February 2012
4 posts
3 tags
Hands Across The Void
The sleek dark ship prowls through the void. Its skin absorbs the rays of distant and feeble stars, converting every bit of heat and radiation it can grab into energy it can use. It isn’t much, but it doesn’t have to be. There are no life support systems on the ship. Nothing that cannot be turned off and on at need. Nothing that would damage the ship if it went inert..
The original fuel core had...
One More Spin
The carousel goes around again. The horses move up and down. The music plays. There are no children on it. The operator watches, his hand on the lever and ready to stop it in case anybody in the sparse crowd is drawn to the sound and motion and comes to ride. He had thought that maybe when the deflating bounce castle was finally taken away some of the kids might look his way, but so far he’s...
3 tags
Tessellation
Both women reached the door at about the same time. Having been so fixated on their mutual objective, neither one had noticed the other until their hands almost collided reaching for the handle.
“Excuse me, but what do you think you’re doing?” a woman dressed in something resembling a Victorian dress and a leather aviator’s cap.
“Excuse me, but I’m Nicole Tesla and this is my lab,” the other...
4 tags
Speeding Bullets
The thing about moving at superspeed is that from your point of view everything else has slowed down and you’re moving at normal speed. So, yes, I can run back and forth across the country in way less time than it would take a commercial jet, but when it’s not an emergency I still fly.
Do you know why? Because relative to my point of view, I’m running at about twenty miles per hour. That’s fast...
January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Petal To The Metal
There is a sound like the crinkling of aluminum foil as the scytheflower slowly unfurls its petals. The stem flexes and they turn to face the rising sun, the petals angling to best catch the light. The plant’s leaves make use of sunlight for photosynthesis, but the mix of metallic elements in the petals allow it to produce energy more directly as they heat up throughout the day.
The energy...
4 tags
Hat Trick
The whole crowd watched in awe as the magician produced from his silk top hat not just a line of brightly colored handkerchiefs and a rabbit from his hat, but a whole flock of doves, a seemingly endless progression of eggs that he juggled easily then broke open to reveal they were already perfectly scrambled, and a blast of fire.
The whole crowd except my companion, who sat impassively beside me...
4 tags
Run, Run
In a little old house on the edge of the woods, an old woman took a tray from the oven. The delicious smell of gingerbread wafted up to her nose. She laid the tray out on the countertop and then went to sit down in her chair to wait for it to cool.
No sooner had she turned her back, though, when a little figure on the tray began to stir. It lifted first one arm and then the other free of the...
5 tags
Bloodmouth
“So you’re a vegetarian vampire,” I said.
“Vegan,” he corrected me gently.
“How does that work?”
He smiled showing the points of his upper canine teeth.
“Better than you would think,” he said. “My dietary needs are obviously different than they were when I was a baseline human, which just leaves me with the moral and ecological components of veganism… although in my mind it’s all a matter of...
4 tags
Short Story - A Matter of Appearances →
alexandraerin:
Excerpt:
Most of the great cities of the south were blessed with a wizard tower. Many of them had in fact sprung up around the towers, and any spot on the map that was important enough to be settled for other reasons would eventually attract one.
The City of Stars alone had two. It was big enough to require more than one wizard, but having a double helping of magic was not...
3 tags
Bogey Nights
Every night when his mother turned out the lights, there was a brief period when the darkness seemed total, with everything except for the squares of light behind the window shade draped in total blackness. And every night the child’s eyes adjusted, as eyes do, and the familiar features of his room returned in their shadow-drenched form.
But one night it began to seem to him that even as most of...
December 2011
21 posts
Fantasy In Miniature will resume on January 3rd.
I’ve got a lot of things happening in my life, none of them expected.
2 tags
Present
For Kim, in loving memory of Charles Barnes. With kindest affection to Charles Dickens, who rendered some slight assistance with the opening.
It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward...
Slipped
Eventually she did make it back to Kansas, despite the last witch’s trick. When she got there, her family’s farm was gone. It was not just that the buildings had been destroyed or carried off by the twister, but the land they had stood on was no longer there. The space it had occupied was gone, like someone had taken a map of the county and pinched part of it.
When she got over her shock she...
3 tags
Save Your Breath
Rage.
