharilex, the ancient oneness. As a result, all that man created resulted also in a fair share of waste and destruction. In the wake of his actions, the waste and the rubble that is the domain of Phanex (brother of Klestonocad; the twin sons of Intonnegethus), Intonnegethus brings forth Cannae to collect and to horde the broken pieces that remain.

For fear that the destructive influence would increase and poison the actions of man, Angectica creates Brehnill.

Brehnill is the goddess of sorting and organization. In her realm, all things must be aligned and tidy, sorted and placed.

As Angegtica’s creationism forever grapples with the destruction that Intonnegethus brings, Brehnill ceaselessly and tirelessly sorts and aligns and organizes not only the things that are, but also the broken bits that are left behind.

Anywhere there are patterns, you will find the signature of the work of Brehnill, forever weaving order from chaos.

Brehnill begins to hold sway over man, his perception of his own works, and ultimately the fate toward which he struggles. This momentum of effort between man and the unseen goddess of structure brings Emnanitic into being, the god of the efforts of man.

*knock knock*

Mr. Kurtis Dunbar gets up off the sofa, tearing himself away from NASCAR time trials on his very large television (his wife Alexis was away, you see), and walks his socked feet to the front door. He looks through the peephole and sees nothing, begins to walk back to the sofa.

*knock*

He returns to the door and opens it briskly, expecting to yell at some neighborhood child for pranking on his doorstep.

“What….”

A very long, very dark bumpy green form charges into his doorway across the floor.

“….THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL!” Kurtis sprawls without aim or skill, hurling his own body for the kitchen table top just to his right, crouching on a placemat, ready to… do something.

The alligator webbed-hand-slapped a bellycrawl through the Dunbar foyer, and over to the edge of the carpet. He turned back to look at Mr. Dunbar, crouched and ready, on the table. The alligator slowly opened its very long jaws.

“hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhh” it exhaled, then slowly closed its mouth again. It looked at the television. “NASCAR!” it croaked, “Brilliant!”

“……” Mr. Dunbar crouched.

“Got any drinks? I’m flippin’ parched.” The alligator horsed its request, shuffling side to side in that alligator way, making its way further into the Dunbar home, looking for the loo.

Mr. Dunbar crouched and listened.

Splashy slurpy noises could be heard coming from the direction of the toilet.

Mr. Dunbar’s crouching culminated into a quick burst into action, as he tumbled to the floor and ran as fast as he possibly could out the front door, and down the street.

“Dunbar!?” yelled the alligator. “Dunbar! Where’ve you gotten to, man? Have you any chicken? I LOVE CHICKEN!” it coughed and wheezed a bit, having over-exerted its voice, and crawled back into the living room from the back of the home, looking around for his absent host. “Typical.”

Two blurs with pointy ears and calico tails darted across furniture and bounded out of the open door.

Mrs. Dunbar’s car pulled up out front.

My story was up against some really spectacular talent, so please don’t fail to read their entries as well. Please also take the time to comment on their original blog entries. Comments are always supremely appreciated by the authors!

Many thanks to Angela and Gene for the opportunity, and to everyone that read and enjoyed my entry.

thanks, everyone!

Angectia, goddess of creativity and invention

Angectica is one of the three most ancient sibling forces (along with Intonnegethus and Matignagol), born of the oneness that is the Omnitharilex. She represents invention and creativity, and is the muse and action of all creation, and of all those that would create. All things exists due to the actions of Angectica, as she gathers components from within the Omnitharilex to sculpt these things into existence.

Her endless endeavor to invent and create eventually caused irritation within the Omnitharilex, and she was finally judged to be selfish in her actions of taking components without consideration from near and far to be used for her own creative hobby.

As a force ultimately of creation, Angectica remained at constant discord with Intonnegethus, the ancient force of destruction. This was further irritation to the Omnitharilex, and was not in harmony with the union of oneness.

The Omnitharilex eventually isolates Angectica from itself into her current form for her transgressions of selfishness, which conflicted with the wholeness and union that is the Omnitharilex.

Angectica continues through eternity as the force of all things being created.

Scorned by this judgment and isolation from the oneness of the Omnitharilex, she eventually comes to terms with her fate, because she believes that, above all things, creation is the most important thing that can be done, so being bound into the Omnitharilex is not essential for her duty, which is more supreme than being held in thrall.

Isolated from the wholeness of the Omnitharilex, she learns the depths of loneliness, now knowing how much comfort the wholeness had formerly brought to her. Through her own voice, she creates Siennefelle, the goddess of music, who becomes her sibling in creation as the creator and muse of all harmonious sound.

I’ve been working on building my own world of post-apocalyptic nanotechnology future, and I’d come to a point where I’d like to have a history constructed of mythology at hand. With that, my characters can refer to these gods and events in their own world, hopefully enriching my story world.

Like a dork, I decided that it would be an awesome idea do construct this pantheon of mythology for Renegade A to Z, since, how hard could it be.

TURNS OUT IT’S PRETTY FRICKIN HARD.

But, so far, a good deal of fun.

So, for my May #renegadeatoz, I’ll be presenting the gods of my pantheon in alphabetical order. Hopefully by the end of May, it will click and make some sense at some level, but who knows!

Damn the torpedoes.

(Also, feel free to join in! My wife @micala is on board, too, so, use the hashtag, and get to it!)

This is my entry.

Immortal

Janet walked in, closed the door behind her, and walked down the hallway into the kitchen. She dropped her bag and sweater over a chair back, then walked to the refrigerator, opened the door, and stood there, staring at the contents.

She looked from shelf to shelf; milk, pickles, olives, half a head of lettuce, stacked cans of soda. Nothing looked interesting. She closed the door and browsed the counter. Bread. Crackers. One bagel. Boring.

Back to the fridge; opened the main door and the freezer door together. Milk again, of course. Frozen waffles with icy hair. Ew. Olives. Mustard. She sighed and closed both doors again, wandering to the kitchen table and sat.

The centerpiece bowl had three bananas with brown spots, but small brown spots, so those would be just about perfect. She reached under those and took a clementine.

Janet rolled it around in her fingers, admiring the deep orange color, the pores, the bit of stem left, and she peeled off the small oval product code sticker.

She pushed her right thumbnail into the peel, and began to tear it back to reveal the sections inside; tiny sprays of pungent fragrance erupted from the wound as she worked.

With a small bit peeled, she stopped, looked at it closely, something was definitely wrong with this one.

Holding back the flap, she turned the fruit into the light. She was expecting to see bits of pithy strings, tiny juice sacs arranged into segments, typical citrus stuff. Instead, she saw a lump of smooth flesh colored shapes. She poked at the lump. It was soft and flexible, warm.

She put the fruit down onto the table, suddenly not at all hungry.

Curiosity would not leave her, and Janet picked up the fruit again, began to tear away more of the peel.

As she did, she discovered more fleshy lumps, as well as noticing that all the lumps were connected, folded together in a tight fit like some sort of puzzle. All the lumpy parts had the same fleshy color, the same soft flexibility, the same warmth. More bits of peel fell away from the fruit.

After about half of the fruit was peeled back, she noticed, too, that the stuff inside had a certain symmetry to the folds; and arms, and legs.

The remainder of the peel came off in one piece, and a small man fell to her table, unfolding, lying face down, covered in orangey juice.

Janet stared at the little man.

She poked the warm flesh of his thigh.

He was perfectly proportional to a normal sized human, just, orangey.

She looked around and blinked, looked back; he was still there. Not dreaming this.

She began to wonder what one does with a small person that was in your fruit. Is there a number to call? A website with more information? Does Wikipedia have anything on fruit people?

