Stories and Sails

Writblr for Erin Schulz. Want some words? You've come to the right place. Your one-stop shop for stories about girl sailors, sheep magic, time-traveling Shakespearian actors, insufficient adult supervision, and emotionally constipated dorks. 

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Marmageddon: The Paranormal Romance No One Wanted (An Excerpt)

“I've tried to tell this story a thousand ways. When you get to my age…” “You're twenty-four.” “Ahem. When you get to my age, you realize that stories aren't as simple and straightforward as they seem.” “You're not my grandpa. Cut to the chase.”

It started when that marmot bit me. I mean, obviously that's how it started. He was underneath my truck when I—well, that part isn't important. It started when that marmot bit me, and the first full moon after that, I transformed into a marmot. I'll spare you the denial and disbelief. I mean, would you believe it if you woke up in the body of a rodent, lying in the middle of your front lawn in a pool of decapitated grasses, hands and face smeared with mud? I had become a monster. I had become the thing I feared most.

“You’re being extreme,” “You can't understand. You're not were.” “And you're not a were-wolf. You didn't bite anyone or maul any innocent villagers.” “Still. The shock. The horror. Like I said, I'll spare you the details about coming to terms with who I had become. It wasn't pretty. In time, I’ve come to accept myself. That I have appetites for things that normal men don't.” “Oh my gosh, Hunter. People eat vegetables all the time.” “Rabbit food. It's not natural.” “Are you going to tell the story, or are you going to keep being ridiculous?”

You have to understand that when you first become a were-marmot, the changes aren't voluntary. You can be in the middle of driving your truck, and hear a strange noise, and BAM, you've got your little marmot paws clinging onto the steering wheel and no way to reach the brakes. Or you'll be in the middle of scurrying into the burrow when suddenly you get this funny feeling in your gut and WHAM, you're raising the roof. Literally. That's a problem for people like us, of course. Lot of the new guys don't ever make it through the first few months.

It wasn't like I could just call into work for four months straight. And who was I supposed to tell? “Hey can you come check in on me at the house? Might turn into a marmot and not be able to reach the door handles.” No. This was the kind of thing I had to handle on my own. 

So there I was at work, standing out by the shed with the guys and waiting to see if the rain was going to let up or get worse, but then I saw this marmot running through the field. Every now and then he'd stand back on his haunches and wave his little paws in the air like he was trying to get our attention. Shoot. I knew right away it was Swiftpaw. They would have sent him to warn me, but only if there was a real problem. The guys were starting to notice that something weird was going on, and worse, Emma had decided he looked tasty. 

“Emma,” I said, leaning down next to her ears. “Calm down, girl. That's a friend, not a food.” But her eyes were fixed on him, and she was getting that crazy predator glint in them. Maybe I could have gotten her to calm down, only at that moment, I felt a weird twinge in my gut. Not a “shouldn't have eaten those pickled eggs” twinge. A transformation twinge. 

“Uh,” I grunted. “I gotta..” I started running for the corner of the building, hoping I'd get there before I shrunk enough to notice, especially since all the guys had turned around to watch me run, laughing and calling encouragement. For all they knew, I’d been making an awful lot of sprints to the bathroom lately. You're wondering about my clothes, right? When I told you that I kept transforming in the middle of daily activities, you wondered what happened to my clothes every time. This is what: I ran right out of my shoes first, and then collapsed, writhing as fur sprouted from every inch of my body and my teeth and snout elongated. When it was over, I was surrounded on all sides by denim. I've chewed my way out of more pairs of pants than most folks have. 

I managed to wiggle out of this pair without chewing and dragged them to a corner where I hoped they’d go unnoticed by the guys. I didn't want to answer the questions if they found every article of clothing I wore that day dropped on the floor of the shop. Again. 

After wrestling around with my clothes like that, I'd lost some time, so I scooted on out to see if Swiftpaw was still in the field.

I stood up on my hind legs and sniffed the air, sensing the many details that human noses just don't get. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are a lot of different poop scents around a farm. A whole mosaic of them, really. But I didn't have long to stop and smell the, uh, roses. Emma had chased Swiftpaw to the top of a fencepost and was leaping around, barking her head off. Most of the guys were just standing there laughing. At least Hinkley was trying to call Emma off whenever he managed to catch his breath. 

This was going to call for a decoy run. 

Letting out a chittering whoop, I scurried down the hill. 

You notice how fast marmots are when you hunt them. I've noticed it before. They’re fast. They boogie. But you don't realize until you've been one of them how fast it feels to go flying over the ground, the long grass whipping against your cheek pouches, paws barely skimming the earth.

“Okay, you're not a thoroughbred racehorse, either.” “Well. No. But it feels really fast, okay?” “Sure. So you were sprinting majestically across the field.”

To rescue my friend from Man's Best Friend. Right.

Luckily, Emma seemed to think that a sprinting target was even more fun than a fixed one, and she ran after me, which gave Swiftpaw enough time to get down from the fencepost and make for the burrow. 

Unfortunately, Emma seemed to think the sprinting target was more fun than the fixed one, and within seconds she was hot on my heels. 

“No!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Emma! Bad dog. No chase. Go home.” I swear I saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, even though I didn't speak with my human voice. It was almost like she knew who I was. Which would have been impressive if she hadn't watched me transform in front of her own eyes about fourteen times since I'd been infected.

“Emma!” I shouted. “It's me! I buy you dog food and let you sleep in my bed. Do not kill me.”

