A lone swing creaks, wood cracked and weathered by the endless mist and long-dead children.
The metal frame is covered in paint that flakes away under her fingertips, leaving fragments of green paint and rust on her skin. The sky is gray as she lifts her eyes, a hint of watery sunlight swiftly swallowed by the unending clouds. It threatens rain. For three nights they’ve been here, and every night it rains, and every day it threatens to.
The air is always wet.
“Mommy?”
Breathing in sharply through her nose, trying to find clarity, find thoughts, she drags her gaze down from the endless gray and into a worried stare. Her eyes, blue, but so much more hopeful and softer. With a smile, she reaches down and rests a hand on her daughter’s head. Her hair is fine and thin, wisps blown in the wind.
“Sorry, dolly. I was just thinking.”
A hand is held up, hopefully, and she lets it take hers, pulling her away from the swingset. More paint flakes off on her fingers, leaving her tarnished and unclean. Impatiently she wipes it on her jeans.
“It’s not a very nice playground. Why don’t we go home?”
Her daughter leaps up onto the seat of an old wooden bench that surrounds a dry fountain, pristine white sneakers landing in tandem. The bench is dark, waterlogged, and pale lichen spills out of splits in the wood. She walks along it like an acrobat, one foot in front of the other, concentrating. Her path is broad, not dangerous, but children must imagine danger first to be prepared for it.
Some things cannot be prepared for, though.
Could not…
“I’m tired of being inside! It’s boring! I want to run!”
Uneasiness bubbles up and she doesn’t know if it’s because of the mist, or the unwelcome emptiness of the playground. The creaking of the swing. The gulls in the distance, wheeling over dead things at the beach. So much detritus washes up.
The decay in the air grows stronger with every breeze, like a memory.
Laden with death and saltwater, it toys with the little curls around her daughter’s ears as she tries to climb up to the back of the bench to find some more thrilling hint of danger. But mother holds her hand. She won’t fall. She can’t fall.
“We’ve only just moved in. We could go decorate your room.”
“I said no!” her daughter says, petulant and demanding. “Can we go to the beach?”
“Not today, today is a bad day to go to the shore.”
In deep blue overalls the little girl walks across the back of the bench, white tennis shoes lining up one after another, toe to heel, heel to toe. Wobbling, one arm held out for balance, face scrunched in concentration. Eyes like her mother.
The child attempts to leap off the end of the bench, and she lunges forward and catches her around her waist, a thrill of fear in her chest. Terror. But the child only laughs, caught and held in the safety of her hands, never doubting for even a moment that she’ll be caught. Flying.
“You shouldn’t,” she scolds, drops her down on the thin layer of pebbles that crunch underfoot, rolling across the packed earth. “You could have hurt yourself.”
“Mommy caught me!”
“And what if I couldn’t?”
The face that was so serious is all sunny smiles now, turned up to her like a flower hunting for the sun that will never, ever come. Her voice is cheerful, but it echoes. “Mommy will always catch me.”
Until she can’t.
The swing still creaks, with a weightiness that makes her uneasy to suggest it; it feels like someone else is already there. An invisible weight, a pressure like being observed by unseen eyes. Three crows sit atop the rusted slide, silent judges.
Three for a girl.
In the distance a car goes down the main street, a low drone that barely eclipses the sound of the ocean two streets over. The small hand twists in hers, restless, sliding free with a laugh as the child bolts for the dead fountain. She hops up on the edge, begins her tightrope walking all over again, chattering away about…nothing. Something?
The calling of the crows, the creak of the swing, the voice of no one's child, and the waves, the waves in the distance that bring in the mist, it all becomes one great sound.
Noise, it’s all noise, filtering into her ears as time stalls, the entire world being dragged past her to the left and right, just out of view. It stretches out, everything ahead gray nothingness. All color and life fades into that distant pinprick, her dry eyes staring. Forever and ever.
She breathes in the mist.
“Mommy?”
Blinking, she glances down into eyes, dark eyes. Eyes like her mother. The crows croak a warning, but the seabirds are screaming louder, fighting over something dead on the shore. That’s right. There had been a warning this morning, passed by her gossipy new neighbor. Dead whale.
Washed up on shore.
She’d never seen anything like that before, and she’d gone with a morbid curiosity–
“Mommy.”
A warning.
“Let’s go play on the boat,” she suggests, hoping that the faded wooden vessel across the way will be less rusted and dangerous. The wood was polished once, but that didn’t stop the wet. Like the benches, cracks have become home for insects, mosses, and straggling dune plants. A beached vessel bursting with life.
Dune grasses and sandburs shouldn’t make it this far up, but they find a way.
The child rushes onto it, tennis shoes squeaking, and makes right for the helm.
The little wheel rattles and shakes as it’s turned, corroded bolt groaning its protest. The colors of the boat have weathered to grays except for small splashes of red and dirtied white on the trim and on the lifelike carved barnacles clinging to its hull. She paces alongside it, holding up a hand as the child moves to balance on the prow. As always, the hand clings to her, holding tight.