The little man moved.

He twitched and convulsed, flopped around violently like a fish on her table, splattering orange juice drops around. Some went into her eye and stung a bit.

He coughed and gasped for air as though he were drowning, or coming to life or, something.

On all fours, he coughed and wheezed and choked, and appeared to stop breathing, but was still twitching and straining.

At once he coughed out a seed, about half the size of his head, that skipped several inches across the table and skittered to a stop.

He collapsed and gasped a final time, went entirely limp, without a word or a breath.

She poked at him, and he didn’t move or twitch. Could she do finger-CPR without crushing his little bones? Would it even help? Is this the lifecycle of the fruit people?

She picked him up and held him to her ear; no breathing.

She picked up the seed.

Janet gathered together a shoebox, a small shovel, a flower pot, and some potting soil.

—–

*UPDATE*

I brought this in my lunch today. I will not be eating it.

*UPDATE*

This is as good as it gets at the moment: “Bizarre Fruit” by M People

1) Missing the boat
Seems there’s been a writing meme ongoing for the month of April called the #atozchallenge. The idea is to write a post, daily, corresponding to each consecutive letter of the alphabet. I missed out on this by paying attention to everything else but.

2) Eavesdropping
I happened to notice both @EmApocalyptic (web) (From Dark Places) and @TheCharmQuark (web) (The Inheritor) talking about wanting to do an AtoZ for May. Being nosey that I am, I asked if they were up for joiners, and it so happens they were!

3) Drinking from the Firehose
I take on too much. This is what I do, that’s how I do it. I’ve got more than enough on my plate at any one time, so, yaknow, why not add another project!

Thus we have, starting May 1, #renegadeatoz, the #atozchallenge for May. You’re welcome to join in, as well; “the more the merrier”, @TheCharmQuark said.

Use the hashtag (#renegadeatoz), have the fun.

Also, check out the collection of writing already in place with April’s #atozchallenge, still ongoing at this moment. There are some fantastic stories by a breadth of talent, so don’t miss the good reading.

* UPDATE * I’ve created a collector page for all the posts: Renegade A To Z

And I quote:

angelaperry: Due to holiday overcommitment, my #FridayFlash is -very- late. I have no idea where Friday (or Saturday) went. http://bit.ly/e4aYrn

reginaldgolding: @angelaperry close enough; not Monday yet!

angelaperry: @reginaldgolding Whew! Squeaked that one in by the skin of my teeth. Ew, teeth skin! Time to brush my teeth

reginaldgolding: @angelaperry haha teethskin. That’s a writing prompt if ever there were.

angelaperry: @reginaldgolding LOL, I’m not sure I’d want to read what came from that prompt.

reginaldgolding: @angelaperry yeah definitely vampire or zombie.. Or worse.

angelaperry: @reginaldgolding Uh oh…now I’m thinking. Drat. May have to do teeth skin next round for real Care to join me?

reginaldgolding: @angelaperry I’m totally in

angelaperry: @reginaldgolding Awesome. It’s a date Can we do it the first Friday in May? I have a blog contest coming up this week.

reginaldgolding: @angelaperry done!

angelaperry: @reginaldgolding Yippee!

So, now I’m in a panic, because I have no earthly idea what I’m going to do with this. But, I’ve got a couple of weeks to ponder, so it should be fun!

Teeth Skin!

Drops of blood and drips of tears marked the path all the way to the cracked white steps. Breathless, Toby took Liam up the steps and inside.

“LIBRARIAN!” he wheezed. “LIBRARIAN! HELP!”

From a lit room in the far corner, a long shadow emerged, “What is it, boy!” it yelled in a gravelly voice, looking up at the ceiling, and around as if to find where the yelling was coming from.

“An accident!” Toby wheezed, “At the dig site. This is Liam,” he gasped for breath, “Help him!”

“Quickly now, quickly, inside.” the Librarian motioned Toby toward the lit room, and he limped around to follow Toby inside.

“Boy. Clear that table, put him there.”

Toby struggled to rake the books and papers off the table with his elbows while holding his friend, then put him on the flat and empty table. Liam’s breathing was shallow, his skin was pale.

“Help him, you have to help him…”

“QUIET, BOY.”

The Librarian patted Liam’s body, felt around, tilted his head as if listening. He wore a device across the back of his head that covered his ears, much like the headsets the boys wore to work, but more elaborate. Toby could see in the dim light that the old man’s eyes were cloudy and yellow, more than he remembered them to be.

The old man gathered a bowl and felt around for several vials from his shelves; shelves stocked to bulging of vials and bottles and pouches of every assortment, all containing seemingly the same gray powder. He mixed a paste together in the bowl and smelled it, then held it near the headset at his ears. He was listening to it.

“…hurry,” coaxed Toby.

“LEAVE US, BOY. I NEED SILENCE HERE,” he barked.

Toby reluctantly left, latching the door carefully behind him.

Liam moaned slightly, the pain and shock were greater than he’d ever known, and he was beyond being aware of where he was or what happening to him.

The Librarian mixed and listened to the paste in his bowl, mixed some more, listened more. He listened to the bleeding stump that was Liam’s right forearm. At last he was satisfied, and pulled Toby’s shirt off the stump, and began to paint the paste onto the wound with a ratty and broken brush. As he painted, it twitched and grew, and the entire area grew a covering of skin, sealing the would entirely. Lumps appeared around the area and churned beneath the new skin as if there were tiny animals fighting and crawling inside. The movement subsided, and the stump appeared completely healed.

The old man leaned down and kissed the boy between his eyebrows.

He collapsed into a chair, and he sobbed.

He listened for hours to the boy breathing. Liam’s heart slowly grew stronger. After some time of observing constant improvement, the old man napped there in his chair.

Eventually, Liam’s breathing changed. The Librarian awoke and listened. Liam was improving rapidly now. He stood and went over to the boy, placing his palm on Liam’s head. Liam woke.

“Boy. Don’t move.”

Liam’s heart raced, remembering what had happened, but could not understand where he was now, the place around him was unfamiliar.

“You were injured, Boy. I’m taking care of you.”

Liam’s eyes glistened with tears, not falling.

“Boy. Understand now… I will never make you dig again.”

Liam’s tears flowed freely from the corners of his eyes.

“Rest now.”

Liam did.

“Why do I have to always be the one to carry this shit. You could help you know.”

“Look who suddenly knows so much,” Toby glared over his shoulder and down at Liam. “I do help. There’s no way you could manage this alone.”

“I do manage this alone.”

“You don’t know what all goes into this line of work, little man. If it weren’t for me, all the deals and trades I make behind the scenes, they’d be beating you to a pulp daily, every trip both to and from the dig. They hate you.”

One of the oncoming kids threw little pebbles at Liam absently, grinning a very not friendly grin.

Liam stumbled across the rubble, trying to keep up and stay balanced.

“You don’t hear how they talk about you. Clumsy. Weak. I’m keeping you alive. I keep them beat down so they’re not all over you. I’m your protection.”

“Sure don’t feel fair,” his feet skittered between rocks and gouges along the path, but he keep finding his footing, kept moving onward.

“Yeah well how fair would it feel if you had to carry all that with a bloodied-up lip? Or a couple of eyes swollen shut from fists and elbows. Any of a dozen of them would love to put you low. They think you slow us all down, that we’d be better off without babysitting you.”

“Why do you do it then. Why am I worth your bother.”

“When you’re old enough, you’ll find something bigger than your own self to care about, then you’ll understand.”