Her momentary confusion bought me enough time to scoot my butt into the burrow, and she couldn't follow. She sniffed and scratched around the entrance for a few moments, and several of the marmots in the little burrow turned to give me irritated looks.

“Sorry,” I offered. “She followed me home.”

Loosetooth's head popped into the room. “Hunter. You're here. We sent Swiftpaw to warn you of the danger.”

I grimaced. “Yeah. Maybe next time he should—you know, kind of sneak around the back instead of running up doing semaphore signals.”

She waved away my suggestion. “There's no time for subtlety now. Rumor has it the Marmoth has been spotted to the east.”

I chill ran through my fur, even though I didn't know what she was talking about. “The what?”

“The Marmoth” she repeated solemnly. I saw several of the nearby marmots pause to look at her, their eyes seeking confirmation. 

“It cannot be,” one of them said in a hushed whisper.

“We believe that it is true. That the Marmoth has returned,” she turned back to me, and I could see that her fur was standing on end and her eyes were huge in fear. “The Marmoth is like you and I. He once was human and now is marmot. But he is—really, really large.”

“Okay…”

“He never settled between human and marmot. Instead, he is caught between. A marmot the size of a man.”

“Okay…” I repeated. I was waiting for, something scary. Like, he was really big and could shoot snakes out his nose. Or, he was really big and had an army of snakes. Or, he was really big and—

“Well. Don't you see?”

I squinted. “Uh, no? You're saying he's the size of a human. But so am I, most of the time.”

She dismissed this too. “I should have known one of the new pups would not understand the danger we face from the Marmoth. But rest assured, those of us who remember know the danger. He destroyed more than one den when last he passed through.”

Murmurs of agreement spread around the group, and several of them were looking at me with expressions of disgust. 

“Okay, okay!” I held my paws up in front of my chest. “He's a big deal. We need to chase him off. Is that right?”

I'd made the mistake one time of saying that I could shoot something while I was in my human form, and the entire marmot community had shunned me for a week. It left me feeling strangely bereft. I'd put my gun in the back of the closet and replaced “shoot” in my vocabulary with “chase off.” Where it was appropriate, I mean. I wasn't about to go ask the guys if they wanted to chase off some pool. There was a lot of context involved with switching between forms like I did all the time. 

Anyway, the marmots looked at me like this was a really shocking suggestion. “You wouldn't say that if you'd met him. If you'd seen what he could do. What he has done.”

How scary could some oversized rodent be? I wasn't trying to downplay their fear, but I was pretty sure my colony could “chase him off” if need be. “You speak of what you do not know,” she intoned. “Go home. You will see the devastation there.”

That was enough to make me want to human back up, but I couldn't just flip the switch. Besides, I was still stuck in the middle of the burrow, and I needed to scoot on out of there before turning back into a human. 

“Great,” I said. “I'll see you there.”

I'll be honest. When I first turned, I didn't think I was going to get too involved in the inner workings of the marmot people. I mean, they were animals, and I was a human, so what could we possibly have in common? But it's a lonely thing, being a were-marmot. Even your own dog will turn against  you, and eventually you start turning to the company of those like you. Or like you in some way. Within the marmot colonies, there were a lot of folks that were pure marmot, never human. There were a number of were who, once they could actually control the shifting, chose to stay marmot most of the time. There were those of us who'd been made through an infected bite, and were-marmots that had been born because their parents were were. We didn't all have the same view on everything, but they understood better what I was dealing with than any of the full-time humans I knew. None of them had even heard of were-marmots. So even if my colony was a little extreme sometimes, and even if they did like to eat unspeakable things, I liked them. If this Marmoth was a danger to them, I couldn’t take it lightly.

“Were they right? When you got home, I mean, was it as devastating as they said it would be?” ... “Hunter? Hunter, are you okay? You're kind of spacing out.” “Oh. Oh, right. I was just remembering.”

[onamountaintop]

[stories-and-sails]

This works about as well for me as skipping an answer on a test. When I come back later my head is still as empty, but at least I finished the test and I just have to BS one part. 

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Inktober Day 9: Swing

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Inktober Day 7: Enchanted

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Inktober day 5: Build. 

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Inktober (Writer edition) Day 3: Bait

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Enjoy my weird handwriting and doodles--I got inspired by others who are doing inktober writers’ edition in pen.

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Inktober shorts: Ring

Happy October! I’m going to be participating in the writing version of inktober: 50 word micro-stories based on word prompts.

The operation waiting room. Too full for the week before Thanksgiving. The phone on the wall rings. This time it is not a confused patient calling for room service. 

“Dannons?” 

My mother takes the phone. 

Hands still, phone screens go dark. 

Her forehead bows, rests against the wallpaper. 

“No.”

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Beasts (Short write for NaNo)

I knew why my parents were banishing me to a year of camp up in Dragon Mountains. It was all my tutor’s fault. 

“He’s unmanageable,” the white-haired man had insisted to my mother, stuffing his maps and scrolls back into a leather bag. “And I’m not going to mince words, he’s also dumber than a pile of rocks. No one’s going to be able to teach him to tell his name from a dragon dung, and that’s a pity. But it’s worse that no one bothered to teach him to do as he’s told.” 

I stood between my parents, who kept turning stern looks in my direction. They were great at stern looks. Mother seemed annoyed, and father seemed angry, and my care-aunt seemed sorrowed. I smirked back at all of them. 

