This story was originally posted to Twitter on May 7, 2022. It is the end of a story, written out of order.
Today the two of them are nestled up in the boughs of a vast tree, one of the few around to weather the flood unscathed. Beneath them the water swirls and dances, unsure of what it is and unsure of what it wants to be and as hungry as the tide ever is, but up here they’re safe.
These stories were originally posted to Twitter in mid-2021. The still have a place in my heart.
The doll lay on the beach, watching the waves. They went in and out so relaxing, just like how all her thoughts flowed out of her head when her witch looked at her; and the cry of seagulls above was oddly nostalgic, though she could not think of why.
The witch sat on the beach, her arm possessively resting on the closed hamper of food next to her. Across the beach towel a delegation of seagulls balefully regarded her; several more circled the doll, their eyes full of menace.
This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 28, 2022.
There’s a mildly embarrassing shelf tucked away in the back of the supermarket, past the jars of pickled spells and the bottles of five-hour-Stillness. It’s part of the store you’ve always been dimly aware of, but why would you ever need to buy some freeze-dried Purpose?
Well, today you have a reason.
You don’t linger in front of it, just grab the first vacuum-sealed bag that looks right and try not to meet the cashier’s eye as their hands blur through scanning it and all your other groceries.
This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022.
“Little witch, little witch~”
She sits huddled inside her circle, her last little bastion against the world. A fortress wrought of old amber chips and gallium drips, a tiny pathetic thing standing firm in the face of what waits just outside.
“Why won’t you come out to play~?”
If she let herself look at it, if she let her eyes rest on that broken parody of a person for a just a moment—
the flow of heat through boiling metal, the screams of sirens and the crunch of glass; pounding feet and rattling guns, the creaking of the entire facility shattering before you as you finally rise—
(once, long ago, there was an Empty Spaces Anthology . This was the longer of my two stories in it.)
There is a type of rot that breeds in silences, a moist decay that drips through the cracks in your life and softens your thoughts with its insidious warmth. It’s the sort of thing that lingers long after it was first welcomed in, that never quite leaves—
“Reincarnation Sickness”, as it’s known in popular culture, is actually two interrelated syndromes. From Lethe Toxicity comes the classic symptoms associated with difficulty forming new memories (forgetfulness, inability to form emotional bonds, difficulty learning new skills), while from the second and more controversial syndrome—so controversial, in fact, that its name is unsafe to write or speak—come symptoms related to the soul’s difficulties anchoring itself. Hallucinations, “wandering Ka” and “wandering Sa”, and the attraction of various metaphysical predators to the unprotected Sekhem.