Connie's Little Bits of Fiction

Forgotten. Lingering

2021-09-26T00:00:00Z

Lorn chased eclipses. This life, of getting up to travel, of hoping the eclipse's totality was reachable, was frustrating. She wanted to stop the chase, but at least for now, continued.

Mathew Schwartz

Emotion is embodied.

Our heart races, our gut churns, we sweat, we go weak in the knees. We feel.

Lorn believed this: memory is not emotion. Memory is fickle. It seeps into you, as if you're porous, a being of clay waiting to be infused, to be made more than you were in the past.

Memory is a plant. It twines its roots around your heart and sends its budding branches of leaf, thorn and fruit into your mind.

There are two eclipse seasons a year, two or three eclipses a season. Only half of these are solar eclipses where the moon occults the sun, hiding its light.

It had been a good idea to take her memory and hide it, to change it, to bind it to an eclipse and let it go. But the pain remained, a shadow of heartache and anger in her body that she no longer understood because the memories were gone. The smell of vanilla made her heart beat a war rhythm, made her want to kill. And rain clenched up her chest hard, so that she breathed in gasps but didn't know why.

So Lorn chased eclipses, hoping to find where she hid those memories. Hoping to understand.

Corrupted friends

2021-06-16T00:00:00Z

He was asked to come to the temple to record their beliefs, to ensure their truth would be remembered and shared.

t_h_e_h_i_d_d_e_n_

The temple was small. Few people lived there, surviving off their own labour, off gifts of food from the nearby villages. They taught him, showed him things, darkened his mind because sometimes truths are unexpected.

And people came to him, too. He made friends amongst the devotees and supplicants who stayed on the temple grounds. He was considered wise. This was flattering and worrying: while they thought his advice was good and sensible, advice and knowledge change people.

The change was clear to him: some nights, after hours of writing, he woke from his nightmares screaming.

They asked him to leave. His notes were incomplete, but his approach to the Elder Ones, he was told, was warped and twisted. In turn, he was warping and twisting others.

With his few belongings — the clothes he came in, writing implements, his notes — he made his way to the closest town.

Writing the manuscript came easily. This was no longer a project to merely record someone else's truth, but would be a warning to the world.

Just as he'd made friends of the devotees, he now made friends in the town. One described himself as a printer, setting text not in solid blocks, but to individual bits of cast letters, moveable as needed between locations on a page of typeset text, and reusable between pages. This reduced the time and resources needed to typeset a book so considerably as to be somewhat miraculous.

But the printer needed advice as well — people saw this ability to easily create typeset text as a tool of corruption, allowing foreigners and slaves to share knowledge in their own written vernacular, on topics not appropriate to be shared.

The printer was afraid, because it was true.

So he told his printer friend not to worry. He, a writer of manuscripts, and he, a printer of books, would together make plans.

Print was a tool of corruption. So too shall his book be.

He still sometimes woke at night, screaming.

Liberated Dissonance

2021-04-11T00:00:00Z

"No, that's just trying to return to the status quo," she said.

Plants grow from between the tiles. Their little stalks have broken through the grouting and sprouted, looking like a rainforest of moss and tree in miniature.

Angèle Kamp

"Why do you leave it?" her boyfriend asked. "I'd be so pissed if I was your landlord."

"It's good to see things growing where they're not wanted," was her answer. And that was true. "And sometimes you need to break things to move on."

"That reminds me of that Japanese thing, kintsugi or something — where you fix up broken things, and, you know, not try to hide the damage but, like, make the cracks and stuff beautiful with gold inlays and shit."

She laughed. "No, that's just trying to return to the status quo. Make a pretty thing whole again. Think of Schoenberg — he wanted to break down tonality in music. Make a mess of things. Show that music can be free of our expectations and the status quo and still be beautiful."

"What the hell are you on?"

"Sometimes broken things should stay broken to make space for new things," she said. It was good to break things, and that was true as well.

"I've never even heard of — who? — Schoenberg?"

She pondered the little plant, the tile-sproutling, and wondered if it was time yet to break up with this person. To grow into new things.

The grouting would be broken apart. And the underlying concrete bed crumbled, transformed into dirt for roots.