One of the kids in the outgoing line stared at Liam oncoming. As soon as they were close, he lunged at Liam suddenly, yelling “GWAH!”, then backed away again, laughing with the others.

Liam double-stepped to speed up, get past him, catch up with Toby a bit more. The weight of the buckets swinging shifted forward and Liam tried to lean back a bit while half running to counter the sway. Rubble underfoot went loose, and Liam lost his ground.

The right end of the yoke speared forward into the ground ahead of him, spilling that bucket onto the ground. The left yoke end cartwheeled overhead and sent that bucket flying off the side of the path in a long spinning arc. Liam himself spilled in slow motion, fully expecting his face to catch the sharps on the rocks under him.

In his ears, Toby heard the seeker tone as it followed the flying bucket, and he turned around to see what exactly had happened.

The left bucket landed in a patch of scraggly shrub and underbrush, spilling the gray powder around. The stuff glimmered and buzzed, began to pour itself upward the into the bushes, coating the branches, surrounding the twigs and leaves and buzzing around itself in a frenzy of fuzzy blur. The shrubbery dissolved, vanished, and the powder fell silent and dead.

Liam got his hands in front of himself in time to catch his fall and not land face first on the craggy path, but his right hand went right for the pile of gray that had spilled from the first bucket.

When he landed, his left arm jabbed the earth like a tree trunk, jarring the force of his body weight onto the palm of his hand, clicking his teeth together hard.

His right hand sank into the gray stuff as if it were soft jelly, and he felt a slow sinking sensation as his fall slowed against his right arm.

He went breathless as he realized, though, that he was not sinking into the stuff, but the stuff was dissolving him — his right hand was gone.

Liam rolled to the side, pulling what was left of his right arm out of the powder.

The line had stopped to crowd around and laugh at the fallen boy, but fell silent instead.

Toby rushed over and wrapped his shirt around Liam’s arm stump to stop the gushing redness.

“MY ARM MY ARM TOBY!” Liam gasped and winced in pain.

“Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up…” Toby worked desperately to tie off Liam’s arm as fast as he could, hoping he could get the blood to stop.

“The Librarian!” Yelled some of the boys, “Get him to the Librarian!”

“Yeah, quickly!” Others agreed.

Toby picked up Liam in his arms and stumbled, running, past the outgoing line of kids, and back in toward the crumbled library building.

“It’s glass today, Liam. Bring buckets and shovels and best get the yoke. Glass buckets. Glass shovels.”

“Okay, Toby, I got it, glass.” Liam uprighted two crudely formed glass buckets, slid into them shovels made from a similar bubbly glass, and fastened them onto the ends of a shoulder yoke. This he lifted and balanced, and followed Toby out toward the western rim.

Other boys and girls, none quite adult age, with yokes and glassware, walked in a wandering line westward as the sun rose across the rubble.

They marched along to the dig site as the sun broke through the open roofs and window holes in what was left of the buildings. The beams of light bounced through the bubbles in their glass tools and refracted rainbows onto an otherwise gray and crumbled ruins of landscape.

“This sucks. Why do we have to keep doing this.”

“Shut up and get it done, Liam.”

“That’s your answer for everyth-” Liam’s complaint was cut short as he stumbled over a spill of broken bricks.

“The only way out is through. Trap your yap and pay attention to what you’re doing.”

By the time Toby and Liam had gotten close to the dig, the first of those in line were already making their return trip. Each of them with a bucket or jar or container of some sort, all glass, all full of the same gray powdery stuff.

“What a surprise. Gray shit again.”

“Liam.”

“I know. Shut up and get it done.”

As the first of them passed, Toby stopped and adjusted his headset so that the seeker tone was in harmony with the dig powder. The seeker tone made a pleasing hum when tuned, and the sound seemed to move to follow the powder’s location. Tuned, Toby walked on past those on the return.

As Liam approached, he screamed and crumpled to the ground, dropping his yoke and scattering his buckets. Clutching at his headset, he raked at the controls to find a compatible seeker tone. The shrieking stopped once he was tuned in to a harmony that matched today’s dig, and he gathered his gear again.

Toby looked back over his shoulder, “Forgot to tune out last time, did you? Did I not remind you about that? Can you even hear me past the ringing in your head yet?”

“I’m tuned, I’m tuned.” Liam stomped onward toward the dig.

The dig site was an orchestrated chaos of boys and girls arriving, leaving, filling buckets and jars. The group of ambient seeker tones all pleasantly tuned made a weird sort of music when this activity was going on, and it was the only thing Liam liked about the work. The ballet of movements, the seeker tones harmonizing and guiding the workers; it was all very fluid and soothing.

“OH GOD OH GOD I GOT THAT SHIT ON ME I GOT IT ON ME!!”

Liam spun around toward the yelling; one of the boys had fallen to his knees and was clutching his one hand with the other, terrified.

He ran over as fast as he could and fell to the boys side, “Where’s it on you, WHERE’S IT ON YOU?”

The boy looked up, eyes as wide as nightmares, and showed his hidden hand to Liam, the middle finger entirely missing at the second knuckle. “IT’S GONE LIAM, IT’S FUCKING GONE MY FINGER IS FUCKING GONE!!”

Liam’s heart vomited into his neck and stuck there like a fist, he fell backward in a panic, with no idea how to help his friend. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move.

The boy curled his whole hand into a fist, the popped his middle finger up straight and high. “BOOM! Gotcha!”

Liam’s vision was blurred by tears, he couldn’t process what he was seeing, but the wave of nearby laughter snapped him out of it. His heart fell back into the abyss of his chest like a pebble in a pond.

The boy rolled in the dirt, holding his sides, laughing almost as loudly as the crowd.

Liam stood up and went back to his yoke. Toby’s bucket was already filled and the shovel was resting inside; Toby waiting there with his arms crossed, ready to start the return back.

Liam took his bucket and shovel over to the rim and scooped. The tears bulged at the edge of his eyelashes, pooling there but not yet falling.

The seeker tone was centered in his head and panned forward, focused on the gray stuff. He pushed his shovel in, and it sank into the pile almost without friction. He poured it into the bucket, and it settled without shifting; there was none of it swirling on the air, it just lay flat and dead in the bucket like heavy dried water. Liam carefully continued until the bucket was full.

The tears did not fall.

“Anytime now,” Toby said.

Liam yoked up the buckets and slowly stood. Toby started the walk back, and Liam followed, steadying himself under the weight.

They trudged on, following the others returning, and passing by the outgoing line, still making its first trip to the dig.

A waiter carried a fresh pitcher of water over to table twelve where two couples had been seated. Table twelve was a booth by the window, first along the wall.

“Hello everyone, welcome, I’m Andrew.” On his right, he filled glasses in front of Tristan and Amber. On his left, he filled those in front of Phillip and Kristen. “Do you need a few minutes?” They all mutter and nod, so Andrew steps away to give them time with the menu.

“What are you getting?” Amber asked Tristan.

“Oh I dunno. I should probably get a salad.”

“I was thinking that too.” she said.

“A salad?” said Phillip, “We get together once a month, and the best you can do is roughage? Live it up you two! It’s on us this time anyway right?”

“Yes, it is us this time,” said Kristen, “So go on, pick what you want, live it up.”

“You guys are so the best,” said Amber “But I still can’t decide. I’m so indecisive today.”

“Well you two take all the time you need, no rush at all. We, however, are ready.” Phillip snaps his menu closed and flaps it onto the table triumphantly, “We know precisely what we like, and have been looking forward to it all month, so there’s no debate involved, am I right?”

“Of course, yes,” Kristen slowly closed her menu, now that browsing was pointless.