Holding very tight.
Glancing up, she reaches for the white tennis shoes, trying to untangle a vicious sandbur from the laces. Clinging, nasty little seeds looking for a place to settle. It’s dug in tightly, and the child refuses to hold still, leaping off of the prow with a laugh of delight. She startles and jolts forward, an arm latching, staggering under the sudden weight.
A close call, a near fall.
Her heart pounds with another near-miss in what will be a lifetime of them.
Setting the child down, she crouches at her side, pebbles digging into her knee. “Let me get rid of the sticker-burrs, we can’t take them home.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re seeds. If we take them home, they will put down roots, and then our yard will be full of sticker-burrs and there won’t be any room for flowers.” Her fingers carefully work the vicious barbed thing out of the laces, leaving them fuzzy and stretched. “Mmh, these were new shoes,” she complains quietly.
“I’m sorry.” The voice is small and sad and penitent, and the child stares at her shoes with regret. It breaks her heart, the sorrow, and all morbid curiosities are washed away. She’s needed.
“It isn’t your fault,” she reassures, tossing aside the last little parasitic seed, scooping up her daughter. “I promise. Where would you like to go?”
Her daughter smiles, tilting her cheek to a supporting shoulder, fathomless eyes dark and incomprehensible. “Can we go home now?”
“Yes.”
With the child clinging to her, she leaves behind the empty swing, the warning crows, and dead things on the beach.
Sometimes when you’re stressed, you just gotta step back and draw some lovely Object-Head OCs to unwind.
We got Spoonston (25), a trans sports instructor who’s getting his life back together after divorcing his spouse and getting full custody of their spork daughter, Pauline (9).
You’ve already met B.D (29), the cranky half-pint cartoonist, previously but you get to see him in HD now.
The Caddy family comprised by the widower Carlson (34), a mute 6′12″ beefy mortician, his three daughters Cecilia (10), Clara (8), Cora (6), and youngest son Pietro Johan (3). They’re a very tight knit family.
Finally we have Madam Camilla Windrose (41), a rich and influential widow with a mysterious past and even more mysterious daily life...
No one knows what she gets up to, but she certainly attracts a lot of attention.
Tagged by @vorchagirl and then it lurked in my drafts for days and days. Mostly because the question of “WHO ARE MY FAVOURITE 3 CHARACTERS??” required a level of introspection I was not prepared for.
Relationship Status: Long term co-habiting, not really intending to get married, but about to start building a house together anyway.
Lipstick or Chapstick: Chapstick
Last song I listened to: I can only stare ~ Sleigh Bells
Last movie I watched: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies
Top 3 TV shows: Deep Space 9, Stargate SG-1 and Buffy are my 90′s loves that I always come back to. Top 3 that I have enjoyed lately are Sense8, Brooklyn 99 and The Expanse.
Top 3 characters: Angua, Cassandra, Major Kira
Top 3 ships: I am a really boring shipper actually. I am mostly just over-invested in my player character's romances, so- Cullen x Inquisitor, Shepard x Kaidan. I am also quite invested in Cullen and Cassandra’s supportive bromance.
Gender: Female
Nickname: None that I’m aware of. If they exist they are probably unflattering references to my extreme caffeine dependence.
Starsign: Virgo
Height: 5′ 7″
Birthday: 26th August
Hogwarts House: Slytherin. People are usually like “Ravenclaw!” and then they see me in my Slytherin t-shirt and then it’s “..Ohhhh, yeah. Yeah. Of course.”
Favorite color: Red
Favorite animal: Fox
Average hours of sleep: 8-ish. But really it varies wildly from barely enough to function to actual hibernation. My sleep cycles are... interesting.
Cat or Dog person: Cats. CATS. C A T S.
Favorite fictional characters: Angua von Uberwald (Discworld), Anya (BTVS), Cassandra Pentaghast, Aveline Vallen (Dragon Age), Sabriel (Abhorsen), Temeraire, Jean Tannen (The Gentlemen Bastards), Olive Snook (Pushing Daisies), Jadzia Dax, Kira Nerys (DS9), Samanatha Carter (Stargate), Aeryn Sun (Farscape). I could probably go on.
Number of blankets you sleep with: Duvet, and a fleece blanket on top if it’s extra chilly. But mostly my dude is a furnace that negates the need for either.
Favorite singer/band: Tori Amos, Regina Spektor, Garbage
Dream Trip: A tour of the ruins of the ancient world.
Dream job: Prop and/or costume making at Weta. I’d settle for just being allowed to sit quietly in a corner and watch. I could make the tea or something.
When was this blog created: July 2015
Current number of followers: 964
What made you decide to get a Tumblr: Mostly for lurking in fandoms, and then I wanted to get involved in them and post my art.
