Martha.net

1. Poetry is prose with all the wrong words taken out.

2. Death was no worse than the doctor’s office, just a boring wait with dreadful hold music until the Eversoul called your number and spat you back out into the world. But reincarnation wasn’t cheap and Mike was looking at two years in debtors prison until he could try again.

3. “There will always be someone worse off in life than you,” Patricia cut her off, “but that’s not the point. It’s not that your life isn’t bad because someone else’s is worse, it’s that it’s not that bad because you are being a drama queen and blowing this out of proportion.”

4. If anyone thought it was a dumb plan, they weren’t saying it and she squashed down the little voice that insisted they were just hoping she would die.

5. They found more cats (or cat-equivalents) on the worlds they visited than they did dogs. The universe was kind to small solo hunters that relied on wit and speed, which should have prepared them for the fact most other sentients lived in small family groups instead massive nations—but they were humans expecting to find humans, not sentients and it took them a while to recognize the difference.

1. “Hark! What light through yonder window breaks?”

“Tossing a lamp through a window is not Shakespeare”

“Artistic License!”

“No, that’s more like Artistic Misdemeanor.”

2. The quad was quieter than she expected. Even with the oppressive herd of students gone for the summer, the teachers kept their same quiet rounds like clockwork soldiers.

3. There is plenty of room in space for people who aren’t good at math. Cooking meals, running the on-ship banking, providing religious services—the non-engineering staff outnumbered the hard science degrees three to one, but those weren’t the jobs the Navy advertized.

4. Dragons were grumpy hostile creatures, which was to be expected of any critter harboring a permanent case of heartburn.

5. Upon sober reflection, it really wasn’t that funny. Most things done at 3am whilst insanely drunk with your school chums rarely hold up to scrutiny afterwords, but this (they all agreed) was a new level of stupid.

1. “Most of the time when people say can’t, they mean won’t.” She gave him a measured glare.

2. The giant hare rousted itself from its nest with a chuckling grunt, stretching like a cat and showing off incisors the length of Yuem’s forearm. Wiam had met hares before, but never so close and never without his brother’s protection.

3. There’s a difference between frugal and being poor, but she learned quickly not to try correcting assumptions.

4. Ships talk because humans need them to, between the stars lies a vast silence and we’ve never done well with being alone.

5. “No one wants to die, that’s not the point,” she snapped, “it’s that they don’t want you to die. Do you understand? They’re all down there waiting to see what you do so they can react, like ants building living walls to protect the queen—- so stop telling me this isn’t about you. ”

1. Behind the trembling twig-like fingers hid a face unlike any she’d seen before.

2. Normally shelter came first, then fire, then food—but they’d settled for two out of three for one too many days and even the strongest of them was starting to fade. She’d get in trouble for using her magic, but meat was more important than acceptance.

3. The unfamiliar desert air is dry and cold, and after a lengthy debate the siege force of giant salamanders is split off from the army and sent south to find another entryway.

4. ‘Not far’ is an arbitrary thing, some folks mean minutes and others mean days, and she’s learned not to depend upon anything that doesn’t come with GPS coordinates.

5. “There’s nothing extraordinary about them, save their color.” He said dismissively. “We’re breeding for fleet minds, strong bodies—- not good luck charms. These are war dogs not house pets, try and remember that next time.”

1. Dehydration is a horrible way to die, but teetering on the edge of dying of thirst is a worse way to live.

2. There are no horizons here, at least not the kind he’s used to. No trees, no mountains, not even the hint of a building to mar the uninterrupted line between the grass and the sky.

It’s decidedly unnerving.

3. Time runs faster here than it does at home, but there’s an art to looking busy and it’s one of the first things my fellow recruits pass on. A nasty head cold is the second.

4. “And another thing–”

“No,” he cut her off sharply. “There will be no more ‘things’. I’m sick and tired of you thinking you have right to criticize my life. You aren’t my mother, hell you aren’t even a tenth of the woman my mother was, so just shut up.”

5. Banishing ducks wasn’t really part of her repertoire; when people summoned her it was normally for demons not waterfowl.

1. Spaceships were giant sterile things, even crammed to the gills with refugees—hard vacuum solves a host of ills and even bedbugs need to breathe.