“We love this monthly dinner date, Kristen and I do, I know I’ve said before,” Phillip continued, “but I’m proud to say again. You’re our favorite couple, and time spent with you people is time well spent, indeed!” He accented this sentiment with a solitary raised glass and a sip, setting his water down again with a refreshed, “Ahhh!”

“I’m glad too,” echoed Tristan, “It’s good to get out of the normal rut, spend some time with friends.”

Tristan and Amber continued to browse the menu. Kristen sat and waited.

“Yes, yes, quite!” Phillip went on, “And while this may not be the best place in town, it is OUR place, isn’t it? I find that so important, to find a place that you can be comfortable at, it allows you to be more yourself, and to explore your experiences without the things that would preoccupy your attentions…”

As Phillip droned on and Amber remained indecisive, Tristan double-blinked, and a glowing green overlay appeared in his vision. His Beholder contact lens system powered up, and command menus made themselves ready for his actions. By moving his eyes around in tiny movements and blinking, he accessed the communication system, and started a session. Blinking through the commands, he created and sent a message: {It honestly escapes me how you stay with this guy.}

Across the table cornerwise, Kristen’s Beholder powered up and displayed the message, visible only to her.

“…and I’ve lived in many places, and let me tell you, there’s ultimately no difference from one city to the next when it comes to people and culture. We all are motivated by fear or by love… or by food!” Phillip laughed far too loudly at his own observation as Andrew returned to place a basket of bread between the four of them.

“Another minute then?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, I’m not quite sure yet” said Amber.

“Very well then, I’ll check on you again in a few moments.” Andrew bowed and stepped away.

Kristen double-blinked, powering her Beholder off.

Tristan blinked through another message, {I know you’re ignoring me.}

Kristen blinked back, {Tristan. Please. This is way too awkward. They’re both, right, here.}

{And they have no idea, like always. You worry too much.}

{I really don’t.}

{Look, I miss you. Miss your touch. Can we get together again, soon?}

{No, Tristan,} she tried to keep her blinking from appearing too rapid or emphatic, but her heart was racing, {We cannot.}

{I really don’t get it. You remember how good we were together. Why do you want to let that go?}

She didn’t reply.

“OOOoo this looks good,” said Amber. “I think I’m ready now!” She folded her menu and smiled around the table.

“Yeah I think I’m ready too,” Tristan dropped his menu.

“Well then, off to the races!” Phillip craned his neck and looked around “Andrew! We’re ready, sir!” he called.

The waiter returned, took their orders, gathered their menus, and scurried away.

“Now then, orders all taken, we can really get down to business!” Phillip settled in. “I’ve waited all month to tell you about my new hobby. It seems there is an entirely fascinating subculture revolving around the early advances of optics. Now, I’m not referring to the latest lens implants and such technology, although no less interesting, are you folks all aware of the current advancements in the field of contact lens computing?”

Kristen shuffled uncomfortably.

“But no, I’m talking about the devices and methods developed upon the brink of discovery…”

Tristan blinked out a message, {Are you, Kristen, aware of the advances…}

She ignored him.

{All I’m saying is that what we had, to me, was the most amazing feeling I’ve had in a long time, and I think that means something important, and I’m sure you felt the same way. So, to just let that die is something really terrible.}

{Tristan. I’m done, okay. Not doing this. Not doing that. Please, just leave me alone. This has got to be left in the past.}

“Optics, you see, were limited by technology. In the early day of glasswork, a person, even a skilled craftsman, was limited to a certain size of volume of glass that was even workable by hand…”

Tristan blinked another message back to Kristen, {Please, just think about it, then let me know.}

Andrew returned with plates balanced on his arms, distributed meals all around, checked that all were happy, then left again.

Kristen unwrapped her knife and fork from her napkin, and another message popped up in her vision.

{I miss your warm breath on my neck.}

Kristen blinked a message back {I know, I miss that too. When can we meet? Tomorrow night?}

Amber blinked a message back to Kristen, {Yes, tomorrow night.}

“Fif-tay!” Phereton called into the crowd, looking for eye contact. “Got a Fifty-fifty over here! Fif-tay!”

All around him, bumping, shoving, gesturing, dozens of people, all in need, all looking for their match. Marketplaces in Caspaeia were found where they formed, usually in the side streets, concentrated on the corners of busier intersections.

Some people paired off and chatted, some made no conversation at all, but conducted business with blinking and gestures. Some making barely any contact at all, just subtle swaps of small items from palm to palm, and then disappearing again into the crowds.

“Fiddy, fiddy, fiddy, fiddy… Fif-tay!” Phereton tried again.

A girl waves at a fellow with a wheeled box. He stops and they talk. She waves gestures in front of his face, he points at the box. They gesture back and fourth. She shoves something small and folded into his hand, and he runs off. She looks around, takes the wheeled box.

Phereton yells at her, “Fifty? Up for a fifty-fifty over here?”

She pauses, scowls at him, continues into the crowd.

Phereton shrugs, “Fif-tayyyyy! Fifty, fifty, fifty…. Worth your time!”

A group of three enthusiastic people work the crowd in matching hats and shirts, “VOTE FOR HEUER!” They shove leaflets into hands, trying to solicit support for their candidate.

A young man makes his way through the crowd, watching everyone curiously, taking fliers from everyone handing them out.

“Fifty?”

The young make strolls over. “What was that? Fifty?”

“Fifty-fifty. You in?”

He shakes his head, shrugging.

“You got an account?” Phereton asks.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Right. I don’t. You key me in, I deposit what I got, we split the difference. Fifty-fifty.”

The young man looks around, looks Phereton up and down, looks at the piles of bagged stuff behind him. “And if this is all stolen? Tracks back to me?”

“That’s the gamble. The payoff will cover the fines. In or not?”

The young man walks over to the front panel of the bulk reclamation kisok, swipes his card, keys in his identification code.

“Hello, Thomos Biont, thank you for keeping our city clean with a DaNATech bulk reclamation kiosk. Please make your deposit into the side bin.” The bin door on the side of the large kiosk slides open.

“Alright, then.”

Phereton starts quickly handing bags and boxes to Thomos “Throw them in, throw them in..”

One after the other, the packages came quickly, and the kiosk began to fill. Once the bin was packed, Thomos tapped the screen and the bin closed. On the display, a periodic table appears, showing a tiny graph over each element. As the load processed, the graphs grew, updating the credited balances.

“C’mon kid, move it.” Phereton already had both arms full, obviously in a rush to get everything done.

“Okay, okay..” Thomos tapped the screen to open the bin and began filling it again.

Under the rubbish of boxes and bags, gleaming metal canisters with green glowing ends appeared. Phereton started handing them over, one at a time.

Thomos took the first of these and his eyes went wide.

“Go, go, go, we gotta finish up.”

About a dozen of these canisters went in before the bin was full again. Thomos tapped the screen, and the graphs updated. This time, the bottom rows of the table lit up, and the charts grew rapidly. “Mister.. what kind of trash is this?”

“The stale from waiting around kind. Let’s move it.”

The two continued to load the empty bins until everything was gone. Thomos gawked at the screen. “I’ve never seen numbers like this…”

“C’mon kid. Where’s my fifty.”

Thomos tapped a few commands on the screen which requested the machine spawn the credit onto a transfer card, which ejected from the machine.

Phereton pulled the slider on the back of the card and it glowed, showing the card balance. Satisfied, Phereton ran into the crowd and vanished.

A little bewildered by the departure, Thomos stood there and gazed into the pulsating creature that was the crowd. The sheer volume of credit equivalence now on his account was staggering.