Sing not to me, oh Muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus. Sing not of the rage of the one who brought so much misfortune upon the Achaeans, hastening so many souls down to Hades, offering up so much prey to dogs and vultures. Sing not a word of how the dire wrath within Achilles grew. Sing not one note about the anger of the god-born killer, doomed to die.
Mention nothing of the...
3 tags
Infinite Scoops
“Do you think somewhere there’s an alternate universe that’s just like ours except they have frozen cream and ice yogurt instead of ice cream and frozen yogurt?” she asked while we waited our turn in line.
“Probably not,” I said.
“But if there’s an infinite number of worlds, there must be at least one where that happened,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Infinite worlds doesn’t mean that...
2 tags
Who Said Life Was Fair?
“So, you’re after the fair folk, are you?” the old lush said to me.
I’d been pointed his way as part of my quest. I had been told not to expect any information about where I needed to go or what I needed to do, but that I needed to hear what he had to say, all the same.
“I am,” I said.
“Then you need to hear my warning,” he said.
“I’ve heard lots of warnings,” I said.
“About accepting gifts,...
2 tags
The Song Remains The Same
I was six the first time I heard the song.
I was in the hospital, for a muscle biopsy. They put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The air inside was like nothing I’d ever known… heavy and sticky and sickly-sweet. Things got fuzzy right away. Vision, feeling, the sounds of the doctors’ voices…
Not all the sounds did, though. The “beep… beep… beep…” of some monitoring machine cut...
2 tags
When The Giants Wake
If there’s a certain amount of poetic justice in the latest round of layoffs to sweep the country, it’s a small one. In the first place, the executives who were let go all had contracts that stipulated exorbitant severance packages and in the second it doesn’t really portend anything good for the working class.
Nobody’s even sure exactly where the trend started, where the idea came from. Memos...
2 tags
Tick, Tock
At last, it could be said that the trains ran on time.
Like clockwork they clattered around their tracks, reaching each destination exactly at the appointed minute and hour. Not a second sooner. Not a second later. The Yeats™ brand entropy engines were powered by the flow of time itself, whose inexorable passage could not be halted or even slowed appreciably.
At least, not at the speeds at which...
2 tags
Check, Please
“Is it true,” I asked Death, “that I can challenge you to a game of chess for my life?”
“It is,” Death said. “But few enough people think to ask, and even fewer exercise that right. Fewer still see the game through to completion. Most give up within a matter of turns.”
“Are you so good?”
“I am as skilled as you might expect of one who has had as much practice as I have, though my skill is not...
3 tags
Water On The Brain
Every night, I dream of the lake.
It started sometime after college. The lake is never there when the dream begins. I’ll be sitting in a classroom in my old high school, or at the mall, or walking down the street in the middle of town. The dream will start up and it might be a bunch of random nonsense or there might be something like a plot… or maybe it’s always random nonsense but sometimes I’m...
4 tags
The Dance of the Damned
16 July 1923
I fear it has started again. Despite all of my precautions, despite the traps and the presence of my faithful cats, it has begun. The protestations of my friend the captain as to impossibility of the testimony of my senses notwithstanding, the facts are irrefutable. The sound in the walls, the mad frenzied scrabbling beneath the surface of the solid-seeming limestone, is only the...
4 tags
Corked Creativity
The magician pulled the stopper from the pewter bottle. Oily black smoke bubbled out of the top and then spilled down the neck to pool around its base. Gradually, the dark vapor coalesced into a solid form, that of a tiny figure with needle-sharp claws, glowing red pinpoint eyes, insectile wings, and a twitching tail. It wore a black hat with a skull and crossbones on it.
“What is thy dread...
2 tags
Ignorance Is Bliss
The little girl looked out the window of the airplane. It was the second leg of what seemed to her like a very long journey. She’d begged for a window seat for both of the flights, but the first one had been in darkness and she’d seen very little but lights far below. They had been pretty, in a way… a lot like stars, in fact. She’d thought they were stars, actually, until she asked her mother, who...
1 tag
Paint It Brown
The tiny, bat-like creature perched invisibly on the child’s shoulder.