Doorways

2021-03-07T00:00:00Z

Occasionally, when walking through the passages, one of the doors she would try might be locked. The next, though — that would open.

Quino Al

And the door she came to the passages through would always be unlocked, a way back to wherever she’d come from.

Not this time.

The lock snapped into place as the door closed. And each door she tried after, each one, was locked.

Three days of walking through the passages since then. And every door: locked. There were only the passages, the closed doors and stairwells. No windows. No rooms. No people. This was the passages.

She slept on the floor, jacket for a pillow. She had no food, no water, but also no hunger or thirst.

Then the passages changed. The paint was a bit more peeled, light bulbs slightly dimmer, flickering, sometimes even burnt out.

The passages grew darker as more lights failed. Some forks and stairwells led into blackness. The wall-plaster was now cracked, chipped enough to expose brickwork.

Down one of the dark forks was something unexpected: a beam of light in darkness, not a cold electric bulb, but a small lance from a wall, scattering stray motes of dust.

The plaster and brickwork had crumbled enough to make a small hole through the wall beside a door’s wooden frame.

Only her finger could fit, but the brickwork was crumbling, and she needed no food.

Passages

2021-02-07T00:00:00Z

Door 256.

Night. Quiet roads. Rain. Street lights reflect in puddles. A small food store remains open and mostly empty. They take credit card. Leslie speaks some Japanese. The owner is looking for help in the kitchen, so now Leslie has a job. She stays for a few weeks.

CHUTTERSNAP

Door 257. Humid. Hot. Walking through the door is like walking into a wall. Tombouctou. She speaks enough French to get by.

Door 258. The land is moving, rising and lowering, swells in a storm. A boat.

Door 259. Night. Cold. Lights are off. Someone’s home. She makes her way down carpeted stairs. A cat yowls, lights flick on but she’s already in the street. Leslie teaches a medley of languages to a classical guitarist who would like to one day leave the Ukraine, but who worries that they’ll never practise enough, never earn enough.

Leslie also worries. When she stays too long in a place she can feel it, approaching, door by door, person by person.

Door 260. 261. 262.

Sometimes she asks herself if she is being followed, if this isn’t the doors and her fears. But the feeling returns.

The follower never relents.

Nairobi. An abandoned oil rig. Jeddah. Samarkand.

Footsteps on an empty street. A shadow on a street corner.

Door 263. Driving for uber in a car owned by a taxi company. Travel through the car door when the anxiety approaches.

Door 264.

The Bone Orchard

2021-01-24T00:00:00Z

When she was 13, her parents walked her out of the valley and into the forested hills. The monastery that stood there was already old, its eaves leaking in the rain, its fencing struggling against rot.

Julia Kadel

The monastic Order was declining, but valley locals still thought well of the monks, and her parents were living hard years of illness and little food — and so it seemed that offering her up would do some good.

At the monastery’s bone orchard they asked her parents to say their goodbyes. Bones of the dead had been placed in mounds or strung together to create shapes: macabre trees, bone white bushes, benches to sit on. This was a place for things to decay and to pass away, a place for goodbyes.

When she was 67 she returned to the monastery. She’d lived her years as a mendicant, travelling between towns and villages and living wherever people would shelter her, carrying no more than what she could carry, teaching and helping when she could.

The monastery in the hills was now abandoned. The bone orchard was still there in its own way: vines had entangled themselves in everything, hiding so many of those bones that had not yet crumbled with time and exposure. No one was here to tend the place, but she supposed that this was natural, if unbalanced. Sometimes things are overrun, sometimes they decay away. The Order of things is to move on, and soon so will she.

Blue

2021-01-17T00:00:00Z

Your last day before retirement is a relief. Work friends have organised evening drinks at a bar down the road from the office. It’s intended to be a celebration: of you, of your work, of the value you’ve brought to the company in the last decade.

Jordan Whitfield

And this is a time for celebration, just not a celebration of what the company wants. After you’ve said your goodbyes and walked out of the office, you text, I’m sorry! Something’s come up! I won’t be able to make drinks tonight. Enjoy yourselves.

This is your freedom.

Bruises begin as blue stains. Their colour shifts, fades to yellow as they heal and once the red blood that had seeped from your veins and arteries ages and breaks down.

