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=Writing daily flash fiction in response to prompts since November 1, 2016=

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(Day 20: Ouija boards) 

"Is this safe?" She asked, her fingers still tentative on the planchette. It lurched into motion, and she almost jerked her fingers away. 

"YES." The planchette centered itself on the answer almost smugly. She frowned. The planchette looked so innocent in the flickering light from her circle of candles. Like it was giving her a friendly wink. But still... "Are you being sarcastic?" 

The planchette zipped cheerily around the board. "OF COURSE NOT."

 -*- 

Guess who couldn't find a picture for today! Me! Guess who's caught up! ME.

My cat looks the way I feel 😸

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(Day 19: First kisses)

"First kisses are never exactly what you'd expect. They're like...like being at a party, wearing a dress that's a little too stiff with newness and a little more adult than you feel, and wearing shoes with heels that you feel could tip you forward into the future. It's like seeing someone familiar come up to you with a paper plate of tropical fruit. You know, the kind with spikes and tendrils and fur, the kind colored like loud rainforest parrots. The kind you always see in the store, and you wonder about how it would taste on your lips, but you never buy it. You're not even sure how you'd eat it, not sure if you're supposed to eat it at all. 

"But now, here someone is offering it to you, glistening with a freshness that turns familiar colors strange. Someone is offering it to you, and they have a sweet smile, and soft lips, and eyes you could curl up and read a book in. 

"So you eat one. And the flavor is so, so strange. Not bad, really, just unexpected. That's the best part, how you never know exactly what it'll taste like when it touches your lips. 

"And then, of course, you look at the person who offered it to you, and they aren't quite as familiar as they were before."

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(Day 18: "Every time I go into that room...") 

Every time I go into that room, I can hear the walls talking. They like to gossip, passing around old stories that seep through from other rooms. Even though they’ve all seen the same thing (me) for so long, they retell stories from my childhood like grandparents at a graduation. They shuffle proud attention to the marker drawings I left there years ago, now hidden by a layer of primer that was supposed to be covered by a matching shade of paint. It’s fine, they assure me, laughing. It’s fine. In the corners, the walls interweave their many fingers and bend their heads together. They lean over, just a little, and whisper when I sleep. Headlights pass through the window from late-night cars, flitting over the walls like moonlight through a grove, and still the walls tell stories. They shush each other as I slip away from consciousness, just watching and waiting for another story to add.

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(Day 17: Enemy of Mine) 

The warm morning sunlight fell in even lines across the suitcases of his wife's clothing. She'd folded everything in neat rows, and he could read the cloth of the shirts like the spines of books on a shelf. There was the rose-patterned blouse she'd worn during the stormy drive back from her brother's house, when they'd fought the entire trip about the money she'd given him; there was the faintly sweat-stained blue button-down she'd worn when stabbing her gardening spade into the backyard soil, not caring anymore if she damaged the root system of the weeping willow; and there was the simple gray t-shirt, already laundered, that she'd worn last night when she'd slid the papers across the kitchen table for him to sign. 

"I'm tired," she said, and she looked it, with such deep violet circles bruising beneath her brown eyes. "I'm going to go to bed." 

Of course, she hadn't. She'd gone to pack. He'd heard her getting the suitcases out of the attic, heard the faint clatter of clothes hangers. He sat alone at the kitchen table, tracing the circles they'd stained into the wood when they'd set down glasses without coasters. A light rain rattled against the trees outside. If he really looked hard out the window, he could just barely make out the form of the dead willow tree, brittle and bare, looming out of the shadows and leaning in towards the house. He'd been meaning to cut it down. He clicked the pen he held a few more times, stared down at the papers, and signed. 

It was the right thing to do, he'd told himself, and he thought it again as he stared down at his wife's suitcase. He wanted to reach out a hand, drag his fingers across the cloth that had grown so soft with age, but that wasn't something he could do anymore. In the bathroom adjoining what used to be their bedroom, his ex-wife was finishing up her shower. The hiss of water cut off. 