“Wait,” my mother said. “We can’t hire another tutor at this time, we need you—” 

“Life is too short to spend in the service of idiots,” the tutor said, and then he left. 

I grinned at my parents. “He thinks I’m stupid,” I said, “but he’s not talking about me.”

Which is how I ended up sitting on my trunk at the edge of the camp with the hundred other hapless fools who’d been awarded a spot at this ultra-competitive shindig. 

“It’s an honor to get to train with dragons,” my father had said. “Many people would kill for your position.”

I didn’t answer him. I knew that lots of the bravest little soldier-wannabes of my age begged their parents to be able to train  for the dragon riding corps, aching to Prove Their Mettle, or Find Their Purpose, or Die Trying. I knew my parents didn’t hold out any hope that I’d actually become one of the riders, but they hoped I’d Figure Out My Shit or Die Trying. 

They might be leaning heavily on the Die Trying. 

“Look, there’s one!” shouted a boy near me, pointing into the sky. 

For a moment, all I saw were clouds, and then, all at once, there was a beast streaking towards us, jaws open wide to show off its teeth, wings stirring the air around us. 

I screamed and fell flat to the ground, which would have been bad news for my social standing at camp if almost all the other kids didn’t follow my lead. When I picked myself up, I could see that the boy who first spotted the dragon hadn’t flinched like the rest of us. He was eyeing the dragon hungrily, thumbs hooked through the straps of his backpack. 

A girl dismounted from the beast in question and smirked at the newbies, still trembling and covered in dust. “I’m Desi. This is Hol. Commander Gao sent me to welcome all of you. So. Welcome. It’s easy to tell which ones are going to be sent home soon.”

“Can I go home now?” I grumbled.

Even though I’d said it under my breath, easy to ignore, her dark eyes caught mine and radiated scorn. “Come now. Don’t be a coward.” Then she continued in a lighter tone, addressing the crowd. “You’ll be staying in tents to the left of the mess hall in groups of four, as have already been determined. You have fifteen minutes to find your own tent and assemble on the combat field.”

She rattled off the occupants of 25 tents, including “E32, Caleb of Snocap, Geovanny, Damien Underhill, and Ivan of Cold Bay.” 

Each person raised a hand as she said their name, and when I saw Geovanny—aka the spunky backpack boy with dragon-vision— raise his hand, I groaned out loud. “Seriously? Don’t put me with him. I’ll kill him within the week. I can already tell he’s obnoxious.” 

“Wow,” Desi replied in a deadpan voice. “You must be really good at spotting the obnoxious person in a crowd.”

Now I officially hated her too, and from the snorts I heard around me, I could count on hating everyone else, too.

I didn’t know who the other boys in my cabin were, only that Caleb of Snocap and Ivan of Cold Bay were likely sons of barons or lords, and probably rich prigs. To the surprise of no one, many of the recruits were of noble birth. Most of the families had to pull a few strings to get their kid accepted. The only difference between them and me was, most of them probably did it because their kid actually wanted an opportunity to face the business end of a dragon. I had no idea how the others, the ones without family names, had scored their place at the sleepaway camp for burning and maiming. It was enough to make Geovanny interesting, and if I didn’t already hate him, I might not have minded having him in our cabin. 

I hefted my trunk into my arms and started down the hillside to the tents left of the mess hall. The mess hall, as far as I could see, was the only real structure, wooden beams holding up a thatch roof. Everything else was temporary, tents and pavilions. Great lights of the sky, I hoped they didn’t decide to take this show on the road. 

It wasn’t long before I noticed a couple of boys jostling near me. They were struggling to keep up because they were dragging their trunks over the terrain, cursing and huffing all the while. 

“Are you following me?” 

The taller boy nodded. “You’re Damien Underhill, are you not?”

“Yes. I did raise my hand when she said that name, so, yes?”

“It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Ivan of Cold Bay, here to earn my family greater honor and pride by gaining a place in the Queen’s Corps of Riders.” 

I faked a yawn. “Wow. That sounds exciting for you.” With that, I turned around and started walking faster to find the tent. 

Of course, somebody beat me there. Little Geovanny with no last name was already standing in the entrance of the tent when I arrived, his arms wrapped around his backpack. No trunk. Guess that was faster. I elbowed him out of the way and set about making myself at home. 

We had a week to settle in before we were supposed to attend our first hatching. Everyone talked about the hatching in hushed voices of awe, and every time they did, I felt a crawling in my spine. We’d stand in a huge cavern, surrounded by cracking and splitting eggs, waiting for one of them to imprint on us or decide that immediate after-hatching nutrition was more important and start chewing on us. 

I did everything to get kicked out that first week. When we were supposed to run a timed mile, I waited until all the fastest kids had finished before I even started, so my time was something like twelve minutes. When we were supposed to be doing drills, I lazed on the grass until one of the older students found me and started shouting at me. And when it came to the history and comportment lessons, I didn’t even have to pretend to be useless. 

When that failed to get me kicked out, I decided to see if some old fashioned Being an Ass could hack it. Geovanny provided the perfect opportunity when he approached me in the mess hall, holding his bowl cradled close to him. “Can I sit with you?” 

I stared at him. He was always edgy around me and kept far clear of me when he could, so I didn’t know what his angle was approaching me in the cafeteria. Maybe he thought he was safer in a public space. Poor, naive child. 

I was sitting alone because everyone, even Ivan and Caleb, had already figured out that I was best left to my own devices. But I was going to need attention for this. 