You go home.

Bruises and cuts take a long time to heal. You want them to heal.

But some wounds don’t heal well — scars remain, joints hurt when weighted, mobility is lost. Tiredness seeps in to bones and flesh, pervading all.

It’s been a long life of doing things for others, spending your days making a living. Familiar thoughts surface: what is next for you? What do you want to do, now that you don’t have to spend your waking hours working a job just to survive?

What are you hobbies? There have been many over the years, but they’ve come and gone and been given up to the daily grind of work.

What is important to you? What was important?

You sit and wonder.

Red

2021-01-10T00:00:00Z

Red. The colour of blood. The colour of an open wound, of pain.

Alex Rainer

You open a new bank account. There’s not a lot that you can spare, but every month you deposit the little that you can. It’s an emergency package, a parachute, a hope.

Close to your work, at the mall, you have a spare set of car keys cut. You keep them at your office, with a bag of spare clothes and your passport.

Red is anger. We say, to see red.

The colour red doesn’t appear alone: there is the yellow puss of infection that’s the tint of anxiety, the blacks and greys of rot, of fear, of numbness.

You want to shout, to scream. That was something you learned (quickly quickly) to not do. Anger is one way to be hurt. Crying is another.

Your current friends are his friends. They’re all his friends — your friends hadn’t liked him, and he very much didn’t like them. You’re going to miss having friends, but maybe you can reach out to people you used to know?

But old friends are a way for him to find you.

Job interviews are stressful. The job you find is across the country. The job offers a fresh start, cut off, distant and alone, but hopefully unfindable.

The last few days of your old job are paid leave days. You don’t tell him. When your leave begins, your first stop is the office to pick up your travel bag.

Everything else you leave behind.

Sometimes rot needs to be cut away.

Yellow

2021-01-04T00:00:00Z

Your name is Rot.

You sit at your desk. It’s been four hours since you’ve arrived at work. When you have to, you answer emails. Otherwise you sit at your desk.

You sit at your desk.

You just sit.

Sandy Millar

Yellow isn’t the only colour of rot. There are the greys and greens, the shades of damage, decay, mould.

You can’t do this work anymore. The work — you’re told that your work is fine. People are happy with your work. It’s good work. Only that’s not how they behave. Every moment convincing people that it needs to be done is a struggle; every moment is an argument for why something had been done.

Arguing that the work isn’t wrong. That it is fine, that it is good work.

You’re tired. And you don’t believe their words anymore, just their actions.

So you sit.

Rot isn’t only decay — fungal bloom is growth; eggs laid that hatch; the eruption of maggots. Things grow and change, become what they are not.

You are bad at your work. Avoiding the continual struggle and doublespeak means avoiding work. Avoiding work means you are worse at what you do.

You sit at your desk.

You are worse.

It’s important to stop caring — so that the bruising stops, so that the hurt is less. So that the rot can settle.

Rotting things can’t be used for what they were originally intended for.

The rotting apple no longer feeds. Mostly.

My Hollow Heart

2020-10-25T00:00:00Z

The flyer he found in his letterbox read:

Feed yourself and your family. Grow your own food.

So he tried.

Nicolas Dmítrichev

It was early spring and the flyer recommended starting with potatoes — they were easy to care for and difficult to hurt. Some of the old potatoes in the kitchen were sprouting. He sliced these into chunks, a sprout per chunk, then planted them.

The waiting began.

It wasn’t just waiting. At first there was watering — much later, when little leaves broke through the surface, he would examine the seedlings daily for pests. He felt glad. They were little growing things and he was caring for them.

The pests came. The aphids sat under the leaves, out of sight, and he took care to lift each leaf as he sprayed insecticide.

But one day the leaves began to die — not because of pests, but because it was time to harvest. He dug into the ground, careful not to damage the tubers themselves. When cleaned of dirt they were bulbous with soft skin and firm flesh.

He had grown them. Now it was time to cook.

But this was when their problems became visible: their centres had a small empty space, a hollow surrounded by brown, rotten flesh. Each were like this, healthy on the outside but hurt at the core. These couldn’t be cooked with.

He didn’t try to grow food again. He had to hold on to his own heart.

