“You have to start spreading out your celebrations,” Marco said, handing Ace one of the mugs of beer he was carrying. “You’re going to make me go broke.”
Ace tipped his head back and downed a quarter of the mug’s contents before replying, “You’re a pirate. If you’re broke, you’re doing it wrong.”
Marco glared at him, but Ace just beamed back, the very picture of innocence.
It was the freckles and the big brown eyes, Marco thought. Ace’s face lended itself well to making him look like a fine, upstanding member of society. Marco knew him too well to buy it, but he could see how it might have gotten Ace out of more than a few sticky situations.
“Anyway,” Marco went on, nursing his own drink far more slowly than Ace was, “don’t you get exhausted? A holiday, a birthday, and an anniversary seems like a bit much for one twenty-four hour period.”
“You could argue it’s forty-eight hours. Most people celebrate New Year’s Eve more than New Year’s. If you sleep in between them, it’s two different days.”
“By that logic you must have gone through four times as many days as the rest of us,” Marco said dryly, smirking.
Ace shrugged, unembarrassed, a lazy smile across his lips. “Hey, just because you’re jealous that you can’t fall asleep anywhere you want to...”
“You fell asleep into your cake, Ace. If it wasn’t for your devil fruit the candles would have burned the freckles right off you.”
Ace flashed him a sharper smile. “And now the whole cake is mine.”
Marco rolled his eyes. “Don’t try and convince me you did it on purpose.”
“I didn’t say that. I just know how to take advantage of a situation.”
Marco knocked their shoulders together. If Ace’s beer mug hadn’t been half empty already it would have sloshed out over the edges.
“Besides,” Ace went on, unconcerned, “just think of this as the one day a year you have to spoil me.”
“Hey, it’s my anniversary too.”
“Mutual spoiling then. But, like, more for me. Since it’s my birthday.”
“You did this on purpose, didn’t you? You purposely had us get married today so that you’d always be able to lord your birthday over me.”
Ace put a hand on his chest in mock horror. “Do you truly think I could be so manipulative?”
Marco rolled his eyes again and set his beer down on the counter. He hooked his arm around the back of Ace’s neck and pulled him close - he’d have used his shirt, but since Ace wasn’t wearing one he had to get a little creative. “In order to get me to shower you with affection? Definitely.”
“As though I have to put that much work into getting you to do what I want,” Ace said, mumbling the last few words as he closed the distance between them.
The kind of tart that itches the tongue, puckers the mouth, and constricts the throat.
More than anything Shelby wished her dad would stop saying that word. He was an English teacher after all, he was good at finding other words off the top of his head. Crosswords had always been his specialty. Three letter birds, and seven letters for destructive. But not that word apparently. He just couldn’t find a synonym.
Hospital.
Crisp, sour apple taste cascaded across her tongue at the sound of that word, and she sucked in her cheeks instinctively.
A conversation had never used the same word so many times, but her dad sat there talking with her grandmother using that awful word over and over again. Without a thought for what it was doing to her. And she was expected to sit like a good little girl and mind her P’s and Q’s and not say a word while he used that word repeatedly until she thought she would throw up pieces of an apple she hadn’t eaten.
Hospital.
Bile soured apple chunks surging up from her stomach.
Why couldn’t he use another word repeatedly? One that tasted like something good? Friendship was a good word, it tasted like pumpkin seeds. Or horrible, a terrible word, but it was the warm saltiness of chicken soup.
Hospital.
Stinging tartness like razorblades on her tastebuds.
At least the flavoured word was distracting her from the reason he was using it. The gut clenching taste kept her mind from wandering back to that room in that place where a bed held a body that didn’t in any way resemble the person she had loved before.
Hospital.
This time she did gag, loudly retching at the flavour lighting up her senses.
The conversation stopped dead and her father looked at her, concerned. Her grandmother looked disgusted as she often did, ashamed of her “mentally ill” granddaughter who was always just “looking for attention.”
Shelby couldn’t stand to hear that word one more time, jumped up and ran out into the cool fall day. She’d wait until they were done with their repetitious conversation, and then she’d come back.
September Writing Challenge from @katywritesbooks
I’m sorry if this wasn’t clear or doesn’t make sense... It’s based on a perceptual disorder called Synesthesia where people hear certain sounds or words and it causes them to taste things. It also causes people to see words in colour and hear shapes and colours... but I went with tasting words for this piece.
For many swimming is an exercise, difficult, an inconvenience. Too much changing, showering, nakedness. People are self-conscious in a swimming pool. Too aware of their own bodies, their swimming abilities, the pool depth.
But for me, the pool is my special place. I grew up on a poolside, swimming multiple times a week and for hours on end. Now the pool is an old friend. It’s where I go when I’m angry, sad, happy, despairing and hopeless.
As I glide up and down through the water, effortless, weightless. I’m reminded that I’m not terrible at everything. The water treats you the same no matter what mood you’re in. It surrounds me but I feel in control. My mind empties and everything becomes clearer. My problems seem smaller, more manageable.
I swim a length underwater and my throat closes in. Panic sets in. Your body screams for release and it would be so easy to give in. But I power through, I overcome by bodies panic, something I can’t do in every day life when anxiety overtakes me. But in the pool, I rule that feeling. Breaking through the surface and I feel ethereal, the little mermaid scene playing in my head.