He was snapped out of his fog by a sharp pain in his right shoulder, as he was grabbed and hurled face first against the kisok. A heaviness pressed across his shoulder blades, while a moist hotness poured across his ear.

“I want my cut too, Fiddy.”

“Urgnnn” was the only noise that Thomos could make.

The thug holding him down grabbed his loose arm by the wrist and hurled it against the control panel. “Punch up my cut or I’ll crush your ribcage.” He leaned and something in Thomos’ chest popped unnaturally.

Thomos punched at the screen, spawned another transfer card packed with half of his credit balance.

The thug dropped Thomos into a heap and took the card.

“URGNNN” was the only noise that the thug could make. His face, wrists, and knees all pinned against the concrete of the sidewalk by gleaming metal clamps.

The clamps were hinged and attached to the exoskeleton suit worn by the man standing over the thug, who had rushed in to break up the ruckus. From a leg strut on the suit, a long thin arm with a tiny clamp extended itself and plucked the transfer card from the thug’s pinned hand. The card was slid into the man’s shirt pocket, just below a patch that read “Caspaeia District Police”. The thin arm collapsed back into the suit.

“You are now on file. You will leave promptly and never return to this street.” The officer released the thug, who slowly clamored to his feet and stumbled away.

“Wow. Thanks. Wasn’t sure how to get away from him.”

“Fifty-fifty?”

“Yeah, last time I every do anything like that.”

“Not exactly legal either.”

Thomos looked at the officer; was that a threat?

“What kinds of things were you loading?”

“I really don’t know, but it all peaked really high at the bottom end of the table.”

“Very much not legal then. Punch back in then, let’s have a look.”

Thomos slid his card and keyed in, pulled up recent reports.

“Hmm” said the officer, looking at the readout “Yes. Whoever you were dealing with had a serious load of goods. I hate to say it, but you’re in a bit of a bind here, kid.”

Thomos sighed.

“Then again,” said the officer, “Sometimes these things …malfunction.” He punched through the menus and offloaded the remainder of Thomas’ credits onto a transfer card, which popped out of the kiosk. He pocketed that card along with the first one taken from the thug.

The officer swiped in with his own card and keyed in. After a few menu commands and gestures, the kiosk powered off entirely, then began to cycle on again.

“I’m afraid we can’t press any formal charges against you. There’s no record of your transactions today. Looks like you got off quite lucky.”

“…what?”

“You’ll have to create a new account though; yours got erased when the machine malfunctioned.”

“My balance? What about my cards?”

“Run along now. Dangerous around here.”

Corey kept his hands in his pockets and made long uncomfortable strides up the slope.

Merriene was there, just on the peak of the downslope, sitting with legs crossed, leaning back onto her elbows, watching the sun set over the giant wall on the horizon. Beyond that, the people that shut out the rest of the world.

In the near distance, the ocean lapped the gray shoreline, churning the silty black mud at the edge of an expanse of gray beach. It separated Marriene and Corey from the water, a swath of gray powder that filled a bedrock trench; the earth on which no one steps: The Rim.

“It looks heavy.” A slight breeze flipped Corey’s hair around.

“It was.” Merriene wiped tears from her cheeks. “As heavy as stupid,” she whispered.

Down the frontside of the slope, at the edge of The Rim was a coiled bundle of iron bars, boards, pipes, and axehandles, all arranged in long parallel and lashed together. Steven and Harry leaned on the coil catching their breath; it was a massive load to get up the slope and then down again to the edge.

“I think this’ll work.”

“It won’t.”

Steven and Harry set about selecting rocks just heavy enough and grippable, making four knee-high piles.

Corey leaned down, picked up a rock. He weighed it in his hand, rolled it around for the best hold, pulled back and threw it in a long arc toard the powder.

It landed in a puff, shaping an oblong crater into the stuff.

The powder rushed in on the rock and covered it in a seething, churning, heap. It gobbled around the object in a mound of surging fury. The sound of it was a high-pitched fuzz; like glass shards and razor blades sliding down charkboard. Momentarily, the mound settled and smoothed back into the rest of itself, leaving no visible trace of the rock.

Merriene buried her face into her knees and sobbed loudly.

Corey stooped and put his arm around her shoulders.

She shrugged him off.

Behind them, a clanking, dragging figure started up the slope at them.

Stire’s thin but muscular frame was not visible beheath the costume of gear and assortment of load he was carrying. At the peak, he towered over them wearing boots that looked like they were banged together that afternoon; leathers up to the knee and laced tight, soles made from a dozen or more layers of hammered metal, cupped one into the other. He dropped his stuff in a heap. From his shoulder he dropped a pole and a pair of stilts which were fitted with layed metal feet, just like his boots.

“RIM!” he shouted. “RIM, DO YOU HEAR ME, RIM? TONIGHT I PUT YOU BEHIND ME, RIM. BEHIND ME, YOU HEAR?” he laughed.

Stire sat down between Corey and Merriene. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I came to stop you,” said Corey.

“No you didn’t. You came to hope I’d not try it.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Sorry, Corey. I can’t ..be ..here anymore. And if we don’t try, if someone doesn’t try, then none of us will ever know.”

“Don’t do it.” said Merriene. “Just don’t.”

Stire put his arms around her.

She shrugged him off, “You look ridiculous.”

The wind blew and the sun slowly sank.

“Alright,” he finally said, “I’m going to need help.”

The three picked up his gear and walked down to the edge where Steven and Harry waiting with the coil.

Stire slung packs over his shoulders, around his neck. He cinched up buckles and checked his boots. He laid the stilts out side by side and stood between them, near the foot holds. They lifted him up with the stilts and steadied him. His practice showed, taking small steps to balance, he was set.

“Ready with that red carpet, boys? Let’s go!”

On his signal, Corey and Merriene started throwing rocks into the powder in two lines. The powder rushed toward the stones, moving away from the middle and leaving an open space on the bedrock below.

Steven and Harry shoved the coil and it began to unroll itself into the open path on the bedrock, as far as it could unroll. They joined in throwing rocks on either side of the path, keeping the powder occupied.

“ARRGGWHARGGG!!!” Stire screamed and charged out onto the trail in gigantic stilt strides. The path held, and the four on shore threw rocks as fast and as far as they could to keep the path open as far out into the powder as they were able.

Stire’s strides soon outran the coil and he was starting to stride directly into the powder. The podwer was clumping around the metal layers at his stilt feet, but was having a hard time disolving though the metal layers. He was able to make a dozen strides or more past Harry’s best throws and he laughed.

Once the powder clumps got past the metal feet, the stilts disolved quickly. Each stride was taken much closer to ground level than the last, the stilts had done about all they were able. He tried to go faster.

From his back, he pulled out the pole and planted it several feet ahead of him, using the last of his speed to vault himself up and forward. At the top of the arc, he could already feel the pole shortening; the powder appetite was voracious.

He landed right in the stuff, feet first, boots first, at least. The depth of the powder was suprisingly shallow this close to the water, but no less dangerous. Without slowing, he broke into a run, leftright, leftright, don’t stop, don’t stop, get to the surf, get to the surf, get to the surf.

Almost there, his boots were getting shorter and shorter with each pounding of powder, the stuff dissolving the layer after layer off his gear.

From his back, he pulled out the raft pack, threw it at the water, and pulled the inflator mechansim in one movement. The boat inflated slowly, but he was at the water, almost out.

Stire ripped the zipcord from his boots and they fell away into pieces, he leapt into the boat and it floated outward with him into the surf.