Scented

2020-10-11T00:00:00Z

7:00 am and the sun was up! Summer months were easy months for Kim to climb out of bed, and her little dachshund, Leila, agreed. Leila jumped into the bed as soon as she noticed Kim moving, and the two would greet one another a good morning.

Hannah Bruckner

Across the road from her apartment block was a walled off space that had once, years ago, been a community garden. Now it was abandoned, with no one looking after it.

People said it was haunted, but it was just uncared for.

On most days, Leila would lead the way to its large, double iron-gates. They sat ajar, their lock long broken and never repaired.

The two of them never met anyone else as they walked between the wild plants, flowers and trees. Everything was quiet, the sound of cars and people had faded into the distance. The original vegetable and herb beds had died off and were now overgrown — Leila walked between the flowers and weeds that had taken root and made the space their own. Kim let her off the leash and followed. Leila often stopped, smelling everything, smelling the leaves, the flowers. Sticking her snout between petals and leading the pair of them from one flowering bush to another.

Old stone walkways appeared and disappeared between the clover, chamomile and the muted snow-in-summer. Untended trees loomed over it all — Kim and Leila sat in their shade, Leila drinking from a portable water bowl, Kim from a flask of coffee.

Everything was so quiet, yet even so, neither Kim nor Leila could hear the fairies. This isn’t unusual: for the most part, people don’t notice them. You might sense the prickliness of being watched and the fierce chill of their anger and their loathing, but most of us blame that on the place and the wildness and the abandonment. Kim and Leila never felt that here, though. There was peace as they moved through the overgrowth, and the fairies watched and were glad at the little dachshund’s joy.

When they left, they took nothing with them.

Liminal

2020-07-26T00:00:00Z

I am not able to leave this place.

At the start I thought I would. My team travelled by ski and sled, pulled by dogs bred for cold and snow and the eternal, blasted light that meant we all struggled to sleep.

Zac Durant

At each day’s camp, when sleep evaded me, I read from the brittle pages of the journal that had led me to this place; while in my own journal I wrote of my fears, of my rival who was somewhere on this frozen wasteland, also searching for the same thing that we — I — was.

The snow and the cold and the tiredness sept into us, leaving us wearier at each of our stops.

Our first storm was a whiteout. We wore darkened goggles so that we would not be blinded by the light and the snow and the forever white. No-one saw the crevice: the snow gaped open and a dog team disappeared into the only darkness we had seen in hours. A sled went over, wedging itself into the crack. This was were we lost our first lives, between the light, in the shadows.

Zac Durant

No unsplash!

I read from the journal when we said farewell to our lost teammates:

The safest place for us all is in the shadows at the edge of darkness.

This distressed the others.

Two weeks later I left the last of my team in her tent with a broken leg and unable to ski. The dogs were dead and the sleds long discarded. She had been so close — just days later the wind dropped and the snow cleared. Finally, I saw it: the building the journal called the Umbral.

I pushed my way through two consecutive pairs of doors, one wooden, one bone. With both closed behind me, the worst of the cold was now shut out. I dropped my bags and lit my lamp.

I wandered the windowless hallways. The journal described some of the chambers and their purposes and rituals well enough that I could recognise them. In my eagerness and sadness it took me some time to realise that woodsmoke lingered in the air — I was not the first to reach this abandoned structure.

In what had once been the dormitory I found a tent. One of the wooden beds had been smashed apart and used as fuel for a small cooking fire. Its ashes were cold and no one was in the tent, but there were still supplies here, scattered between worn clothes and brass jars that were cold enough to hurt when touched.

I continued my search — and then found the room I had spent years of my life to reach.

The floorspace of the Umbral Orrery was, like a library, filled with shelves. These, though, didn’t hold books but a collection of clay jars. I did not open these, but I knew what was inside them: the desiccated remains of organs, removed from the supplicants who had pledged themselves to the penumbra, to living in-between, to liminal spaces and liminal selves.

Zac Durant

No unsplash!

The ornate mechanical globes of the orrery itself hung above this all, locked in their final positions, now themselves held in a liminal configuration that its original engineers had likely not intended.

