Martha.net

“This isn’t a win-lose situation,” he adjusted the focus on the binoculars, “it’s more of a lose-lose.”

“Well then it’s win-win for the other guys.” She carefully unpacked the sniper rifle from its case. “Which is sad considering they don’t even know they’re playing.”

“Feel free to call them.” David scanned the parking lot, “I’m sure they’d love to know just how suicidal you’ve decided to be.”

“We’ve got a thirty-seven percent chance, that’s not suicidal, it’s just—”

“Stupid?”

“—Stubborn.” Amy finished putting together the last pieces of the rifle and turned to carefully unwrapping the unusual ammunition.

“Remind me never to ask what you consider stupid.” David’s breathing quieted and she could tell from the sudden stillness that he’d found their target. “Last chance to change your mind.”

“No man of woman born.” She slid the round home and took up position on the ledge beside David. “Lay on Macduff.”

“Second level, section C, tan Honda, wait for my signal.” He resettled himself, focus never leaving the target. “And less Shakespeare, more Die Hard.”

“Yippee-ki-yay Macduff?”

It wasn’t healthy, but she couldn’t bring herself to give up what little hope had made it through the war. Her life reduced to pacing stone paths, littered with shards of colored glass worn harmless by the waves.

The colors remind her of summer vines, blooming in draping avalanches over rough-hewn stone parapets. But the vines and stone are long since gone, the lighthouse’s church in shambles at her feet. In her head she knows the ships aren’t coming back, but in her heart lives the hope that drives her forward down ruined paths.

The light must shine.

“Alright, so think about it like this: if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to kill your dog.”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“And by ‘dog’ I mean ‘brother’.”

“Or a brother.”

“Close family members?”

“I’m an orphan.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Boyfriend, and no.”

“Well damn, you’re not making this easy.”

“We could always start dating, then you could kidnap yourself.”

“As tempting as that is… no.”

Once long ago and far away, there was a young girl who was heading off into the world to make her fortune, even though it’s not very original of her.

Hey!

Well it’s not.

Did I ask your opinion Mr. Know-it-all? Teenage questing is a time-honored tradition, and if it was good enough for my parents, it’s darn well good enough for me.

I happen to know your parents’ questing consisted of hitting up the job fair in Three Elms and then settling down for a nice boring life. Ever consider taking up work as a carpenter’s apprentice? Nice easy work, if you don’t mind the splinters.

I can always find another Narrator.

Actually you can’t, it’s by Guild Assignment only kid, so why don’t you just think of another storyline and we’ll both be better off. Something short and sweet, because I got things to do, places to see, actual adventures to narrate…

Coming of age stories are actually pretty popular you know, you could do worse. What do you normally narrate? Maybe we can work something out…

Horror.

Or maybe not.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

“Right, because ‘What was that?’ is such a convincing argument.”

“Yes, but when you say it like Cthulhu’s crawling out of the sink behind you it’s a tad more commanding than normal.”

“Well he was.”

“See? It’s irrational statements like that that cause adventures like these. Quid pro quo: All your fault.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong bit of Latin.”

“Do you speak Latin?”

“Not last time I checked–”

“Then what does it matter? Ah-ha! See? It’s just a giant squid.”

…

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa!”

“Look, you’re the one that wanted something short, sweet, and accomplishable in a weekend.” The Muse, dressed in Company overalls and a well-worn t-shirt, was crashed on the couch watching what passed for Saturday Morning Cartoons. “And now I get ‘I’m Grumpy’. Real writers don’t get grumpy.”

“They do too.” The Writer –who amazingly wasn’t any less grumpy for having walked into her living room to find the Muse blasting cartoons at 7:30 in the morning– finished gathering breakfast-related items and collapsed back into her computer chair. It was Saturday, day of mostly-rest, and she was Grumpy(tm).

“No they don’t,” the Muse sniffed, “They are never grumpy, they never procrastinate, and if their Muse gives them an idea, they damn well run with it right then and there.”

The Writer looked up from her cereal and just stared her best ‘You Can’t Possibly Be That Stupid’ stare (which she had learned by watching copious amounts of House and Rodney). Sadly she apparently needed more practice; the Muse was unfazed.

“Look,” the Muse rolled up on one shoulder to look back at the Writer, “why don’t you just work on it a little. Doesn’t have to be good, just treat it like NaNo. Words on paper, that’s all I’m asking.”