It was with him through each humiliating defeat on the pitcher’s mound. It was with him for every lost kite and every missed kick. It was with him every holiday when he suffered through the loneliness of being the only one in his class to receive no seasonal cheer: no valentines, no Christmas cards, nothing but a sack full of...
cypheroftyr asked: Elves
5 tags
On The Other Foot
His wife was waiting for him when he slipped back through the crack that led to their side of the wall.
“Well?” she said. “Did you find anything we could use?”
“There was some leather,” he said. “All cut out and laid out for tomorrow’s work.”
“Have you made anything for our shop this day? Any clothing we can sell?”
“No clothes,” he admitted.
“Then what were you doing all hours of the night...
4 tags
The King Dreams
In a crystal cavern, beneath a blessed island of apples, there slumbers the once and future king in an enchanted sleep. He was placed there by a man with no mortal father, to rest and heal and to await the day the world would grow wide enough and wise enough to accept his reign.
As he sleeps, the true king dreams of a world where the information that was once bound in books may be copied...
6 tags
Upon Whom The Bell Tolls
The angel Gabriel had six hundred wings.
He did not fly swiflty upon them. They were so crowded upon each other, many growing out of the backs of others, that they could not hope to bear him aloft. Indeed, he could hardly bear their weight himself. He had six hundred wings, and more were springing up all the time.
He took a flaming sword and sheared off all that he could reach, leaving the smell...
Anonymous asked: Write about constellations!
4 tags
Faith Takes Flight
“Do you ever wish you could fly?” she asked me one day, out of the blue.
“What, you mean like Superman?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Or Peter Pan, or whoever. Just… lift your feet off the ground and soar up into the sky.”
“I suppose everybody must,” I said. “I mean, I’m afraid of heights but I still wish I could fly. I think there’s a tacit assumption that if you could fly like that,...
3 tags
Undue License
“I’d like to issue you a preliminary welcome aboard,” the interviewer said. “Of course, we do have to wait for your genetic screening to come back. Most of the time if someone makes it this far in the interview process, there are no nasty surprises lurking there. The questionnaires catch a lot. But… people slip up. Eat a patent tomato, dump a packet of sweetener in your tea at a restaurant without...
November 2011
28 posts
I'm opening up the Ask box. Use it for questions...
3 tags
All Manners Of Wizardry
“Do you have real magic books here?” the boy asked the old man.
“Oh, yes,” the man said.
“Like with magic words that let you do things?”
“Certainly, among the other sorts,” the man said.
“Like, I could fly or make a million pounds of gold appear?” the boy asked.
“Is that what you’re interested in?”
“Yeah, sure,” the boy said.
“Well, then,” the old man said, ducking beneath the counter and...
3 tags
Pandemic
When they pulled the third victim from the river in as many days, they found a dog with him. Public health officials were wary of sparking a panic, but they were quietly worried. Not only did it seem that this new strain of drowning was contagious, but it had also demonstrated the potential to jump from species to species.
2 tags
The First Blush of Spring
The old year moves on.
The new year rolls over, stretches, sits up, and looks around. It notices with a slight blush the bare limbs of its trees. It notices the layers of ice and snow that the old year had piled on before its departure. It is a look that the old year had the maturity to wear well, but the new year finds it gaudy.
It’s time for a change, the new year thinks, and it begins the...
5 tags
Where The Worm Dieth Not
“You know the garden of the Hesperides?” she asked me.
“With the nymphs and the golden apples of immortality?” I replied.
“Yeah,” she said. “And the apples are supposed to be guarded by this hundred-headed snake/dragon thing.”
“Ladon,” I said, nodding. “Yeah.”
“I don’t think he’d be a very effective deterrent,” she said. “I mean, if the apples make you immortal, you just have to get one of...
3 tags
Cut-Rate Mythology
“Of course I will pay the forfeit of a wager fairly lost,” the trickster purred. “Refresh my faulty memory, though. What was the price to be?”
“Your head,” the dwarf said, hefting his axe.
“Just so,” the trickster said. “But whatever did you bring that axe for?”
“Why, to cut through your deceitful neck,” the dwarf said.
“Deceitful, you say? Such slander! I’m not the one trying to alter the...
3 tags
Playing Soldiers
The first truck rolled up to the curb at fifteen hundred hours. The children on the swings nearest the fence noticed it first. By the time the first boots were on the ground, all activity on that end of the playground had stopped and kids were drawing cautiously closer.