“What do you want, little freak?” I asked loudly. 

He glanced around at the students starting to turn and look. “Maybe I can sit down and talk—”

“No. Just tell me what you want. Can’t you find someone else to tolerate you during a meal?”

He pressed his lips thin, then said, “Fine. I was going to offer to tutor you. If you want to last here, you’re going to—”

I pressed two fingers down on the lip of the bowl he held so that it tilted away from him. It would have slid harmlessly to the floor if he hadn’t over-reacted, yanking the bowl up and towards him as I removed my fingers. 

“I might be stupid,” I said with a sweet smile, “But I’m not the one wearing my lunch.”

Once people got the idea that I was bullying Geovanny, it took very little to fuel the fire, and by the sixth day of camp I was facing the Commander across his very own tent, waiting for my discipline. 

“I suppose you’ll have to send me home,” I offered, bowing my head in an attempt to hide how triumphant I felt. 

“You do understand what punishment is, don’t you?” 

I looked up. 

“As in, it’s not supposed to be the exact thing you’re angling to get? We’re not sending you home. I know you miss your family.” 

I snorted. He thought he knew everything. Why would I miss the people trying to sentence me to death?

“And that you’re unhappy to be here. You’ll flunk out when we’re actually sure that we’ve seen what you have to offer and that you’re not cut out to be one of the Queen’s Corps.”

“Sir,” I offered, “I’m horrible. I’d think that’s enough to convince you I’m not cut out for such a prestigious position. There are families that can actually make it worth your while. Why don’t you just wash your hands of me and simplify things for everyone?”

He watched me impassively. “Are you finished?”

I blinked. 

“Good. You think you’re so clever because you were the worst child your parents had ever had to deal with, but guess what? I’ve dealt with thousands. I’m not afraid of you.”

My mind scrambled for a response. All I managed was, “I’m not afraid of you, either.”

He shrugged. “You might consider that while there are families with more means represented here, your own family made it worth my while to keep you away from home for as long as possible. Have a good time at the hatching tomorrow.”

The hatching was at sundown. I didn’t talk to anyone all day, which was probably an improvement for them. The third-year students held torches and marched with us to the mouth of the cavern. 

“Damien Underhill?” It was everyone’s favorite Desi-who-likes-to-terrorize-first-years.

“What?” Lights of the sky. My voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “What?”

“Take the torch. You’re supposed to lead the class in.”

So this was the actual punishment. I forced my hand to rise and take the torch, but that seemed to be all I could do. I couldn’t force the blood to continue pumping through my veins. It had drained from my face and was thumping around my heart like a fist. 

“Go ahead, Damien,” she said, her voice falsely bright. “Everyone’s waiting. You don’t want to miss the hatching.”

The muttering started then. I needed to move, now. I sucked in air and it came too much like a gasp. Everyone could see me setting my shoulders and trying to gather up my nerve. 

“I think he’s freaking out,” I heard a third-year near the back mutter to her friend. And then it was a chorus of whispers, and the first snorts or laughter. This was making the grisly/toasty death waiting for me on the inside of that cavern sound almost appealing. But I still couldn’t force my feet forward. 

There was a shuffling in the crowd next to me, and I waited. Waited for someone else to take the torch and pronounce me useless and go in to find their honor or whatever they were looking for in there. And I’d be left out here, because I wasn’t looking for anything. You don’t bother to go looking when you know there’s nothing to find. 

I glanced over and saw it was Geovanny. Perfect, that he would show up in this moment. He’d lead them in, the torchlight painting the nameless boy as a hero, and it would be—

“Come on.” He put his palm at the center of my lower back and pushed. I took one jolting step forward, and then another. He kept pace with me.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. The rest of the crowd startled itself into motion behind us. 

Behind us, I could hear jostling and shoving, people complaining, “Hey. That was my foot. Wait your turn.” But no one got close enough to touch us. 

“I want to see the hatching,” he said. “You’re holding the torch.”

I had more questions, but none that I wanted to ask with an audience, so I shuffled through the mouth of the cavern. I could feel the air change around me from the warm mugginess of the summer evening to something cool and scaley-dry. I could sense the hugeness of the cavern, but I held the torch closer to myself. I didn’t want it to illuminate the walls and far off ceiling, and I didn’t want to see eggs the size of boulders all around us. 

I could hear them. The clicking and shifting. Fear tapped on the inside of me like I was the shell. 

“Hold the torch up,” someone barked. “I can’t see where I’m stepping.”

I tried for a caustic reply, but there was still nothing in my mind. Geovanny’s hand nudged my elbow higher. 

I tried to squeeze my eyes shut before I saw the light falling over the eggs, but I was too slow. I already had an image imprinted in my mind’s eye of dozens of eggs, some of them rocking softly, some of them cracked or chipped, the smallest the size of my head and the largest the size of our tent. 

I kept my eyes squeezed shut as the crowd around me gasped and shuffled out. I could hear their footsteps moving among the eggs, could hear them calling out to one another about how beautiful this one was or how close another seemed to hatching. 

“You should open your eyes,” Geovanny said. 

“You should shut your mouth,” I replied. I was annoyed that he’d been watching me. And that he felt like he got to boss me around. But I peeked my eyes open anyway.

In the flickering light of the torch, the floor of the cave shifted with the cracking and rocking of dragon eggs and the wiggling of limbs. 