The shelves were marked with nameplates for the supplicants whose organs were contained in the jars, as well as the dates of their passing. The last few shelves were empty, waiting to be filled with jars that would now never come.

But there was a collection of new jars here, sitting isolated on these last barren shelves. Unlike the others, these were made of brass and not of clay — brass, like those I had found at the tent. No nameplate identified the supplicant or their date of liminality.

Dark pools of blood had frozen on the floor. They led into an adjacent room, the one the journal called the surgery. The room was laid out as a lecture theatre might be, with seats arranged in tiered concentric circles and a stairway leading downwards to an open space that held not a lectern but a sluiced table large enough to hold a prone person.

More blood had frozen in the sluices and on the floor; scalpels and medical scissors lay scattered, discarded.

Someone had been at work here.

There was no-one else in the remaining rooms. I set up my tent beside the abandoned one and all of its supplies and lit a fire using wood from the broken bed frame.

I am not able to leave this place. The ship waiting for me on the coastline is too far away and will only wait until winter sets in — but I believe that there is another path from the Umbral that’s hidden from me. My rival likely knew it. Can I find it? Had she?

I will not leave this place.

But I am so close.

I am so close.

Possibility of the Coffee Machine

2020-07-04T00:00:00Z

The pawnshop was cluttered. Its dark windows were stacked with guitars (acoustic; electric), vacuum cleaners (bagless; mite sized; huge beasts), keyboards (casio; apple), heaters, picture frames that still showed photos of their last owners.

Mike Marquez

The espresso maker was an old, dented steel machine, but the broker assured Kevin that it worked just fine.

He bought it.

It sat on the family’s kitchen counter while Kevin experimented with its knobs and valves, but he lost interest. His daughter, Becky, figured out the finicky pressure for the water pump and the steamer. She used the machine long after her parents had grown frustrated with understanding tamping pressure and water pressure.

The car was cramped when Becky’s parents drove her to university — a part of the problem was the espresso maker beside her on the back seat.

Becky kept it in her dorm room but couldn’t often afford the coffee grounds, sugar and milk — and everyone who visited always asked for a cup, eating into her small allowance.

She couldn’t always afford her text books, either.

Becky sold the espresso maker to Kyle.

Kyle didn’t keep the machine in his dorm for long — the room was cramped with no space and he hated coffee. That was something that he’d never tell Simone.

In her little studio apartment in town Simone would make him instant coffee. “I hate instant,” she’d tell him. “Tastes like dish water, but the caffeine hit — so good!” It helped with her ADHD, she said. Simone never seemed like the hyperactive boys he’d known in school. She did talk a lot, which she blamed on her ADHD, but Kyle liked that, maybe even loved that. Her voice, her stories. Just not her coffee.

Simone liked the machine but was wary to take it. She only did when Kyle told her he wanted nothing in return, that there were no strings attached. This wasn’t how he felt, but it seemed like a good thing to say.

Simone was a mixed media artist. Her current work was painting over portions of a digitally altered photograph of her girlfriend. She hated that she did her best work at night, alone and uninterrupted, fearing the coming dawn and possibly not having done anything. But at night there was less to distract her, just herself, her fear, her coffee.

Just her.

Ice-Cream

2020-06-16T00:00:00Z

He is a merchant of joy and ice-cream is his product. The rich and their family array themselves in their homes for him. He sets up his goods, neatly labelled jars kept cold in tubs of melting ice. Everyone has a chance to sample the contents: cold on the tongue, rich, sweet. Ice-cream is a surprise, bringing laughter, bringing smiles.

Bringing joy.

Sharon McCutcheon

The merchant explains: “The one you’re trying now is certainly expensive. All these samples use sugar we ship in from the colonies, but that one — that flavour comes from vanilla, such a rare thing because our attempts to cultivate it have so far failed, so we are forced to hire workers to explore distant jungles, harvesting in small quantities what you have just tasted.”

And the clients are pleased by the story he spins them, pleased by the coldness and the flavours and the sensations.

The merchant returns to the factory.

Its sturdy roof and windowless walls support the weight of the mechanical drive shaft that runs from the ground floor up, up, through all four floors to the ceiling. The refrigeration units powered by this are scattered through the building, seeping ammonia that can be smelt throughout.