Two soldiers, disregarding the gate not fifteen feet away, quickly cut through the chain-link fence. One peeled back the snipped...
6 tags
Eve Explains
They tell me the book says the snake told me “surely you won’t perish”, but if he did I didn’t even hear it.
I wasn’t listening to the snake. I was listening to the tree.
The fruit called to me… it sang to me. God made man from dust and breath, but He didn’t put any music in us. He didn’t think to. When He put the tree in the garden, He didn’t realize how it would sing. God sees everything else,...
8 tags
Four Impossible Things Is The New Six
“Now then,” said the Tailor to Alice, “I must measure this frock, and then we’ll know what size we must make you to fit it.”
“What?” said Alice, certain that she must have heard him incorrectly. “But doesn’t it make much more sense to measure the person and then make the clothing fit them?”
“Measure the person? Make the clothing fit? Well I’ve never heard of such a thing. What queer ideas you...
6 tags
The Quick Brown Fox
He flicked his thumb across the phone’s screen to switch over to the weather app, but it just told him there was a network error and to please try again later.
Frowning, he glanced to the right to check the window, but they’d put tinted screens over most of them that rendered every day sort of gray and muted-looking. Still trying to get his phone to connect to the errant server, he headed for the...
8 tags
The Sweat Of Their Brows
“Walk me through this again,” the executive said. “Make me understand it.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple, actually,” the computer engineer said. “All of our computer equipment has the same dedicated parallel cognition processors as everyone else’s.”
“The smart cards,” the executive said, nodding. “So? You can’t buy a computer without one these days and I don’t know why you’d want to. They make...
6 tags
Frozen Over
The snow started around three in the morning.
Heavy snow at night always did weird things with the light, catching and refracting the sodium-vapor glare of the street lamps to make the whole sky seem to glow amber. At first we told ourselves that it was just a similar trick of the light that made the heavily clumpe flakes look so unusual as they fell, but once it started to stick and then pile up...
6 tags
Time And Tide
A man stands on a rock-strewn beach. In his hand is a clipboard. He squints at it, and then at the line where the water’s lapping inches from the toe of his boot. He grunts, then pulls a watch out of his pocket. He stares fixedly at it for several seconds, watching the hand ticking its way towards the end of a circuit with one eye while the other eye stays on the water.
He calls out a signal and...
5 tags
Wood She Or Wouldn't She?
Laurie had not planned on being out in the woods after the sunset, but it set so quickly in the autumn and her body was still stuck on summertime. The tall trees were still laden with leaves enough to hide the position of the sun from her that by the time she noticed how much dimmer the light was getting, she knew it was too late.
Still, she wasn’t exactly lost… she knew the way back to her car,...
5 tags
Of A Feather
“It’s creepy,” I said, looking around at all the large ugly birds arrayed on the fence posts, tree limbs, and wires. There were more birds than perches available… still more wheeled about overhead, high in the sky. “Like something out of Hitchcock.”
“I’ll admit it’s unusual,” my guide said. “But nothing we need to worry about right now. These are all varieties of the American vulture, or condor…...
7 tags
Net Gains
“So… you don’t grant wishes?” the man asked.
“I’m not that kind of magic fish,” the fish said, wriggling in the net. “But I can dance… I can dance right across the surface of the water. If you let me go, I’ll give you a performance that you’ll never see the like of again.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” the man said.
“Why not?” the fish asked. “I’m talking, aren’t I? That’s pretty clearly...
5 tags
The Skin It's In
Slowly, the skeleton stretched, sat up, and got to its feet.
This sight might have been as impossible to explain as it was fearful to behold, but the skeleton was covered with a grisly network of muscular fibers that pushed and pulled its bones along in a crude sort of lumbering locomotion.
The muscles and all the blood vessels and various organs that fed them might have only served to make the...
5 tags
Perchance To Dream
“So, what else you got?” the kid asked.
“Well… I’ve got this new thing,” the pusher said. “Don’t know if it would be in your line, though. It’s a little different.”
“What, is that supposed to make me want it more?”
“No,” the pusher said. “It’s honestly just not to everyone’s taste. If I recommended it to everybody, I’d have a lot of unhappy customers.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called ’sleep’,” the...