“Have I ever told you that I hate this time of year?” “No, I don’t think so,” Rue swings her feet, kicking at the air; a tiny dinosaur and a harried zombie meander along the street three stories below. “You do?” Arlene hums in reply, and glares at a giggling mass of sexy fruits. A bare-chested nurse runs after them, abs glistening in the fading light. “It’s just so surface.” ...
Dead thing sits on the floor, watching. Doesn’t move an inch. Its skull is a crushed mess and one of its eyes popped as it died, a mass of slime dripping down from its ruined cheek onto one of its perfectly formed and perfectly unblemished breasts. Death’s eager embrace didn’t care at all for its body; the trap’s jaws only took its too-curious head.
Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met. ...
“What is true power” is supposed to be one of those deep, philosophical questions with no real answer. It—and the thought experiments which grow on it like clinging weeds—are meant to become a mirror to the speaker’s biases, to reveal how they think about the world. Let that be so. To my mind, the answer is simple: true power is control of the context in which the world is understood. It is the ability to say “this is what the world is”, and be heard. ...
She doesn’t get a chance to understand before it kills her.
This story was originally posted to Twitter on June 6, 2022. Long-forgotten Fireflies finds her doll huddled outside, its display case’s well-polished glass shining in the little nook between two of the building’s many trash cans. She hums happily and kneels down beside it. “Hey, Lace. What are you doing out here?” It doesn’t meet her gaze. It’s garbage day, but they’re so far into the concrete forest that the truck won’t reach them until the evening; that vast thing rumbling past is just a bus, no matter its grasping arms or Lace’s hopeful gaze as it passes it by. ...
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. ...
There is a door at the top of the staircase. Perhaps someday you will step through.
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. ...
(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— “Miss,” the doll’s plaintive voice echoes through the bedroom door, “are you in there?” ...