“Oh my gosh,” a girl on my left crooned. “Look at this one. He’s adorable.”

I looked at the head of a dragon that had forced its way from the egg, and I let out all the air that I’d been holding inside of me. 

It was a small version of the arial burning machines. I could already see the sharp teeth, the glint in its eye, the coiling of its muscles. 

But yeah, it was also kind of cute. 

One minute, there was only one or two dragon faces to spy in the room, and the next, the cavern was full of writhing bodies as they slithered between the eggs and legs to find the human that they wanted. I saw Caleb of Snowcap bending over to pat a white-and-teal dragon that probably weighed over a hundred pounds already. Was that thing supposed to sleep in our tent? With me? Hopefully we’d be able to store them elsewhere.

For fifteen minutes I stood there, flinching every time a dragon wound itself around my legs on the path to the person it was really trying to find. As dragons and recruits united, the humans led them out of the cavern. I could hear the third-year students shouting their approval at each recruit as they came out. 

In the end, it was just Geovanny and me standing in the cavern with eggshells and a few dragons that didn’t seem interested in us as their human choices. I wondered if Geovanny hadn’t been picked because he was standing too close to me. 

“You know,” I started, “It’s really humiliating needing help from someone like you.” It had sounded more like an insult to him in my head, but saying it out loud it just seemed true.

He smiled. “Good, I was hoping it would be.”

“Is this normal?” I asked. 

“What?”

“Getting rejected by dragons.”

“Be patient.”

I hated being told what to do, but apparently life was full of things I hated. “You could have just left me outside.”

“I don’t like that,” he said. “I thought about it, but that’s not what I wanted.”

He was staring hard at the floor as he said this, and I was feeling annoyed for reasons I couldn’t figure out when he pointed suddenly. “Look!” 

 A few late-to-emerge hatchlings were shaking off the last bits of shell from their wings and tail. That red one--with the gold tipped wings. Lights of the sky, it looked terrifying. It looked like trouble. It was looking at me. 

“You got one,” Geovanny whispered as it pranced over to me, its head wobbling on a skinny neck. 

I forced myself to stand still, not to take a step back. “Hi,” I said to it, holding my hand down so it could sniff at my fingertips. “Hi, you weird little creature.”

Geovanny laughed, and I felt an actual pang of guilt. If there was one recruit at this sham of a training camp that deserved a dragon, it was Geovanny. Where—

“There he is,” Geovanny breathed. He dropped to his knees and held his hand out, waiting. I held the torch up higher and saw his dragon, sidestepping around the light, trying to make its way to Geovanny but too shy to take the final steps. 

I lowered the torch and waited with him while the little creature finally worked up its nerve. 

When we finally left the cave, all the other recruits and the older students had given up on us and gone down to the combat field, where they were celebrating the night by shouting about whose dragon was best. 

My dragon kept tripping me, trying to sniff at Geovanny’s beast, which kept darting just out of reach only to return and flick my dragon with its tail when she’d given up. 

“Look,” Geovanny smiled. “I think our dragons want to be friends.”

“I think our dragons want to be friends,” I repeated in a sing-song voice. “Honestly, you’re so—” I was about to say pathetic, but I looked at Geovanny and saw that my words had actually hurt him.

So pathetic. So stupid, to let me keep hurting him when he’d been in the position to hurt me, and he hadn’t. So obnoxious. 

“You’re so stubborn.” I finally said. “You’re really stubborn, aren’t you?”

He blinked, and most of the hurt was gone. “I know what I want,” he said. “That doesn’t always mean I get it.”

I tried to think of something to say that would actually sound like me talking, but I didn’t know how to be in moments like this. I couldn’t think of any moments I’d ever been in that were like this. 

So I said, “Thanks. For helping tonight.” 

He smiled all the way, and we walked straight past the combat field to the tent. I don’t know why he didn’t want to go show everybody that he’d matched with a cool dragon, but I hoped that everyone was writing us off tonight, assuming we’d be going home. I couldn’t wait to see everybody lose their heads tomorrow when we showed up with the coolest dragons by far.

[stories-and-sails]

You Do You

Early this year, I saw a post from Maggie Stiefvater (since departed from Tumblr, RIP) announcing that there were still spots available to her workshop in Seattle. I managed to con my friend from Wisconsin into traveling to Seattle and drive across passes that were definitely not supposed to be open to my Volkswagen Jetta with all-weather tires. 

One of the most actionable pieces of advice I came away with was that writing a short story every week could accelerate my growth as a writer. Stiefvater practiced this with a group of writing friends for years. She told us the books that she wrote before and after writing a weekly short story, and I accidentally laughed out loud. It was kind of awkward, considering that I was sitting at the bar, farther forward than the front row. But her “before” example was the series I recommended to my friend, saying “Maggie Stiefvater was a human writer once.” I didn’t love the series, but I loved knowing that the author I was so impressed with had started somewhere.

Now I’ve been writing weekly short stories for ~28 weeks and have ~27 stories, plus the beginning of a story about were-marmots that I’ve never finished. It haunts me every day.

 Some weeks I try to be Fancy and Experimental with something in my writing style. I wrote a story without dialogue. One time I quoted some poetry, and once I even wrote a story for a contest that was supposed to be a historical romance. But mostly, what I write every week is something that I think will be fun. On a typical week, I sit down and think, you know what I really want to write about? Dragons. And then I write a story about dragons, or selkies, or high school Knowledge Bowl teams, or more dragons. Or I start to write a story about were-marmots, get scared, and let it percolate for months. 