Working quickly, he unfolded a small scaffold that fit snuggly inside the boat, and mounted two small pipes on the brace, firing them both off. The rockets propelled him away from the cycle of the surf, and burned long enough to get him out, and on to the outcurrents.

In the dusk, farther in than they could see, Corey, Merriene, Steven, and Harry all saw a pair of orange lights appear, then shrink away.

He made it.

It was cold.

The streets are quiet when the Sunday morning is early. No cars, no deadycabs even, racing by on suspensor field quickness. Just the streets, just the buildings, just the coffee, just a dirty floppy paper cup.

Marchalle flipped the good side of his collar up, turned into the breeze, sipped at his steamy black wakefulness. What to do today?

The wind kicked up briefly and he felt it on his toes. New shoes would be nice. Legal tender is hard to come by.

He walked a little, maybe something interesting would happen.

Sometimes you can find trash or something dropped or discarded, pop it into a reclamation kiosk for credit. After a couple of blocks of walking and looking there was none to be found; picked pretty clean overnight.

No stores open, ambient sunlight getting brighter and brighter. Soon the driverless mass transit shuttles and deadycabs would start routes and the street blood would be flowing, waking the Caspaeia district.

The last glug of coffee was grainy cold. He winced, “Full body.” He pushed the tip of his tongue against his pursed lips and spit some grinds out, then looked around for a kiosk.

Across the street and half a block along he found a reclamation kiosk. He swiped his card in, keyed his personal verification code. The matte black kiosk screen glowed to life, showing a very friendly blonde face.

“Hello, Marchalle Windholm, thank you for keeping our city clean with a DaNATech reclamation kiosk. Please make your deposit into the tray area.” A door in the belly of the thing hinged down, and he dropped in his soggy coffee cup; too far gone to keep for any more refills.

The door hinged shut. “Thank you, Marchalle, your deposit is appreciated, and will be transmitted to Central Disassembly. If you would like a receipt of line items by element, please press anywhe-”

He tapped the screen.

“Very well, please take your receipt. If you would like to make another deposit, please pres-”

He tapped again, then took his receipt out of the slot.

“Please make your deposit into the tray area.” The door opened again.

He dropped the receipt back into the machine. “Never tried this before…”

The door hinged shut, then opened again. The receipt remained there. “I’m sorry, Marchalle, DaNATech Reclamation Kiosk receipts cannot be deposited. Keep these receipts on file for your records. Please remove your attempted deposit from the tray area. If you would like to make another deposit, please press anywhere on the screen within the next five seconds.” The friendly blonde face scrunched her nose cutely while she waited.

He took his receipt again and shrugged, “Hey, worth a try.”

She waved happily as the tray area hinged closed, “Thanks again from DaNATech and goodbye, Marchalle!” She faded away again behind the matte black.

“She loves her job, man.”

A woman screamed and shouted, “I CAN’T FIND IT!”, around the building corner, then she laughed in an insane sort of way.

“…not entirely sure she does, though.” Marchalle walked slowly to something that would surely be interesting.

He craned his neck to peek around the corner, hoping to size up the situation before actually getting involved.

She was alone, and a recent mess. It was evident that she had made herself up just the day before for a Saturday night out. The heeled shoes now scuffed, the short colorful dress now torn at the thigh, her hair half perfect and half tangled and nestlike, her makeup now smudged her cheeks where tears had gone. She’s definitely not street people.

She was beautiful.

The woman was there with her front side pressed flatly against the wall of the building, her arms stretched fully straight fanning up and down, her fingers frantically feeling, searching the mortar between the bricks, as if looking for some tiny bit of something; something that was more important to her than life itself. She was raving to herself, “Where is it, where is it, where is it, it was right here, right here, right here, right here. WHERE IS GODPLAN!?”

“I know what this is.” He looked all around, carefully.

No one else to see.

She was now curled in a tight ball touching herself frantically or scratching or having some sort of seizure, or, something. She moaned ecstatically laughed, shouted, “got lost, got lost, got lost, where’s GodPlan, where’s GodPlan…”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small contraption that looked nothing like a gun. He positioned the device in his fist and aimed the back end of it at the woman.

Marchalle whispered “I’ve got what you need, baby girl… and that’ll make for a fair trade.” He steadied his aim. “Tit for tat.” He squeezed the device to activate it.

A small cartridge of pink liquid followed its needle as it flew through the air toward the woman. The needle pierced the dress and sank into the skin of her back, just below her ribs. She screamed and scrambled across the sidewalk to get away from the pain, found her feet and ran a few steps.

The springloaded dart pushed the pink stuff into her flesh. Her body spilled into a limp heap on the pavement, flat on her back. Under her dress, her bra clung desperately to the remaining thread of her decency.

Marchalle pocketed the dart launcher, and looked around again.

Still, no one to see.

He jogged over to where she lay. From a pocket, he took a small envelope made from layers of metals and meshes of electronic fabric.

Her eyes were open and aware.

“You, little lady, are going to be in a whole new world of hurt when the pink takes hold, but the other side of that is far better than what you’ve got going now. I know what you did. I see it all the time. Your first time, am I right? Always is. Don’t try to answer, you won’t be able to.”

The fog river of sound and light in her brain began to clear away as the nanogins delivered by the pink sludge began bonding with the cocktail of drug-mimicking nanogins already in her system, deactivating the tiny machines by the millions. She was still lost, confused, but the storm in her mind was starting to give way to her own control. She knew she was in the street with a man over her, and she could not move. She felt she had regained the tiniest amount of self control, and with that, she prayed he would not hurt her.

“Now,” he said, “About that trade.”

She sank within herself. She was entirely helpless.

“You have a couple of things for me.”

She wanted to scream, to run, to hide, to cover herself. He was coming toward her.

He leaned in, looking deeply into her eyes. He reached over and pulled her left eyelid up, exposing her eye more fully. With his other index finger, raked across her cornea, popping a contact lens free, and pinching it, stuffed it into the layered envelope. He did the same with her other eye, then sealed the lenses and pocketed the package.

“There. Not so bad, right? You lucked out. Next time, you won’t be lucky enough to run into someone like me.”

He wiped chunks of mascara off her cheeks with his thumbs.

“You’ve never been on the pink, so I’m going to tell you what to expect. It’s going to stay in your body for about three weeks and you’ll be sick to wish you were dead the whole time, but ride it out, stay warm. It’s going through your blood and tissues and canceling out the microscopic crap you put in you body last night.”

He smoothed her hair and tucked the stray bits down.

“Your mind will be foggy for about an hour, but that will clear up. Ten more minutes or so, and you’ll be able to walk home. I’ll be close to be sure you’re safe, but you’re on your own after.”

He stood.

“Stay away from GodPlan. Find somewhere else to dance, beautiful.”

He walked away.

She waited.

“Dammit. Stetman. Come here, look at this.” Martin Crate struggled with his sleeve and cuff, tangled in a knot on the unreachable backside of his right forearm.

Yimmel Stetman strolled over curiously, examining the struggle with an amused and pompous eyebrow treatment. “Never happened to me.”

“Never happened to you because you never pop gear.”

“I never have to resort to that.”

“Because you never do your job.”

“Because I’m adorable, like a newborn baby. It disarms the savage intent.”

“You’re something like a baby. Now get your drooling heavy-pants cuteness over here and help me out.” Crate’s right forearm was a porcupine of protruding metal quills tangled up in a mass of sleeve cloth. Needle-like protrusions and hinged clamps and probes bristled from both arms; the tools from his left arm were pinching and pulling and pushing at the tangle around his right arm. Crate’s brow was equally tangled as he fussed and mucked with the situation. In his vision, the green glowing display generated by his B-Holder contact lenses overlayed his sight. He grunted and spat, while blinking through activation commands in the green menus, orchestrating a dozen of the needley tools and clamps in play in a concert of attempted resolve.

