Brief Stories

Beatrice sniffs the air uneasily, unsure of herself in a way that she once vowed she would never be. Something has changed, something has shifted within her home's generous confines, and she hasn't the slightest idea what. An absence in the air; a lack of smell and noise.

"Cinnamon," she calls, "I need your eyes."

She wanders into the kitchen midway through your preparations, drawn by the warm scents of cooking meet and browning bread and your heartbeat's happy rhythm. You tug the blackout curtain closed as she does, walling out sunset's last beams before they can touch her grey skin.

"Hey!" you cheerfully greet her sleep-mussed hair and hollow eyes, "do you want some coffee? It'll be ready in a minute."

She grumbles at you and shakes her head; not a surprise, since things like her don't really need to eat, but you like to offer anyway.

Each day you walk past the dollmaker's store, past those wide glass windows full of carefully constructed cages. They almost look like they're not cages at all, just dollhouses, but you know better: you've spent enough time watching to notice the bars.

The dolls gambol and dance, climb their furniture and nestle in little display cases almost like they weren't alive at all; sometimes you even pass by as they're having a tea party, a matched set drinking in unison.

Every few weeks one or two of the cages sit empty.

"I heard that there's a new dollmaker moving into town."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, they're setting up at the old mushroom farm. Everyone in the market was buzzing about it."

"Who?"

"One of the big corporate ones, I think—"

With the click of a button the room fills with the mournful sounds of a funerary dirge, a piano's mournful notes weaving through droning prayers and grief-filled tears. The music drips down the cold stone walls and across the marble slab—

"Ugh, it's so cold in here ..."

The body on the slab shifts just enough to stare at its companion. She's shivering in a lacy black dress and mourning veil, nipples hard and skin goosebumped.

"It's a crypt. Of course it's cold."

They say that light hangs timeless in an eternal now.

They say that each glimmer of starlight is a glimpse of grace; that heaven lurks among those twinkling pinpricks and only light will ever be truly saved, in that eternity lingering between emission and absorption.

They lie.

It's obvious if you have the nose to smell it. Few do, and fewer bother.

“Did you know,” she says, “that the average person can endure less than five minutes of direct exposure to Her before their timeline is completely overwritten?”

You, bound and gagged on the floor of the temple's airlock, can only nod in response. Everyone knows that.

She grins at you. “Unintelligent matter is rewritten faster, of course, and living wood endures surprisingly well—that's why your rebellion was so excited when they found the asteroid forest, right? Sucks for you that we got here first.”

Fleeting waves of mirage haze sleeting across my eyes like rot's reeking spore, each flexing the world's bounds further still—walls bow against absent pressure and cracks grow into gaping doors, and all the while the shimmering gem of aura's heart eats and eats and eats—

That brightly lit not-mouth, an angel dancing at the center of my vision; it's odd how similar a mouth and a wing and an eye can look, you know, how feathers are just teeth seen by someone who's still waiting to be taught how to be a victim.

Angels eat just the same.

"Mommy!" You cry as she's just about to walk out the door, "I want to go worship with you!"

Her scarred flesh wrinkles into a smile as she laboriously reaches down to ruffle your hair.

"Not until you're older, dear heart."

"But why? I'm a big girl now!"

Pain attends her even in her dreams, a writhing tapestry thrown all across her dreamscape—buried in scraps of imagery, hidden in the shattered rooms of her failing dreams, and nestled all about her not-body. Stranger than in her waking hours, both more and less urgent—

But when dreams end the pain remains.

She groans as she wakes, feeling the knots curling through her back and the bundles of unoiled needles flexing in her joints; her elbows burn and her knees scream and hungry-mouthed snakes curl in her thighs and all through her belly—

As she stumbles to her feet she wishes once again that the pain would remain in her bed, like it did for so many years. If only the hint of motion was enough to scare it off, to ward it away—but all motion does is coax out the painful needles of her slowly waking extremities.