I am sure that I would learn a lot about myself as an author by challenging myself to a new genre every week, writing stories in the style of Bradbury and Poe and Gilman and Jennifer Egan. I may get to that. But pulling every story out of a grab bag of the most random corners of my mind with only the criteria of finding the kind of story I want to write has acquainted me with some surprising joys. It’s left me with a whole table of contents full of titles that make me smile.

Someone told me about one of my stories lately, “Not what a lot of people r looking for but you do you.” Here’s the thing: with or without their permission, that’s what I came to this party to do. I do care about being a skilled writer, and I care about writing things that other people feel. I get that creating things from the core of my weirdness might mean that no one else is looking for that yet. But I also believe it means I’ll have something that’s really mine to share. 

[stories-and-sails]

Spelling Test

Based on a Tumblr prompt that I have since lost track of: You are a witch working at McDonald’s. There is this one colleague you secretly hate so you cast a curse that slowly destroys the thing they love the most. Months pass and nothing has changed, but you are starting to get sick.

I suppose it’s a stereotype, but I didn’t expect to run into that many Republicans working at the homeless shelter. I mean, I didn’t have any presuppositions about who would be actually staying in the homeless shelter. I carefully schooled myself away from assumptions about the clients. My colleagues, on the other hand…

He showed up in the middle of September, wearing a freshly pressed dress shirt and, of all things, a red tie.

“Are you lost?” I asked politely. 

He laughed. It showed a lot of very square white teeth. “No. At least, not physically. This is my first shift. Are you Gana?” Before I could respond to any of this, he continued. “Herb said that you’d be the best one to show me around, because nobody knows this place like you.” He winked, and I bristled. What exactly had Herb told this cut-out doll of a Yuppie about my history? 

“Yes,” I said, and before I got anything else out, he interrupted again. 

“Are you going to give me the tour?”

I did, and there were whole stretches when I was able to get out useful sentences like, “This is the staff bathroom,” or “Here is where we fill out incident paperwork,” but mostly I learned all about Daniel Bellview. I will summarize, because I do not wish to subject anyone to the same irritation I experienced in listening to his life story. 

Daniel had recently graduated from Dartmouth. He was taking a (third?) gap year from finding a real job. (I didn’t know you could call it a gap year after college, but it seemed like Daniel made the rules.)

His father was John Bellview, Congressional Nominee

His father thought that having a kid working at a homeless shelter would make him seem more sympathetic, especially given that one of the measures he supported would cut funding to social programs like Meals on Wheels

Daniel was more than happy to help with anything that would benefit the Grand Ole Party. And hey, he might learn something working here, right? Anything’s possible. 

In the kitchen that evening, as we oversaw the church group that served on Friday nights, I confided in a co-worker I actually liked, Angela. “He’s just so--Republican.”

She gave me a guarded look. “What is that supposed to mean, Gana?” 

Which is to say, of course, that she was secretly Republican this whole time, and I had to spend the next five minutes trying to try to make my words less offensive. Daniel’s presence in the shelter had already made me a terrible person. 

That night with my Sisters I was able to dump the whole story without any apologies, and they were righteously angry on my behalf. I could always count on them to see things my way. 

At the age of fifteen, after I got to know the homeless shelter downtown better than almost everybody, I found my family. They didn’t seem to think it was alarming that when I tried the spells from Harry Potter, they actually worked. Haile and Dora were clairvoyant, Amber could work magic the way I could, and Yajaira was simply very good at keeping us all organized and financially solvent. This was the most baffling kind of magic to me. 

Amber, predictably, offered to hex Daniel Bellview into a roach. (This sickened me a little bit, because she had a thriving colony of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches in her bedroom, and probably a quarter of them had started out as men who did something she perceived as unforgivable.) (Only two of them had done something that was truly horrible. That left five men-as-cockroaches in her room that had been irritating but not evil. They had been cockroaches for between one and five months, and I was starting to get antsy about whether she was ever going to return them to normal.) I passed on turning Daniel into a roach. 

Haile offered to read something of his, if I could get it home, and Yajaira just told me to eat my dinner and give it time, because I always needed time to warm up to people. 

Warm up to Daniel. Unlikely. 

Over the course of the next month, my teeth began to wear down from the pressure of clenching them all the time around my ever-present co-worker. Herb told me to be nice to him, because, “We need him to like us. And to think that the shelter is a good thing. He has a good relationship with his dad, and we can use all the help we can get.” 

But Daniel was not an easy person to be nice to. At least, not for me. The girls who worked in the front seemed to find him charming because he was a snappy dresser and backed his inane comments with a dentally-privileged smile. He was particularly cheerful (he would tell anyone who asked) because his father was doing so well in the polls, and there were only weeks left until election day.

But I tried to be nice to him, or at least helpful. “You know, you sound like an idiot when you ask kids where their dad is.”

He blinked. There was a moment of surprise before he recovered his Smarmy™ smile. “Okay. What am I supposed to say?”

“You can ask them if they’re here with anybody, or if there’s anybody they need to get in contact with. I know your dad is perfect, but a lot of the youngsters here don’t have both parents in their lives, or their here because their parents aren’t doing stellar at the whole parenting gig.”

“Wow,” he said. “Thank you. Herb was right, you really have a feel for this.” 