This is forward thinking industrialisation: blending machinery and chemical methods of refrigeration with the politics of modernity, cheap labour replacing animals to run this drive shaft, a team of people on every floor working around the clock to push the drive shaft (frozen goods must never melt), cutting costs while improving safety.

The merchant feels pride.

The ground-floor foreman calls the shift change. Fresh crew slip into the shafts while sweaty, tired workers wash themselves at the water pump in the street, taking their small pay to wherever they sleep for the night.

If they can sleep. No rest for the wicked, after all. How else to bring joy into the world?

Thinking

2020-05-24T00:00:00Z

The apartment block was pet-friendly and cats roamed its walkways and passages.

Sign one: at night their howlings and hissings increased. In the mornings the block’s WhatsApp group complained about misbehaving pets.

Andras Kovacs

Sign two: the cats began to disappear. WhatsApp speculated and finger-pointed at who could be awful enough to kill pets and hide the bodies.

Sign three: Kim went missing. She was only five. The window to her bedroom hadn’t been broken but dissolved. Kim’s bed was stained green and black, was filled with fragments of moss and algae and decay.

The police interviewed and examined and questioned. The WhatsApp group blamed strangers and reported on anyone walking passed the block.

Sign four: Alfonso, six, went missing. The block organised a watch at the gate and a nighttime patrol through the corridors. Tenants who could left to stay with relatives and friends.

Alyssa and Laurie took the midnight patrol. It was the sound that alerted them, soft and slithering and wet, like a creature in a puddle. Damp stains led them upstairs where apartment 55’s window stood open.

Sign five: the smell seeping from the window was nauseating.

No one opened the apartment’s door when she knocked, so Alyssa forced the window wider and climbed into the darkness. She stood in a small kitchen under the weight of the scent of rot. The torchlight revealed a fridge with its door open wide. Inside, a mass of darkness — no, a mass of dark green mould, algae and flesh — pulsated and breathed. It shifted in place, as though turning, and its pulsation stopped. Alyssa thought that it had noticed her, that it was thinking and aware. Then it poured itself out of the fridge, began to slide towards her in the darkness.

Ars Fatuous

2020-02-23T00:00:00Z

There is no center. There is a sign on the street that suggests a centre: Department of People. People work for this department. They are ordered in a hierarchy, an ascending chain of people placed one above the other and at the top of which sits a single individual. He thinks of himself as the centre. His orders are vague, but, like religious pronouncements, are interpreted by those in the chain below him, are made explicit, are enacted upon the world.

Maarten van den Heuvel

The links in the chain listen. They already have existing orders and the new ones, vague and unsatisfactory, are embellished and refined and made anew. The chains become entangled and sometimes the links between each other are unclear, and the people live and make spaces for themselves in the interstices, both person and link, interpreter, shaper, enactor.
You’ve heard the stories from your friends, of their supplications to the Department. Now it is your turn: you visit. you queue, your are told what forms to fill in (you are given no pen, but you have brought your own), what desk to hand the forms in to (no dear, you need to fill in form 26a revision ii, not 26a), where to get 26a revision ii (revision ii is unavailable, but you’re given revision iib), but by then you’ve paid the application fee with the wrong cashier and no refunds are to be given, although after lunch the correct cashier opens and the long queue does move, occasionally, and you wait in line until it’s 15:00 (how did the day disappear?) and you’re given a hand written reference number and told that the Department is closing for the day, could you please return tomorrow with your forms appropriately dated for tomorrow, thank you.

Legio

2019-10-13T00:00:00Z

Crowds are beautiful.

Our favourite crowds: small cafés. You people who have time and money, eating your rolls with cream cheese and almond milk flat whites.

Petr Sevcovic

We love you all (I don’t — but I do). The flavour and taste of you (the stink). We love you.

But the stories you tell of us — why would we settle on a single man or a herd of pigs when there is all of you? Consuming, self-satisfied in discontent (I hate — love — their pain).

We insinuate ourselves inside of each of you — we are many, we are enough (and I hate — no, I love and must possess).

You, by the window seat: we can sooth your pain (my other me will, we won’t all be with you, but are all here, nearby). We can give you family, siblings (us, we will make you us).