He looked away from the suitcase, studying the way the veil-like curtains clung to the sunlight. "I don't hate you, you know," she'd said last night, like it was a comfort. "You'll see." And he did. The sun had still risen this morning. But of course, they both had higher expectations than that.

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(Day 16: Exhilaration)

When Mr. Wilson gunned the bus down all those Iowa straightaways, I could feel my heart jump almost into my skull over every pothole. Everyone knew when the big ones were coming, and we would rise half out of our seats, gripping the pleather tight with sweating fingers. We flew up into the air in one shouting mob, just a mishap away from a crash that would send all of us colliding together into a pile of broken limbs. After everyone fell back into their seats in a giggling pile, Mr. Wilson would look up into the rearview mirror, laughing along with us. On either side, rows and rows of corn and greens ticked by like the teeth of a zipper. Like tiny peaks on a heart monitor, marking our nervous excitement. Through the open window, the last breezes of summer tore through our hair and numbed our grinning faces.

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(Day 15: “Hope is boring, man.”)

"Hope is boring, man." 

"Not as boring as nihilism."

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(Day 14: Halloween from a pumpkin’s perspective)

What always strikes me the most are the changes. How quickly they happen, and how completely. I've seen these children walking to school every day for the last week, ever since I had eyeholes and a grin cut into my core, and I went from plain pumpkin to jack o'lantern. I was a pumpkin until I wasn't. 

It's the same with the children. In daylight just a few hours before, they'd had their woolen caps pulled down over their ears. Their backpacks bounced as they ran home. Now, I can barely recognize the children of our own neighbors. It's all sweet dogs and vicious demons, all giggling ghosts and ghouls. All cats and clowns and Captain America. Amazing what face paint and a few scraps of fabric can do. All the trick-or-treaters were children, until they weren't. 

The lady of my house turns a few un-costumed teens away with a shooing hand and a prim goodnight. I watch from the stoop as they slouch away towards the street, and I'm very grateful they didn't give me a good stomp as they passed. Their forms turn to shadows as they melt into mist amber with streetlights. It's incredible, how quick and complete the change is. Sometimes I can't even tell if it's growth or decay.

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(Day 13: Time stops for everybody but you and another stranger)

"So," she said, ducking under a doorway, "Does this mean we're in love or something?"

"Jesus, I hope not," I replied. I circled another guest. The champagne he'd been pouring past his lips had ceased moving, frozen in a stream like liquid topaz. I poked his cheek. No reaction. The giantess leaned down behind me.

"Huh. And he's definitely not dead?"

"Who knows," I hiked up my blue skirts and kept walking through the ballroom. Single tones from halted sound waves rang out, loud then soft, high then low, as I maneuvered around the guests. It was like walking through a garden made of sedentary sound. The giantess shuffled after me, occasionally stumbling over the hem of her frosty white dress. Whoever had dressed her was an idiot. You never give a girl like that white to wear.

"Why are you following me?" I asked, turning to glare at her. She froze, still as the living statues that surrounded us. The room hummed with time-corked noise.

"Where else do I have to go?" She asked, picking at her embroidered gloves. "I mean, it seems like you know what you're doing."

Close to seven feet tall but she seemed more like four. The sparkling choker around her neck looked like the collar on a puppy. I looked away from her wide blue eyes and at the guest next to me. He'd been caught in mid-laugh. There was a piece of broccoli lodged next to a sharp yellow canine. Did he even know enough to feel self-conscious about it?

"Do you think we're dead?" The giantess asked.

"I hope not," I said. The pins holding my hair in its pristine bun were starting to hurt. I removed them and shook my too-curly locks out. In a few minutes, they'd revert to their normal tangled mess. "C'mon, this place is creepy."

I headed out the front door, past the valets and the doormen, past the frozen fountain, out across the street that gave out a dull roar like a river. The giantess followed me the entire way, weaving with some difficulty through the packed cars. We walked several blocks in silence.