There was a long pause.

“If you don’t I’m going to ask Ship what rhymes with Orange.”

“Ha,” the Writer rolled her eyes, “She’ll just tell you ‘S’morange’.”

“That’s not a word!”

“Yes it is, it’s an orange flavored S’more.”

There was another long pause, this one somewhat smirkier than the last.

“Just write the damned story.”

“S’morange!”

It was one of those things that only happened on TV; a five passenger plane crash in the midst of the Rocky Mountains where everyone survived. Of course, in line with the extreme improbability of the situation, they had crashed in a low valley and damaged their emergency beacon along the way. They were rescued four days later, having built a fire, constructed a lean-to, done passable first aid on the wounded, and made enough extra rootstock stew to offer their rescuers a bite. Embarrassed, but alive, the five were forever known as ‘Those Guys Who Were Saved by Reality TV’.

The Discovery Channel was very quietly smug.

There’s a point in every story where the protagonist is asked to step out of the known and into the unknown, where they leave the comforting familiarity of every day life for The Grand Adventure(tm). It’s traditional. It’s expected. It’s just something they do.

Only sometimes they don’t.

Dear PlotDragon,

     Yes, you are cute and purple and the scaly doom of PlotBunnies. This does not mean you get to horde all of the Plots. Just some of them. Now gimme.

No love,

  The Writer

dfeart wreter,

     *burnt paper*

lkov,

  *teeth marks*

This, this is where the world ends, the long dark drop into something that isn’t. Shadows, echoes, misty doppelgangers of a waking world, and yet… what is real? Butterflies and men and the tick tick tick of clocks that pull us back, away, that count the time in ways no other thing has bound itself with. Bands of time, bonds of time, tying us to now, and here, and hurry hurry hurry, because this isn’t real, just echoes, and you can’t stay too long in echoes.

But sometimes, when the echoes are all you have, who can blame you if you let the butterfly win?

If this was a story, one of them would be dead by now; trampled by a rising action or gored by a plot twist. But it isn’t, and they aren’t, and they soak in the blissful lull where life happens when the narrators off having fun. It’s love without the misty eyes and sappy promises, lust without the weight of destiny or finely orchestrated dances where every touch is perfect. It’s life, and love, and lust, and none of it worth writing home about, except that it is. And someday, when the narrator has had it’s fill of Action with an A, and Romance with an R, they’ll show it just how much it missed, and why sometimes it’s the story that isn’t a story that’s worth telling.

Take this pain of half-imagined never-afters,
salted earth and clinging strands of nightmare.
Take this pain and bind it, chain it, burn it to the page.
Unmake the world one letter at a time,
In blood, in ink, in will alone;
Fire-bright and frozen.

In a thousand voices scream against the silence,
the all-consuming nothing,
where dreams die in dust and fairy tales,
and force the story forward.

This is not so,
will not be so,
shall not be so…

And thus unmake the world.

In the end even Mirrim had to admit they made lousy pirates. It wasn’t for lack of trying, they swashed and buckled, keeled and hauled, but it didn’t make a lick of difference. Every time they pulled alongside another ship the crew just laughed and kept on sailing.

Everyone had their own ideas about what was wrong. Pauli thought it was the outfits, Debbie thought it was the music, and Crissie was positive it was the dance routine. Rachel had a feeling it might be the name, after all Maggie and the Pirates hardly stuck the same kind of fear as Infernal Chorus or Styx and Stones.

But those were forty-man ships, they had live bands and three-man pyrotechnic teams, and when they danced even Queen Ferdinand’s Puritanical crews were mesmerized.

There is a pattern to the silence; a rhythm of rolling nothing that surrounds them, enrobes them in whispers that die before they reach the lips. Enforced reverence, perhaps, or technology meant for less religious bents, but here and now it serves to mask the temple from the profanity of life.

No footsteps, no breath, no heartbeat echoing loud beneath the skin, makes it past those winds that strip away a sense they’d never focused on. But now, in the silence, unnatural and unnerving, they grasp after it in rising panic.

But the Gods sit cold and silent, enthroned in stone and held to that one eternal truth: They are not there to listen.

I take my dreams and hurl them at the page.

Sometimes they stick.

Sometimes they fall.

Sometimes they shatter into pieces and start stories of their own.

But mostly– mostly they just hang there, suspended in the air, and never reach the page at all.