“But you seem to be doing so well without the help.”

Crate closed his eyes to clear the HUD menus, but he felt it looked like a defeated gesture. All the extended tools folded, retracted, and otherwise tucked themselves back into the external struts, the bones, of the silvery exoskeleton that is standard issue to all Urban Enforcement members. All except for the four or five devices that remained hopelessly entangled in his right sleeve.

Stetman grinned, blinked a few times. Tools and clamps exploded from the struts along his arms, and spidered over the tangled area on Crate’s sleeve, snipping bits of cloth furiously, shredding the problem. With a few more blinks, Stetman put away the devices, all folded and tucked seamlessly. “Solved for X.”

“Thanks.” The newly untangled tools slowly folded back away into Crate’s arm struts, clicking impotently into place. “You owe me a shirt.”

“No I don’t. That shirt was done as soon as you got it caught up in your gear, champ.”

Simultaneously, they stopped at stared at no particular objects. In their lens HUDs, an indicator lit up, putting them into active duty mode, and switching their menu systems from a green overlay to an amber set of menus. Text scrolled past them in a flood, and without speaking, they were both ready to move.

Crate threw off his one-sleeved shirt, leaving it in a heap, and grabbed a new one from his locker, which he didn’t bother to close. They both ran out of the station as he cinched his uniform.

Their exoskeleton suits powered into jog mode, and they were running at an inhuman pace to the intercept location. As they ran, their gear began to synchronize movements with each other, creepily matching pace and strides.

Several blocks away, at the boarder between the Caspaeia and Detoinia districts, a young mother was strolling with her infant in a push carriage. She stopped to bend down and check on the child when a whoosh of wind overtook her spot.

Crate and Stetman stood on either side of her. Scrolls of information flew by in their vision, crosshairs on both the mother and the child, both showing as “UNREGISTERED”.

Crate studied the surroundings for others in the area, street layout, weapons.

“You are unregistered. What is your district?” Stetman blinked at the woman.

“I am registered, we both are, with Detoinia.”

“You are in Caspaiea.”

“Oh my.” She said, looking around for street signs.

“Around this corner,” Stetman indicated the corner just behind her, “Westward two blocks. Or submit to process.”

“I’ll leave, we’ll leave, I’m so sorry!” She gathered herself and moved quickly to the directions he indicated.

Crate and Stetman monitored her movements until she was shown to have returned to Detoinia.

“Yeah,” Crate blinked through menus to file the report of the incident, “Savage intent disarmed.”

Both men’s HUDs returned to green. They powerjogged back to the station in that oddly synchronized run.

Time is meaningless in the alley.

At first it means something, usually regret and paranoia, but less and less, then more and more. I’ve been here for ages today, staring at my arm.

I’ve had that thing in there for weeks now, and I know what it does, and I want it gone. I’ve had enough, and it just repeats and doesn’t change, and I need something new.

And it itches.

They say the itch is the nanogins, but that’s all lies. DaNAtech lies. DaNAtech miracles. DaNAtech secrets. They all lie; miracles and secrets and everyone has them and everyone’s a liar.

But whatever. It itches and it’s gotta go.

So I have to get the nerve to do the change.

I’ve done it before a dozen times or more. It’s easy once you’re down to it, but I hate starting. I hate the getting started. So i dont start, and sit here for hours not starting, and itching that damn itch.

But you know the real thrill is the new one. It’s like a treasure hunt, it could be a fortune, or it could be a waste. I’ll probably end up with less than what I have and the same amount of pain and the same amount of heal but whatever. That’s still better than sitting here not starting, itching.

So. Get to it.

Unwrap the cloth. It’s wound around my arm a couple dozen times and it’s stained with blood from the other times but off it comes. Round and round and round it comes off and opens up my real arm beneath, the scar, the pressure lines.

The skin is puffy and moist since it’s been covered, but it’s better that way, itches less.

Round and round and I have a pile.

I had a knife and that made it easier but I dunno where I left it. I thought it was in the alley but then I’m in alleys alot. This alley had a busted out window so I got a blade of glass, that’ll work. Wrap my cloth around my hand so I dont fuck up my hand doing it.

Pushing the edge in hurts alot, but it’s like falling in a lake, you only fall so far before the floating starts and then you wait, and if you’re lucky you’re still breathing at the end.

The trick isn’t the pain, the trick is missing the main pipes. No idea how I learned; it’s not like you can mess it up and learn from the mistake, it’s just something you cannot do, ever, or you drain all out.

But I do it and the cut is done and the glass falls.

Then it’s easy, the finger goes into the gash wet and warm, and you feel around for the bit that feels different. Wiggle it out like a bad tooth until you can get the edge of it in a grip and wiggle it loose and pull it free bit by bit.

You get the vertigo as the drain goes but it’s mild so I know I’m in the right place and the noise stops.

The noise stops.

And the blessed silence tells me that the circuits have disconnected and my body is letting go of the circuit board and it’s mine, or not mine anymore, and it’s pulling free like a scab.

And then it’s out. And I hold it up. Old chunk of computer. Out of me.

I think the squirrels are God.

It’s they only way they know. How else could they know. It’s so the same every time. Once they’re out of you, the boards, that’s when the squirrel comes.

And there he is, like I called him to task, and as if that’s what he’s built for.

And the squirrel takes the bloody circuit board out of my hand and scampers away and I listen.

I listen to the silence.

Beautiful.

I’m not itching.

I miss the itching.

The squirrel comes back. God comes back.
Or a different squirrel, or a different God, I’m not sure.

But it’s a different circuit board, that I know, and it’s mine.

He drops it and scurries away again. How do they know. How do they do that.

It’s a DaNAtech miracle.

I push the shiny edge of a miracle into my arm.

What will it be when the circuits hit the stream. What will I get from it. Will I remember who I am this time.

Shove.

The connections make.

I feel the new math.
I feel the new itch.
I know this one’s mine.

I shove it on in. Pick up the new board. What’s on it. I never could read them. They’re so the mystery. Full of secrets. Full of lies. Like every one of us.

Round and round the cloth goes off my hand. Gotta get the arm wrapped before the black. Round and round off the hand, round and round onto the arm.

That’s the life. That’s the circle. On and off, round and round.

It’s the Paste, they say, that does the healing so fast. It’s full of bugs that do it. Or miracles. Secrets. Lies.

Makes you heal fast, the Paste. But it goes bad, you have to get more and more all the time and I ran out a couple months ago.

It’s still good for now, the itch says so. It heals the flesh around the circuits and makes them talk, shares the secrets, the lies.

I’m whole again.

The bleeding stops. Just need to clean up.

Again.

I’ll be alright again. In the alley.

Shelk hunched in an alleyway, ragged bits of her clothes dunked into the gray and brown street water.

“Everyone looks normal, acts normal, but they’re not. Can’t tell who’s infected, who’s OTIS, who’s being controlled, who’s in charge …or who’s just dumb. They’re all dumb. I’m the king of the dummies. For even being here.”

A shiver almost broke her will.

“Everything’s wired. they see it all, everything. I have to be sure there’s no eyes anywhere, people or otherwise. Even the computers. As much technology we have, pretty much everything but teleporting, and the safest thing I can do is scribble on a sheet of trash.”

Shelk looked around, no one near, except for the occasional walker out streetside.