But underwater isn’t just panic. It’s calm. It’s clear. Have you ever gone underwater and looked up? Watched how the light glistens on the surface? Looked at how it shines on the bottom tiles too? Pretty patterns you can’t duplicate exactly. Have you ever gone underwater and listened? To the muffled sound of voices? Bubbles rushing to the surface? To your own heartbeat in your ears?
That’s my favourite place. Sitting on the bottom of the pool and watching the light flicker.
When I get out of the water I feel rejuvenated. It feels like a fresh beginning, and I started by doing something I’m good at. I walk around poolside with my chin held high because this is my home, my domain. You can judge my body all you want, but most of you can’t do what I can do in the water.
Now? I teach swimming too. To many others. I teach it not just so that they will be safe too, but with the hope that one day the pool will be there safe space too. That they will go there when they’re feeling down, and that their minds will be peaceful too once the water rushes over their faces.
#septemberwritingchallenge by @katywritesbooks . All characters and ideas short of the prompt itself are mine. Please do not judge my writing too harshly and please do not steal my work. Thank you.
____
It was pretty obvious the kid hadn’t been anywhere near water before now, besides the hot springs where the Kappa lived. Pure astonishment, followed by admiration, then thrill, crossed his face. His dark eyes reflected the sunset. I heard Lindsey laugh.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked. Yako just nodded, grinning, barely containing his excitement. I glanced back at Trish, who for once in her life was at an equal loss for words. She’d never been here before, either. Lindsey and I had, though. Plenty of times. After all, it was by sea that I’d gotten from the Aussie subcontinent to Los Angeles. Ports were the best places to find business and news. And most importantly, ports were the best places to find smugglers. Because unless we planned to swim south to the Capital, there was no way besides illegal transport to avoid the Golden Crown from here.
I looked to Prince Henry.
“Do you trust me enough to find the right captain, your Highness?”
He gave me a weary smile. It was the first time since we’d met that I had used his title, and he seemed unused to it.
Day Three of the September Writing Challenge by @katywritesbooks. Featuring more characters from The Autumn Door, this time 13 years in the future. Thanks for tuning in!
“June 2nd,” he said to himself. The words were fire in his throat. He’d always hated the day—took it off work, went to church, and pretended the rest of the world didn’t exist. It had been thirteen years since he was dragged away from everything he knew. The iron cross at his neck warmed him and kept him safe from those terrors. “It’s June 2nd.”
He thumbed through a hymnal, muttering the words like a holy refrain. There was nothing in those pages that surprised him or washed him of his past. He twisted the cross pendant in his fingers, black with age and red with rust like blood, and flipped through the pages until he found the hymns he sang as a child.
Every year, for just a day, Scott liked to pretend there was a seat in the house of the Lord for people like him.
“I heard I’d find you here.” Her ghost settled next to him on the pew. She wore her head shaved and tattooed in blacks and blues, twisting shadows and malformed words. She didn’t reach out to touch him, but just being there was too much.
“Go away.” It was a numb demand. The words dropped like a pin on the floor of the silent church.
“I’m sorry.” She splayed her hand out on the seat of the pew. They’d been so close, once, but now the two feet between them felt like a mile.
He wished it was a mile. He wished it was a thousand miles. He wished she was somewhere else, messing up someone else’s life. He was happy—finally, truly, happy—and now his heart was turned to stone again looking at those hands. Those splendid rings, made of metals he’d never find on Earth, adorned with stones from deep beneath the oceans. That slender wrist, mangled by a scar.
“You’ve done well,” she said, like he needed her validation to know that. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
His eyes flickered up to hers. She didn’t belong here. He shook his head mutely—no, low and harsh, buzzed in the air between them. “Why are you back here?”
She lowered her eyes and lifted her knees to her chest. She was longer than she had been as a teenager. No taller, but more stretched out, dark circles stained under her eyes. Like she’d been to Hell and back. “I wanted to apologize. It’s been…long enough. I never got to say sorry.”
He bit back the urge to welcome her back into his life. That was her twisted magic, he reminded himself. It took thirteen years, but he’d taught himself to cringe from people with orange eyes, people who ran like the wind, people who had no flair for tact but complied obsessively with the truth. He twisted the cross again and again in his fingers until the chain was tight against his throat. “So in the end, it’s all about you.”
“I never—”
There was a perverse kind of joy to be had in listening to her choke on her own words. She clutched for truth, hands balled into fists, body curled into a ball. Finally, she breathed and let herself relax, standing from her seat. “I’m sorry, Scott. You’re right. I was making it about me.”
Somehow that was worse than the alternative.
“Your wife is kind,” she continued, “and your daughter will live a long and satisfying life.”
The sharp twist of magic in the air caught him. His stomach knotted in his throat. “No! Don’t—”
She looked at him with old, sad eyes. “You were my best friend, Scott. Do you really think I would hurt you like that?” She shook her head, lights shimmering in the air as she passed by him towards the huge double doors. The fading sunlight scattered through the stained-glass windows and painted her the Virgin Mary. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come back.”
“That was all a long time ago,” he tried to say, but she was gone.
The echoes of her words hung like sweet perfume: “You have been tortured for thirteen years. You shall be joyous for thirteen more. May your table and heart be full ‘til we meet again.”