They fade, so slowly, fade to dust and light and half-remembered tunes.

And I watch them die, and cannot bear to watch them die, and horde the dreams away from ungentle time.

Horde them, until I cannot stand the noise.

I take my dreams and hurl them at the page.

The book slid out of the editor’s envelope heavy with prose, adjectives leaching from the pages into indigo pools. She found herself not trimming fat, no, but mopping at pools of description in frantic haste. In the end she simply made a dam of bone-dry Hemingway and soaked up the drops of punctuation with a chapbook of e e cummings.

Ah well, she hadn’t like those shoes anyway.

I’m so tired, yet cannot sleep. Trapped hovering somewhere between what’s real and what’s just the far side of normal. Where maybe there really is a dragon hiding under the bed, because, really, I haven’t ever looked for one there… and it’s the cat again. Alive and Dead. Two worlds alike in dignity, in endless mirror dances only the reflections never the same. One where there’s a deeper meaning, a plot, a thread, a sense of purpose, even if it’s badly written. And sometimes I think I can step over, in those long dark hours after midnight, where the lines are blurred and if I just look deep enough into the shadows I can go strolling through the worlds in my head. Guiding them along, finding them the happy endings that I’m so scared of losing here, trapped on this side of the mirror.

Alive and Dead.

And maybe there’s a dragon after all…

Sleep, sweet sanctuary so long sought. Siren song, surcease of sorrow, soothe these seamless stretches of somnolent suffering.

Succor!

It seemed silly in retrospect, after all no one wanted people to be unhappy. It they could tell, through testing and observation, that a child had an aptitude and love for things mechanical, would it have been fair not to give them that chance? Or another who’s love of numbers and mathematics meant she was primed to play in the world of quantum mechanics? If they knew, then wasn’t it their moral obligation to make sure these children were given the chance?

And if they missed out on all the chances they weren’t given on other things, didn’t it balance out in the end? A mathematician was still a mathematician, even if they might have had a minor twinge of pianist growing up. It was silly to let them spend time and effort on something they would forget about later in life. After all, they were happy.

Sometimes life echoes too loudly in the silence. The messy cacophony of joy, and pain, and love, and heartbreak, and a thousand other spirits in the maddening chorus echoing where there should be emptiness. Should be quiet. Should be you.

Ethereal and unaware, existing in the realm of not-quite-dreams spun to life in the dark. You are my hopes, my fears, my foe, my friend, my half-that-isn’t, and you aren’t real. Never real. Never there, past dawn and daydreams, in the world I walk.

And yet… I can feel the hole you leave behind. The shadowed silence of would-have, could-have, should-have, silent until I sleep again.

Sometimes life echoes too loudly in the silence.

There are some days that don’t fade towards five, but gallop madly through the hours, stirrups akimbo and eyes wild. Days when you look up in confusion at the mass migration of coworkers and try valiantly to remember if you’re on summer hours.

Alas, your week is up. Dismount, untack, and walk your workday cool… the weekend waits impatient in its stall.

There was a possibility that laptops made good Frisbees. Not a concrete theory, but it had a growing plausibility. Tucker poked the M key again, in hopes the resident gremlins had decided to surrender. Nothing.

He pushed the obviously cursed thing away from him and turned his attention to his coffee. Or what was left of his coffee.

He swirled the cup once then decided it was safer to get a refill than chance the murky depths. Thankfully the cybercafe was mostly empty, so the line was short and less surly than it had been during the morning rush.

He waved the cup at the cashier with a grunt and she run him up a refill with a silent grin. $3.71. It was always $3.71. He handed over the last of his unbroken twenties and waited impatiently as the other worker prepared his refill.

She was gratingly perky compared to Marissa’s companionable silence and he favored her with his best grumpy look. She remained unfazed.

Refill in hand Tucker retreated to his table, giving the newcomer a thoughtful look and wondering once again if laptops were meant to fly.

There were few things quite as boring as sweeping the stables. Bella grumpily pushed the wide broom down the walkway, kicking up dust and not much else. Every bell-chime, sweep. Even if no one had been out of the stalls much less plodded down the walkway. Sweep. Even if the stables were two-thirds empty because of the war. Sweep. Even if no one was supposed to go riding today. Sweep. Even if there was nothing left to sweep. Sweep.

She had half a mind to just burn the whole thing down.