I scowled. It wasn’t like I was trying to hide my past from Daniel Bellview, or anybody else for that matter. From the glazed look on Daniel’s face half the time, I wasn’t sure he even saw the people who stayed here as people. I didn’t want that expression pointed my way.

But it was even worse to keep wondering what he knew. So. “I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up. Ages twelve to fourteen. I mean, it wasn’t home, but I was here more than anywhere else.” 

Okay, so he hadn’t known. He looked insultingly stunned. “You?”

Wow, it was the shortest sentence I’d ever heard him utter. And he was actually waiting for a response. I didn’t owe him anything, so I nodded and handed him a bucket of disinfectant water. “Hard surfaces,” I said. “Go.”

Amber was sympathetic in her usual way. “I know another spell you can try,” she smiled, “If you don’t want to turn him into a cockroach.”

“I’m listening,” I sighed. 

“Katastrepe agapate. It destroys what they love the most.” 

“That’s horrifying,” I answered immediately. I didn’t want to kill his dog, or sister, or the thing that he probably actually loved the most, himself. “That’s worse than roaches.”

“It doesn’t do death,” she promised, waving away my primary concern. “Usually. And you can put in a spellsafe so he can undo it if he stops being terrible. Besides, election day is only a few weeks away, and I have a guess about what he loves the most.”

I just didn’t want to take any chances. I mean, gods and stuff, if I harmed a pet I would never be able to live with myself. 

“Daniel,” I started casually. 

He already looked startled. “Daniel? I thought I was Bellview.”

Dammit. He was right, I had never addressed him by his first name. I tried to avoid names all together with him. “What would you say you love the most?”

“Wh-what makes you ask?” 

“Just, you know, conversing with my co-worker. Trying to get to know you better.” So convincing, Gana. 

He maneuvered a smile back into place. “Other than my own reflection?” He laughed like he was making a joke about himself, or maybe a joke about the way I thought of him. “Probably, the values that make our country so amazing. Virtue. Independence. Innovation. Things like that.” 

I was sure that a spell couldn’t harm Virtue, and besides, that sounded like code for “my dad being a senator.”

“What about you, Gana?”

“Huh?”

“What do you love most?” 

He had gotten slightly better at waiting for me to answer things, but this took an exceptionally long time for me to answer. “I think--I think it might be this place,” I finally said. 

He nodded. “I can see it.”

With three weeks to go until elections, I cast the spell with Amber over a toothbrush that Daniel kept in the staff room. “Katastrepe Agapate.” The silly spellsafe I put over it was that, of course, if he wanted to protect the thing he loved, it was going to have to be Twue Wuv’s Kiss. If things started going bad for a pet or secret sister or something, it should be easy for him to undo. And if it really was his reflection, it should be pretty amusing. 

Over the next weeks I waited for the scandalous news to hit and the GOPs poll numbers to crash, but instead:

Congressional Nominee John Bellview climbed several points in the poll after doing a special appearance at my very own place of employment and making A Very Generous Donation.

Several Democratic candidates fell into traps of their own making and dropped in the polls.

I wondered if Daniel was secretly just a terrible Democrat, and my spell had backfired.

Daniel and I fixed five showers and a toilet that had been out of service for over a month. I asked him how he knew plumbing, and he reminded me that this was his third “gap year.” I told him that he couldn't indefinitely call his life a gap year, and he said that it made his father feel better about him not embarking on his eventual journey toward a doctor/lawyer/CEO.

Daniel also asked 35% fewer stupid questions, like he actually heard me when I told him he was being stupid.

Daniel thought I was starting a game by asking him what he loved best, and so every shift together, he would have a new question, like “If you were a constellation, which one would you be?” and “If you could speak any five languages, which ones would you choose?” Some of the questions were more serious, like “What is your biggest regret?” He always listened to my actual answers, which was at first more than I expected of him, but I started to get used to the listening and the honesty. 

 He did not cease to be irritating, but I started to understand when he was being ironic and when he was simply being stupid. There were measures of both.

I almost wished I hadn’t done the spell.

Especially since I could figure out what it was affecting. He gave no hint that anything was wrong away from work, and everything at work was fine. 

The stress and guilt of possibly destroying something I couldn’t even identify was making me miserable. Clumps of my hair started coming out in my brush.

I took this final problem to Yajaira, who combed her fingers through my hair and came away with more fine strands of hair than I wanted to part with. “Maybe you should take some time off work, Gana. Either you’re not eating right, or you’re stressed out.”

She was right. I was stressed. I stayed home from work for the first time in a year and helped Yajaira with the quiet magic of bulk-cooking vegetarian meals and storing them in the freezer. In the middle of stirring a pot of soup and chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” to double the recipe without having to increase the ingredients, the periphery of my vision went dark, and my knees buckled. I was left on the ground, clenching the wooden spoon.

“Dios,” Yajaira cried, dropping to my side with half an onion still in her left hand. “Gana, I’m taking you to a doctor.”

“I’m just tired,” I whispered. “I was trying to do magic, and I haven’t been sleeping well.” Maybe the agapate spell was taking a little bit of my magic at all times, and that was causing my exhaustion. 

“Doctor.” Yajaira responded firmly. 

“Please not for this, Yajaira. Can’t Dora just take a look at me and see what’s wrong?”

Yajaira seemed annoyed by this and called Dora to come home from school to take a look at me. (Dora was a fifth grade teacher. Being a fifth grade teacher sounded exhausting, but being a psychic fifth grade teacher seemed like actual hell. Dora seemed to enjoy it.) 