The diner was still where I remembered it, still a greasy beacon shining neon light out into the streets. The bell started to ring when I pushed the door open. The giantess reached up to quiet it.

"What is this place?" She asked, sitting down at a nearby booth.

"A diner?" I said. I took a pot of coffee from a waitress' hand and grabbed two plates from a couple at a nearby table. "My mother worked here when I was little. Before she met Michael. He's my step-father."

I sat down across from the giantess, kicking my heels off under the table with a sigh. I gestured at the plates. "You want pancakes or bacon and eggs?"

She took the pancakes. "Thanks," she said, and paused for a moment, watching as I poured us mugs of coffee. "Sometimes it feels like I live on food that's held together with toothpicks, you know?"

I snorted into my coffee. "Yeah. Trust me, it's better than rice and government cheese."

"Maybe." She shrugged, pushing a bite of pancake around like a mop through the syrup. "What's your name?"

"Joanna."

"I'm Emma." She put her fork down, her blue eyes earnest. "Do you think it'll be like this forever?"

I glanced down. Somehow, she'd gotten a drop of syrup on her white gloves.

"I hope so," I said.

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(Day 8: The underside of waves) When my family goes to the seaside every June, I like to sit on the seabed and stare up at the waves. Watching them pass over me feels as if I've slipped into a space that was never designed for anyone to see. It's like the time I stole into St. Isidro's after Father Thomas had locked the doors. I'd just gazed at the domed ceiling silver with moonlight, struck by how alone I felt. Like even the Holy Ghost had gone home for the night. I held my breath and wondered at the silence. How alone was I, really? When I dive down to the sea floor and dig my fingers into the soaked sand to anchor myself, I feel more alone than anyone ever could be. The undersides of waves are a place people seldom see and think about even less, so if I'm hidden away beneath them, do I become something not made for human eyes? I think about that when he throws his head back to laugh and I get a glimpse of the roof of his mouth, a part of him that probably no one knows. I think that I could hide in the grottoes of his laughter like I hide beneath the waves. Rocked and reeling with the tides. Holding my breath until I have to come up for air.

***

(I forgot to post day 8 @_@ Here we go)

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(Day 12: Fluffy puppers)

"Ask me about whether I believe in God, and watch me hold up a mirror like a self-conscious magician. I believe very strongly in dog. Well, all dogs. If you want goodness, stare into a dog's eyes. Rub their bellies for happiness, and know that absolution means puppy kisses. If I could, I'd remake the world on the back of a frisbee for a dog to catch, and that dog would be living in a world suspended atop another frisbee, and the dog catching that frisbee would be on another frisbee still. It's nothing but dogs holding up the world. It's dogs all the way down."

***

(I really, really like dogs. The answer to “who’s a good dog” is “ALL the dogs”)

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(Day 11: Cannibalism in the workplace) Today would be the day Alice was eaten alive by proxy. She’d had an entire damn carousel of gel pens at the start of her job, displayed it proudly in the corner of her desk like an anniversary bouquet. She had the best pens in the office, everyone said so, and everyone always asked to borrow them. Borrow! More like cleave off like a good cut of meat and then nibble and gnaw into oblivion. Alice knew teeth marks when she saw them, even if she saw them rarely. Everyone else just never bothered to return her pens. And now she only had one left, one sad purple pen like the last wilting carnation in an arrangement. Someone would take it today, she knew it. And where was the gratitude for her work? Or a simple “thank you” for her pens? She swore, it was like they were picking at her bones.

Alice jammed the key to her office door in the lock and found that the door was unlocked already. Oh, so they’d already come in, had they? Just needed to help themselves to a pen. Of course, of course. They should just crack open her femur already. That marrow shouldn’t go to waste. She flung the door wide, half-snarling already.

“Surprise!” Came the shout, and her eyes widened. It seemed like everyone in her department was crowded into her tiny office.

“What?” She asked, her mouth hanging open slightly. Her boss approached, holding something behind his back.