“It’s all connected, and he’s watching every single thing. You’d think it would be a warm feeling but it’s not. It’s like rusty nails being sharpened on concrete and lined up in a board and raked across your back. If there is a god that exists, he’s pissed off right about now, but not doing alot about it. Are we supposed to learn from this? Is that what this is? Not dead, making us stronger?”

She chewed at the end of her pencil near the lead. The splinters were gritty with soil.

“I dunno. I feel thinner and muddier and more desperate than ever. Not sure it’s a god. I think it’s a man. One twisted fuck of a man with a throatful of hate that wants everyone to… I dunno, no idea what he wants. But I know that this isn’t working. This isn’t the best we can do. As people. We’re so much better than what we’ve become.”

She listened, then continued.

“Everyone either stupid or in fear. Being controlled or hunted. Right now I’m hunted and no one knows it but me. Gotta find a way. A way out. Or a way to stay. A way to break this shit up. Something. Tried to stay, but I know too much now. Tried to get out, but there’s that wall; that fucking wall. That huge fucking wall. Something has to break. There’s a crack in it somewhere, some tiny, miniscule little hairline fault that can be aggravated and widened and earthquaked apart. Busted into. Torn down and started over. Some. Little. Grain of friction to grind and …”

Shelk looks at a rusty poof of dust where a squirrel whumped on a dumpster lid net to her, but it had already bounced off the opposite wall, landed in her lap, grabbed the paper, and sprang up the side of the wall. By the time she was on her feet, it was tightroping over a powerline across the river of speeding cars.

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.”

Several components of that struck me directly in the way that when you read a quote, it doesn’t just feel like something that someone once said, but spoke directly to things I’ve been feeling lately.

It’s not an exact representation of the progression of it, but you certainly do feel these things in turn and in mixed combination.

My story right now is somewhere between master and amusement, but also is taking on a feel of precocious child. It’s broken free of my grasp, and has decided to run full-tilt through the aisles of the grocery store, laughing. I’m angry, because it’s not doing what it’s told, but it’s doing what it wants, and it’s never been happier.

At the moment, it’s hiding from me, peeking around corners and ducking the other way.

I’m struggling with the feeling that it’s meandering, but when I re-read the draft of what I have, I don’t get that sensation, which is good. But I’m also outrunning my outline. I’ve gotten an outline prepped, to some degree, and that has made the drafting process about a thousand times easier than drafting without that roadmap in place. The beat-beat-beat point cues are always there and ready to keep going. It feels like walking a path through the woods, coming to a dead end, and immediately finding a machete there, ready to hack out more path.

Problem is that I’ve been in such a groove now with drafting that I can see my outline overlooked alot of developing plot that has appeared in the draft, so it’s time to set the draft aside, re-visit the outline, get more beats planned out; as the story is now demanding these things of itself.

So, the outline defines the draft, the draft defines the outline… can’t be long before it writes me out of the picture entirely.

Bastard.

“Writers write”, yes, but it takes alot more than that. Not the least of which is skill, which is acquired over time by way of doing.

There’s some component of talent in there, too, being the inherent ability to be competent toward a particular task, but I don’t know how to quantify that in any real way. I think talent is observable after the fact, once you can review some product as a finished piece and hold it against any measure of critique, but until then, there’s just no framework to measure talent.

As you set about doing a thing, however, you become greatly aware, if you’re watching, that skills would be handy to have to actually get you going and keep you going on the task.

Specifically here, the process of writing, and in perspective, the process of writing a long volume of prose as a vehicle for storytelling.

So, I’m not a writer, but I’ve been working on drafting a story for the last few years in what time I manage to grab and dedicate to the task. I think, perhaps, I’m the slowest author on the face of the planet.

When I read around and listen to writer-focused blogs and podcasts, I get a better sense of who’s writing in what arenas, and what kinds of wordcounts they hit per time, and get a feel for their rates of publication (or, at least, completion).

I’m not even close.

When I can focus and get my head in the story, and manage to have an hour or two of uninterrupted, self-serving writing time when I can make pace, I know I can do about 500-600 words per hour, which is respectable for a rookie. There’s alot of “ifs” in that equation, though, and I typically let those inflate into entire blockades.

That’s where the skills would help.

Writing is easy enough, in the sense of the act of putting words down (putting down words that sum up to exemplary writing is another matter altogether). All the extra fluff that gets you from zero to one, that’s the head game. That’s where you’re either smart enough or dumb enough to cut through the lies of things that appear in the way, and get down the the simple process of the process.

The Outline
I find that I really need an outline, but not in the sense you think (at least, not in the sense I thought). When I think of an outline, I think of a structured, bulletted (is that a word?), formatted, progression of ABCs, 123s, and I,II,IIIs., but that doesn’t work for me. What does work for me, though, is a streamed list of touchpoints. What I do here is I get my brain into the scene where I want to be; who’s there, where are we, what’s the set of events we’re involved in. In that, I’ll start what looks to be just a list of words or phrases less than four words each, and I’ll just run through all the core events that need to happen to make a skeleton of what this scene has to do. The final product here is an ugly, senseless list of points and cues, directions, actions, reactions, key plot elements, and probably only a list of memory clues for me, and probably impossible for the casual reader to follow. With that, I can see the web of things that must happen here; incoming, involving, and outgoing.

The Draft
Two keys make this missile launch: allowing the writing to be bad, (easy for me!) and resisting the urge to re-write. These are ridiculously difficult for me., actually. My nature says that anything you write should be and must be polished the first run through. My nature says that only perfection can be written, and to do that, it takes monklike focus and a supercharged caffeinated editor layer in my brain between the thought and the typed words. Does that mean what I actually do write is perfection? No, just that my tendency of nature is to think about it in those terms. The thing to know here is how insane it is to attempt to write that way. For me, it creates a huge burden of perfectionism, and puts me in the mind of “If I cannot create the conditions which produce this perfect mindset prior to writing, then I will wait until that can happen”, and that kills it before it gets started. To draft, I’ll take a chunk of outline (ten to fifteen to twenty items), read through it a few times, then bang out a lengthened version of outline, usually with dialogue, narrative, stage cues and random thoughts all together. That gets a good chunk of the real feel for the scene down, and away from the trappings of writing nothing.

Not Editing
As I said, the huge thing for me to learn is the fighting of the urge to re-write. In drafting, my tendency is to reconcile my abandoned perfectionist and dig in to the scene to start polishing it up toward a final goal. That’s a trap, and I’ve been good lately as avoiding it. The bulk of my writing time now is spent in The Draft mode, wading through my thoughts and getting them down as quick and dirty as possible, while resisting the gravity that’s pulling me in to stopping that forward momentum in favor of fiddling with polishing up scenes. I try to remember that if I do that, not only am I stopping my forward movement, I’m closing the doors to future tie-ins. I’m a huge fan of layering and referencing, and I want my plot to be open to feeding itself not only both forwards and backwards in time, but laterally in progression, to allow parallels to compliment and to create friction against each other.

The Re-write
Everything in me wants to get to this phase, and I’m not there yet, and I’m trying to not go there. This is a rookie/newbie writer problem. A writer that’s been through the process start-to-finish a few times already has the skills to do these things in proper time, but I’m not that advanced yet. I keep the idea of The Re-write as my goal, for now, something to aim for. Without that goal, without that light in the distance, then the process is open-ended and strays without drive; that’s another killer to avoid. Keeping that light in focus gives the drudge work alot more flavor to chew on.

After that will be the the polish and edit. That’s too far ahead of me to worry with now, but I’m excited knowing I have goals beyond the current goals to keep this thing going.

Being not a writer sure is full of alot of writing-related activity…