I napped on the couch like a sick kid. In some corner of my mind, I could remember being five and six and having a place where people had given me a warm water bottle to hold when I had a fever and putting orange juice on a tray by me as quickly as I could drink it. I could also remember being dead on my feet from some flu I’d caught on the street and dragging myself to the shelter, where they found a room to quarantine me and flu medicine that I could never pay for and didn’t have to. It was funny how the state of being sick made me feel like I could reach out and touch those other sick versions of me throughout my own history. 

Amber arrived home just a few minutes before Dora and force fed me the soup I’d been making, but when Dora got home, she brushed Amber out of the way and started inspecting me. “It’s good you let me take a look at her first, Jai. This is a spell.”

My eyes snapped open, winced, and closed again. “What kind of spell? Who could--” I’d met some others like me in the past couple of years, but it wasn’t like we had a rival gang of witches living on the East side. I couldn’t see why anyone would target me.

“Gana, I don’t understand. It’s you. The spell is from you.”

Gods or something dammit. 

It took a lot of explaining and answering uncomfortable questions, which I could only do between bouts of fortifying soup and closing my eyes to rest. “Amber, are you sure this spell doesn’t cause death?”

She looked horrified. She’d taken off her giant glasses and was cleaning them on the edge of her cardigan rather than meet anyone’s eye. “I told you it’s usually not a death curse. You did use a spellsafe, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I sighed. And what an easy, convenient spellsafe I’d chosen. “A kiss.”

At this, Amber shoved her glasses back on her face and stopped looking miserable, and Yajaira sighed, “Is that all? Somebody go get the boy.”

I struggle to sit up. “No, no, no. Definitely not him, here.” 

Dora looked at her watch. “It’s still the middle of your shift. If I drive you in, do you think you can take care of it?”

I felt sick. It was difficult to know if the feeling came from dreading the conversation that would have to occur or if it was the superbly stupid spell. “I blame you, Amber,” I shouted as Dora bundled me out the door. 

If I thought it was awkward explaining the situation to my sisters, it was nothing compared to facing Daniel. Could I have lied about the situation? Probably. I did not love lying to people, and I just did not have the emotional and mental capacity to do this right now. 

“Wow,” he greeted. “You look terrible.”

“Thanks,” I returned. “You are terrible. Mostly. Will you kiss me?”

That got a look out of him that I hadn’t seen before. His eyes went round and bulgy, and he choked out, “What?”

“This is going to take forever to explain, but I do...spells? I do spells. And stuff. And I did a spell on you to destroy whatever you loved the most. Which I specifically asked you about, by the way, and you lied. I thought we were being honest with each other. So now I’m very ill, and look terrible, as you mentioned previously, and in order to fix it I need a kiss from you.”

“Oh,” he said, “That’s embarrassing.”

“Yes,” I said, “But I’d rather deal with it than continue to pass out in the kitchen.” 

“I meant for me,” he corrected, that now-familiar mockery of a smile on his face. “You know I always think of myself first. I didn’t plan for you to find out like this.”

“How would you possibly have planned for me to find out like this?” I snapped. 

“Point. But also the reason I wasn’t honest with you when you asked me about the object of my affections. It seemed like an inopportune moment to spring my feelings on you.” He shrugged. I had never seen him look uncomfortable in this particular way. 

“It seems you don’t have to worry about it, because I’ll find a far less opportune way of finding out.”

His laugh sounded tin, and then looked around to make sure we were alone in the room. “You know this is also a terrible thing to do?” 

“Oh, yes. I could probably have this conversation a lot better if I wasn’t on the brink of collapse, but I’m very sorry and feel like an idiot and promise not to let my irritation get the best of me in the workplace. I feel very bad about it and not solely because it’s nearly killing me.”

“It certainly communicates where I stand,” he laughed without any joy behind it, and then leaned forward and pressed his lips against mine. 

I’d watched his lips as they smirked and schmoozed and I had never once imagined them pressed against mine, and at the moment that seemed like a terrible oversight. I made a soft, happy noise against him, and it startled him into tugging away. 

I instantly felt much better, although it was still impossible to tell if I was relieved that the conversation was over, or if the curse was broken, or if it had just been a really nice kiss. 

He whistled and turned away to find something to do with his hands. “Hope that helped, colleague of mine. Now I need to go--I don’t know--drink something strong.”

“You’re still on shift,” I pointed out. “And I am too, I guess, since I’m no longer sick.”

Having found nothing else to do with his hands, he just looked at them. They were not clenched, but they kept making tight little motions at each other. “I can ask to be transferred to another shift. I’m not ready to leave yet, but you don’t have to see me.”

“I don’t have to see you?” I frowned. “You’re the one who should never want to see me again. Like you said, that was pretty terrible. I’m sorry.”

“And also like I said, that gives me a pretty clear answer regarding how you feel. As if you’d ever left any real room for doubt. A little bit of distance would probably be good for your health.”

I don’t know why it caused such a pang of regret to hear him say this, but I felt an undeniable urge to make it better. “Having you around was pretty good for my health today.”

There was a sad little cousin of a smirk on his face. “There’s that, at least.”

“I think you should hang around a little longer. It takes me a notoriously long time to warm up to people. Give me a chance.” 

He looked at me closely. “Are you sure? You’re not still fevered? I’ve heard my kisses can be intoxicating.”

What a dumbass. “I’m sure.”