“We thought we should show our appreciation for your hard work this year,” he said, and held out the hidden gift. Alice’s eyes went misty. Her boss was holding out a perfect carousel of gel pens, an absolute rainbow that any color-coding type-A IT worker would be honored to have. She took the carousel in her arms, cradling it.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“No problem! Oh, and we got you a card as well.” One of her coworkers handed the boss a greeting card. “I just need to sign it…"

He patted his pockets for a few moments, frowning. "Alice?” He asked, his voice light and filled with the gentle bubbling of a human stew-pot. “Could I borrow a pen?”

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(Day 10: Visiting a relative in Seattle) It’d been so long since you’d seen her outside a photograph that you’d forgotten what she looked like when she actually moved. She’s on her toes, like a dancer, half-pirouetting to search the faces in the crowded airport. You wave to her, and the expression of not-quite-confusion on her face when she sees you doesn’t escape your notice. It really has been that long. Still, her grey eyes light up after a moment, and she bounds over. Her hair is longer - somehow you’d almost fooled yourself into thinking it would still be the short black bob from five years ago. As she gets closer, battling through a crowd that stands a head taller than her on average, you wonder how you had such an easy time of recognizing her. Seeing her approach is like watching a Monet come into focus. You would never expect the details you see. The beginning soft imprints of crows’ feet crinkle as she smiles, and you think that she might carry herself a bit differently, more like she’s pressing into the high winds of a storm and less like she’s daring them to carry her away. She’s gotten older, and so have you.

*** (This would have been posted on a Thursday, so #tbt to that time I was lowkey terrified of falling off the Space Needle. Also, I know this one doesn’t have a lot to do with Seattle, so if you want, just add “the Space Needle had also aged” to the ending sentence.)

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(Day 9: Describe the moon without mentioning the moon)

I wonder what she looks like when she turns away. Does her face stay the same, or does the benevolent expression slip? When I see her in profile, it's almost like she's winking. Her sideways smile is sharp as a silver knife, the good cutlery she only shows to honored guests. I'm lucky to see it.

But still, I never know what she looks like when her back is turned to me. Is she grinning? Laughing? Is she upset? Angry, crying?

I'm scared that she'd look exhausted. This is an awfully long time to stitch the tides. An awfully long time to watch your children grow old.

***

(Back on the horse. Or the wagon. I know that I fell off one or both of them and into the mud of procrastination 💩  Mass update coming in 3...2...)

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Day 8

The underside of waves

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(Day 7: A good smell)

On days that were particularly hard, my mother made carrot soup. She used a simple recipe: broth, carrots, cream, and cloves. Sugar and pepper for sweetness and spice. 

While the broth boiled, softening the hard discs of carrot, steam that smelled like cloves rose into the air as a substitute for the conversation we probably needed to have. My mother never needed to ask when my days were bad, although sometimes my new black eye would tip her off. Slowly, the scent of cloves enveloped the entire kitchen, strong and sharp like a deep gash in the bark of a pine, warm like the dark amber beads of sap leaking from the wound.

I imagined the smell soaking into the walls of our trailer, curling around the black leaves of the maple outside, spilling deep into the frozen soil and warming the earth like the steadily beating heart of a glowing coal. It draped around my shoulders like a wool blanket, soft and rough all at once. It brushed against my black eye like a chapped-lip kiss.

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(Day 6: A single cloud)

She’d been standing under the streetlamp for nearly twenty minutes. Her misted breath rose in plumed puffs, gilded by the amber light. Each one hovered over her for a few moments like a spirit before disappearing in gold wisps spun out by an ambient breeze. They seemed to be peering down at her, incredulous. You’re still here? And now? You’re still here even now? She shivered and drew her jacket closer around her, but her breath stayed steady. Another small cloud rose from her lips and made unseen wind currents visible. Yes, as this cloud spiraled up, turning gold like an artificial sunrise in the streetlamp, she was still here. And when the evidence of her breath dissipated, she would yet remain.

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Day 6

A single cloud