The barista making coffee: she’ll be going home, and we’ll make sure she finally leaves her lover. Past pleasure is memory, and she can take those with her (I’ll reshape them into beauty).

Each of you, we will play you like puppets, caress your minds and hearts, make them our own. This makes crowds a joy: so many situations and flavours and problems and hates. Each person thinking themself disconnected, an island alone.

Unlike you, we all talk continuously, we babble (not me) and see (are) connections.

We are love, we are zeitgeist. (I am hate.)

We are coming home with you.

Dark Places

2019-09-23T00:00:00Z

A place is not entirely alive. A person can point at another person and name them: “Person.” They understand their existence as an individual.

Natalya Letunova

Crag is a place.

At its heart are the people living Above, in the visible buildings and teeming streets. They point to Crag, their homes, their factories (and occasionally even their gaols and sanitariums) and say, “Us. Crag.”

They live off of the world Below, the strata beneath their streets, old buried roads uncovered in dim tunnels and remade into hallways; homes dug into old buildings and rock. Artefacts brought up to the surface and sold, water works running and pumping and mostly keeping their water potable.

“The Below,” they say. Other, ours but not of Crag.

Crag is a place.

At its heart are the ruins and buildings and spaces rebuilt. Lives grown in and around a past reworked for the living. An environment shaped by those who have come before, made richer and poorer and different and other.

Crag is a place.

At its heart are those Below, who have learned to live in the spaces allowed by both the tunnels and the hearts of those Above. They delve deeper, to avoid others, finding new paths, but always leaving behind and remaking their homes, their selves.

Crag is a place. It has no life of its own. A person points to it and says, “Place,” and points elsewhere and says, “Elsewhere.” They understand a place’s existence as being individual.

Wilder

2019-09-16T00:00:00Z

I was sick.

My skin blistered and cracked. The cracks were open wounds, chasms, seeping liquids then drying out. They formed webwork, dividing me into irregular tiles of pustules and bruises.

Mona Eendra

The medicine came with a warning: changes were expected, in me, myself, my core, who I was. There was fear.

The creams burnt, but after only minutes became a soothing balm. The liquids I drank tasted of rust and decay and aged furniture. For the first week I felt nothing but the easing of my discomfort as the cracks dried and flaked and became softer flesh — like soil hardened by rain, but finally breaking open to allow life to grow anew.

My flesh allowed life. I began to grow, to change.

Friends did not question my anger at the world. “You seem justified,” they said. Until I was angry with them. “I am justified,” I told them.

The anger was new. Unlike the growths that flowered from my flesh (the pustules that had become boluses of life, sprouting leaves and moss and flowers), I did not notice my personality change. What I had feared — my core being altering — was not the problem I had thought it would be. It felt natural, normal. I had become angry, but the world made me angry; I spent less time with friends, but they saw the world so differently to me, why spend time with them?

And I healed, and I changed. And I stood in the sun and flourished.

Surprise

2019-08-26T00:00:00Z

It's winter. It’s cold, but the car is warm. Highway traffic is busy yet free-flowing. Cars — all around, impatient, individual, rushing to be somewhere, all moving in the same direction, in the same way, with the same urgency.

Xan Griffin

You’re in the passenger seat, talking to Henry, glad for the warmth. Being around people the whole day has meant not using your abilities to warm yourself. Being around people means working to not draw attention to yourself.

It can be difficult, but it’s become almost (almost) a habit. It’s easy to think that you’re safe from mistakes. Sitting in the car, you don’t habitually reach out to those passing by, to other drivers or passengers or pedestrians.

Except, sometimes, an act is forced out. Like so: a car begins to change lanes. You’re in their blind spot and they don’t see you — any moment there will be a collision.

There is no time to weigh costs. You need to live.

You reach out, form an invisible webbing around the other car, a resistant mesh shaped by your mind. It stops the car — or it would have, but Harry hoots. The other driver swerves, hoots themselves.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Harry says, even though it’s not his fault.

You tell him this. At the same time, you wonder if the other driver had felt your web, if Harry had noticed your efforts.

You want to scream, because of your slip of control.

Harry occasionally peers at you. Perhaps he’s just concerned.