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,...