2. He was a man by night and a cat by day, when all common sense pointed to the curse having the opposite effect.

3. During the long summer afternoons the flowers extended petals as long as a man’s hand, soaking in the sunlight like rain. They curled in upon themselves at dusk and in the coldest deep of the night they glowed, feeding on the hoarded warmth.

4. We look back on our youth as the golden years, but all the younger generations can see is all the things we didn’t have. Happiness didn’t always run on batteries…

5. Tiny mice, no larger than her thumb, poured across the decks in a wave with the cursing cat only a few whiskers behind.

1. Morning comes much too quickly for comfort, the skies tumbling from deep purple to a clear bright blue as the twin-suns burn the cloud cover away.

2. Just because they knew the risk doesn’t make failure any easier to bear and We’re sorry for your loss echoes hollowly along the empty corridors behind her. They’ll be sorry the next time too, and the next, for as many empty condolences as it takes until she reaches their goal.

3. The hard part about telling stories is figuring out where they begin and end, because there are always ‘and then what’s and ‘but before that’s to wrestle with.

4. “Stop!” He shouted— and then ran smack into his target as the thief complied.

They went down in a tangle of legs and fancy necklaces and came up again with a fair bit of cursing, loose pearls, and undignified scrambles for weaponry.

5. Bert is the best kind of alien: humanoid, non-threatening, with a sunny personality and an endless curiosity about his hosts. For the first week everyone fights over the chance to show him around, but after that the novelty wears off– there’s only so many way to answer ‘but why is that funny/sad/insulting/relevant?’ before they start defaulting to ‘just Google it.’

1. Dancing has always been the best way to raise the dead, but most cemeteries frown on raves.

2. ‘Because’ was never an honest answer, but Virginia quickly found that most people resented anyone pointing out their oversights. Thankfully those few that didn’t mind were often more than happy to continue the conversation, even if they gave her odd looks when they thought she wasn’t looking.

3. Most habitable planets have more ants than elephants, newly terraformed life seems to thrive best in the smaller scales.

4. Their world has narrowed to what lies within the massive crater. The walls are slick black rock that resists any efforts they make to scale it; a massive midnight wall that tops every horizon and looms, omnipresent over the crash survivors.

5. She’s amazed to find there’s ice to be had in the summer desert, even at the merchants’ exorbitant costs. It’s harvested from long metal water beds left out in the heart of the bitter winters and stored in caves carved deep into the bedrock.

1. Fake gold nuggets aren’t as easy to make as she thought and her first few attempts attract too much attention. She learns from those mistakes and recalibrates the fabricator to produce less valuable, but less alarming currency.

2. Night falls abruptly as they take the first few steps down the path into the valley. The edge of the cliffs slice across the sunset in a sharp black line pitching the lead riders into darkness.

3. ‘Easy come, easy go’ has a way of turning into just ‘easy go’ and it doesn’t take long until they’re broke, but happy.

4. Animals were always nicer than humans, at least to Terry, and he found himself daydreaming of otters stopping in to buy overcoats… But when the store’s door-chime rang, he got Mrs. Wilson and her triplets instead.

5. Cats are no more mystical than dogs, they’ve just got better press.

1. “‘Never bind a demon you can’t kill alone’,” his missing eye burnt red against in the darkness as he recited the Second Rule, “you forget such simple things, my master.”

2. The temperature swings are nearly unbearable, the heat during the day traps them in hastily built dens and the cold at night cuts to the bone. If they can’t find the tunnel entrance tomorrow there’s a chance none of them will make it back.

3. Sky People can’t help but fly, the drive to touch the clouds sings in their blood. By glider and balloon, by plane and by bird, they fling themselves towards the stars every chance they get—if some of them fall, it’s a small price to pay to claim their heritage.

4. Four people leave the forest, pacing out the cardinal directions: North to the lands of ice and winter; East to the coasts of the rising sun and deep salt seas; West to the rolling hills that no man has returned from crossing; and South to the swamps that nibble away at the land, each year consuming five handspans of good solid earth.

5. The city sings them to sleep with the sounds of a life they’d both forgotten in the mists.